5 ms·

the ethics of business are... way harder than the ethics of Engineering. Engineers occasionally have conflicts of interest with their employers and clients (e.

by lsc 13y ago

the ethics of business are... way harder than the ethics of Engineering. Engineers occasionally have conflicts of interest with their employers and clients (e.g. when asked to build something clearly dangerous) but it's very, very rare. And Engineers are almost never asked to conceal relevant information from people they directly work with.. Business people face conflicts of interest with their customers and suppliers every day. In business? concealing relevant information is standard, in fact, you might be failing in your duty to your shareholders if you reveal relevant information to your customers or suppliers. But, you may be defrauding those customers or suppliers if you don't reveal enough information. This makes business ethics a lot more complex. Now, I agree that the YC ethics as written are super vague and making them more clear would be very good. In fact, I think YC has a chance to set a standard here. Considering how YC explicitly asks for hustlers, and people who push the line, one could even argue that they have a responsibility to make the line clear. However, it is an extremely difficult thing to do. When a task is beyond your means, is it better to put up a "better than nothing" attempt that doesn't completely solve the problem, or to put up nothing at all? I don't know.

wpietri 13y ago
I agree with you entirely on the trickiness of business ethics, but I'd be very skeptical of anything that is more precise. If it's too long to keep in one's head, it will be easily forgotten. And if it's complex enough to cover everything in some detail, there will be a lot of opportunity for hole-finding, rules-hacking, boundary-arguing, and confusion-sowing. Contrast that with the simplicity, say, of the Golden Rule, or Rawls' Veil of Ignorance [1], or the Eightfold Path [2]. Those are trickier to apply, because you have to do the unpacking yourself. But they're also harder to fool yourself and fool others with. I think that's true generally, but especially so for YC. If they stick with sufficiently broad principles and heuristics, then they can finish up with, "... and if you aren't sure, ask." YC has a lot of high-touch mentorship, and mentoring is one of the best way to deal with ethical questions. They also have a strong interest in making sure YC startups behave reasonably well. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path
- tuukkah 13y ago
  Then, do you ask for permission, or do you ask for forgiveness?
- lsc 13y ago
  >Contrast that with the simplicity, say, of the Golden Rule, or Rawls' Veil of Ignorance [1], or the Eightfold Path [2]. Those are trickier to apply, because you have to do the unpacking yourself. But they're also harder to fool yourself and fool others with. I think the golden rule is a perfect example of how overly-simplified rules, well, just don't work very well. And yeah, it's easy to "fool yourself" or justify whatever it is you want to do with the golden rule. It offers no more guidance than the content-free "Don't be an asshole." The golden rule involves a lot of assumptions that the other guy is, well, like you, or if you take the "treat them how they want to be treated" interpretation, then it takes a lot of guessing as to what they want. For me, leadership means taking responsibility for failures, distributing credit for successes, and listening to the right people when it comes time to make a decision, and taking responsibility, again, for the emotionally difficult parts of that decision. Like firing people. You need to listen to the other people on your team; unless you are a very small team, that should be the largest part of the decision. But on an emotional level, those people you are asking, and those people who are getting fired both need to feel like you, the leader, are actually doing the firing. For most people, though, that's not a leader, that's a wimp. For most people, the primary characteristics of a leader are decisiveness, dominance and charisma, things that I usually regard in a negative light.