Systemic abuse in the software industry is ruining lives… and taking them.
This article more seemed to suggest that extremely intelligent people are more likely to get into trouble than any apparent root cause to me. In Schwartz and Turing&#x27;s case, while the law was misguided, it compounded their stressors and took their lives. In the one fellows case he apparently broke into someone&#x27;s house wasted and was arrested. And there was the guy announcing his suicide on twitter (that might be the same guy, can&#x27;t remember), a serious call for help.<p>I&#x27;m not so sure this article made me think it&#x27;s endemic to the software industry. Large numbers of people commit suicide in the United States and abroad every year. Maybe it&#x27;s the cultural stressors of bills, and grades, and social exclusion, and yada yada yada onward and onward for as long as you&#x27;d like that contributes to the high rates of suicide in high stress environments.<p>And then this weird tangential aside about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and how they&#x27;d be equally disastrous convinced me this was an emotional plea for <i>something</i> (the vague sentiment that we should treat eachother like humans regardless of seniority when humans don&#x27;t particularly have a great track record on that front and while... positive is just as <i>kooky</i> if not much more so than anything Bernie Sanders has said) not particularly well grounded in reality and with no proposed solutions besides a call for empathy.<p>If you want people to stop commiting suicide you need to take away their major stressors which compound their depressive states. Correct the law so that gays are free to be themselves. Pay people living wages so their bank accounts have at least a small buffer. Make sure health care and education are affordable and accessible.<p>So in a way his potential future vote for Bernie based on Bernie&#x27;s empathy was the wrong path to the right choice. It&#x27;s not just in this individual instance that Bernie feels empathetic towards man, but in almost all instances of Bernie&#x27;s recorded public profile. Whether it comes to the oppression of African Americans and gays, or to the inability to pay bills or access health care of education of the lower and middle class Americans he represents, Bernie has consistently been on the empathetic side of the equation.<p>But it&#x27;s his policy proposals which make Bernie the right man for the job, not his empathy which shaped them.