4 ms·

> A lot of us don't see ourselves as professionals, with our own ethical standards and responsibilities. We just do whatever a boss orders us to do, like minion

> A lot of us don't see ourselves as professionals, with our own ethical standards and responsibilities. We just do whatever a boss orders us to do, like minions or mercenaries. In contrast, I think that's precisely how we all feel about ourselves. Some people just have different (i.e. lower) ethical standards than you do. > If you're, say, a doctor or an actual engineer, there are professional organizations that stand up for the professional standards and that can have your back if you're being asked to violate them. More importantly, they're the ones that set a minimum baseline for ethical behavior. We don't have that. That's what makes it so easy to threaten to replace developers with people who will do what their told. They can do it, and easily. It would be a much more hollow threat if they were going to have to find someone willing to risk their career. > This is especially disappointing to me given the demand for software developers. It's much easier for us to find news jobs than most people, so the risk of taking an ethical stand is much lower for us than most people. The risk still isn't low enough. The incentives are wildly mismatched. Either I put a shitty anti-user feature in a product I'm probably never going to use, or I risk my family being homeless. It's probably a small risk, but so is dying in a plane hijacking and yet a lot of people worry about that. > And we also have a lot to gain! So many places are poorly run that businesses and developers would all gain if we used our power to fix process and organizational issues. I would put an extremely heavy "citation needed" around that. I don't doubt that we can all identify things that need improving at work, but having 85 different developers asking for 307 different things all at once isn't going to help. You need something structured. A union or professional organization might be helpful. A bunch of people threatening to quit for random causes probably won't.

wpietri 5y ago
You don't seem very consistent here. Either "all" developers have ethical standards, meaning that there are things they will stand up and fight for, or they're people who are much more concerned for their jobs and will do whatever managers say. But you can't really argue for both at once. You also talk as if you aren't at risk of losing your job now. People lose their jobs all the time. It's something any responsible adult has to be prepared for. And yes, of course when I say "we used our power to fix process and organizational issues" I definitely meant the "we" part of it, not some half-assed random individual behavior. A suggestion for happy dialog: try assuming the person you're talking to has thought of the obvious implications that just occurred to you.

wpietri 5y ago

You don't seem very consistent here. Either "all" developers have ethical standards, meaning that there are things they will stand up and fight for, or they're people who are much more concerned for their jobs and will do whatever managers say. But you can't really argue for both at once. You also talk as if you aren't at risk of losing your job now. People lose their jobs all the time. It's something any responsible adult has to be prepared for. And yes, of course when I say "we used our power to fix process and organizational issues" I definitely meant the "we" part of it, not some half-assed random individual behavior. A suggestion for happy dialog: try assuming the person you're talking to has thought of the obvious implications that just occurred to you.