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    I agree with you entirely on leadership. But I disagree entirely on the golden rule. I hear about people all the time who justify some action with, "Well, it isn't illegal". Because with a legal code as complex as the one in the US, it's easy to lose sight of "it's right". Empathy, though, is a foundation of human moral reasoning, and the golden rule points that out. You can see this in kids all the time. There's the classic "but I didn't break rule X" defense, wherein the kid hacks the rules. E.g., "You said not to touch him." But "How would you feel in that situation?" and "How do you think they feel?" are much harder to hack. Even if the transgressor is able to self-fool, the flaws are much more obvious to third parties. The apparent lack of content of the golden rule is a benefit; the simplicity leaves less room to hide.
cousin_it 13y ago
The ethics of engineering is also hard. If your employer asks you to implement a feature that hurts the users, what do you do? Examples include working on the Sony rootkit, etc. Here's a great post about why it's a difficult problem and why all existing "codes of ethics" (including the IEEE/ACM code) completely fail to address it: http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html.
- lsc 13y ago
  >The ethics of engineering is also hard. If your employer asks you to implement a feature that hurts the users, what do you do? While that is true, (and that is a tricky situation) It is almost always okay to tell everyone you work with what you know, especially if the project will harm the users, and especially if you screwed up. The only times when there is complexity is when management has the intent to harm the users, or when management is willing to cut corners to the point where the product will be unintentionally dangerous to the users even after you point out how it will be unintentionally dangerous. My point isn't that those aren't complex conflicts... my point is that those are not what you spend your days thinking about. Most of the time, the right thing to do is to solve the problem in the best way you can, and to tell your supervisor about all problems. In fact, I can't think of a single situation where it's not appropriate, as an engineer, to tell the person you are reporting to about a problem with something you are working on. There's only a conflict if folks further up the chain of command don't do their jobs correctly. And all employees deal with this. "If I have done my job correctly, but the company is doing something harmful to society, what responsibility, if any, do I have to stop the company?" All employees have that conflict. I like the example of Werner Von Braun. He designed the V2, a terror weapon for use against civilians. But after Germany lost? there was no talk of prosecuting him for that. There was, however, talk of prosecuting him because he knew the Germans were using concentration camp labor to build the V2, he was in a position of moderate authority, and he did nothing to stop it. Note how history judges him harshly for the actions he took (or did not take) as a middle-management joe (or fritz, I guess) - not for his actions as a brilliant Engineer. The problem with business ethics is that every decision you make has to balance your responsibility to your shareholders to 'maximize shareholder value' - which involves concealing information from suppliers and customers, with your responsibility to be honest and up front with your suppliers and customers. The ethical conflict is the normal state for business people, while it is the unusual case for the Engineer or other employee.
nymph 13y ago
This makes business ethics a lot more complex. Complex, yes, but not nearly as complex as junior founders tend to think they are. Like as not their definition of a "complex" business ethical comes down to, more or less: "Say WHA? They're actually reading the contract I downloaded from somewhere (or which some random mentor gave to me) -- and they actually think it means what it says? And they want to negotiate some aspect of it? OMG they're lawyering up on me! Worse, they seem to know more than I do! I'm scared!"
- lsc 13y ago
  If you are signing big contracts without legal advice, certainly, that's a big problem. I've lost money that way. I don't think I'd call it an ethical problem, though. It is more of a "I did something stupid because I thought I had capabilities that I do not, in fact, have."

