Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

So reading the comments. I am on the side of having business owners taking some kind of oath, not software engineers. If a software engineer was programming IE around the time that MS was hit by regulators years ago, and this "software engineer" oath was in place, would the software engineers being asked to code a web browser be at fault for the wrong-doings of the company?

It just seems wrong for someone that has been asked to "write a web browser" to be at fault for anything.

What about someone asked to code up a voice prompt on something that answers the phone for a telemarketing company. And said company later uses the code to do illegal spam robocalls instead of what they told the developer they were doing with it?

What about if a software developer that writes code to turn off and on a sprinkler system by phone is later convicted of writing the code for a bomb that blows up a building?

What about if a software developer writes code that matches human faces for the purposes of automatically unlocking his door at his home, ends up being open sourcing it, but the developer is arrested for that software being deployed on a drone that murders specific people?

What about if a software developer that is asked to install the above Face Rec system on a drone but is told it's designed to take pictures of people it knows at a birthday party, and is later switched out to trigger a machine gun.

There are not two sides, because both management and engineering should face consequences for building harmful software. And I'm not sure it's appropriate to test these "what ifs" as if looking for logical flaws in such a system, because a well-functioning court and jury should easily be able answer these questions, and I'm sure you had the "correct" answers in mind when you wrote them. Whether or not our courts and juries are currently well-functioning enough to support something like this is a different question, but we should strive for it.

In any case, we already have laws like this! And they're not controversial! If you commit war crimes by killing people with a shovel under the orders of your superiors, both you and your superiors are responsible, but the manufacturer of the shovel obviously isn't responsible for what you did unless they advertised the shovel's skull-bashing capabilities.

But what is harmful software? Today, while there are arguments about facebook being too addictive, it's really just competition between platforms, it's not everyone's opinion that the software engineers at facebook should be liable at this point for making an addictive algorithm. At some uncertain point in time, there's the possibility that facebook will be sued for the addictiveness and lose. Should that happen, I don't see why the software engineers should be partially to blame.

If Facebook gets sued for its addictiveness and loses, then that would be a pretty solid judgment of its harm, wouldn't it? And it'd be up to the court to decide whether the engineers (and which ones) were complicit. There is room for nuance here.

> I don't see why the software engineers should be partially to blame.

Because they chose to build it! Software engineers aren't ignorant and helpless executors of instructions. They are responsible for what they build.

That makes no sense. That's the exact angle I'm trying to argue isn't feasible. It should absolutely be the corporate entity that takes the blame for things like that. If we were to change things to make the engineers directly responsible, we're just adding an entire industry that's not necessary.

We'll end up creating an entire class of insurance for software development liability. It doesn't really change anything except again, raise the cost and shift burdens.

> a well-functioning court and jury should easily be able answer these questions,

I'm going to ignore the qualifier of 'well functioning' which obviously up for debate. The process of being charged with a crime, being put on trial, wondering at the consequences of the outcome etc., is no joke. It is a tremendously time-consuming, expensive, and stressful processes and even if you are acquitted there is no undoing the damage that has been done. There's a reason doctor's spend huge chunks of their income on malpractice insurance, and if we decide that engineers need the same protection in case they get sued than the biggest beneficiary is going to be the insurance companies.

If insurance companies also had to sigh oaths we might make some progress, but the nature of their game is to spread the risk - which is to say they take money from a lot of people and hope they never have to pay them back. There's only so much regulation can do about that.

It shouldn't just be thrown out as 'well if you make a decision in good faith then you are sure to win your court case'. It is not a reasonable burden to put on someone who cannot anticipate all the possible outcomes of decisions they make.

That's exactly it. It also begs the question, if corporations already have liability insurance, what's the point of forcing all of its employees to get similar coverage. It really is just giving more money to the insurance industry.

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