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When a building without enough exits burns down and kills 100 people, blaming the construction workers who built it isn't going to help anything. It's rare tha
by learc83 7y ago
When a building without enough exits burns down and kills 100 people, blaming the construction workers who built it isn't going to help anything.
It's rare that it's developers who actually come up with these ideas, they're usually just employees implementing someone else's plan.
Unless we're talking early startups--then there's a good chance the developer is responsible.
- mathieuh 7y agoI would find somewhere else to work if I had ethical concerns over what they were asking me to do. For example, the UK’s department of work and pensions was a contract the company I work for had at the time when there was a huge furore over IDS (a politician)’s policies. If i had been assigned to work on that project I would have resigned.
- wserjifowe 7y agoI think it's not going to be so obvious. If you write a feature that is intended to deceive then sure, but the developer who wrote that feature was probably told "ok, if the inventory is below a certain threshold, then add this behavior". The feature itself is benign. Should a developer resign anytime they can concoct a theoretical way in which a feature they're writing could possibly be exploited?
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- chucksmash 7y agoIt's hard to distinguish between something being explicitly shady and just a bad system though. "As a user, if I arrive on a booking page and the live API data shows our cached pricing data is stale, I expect the difference to be acknowledged." Developer implements animation callout and an approximate, non-technical explanation Cached pricing data continues to often be stale
- prepend 7y agoI call those asshole user stories unless there is a logged story “as a user, I expect inventory prices to be accurate in real time.” I don’t like user stories that are anti-customer and in the developer’s favor unless it’s clear that there’s a path to fairness. The motivation to a system should be to have as current as possible pricing, not some nightly batch that shows cheaper, unavailable prices and pisses off people when the real price is actually checked.
- pwodhouse 7y agoI assume that you refuse to be paid more than a construction workers then? Part of the legal definition of a salaried professional is that the job entails the use of judgment.
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- ionised 7y agoEvery job requires judgement of some kind.
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- xorcist 7y agoWhat a strange comparison. Would you consider it equally unjustified to hold construction engineers and architects responsible for constructing a death trap? Even if that is what the customer ordered? It's probably not a coincidence that engineers and doctors are professionals well known to place their own ethical standards above their customers. It is expected that a doctor refuse to carry out a procedure that puts innocent people at harm.
- ForHackernews 7y agoIt's a perfectly apt comparison. Software "engineers" are not actually engineers. We are not professionals, we are wage labor. * No professional code of ethics. * No professional body that oversees the profession and sets standards. * No licensing or certification (except maybe in Canada). I'm sure I'll get a bunch of flack for this, but it's well past time developers stopped indulging in classist self-flattery pretending they're the peers of doctors, lawyers, or accountants.
- umanwizard 7y agoI don't follow your argument. Existence of the things you mention are not really the main distinguishing features of different socio-professional classes. A programmer is still more like a lawyer in almost every conceivable way than they are like a bricklayer: level of education, social circles, work environment, pay, cultural values, etc. (This has nothing to do with "self-flattery" unless you think I'm making some sort of value judgment about these different classes, as opposed to just describing them).
- ForHackernews 7y agoLawyers will not commit malpractice because they would open themselves up to liability and damage their professional reputations. In contrast, most software devs will code up whatever evil garbage features their bosses tell them to. They don't even have a concept of malpractice. Very rarely, one might quit, but they have no standing to say "no" to their employers and remain employed.
- smt88 7y agoDevelopers don't always come up with dark patterns or fraud, but they implement them. It's possible to say no on ethical grounds, isn't it? I was once asked to finish and deploy code that the previous dev had stolen from his old employer. I said no because the code was paid for by someone else and belonged to them. It wasn't a big deal -- my career didn't suffer.
- uoaei 7y ago"I was just following orders" is an excuse that fell very out of favor last century.
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- groby_b 7y agoDon't worry, it's coming back in fashion. Ask ICE.
- learc83 7y agoSo do you think that the correct way to make sure buildings have enough exits is to shame construction workers into not working on buildings that they think have too few exits? Keeping in mind that an individual worker may only have knowledge of a small section of the overall building. To your point specifically how many low level German laborers were prosecuted for following orders to build a prison camp or lay railroad track?