[mattmaroon]

I still don't blame the developers, I blame government. It's not the job of rank and file workers to police companies. I wouldn't work for LN, but I'm not going to blame someone else for doing so. We've all gotta feed our families. (I realize there's a line somewhere, you wouldn't excuse a prison guard at Auschwitz the same way, but I can't get too worked up about a developer making a ticketing app even if I hate the ticketing company.)

Developed countries long ago came to the conclusion that companies should not be allowed to have monopolies because it is bad for society as a whole, and it's hard to think of a current monopoly as egregious as this one. There is absolutely no reason one company should have exclusive rights to 85% of large venues, also be an evebt promoter, and also be the ticket seller.

Anything their developers do is not the real issue, a society that allows this to happen in the first place is.

[reddalo]

> I still don't blame the developers, I blame government.

Yes, but I think they still have some responsibility, even if they say "I was just following orders!" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

[toolz]

Everyone bears some responsibility if you've ever interacted with any entity that profits off of TM or helps TM make profit. I don't find it's particularly useful to spend any thought on what people with minuscule responsibility should do differently. It's just bike-shedding when there are important problems to solve.

[vjerancrnjak]

Even government software has issues (Vienna). I paid a €100+ fine for not having a ticket, even though I spent time going through the purchase flow. I have 100s of tickets purchased. Live agent and support agent just shrugged and told me I don't know how to use the app, washed their hands of any responsibility or need for understanding.

It's like there's no way to make the software human and humans in the loop have a crutch to lean on to not behave as a human. When I contacted the dev team directly, they shrugged too. No refund.

To me it feels like software is the place where society can just exercise its cruelty and indifference, or maybe it is a reflection of society, it's probably just like humans are. What we think software should behave like is not human.

I had more pleasant experiences with London/UK train ticket edge cases and felt like the system is built to deal with user/server errors.

[dzhiurgis]

That’s just reflection of your culture. I.e. I come from Eastern Europe where cheating is so engrained and “i made an oopsie” would never fly. Beurocracy is face to face and takes ages

Now living in NZ I get tons of slack for something like “verify youre local for free museum entry” or “get your passport by post”. Life is so much easier when societal trust is high.

[lmm]

Societal trust is extremely valuable. Policy decisions that weaken it should be scrutinised extremely strictly.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

I mean would you say that developers who work for Facebook have crossed that line?

[NavinF]

...by doing what? FB is one of the largest employers of people on this site. If you ran a poll, I'd expect the majority to answer "no" to your question. Of the people who answered "yes", I bet the majority would still accept an offer from FB if it was just 20k more than the next best offer.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed.

Right? Wrong? Discuss.

[pfisherman]

Textbook case of unethical conduct of research. The key here is lack of informed consent by the study participants.

The APA put out a press release about this study violated their code of ethics.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/06/informed-con...

[sethammons]

I can't put any facebook developer in the same bucket as a guard at a concentration camp.

[gowld]

Because a concentration camp guard would be jailed or killed for refusing service, but a FB dev would lose a few $thousand in opportunity?

[toolz]

Working at a faang level company is associated with a large enough increase in income that it could support a handful of families in developing countries. I don't know what purpose it serves to downplay just how substantial that amount of money is.

[bentcorner]

I think that was wrong. At the same time, drawing lines of good/bad at the boundaries of the people working at facebook is, imo, not useful.

[NavinF]

https://xkcd.com/1390/

I don't see the issue. Every social media site does this, FB was just naive enough to share their research

[pfisherman]

The issue is the lack of informed consent. This is pretty basic ethical conduct of research stuff.

[Jensson]

I have never seen a social media site ask for consent for A/B testing their new things. Everyone does this, I am pretty sure even the big news sites that wrote those headlines also does this without asking. The only thing facebook did differently was calling it research rather than A/B testing.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

And this just proved my point. During the Nazi regime, everyone was hating the jews. And everyone was doing fascism.

Now to bring this to a close, people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000 and have lost the ability to see a clear ethical violation will be holding the guns and guarding the gas chambers when the next Hitler comes along. Meditate on this.

