Ask Slashdot: Ambitious Yet Ethical Software Jobs?

First time accepted submitter hwaccaly writes "I'm a mid-career developer with a fair amount of experience working on data-intensive, mathematically ambitious software projects for fun — things like physics and systems simulations, written mostly in CUDA, targeted at Tesla GPUs and small clusters. Ideally, I'd like to get paid for this kind of work, but I've found little call for these skills outside of the financial and defense industries. My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either. The medical/pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly require complex software, but the unavoidable animal testing at the end of the pipeline probably lifts its body count higher even than the defense industry's. And academia pays in degrees, not dollars. So what's left? Do any ethical businesses have a pressing need for high-performance computing, or is it basically a hobbyist niche?"

Comments

Ex-Gaming

[dcollins]

Fifteen years ago I was happy to be in the games industry and saying, "Isn't it nice to have a job for smart technical people that can't possibly be of any use to the military", but now even that's not the case. Plus the industry is wildly volatile and not great or long-term working conditions.

Re:Ex-Gaming

[JerkBoB]

Certainly the military doesn't have to do any particular mission overseas; however, if it does no missions overseas, eventually it will be doing such missions within the State.

Ugh. You know, I was mostly with you up until that. Really? You are rolling out the old "if we don't fight them overseas we'll be fighting them at home" chestnut? What if, I dunno, we didn't do things to provoke them in the first place? Have you really bought into the BS rationalization that it's because "they hate our freedoms"?

I come from a military family. Father, both brothers. I chose a different path, but I'm very sympathetic to and have much respect for those who choose to serve. I don't, however, accept bullshit rationalizations from the war-mongers who stand to profit (financially or politically) from never-ending conflict. You really think OBL and Al-Qaeda were that much of a threat before we made them so? Believe what you want, the rise of OBL was at least what those in the intelligence community call "blow-back", if not something more orchestrated by those who saw the decline of the USSR as a threat to the defense industry money train.

Don't be so naive. Invading Afghanistan as a response to 9/11 mostly made sense; they were harboring the bad guys who did it, and the mission was pretty clear -- turn over the rocks (with high kinetics) to squash the bugs. Iraq was straight-up bullshit. I understand the need for those on the ground to make their sacrifices mean something, but wanting to believe something doesn't make it true. Don't dishonor their memories by accepting the crap being fed to us by the mil-ind machine.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." -- (former FIVE-star) General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 17 Jan 1961

Medical

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a though bu if you are working in the medical industry on something that is killing people today then might not your body count actually be negative? Yes, I can see what you are talking about with animal testing leading to death from your work, but lets assume what you are working on ends up saving lives. Lets say in testing 10000 mice have to be killed to ensure the results from your work are correct (yeah that sucks, no one wants to kill animals) but if that leads to something that helps save peoples lives for the foreseeable future I'd argue that it could easily save more than 10000 people. so treating all lives as equal you are still coming out positive

Re:Medical

[Anonymous Coward]

The universe can only be experienced through a single life, no more, no less, so the destruction of any one life is the destruction of an entire universe of experience. For that reason, the "badness" of that death is infinite.

10,000 x -infinity + 10,000 x infinity = NaN.

Simple subtraction falls short of capturing the destruction of 10,000 lives.

But on the other hand, they're mice, and they were just going to poop on mazes anyway.

Re:Medical

[mwvdlee]

Animal testing isn't the first step in medical research, it's the last step before human trials.
Do any of those "ethical" people want to take the place of those animals or do they think other humans should take that risk?

Re:Medical

[Electricity Likes Me]

Also, the needs of animal testing are generally reduced by the availability of high-performance computing anyway. Animal testing is expensive and difficult to get approval for - much of the goal of simulation (which is the type of thing you use HPC for) is to reduce your need for it.

Re:Medical

[Cryacin]

Yes, and I'm sure that lions think about the universe of experience of the animal that they're currently tearing to shreds. The same goes for crocodiles as they crunch the bones of an animal that happens to get too close to the water, and shortly afterwards drown them. Surely wolves think the same. How about the average house cat that chews the legs off a bird that's still alive, tormenting it for hours until the owner hits it with a shovel to put the poor thing out of its misery. Nah, it's character builder when nature does it.

