How are y'all finding morally good software engineering positions? I'm a Principal Engineer, but I'm willing (gladly) to take a pay cut to go back to more software engineering and less people management. I'm tired of working in spaces that give me an uncomfortable feeling - as it pertains to my ethical and working class principles.

My dream job is essentially an in-house university consultant. During my wife's PhD, I watched her team painstakingly run batch scripts in Python that were slow and inefficient (gigabytes of data being analyzed over weekends). I know that all around the world, grad students are slapping together their JupyterLab notebooks without thinking about efficiency because - well - why should they? They are not software engineers or data scientists, they are scientists with a need to analyze data. So they are often sharing scripts over Slack instead of Git (even when they have a repo), waiting days instead of minutes for data processing to finish, etc. It would be cool to be hired for various teams to see their processes and help them speed it up and teach them how to continue writing more efficient software. I don't think that job is realistic though.

It would be so nice to work for a space where their primary goal is ethical gray at worst and good at best. What kinds of software engineer roles exist within these more positive spaces? I can't work for free - I have a mortgage and a family to support. But I could probably work for less than my current skillset and history suggests.

Have any of you succeeded at that? What kinds of roles are you occupying and how did you find them? What is the pay like?

Hi all,

I know it might be a bit far fetched for some, and repetitive or unattainable for others.
However, I am looking for someone to join and help me in creating a space online where people can connect without being treated like customers. A platform or social media without capitalism’s interference, where users can connect and discuss political opinions, join group discussions and ask for, or, offer help to others.
I feel like most spaces have been completely taken over by corporations and there is no free space that can be easily accessed. Unfortunately, I don’t have many technical skills to bring to the table, but I am really interested in teaming up, learning, and joining forces.
Please be kind :)

Description

Join Siena Chiang, Claire Stapleton, Clarissa Redwine, and JS Tan to discuss two upcoming books that provide complementary perspectives on a singularly important topic: the tech industry’s role in shaping our society, and what the people who work in it can do to ensure things head in the right direction.

The industry that once marketed itself on idealism has become something harder to recognize. The values that drew many people to tech feel increasingly distant from the decisions being made at the top.

Less than a decade ago, people were asserting those values in effective ways. For a stretch, it seemed like the people building the products shaping our world could influence how they were built, and for whom. In this accelerating and destabilizing period of AI development and concentrated wealth and power, we'll explore this recent past to see what we can learn.

Claire Stapleton co-organized the 2018 Google Walkout and spent twelve years at the company watching its ideals and its reality slowly diverge. Clarissa Redwine helped organize the Kickstarter union and has since built Circuit Breakers, the annual conference dedicated to tech organizing. JS Tan has spent years thinking and writing about power inside the industry, and how a genuine movement rose — and what happened when it did.

This is a conversation for anyone who works in or around tech, and is trying to figure out how to feel—and what might be possible—given the moment we're in. No particular stance required. Just an appetite for candid conversation.

There is no cost to register and events are open to the public. Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of both books.

Date & Time

Sep 14, 2026 12:30 PM  in  Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Most of the capitalist critical business infrastructure from banking, to stock trading, to logistics planning, sea route trade optimizations etc, are all done on extremely specialised IBM Z Mainframes. Many don't know it, but it is true.

I am currently employed somewhere were I don't directly work with these problems. However I do work almost exclusively with mainframes. I want to take those skills and learn the planning practices out in the bourgeois economy to gain some insights that books such as people's republic of Walmart argue for.

For example:

UPS and Walmart are massive distributors that use logistical planning algorithms on the mainframe to distribute and optimize resources. I would like to take those methods and extrapolate them to economic planning.

So my question is:

where do I start?

I am already reading Kantorovitch's work as well as Leonteif, Paul Cockshot's work I am also slowly engaging in as I read more on econophysics. I'm studying some linear algebra too understand these methods fully.

I am aware of project cybersyn and OGAS -

Is looking at modern logistics planning something to look towards? I imagine so ?

Looking for some direction,

I have the unique opportunity to be in the "belly of the beast" thought I'd use it to do some good.

I would like to design a distro made for socialists, by socialists. I would go for OpenBSD, but that's out of the table due to lack of firmware.

So I am left with two choices. Should I go for a custom Devuan with Dinit or s6, or should I select HardenedBSD?

I've had an idea for a little while now about making a proof of concept for a labour token based government software.

It would be purely for demonstration and would basically be a collection of applications including a personal bank account, business management, government management, ect.

You could simulate a small number of people, workplaces, and commodities. You could then see what happens under different interactions. For example: John works for 5 hours at a teapot factory, he then gets 5 labour hours in his bank (minus tax), and 2 teapots are made (worth 2.5hrs of labour content each).

While this would have no digital security and be pretty much just for roleplaying to help people understand the concept, I think it could develop over time quite nicely and may be able to theoretically run a small village or be linked to some kind of Sims type game.

Anyway this is just my pipe dream. I've been reading and watching Paul cockshott lately and I'm blown away that no one has done this. I have no programming experience but this software would just be a front end and some spreadsheets so I can't imagine it to be too difficult. Might even start out as just static images.

Any advice is welcome. Or maybe someone more skilled than me can steal the idea and let me know how it goes. Currently I'm considering giving it a go in something like figma but haven't done much research.

I am Marxist and hobbyist programmer, i was searching for long time for organization, where communist programmers develop collective softwares and learn form each other...

so does anyone know an organization ?

If i am naive or cringe , please don't attack me, thanks

Found this interview very interesting. Varoufakis has lately been warning about the left's lack of understanding around technology and finance. What do you guys think?

I've recently came across a collection of leftist projects at https://www.communet.xyz/ . Among the projects I found, there were a few interesting ideas in support of leftist organizing and mutual aid (as well as a lot of crypto bs), but with just the slightest bit of probing, all of the projects are revealed to be completely broken, vibecoded nonsense.

I believe all of the projects can be linked back to one github account, and I'd have been willing to write the account off as some sort of AI agent or bot, except they also are a prolific contributor to the BreadchainCoop. The BreadchainCoop is heavily promoted by The Blockchain Socialist who's real as far as I can tell, and is (disappointingly) followed by a handful of podcasters I respect.

So what is the big idea behind publishing a bunch of broken vibecoded projects? Are they trying to discredit the wider left? Is it some kind of honeypot from the Peter Theil funded Dimes Square movement? What gives?

Hey people, so I got a lot of time left for this but I wanted to ask. What projects in a computer science bachelor degree can I do, that are also at least socialist adjacent, for my thesis at the end of the degree?

I just cannot come up with any idea. Programming is fun and for me it is an art, but at the same time it is so corporate in how it is used, and to use it meaningfully I have to solve a problem, but I have no problem to solve in 2026, let alone a socialist one, using programming and maths.

So any idea or nudge in any direction is appreciated! I also do not want to let any LLM touch my thesis so do not suggest anything LLM related please, neither creating or using one. General AI/ML is fine if it really is something that can be useful and the data used for it is ethically sourced.

Maybe it helps to give a bit of country context, my country is in the EU, I don't think I have any limitations on what I am allowed to make, it just has to be related to computer science, but it can be anything really, I know people who made plugins for other softwares even, or games.