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Do people have any personal accountability anymore? "The company will protect me" is such a foolish thought process, especially when you're playing with beta fe
by unstatusthequo 7y ago
Do people have any personal accountability anymore? "The company will protect me" is such a foolish thought process, especially when you're playing with beta features that have risks.
This to me isn't all that different than the guy who crashed his Tesla while watching a movie behind the wheel. Culpability. Assumption of risk. But-for causation. All the usual legal theories apply.
- serf 7y ago>Do people have any personal accountability anymore? Yes. The problem is that people shouldn't have to be accountable for failure-modes that they in no way have the training to predict, understand, or recover from. The FDA explains the specific risks of a drug. They don't just say "This drug can cause issues.". Hand-waving all corporate fault by admitting that your corporation is perfectly okay with beta software being on the public road as long as the car owner assumes responsibility is not a solution to the liability question. A responsible beta program would 1) not be on the public highway in any means 2) require the participants to have a high familiarity with the product and the technical know-how to be effective members of the testing community; which should include training on not only error and incident reporting, but failure recovery and failure scope. It's perfectly reasonable that a user would operate a mechanism incorrectly when their only advice is "Good luck, it's experimental!".