This is what I love about the PITA (Yes, I know it's PETA, get the joke buddy) trustafarian types. You know the ones, that tell everyone they're screwing the planet whilst living off of daddy's trust fund. Nature is violent. Nature is gruesome. The coal face of society is no different. It's only within our bubble of existence that we can maintain the suspension of disbelief that we, and all things surrounding us are immortal "universes of experiences".

Given the choice of 10,000 mice dying for the sake of medical technology to save even 1 life is more than worth it to most of human society. Disagree with me? What if that life is your life, or the life of your child.

Please, for the sake of rational agents everywhere, leave your hippie rubbish at the door.

Re:Medical

[Surt]

Mod parent up. I was just coming to point this out too. I did neural simulation software at the beginning of my career. The explicit goal of the project was to reduce the need for carving up mouse brains. There are lots of projects like that out there. Go find one.

Re:Medical

[busyqth]

Animals are innocent, they don't know any better. We, as humans, do not have that excuse.

Actually, animals do know better, but they think that ripping other animals to shreds is a sacred calling.
After careful consideration, and soul searching, carnivores have come to the realization that failing to kill is highly unethical.

Re:Medical

[MalachiK]

Right on. I set traps for all sorts of rodents and pests around my garden. I even used chemicals to kill an ant nest once. For no other reason than they were annoying me. If I could have got some better shampoo out of it then that would have just been a bonus.

Re:Medical

[Lurker2288]

This is wrong, I'm afraid.

First off, given the boundless evil and greed of Big Pharma, one wonders why they'd continue to spend money on animal trials if they achieve nothing more than the production of plausible deniability for the inevitable failures in clinial development. Given that they already blame their failures on the complexities of biology and the difficult regulatory environment, the benefit produced by pointing at animal test results seems pretty slim. How does your scenario work? "Well, shareholders, it's true that we've spent $50 billion this year and only put one new drug on the market, while we've had to withdraw three old drugs for unforeseen side effects, but, in our defense, we injected it into bunnies first and that seemed to work okay." Really, is that how you imagine it?

Second, do you by chance know how many potential compounds fail in animal testing before they even make it into people? If you start with 1000 compounds, and 900 are disqualified by preclinical testing (which includes animal testing) before the remaining hundred enter human trials, that's still a pretty substantial benefit. Indeed, that's about the proportion of compounds which are dropped prior to Phase 1, although the statistics I've seen don't break out animal testing specifically. The alternative to testing in animals, barring significant advances in computational predictive methods, would be to test each of those thousand compounds in people with minimal prior knowledge of safety. So for someone so concerned about animal welfare you're shockingly cavalier about the well-being of other human beings.

I wonder, do you resolve this apparent paradox by actually putting your own health and safety on the line by volunteering for Phase 1 studies? Do you keep your morals unsullied by refusing to take any medication which was tested in animals? Or are you a hypocrite in addition to being utterly ignorant?

Re:Medical

[WayfinderSteve]

Joined Slashdot just to post on this thread. No longer a lurker! 20 years IT, working with health systems for 6. Healthcare desperately needs math and physics gurus, and you will get respect in this industry. The data sets are finally large enough to need your expertise. I've worked on projects with meteorologists looking at boundary detection and then anatomy matching in 3D imaging data sets, We've done Gaussian curvature in mitral valve deformation. I've got another project looking at quality outcomes using mathemateticians we hired away from Oxford and Trondheim universities. Some of these are startups, some are nationally funded research projects. Some blur that line. All are ethical, in sense of first do no harm. In the tougher issue of weighing intentional harm vs capability, it's good the be surrounded by people who consider that their life's work. As those projects come up, each is evaluated and risk/harm is openly discussed. I love this environment, and love that occasionaly I get to run stats to show interventions prompted by new data modelling techniques saved lives over the traditional standard of care. You can make a difference, please do so.

What?

[pal]

Huh? The academy doesn't pay people? Medical research is a net negative? Maybe you could make some money doing character consulting for an upcoming season of Portlandia.

