The Professionals is a series of articles in which three people from one field share their views of Ireland today. Keep an eye out for other articles: the psychologists, the teachers, the tech workers.
The panel
- Peter Rogers: Technology sales professional for Workvivo, an Irish company now owned by Zoom.
- Fatima Ahmed: Has worked in trust, safety and compliance in companies including Storyful and Stripe.
- Aaron Rodericks: Head of trust and safety at Bluesky.
What do you find most rewarding and most challenging about the work you do?
Peter Rogers: I work in enterprise sales for Workvivo, an Irish company that was bought by an American company a couple of years back, Zoom. In terms of the rewarding aspect of what I do, it’s problem solving. I’m quite a process-oriented individual. When you’re working in sales, that takes two forms. It’s how you can resolve issues for your customers and then how you can operate more effectively within the business.
It sounds cliche or corny, but being able to actually solve someone’s problem has a material impact. The challenging part – I know all of us here have worked for large American companies – is the lack of cultural sensitivity, in terms of difference, can be really striking.
Fatima Ahmed: I’ve been working in the tech sector for over a decade now across a number of major platforms in various trust and safety and regulatory compliance-type roles. My work has been focused on tackling online harms, from hate and harassment to money-laundering, protecting democratic processes through election integrity work and also building inclusive tech communities. I transitioned into tech in about 2013 from the international development and NGO sector.
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I’ve recently finished maternity leave with my second child and I’ve decided to take a couple of months just to recover. What I find most rewarding is centred around the humans beyond just the tech. The problems themselves are fascinating. We’re often looking at harms that have existed throughout human history – all forms of harassment and exploitation and hate – but now they’re manifesting on platforms that literally didn’t exist when I started my career. That is a challenge.
Aaron Rodericks: I’m the head of trust and safety at Bluesky. It’s a small start-up that is trying to do social media differently. Previous to this I was at Twitter for about five years and became one of the co-leads of trust and safety there as well. As someone wanting to make the world a better place, you get that fix every day. You are in a very ugly fight to try to come up with norms that humans can largely agree to, and it is an incredible struggle. This is the first job that I’ve ever had where I stepped into a public role and then users yell at me and call me horrible names. So learning to build thicker skin has been a huge part of this role.
How has your profession changed in recent years, and what forces have driven those changes?
Peter: There used to be, particularly in sales, this sense that if you hit your number, you had your job. Those things are gone now. AI has become omnipresent. AI can accelerate solutions to the problems. These kinds of things are groundbreaking. But the other side is we hear about insurance companies resolving claims based on inherently baked-in biases within an AI structure.
I’ve seen a power shift post-Brexit where a lot of functions have moved to the Middle East, specifically to Dubai. If you’re looking for funding now, that often takes place in Dubai and executive function is often being moved out of Ireland and the UK into the Middle East.
Fatima: The profession has gone from being quite niche to being central to major societal questions, especially trust and safety. When I started in YouTube in 2013, it felt very new, and most people you told about the work would not really know at all what you do. The platforms that we’re talking about have become fundamental infrastructure for billions of people. We are seeing a lot of automation, but so much of what we do relies on human judgment. We are yet to see where that will go. On a global scale we’re seeing Europe move more towards comprehensive regulation of technology ... We’re seeing other jurisdictions pull back, and trust and safety work becoming a lot more politicised.
Aaron: The pendulum has swung. You saw massive lay-offs in 2022 in the trust and safety and social media industry; you’ve seen a lot of people switch to consulting or outside of the space. It’s all gotten tied up with these geopolitical tensions. Certain governments are regulating a whole lot more, but that’s also getting wrapped up in this dialogue on freedom of speech. If that was just what was happening, great, but this is also happening at the same time as billionaire ownership gets consolidated.
What opportunities and risks do you see ahead for your field over the next decade in Ireland?
Peter: There’s a huge brain drain with the younger generation where we’ve got massive emigration. Our housing and cost-of-living crisis is driving people away. It’s preventing entrepreneurship. There’s a really entrepreneurial, highly educated and ambitious cohort of people living in Ireland, and the Irish diaspora too. Within my own circle of friends, people I grew up with in Dublin are now in Singapore and London and New York. I feel like we’re haemorrhaging optimistic and entrepreneurial people as a result of inactivity and passiveness.
Irish people are ambitious. Where I’m a little bit concerned is I don’t often see that same ambition when it comes to the governance of Ireland. But people in Ireland find solutions all the time
— Peter Rogers
It’s not things that have been hard fought for, it’s about modernising and adapting to the world around us. If we don’t do that, we lose our position in the global scheme of things. To be optimistic, we are the most educated workforce in Europe, I believe, which leads to a breaking-down of barriers. Diversity of opinion and background leads to opportunity and success.
Fatima: I resonate with that – all of the friends who’ve left and will never be able to come back. I was one of those people. Funnily enough, I came back home to Dublin for tech; it was the sector that I saw a future for myself in. Other friends in other sectors have had to stay in London and elsewhere. We’re in quite a unique position here, being the EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] hub for most major tech platforms but now also becoming a significant regulatory centre. I worked in Stripe, and when I worked on financial crimes it was so different to the social media space, where regulation was not well developed. In social media you see regulation so much less developed.
I was thinking about John Collison’s piece on regulatory fragmentation. I personally think that clear frameworks are important and having well-resourced regulatory bodies is going to be crucial.