Also this XKCD is dumb. Previously the feed was chronological post of friends which was definitely more ethical. But of course that didn't make people addicted enough.

[gowld]

Did you get informed consent from me regarding the methods by which you constructed your comment? Or are you manipulating my emotions unethically?

[mattmaroon]

If that proved your point, you didn’t have a point. If you can’t see the difference between genocide and lack of informed consent on a social network algorithm experiment you can’t be helped.

I’m all for moral relativism, but there’s no future in which Facebook’s current actions aren’t at least reasonably debatable, and no past in which Auschwitz was.

If you wanted an example of where the line gets blurry (it does sometimes, just not in either of these) I’d go with pharmaceuticals.

[immibis]

One thing I have learned from the internet is that if you mention the Nazis or the Jews, you lose, good day sir, even if you are right.

People are illogical.

[NavinF]

> people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000

???

I said I don't find A/B tests unethical. Literally every tech company runs A/B tests just like that one. Why would I ask for 20k more?

> Previously the feed was chronological post of friends

Yeah, before they measured the impact of a good recommendation algorithm.

[photonbeam]

Depends on when they joined

[mattmaroon]

No. Not even close.

[ryandrake]

"Developers are blameless" is a uniquely HN take, for obvious site demographic reasons.

I see a worthwhile product as a stool with at least three legs: Technical feasibility, business viability, and ethical acceptability. Take one leg away and the stool should fail. Yet, HN commenters endlessly discuss/debate the first two and largely ignore the third. I think we all have a duty to work on projects that are ethically sound (defining that is a whole other discussion). There are plenty of companies out there and plenty of products to work on--it's not like we have to pick an evil one in order to survive and "feed our families."

[efitz]

There should be more choices rather than "find another company". The problem is that it is an economically valid argument to say "if I don't, someone else will".

I believe that professions should have codes of ethics, and people should be expected to adhere to those codes of ethics. Right now there is no licensing or apprenticeship or registration associated with the profession of "software developer". There are some organizations that issue professional certifications in adjacent areas (MCSE, CISSP, etc.) that have codes of ethics associated with them, but I rarely see disciplinary action associated with them, and in any case employability is not linked to these certifications.

Conversely, lawyers have bar associations that evaluate complaints and can withdraw permission to practice.

Doctors have the Hippocratic Oath, but I'm not sure that it's enforced for medical licensure. However doctors do have medical licensing boards and licenses can be revoked.

Pilots have revocable licenses but I'm not sure they have a code of ethics.

Civil engineers have codes of ethics and licensure, but licensure revocation appears associated with legal malpractice, not ethical malpractice.

In any case, there are societal mechanisms that could be used to associate codes of ethics with software developers, if we as a profession and a society chose to, which I'm not optimistic will happen.

[mattmaroon]

Sure, but the issue is, someone might not think ticket master is evil. And I’d argue the things they do that should at least be illegal (in my view) have nothing to do with developers.

Take away their exclusive rights (on both sides of the business) to 80+% of large live music venues and they’re just another ticket platform.

[jgeada]

Yeah, but only one of those legs controls the money. At least in the US, no money means no food, no shelter, no healthcare, etc, so it is not a viable choice for most. So rightfully most of the blame should be assigned to those that control the money: management and executives. Rarely hear of required ethics guidelines and handwringing about ethics from the MBA types.

I'll accept a share of developer blame in places with strong unions and the ability for workers to strike.

[mattmaroon]

And the developer job market has changed. We can act like everyone can just go get a job that pays well somewhere else, but I’ve got friends who are very senior developers who’ve been laid off and had a hard time finding a good job in recent years.

The market isn’t what it once was and while overall still good, we do all have bills to pay.

[ryandrake]

I guess I'd turn it around and ask those developers: Are there any projects you wouldn't do, no matter how much you needed the money, because you found them ethically unacceptable? If the answer is yes, then they actually agree with me, and we're maybe just discussing where the evilness threshold line should be drawn. I don't know many actual people who would say "No, I would willingly work on absolutely any project, no matter how harmful or depraved it is, as long as I get paid," but then again maybe I don't know enough truly desperate people.