Here's one...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a new industry with opportunities pertaining to your expertise right now...

the exciting world of Bitcoins! :D

Re:Everything's unethical!

[Anonymous Coward]

As point of fact, he did not say he wanted a high paying salary, just that he would like to get paid. There is a distinction. Your hyperbole adds nothing, and only makes it look like you're trying to demonize him.

No such thing as an "Ethical" business ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Every business or venture has its positives and negatives. The defense industry of course kills people. On the other hand, if we had no military it would not be long before some enterprising country decided that they could annex ours whether we liked it or not. The medical industry of course tests on animals. On the other hand, it preserves human life and perhaps someday -- yours. The gaming industry -- wow, what a waste of time that is. People sitting in front of their computers or televisions when they could be out saving the world -- literally. Perhaps inventing some new power source, medicine, or helping some new immigrant to learn English. On the other hand, just think of all the "blood minerals" that are used to make your hardware you use to code with.

Perhaps the only "ethical" business is to go be a gardener. (And to be frank, I could do that for the rest of my life happily.) On the other hand, I'm not sure the "weeds" would agree.

standard too high.

[zerotorr]

No, because all that computing is being done on machines using rare-earth blood minerals mined in Africa, or composed of parts machined in sweat shops in China. Seriously, if you're going to claim that level of ethicality, you should be farming your own veggies in a self sufficient, carbon neutral commune.

Come work for us

[Anonymous Coward]

We are a very socially conscious company which uses GPU's for video encoding - http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/company/careers/opportunities-at-elemental

About medical...

[Genda]

There is tons of medical and biological heavy lifting with computers that would prevent animal testing and perhaps prevent the need for double blind medical trials (meaning we wouldn't have to give placebos to critically ill people, and potentially save twice as many people.) Everything from advances in protein modeling and dramatic breakthroughs in analyzing DNA to DNA/RNA origami (designed and implemented first in computers) that will almost certain provide exciting new cures to everything from cancer to autoimmune diseases.

I agree big Pharma is a nasty business, but there are plenty of places where you can make a meaningful contribution to the human condition and at the same time exercise your frontal lobes.

Re:About medical...

[Nutria]

I agree big Pharma is a nasty business

I say a little atheist prayer every night thanking the FSM for the existence of Big Pharma, because without them I'd be in a sanitarium (or whatever they're called now) having almost continuous seizures.

Everything you have now had a price.

[Karmashock]

You drink the same water. Eat the same food. Consume the same energy.

This all has a price. You think you're a more moral man then Einstein?

Do you know what the first man to discover fire said?

"Ouch"

There is a price. Ambition has it's price. I'm not saying you should be unethical. I'm saying defense work, animal testing, etc aren't unethical. If our people didn't do it then where would we be? Imagine if the US never had defense contractors or scientists and engineers that contributed to the defense industry. What would the soldier go into battle with? Either a sharped stick and loin cloth. Or more likely we'd be forced to buy weapons from an extra national third party and be beholden to their whim whenever we engaged in war.

And what of testing on animals. What medical breakthroughs were only possible because of animal testing? Ask a biologist, a doctor, or any other stripe of medical expert what our medicine would look like without animal testing.

And why do we do animal testing? Because we consider it more ethical then doing it on people. Which is the alternative. Do you want to be the white rat in cage 1173?

Look, I don't want to attack your world view or suggest you need to do things you disagree with... What I am saying is that you benefit from these things every day of your life. I don't understand how people can look down their nose at these methods while at the same time voluntarily benefiting from the consequences.

Would you torture a lab rat to save your mother's life? I mean... torture it. I'm talking live vivisections... Ideally with no anesthesia. Simply bolt it's limbs to the to a board. This is to save your mother's life. I would. I'd take alternative paths if there were better options. But if it was a straight up choice between torturing a little animal and a human being dying. I choose human life every time.

Am I an evil person for making this calculation? Are the millions of men and women that have made this calcuation for generations evil? You eat evil every day. You drink it. You live in an evil society that is part of an evil civilization then. Because my view on this matter is the default setting for our whole civilization going back thousands of years.

