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by resu_nimda
3900 days ago
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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. 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. |
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Sadly, yes. I've found this to be the case with most outsourced developers I've managed. They follow the spec to the T even if there's a glaring issue staring them in the face.