RECENTLY, IBM ANNOUNCED it will lay off thousands of employees; Amazon announced over 14,000 layoffs. Companies like Google and Microsoft have also faced criticism this year for plans to develop AI for weapons and for firing outspoken critical employees. Clearly, Big Tech is facing uncertain times.
As a Ph.D. researcher at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, and as a former science and tech analyst for the ACLU of Massachusetts, I’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news? Tech job-seekers don’t have to work for these companies. In fact, they don’t have to work for companies at all.
Rather, we need a new generation of tech workers — I call them advocacy technologists — who support the public sector and work in mission-driven, advocacy-oriented organizations.
In a new study published last month in a computing journal on Human-Computer Interaction, I analyze interviews with 23 tech experts in nonprofit and advocacy settings, describing the uniqueness and importance of these advocacy technologists.
In much the same way that public interest law was built up as an alternative to Big Law in the 1970s, these workers offer an alternative future for tech jobs beyond Big Tech. They can act as translators between the needs of advocates and the capabilities of tech.
A new kind of tech worker
Advocacy technologists might build custom dashboards for swamped food banks, help shape policy addressing the dark underside of tenant screening algorithms, or offer trainings for how activists can operate safely online. What’s more, they can serve as a first line of defense against overblown tech hype and AI snake oil: interpreting for their nonprofit colleagues what, say, the latest ChatGPT release can and cannot do.
The workers I spoke with come from a wide diversity of backgrounds. Not all had undergraduate degrees; those who did had majors ranging from statistics to neuroscience to international studies to art history.
I myself found my way to advocacy technology work after a career that began in astrophysics. Translating my coding chops from space to civil liberties was a serious learning curve, but the opportunity to work with ACLU-MA’s Technology for Liberty project was something I couldn’t turn down. In my two years there, I was able to support projects addressing issues ranging from racial profiling in traffic stops to COVID in prisons to police overtime pay. My colleagues were exceptional and the work was incredibly rewarding; it ultimately inspired me to pursue a Ph.D. in order to better understand how data and tech can best support political advocacy.
Nonprofit technology initiatives are often at the whim of philanthropists, leaving advocacy technologists struggling to learn about job opportunities and options for professional advancement.
But here’s the bad news: nonprofit technology initiatives are — like nonprofits themselves — often under-resourced and subject to the whim of funders and philanthropists. This leaves both prospective and current advocacy technologists struggling to learn about such sparse job opportunities in the first place, and with few options for professional advancement once they’re in.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that few job-seekers even know where to look to find work in ‘tech for good.’ In the words of one junior technologist included in the study: “There wasn’t a clear path in front of me for what to do if you like math and don’t want to do evil.”
Strengthening support for advocacy tech
Some exciting new initiatives are working to build a more robust pipeline, including All Tech is Human’s support of “responsible tech” work, the professional association Technologists for the Public Good, the Public Interest Technology University Network, the #BlackTechFutures Research Institute, and more.
Nevertheless, nonprofit funders and grantmakers should take note and commit to building out a lasting infrastructure for this exciting new professional trend. It’s been done before. The Ford Foundation in the 1970s was instrumental in building out the profession of public interest law.
Of course, nonprofit salaries will never be able to compete with the eye-watering compensation packages we see coming from billion- or even trillion-dollar tech companies. Yet these advocacy-oriented jobs offer more than money, they offer value alignment. As a more senior study participant shared, “I know that I could be making a lot more money if I went to Ad Tech or Big Tech … But I grew up in a family of educators, warriors, and farmers who taught me the value of community.”
As our talented and tech-skilled professionals — and especially young people just entering the workforce — are looking for their next gig, they shouldn’t limit their search to Big Tech or flashy startups. We should be enabling more technologists to explore mission-driven tech jobs outside of the private sector — working for the public good rather than the bottom line.
About the author
Lauren Chambers is a Ph.D. candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information, a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with The OpEd Project, a Ford Foundation Fellow and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow.