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I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job.

by OskarS 1y ago

I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. Your manager is certainly culpable, but if you act against the law, you are culpable as well. The exception is if you fear literal physical violence against you or others, or are being blackmailed or something, then of course you are being coerced and have no choice. But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion. Not saying it's easy, it's a horrible situation to be put in and I have huge amounts of sympathy for a person who has to experience this. No one is perfect and act with faultless ethics at all times. But hard or not, it is your duty as a citizen not to violate the law.

overscore 1y ago
> I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally. > The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only excusable, it's the only moral action.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- philipallstar 1y ago
  > When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions This is the time when your ethics are tested. Anyone can do the right thing when they're getting paid for it.
  - tpoacher 1y ago
    There's a nice Jordan Peterson quote: > There was a lesson to learn from the holocaust. We're always reminded that: "Never forget, we've learned our lesson." "What was the lesson?" That's the question. The lesson is, "You're the Nazi". No-one wants to learn that; If you were there, that would have been you. You might think "Well, I'd be Oskar Schindler and I'd be rescuing the Jews." It's like, no, afraid not. You'd at least not be saying anything. And you might also be actively participating. You might also enjoy it. Hindsight theoretical morality is very different from experience on the ground, where peer pressure, stress, uncertainty, exploding situations and fog of war come into the mix.
    - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - DennisP 1y ago
      Seems like a better lesson would be "don't be the Nazi." It's not like it's impossible. The Nazis arrested 800,000 Germans for active resistance activities, and several hundred thousand Germans deserted the military, many of those defecting to the Allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism It wasn't a huge percentage, but we don't know how many actively resisted without getting caught, or resisted in more passive ways. And that was resistance against the Nazis, who had no qualms about killing resistors. Risking or quitting your job to not only do what's right, but avoid getting in trouble with your government, isn't in the same ballpark.
      - rurban 1y ago
        The figure of German soldiers deaths has an estimation of 50% suicides.
    - throwaway173738 1y ago
      You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to think you’re the Nazi. What change is he trying to effect in our culture, and how does that belief support his desire? Rhetoric always aims to effect some change in the attitude of the listener, and never without some benefit of the speaker.
- cess11 1y ago
  Right, saying outright that Thoreau was wrong and also that pretty much every famous person who took him to heart was wrong too is a rather strong position to take and likely very, very hard to defend. Or, for a more obscure example, that Antigone should just have said 'yes daddy' and left it at that with the play ending somewhere in the initial conversation with Ismene.
- barney54 1y ago
  It is not moral to break the law in the furtherance of fraud. That’s the point.
  - thyristan 1y ago
    But if the fraud secures the livelyhood of $bignum children and they would starve without their parents committing that fraud?
    - cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
    - throwaway173738 1y ago
      I think my son would rather have me in his life than have me in jail.
- OskarS 1y ago
  We're not talking about living in a totalitarian state and breaking the law by aiding the resistance here. The cases in the article is like committing financial fraud or faking customer data. And then, yeah, I do think there is no excuse for going along with it, you have a duty as a member of society not to do such things, even if it costs your your job. It's not easy, and as I said I have enormous sympathy for a person in this position, but there is a clear right thing to do, and you have an obligation to act accordingly.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  To get rich at your software startup is not one of the situations where you have a moral obligation to break the law. None of these people were stealing bread from the rich to feed their children.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  As a parent, I would risk destitution over going to prison every single time. I don’t even have to think about it.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  At least in the case of engineers, we're talking about highly compensated people. You should have a solid emergency fund put together within a few months of starting your career. From there, it's on you to not put yourself into an economically precarious position. People who are making multiples of the median household don't have food/shelter as an excuse. Not that it's much of an excuse for everyone else either, but with people in the professional-managerial class it's absurd.
  - closewith 1y ago
    Globally, most software developers are not highly paid and certainly not enough to be above financial pressure. Becoming a whistleblower or refusing unethical demands can also lead to being blacklisted, as in most industries, loyalty is valued more highly than ethics.
    - LadyCailin 1y ago
      And the more people that buy into that, the worse it gets. That’s why this has to be fought tooth and nail from day one.
      - closewith 1y ago
        If you want to fight corruption and unethical behaviour, start with a just society that doesn't tie a person's value and well-being directly to their income. Otherwise you're fighting incentives and will never win.
        collinmcnulty 1y ago
        You don’t get to a just society by not fighting corruption. Ask yourself not what “engineers globally” can do, but what you can do. Historically, pressure from the educated middle class has made huge impacts on culture and society.
        closewith 1y ago
