capitalism = ads

Forbes’ list of the most valuable brands in the world in 2015 has Google at #3 and Facebook at #10. Other top ten brands are Coca Cola, McDonalds, Toyota, Samsung, and Apple. There’s a significant difference between Google and Facebook and the rest of the companies – the amount of time it would take people to formulate an answer if you asked them what the company sells.

Coke, fast food, cars, electronics, and iPhones are all easy answers. But what are they going to say for Google and Facebook? It’s not something we think about when we interact with them daily.

With a little help, most people could probably come up with the fact that Google and Facebook make the majority of their money from advertising. But it would take a little more thought to grasp the implications of Google and Facebook making all their money from advertising…

Of course, they get lots of page views, so ads seem worthwhile, but the ads are most valuable when they’re targeted. And to deliver targeted ads, advertisers need to know about you. Your likes, your interests, your location at any time during the day.

So a company, whose primary interest is to serve its shareholders (most often by making money), has all kinds of useful data about you. And it’s definitely useful, as illustrated by the study about Facebook and “intimate” data. They showed you can tell a great deal about a person with just a little information about a lot of other people.

Assume that Google and Facebook know everything about you – your interests, your relationships, what you’re passionate about, what makes you angry, how you spend weekends, what you do after work – because it’s not that far from the truth. Is that a bad thing?

Even if they’re selling that information to advertisers who then manipulate ads to increase their efficacy, the advertisers don’t care who John Smith is and why he spends so much time building model airplanes. And you don’t care because you have AdBlock and don’t even see the ads.

One danger is the information passing into the wrong hands, to someone who could use it maliciously. That is bad news, and it might be worth researching a company before passing a chunk of personal information to them to store, but you might justify the risk by assuming no one would ever want your data. You’ve got nothing to hide (second week in a row this has come up – might be worth addressing in further depth if it comes up again).

And you can’t really blame Google and Facebook. Without advertising revenue, they wouldn’t be able to provide you with their service. Well couldn’t they get money some other way? They could make you pay a monthly fee. Or pay for a premium account. Or sell a lot of sweatshirts. But it’s probably safe to assume they’ve considered those options and determined that advertising, while it sacrifices privacy to a certain degree, is the best way for them to make money.

If there was a paradigm shift in the way the public perceives Google and Facebook, and advertising was viewed as evil, it would make economic sense to ditch the ads and try out something else. But as long as we’re content to trade information for the use of a service, they’re content to work harder to give us ads we actually care about.

 

does the government need a backdoor?

This is a really perplexing question for me. I read all of the articles and sat and pondered for a while, and still, no solution is overwhelmingly clear to me.

The government’s primary argument is for national security. They posit that Apple ought to cooperate and sneak a feature in to allow for a simple entry to the locked phone so that they can access data that will further their investigation of a terrorist attack.

On one hand, the government has been doing this for years – collecting data from people and corporations to aid in their investigations. For the most, part people have gone along with it. And for the most part, the government seems to handle the evidence responsibly.

On the other hand, the changing presence of technology in our society has morphed the playing field – it’s not as cut and dry as testifying that you saw someone do something. In order to turn the evidence over to the government, Apple would have to develop a modified operating system that would allow anyone in possession of the operating system to essentially break into any phone.

Of course, that software would likely be kept as secure as possible in Apple’s safe, but one of the biggest worries is that once the precedent is set, the government could run this procedure whenever it wants.

If we trust our government to use that power and the evidence that comes with it responsibly, it seems to me that it is an okay precedent. Just like we’re willing to let the government come search our homes (an invasion of privacy) if they have a search warrant, we ought to be willing to let them read our emails or look at our pictures.

But that’s a big if.

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The whole dispute/investigation/case is a bit dramatic, in my opinion. I think this is an important debate to have (privacy vs. security) but framing it as “encryption is the reason the Paris attacks happened” vs. “giving the backdoor to the government is the end of your privacy forever” is overblown.

With regard to the government’s melodrama, regardless of whether or not the terrorists in Paris achieved their end with encryption, there shouldn’t be a reasonable expectation for the intelligence powers of the world to bust all potential attackers. People can be secretive with or without encryption (steganography).

In the truck driver sexual assault case that the government cites (in which an incriminating video on the truck driver’s phone led to a conviction), an investigation stalled by no access to the phone would proceed much in the same way the investigation would have proceeded 30 years ago, when the truck driver wouldn’t have been carrying a smart phone at all. Sure, there are obvious uses for subpoenaing smart phones, and it is vitally important for the government to do its best to keep up with the technology curve, but to rely solely on evidence from smart phones would be unsafe hyper-dependence.

With regard to Apple’s comments, it seems that 100% secure, end-to-end encryption might be too much if it conflicts with the government’s ability to access warranted evidence. Apple may feel compelled to offer customers the finest encryption service in the land, but they should also feel morally obligated to prevent evil acts from happening when it’s in their power.

I’m not suggesting they snoop around people’s data, but if it is determined that the FBI has warranted power to get the info, Apple (and other tech providers) should be able to comply.

