Who gets in trouble if it turns out you are actually held to the literal rule?
As an enterprise architect, these are all part of the meetings you have with compliance when you are working on major projects. I have had the privilege of working with some excellent compliance officers, and they are the opposite of the nay-saying caricature that is often painted of them. I found these people to be extremely creative and helpful, working together towards solutions rather than stalling or nixing viable progress.
I'm not implying anything else. I used your own "literal" wording to refer to the "more strict than yours" interpretation.
I suppose I should have used scare quotes around "literal".
Company politics, feudal wars, fiefdom protections, backstabbing and outright sabotaging, now there's a daily occurrence and many minions are cannon fodder in those skirmishes, but they usually stay clear of regulatory issues minefields.
If the company you work for actually had such a no-fault culture, I doubt you'd be criticizing programmers so aggressively for being sticklers, but would instead be trying to understand and account for the systemic factors (including human factors) behind their behavior.
I don't see why developers should be in trouble. Developers don't make unilateral decisions on non-trivial compliance matters. A finding of non-compliance at a financial institution would typically be the result of an investigation, a disagreement with the regulator or a court ruling. It would come years after the organisation as a whole decided to adopt the interpretation in question.
Engineers are not shielded by their implementer role if they participate in illegal activity. James Robert Liang was a rank-and-file engineer for Volkswagen and he got jailed for his role the VW emissions scandal[1].
No matter how much an enterprise architect or compliance officer promises "it'll be fine" to the developer, the developer needs documented CYA. An enlightened organization would perhaps find ways to expedite that CYA documentation rather than demonizing programmers as a class.
[1] https://apnews.com/general-news-988ea2ae45694b37b320e68cefe3...
Liang got prison time because he _did understand_ that the engine wasn't compliant with regulations and chose to build the system to falsify the emissions output during tests anyway. He was not a scapegoat.
"On 9 September 2016, James Robert Liang, a Volkswagen engineer working at Volkswagen's testing facility in Oxnard, California, admitted as part of a plea deal with the US Department of Justice that the defeat device had been purposely installed in US vehicles with the knowledge of his engineering team: 'Liang admitted that beginning in about 2006, he and his co-conspirators started to design a new "EA 189" diesel engine for sale in the United States. ... When he and his co-conspirators realized that they could not design a diesel engine that would meet the stricter US emissions standards, they designed and implemented [the defeat device] software.'" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Complain about them, denigrate them, upbraid them for performing analysis outside their primary expertise, fire and replace them.... none of that changes the incentive structure that shunts people in the implementation role towards conservatism out of a perceived need for self-preservation.
"decisions which they don't understand to be compliant" = "decisions which they don't believe to be compliant"
In other words, they understand that the decisions are not compliant. There's no contradiction with what you said.
a) Engineers don't know and cannot be expected to know whether what they are being asked to implement complies with all regulations. This is completely normal.
b) Engineers know or can be expected to know based on their expertise that they are being asked to cheat. That's when they are on the hook.
VW was a case of (b). It was clear-cut criminal behaviour on a very technical level. But that's not what typically happens in financial services and many other domains.
But if your point is merely that engineers are not automatically in the clear just because someone higher up told them what to do then I agree with you.
Then the rules should enumerate all the ways. From your posts, you come across as if programmers don't know what they are doing which is insulting to those who work in mission critical industries like aviation where a programmer could be criminally charged if he/she didn't implement the specs STRICTLY.
Is neither what I said nor believe.
It's nice to want things, but rules are much squishier in real life. There's rarely any truly bright line.
It doesn't feel like we're living in the same world of regulation that existed prior to DOGE.
What a win!
> I also work in finance... DOGE wiped out a large amount of the regulators in government.
However, I don't see anything about finance there. I'm confused by your comment. Can you provide more specifics?
I can't go into too much detail, but for a financial institution to offer certain financial products, you have to submit a proposal to one of the above regulatory bodies to get their approval. We were attempting to do just that and we couldn't even find the proper person at the given agency who should be receiving said proposal. It was even rumored that regulatory agency who would normally review such proposals didn't have the staff to review them. And the review would be done by an entirely different group of regulators who have not done such things historically.
Additionally, these agencies do regular exams of financial institutions to ensure they are complying with regulations and handling fraud properly. These cuts have led to those exams either not happening, or happening at a fraction of the depth they had been previously.
There’s a reason it’s called “judgement”
My point was simply that it's easy to scoff at someone else being careful if it's their neck and not yours.