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Software engineers don't make corporate policy. If Amazon or Facebook or Google decide to take advantage of their insider info on consumers to victimize them,

Software engineers don't make corporate policy. If Amazon or Facebook or Google decide to take advantage of their insider info on consumers to victimize them, that decision maker will be the CEO and the board, not lowly S/W developers. The most SWEs can do with their ethics is avoid or leave employers that have a history of such abuses. And clearly that is not happening.

gizmo686 9y ago
There are still more mundane questions about engineering ethics. Your boss is pushing you to get a feature done by the end of the week, but doing it properly would take at least a month. You could finish it, but doing so would lead to increased maintenance costs, inconvenience/costs to downstream users/ etc. What are your ethical obligations here. Blindly listen to your boss, make sure your boss is aware of the engineering trade-offs being made and has made an informed decision on the timeline, refuse to deploy sub-par code, quit, leak about poor engineering practices, publicy shame about poor engineering practices?
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  You make sure your boss is aware of the trade-offs, but once the decision has been made, you carry it out to the best of your ability. In the long run, you don't get paid unless the business makes money, and examples abound that show getting to market first is often more valuable than getting there with the best product. If that bothers you, talk to a union rep, because few businesses in existence would rather do the right thing if doing the wrong thing makes an extra buck. If the money flows in, those maintenance costs will keep you employed; if it doesn't, those costs won't need to be paid. You don't refuse to deploy, you don't leak, and you don't shame. If you feel as you you ethically must do any of those, quit first. (Don't mention your intentions to HR at your exit interview.)
  - gizmo686 9y ago
    What if you think it will cost the bussiness money, but will improve your bosses standing (for example, the damage will not be blamed on you boss), do you go to your boss's boss? What if you don't question that the change will make money for the business, but have ethical concerns about it (either because of its effect on users, competition, third parties, etc). How do you decide if you have ethical concerns? What if you are writing firmware for brakes that is going to get deployed to thousands of cars? >If that bothers you, talk to a union rep What union? Even if there was a union, this entirely avoids the central question: what behavior is ethically concerning? >If you feel as you you ethically must do any of those, quit first. This answer entirely avoids the ethical question of '(when) should you do any of those things'. All it says is "quit first" (a position which solidifies your moral high-ground, but which I do not agree with from a purely ethical standpoint).
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      > What union? Exactly. Software professionals don't have a (powerful) union or trade association, so our ethical concerns are not significant from a business standpoint. The company hired you to do what the company wants, not what you think is best. You have no leverage to enforce your views. Making an ethical stand can get you fired or blacklisted from future promotions. Or it might get you recognized and rewarded by the company. It all depends on the company leadership. Do you believe your company leadership has the same respect for ethics as you?
anigbrowl 9y ago
Unionize or professionalize with a guild structure. There is a slight economic cost to your doing so, in terms of both rent to the organizational structure and the opportunity cost of unethical choices foregone, but organizing the only practical response to organizational pressure upon the individual. Have you ever considered that the ideological opposition to collective action and glorification of individual liberty that obtains in hacker culture is in fact a form of social engineering expressly designed to disempower you and prevent you from threatening the social structures that rule your life? While public companies are nominally semi-democratic and allow open access to participate in their commercial rewards, in practice almost all large firms are dictatorships and operate on the same pragmatic principles as dictatorships. It's baffling to me that so many people who conceive of themselves as free individualists are in such a rush to put themselves as the disposal of autocratic rules. Meanwhile the open-source movement systematically cuts itself off at the knees by displaying an irrational antipathy to any sort of private profit, thus ensuring a steady supply of free voluntary labor which is economically unsustainable for anyone who isn't willing to live as an ascetic.

gizmo686 9y ago

There are still more mundane questions about engineering ethics. Your boss is pushing you to get a feature done by the end of the week, but doing it properly would take at least a month. You could finish it, but doing so would lead to increased maintenance costs, inconvenience/costs to downstream users/ etc. What are your ethical obligations here. Blindly listen to your boss, make sure your boss is aware of the engineering trade-offs being made and has made an informed decision on the timeline, refuse to deploy sub-par code, quit, leak about poor engineering practices, publicy shame about poor engineering practices?

logfromblammo 9y ago
You make sure your boss is aware of the trade-offs, but once the decision has been made, you carry it out to the best of your ability. In the long run, you don't get paid unless the business makes money, and examples abound that show getting to market first is often more valuable than getting there with the best product. If that bothers you, talk to a union rep, because few businesses in existence would rather do the right thing if doing the wrong thing makes an extra buck. If the money flows in, those maintenance costs will keep you employed; if it doesn't, those costs won't need to be paid. You don't refuse to deploy, you don't leak, and you don't shame. If you feel as you you ethically must do any of those, quit first. (Don't mention your intentions to HR at your exit interview.)
- gizmo686 9y ago
  What if you think it will cost the bussiness money, but will improve your bosses standing (for example, the damage will not be blamed on you boss), do you go to your boss's boss? What if you don't question that the change will make money for the business, but have ethical concerns about it (either because of its effect on users, competition, third parties, etc). How do you decide if you have ethical concerns? What if you are writing firmware for brakes that is going to get deployed to thousands of cars? >If that bothers you, talk to a union rep What union? Even if there was a union, this entirely avoids the central question: what behavior is ethically concerning? >If you feel as you you ethically must do any of those, quit first. This answer entirely avoids the ethical question of '(when) should you do any of those things'. All it says is "quit first" (a position which solidifies your moral high-ground, but which I do not agree with from a purely ethical standpoint).
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    > What union? Exactly. Software professionals don't have a (powerful) union or trade association, so our ethical concerns are not significant from a business standpoint. The company hired you to do what the company wants, not what you think is best. You have no leverage to enforce your views. Making an ethical stand can get you fired or blacklisted from future promotions. Or it might get you recognized and rewarded by the company. It all depends on the company leadership. Do you believe your company leadership has the same respect for ethics as you?

anigbrowl 9y ago

Unionize or professionalize with a guild structure. There is a slight economic cost to your doing so, in terms of both rent to the organizational structure and the opportunity cost of unethical choices foregone, but organizing the only practical response to organizational pressure upon the individual. Have you ever considered that the ideological opposition to collective action and glorification of individual liberty that obtains in hacker culture is in fact a form of social engineering expressly designed to disempower you and prevent you from threatening the social structures that rule your life? While public companies are nominally semi-democratic and allow open access to participate in their commercial rewards, in practice almost all large firms are dictatorships and operate on the same pragmatic principles as dictatorships. It's baffling to me that so many people who conceive of themselves as free individualists are in such a rush to put themselves as the disposal of autocratic rules. Meanwhile the open-source movement systematically cuts itself off at the knees by displaying an irrational antipathy to any sort of private profit, thus ensuring a steady supply of free voluntary labor which is economically unsustainable for anyone who isn't willing to live as an ascetic.