[josephg]

Sure; but politicians don’t know anything about technology. They usually don’t even decide what’s right and wrong. They take what culture has decided is right and wrong and codify it in law. The law is a trailing, not a leading indicator of ethical practice.

Do you think planes were falling out of the sky left and right before those air safety laws came into effect? No. The engineers at some companies pushed for sane, safe practices first. Later they were adopted by the industry and later still they were enshrined in law. Before those laws were passed, airlines still had a duty of care to their passengers, ethically and (I think) legally.

Likewise it’s up to us to decide what sane, secure software engineering looks like. Not politicians. Not management. It has to be us. Nobody else is qualified to make those choices. At some point those ideas might be codified in law; but we need to figure out what that looks like first. (And to be clear what you’re arguing for - imagine the reverse. Imagine if inventing security best practices was outsourced to politicians!)

The idea that management should feel free to steamroll over their own employees’ judgement for the sake of the initiative of the day is toxic. And that’s exactly the sort of work culture which creates global security issues like this one. Of course a balance has to be reached, but you don’t do anyone any favours by being management (and the law’s) highly paid keyboard.

[marcus0x62]

> Do you think planes were falling out of the sky left and right before those air safety laws came into effect? No.

That is exactly what was happening. In 1924, prior to the introduction of the first federal aircraft safety regulations in 1926, there was 1 fatality per 13,500 miles for commercial flights. Between 2000 and 2010, the average was 0.2 fatalities per 10 billion passenger miles.

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/03/03/early-aviation-safety...

[josephg]

Thanks for those numbers!

Imagine yourself as an aeronautical engineer around that time. You have a sense of what good safety practices could look like - you’ve been to conferences and talked to your colleagues, and you have some thoughts yourself. But management at your airline doesn’t want to spend the money.

Would you argue for meekly going along with management’s choices, knowing those choices will kill people? I would say, if you did, you would have blood on your hands. We’re people first and employees second.

The stakes are lower and there’s a middle ground here. But you have a voice, and usually more power than you think. The siren song of dumping all responsibility for your actions onto upper management makes you into a victim and a child. It’s bad for society, usually bad for your company in the long term and bad for your psychological health and development. And a disaster for your professional development.

I don’t know if that lands with you, but it’s certainly a lesson I wish I could give to myself over a decade ago.