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Yeah, but you have to factor in the probability of the orange jumpsuit. You're not going to be of much use to your family in jail. It's still a difficult decision, but it's not just your job vs your morality. It's your job vs morality+potential jail. We dish out criminal sentences precisely in order to affect the equation like this, because we know people don't always act on morality alone.
- freehorse 1y ago
  > […] that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally. Wow. This is incredibly dangerous way of thinking. Are any “downstream outcomes” justified as moral in such a case? How about outcomes involving people dying eg due to safety or quality rules broken? People may do things like that “to feed their kids” but that does not make it ethical, especially when we actually talk about preservation of certain social status rather than real survival.
surgical_fire 1y ago
"losing your job", for a lot of people, is extremely effective coercion. We are not talking about luxury here. A lot of people depend on their salary to pay rent and put food on the table. This is even more pressing if you have a family that depends on you, if you are in need of healthcare, etc. What your post fails to recognize is that in the current system, labor is already a form of coercion. You need to work because the option is homelessness and starvation. If you can avoid those even when unemployed, you are extremely privileged.
- em-bee 1y ago
  If you can avoid those even when unemployed that would be all developed countries except the united states
  - rfrey 1y ago
    So yes, the extremely privileged
    - em-bee 1y ago
      privileged? sure, but extremely? nowadays even in china everyone gets healthcare, working or not, so we are talking about almost a quarter of the worlds population.
  - snypher 1y ago
    380k homeless in UK. 262k in Germany. 122k Australia. 650k in USA. The per capita math is left for the reader but I don't believe there is much distinction here .
    - throwaway-0001 1y ago
      You're right, the numbers are very close to recent official figures. I looked them up to calculate the per capita rates. So USA is actually better than other countries? Kind of defeats these arguments here - interesting. (By the way I’m not from us) Based on the latest available data (mostly 2023) and current population estimates: * *UK:* ~56.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 178) * *Australia:* ~45.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 220) [using 2021 census data] * *Germany:* ~31.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 323) * *USA:* ~19.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 515) The per capita distinction is more significant than the raw numbers suggest. (Note: Methodologies for counting vary by country, which can affect direct comparisons.)
array_key_first 1y ago
I think, for most people, getting the shit beaten out of them is a preferable outcome to losing their job. For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc. This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enough.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- DennisP 1y ago
  The cases in the article were software engineers in the US, and at FTX. Two were engineering directors and the third was a senior engineer. If any of them didn't have plenty of emergency funds set aside, they should have seriously rethought their spending.
  - tverbeure 1y ago
    I know plenty of people who saved for years to get a downpayment for a house and then used all of that for just that. After that, it will take a while to replenish their emergency fund with very little margin of error. A job loss would be devastating.
    - DennisP 1y ago
      My claim is that that's a bad decision, for exactly that reason. Job loss can happen for any number of reasons, often without warning. Getting a mortgage without any cushion for job loss is a huge risk. Note also that I'm talking about highly-paid software engineers, not about people in general. Lots of people in the US make way less money than senior software engineers, and they manage to get by. Live at that level and secure your emergency funds first, and you'll be a lot more comfortable dealing with any ethical quandaries at work.
      - tverbeure 1y ago
exe34 1y ago
> But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion. it depends how many friends and family you have in the area that can host your whole family that is now homeless. it depends how much disruption you are willing to inflict on your kids definitely right now as opposed to maybe in the future.
swiftcoder 1y ago
I think the risk is somewhat higher than just losing your job - you are potentially burning your whole referral network in the process (especially if you end up with your name in the press during any resulting prosecution). For a junior engineer it may not be that hard to fly under the radar, but senior/staff level folks tend to be well known by the execs. And execs talk, they call their friends to vet future hires... burn your execs, and maybe you don't work in that town again
- scaramanga 1y ago
  Probably for the best... Like, anyone who would work with some of my previous employers, are places I wouldn't want to work anyway. It's a big wide world out there.
  - phatskat 1y ago
    > Probably for the best... Quite. One of my first gigs was at a large real-estate aggregator. The people were great but the highest levels of the company did - A pet “adoption” site, in quotes because to my knowledge the pets weren’t real and it was a subscription service with no means of cancellation outside of a voicemail box - A kind of Craigslist-esque site for selling home improvement services that was wildly vulnerable to XSS - I discovered that during an unannounced client demo when my own manager had said “you guys try to break it” - We were a PHP shop from the beginning. One day, engineering gets pulled into a meeting room and told that they’ve been developing 2.0 in an office downtown, with a separate team, in ColdFusion. They fired the lead engineer on the spot and most of us left or got fired shortly thereafter. They did offer to train us in CF, but the bad blood was too thick for my taste. All that is to say, if I ever get wind of the owner or CEO being involved anywhere that I’m working, I’ll probably be walking.

