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It shouldn't be the workers job to maintain those ethics, though. Don't get me wrong I'm all for unionizing and all the benefits it brings, but it's not the wor

It shouldn't be the workers job to maintain those ethics, though. Don't get me wrong I'm all for unionizing and all the benefits it brings, but it's not the worker's responsibility to ensure business behaves ethically; that's the job of regulation. They shouldn't have the option to behave unethically in the first place, and the determining factor should absolutely not be if they can find sufficient human resources willing to sacrifice their ethics to feed themselves. I'm all for whistle-blowers of course, but these companies aren't breaking the law, and that's the core problem.

undefined3840 7y ago
Well yes I agree in principle but you as a worker voluntarily choose to work somewhere. Sometimes it’s only when you actually start at a job when you realize that there’s a disconnect between a company’s behavior and your own principles.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  > voluntarily choose If my workplace tomorrow decided to implement things I ethically disagree with, I cannot in good faith say that I would quit. It's easy to say stuff like that, but when you have a mortgage, have family that depend on you, a home you've put tons of work into, hobbies you love... I mean you can call me a sellout if you want, and I couldn't really disagree, but why is that burden on me? To relieve the politicians of the awful work involved in doing their job? My job is to write code. Their job is to write law. Why must I quit mine and jeopardize my livelihood so they can eschew theirs?
  - Retric 7y ago
    I don’t have a problem with that on day one, but I do think you should start looking for a job in that situation. This results in increased costs via turnover which discourages unethical behavior, and let’s you do something meaningful without pushing the full burden to you.
    - FussyZeus 7y ago
      I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying, but I still say “just get a different job” is a huge simplification of the issue. An issue which again, I put forward, is not something I should be responsible for fixing.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    It's not either/or; it's both/and. We need politicians that are actually doing their jobs. And we need people with consciences working for tech companies. We need both. As for quitting... if you were a factory worker in a one-company town, you'd be in a worse spot. But I hear that software engineers are in demand these days. And if you're in somewhere like the Bay Area, there are many options available to you. For that matter, there may be many options available to you even within your own company. You may not be able in good conscience to work on that project, but can you transfer teams? And, if you're feeling that it might be useful, tell them why. On the other hand, that leaves such a team with nobody left working on it that has a functioning conscience. That's not ideal, either. But that comes down to your judgment about whether you can actually change the course of the team. If you can't, what's the point in staying?
  - atoav 7y ago
    Everybody has an impact, culture comes always first, then comes law. If we are lucky and the right people are in office bad culture gets outlawed. If we are unlucky and our political structures influencable by business the existing culture becomes the law. I have two grandfathers, one found a way to evade the Nazis and one was a Nazi. The former always said they were uncultured and barbaric, without humanist values. The latter said all he did was following orders and the law, and they built streets after all. In my eyes the ahistorical period is over, and in hindsight it never matters how convincing your excuse is, when your grandchildren ask you what you did when X happend. If you can change culture for the better, do it.
    - eevilspock 7y ago
      Yes, culture is primary. (though I'm confused by the rest of that paragraph) The Banality of Systemic Evil: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banalit... It's sad that thoughts such as yours and mine get downvoted. Even an Upton Sinclair quote that no one can honestly disagree with gets downvoted, all because we're touching on people's comfy lives and self-esteem.
      - FussyZeus 7y ago
        Again, it's easy to say 'quit your job' when you're a 20-something living in a group apartment, with no family, and no real responsibilities, in San Francisco and a new job is more or less a few phone calls away. It's quite another when you're providing for a household, with family with medical issues, shouldering debt and just making the ends meet, which is a much more common situation to find yourself in, here in the States at least. And that's not to say I wouldn't be finding a new job, but again, I wouldn't have to find a job, nor would my boss be pressuring me to do this sort of unethical stuff, if the unethical stuff was simply made illegal. Settles the matter entirely. Will there be bad actors skirting those regulations? Of course, there always are, but laws don't stop 100% of bad activity and that's never stopped us from trying.
  - gwright 7y ago
