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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Do engineers on these teams not voice their concerns and refuse to do stuff like this that actively hurts the web?

This points at a huge problem in software culture. A lot of us don't see ourselves as professionals, with our own ethical standards and responsibilities. We just do whatever a boss orders us to do, like minions or mercenaries.

It's also an organizational problem, though. If you're, say, a doctor or an actual engineer, there are professional organizations that stand up for the professional standards and that can have your back if you're being asked to violate them.

This is especially disappointing to me given the demand for software developers. It's much easier for us to find news jobs than most people, so the risk of taking an ethical stand is much lower for us than most people. And we also have a lot to gain! So many places are poorly run that businesses and developers would all gain if we used our power to fix process and organizational issues.

I've certainly done my best to use that power well. But I would love to see cultural and organizational changes so that more of us do that.

100% true.

If a software engineer writes software that hurts people, they believe in hurting people and believe people should be hurt.

If they didn’t, they wouldn’t write software that hurts people.

The impressive amount of freedom tech workers have to choose what they work on means the ethical and moral issues with their production should fall on each person’s shoulders, but it doesn’t.

It's a video scrub bar. Calm down.

This attitude implies an unambiguous, black and white world where such decisions are always clear. In other words, a fantasy world which does not exist.

I agree it's a bit hyperbolic. But it seems weird to suggest that developers, who are hired for their intellectual power and subtlety, are great at figuring out the implications of complex decisions except when ethics are involved.

I think it's more likely that their sudden inability in this one aspect is related to Upton Sinclair's observation: " It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

> A lot of us don't see ourselves as professionals, with our own ethical standards and responsibilities. We just do whatever a boss orders us to do, like minions or mercenaries.

In contrast, I think that's precisely how we all feel about ourselves. Some people just have different (i.e. lower) ethical standards than you do.

> If you're, say, a doctor or an actual engineer, there are professional organizations that stand up for the professional standards and that can have your back if you're being asked to violate them.

More importantly, they're the ones that set a minimum baseline for ethical behavior. We don't have that. That's what makes it so easy to threaten to replace developers with people who will do what their told. They can do it, and easily. It would be a much more hollow threat if they were going to have to find someone willing to risk their career.

> This is especially disappointing to me given the demand for software developers. It's much easier for us to find news jobs than most people, so the risk of taking an ethical stand is much lower for us than most people.

The risk still isn't low enough. The incentives are wildly mismatched. Either I put a shitty anti-user feature in a product I'm probably never going to use, or I risk my family being homeless. It's probably a small risk, but so is dying in a plane hijacking and yet a lot of people worry about that.

> And we also have a lot to gain! So many places are poorly run that businesses and developers would all gain if we used our power to fix process and organizational issues.

I would put an extremely heavy "citation needed" around that. I don't doubt that we can all identify things that need improving at work, but having 85 different developers asking for 307 different things all at once isn't going to help.

You need something structured. A union or professional organization might be helpful. A bunch of people threatening to quit for random causes probably won't.

You don't seem very consistent here. Either "all" developers have ethical standards, meaning that there are things they will stand up and fight for, or they're people who are much more concerned for their jobs and will do whatever managers say. But you can't really argue for both at once.

You also talk as if you aren't at risk of losing your job now. People lose their jobs all the time. It's something any responsible adult has to be prepared for.

And yes, of course when I say "we used our power to fix process and organizational issues" I definitely meant the "we" part of it, not some half-assed random individual behavior. A suggestion for happy dialog: try assuming the person you're talking to has thought of the obvious implications that just occurred to you.

For every engineer that says no, there’s thousands of other engineers willing to do whatever’s asked for $400k+/year

I have been that engineer on occasion, though not specifically with regard to DRM. The pushback has typically been something like, "There is too much money on the line," or even, "If we are not setting the standard on this, someone else will, and it will probably be even worse."

In the end, work is not voluntary for the majority of engineers involved in these things, and so you just have to accept that you are not going to win the argument unless you have a good argument that what you are being asked to build is not possible. Engineers often speak of how DRM is basically impossible, but that is only true in an ideal world; in practice DRM is good enough to satisfy business needs and concerns about web openness have yet to materialize (at least in a way that would undermine the business case for it). The relatively small number of hardware and software platforms one must deal with now further weakens the arguments against DRM.

What incentive do they have? Some good feels don't compare to that sweet remuneration package.

At least where I have worked, by the time it gets to me the decision has already been made that X feature will happen.

So you could voice concern there, but it wouldn’t matter.

That's circular reasoning. If you and your colleagues said, "No, sorry, we're not implementing that", then that would mean the decision hasn't in fact been made. Your decision to give up your power as to the decisions is what makes it true.

I get where you are coming from but to me this wouldn't make sense given that they work there in the first place. Same goes for the network team serving the content etc. You start working there, it would be unprofessional to refuse to do this. Quit (or never start working there) if it makes you feel uncomfy.

If the tens of millions of people employed by carbon-emitting industries don't risk their jobs to prevent the literal ruin of the planet, not sure why anyone would think employees would take that same risk to prevent some third-party plugins from breaking.

No, because employee shaming like this make people distance themselves from the criticism and isolate in their work bubbles where they can easily justify any wrongdoings.

You're asking if Netflix tolerates engineers not toeing the party line about their product? Have you seen the news last week? :)

No what news, please share.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/11/22720724/netflix-suspend...

Note that "Netflix then suspended Field along with two other employees for trying to attend a director-level meeting they weren’t invited to." is contested - they reinstated her and confirmed that she believed she was invited to the meeting because she received a link to join it. https://twitter.com/RainofTerra/status/1448097310026747908

Then they fired the leader of the ERG: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/15/22728337/netflix-fires-o...

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