5 ms·

I wish webdevs would stop this bullshit yesterday. "Bbbut, everyone does it. It's industry sop..."

godelski 9y ago
I always love that argument. Because it reminds me when I was 5 and my mom said "Just because everyone else does it doesn't make it right." If your argument is one that a 5 year old is making, you might need to reconsider.
- zeth___ 9y ago
  If you're not paying, you're the product. Until we outlaw a way to make money, expecting people to morally not use it to is extremely naive. Something a 5 year old would expect in fact. There is a reason why we have police, courts and jails after all.
  - Retra 9y ago
    If you are paying, you might still be the product. Companies have plenty incentive to double dip and extract profit from multiple directions.
- dictum 9y ago
  You don't get to a 100M+ net worth by following the virtuous advice of your parents.
  - drngdds 9y ago
    Literally no one needs a hundred million dollars
  - arca_vorago 9y ago
    That statement is a thesis paper waiting to happen.
- eftychis 9y ago
  This is a sign of immaturity of the field in my mind and how management forms and enforces low standards. Developers need to have some leverage to push back from these arguments. Just my 2 cents.
  - godelski 9y ago
    I think we have power. If you can't get people to build a product because they don't think it is ethical, then you can't build the product. That is the leverage developers have. Of course, this works best in an economy where there are a surplus of jobs.
    - moosebear 9y ago
      Swimming with Sharks by Joris Luyendijk (about the finance industry in London) argues that amoral actors develop and thrive in environments where they get a “bonus” for good performance but fear no “malus” if their choices backfire. Organizationally, you see banks with separate, impotent, internal risk and compliance departments, while their “front offices” get literal cash bonuses for successful short term gambles. No rational actor sees any benefit to fighting for change: there’s no lasting result but personal ruin. Developers have the power to refuse bad actions, especially like you say in a job-rich environment. But unless software developers experience risk consequences for developing something bad, some number of them will not obey their conscience.
      - godelski 9y ago
        While I fully agree with you I think the key part is what you say at the end. > some number of them will not obey their conscience. Let's just hope that as time progresses that more will follow their conscience. I honestly think that as our other needs are being taken care of that people are able to act more on their own personal ethics. It is substantially easier to be ethical when you can put food on the table.
        moosebear 9y ago
Sylos 9y ago
The depressing part is that there is actually somewhat of a point to that. I despise Google, Facebook et al and I develop a webpage in my freetime for a club that I'm in. I'll gladly work an extra hour, if it means I can avoid sending data to one of those asshat companies, but it's really not as easy as it sounds. I for example used a template to base my webpage on and that template creator chose a font, as he should, but then instead of statically embedding the font file, the guy included it by linking to Google Fonts, meaning that all of my users' browsers sent their IP and that they are visiting my webpage (as part of the HTTP Referrer) off to Google. I found out by looking at my page with NoScript and I suppose, you could find out by looking at the network requests, too, but neither are necessarily something that a hobby webdev is going to look at. Another time, a module decided to load JQuery off of a Google server. And incidentally, that module was installed by the guy who maintained the webpage before me, so that's another point how "everyone doing it" does actually make it harder on you. Then we wanted to embed a map. I happened to know of OpenStreetMap, but most webdevs probably don't, because everyone's using Google Maps everywhere. For videos, I was convinced to embed YouTube-videos, because of networking effects and such, so then I wanted to at least try to make it privacy-friendly and, you know, comply with EU law, so I put up a picture, if you clicked on that picture, it would then load in the actual YouTube player. I was hoping to find a module that did this automatically. I found one. Exactly one, that is. And it was kind of shitty at that. So, then I had to spend not just one extra hour, but probably rather five, to try to patch that module up into a semi-usable something.
- WA 9y ago
  Templates these days are pretty bad. And you can’t filter for stuff like no third party HTTP requests, or no animations. I even thought about creating a place for minimal themes that don’t load remote JS (and don’t do silly stuff like scrollbar hijacking).

I always love that argument. Because it reminds me when I was 5 and my mom said "Just because everyone else does it doesn't make it right." If your argument is one that a 5 year old is making, you might need to reconsider.

zeth___ 9y ago
If you're not paying, you're the product. Until we outlaw a way to make money, expecting people to morally not use it to is extremely naive. Something a 5 year old would expect in fact. There is a reason why we have police, courts and jails after all.
- Retra 9y ago
  If you are paying, you might still be the product. Companies have plenty incentive to double dip and extract profit from multiple directions.
dictum 9y ago
You don't get to a 100M+ net worth by following the virtuous advice of your parents.
- drngdds 9y ago
  Literally no one needs a hundred million dollars
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  That statement is a thesis paper waiting to happen.
eftychis 9y ago
This is a sign of immaturity of the field in my mind and how management forms and enforces low standards. Developers need to have some leverage to push back from these arguments. Just my 2 cents.
- godelski 9y ago
  I think we have power. If you can't get people to build a product because they don't think it is ethical, then you can't build the product. That is the leverage developers have. Of course, this works best in an economy where there are a surplus of jobs.
  - moosebear 9y ago
    Swimming with Sharks by Joris Luyendijk (about the finance industry in London) argues that amoral actors develop and thrive in environments where they get a “bonus” for good performance but fear no “malus” if their choices backfire. Organizationally, you see banks with separate, impotent, internal risk and compliance departments, while their “front offices” get literal cash bonuses for successful short term gambles. No rational actor sees any benefit to fighting for change: there’s no lasting result but personal ruin. Developers have the power to refuse bad actions, especially like you say in a job-rich environment. But unless software developers experience risk consequences for developing something bad, some number of them will not obey their conscience.
    - godelski 9y ago
      While I fully agree with you I think the key part is what you say at the end. > some number of them will not obey their conscience. Let's just hope that as time progresses that more will follow their conscience. I honestly think that as our other needs are being taken care of that people are able to act more on their own personal ethics. It is substantially easier to be ethical when you can put food on the table.
      - moosebear 9y ago

Sylos 9y ago

The depressing part is that there is actually somewhat of a point to that. I despise Google, Facebook et al and I develop a webpage in my freetime for a club that I'm in. I'll gladly work an extra hour, if it means I can avoid sending data to one of those asshat companies, but it's really not as easy as it sounds. I for example used a template to base my webpage on and that template creator chose a font, as he should, but then instead of statically embedding the font file, the guy included it by linking to Google Fonts, meaning that all of my users' browsers sent their IP and that they are visiting my webpage (as part of the HTTP Referrer) off to Google. I found out by looking at my page with NoScript and I suppose, you could find out by looking at the network requests, too, but neither are necessarily something that a hobby webdev is going to look at. Another time, a module decided to load JQuery off of a Google server. And incidentally, that module was installed by the guy who maintained the webpage before me, so that's another point how "everyone doing it" does actually make it harder on you. Then we wanted to embed a map. I happened to know of OpenStreetMap, but most webdevs probably don't, because everyone's using Google Maps everywhere. For videos, I was convinced to embed YouTube-videos, because of networking effects and such, so then I wanted to at least try to make it privacy-friendly and, you know, comply with EU law, so I put up a picture, if you clicked on that picture, it would then load in the actual YouTube player. I was hoping to find a module that did this automatically. I found one. Exactly one, that is. And it was kind of shitty at that. So, then I had to spend not just one extra hour, but probably rather five, to try to patch that module up into a semi-usable something.

WA 9y ago
Templates these days are pretty bad. And you can’t filter for stuff like no third party HTTP requests, or no animations. I even thought about creating a place for minimal themes that don’t load remote JS (and don’t do silly stuff like scrollbar hijacking).