    > but why is that burden on me? Because you are always responsible for your own actions. You may face difficult choices and unwanted consequences, but you can't abdicate your responsibility for your actions. Note, I'm not suggesting that in the particular scenario you described that there is an obvious right or wrong action, just that you have to accept the consequences of the whatever you choose to do.
- flukus 7y ago
  With google, facebook and just about any other ad driven company you know well before day 1 what their record is like when it comes to respecting privacy. So developers obviously don't care, which leads us back to regulation as the only option.
numtel 7y ago
Laws generally come from practice: first "de facto," (by force) then later "de jure." (by law) Those regulations will exist when there is less political friction required to enact them. When workers unionize, they take the first step into "de facto" practice.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Ok but why? And if the reason is nothing more compelling than “that’s how it is” then I’d say it’s a fine day to change that.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Unions protect their members, they don’t protect society from their members’ work.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  "De facto" does not mean "by force", but "in actuality": especially : being such in effect though not formally recognized. "a de facto state of war" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto
closeparen 7y ago
Legislators have made clear that Silicon Valley’s ethical problem is offering its users too much privacy. When regulation comes, it’s going to be encryption backdoors and copyright enforcement. Stuff that the community here would say we have a moral obligation to resist and subvert.
gwright 7y ago
Shouldn't it be everyone's responsibility to behave ethically? I don't understand the way you have divided responsibility between "workers" and the "business".
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Of course workers have a responsibility to behave ethically, but they shouldn't have the sole responsibility to make sure the business itself is behaving ethically. Architects don't need to consider the ethics of designing buildings up to structural code, because regulations (building codes) demand it. They don't have to worry about their bosses pushing them to design cheaper buildings that don't meet those standards, because the bosses know they will never be approved for use by their customer. Sure, an architect could enforce this himself or herself, but why should they? We as a society have already decided that we want buildings that are safe to occupy, and have mandated standards accordingly. It's now a LOT less profitable to make cheap buildings that won't meet code, because if the buildings can't be occupied after, then the builder doesn't get their money. This is not to say building codes are never skirted, but it's a lot rarer than, for example, a Silicon Valley firm trampling privacy which is completely expected at this point, despite wide and vocal opposition.
  - gwright 7y ago
    I don't think anyone said they have a "sole responsibility". I was just trying to keep the discussion focused on people and not abstract entities like "management" or "the business". I don't really understand your architectural example though. The presence or absence of regulations doesn't change the fact that an architect should follow an ethical course of action and design a safe building. Regulations or standards may help to be more successful at that goal but they don't add or remove the responsibility.
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  Workers get fired if they don't obey the mandates of the business.
  - 7y ago
panic 7y ago
> They shouldn't have the option to behave unethically in the first place, and the determining factor should absolutely not be if they can find sufficient human resources willing to sacrifice their ethics to feed themselves. You'll always have the option to behave unethically. And more regulations make it easier -- you can use the fact that you're following regulations to justify your unethical behavior.
oscargrouch 7y ago
Your post somehow remind me of the most proeminent excuse in the Nuremberg trials. "We were just following orders". You are right that regulation play a very important part into this, but this should not be a excuse to releave ourselves from the burden that in the end we are responsible for everything we do, even under orders, under a chain of command or whatever. Proper regulation is a good goal, but in the meantime, making a ethical stand in what we do, is very important, because the moral corruption can spread faster than the regulation, and in the end, there will be no individual ethical behavior nor proper regulation. People should not just try to quit their jobs just because they work in a big company (maybe) doing shady stuff, because you may be in a job that actually create something good, or even if thats not the case, you can try to move to another product or team.. But if you are working in a core part that are doing unethical things, i guess trying to hide behind the company can work like a placebo for your guilty, but i bet it wont work after a short period of time.