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> > Engineers are of course partly responsible for the things they implement. > That is outrageous. And this is why software engineering is a joke.

• roenxi 4y ago
  Engineers are responsible for strictly technical failures. When a piece of software does what a representative of company management asks for it hasn't failed. Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws.
  • Avicebron 4y ago
    This isn't how ethics works, just doing my job doesn't work legally.
  • rglullis 4y ago
    Engineering is all about working with constraints. Most of these are technical, but some of them are and should be ethical. If the product of your engineering directly enables unethical actions, yes, you should bear some of the responsibility for it.
  • kasey_junk 4y ago
    I’ve received yearly training as part of my job outlining my civil and criminal liabilities as a software engineer going back 20 years. It’s par for the course in finance.
  • morelisp 4y ago
    > Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws. Right, so if something seems sketchy ("please ignore these specific deductions when calculating our holdings") , get a lawyer - or CEO or CFO or whatever - to say in writing that it's fine. And if something seems actually illegal ("just run the blood test results out-of-spec and report them anyway") just don't do it. Nothing absolves you of some things.
    • roenxi 4y ago
      Sure. But if the engineer doesn't think it is sketchy enough to seek out a lawyer, why would they suddenly be liable for issues where they are obviously ignorant, and never expected to be competent?