by OskarS 1y ago

overscore 1y ago

> I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally. > The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only excusable, it's the only moral action.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
philipallstar 1y ago
> When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions This is the time when your ethics are tested. Anyone can do the right thing when they're getting paid for it.
- tpoacher 1y ago
  There's a nice Jordan Peterson quote: > There was a lesson to learn from the holocaust. We're always reminded that: "Never forget, we've learned our lesson." "What was the lesson?" That's the question. The lesson is, "You're the Nazi". No-one wants to learn that; If you were there, that would have been you. You might think "Well, I'd be Oskar Schindler and I'd be rescuing the Jews." It's like, no, afraid not. You'd at least not be saying anything. And you might also be actively participating. You might also enjoy it. Hindsight theoretical morality is very different from experience on the ground, where peer pressure, stress, uncertainty, exploding situations and fog of war come into the mix.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - DennisP 1y ago
    Seems like a better lesson would be "don't be the Nazi." It's not like it's impossible. The Nazis arrested 800,000 Germans for active resistance activities, and several hundred thousand Germans deserted the military, many of those defecting to the Allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism It wasn't a huge percentage, but we don't know how many actively resisted without getting caught, or resisted in more passive ways. And that was resistance against the Nazis, who had no qualms about killing resistors. Risking or quitting your job to not only do what's right, but avoid getting in trouble with your government, isn't in the same ballpark.
    - rurban 1y ago
      The figure of German soldiers deaths has an estimation of 50% suicides.
  - throwaway173738 1y ago
    You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to think you’re the Nazi. What change is he trying to effect in our culture, and how does that belief support his desire? Rhetoric always aims to effect some change in the attitude of the listener, and never without some benefit of the speaker.
cess11 1y ago
Right, saying outright that Thoreau was wrong and also that pretty much every famous person who took him to heart was wrong too is a rather strong position to take and likely very, very hard to defend. Or, for a more obscure example, that Antigone should just have said 'yes daddy' and left it at that with the play ending somewhere in the initial conversation with Ismene.
barney54 1y ago
It is not moral to break the law in the furtherance of fraud. That’s the point.
- thyristan 1y ago
  But if the fraud secures the livelyhood of $bignum children and they would starve without their parents committing that fraud?
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  - throwaway173738 1y ago
    I think my son would rather have me in his life than have me in jail.
OskarS 1y ago
We're not talking about living in a totalitarian state and breaking the law by aiding the resistance here. The cases in the article is like committing financial fraud or faking customer data. And then, yeah, I do think there is no excuse for going along with it, you have a duty as a member of society not to do such things, even if it costs your your job. It's not easy, and as I said I have enormous sympathy for a person in this position, but there is a clear right thing to do, and you have an obligation to act accordingly.
skeeter2020 1y ago
To get rich at your software startup is not one of the situations where you have a moral obligation to break the law. None of these people were stealing bread from the rich to feed their children.
nkrisc 1y ago
As a parent, I would risk destitution over going to prison every single time. I don’t even have to think about it.
ndriscoll 1y ago
At least in the case of engineers, we're talking about highly compensated people. You should have a solid emergency fund put together within a few months of starting your career. From there, it's on you to not put yourself into an economically precarious position. People who are making multiples of the median household don't have food/shelter as an excuse. Not that it's much of an excuse for everyone else either, but with people in the professional-managerial class it's absurd.
- closewith 1y ago
  Globally, most software developers are not highly paid and certainly not enough to be above financial pressure. Becoming a whistleblower or refusing unethical demands can also lead to being blacklisted, as in most industries, loyalty is valued more highly than ethics.
  - LadyCailin 1y ago
    And the more people that buy into that, the worse it gets. That’s why this has to be fought tooth and nail from day one.
    - closewith 1y ago
      If you want to fight corruption and unethical behaviour, start with a just society that doesn't tie a person's value and well-being directly to their income. Otherwise you're fighting incentives and will never win.
      - collinmcnulty 1y ago
        You don’t get to a just society by not fighting corruption. Ask yourself not what “engineers globally” can do, but what you can do. Historically, pressure from the educated middle class has made huge impacts on culture and society.
        closewith 1y ago
crazygringo 1y ago
Yeah, but you have to factor in the probability of the orange jumpsuit. You're not going to be of much use to your family in jail. It's still a difficult decision, but it's not just your job vs your morality. It's your job vs morality+potential jail. We dish out criminal sentences precisely in order to affect the equation like this, because we know people don't always act on morality alone.
freehorse 1y ago
> […] that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally. Wow. This is incredibly dangerous way of thinking. Are any “downstream outcomes” justified as moral in such a case? How about outcomes involving people dying eg due to safety or quality rules broken? People may do things like that “to feed their kids” but that does not make it ethical, especially when we actually talk about preservation of certain social status rather than real survival.