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Again, I'm not saying it's wrong. What I'm saying is in our current system, everything is tied to your job; your health insurance, your credit, obviously your income. If you don't have a job, you don't have food, you don't have housing, you don't have gas in your car. This to me is very like when people criticize capitalism and are countered with "yet you participate in capitalism, curious!" as though that's a point. Of course I participate in it. I don't have a fucking choice. If I want to take my ethical stance that capitalism is a dehumanizing and oppressive system, how am I to do that? Go live in the fucking woods? So maybe I have to stay at my job, even if I fundamentally disagree with it, because again, the other choices are horrific. As I said to another commenter, I'd love to hear one of you guys debating whether to continue working at Facebook on their news team, or whatever, if you have a child with chronic illness. Or maybe your wife is in treatment for depression. Hell, maybe YOU are. I'm not saying people shouldn't do their best to act ethically. I'm saying that painting anyone who can't make those kinds of ethical stances as a complicit bastard is the worst kind of horseshit, and putting the burden of the ethics of their employers on them is ridiculous. Just because a shitty company can find enough people who can't afford to say no to develop their unethical software doesn't mean those people are then bad, especially when, again, the alternative solution is put pen to paper and make what they're doing ILLEGAL. With no room for interpretation.
eevilspock 7y ago
What?! This is ONLY a legit excuse for people who are genuinely struggling to survive. i.e. poor people. Otherwise why would you choose to continue at an unethical company? Because switching to an ethical company almost always means a lower salary. In other words profit beats ethics. So how are you any different from the company itself? How are you not complicit? Here's a good read: The Banality of Systemic Evil https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banalit...
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Sometimes, poor people are poor because they have ethics. It's maybe gauche to say out loud "I'm just here for a paycheck," but the reality is that's usually more or less the truth. Grandstanding tends to come at a rather high personal cost.
  - eevilspock 7y ago
    It's only grandstanding if you don't mean it. If you mean it enough to pay the cost, whether it is lower income working for an ethical company, or jail time for civil disobedience, then one is most certainly NOT grandstanding. > Sometimes, poor people are poor because they have ethics. Agreed. But that is the nature of ethics: Doing the right thing vs doing the selfish thing. You simply cannot claim to be an ethical person when you choose the latter over the former. You cannot claim to be an ethical person when you claim, as FussyZeus does in his comments, that it's someone else's problem, that you are only doing your job.
    - FussyZeus 7y ago
      > But that is the nature of ethics: Doing the right thing vs doing the selfish thing. You simply cannot claim to be an ethical person when you choose the latter over the former. You cannot claim to be an ethical person when you claim, as FussyZeus does in his comments, that it's someone else's problem, that you are only doing your job. I have repeatedly pointed out how one is meant to weigh their personal ethics against obligations that are hardly selfish. No one has yet answered. If your child is in chemotherapy and their lives are dependent on your health insurance, is that selfish? You know even just changing jobs will mean a lapse in coverage, usually between 1 and 6 months. Do you think your child's cancer gives a shit about your ethics? I'm not arguing that employees should never take a stand. Absolutely do, if you're able. I'm saying dismissing entirely that anyone who doesn't is a lackey of a system they're refusing to question is ridiculous and insulting, and I'm pointing out that if such behaviors were regulated against, there would be NO NEED for the employees to take a stand on it, because it would be a settled matter. No one has yet deigned to explain why we can't have regulations for things like user privacy, the handling of user data, consequences for companies losing/misusing/exposing user data, or any one of the dozens of other issues that are in sore need of word-on-paper laws that are far from partisan issues, but are generally agreed on, except of course for Facebook, Twitter, and the rest who's business models will more or less implode when they can no longer do business unethically. But no, by all means, blame the fucking engineers. It's obviously their fault, not the fact that reality isn't black and white, the choices aren't always easy, but God forbid we put some human context in this instead of repeatedly insisting that there's no way we'd be the baddies, because nobody ever got stuck between a rock and a hard place before, nobody ever stole an apple because they were starving, no one ever had to take a high interest loan to buy FOOD before. I tell ya it's threads like this that remind me just how sheltered a lot of tech workers are. I'm glad things have always apparently been sunshine and rainbows for you, some of us weren't so lucky.

