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I think punishing the engineer would be much less practical than the CEO. There will always be an engineer (perhaps a remote contractor) who will build this.

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> I think punishing the engineer would be much less practical than the CEO.

Of course. I wouldn't really ever consider engineers to be to blame - they could whistleblow of course, but the people that inked the deal and brought it to the engineers should be held responsible.

If we can't hold the tech industry responsible for this, what hope do we have holding them responsible for murkier issues like privacy/data collection?

edit: by "developers" in my parent post, I meant "the EHR company"

A fundamental part of engineering accreditation in most countries is ethics and enforcing the fact that you are to blame for the things you build and you are obligated to raise objection.

Also, you can be involved in the development of such things and not really be aware of what's going on. Like, you could be the front-end developer that presents the options returned from an API, or the back-end developer that just returns options from the DB and maintains the CRUD site for people to assign treatment X for ailment Y.

The person who ended up pushing opioids as a treatment for ∀y is very likely not an engineer.

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