surgical_fire 1y ago

"losing your job", for a lot of people, is extremely effective coercion. We are not talking about luxury here. A lot of people depend on their salary to pay rent and put food on the table. This is even more pressing if you have a family that depends on you, if you are in need of healthcare, etc. What your post fails to recognize is that in the current system, labor is already a form of coercion. You need to work because the option is homelessness and starvation. If you can avoid those even when unemployed, you are extremely privileged.

em-bee 1y ago
If you can avoid those even when unemployed that would be all developed countries except the united states
- rfrey 1y ago
  So yes, the extremely privileged
  - em-bee 1y ago
    privileged? sure, but extremely? nowadays even in china everyone gets healthcare, working or not, so we are talking about almost a quarter of the worlds population.
- snypher 1y ago
  380k homeless in UK. 262k in Germany. 122k Australia. 650k in USA. The per capita math is left for the reader but I don't believe there is much distinction here .
  - throwaway-0001 1y ago
    You're right, the numbers are very close to recent official figures. I looked them up to calculate the per capita rates. So USA is actually better than other countries? Kind of defeats these arguments here - interesting. (By the way I’m not from us) Based on the latest available data (mostly 2023) and current population estimates: * *UK:* ~56.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 178) * *Australia:* ~45.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 220) [using 2021 census data] * *Germany:* ~31.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 323) * *USA:* ~19.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 515) The per capita distinction is more significant than the raw numbers suggest. (Note: Methodologies for counting vary by country, which can affect direct comparisons.)

array_key_first 1y ago

I think, for most people, getting the shit beaten out of them is a preferable outcome to losing their job. For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc. This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enough.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
DennisP 1y ago
The cases in the article were software engineers in the US, and at FTX. Two were engineering directors and the third was a senior engineer. If any of them didn't have plenty of emergency funds set aside, they should have seriously rethought their spending.
- tverbeure 1y ago
  I know plenty of people who saved for years to get a downpayment for a house and then used all of that for just that. After that, it will take a while to replenish their emergency fund with very little margin of error. A job loss would be devastating.
  - DennisP 1y ago
    My claim is that that's a bad decision, for exactly that reason. Job loss can happen for any number of reasons, often without warning. Getting a mortgage without any cushion for job loss is a huge risk. Note also that I'm talking about highly-paid software engineers, not about people in general. Lots of people in the US make way less money than senior software engineers, and they manage to get by. Live at that level and secure your emergency funds first, and you'll be a lot more comfortable dealing with any ethical quandaries at work.
    - tverbeure 1y ago

exe34 1y ago

> But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion. it depends how many friends and family you have in the area that can host your whole family that is now homeless. it depends how much disruption you are willing to inflict on your kids definitely right now as opposed to maybe in the future.

swiftcoder 1y ago

I think the risk is somewhat higher than just losing your job - you are potentially burning your whole referral network in the process (especially if you end up with your name in the press during any resulting prosecution). For a junior engineer it may not be that hard to fly under the radar, but senior/staff level folks tend to be well known by the execs. And execs talk, they call their friends to vet future hires... burn your execs, and maybe you don't work in that town again

scaramanga 1y ago
Probably for the best... Like, anyone who would work with some of my previous employers, are places I wouldn't want to work anyway. It's a big wide world out there.
- phatskat 1y ago
  > Probably for the best... Quite. One of my first gigs was at a large real-estate aggregator. The people were great but the highest levels of the company did - A pet “adoption” site, in quotes because to my knowledge the pets weren’t real and it was a subscription service with no means of cancellation outside of a voicemail box - A kind of Craigslist-esque site for selling home improvement services that was wildly vulnerable to XSS - I discovered that during an unannounced client demo when my own manager had said “you guys try to break it” - We were a PHP shop from the beginning. One day, engineering gets pulled into a meeting room and told that they’ve been developing 2.0 in an office downtown, with a separate team, in ColdFusion. They fired the lead engineer on the spot and most of us left or got fired shortly thereafter. They did offer to train us in CF, but the bad blood was too thick for my taste. All that is to say, if I ever get wind of the owner or CEO being involved anywhere that I’m working, I’ll probably be walking.