Programming

Real talk, you don't have the luxury of being an idealist right out of university. Your goal is to get a job. When you're in that job you will likely not have the luxury of being an idealist either.

When you have enough experience making practical, reasoned decisions, then you can stand on principals.

For context, I have been in this business for nearly 20 years. The people I have personally worked with who have resisted things on philosophical grounds ALWAYS get left behind. I've seen it with systemd, the cloud, and now I'm seeing it again with kubernetes. You cannot escape the collective inertia of an entire industry.

Obviously there are still thresholds.. I would never work for someone like Raytheon. You have to draw lines somewhere but saying you aren't going to work for a company that does user behavior tracking is short sighted and impractical.

I spent 20 years working for my local newspaper. It was a ton of fun and I constantly got to do new things. I did everything from making a palm pilot game to accompany our coverage of the Sydney Olympics, to an Apache module for a custom cms to iPhone and Android apps.

Now I can't say that working for a news company is a good idea in 2023, but the point is there's probably a company local to you that needs a wide variety of programming and isn't a "tech giant".

Unfortunately for those who have those values, not all paid positions involve acting on those values.

Random brain dump incoming...

Most businesses pay money to solve problems so they can make more money. You can solve their problems - but not in the way that you may be thinking.

This is a generalisation that is not strictly true, but I say it to illustrate a different way of thinking: Businesses do not undertake penetration testing because they want more secure software. They do pentesting so they can stay in business in the face of compliance and bad actors.

To find a job, you want to start learning what people pay for. People pay contractors to come in and fix things, then leave again (politically easier, sometimes cheaper). People pay sotfware developers to develop features (to sell more stuff).

Start looking up job titles and see which ones interest you (DevOps, frontend dev, backend dev, embedded...). Don't get too stuck on the titles themselves. It's just to narrow down what kinds of business problems you find interesting.

Other random questions:

• What specific projects are you interested in?
• What types of problems do you like solving?
• Do you like digging in and finding those tricky bugs that have been bothering people for years?
• Do you like trying out new frameworks which let you think about the system differently?
• Would you rather implement a database or GUI toolbox?

Once you're deep in the belly of the beast, you'll find ways to exercise those values. It's hard to know in advance what this will look like.

I’ve thought of doing pen testing (later on in my career), but I’ve come to realize that it is better if users just started using privacy-respecting FOSS software like Signal, because if you give a hacker enough time, patience, and the right resources, they could hack into anything.

Your idea of pentesting is so far from what it looks like in reality that it's probably not a path for you, at least not now. Let me explain: how am I going to protect my banking app using Signal? How will I know if our JSON unmarshalling library used by transaction service isn't vulnerable or exploitable? What FOSS software shows me live dashboards of deployed software in container and their security risk?

everybody still needs them and they’re not going away any time soon.

Bank is a civilization old concept, it has always been here and will be. Banks are so durable, they will run after our civilization ends.

You won't be stuck. You can always reevaluate and change employer later too.

You can't know many things, like work environment, leadership style, beforehand. After assessment before and during interviews, you'll have to get and and see.

Given that you seem to weigh meaning and impact quite high, I suggest

• check for jobs for Non-profits and rights/citizen protection government orgs
• check companies and industries you're interested in
• consider smaller companies where you have an impact, and where you have or serve a product

You can get an idea of roles and availability from job offers/seekings.

Consider practicality; setting for a reasonable job first, and then taking the time outside of it to seek opportunities, alternatives, or contribute.

North Dakota

I would recommend finding a company with a solid internship program and use the internship program to get your foot in the door and get hired. Companies like Cloudflare, VMWare or other with a security interest have strong internship programs.

Point is, using internships is arguably easier to get in. Many college students, myself included, used internships just to get any experience. But what you really want to strive for is interning where you want to work and kicking butt.

Most jobs that work with FOSS are at the most privacy violating companies unless you go to (eg.) ARM to be a compiler engineer.

Other than that, your best bet is meta, google etc. as they have the resources to pay to write code for other people.