In all our long history I'm not sure if we've ever come across another society that believed as you did... that put these things above their own survival. Consider that that is odd because we've encountered many societies and civilizations. That we've never encountered one with your values implies one of two things. Either human beings are genetically predisposed to not value that view. Or any society that does embrace that view dies out. In the end the second would become the first... so perhaps it's all the same.

In any case, if I were you... and I'm not... I would find a field in which you are challenged and valued. Obviously don't go working for demons, but possibly tone down your standards to something a bit more practical. You are not living in a world of saints. We're simply people. We're not entirely good or bad. We simply are. Try to accept that without holding people to unreasonable standards.

Re:Everything you have now had a price.

[Karmashock]

""Another alternative is to not use neither humans or animal models and to accept a slowing of medical progress.""
No, the alternative would be burning everything we've learned about medicine in the last 4000 years.

How much did we learn by disturbing the dead? Dissecting human remains was where our basic knowledge of human anatomy came from. This was considered by most to be a violation of the corpse.

You have some choices.

1. You can disavow all modern medicine and if you get sick simply suffer and hope to get better on your own.
2. You can be a hypocrite and criticize it while using it. This is what most do that attack the modern world. Evil when they don't need it and suddenly acceptable when they do.
3. You can moderate your position to take into consideration what is reasonable in the real world.

Those are your choices. I'm assuming you're going with option two. I find that unfortunate but there is no law against being a hypocrite.

""This sounds like some fallacious appeal to popularity or tradition. Neither popularity or tradition make something right.""
Not really. It's an appeal to reason. Everything you have had a price. Your forefathers paid it. If you find that price to be unacceptable then return what they took.

You could say that you had no control over that and you'd instead like to simply not do it in the future. Fine. Does that mean you'll refuse all NEW medical care developed through animal testing?

Point blank... Would you DIE to honor this pact? Because this is life and death. We spend the lives of little furry rats to buy life for humans. It is the calculation.

And your progress without animal testing won't be slowed. It will stop. You can't do the experiment without a test subject. Some doctors have experimented on themselves. We could do that.

Will you be my guinea pig? If you say no and won't accept research derived from animal testing then you will get no new treatment. You'll get homeopathy, a warm hand to hold while you die, and a comfy pillow.

I love my family and myself too much to accept that. I will pay the price. And if that makes me a bad person. So be it.

""So what?""
I'd rather my whole society not win the darwin awards.

If you want to go off to the woods and live like an animal that is your business. I won't trouble you. Look at the Amish. We leave them alone.

But if I have any say in it, my society will survive. If you want to die. Die. I believe in the living.

Re:Everything you have now had a price.

[Hognoxious]

On one hand, you know that chicken have to be killed to make McChicken sandwiches

If you'd tasted one you wouldn't be so sure.

A couple of thoughts

[DeathToBill]

Meteorology (and earth sciences more generally). Mostly public sector and academic, but there is some private-sector work going on too. Things like forecasting energy output of wind farms tends to be private-sector and involves lots of modelling and number crunching. Similar goes for mining / geology, depending on your ethical view of that.

While being an academic "pays in degrees, not dollars," doing contract work for academic can be rewarding. Most academics are pretty clueless about statistics and are happy to pay someone else goodish rates to do the statistics for them. While it's probably not the HPC wonderland you're after, it will bring you into contact with very diverse research areas and probably involves at least some crunching of big data sets.

Re:Everything's unethical!

[neyla]

He said that "academia pays in degrees, not dollars", which hints that he'd consider the wages paid in academia insufficient.

In actual facts, university-employees are paid in dollars. They're just lower paid than financial analysts etc.

Re: Ex-Military

[rwa2]

Heh, don't feel so bad working for the military, a lot of the R&D stuff they do makes sense. Training sims keep their people coordinated without burning resources in live-fire exercises. A lot of their command and control mentality is actually flipping the old hierarchy upside down and pushing the "power to the edge" where the people on the front lines are getting more information and making decisions themselves. Yeah, part of the military exists to employ people to push around our neighbors as part of some political circus, but that's not the part you'll be dealing with or even supporting in any conceivable way.

