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But look, the internet isn't just textmode anymore, and it doesn't exist just in cyberspace anymore. Decisions coders make affect the--blah blah you all know th

But look, the internet isn't just textmode anymore, and it doesn't exist just in cyberspace anymore. Decisions coders make affect the--blah blah you all know this, software is eating. So, maybe, just maybe, the hardcore-on-the-spectrum-practically-deterministic-themselves folks shouldn't be the only ones with commit-bits, hm? [...] Because software is eating the world, "Made with love" needs to more than a marketing slogan. If that is the way you want to frame this, I think your goals are tangential if not orthogonal to the conversation this blog speaks to. You're talking about products, most of the social topics rolling through social media and the tech news are about social interaction in and around development. Obviously the developers are in a place to put their mark on a product, but that's quite different. They're generally not the decision makers on the product goals and feature set. And to the extent that they can influence the product, that topic has gone entirely unaddressed. Conversation has focused around about software team interaction. But I don't see how that adds up to building a product "with heart." Some of the grossest software business models and anti-consumer practices come out of NorCal, the epicenter of the brand of progressive politics popular in these discussions. A comically apt anecdote is of a Facebook employee. The name Facebook let a transgender individual use as their workplace ID was not good enough for Facebook's real name policy for end users. Of course Facebook fell all over themselves to fix it when they got bad press. But if any of the political movements in tech were even tangentially about the products getting built, it would have never been an issue. The business rule that developers were tasked with implementing would have never been commited, or never thought up in the first place.

daveloyall 11y ago
> tangential if not orthogonal to the conversation Er, sorry. My train of thought was: products need to be less harmful --> the aggregate character of the the industry needs to change --> putting more emotionally competent people in the industry --> overcoming the gender-related conflict in the industry. Which, I think is the conversation. As to developers cf. management... What sort of developer fails to think about the possible consequences a given product might have on the lives of people they will never meet? #cough#
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  What sort of developer fails to think about the possible consequences a given product might have on the lives of people they will never meet? Any developer on a project that doesn't have a formal analysis system for feeding thoughts about the lives of users into the product spec. And I mean beyond the "will it sell" sorts of analysis. So to answer your question: most. I have worked on safety-critical systems, my train of thought goes: products need to be less harmful --> FMEA. I actually look at it a bit like the way computer security can go overlooked. You can actively employ as many netsec hobbyists that spend their evenings hunting vulnerabilities, reading research and messing with security software as you want. And they might marginally increase the security of the software and systems, but the business has to decide to invest in security before they're allowed to focus on securing the system. Once the business has bought in, then you really don't need a huge cultural change towards security, just get enough guys to set up the quality systems, and then keep up with security analysis and reviews. Edit: From a purely reductive standpoint, developers can tailor product to overseas markets with different cultures. As long as the business cares, and spends the effort to determining how to target a culture, the developers don't really matter.

daveloyall 11y ago

> tangential if not orthogonal to the conversation Er, sorry. My train of thought was: products need to be less harmful --> the aggregate character of the the industry needs to change --> putting more emotionally competent people in the industry --> overcoming the gender-related conflict in the industry. Which, I think is the conversation. As to developers cf. management... What sort of developer fails to think about the possible consequences a given product might have on the lives of people they will never meet? #cough#

forgottenpass 11y ago
What sort of developer fails to think about the possible consequences a given product might have on the lives of people they will never meet? Any developer on a project that doesn't have a formal analysis system for feeding thoughts about the lives of users into the product spec. And I mean beyond the "will it sell" sorts of analysis. So to answer your question: most. I have worked on safety-critical systems, my train of thought goes: products need to be less harmful --> FMEA. I actually look at it a bit like the way computer security can go overlooked. You can actively employ as many netsec hobbyists that spend their evenings hunting vulnerabilities, reading research and messing with security software as you want. And they might marginally increase the security of the software and systems, but the business has to decide to invest in security before they're allowed to focus on securing the system. Once the business has bought in, then you really don't need a huge cultural change towards security, just get enough guys to set up the quality systems, and then keep up with security analysis and reviews. Edit: From a purely reductive standpoint, developers can tailor product to overseas markets with different cultures. As long as the business cares, and spends the effort to determining how to target a culture, the developers don't really matter.