I’ve never felt strongly about the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” argument, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t seen it exploited before…

 

guide to the interview experience

Here is the interview guide I created: EthicsNDCSInterviewGuide.

The most important part of that guide is the final section: the decision.

Preparation for interviews takes place over the course of years; it is a cumulation of everything you have learned, all of your experiences, and the hundreds of hours of work you have put into developing your skills. Honestly, a week or a month before an interview is not enough time to seriously affect performance – there is so much more that factors in that has developed over the rest of your life.

The interview itself is almost entirely a direct result of preparation. Some people are good interviewers, some get uncomfortable talking about themselves or their work. Again, the only way that changes is with relevant experiences that come over time.

The decision, however, can swing any number of ways, depending on what you consider important, and it will have a very serious effect on the rest of your life. Past experiences factor into the decision by determining which factors you are likely to consider most, but I’m here to say, the people matter most.

Sure, you can narrow down your choices (if you are fortunate enough to have a lot) by location and role (e.g. I really don’t want to live in Texas, or this position is too technical for my liking), but like I said in the guide, regardless of what your job is, you’ll be working with teammates on a daily basis.

Do you like the people at the companies you’re considering? Do they have a palpable culture that you feel like you belong to? Those are important questions to ask and ones I wish I would’ve asked myself when applying to internships a couple years ago.

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Regarding the question about whether colleges should adjust their curriculums to include more interview prep, no way.

What I like about Notre Dame’s CSE program is that it starts in what I would call the middle, with C. We work upward from a basic, earl, memory-intensive language to object-oriented C++ and then dynamic languages like Java and Python. We also drop down to the transistor level and work up to C via Logic Design, Computer Architecture, and Operating Systems.

We are given a pretty thorough education in how computing works (computer science or computing science?) which prepares us to do a wide variety of jobs. There are a lot of detailed skills we don’t pick up in (core) classes that could be useful in interviews, but I think it’s up to students to develop passions on the side for specific types of programming, from app development to cybersecurity to data mining.

Once you’re equipped with the basics from core CS classes, try out some new stuff and figure out what pops out at you. For me, it was mobile app development because of the ubiquity of smart phones. Developing an app for iPhone offers me a really unparalleled chance to express myself and (hopefully, positively) impact a lot of people.

 

Bradley Manning

What’s my opinion.

There are a couple of pretty big questions involved in this case that do not have definitive answers and so I can take an opinion:

Is it okay for the government to lie to the American people in order to more effectively carry out what it believes is in the people’s best interest?

I generally believe lying is okay when done for noble reasons, and it’s easy to conjure up scenarios in which lying is an okay thing to do. Say there is a serial killer loose and everyone is terrified to the point of a lower quality of life. To maximize utility, the government says they’ve caught the killer and puts an innocent person on display for the people to see. The quality of life of the people goes up despite the lie. All good?

Well, the real killer is still out there, and they’re sacrificing the integrity of the innocent person, which is actually an entirely different question, but stacking moral dilemmas atop one another seems pretty run-of-the-mill for the US government.

So next question (I’ll get back to the first one later): is it okay to violate the rights of one person in order to benefit many others?

Yes, as evil as that sounds. Please bear with me, however, as we descend into another level of moral dilemmas – the Trolley Problem! In brief, a trolly is hurdling down the tracks toward an unsuspecting crowd. If left undiverted, they will all die. But you can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a different track. On this track, there is but one unsuspecting person. So you can leave the crowd to die by your own inaction, or you can save them and actively draw blood on your own hands. Tough spot to be in…

I would pull the lever, because I would feel the pain of the crowd dying by my own inaction just as much as by my own action since I had the power to stop it. So I am actively sacrificing the right of the one person to survive as the cost of saving many others. So I would do what I described above with the fake serial killer. So  I think it’s okay for the government to lie to the American people in order to more effectively carry out what it believes is in the people’s best interest.

The dilemma is, unfortunately, rarely so easy to weigh (several lives versus one). I do believe, though, that a strong moral compass can guide government leaders to make the right decisions every time.

Where does Bradley Manning fit in? With all the access he had to military and civilian intelligence, he must have felt that the government’s lying was not worth the gain. Killing innocent civilians with near reckless abandon, for instance. Tragically, he could not resolve his moral quandary via the chain-of-command, so he was left to less ideal methods.

As he was on the cusp of whisteblowing in the advanced technology age, he didn’t hit everything spot on – you can’t expect him to. It’s unclear to me based on the sheer number of documents whether everything he leaked was necessary, but he did seek to right what many of us would agree was a wrong.

In doing so, he exposed the broken system of chain-reporting, which is a very valuable thing in itself. Hopefully that is fixed, so in the future, matters of moral ineptitude can be handled internally.

 

 

 

diversity is inherently good

Whether we’re talking about a diversity of choices for lunch, a diversity of companies that develop smart phones, or a diversity of people working together, diversity is good. Diversity allows people to develop different tastes, and people with different tastes keep life interesting.

Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World depicts a world in which there is very little diversity, and it is decidedly an unpleasant one to live in. After all, humans are naturally expressive beings. At the highest level, we have a diversity of beliefs, and it trickles all the way down to a diversity of ways people tie their shoes or style their hair.

Mark Zuckerberg might argue that a diversity of wardrobe choices is draining, but as I claimed in my last post on burnout, trying to save energy by eliminating small choices means you are requiring too much energy for your big decisions – you need to moderate.

The value of diversity of people manifests itself when a team is working to create something. That is a very vague claim, but the idea is that the more perspective you can include, the more well-rounded your product or process will be.

If you are designing a new smart phone, four white male graduates from Stanford will probably create something that works really well and looks pretty sleek, but will it be affordable for people in other parts of the world? Will it meet the needs of desires of the average smart phone user, or will it be focused on what its creators think would be most useful? Market research can be beneficial, but having a diversity of perspectives within the team is a much more solid way to ensure the end result is well-suited to meet the needs of many.

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Diversity is important, and empirical evidence suggests the tech sphere is lacking in it. Who’s to blame? Should anything be done about it, or should we sit back and hope it works itself out?

The blame lies with the culture of programming, and that culture has been built up over the last half century by a variety of sources of influence, from TV shows to software companies to the individuals involved. As several of the readings point out, women and some ethnic minorities are steered away from the software industry because their perception of the industry does not align with what they think of themselves. That is an entirely natural reaction. It is difficult to go against one’s grain and sit down in a room full of people who look and act differently from you.

We need a cultural shift, which is not an easy thing to orchestrate. When the orchestra needs directing, it looks to the man at the front waving his hands around passionately. Who are the maestros of the tech industry, the conductors of change?

Leaders at the leading companies are certainly big voices, and some of them have spoken out about the debilitating lack of diversity in their industry. They have acted upon that notion as well, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to efforts aimed at increasing diversity.

While those leaders have a great potential for change, a cultural shift really moves at its roots, by way of each individual participant in the culture. That’s you and me and every other young mind working to develop beautiful software. By changing the way we act, to think with a broader perspective and speak with a more open mind, we invite people from more diverse backgrounds to join us.

live blogging burnout

I spent about two hours reading all of the links posted and then trying to write a blog post in response to the third question, about burnout. After two hours of typing out paragraphs and then deleting them because they sounded senseless and boring upon a second read-through, I decided that I had experienced burnout like the authors were talking about firsthand, and that was a good enough interaction with the readings to satisfy my desire to complete the blog post assignment. 500 words or not, I gained perspective.

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To deal with my minor burnout on the blog post, I did what the authors did – I took a break: in this case, a short night’s sleep. So what caused the burnout last night?

I was pretty exhausted from playing in an ultimate tournament in Alabama over the weekend, and I didn’t get started on the post until 11:30 p.m. last night. But while fatigue definitely played a factor, I believe if I’d been inspired by the readings, I could have written an inspiring blog post. Unfortunately, reading about tech workers getting tired of their jobs just made me more tired.

Can I use this experience to learn and avoid burnout when I enter the workforce? Well, what did I learn? Did I learn more from the readings or my short firsthand experience?

I think it takes some hindsight to learn from a burnout experience. As several of the authors prescribe, you need a nice, long break when you are suffering from burnout, the purpose of which is twofold. First, to help your mind and body rejuvenate, as they were likely exhausted before you took time off. Second, with the hope that sometime during the break, you will start to understand what exactly led to your burnout – what left you feeling dissatisfied.

Andrew Dumont offers some advice related to the first in the form of a list of tips, including morning exercise to get the body in gear, a nightly walk to clear the head, and paring down the number of decisions one has to make on a daily basis. For the most part, his suggestions sound great to me, and I think they would improve the quality of life for anyone, regardless of how burned out they feel.

He provides an example of “limiting decisions,” however, that didn’t immediately sit right with me: President Obama’s decision to only own blue and gray suits, so as to minimize the energy he has to expend to pick an outfit every morning. Mark Zuckerberg does something similar – he only wears gray t-shirts.

“I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve [the Facebook] community.”

While perhaps the president of the United States and the visionary of Facebook are extreme examples, as they have more decisions to make than the average tech worker, their decisions to cut wardrobe variety out seem to me a diminishment of expression.

President Obama also references food choices as an energy-sucker. If everyone in the tech industry was given a set of outfits that were perfectly adequate and a big pill every morning that contained all the nutrients one could need, all those people would be spared the energy from making those decisions. But our world would also start to look like the dystopian one Aldous Huxley describes in A Brave, New World.

The point I am trying to make is that if you are making so many decisions that you are too exhausted to pick what to wear or decide between spaghetti and fried chicken, you are doing too much. You need to moderate. You’re on the track to burnout. Just look at the before and after pictures of President Obama’s presidency; or any president for that matter. It’s not a sustainable lifestyle being the president of the United States.

Well, I made it – a full blog post! From it, I gained some thoughts about how to avoid burnout: be passionate about your work, but not too passionate. Live in moderation. Find a balance. Live sustainably.