Software Developers underestimate their profession and should occupy a more responsible role in society. After the Agile Brazil 2011 my mind got hit by several thoughts that leaded to one direction: What's the purpose that drive developers?
So I asked my self that question and expanded to all other activities that motivate me: Physics research, 3D modeling, game developing and Agile. One thing that they have in common is the ability to change things in a powerful manner. Physics do it through facts that change our mental reality, 3D modeling and games through operations that change a fictitious and malleable world and Agile through an effective organization of people.
After a while I concluded that they all where driven by a general frustration. Thinking way back, when I was around 12 years old, I remember that a had the desire to change the world. But as I was growing up this thoughts where demoted to a feeling of naivety, but in fact all I did since then was trying to comply with this primal desire - "Oh well, I can't change the world ... but I can refactor this code to two lines!" . Any developer out there feel the same way?
A common word that we hear in the agile world is local optimization, and I believe the majority of Software developers are doing so in their jobs (me included!). When I work for a company I am constrained to the company's objective, and all my ideas are narrowed down to the profitable ones. But think for a while in what's your company doing to society? Extracting Oil? Entertaining? Selling cereal? If those are all good to society we are local optimizing the world's problems, think about the worse of them: poverty, education, health and so on. Do you believe that online entertainment is above them?
Making society happy doesn't necessarily mean that it's good to the society, see coca-cola for example. When living in a capitalistic world we can make things that will increase the overall happiness and profit at the same time, looks like a win win case, right? But we can, and did many times, create a society demand where it didn't exist, and creating a new market might not be a healthy solution to the worlds problems.
At the end we might be only giving panem at circenses to the world, developers and entrepreneurs should go deeper then any medium class shallow desires. I believe that society needs a red pill and it could be our job to build them.
Since our alternatives to the classical capitalism are far from reality I still have to make money and try to balance the equation and dedicate time to this, but its getting hard to don't feel guilty about doing nothing.
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