@samir My guess is that about 99% of professional devs work on either pointless or actively harmful stuff. But my definition of 'pointless' is wide. Anything that serves capitalist goals, i.e. exists for the purpose of profitability or financial growths is pointless in my view. Most of the not pointless stuff is developed by volunteers, i.e. unpaid devs or scientists, who need software for doing their science, but who are not software engineers by profession.

@levampyre @samir

I’m genuinely just curious: can we not assume some of those scientists doing software development could also be acting harmfully or pointlessly?

@betalars and I was wanting to talk about scientists doing software development, not scientists in general. I do not know how we can conclude that most scientists are acting good™️, so I am genuinely curious if we can and if so, how. I’ll edit my post as I did not make this clear, thank you.

@james ah okay.

In that sense: I think some scientists will probably claim moral neutrality and I would disagree with that.

Because while I think the scientific process can be described as morally neutral or positive depending on your world view, the question of what is being researched is a highly moral one.

Besides that there's without a doubt scientists acting in bad faith too ... although I feel like science is less lucrative and less vulnerable compared to other fields.