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by dsfyu404ed
3900 days ago
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I find his assertion that the programmers "should have known" to be beyond naive. There's a reason that teams designing these sorts of systems consult with lawyers who are experts on the relevant law. The programmer's job is to program. Expecting them to also deal with details of legality and morality (beyond grossly obvious things like hard coding dosage limits into medical equipment) is just wishful thinking. That's the kind of talk that people want to hear. "Oh the developers were given shitty instructions, they shouldn't have listened" but talk is cheap. Stop to consider the implications of that sort of second guessing. Obviously things get wacky at both extremes but when you give someone a spec to meet you need to have an expectation that it will meet that spec. Our industry is built upon millions of black boxes that meet I/O spec sure having the developers turn around and say "we changed you spec because it was killing polar bears" comes with a much larger can of worms than just implementing what you're told to implement and accepting that it might not be morally agreeable and getting on to the next thing. There's a reason people aren't all generic worker bees. It's efficient to have the lawyers worry about laws, coders worry about code and managers act as the interface between them and accept the blame if what the lawyers say isn't properly translated into the programmers' instructions. than it is to have all three groups worry about all three subjects. I think law is interesting and has a lot in common with software developing but I don't want to have to go looking up case law as required research before coding a windshield wiper controller.. |
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We're humans, not robots. People can be expected to think about things and participate in society. It's generally held that we should expect pretty much everyone to concern themselves with details of legality and morality as part of being a good citizen... "I'm just a simple automaton doing what I'm told" is generally not a valid excuse.
Do you actually know programmers who literally just take specs and implement them and have no thoughts or opinions about the larger context of what's going on? In my experience, programmers have a lot to say about non-programming aspects of work.
The other issue here is, what constitutes "grossly obvious?" You just drew a totally arbitrary line based on your own opinion of what can be expected and what can't. Your argument is a bit of a strawman, nobody is expecting coders to go read up on case law.
Ultimately, we don't know anything about what happened at VW. We don't know who was responsible, or who knew what, and we're all just crafting up scenarios and speculation ("you see, the specs were such that the engineers couldn't possibly have known what was going on") based on our own experiences and biases.