undefined3840 7y ago

Well yes I agree in principle but you as a worker voluntarily choose to work somewhere. Sometimes it’s only when you actually start at a job when you realize that there’s a disconnect between a company’s behavior and your own principles.

FussyZeus 7y ago
> voluntarily choose If my workplace tomorrow decided to implement things I ethically disagree with, I cannot in good faith say that I would quit. It's easy to say stuff like that, but when you have a mortgage, have family that depend on you, a home you've put tons of work into, hobbies you love... I mean you can call me a sellout if you want, and I couldn't really disagree, but why is that burden on me? To relieve the politicians of the awful work involved in doing their job? My job is to write code. Their job is to write law. Why must I quit mine and jeopardize my livelihood so they can eschew theirs?
- Retric 7y ago
  I don’t have a problem with that on day one, but I do think you should start looking for a job in that situation. This results in increased costs via turnover which discourages unethical behavior, and let’s you do something meaningful without pushing the full burden to you.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying, but I still say “just get a different job” is a huge simplification of the issue. An issue which again, I put forward, is not something I should be responsible for fixing.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  It's not either/or; it's both/and. We need politicians that are actually doing their jobs. And we need people with consciences working for tech companies. We need both. As for quitting... if you were a factory worker in a one-company town, you'd be in a worse spot. But I hear that software engineers are in demand these days. And if you're in somewhere like the Bay Area, there are many options available to you. For that matter, there may be many options available to you even within your own company. You may not be able in good conscience to work on that project, but can you transfer teams? And, if you're feeling that it might be useful, tell them why. On the other hand, that leaves such a team with nobody left working on it that has a functioning conscience. That's not ideal, either. But that comes down to your judgment about whether you can actually change the course of the team. If you can't, what's the point in staying?
- atoav 7y ago
  Everybody has an impact, culture comes always first, then comes law. If we are lucky and the right people are in office bad culture gets outlawed. If we are unlucky and our political structures influencable by business the existing culture becomes the law. I have two grandfathers, one found a way to evade the Nazis and one was a Nazi. The former always said they were uncultured and barbaric, without humanist values. The latter said all he did was following orders and the law, and they built streets after all. In my eyes the ahistorical period is over, and in hindsight it never matters how convincing your excuse is, when your grandchildren ask you what you did when X happend. If you can change culture for the better, do it.
  - eevilspock 7y ago
    Yes, culture is primary. (though I'm confused by the rest of that paragraph) The Banality of Systemic Evil: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banalit... It's sad that thoughts such as yours and mine get downvoted. Even an Upton Sinclair quote that no one can honestly disagree with gets downvoted, all because we're touching on people's comfy lives and self-esteem.
    - FussyZeus 7y ago
      Again, it's easy to say 'quit your job' when you're a 20-something living in a group apartment, with no family, and no real responsibilities, in San Francisco and a new job is more or less a few phone calls away. It's quite another when you're providing for a household, with family with medical issues, shouldering debt and just making the ends meet, which is a much more common situation to find yourself in, here in the States at least. And that's not to say I wouldn't be finding a new job, but again, I wouldn't have to find a job, nor would my boss be pressuring me to do this sort of unethical stuff, if the unethical stuff was simply made illegal. Settles the matter entirely. Will there be bad actors skirting those regulations? Of course, there always are, but laws don't stop 100% of bad activity and that's never stopped us from trying.
- gwright 7y ago
  > but why is that burden on me? Because you are always responsible for your own actions. You may face difficult choices and unwanted consequences, but you can't abdicate your responsibility for your actions. Note, I'm not suggesting that in the particular scenario you described that there is an obvious right or wrong action, just that you have to accept the consequences of the whatever you choose to do.
flukus 7y ago
With google, facebook and just about any other ad driven company you know well before day 1 what their record is like when it comes to respecting privacy. So developers obviously don't care, which leads us back to regulation as the only option.

numtel 7y ago

Laws generally come from practice: first "de facto," (by force) then later "de jure." (by law) Those regulations will exist when there is less political friction required to enact them. When workers unionize, they take the first step into "de facto" practice.

