> 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.