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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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The engineers are writing up the spec, implementing the prototype, and will eventually be responsible for the rollout. The engineers are as much at fault as whoever thought up the idea. Without the engineers being complacent, the idea would be nothing more than an idea.
"Just following orders" has never been a good excuse for doing bad things.
I agree. I'm an engineer and have left companies for doing things I think are unethical. I understand its not always black and white, but at the end of the day, if you're doing something bad and you know its bad, "just doing my job" does not mean you're not complicit and at least partially responsible.
Especially if you work at a place like Google - its not like the only choices are either implementing this or starving. There are plenty of employment opportunities out there for people at the top of the industry that don't involve making the world a worse place for everyone to live in.
There's a decent chunk of google workers who rely on H1B visas, so that's another thing that can remove some agency. I think that the level of coercion and control H1B visas give companies over their workers allow them to do even crazier shit. Part of how Twitter was able to retain some good engineers despite... everything.
I don't know whether that actually applies in this case. But it's not just money tethering people to their jobs.
It's a decent excuse to do mildly annoying things, I wouldn't go so far as to say they're just as at fault. You have to pick your battles and they know that if they refused to do what they were told they'd be replaced. Plus, I don't want to inadvertently shift any of the blame away from the people in charge.
That's only true if the engineers following the order clearly know what they're doing is wrong, which is often not the case. Most software engineers are as ignorant about privacy as their customers. They do not give a damn about FOSS nor privacy and are often users of these products themselves.
Bro it's their job not a volunteering venture, let's take the hyperbole down a few orders of magnitude.
Do you put any blame on the people who came up with this idea? With executives who steer and determine what is going to be implemented? It's also just their job. My point was (and is) that doing bad things because it's your job is not different than doing bad things that aren't part of your job. And the point I made and I'll reiterate is: ideas are just ideas; its the engineers who are implementing the ideas and making them reality. No one at the company is innocent, and that includes engineers.
If my job was asking me to do evil things, I'd not be comfortable working that job. It's the same nonsense with Facebook: you know you're working for an evil company, which is destroying the social fabric around the world, and yet you don't judge yourself for contributing to evil because it's your job. It's inexcusable.
Unless you're a volunteer firefighter or charity worker you're not making the world any better. I think this kind of judgment is shameful.
That's a weirdly reductive and frankly useless way to frame the situation.
First, a paid firefighter and paid social worker are making the world better, just as much as a volunteer firefighter and charity worker. I'm not sure why you made the distinction.
Second, it's not a dichotomy between making the world better and worse. There are things that obviously are bad, and there are things that obviously are good. But there are also things that are almost entirely neutral, or somewhere in between. It's not an all-or-nothing situation: things can be degrees of good and bad.
If you insist on making it relative: these people are currently doing something more bad than what they were doing before. Whether you think what they were doing before was good or bad doesn't really matter. What matters is that this new thing is bad. And that's the problem.
I find the defense of someone doing active harm under the guise of "their job" to be shameful.