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[-] Steeve@lemmy.ca 81 points 1 year ago

Why's everyone blaming the engineers lol, pretty sure they're just doing what they're told right?

[-] HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world 65 points 1 year ago

Exactly, headline should be more like "Google executives want Google engineers to make ad-blocking (near) impossible"

[-] oce@jlai.lu 7 points 1 year ago

Isn't Google famous for giving a large amount of creative freedom to their engineers (and having a lot of dead published products as a result)? Also, Google engineers are not exactly stuck at their job with little hope of finding anything else to survive.

[-] foo@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago
[-] ffolkes@fanexus.com 8 points 1 year ago

I believe that policy was reduced or removed many years ago. Around the time when all the cool new projects stopped, and Google scrubbed "don't be evil" from their site and company philosophy.

[-] underisk@lemmy.ml 33 points 1 year ago

Just following orders is not the ironclad excuse some of you seem to think it is.

[-] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Look dude, I hate advertising as much as anyone. I don't want any TV and most streaming services have wedged in some form of advertising nowadays and I avoid all that.

But equating engineers trying to solve a problem like engineers figuring out how to block ads isn't really equivalent to murder.

[-] underisk@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

People only get held accountable for their actions and choices when the consequences are equivalent to murder? Their bosses hold some of the blame, sure, but they are not blameless and pretending they are just enables shit like this to keep happening.

[-] loom_in_essence@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

They're still bad people, but this kind of blame has to run uphill. The devs only have the option of quitting, not necessarily of not doing what they're told.

That being said, I bet there are some Very Good Boys who enthusiastically and proactively suggest some evil shit to the execs.

[-] Steeve@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago

I mean shit, they aren't launching nukes here

[-] jlou@mastodon.social 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Doing what you're told does not relieve you of responsibility for the results of your actions

[-] Goodie@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

The engineers are not blame free, and can do super shady shit too. For example, the issues with the WebHID "broswer" APIs.

[-] RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

Ah yes, because "just following orders" has worked out so well in the past.

That's right, I just godwin'd this bitch.

[-] HurlingDurling@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Because it is still unclear if this is an official project requested by Google or just some engineers working alone until Google adopts the project.

[-] mriguy@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

The chances that a swashbuckling crew of rogue engineers organized a secret skunkworks project to implement their heartfelt, idealistic vision of an adblocker free web are… low.

[-] ultimate_question@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is exactly something an engineer who works at Google would want to work on, finding new ways to enrich Google is literally their job and there would be great personal benefit from coming up with the best way to implement this DRM crap for profit

[-] HurlingDurling@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

True, but it's not zero

[-] seang96@spgrn.com 2 points 1 year ago

Software engineers have ethics classes, I'd imagine this would fall highly under unethical, just under building software for the military which google employees have protested in the past.

[-] False@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

Software engineers have ethics classes

We do?

[-] seang96@spgrn.com 2 points 1 year ago

It was required for my degree, I'm sure it is required at more than just my university lol

[-] ryry1985@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Not my university. Outside of the engineering classes and prequisites for engineering classes, we only had to take rhetoric and a foreign language.

[-] seang96@spgrn.com 7 points 1 year ago

That's disappointing to hear. Talked about ethics throughout my courses and one was half the class. Hopefully more professors and instructions sprinkle it in there at least.

this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
2110 points (98.6% liked)

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