by lsc 13y ago

wpietri 13y ago

I agree with you entirely on the trickiness of business ethics, but I'd be very skeptical of anything that is more precise. If it's too long to keep in one's head, it will be easily forgotten. And if it's complex enough to cover everything in some detail, there will be a lot of opportunity for hole-finding, rules-hacking, boundary-arguing, and confusion-sowing. Contrast that with the simplicity, say, of the Golden Rule, or Rawls' Veil of Ignorance [1], or the Eightfold Path [2]. Those are trickier to apply, because you have to do the unpacking yourself. But they're also harder to fool yourself and fool others with. I think that's true generally, but especially so for YC. If they stick with sufficiently broad principles and heuristics, then they can finish up with, "... and if you aren't sure, ask." YC has a lot of high-touch mentorship, and mentoring is one of the best way to deal with ethical questions. They also have a strong interest in making sure YC startups behave reasonably well. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path

tuukkah 13y ago
Then, do you ask for permission, or do you ask for forgiveness?
lsc 13y ago
>Contrast that with the simplicity, say, of the Golden Rule, or Rawls' Veil of Ignorance [1], or the Eightfold Path [2]. Those are trickier to apply, because you have to do the unpacking yourself. But they're also harder to fool yourself and fool others with. I think the golden rule is a perfect example of how overly-simplified rules, well, just don't work very well. And yeah, it's easy to "fool yourself" or justify whatever it is you want to do with the golden rule. It offers no more guidance than the content-free "Don't be an asshole." The golden rule involves a lot of assumptions that the other guy is, well, like you, or if you take the "treat them how they want to be treated" interpretation, then it takes a lot of guessing as to what they want. For me, leadership means taking responsibility for failures, distributing credit for successes, and listening to the right people when it comes time to make a decision, and taking responsibility, again, for the emotionally difficult parts of that decision. Like firing people. You need to listen to the other people on your team; unless you are a very small team, that should be the largest part of the decision. But on an emotional level, those people you are asking, and those people who are getting fired both need to feel like you, the leader, are actually doing the firing. For most people, though, that's not a leader, that's a wimp. For most people, the primary characteristics of a leader are decisiveness, dominance and charisma, things that I usually regard in a negative light.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I agree with you entirely on leadership. But I disagree entirely on the golden rule. I hear about people all the time who justify some action with, "Well, it isn't illegal". Because with a legal code as complex as the one in the US, it's easy to lose sight of "it's right". Empathy, though, is a foundation of human moral reasoning, and the golden rule points that out. You can see this in kids all the time. There's the classic "but I didn't break rule X" defense, wherein the kid hacks the rules. E.g., "You said not to touch him." But "How would you feel in that situation?" and "How do you think they feel?" are much harder to hack. Even if the transgressor is able to self-fool, the flaws are much more obvious to third parties. The apparent lack of content of the golden rule is a benefit; the simplicity leaves less room to hide.

cousin_it 13y ago

The ethics of engineering is also hard. If your employer asks you to implement a feature that hurts the users, what do you do? Examples include working on the Sony rootkit, etc. Here's a great post about why it's a difficult problem and why all existing "codes of ethics" (including the IEEE/ACM code) completely fail to address it: http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html.

lsc 13y ago
>The ethics of engineering is also hard. If your employer asks you to implement a feature that hurts the users, what do you do? While that is true, (and that is a tricky situation) It is almost always okay to tell everyone you work with what you know, especially if the project will harm the users, and especially if you screwed up. The only times when there is complexity is when management has the intent to harm the users, or when management is willing to cut corners to the point where the product will be unintentionally dangerous to the users even after you point out how it will be unintentionally dangerous. My point isn't that those aren't complex conflicts... my point is that those are not what you spend your days thinking about. Most of the time, the right thing to do is to solve the problem in the best way you can, and to tell your supervisor about all problems. In fact, I can't think of a single situation where it's not appropriate, as an engineer, to tell the person you are reporting to about a problem with something you are working on. There's only a conflict if folks further up the chain of command don't do their jobs correctly. And all employees deal with this. "If I have done my job correctly, but the company is doing something harmful to society, what responsibility, if any, do I have to stop the company?" All employees have that conflict. I like the example of Werner Von Braun. He designed the V2, a terror weapon for use against civilians. But after Germany lost? there was no talk of prosecuting him for that. There was, however, talk of prosecuting him because he knew the Germans were using concentration camp labor to build the V2, he was in a position of moderate authority, and he did nothing to stop it. Note how history judges him harshly for the actions he took (or did not take) as a middle-management joe (or fritz, I guess) - not for his actions as a brilliant Engineer. The problem with business ethics is that every decision you make has to balance your responsibility to your shareholders to 'maximize shareholder value' - which involves concealing information from suppliers and customers, with your responsibility to be honest and up front with your suppliers and customers. The ethical conflict is the normal state for business people, while it is the unusual case for the Engineer or other employee.

nymph 13y ago

This makes business ethics a lot more complex. Complex, yes, but not nearly as complex as junior founders tend to think they are. Like as not their definition of a "complex" business ethical comes down to, more or less: "Say WHA? They're actually reading the contract I downloaded from somewhere (or which some random mentor gave to me) -- and they actually think it means what it says? And they want to negotiate some aspect of it? OMG they're lawyering up on me! Worse, they seem to know more than I do! I'm scared!"

lsc 13y ago
If you are signing big contracts without legal advice, certainly, that's a big problem. I've lost money that way. I don't think I'd call it an ethical problem, though. It is more of a "I did something stupid because I thought I had capabilities that I do not, in fact, have."