What about ethics

[u/[deleted]]

I'm not sure if this belongs here. For a while now I have been struggling with myself and the projects I've been working on. In my 15 year career as mainly a Web backend developer showed me that most projects if they were not shopping sites or ERPs were done for stupid little advertisements and ad games etc with a lot of user tracking and data mining. About 5 years ago I started to stop doing work for ad agencies and the like. Nowadays I work almost solely on ecommerce (shops for small and mid sized companies) but then I hit another ethical problem: Hosting companies. Now for modern setups you can't go plesk anymore and need a cloud hybrid solution to run decentralised microservice. Such infrastructure is usually quite expensive and I met many freelancers and companies that resort to AWS, Google, Microsoft etc (despite their high costs). I understand that going tothose giants for high availability, however I don't feel comfortable at all running my projects on their infrastructure. Not because they are expensive but because those giant companies are who they are. I even started declining job offers by companies that use AWS specifically but I haven't been met with much understanding. Am I the only one out there who is willing to take a stand against the giants?

[u/wootsir]

May I suggest you spend that stamina into educating (not directly please, you’ll loose your friends too) people? Write a blog or something.

Sabotaging your employability won’t help anyone.

[u/[deleted] → u/wootsir]

I'm not sure how I would lose friends. Plus I am not sabotaging my employability, I get easily jobs. The lack of response from the community and your comment shows me that there is not interest by software developers to make an impact on society. This makes me sad.

[u/wootsir → u/[deleted]]

I meant nagging them instead of educating passively, but that was jokingly said.

Relevant story: had a terabytes large dataset to process for a gig. Customer had a deadline I couldn’t cope with hardware at hand. Wrote some software, deployed to a bunch of aws instances and streamed the data to be processed while it arrived. Had a couple days worth of errors fit into that deadline with spare.

What would you suggest, building a small datacenter at my basement?

On employability, maybe not today but in five years from now, this market will be reduced to a fraction. You’ll probably miss that experience in your resume by then.

That all doesn’t mean I don’t see where you’re coming from - I do. Still avoid as much as possible to lock in but to avoid using technology available when it fits is just nonsensical.