FussyZeus 7y ago
Ok but why? And if the reason is nothing more compelling than “that’s how it is” then I’d say it’s a fine day to change that.
closeparen 7y ago
Unions protect their members, they don’t protect society from their members’ work.
dredmorbius 7y ago
"De facto" does not mean "by force", but "in actuality": especially : being such in effect though not formally recognized. "a de facto state of war" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/de%20facto

closeparen 7y ago

Legislators have made clear that Silicon Valley’s ethical problem is offering its users too much privacy. When regulation comes, it’s going to be encryption backdoors and copyright enforcement. Stuff that the community here would say we have a moral obligation to resist and subvert.

gwright 7y ago

Shouldn't it be everyone's responsibility to behave ethically? I don't understand the way you have divided responsibility between "workers" and the "business".

FussyZeus 7y ago
Of course workers have a responsibility to behave ethically, but they shouldn't have the sole responsibility to make sure the business itself is behaving ethically. Architects don't need to consider the ethics of designing buildings up to structural code, because regulations (building codes) demand it. They don't have to worry about their bosses pushing them to design cheaper buildings that don't meet those standards, because the bosses know they will never be approved for use by their customer. Sure, an architect could enforce this himself or herself, but why should they? We as a society have already decided that we want buildings that are safe to occupy, and have mandated standards accordingly. It's now a LOT less profitable to make cheap buildings that won't meet code, because if the buildings can't be occupied after, then the builder doesn't get their money. This is not to say building codes are never skirted, but it's a lot rarer than, for example, a Silicon Valley firm trampling privacy which is completely expected at this point, despite wide and vocal opposition.
- gwright 7y ago
  I don't think anyone said they have a "sole responsibility". I was just trying to keep the discussion focused on people and not abstract entities like "management" or "the business". I don't really understand your architectural example though. The presence or absence of regulations doesn't change the fact that an architect should follow an ethical course of action and design a safe building. Regulations or standards may help to be more successful at that goal but they don't add or remove the responsibility.
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
Workers get fired if they don't obey the mandates of the business.
- 7y ago

panic 7y ago

> They shouldn't have the option to behave unethically in the first place, and the determining factor should absolutely not be if they can find sufficient human resources willing to sacrifice their ethics to feed themselves. You'll always have the option to behave unethically. And more regulations make it easier -- you can use the fact that you're following regulations to justify your unethical behavior.

oscargrouch 7y ago

Your post somehow remind me of the most proeminent excuse in the Nuremberg trials. "We were just following orders". You are right that regulation play a very important part into this, but this should not be a excuse to releave ourselves from the burden that in the end we are responsible for everything we do, even under orders, under a chain of command or whatever. Proper regulation is a good goal, but in the meantime, making a ethical stand in what we do, is very important, because the moral corruption can spread faster than the regulation, and in the end, there will be no individual ethical behavior nor proper regulation. People should not just try to quit their jobs just because they work in a big company (maybe) doing shady stuff, because you may be in a job that actually create something good, or even if thats not the case, you can try to move to another product or team.. But if you are working in a core part that are doing unethical things, i guess trying to hide behind the company can work like a placebo for your guilty, but i bet it wont work after a short period of time.

