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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

So, here's an honest question: How do they find people to work on these products if the general consensus is that this is a bad thing to do? How do they keep word of these projects from spreading within the company?

It seems if enough people feel strongly about this, then at least one would quit after being assigned to this project, and even if there's an NDA and they can't relate the details of why they quit, it would be alarming enough to say "I felt compelled to quit because I could not in good conscience work on the project I was assigned." I'm not sure an NDA can protect against something like that.

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"(1) A major corporation is like a construction set. It can be used to put together the whole world. (2) Because of the growing division of labor, many people no longer recognize the role they play in producing mass destruction. (3) That which is manufactured in the end is the product of the workers, students, and engineers."

This last thesis is illustrated with an alarmingly clear image. The same actor, each time at a washroom sink, introduces himself as a worker, a student, an engineer. As an engineer, carrying a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a machine gun in the other, he says, "I am an engineer and I work for an electrical corporation. The workers think we produce vacuum cleaners. The students think we make machine guns. This vacuum cleaner can be a valuable weapon. This machine gun can be a useful household appliance. What we produce is the product of the workers, students, and engineers."

From an introduction to Harun Farocki's "Inextinguishable Fire": https://www.harunfarocki.de/films/1960s/1969/inextinguishabl...

The suggestion from the link is that some people involved didn't fully understand what they were working on. And obviously they weren't able to keep word spreading in this case.

But obviously a number of people must have known. I don't know how they approach and recruit these people, it's above my paygrade.

You just get asked to work on project blah. And you're like okay, what do I do? Figure out this system for them, okay. And you work and focus on the technical details.

I mean, I really appreciate all of you who seem to dig in and dive into the what and why of every system you work on, but I often just do work. I get tunnel vision and do the things I have to do. I don't really care about much outside of that spectrum unless it impacts what I have to accomplish.

Oh, I do that too-- especially those times I have to drill down several layers deep into the ugly undocumented guts of an abstraction some other developer left knots in.

But somehow I never climb back out to find the bug I just fixed is part of a giant censorship machine.

Are you saying there is a greater than zero chance that you've accidentally done work on a similarly unethical system?

I've worked on something that I didn't realize was... perhaps not in the sphere of things I want to work on for 1 year.

When you're focused on technical details, cost evaluations, etc, you're not exactly thinking about what the thing is used for, or why. At least, I wasn't and I assume it works the same way for others.

It's really easy to just get assigned to a project, and start working on it.

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