4 ms·

I hate to break it to you, but if you ask every software engineer which companies are morally flexible you'll quickly have a notch in every companies belt and t

by kodah 4y ago

I hate to break it to you, but if you ask every software engineer which companies are morally flexible you'll quickly have a notch in every companies belt and then some. It also usually isn't engineers that are the morally flexible ones, though that's certainly not a rule. It's executive leadership and people who lead products. It doesn't take many of those types to develop a side brand as morally flexible, and frankly, sometimes it's just the outcome of hard decisions. There's plenty of specific indictments of Uber, but most of them don't involve the peons. Engineers passing on judgement to other engineers about where they've worked is pretty silly.

uoaei 4y ago
Engineers contributing to the ability of assholes to continue making others miserable is a pretty clear chain of causation. Everything I've read about people's moral convictions says they consider causal relationships to be morally relevant.
- kodah 4y ago
  Under your logic we've mostly all morally failed. The truth to me is a lot more nuanced. A lot of times engineers don't know how a product is actually being used. They have some key metrics they're responsible for but those are often abstracted away from the intended goal. Other engineers will see that something is headed in the wrong direction and try to influence it from the inside. Other engineers use their knowledge of the inside and share it widely. All of those depend on continued employment. These kind of "causal relationship" judgements sound particularly adjacent to fire and brimstone rhetoric I've heard.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    We all morally fail all the time. It's ok because we are fallible beings with limited access to information about the happenings around us. Asserting that we are capable of perfection as a core tenet only leads to a cynical disappointment-cum-misanthropy. This means that morality consists of recognizing your responsibility to comprehending where you are in the causal DAG and what the probable outcomes of your actions might be, without shaming yourself about what you did before you understood. It's not a perfect description because "getting paid not to understand X" is a real thing, but it's a start.
    - kodah 4y ago
      I agree about the concept, however, these are folks making blanket assumptions about an engineers day to day knowledge that is relatively common not to have in large orgs.
  - KyeRussell 4y ago
    Ah. Classic. “There’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism”, and then you get to run off and do anything you want. Most people working in a tech job in a company like Uber are extremely privileged and could work elsewhere. “I’m morally absolved because I’m an employee” is a particular brand of modern American (esp. SV) thinking. It is not inherent and it’s just not as true as y’all make it out to be. If the collective realised that they actually had an iota of influence over the world around then, the US union movement wouldn’t be the dumpster fire that it is.

by kodah 4y ago

uoaei 4y ago

Engineers contributing to the ability of assholes to continue making others miserable is a pretty clear chain of causation. Everything I've read about people's moral convictions says they consider causal relationships to be morally relevant.

kodah 4y ago
Under your logic we've mostly all morally failed. The truth to me is a lot more nuanced. A lot of times engineers don't know how a product is actually being used. They have some key metrics they're responsible for but those are often abstracted away from the intended goal. Other engineers will see that something is headed in the wrong direction and try to influence it from the inside. Other engineers use their knowledge of the inside and share it widely. All of those depend on continued employment. These kind of "causal relationship" judgements sound particularly adjacent to fire and brimstone rhetoric I've heard.
- uoaei 4y ago
  We all morally fail all the time. It's ok because we are fallible beings with limited access to information about the happenings around us. Asserting that we are capable of perfection as a core tenet only leads to a cynical disappointment-cum-misanthropy. This means that morality consists of recognizing your responsibility to comprehending where you are in the causal DAG and what the probable outcomes of your actions might be, without shaming yourself about what you did before you understood. It's not a perfect description because "getting paid not to understand X" is a real thing, but it's a start.
  - kodah 4y ago
    I agree about the concept, however, these are folks making blanket assumptions about an engineers day to day knowledge that is relatively common not to have in large orgs.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Ah. Classic. “There’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism”, and then you get to run off and do anything you want. Most people working in a tech job in a company like Uber are extremely privileged and could work elsewhere. “I’m morally absolved because I’m an employee” is a particular brand of modern American (esp. SV) thinking. It is not inherent and it’s just not as true as y’all make it out to be. If the collective realised that they actually had an iota of influence over the world around then, the US union movement wouldn’t be the dumpster fire that it is.