FussyZeus 7y ago
Again, I'm not saying it's wrong. What I'm saying is in our current system, everything is tied to your job; your health insurance, your credit, obviously your income. If you don't have a job, you don't have food, you don't have housing, you don't have gas in your car. This to me is very like when people criticize capitalism and are countered with "yet you participate in capitalism, curious!" as though that's a point. Of course I participate in it. I don't have a fucking choice. If I want to take my ethical stance that capitalism is a dehumanizing and oppressive system, how am I to do that? Go live in the fucking woods? So maybe I have to stay at my job, even if I fundamentally disagree with it, because again, the other choices are horrific. As I said to another commenter, I'd love to hear one of you guys debating whether to continue working at Facebook on their news team, or whatever, if you have a child with chronic illness. Or maybe your wife is in treatment for depression. Hell, maybe YOU are. I'm not saying people shouldn't do their best to act ethically. I'm saying that painting anyone who can't make those kinds of ethical stances as a complicit bastard is the worst kind of horseshit, and putting the burden of the ethics of their employers on them is ridiculous. Just because a shitty company can find enough people who can't afford to say no to develop their unethical software doesn't mean those people are then bad, especially when, again, the alternative solution is put pen to paper and make what they're doing ILLEGAL. With no room for interpretation.

eevilspock 7y ago

What?! This is ONLY a legit excuse for people who are genuinely struggling to survive. i.e. poor people. Otherwise why would you choose to continue at an unethical company? Because switching to an ethical company almost always means a lower salary. In other words profit beats ethics. So how are you any different from the company itself? How are you not complicit? Here's a good read: The Banality of Systemic Evil https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banalit...

DoreenMichele 7y ago
Sometimes, poor people are poor because they have ethics. It's maybe gauche to say out loud "I'm just here for a paycheck," but the reality is that's usually more or less the truth. Grandstanding tends to come at a rather high personal cost.
- eevilspock 7y ago
  It's only grandstanding if you don't mean it. If you mean it enough to pay the cost, whether it is lower income working for an ethical company, or jail time for civil disobedience, then one is most certainly NOT grandstanding. > Sometimes, poor people are poor because they have ethics. Agreed. But that is the nature of ethics: Doing the right thing vs doing the selfish thing. You simply cannot claim to be an ethical person when you choose the latter over the former. You cannot claim to be an ethical person when you claim, as FussyZeus does in his comments, that it's someone else's problem, that you are only doing your job.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    > But that is the nature of ethics: Doing the right thing vs doing the selfish thing. You simply cannot claim to be an ethical person when you choose the latter over the former. You cannot claim to be an ethical person when you claim, as FussyZeus does in his comments, that it's someone else's problem, that you are only doing your job. I have repeatedly pointed out how one is meant to weigh their personal ethics against obligations that are hardly selfish. No one has yet answered. If your child is in chemotherapy and their lives are dependent on your health insurance, is that selfish? You know even just changing jobs will mean a lapse in coverage, usually between 1 and 6 months. Do you think your child's cancer gives a shit about your ethics? I'm not arguing that employees should never take a stand. Absolutely do, if you're able. I'm saying dismissing entirely that anyone who doesn't is a lackey of a system they're refusing to question is ridiculous and insulting, and I'm pointing out that if such behaviors were regulated against, there would be NO NEED for the employees to take a stand on it, because it would be a settled matter. No one has yet deigned to explain why we can't have regulations for things like user privacy, the handling of user data, consequences for companies losing/misusing/exposing user data, or any one of the dozens of other issues that are in sore need of word-on-paper laws that are far from partisan issues, but are generally agreed on, except of course for Facebook, Twitter, and the rest who's business models will more or less implode when they can no longer do business unethically. But no, by all means, blame the fucking engineers. It's obviously their fault, not the fact that reality isn't black and white, the choices aren't always easy, but God forbid we put some human context in this instead of repeatedly insisting that there's no way we'd be the baddies, because nobody ever got stuck between a rock and a hard place before, nobody ever stole an apple because they were starving, no one ever had to take a high interest loan to buy FOOD before. I tell ya it's threads like this that remind me just how sheltered a lot of tech workers are. I'm glad things have always apparently been sunshine and rainbows for you, some of us weren't so lucky.