Cat HicksFrom a behavioral and psychological perspective (not interested in this thread in an "arguing about whether our estimation is right" perspective lol), I think the halting, difficult, but clearly emerging work of starting to reckon with the climate costs of computing is so incredibly cool and important. Some questions I want research to ask about this include:
How does the relationship a developer has with the computing resources around them change when climate and ecology are brought into the picture? Does this produce unexpected other changes, for instance, I speculate without evidence that it might reframe your interactions with technology to be less abstract. Despite the massive crisis of climate concerns, is there a protective effect from this? Might this make some technology work feel less alienated from the world?
Do folks in software overall tend to show a "bigger is better" bias or mental model? That's a big question, but assuming this does exist, given that climate conscious computing might emphasize more targeted use of resources, would introducing climate conscious computing shift that bias? Might you begin to value smaller and more targeted solutions? Would this have a spillover effect to other areas of work that don't even have the same sustainability concern?
Glyph@grimalkina “folks in software” is an awful broad brush to be painting with here. If I had to guess I would say that this industry does have that bias, but I think we inherit it from capital, not technology. It is the “bigger is better” of the railroad robber barons, not the homebrew computer club
@glyph here's a less person focused way to frame it that might not activate the same reaction for you? Could define resources many ways but just to pick one "Does long term experience working professionally with large scale software foreground certain priorities around growth in a way that induces people to probabilistically show more cognitive bias in considering growth concerns first or consider the concerns of growth as a core responsibility first and would exposure to x value shift this?"
@glyph aka, I'm never really working from an essentialist model of a person that says "people are like x," I'm always a social-constructivist, but it's a lot to fit into a post 😂
@grimalkina yeah, I hope I didn't come off as essentialist here, so let me take a crack at a more specific mechanism of the social construction
in the vc-backed and big-tech worlds, projects have two general… moods. mood 1 is "we have a runway, it's growth time, burn investor cash or allocated CapEx at maximum velocity to get ANYTHING working, GO GO GO". mood 2 is "oh crap our AWS bill is five million dollars a month, call Corey Quinn and start cost-cutting or we will have to fire everyone"
@grimalkina I have… pretty much never seen a project that was on a self-sustaining, long-term-growth oriented mindset that valued careful construction of a minimal architecture with incentives towards simplicity that could be scaled carefully over time.
@grimalkina this is one reason that I think developers gravitate towards open source infrastructure projects. the "community" serves as a check on hypergrowth pressures even in otherwise hypergrowth environments, it's a management-legible (in the "seeing like a state" sense of "legible") way of articulating a need for sustainability. "community" is the perpetually absent proxy in the negotiation about the need to slow down & simplify
@glyph totally agree. My back of the napkin style take on this overall is the many people experience deep alienation inside of what they feel they are professionally "allowed" to be and do to fit the software developer mold (a multisystems effect of individual, cultural stereotypes, team and system pressures, abstraction of knowledge work and lack of agency) and you can see the "escape" of this as people seek to fulfill psychological needs AND some try to use the power of that back in their work
@glyph whether, why and when developers advocate inside of their own workplaces is another, but highly related, research interest I have!!
@grimalkina anyway my other two thoughts are:
1. I think if we had a functioning carbon regulatory framework and infrastructure costs became punitive faster, if that cost was known in advance, infrastructure budgets would not swing as far to the extreme
2. we are talking as if this is all of "tech" but it's really just consumer-facing companies, there are a ton of b2b software companies who make comfortable margins on reasonable amounts of compute. their growth pressures are elsewhere
@glyph contrasting how people think and what values they foreground in those different industry/business situations is SO understudied imho!! The program with locating all software research on developers inside of "the people I can easily recruit without doing extra work at my big famous tech co...."
Richard Barrell@glyph @grimalkina I've been in (2)! at my first job post uni, I was working for a company that sells a SaaS product for running public consultations (e.g. surveying constituents about proposed bus route changes), for govt departments & such.
So we had this biz model worked out where calculated fractions of each customer's subscription price would get spent on customer support for them, IaaS to make it go, and a couple of SaaS things we had to outsource like monitoring. The sustainability story was that our whole infra bill was directly proportional to the number of customers.
(Admittedly I'm talking cash here not energy but, like, we got charged for the price of the electricity eventually.)
So we had this biz model worked out where calculated fractions of each customer's subscription price would get spent on customer support for them, IaaS to make it go, and a couple of SaaS things we had to outsource like monitoring. The sustainability story was that our whole infra bill was directly proportional to the number of customers.
(Admittedly I'm talking cash here not energy but, like, we got charged for the price of the electricity eventually.)