That said, after saving up a chunk of money I moved out of the military-industrial hotbed and took a job in the gaming industry on an edutainment sim. Yes, the volatility sucks, but I'm having a lot of fun and get to work on more interesting projects which I have much greater personal control over.

Inevitably, I expect the gaming industry to use me up and spit me out, so I kinda expect to start freelancing in green technology development in the future. I'm not exactly sure in the specifics, but I am certain that there's a ton of inefficiency in the way people live and work, and a maybe a decent pile of ethical money to be made optimizing the human environmental condition once people realize it won't be so cheap / easy to simply expand and sprawl to get it "for free"

Ethical Dilemma

[HarryatRock]

I faced this very question right at the start of my IT career, in 1968. I had been absolutely against arms manufacture, but was given a chance to move from chemistry/thermodynamics (working in the development of domestic gas burners) to a programming job in aerospace. I have loved aeroplanes since I was 5, an avid SF reader, and going from a "budget" of 30 minutes of mainframe time per week (that was FORTRAN so included compile, test, run) to being 100% programming in technical problems was like being invited to the best party ever. I was going to have to accept a small pay cut, but that didn't matter a bit. Then I realized that every line of code would be used for military aircraft as much or more than for civil projects. It was a long night of the soul, but I decided to take the job. I am so glad I did, not least because I found that most of the military people (real aircrew) were the real anti-war guys. They were the ones most concerned about reducing "collateral damage", and pushing for more accurate delivery of - well - death.
I think we did a good job. Today's wars are still terrible, but compared with conflicts such as WW2 they are actually more controlled, especially when hi-tech systems are used. I am older and wiser now, and doubt that we will ever see an end to war, but I do believe that armed conflict is getting "cleaner", at least when developed countries are involved. If we get more precise systems then we should be able to bring conflicts to a quicker end, with less damage to civilian areas and the environment.
So my advice is to reflect on the outcome of improving technology by better simulation and then decide on each job offer as it comes. This is true whatever area you look at, the arms industry is investing in "non-lethal" systems, the drug companies in simulation and "in vitro" testing, so both of these provide chances for really good jobs in which you can make a positive difference to the world.
I suspect that this might lose me some karma, but I think that gaming is probably the least ethical area (killing things should never be fun, even in a virtual world), and I personally would never work in the financial sector, but then that's the ethical dilemma we all face.

Re:Everything's unethical!

[ghostdoc]

I think you have your cause and effect the wrong way around.

These days we generally see rich people as being unethical, so logically any work that pays well must therefore be unethical.

It's probably not true.

Re:I hate to rain on your parade...

[fartrader]

... but we still arn't 100% sure of how neurons work so while simulating them in a computer might be useful for AI I fail to see how it can be at all useful for medical tests.

Partial understanding can still be tasked for useful work. As an example I give you the entire field of Physics.

Re: Ex-Military

[O('_')O_Bush]

Everyone that pays taxes does that.

Sorry, but wrong

[Lurker2288]

You can't simulate with any certainty how a living thing will react in toto to a new drug--if that were possible we'd save ourselves the hundreds of millions currently spent in clinical testing and we'd just run simulations. But there are things you can usefully simulate even if you lack a full understanding of the biological processes involved. For example, it's fairly routine to simulate a drug's pharmacokinetics based on animal data and analogy to other known drugs. This helps us choose doses for clinical trials, it helps us figure out how many patients we need to test in order to produce robust results. Nothing about this is worthless--good sample size estimates minimize unnecessary patient risk and save money.

Re: Ex-Military

[readin]

You're still supporting an organization dedicated to killing people.

Depending on which country you work for, you may view it as supporting an organization dedicated to prevention of mass murder.

The US military is controversial to many people, but it was primarily the US military that prevented the spread of Soviet Communism. How many people did the Soviet Union kill - now extrapolate that to what they could have done had they controlled the rest of the world.

Chinese communists did a lot of killing too. Perhaps the US played a role in limiting their damage too. It is tough to say because by the time the Communists came to power the US was dominant enough to contain them and we don't know how aggressive they would have been toward the rest of the world (although as China (still authoritarian but no longer communist) is growing again it is threatening one neighbor with complete conquest and making aggressive territorial claims against other neighbors).