samir, actually the xkcd top hat guyHow many professional programmers are working on pointless and/or actively harmful products?
Give me your best guess.
(If you vote, please boost to diversify the results. It’s polite.)
0–25%
25–50%
50–75%
75–100%
Poll ended at .
liber@samir
Conflating pointless and harmful? Yeah, no vote.
Also, "pointless" is so damn subjective. Prima facie, everything I'm not using and I'm not interacting with in any way would be pointless. But that would raise the "pointless" percentage to 99.999...%, and also, the world doesn't revolve around one individual.
Then again, excluding ANYTHING that at least SOMEONE uses would drop it to basically 0.
IMHO, this applies perfectly:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4173-there-are-three-types-of-lies----lies-damn-lies
@liber Right, this is not a measure of whether the software is valuable, but a measure of how a (biased, mostly left-leaning, nerdy) group values the software.
betalars 
@home@liber
People want to do jobs that have a positive (non-harmful) impact (non-pointless). This is likely why those thighs are mentioned in the same post.
Also: pointless is a subjective term ... I can find stuff pointless that other people enjoy. But I feel like you're trying to distract from the point and I don't know it's arguing about that has a point.
@betalars
My point is that something pointless (with no positive impact, if you like) is not actively harmful (as per the original post).
Developing another office suite, or another ERP, that's doomed to fail, should never, even for the sake of online opinion pools, be placed on the same level with this piece of "human ingenuity", for example:
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1218643254/israel-is-using-an-ai-system-to-find-targets-in-gaza-experts-say-its-just-the-st
It's unfair to those stuck in the former scenario, and it trivializes the latter.
Maybe I'm wrong.
My point is that something pointless (with no positive impact, if you like) is not actively harmful (as per the original post).
Developing another office suite, or another ERP, that's doomed to fail, should never, even for the sake of online opinion pools, be placed on the same level with this piece of "human ingenuity", for example:
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1218643254/israel-is-using-an-ai-system-to-find-targets-in-gaza-experts-say-its-just-the-st
It's unfair to those stuck in the former scenario, and it trivializes the latter.
Maybe I'm wrong.
@liber When I say I don't like encountering muddy paths and bears when biking trough the woods I am not saying those things are equally bad.
pointless is having no impact. People don't like that.
Pointless is without a doubt less bad than harmful.
But as people look for jobs that do a meaningful good, they want to avoid stuff that's either pointless or harmful.