[ John Collison of Stripe: Ireland is going backwards. Here’s how to get it movingOpens in new window ]
Aaron: Ireland has been heavily reliant on its tax harbour approach. As that potentially risks going away with tax harmonisation, there’s a genuine risk that you see people going, well, why are we going to put up with the extremely high cost of housing, the difficulties in transportation, all the other unique joys of Ireland and living in Dublin?
You’re seeing more and more news stories of lay-offs related to automation and AI, and definitely in trust and safety you’re seeing a huge amount of lay-offs linked to advances in LLMs and automation being used for run-of-the-mill content moderation. So both those are threats.
What do people most often misunderstand about your work or your industry?
Peter: People’s expectation of what we do is dramatically different from the reality. A lot of organisations that I’ve been in – almost all of them really – are very focused on giving back to the community they operate within. The people who work in tech are the people within your community. They care about their country, and not in a jingoistic, flag-waving way, but in a practical giving-back kind of way. I think tech also provides an opportunity for us in Ireland to work towards a decentralisation. I have friends who live in Ennis because they’re able to work remotely.
Fatima: You get people – inside and outside the industry – who are uncritically bullish on every tech advance, friends who adopt it all and think it’s fantastic. But then the opposite: people who think everyone working in tech is complicit in societal harm.
If you look at elections, if you only see the positive side you’ve got these platforms that have democratised information sharing in really great ways. We’re seeing lots of grassroots movements organised online, and a lot of perspectives that might never have made it to traditional media. But then you look at the negative and all you see is misinformation campaigns and echo chambers and concerns around corporate control. They’re real problems.
These are just new forms of media. We had newspapers and television and radio before this, and there were people who controlled those and were making decisions about what narratives get shared on those. The difference now is the scale and the speed that we have. But the fundamental questions about media power and democratic participation are not new.
[ Are Ireland’s tech layoffs down to an AI rout?Opens in new window ]
Aaron: A lot is blamed on social media – rightfully so. But what’s interesting is that a huge amount of it is just the way human brains are wired, and the way dopamine receptors work. It’s complicated, because sometimes social media keeps on training the algorithm to make you click more and generate more dopamine. People don’t realise it’s a neuroscience problem, it’s a societal problem, it is a justice problem; it is all these things intertwined. People love to oversimplify and blame the companies, and sometimes they are fully correct, but sometimes it’s a lot more complicated.
We’re a brand-new social media company. People always assume you should know everything, you should have all this capacity. “You should” is one of these very painful terms in the space.
Seeing a lot of people come over for jobs in tech, bringing US salaries and driving up house prices, it’s been quite dystopian watching how we’ve just let it happen
— Fatima Ahmed
The biggest tension in my space is to help people take control of their own experience and use the tools we give them. But one of the things that I’ve really learned very recently is that even if you build all the tools to give people control it is not enough for the average user to be able to control their experience. They’re sometimes only satisfied when they can control the experience of others.
When you think about the future – for yourself, your career, and for Ireland – are you optimistic? Why or why not?
Peter: What makes me optimistic is that Irish people are ambitious and want to pursue that. Where I’m a little bit concerned is I don’t often see that same ambition when it comes to the governance of Ireland. But people in Ireland find solutions all the time.
I moved back to Ireland in 2020. My wife is from America, we live in Dublin now, and we did that for a reason. We see a future in Ireland and we see what it has the potential to be. But I have friends who are master’s holders, who are living in their parents’ attics at 35, 36, 37 years old.
Fatima: I’m cautiously optimistic. We see tech booming, we see our economy apparently doing well and employment figures are strong, but we’ve got a worsening housing crisis, which is key when we want to talk about the future of Ireland.
My partner and I pushed back having kids later than we would have liked, because it just wasn’t really possible. I moved from the humanitarian sector because I wanted to be able to afford to live in this city, and tech has helped me do that. I’ve been able to buy a home in my city, so I can’t be in denial about any of that. I chose a sector that could help me financially, but I’m also still very critical of it in so many ways.
When I graduated in the recession in 2008, there wasn’t a whole lot that you would see if you went down to the now Silicon Docks. People were living there, of course, but now there are so many communities that have been displaced through gentrification. It makes me think back to San Francisco and the dystopian reality of tech workers going into these fancy buildings with their matching backpacks, walking past people who are living in tents and maybe even have full-time jobs.
[ Ireland’s future depends on collective ambition and bold vision on infrastructureOpens in new window ]
I remember starting to see tents pop up along the canal in Dublin, and you’re like, okay, are we going to just keep letting this housing crisis get worse? Seeing a lot of people come over for jobs in tech, bringing US salaries and driving up house prices, it’s been quite dystopian watching how we’ve just let it happen. We’ve been quite deferential to a lot of companies. We need to think about all of that going forward if we want to be optimistic about the future.
I am hopeful because we just had our very hopeful presidential campaign, which united a lot of people across Ireland who are hopeful about solutions for a more inclusive and equal society and pride in our country for all the right reasons. So I think there is reason for hope, but we have to be critical and act.
Aaron: I have learned in Ireland to be a lot more optimistic about the future. I never planned to come to Ireland. My wife got a job out of the blue and I decided to follow her. I came here, was unemployed, and it somehow managed to work out. Ireland has taught me that while I continually expect the worst, things frequently work out. They don’t necessarily work out in the way you’ve planned or the way you would like them to work out, but they do work out. So it’s taught me to trust in the flow a little. Try not to stick to my expectations too hard, but to believe in this place.
