You suggested a false tradeoff between not working on adtech and "the importance of family." There is no such tradeoff. A person might even have more time to spend with the family by doing something different.

Forget about the family feeding justification example. It comes from past HN commments I have seen where people are apparently having a crisis of conscience about what they are actually doing for "work" and looking for acceptable "justifications".^1 The question is why work on adtech versus something else. There is a choice. No one is being forced to work on ads. That is the point of the example.

As for the "vastly inflated sense of how much a programming job impacts the world", that should go the parent commenter as he believes he could be doing something important to the world if he was not working on adtech. We cannot assess whether or not it is "inflated", because adtech is consuming his time and energy and denying him the chance to even try.

What I am suggesting is that simply not working on adtech could itself be something important because, from the computer user perspective, adtech is a pervasive nusiance. It is fine to disagree, and even accuse me of being biased towards users instead of developers, but accusing me of "discounting the importance of family" is disingenuous and, IMO, dishonest. There is no such tradeoff.

Programming jobs can and do have an impact on the world. Consider the environment. The energy consumption of datacenters built to store the results of personal data mining for the purposes of advertising. The energy-intensive minerals extraction for mobile phones that are deliberately intended to become "obsolete" after a commercially desirable period. The auto emissions fraud, e.g., Volvo.

1. Another one is "Well if I don't do this, someone else would just take my place." You just can't make this stuff up.