[ryandrake]

Funny how here's HN, a site full of Software Engineers complaining about ad bombardment, and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! We (as a profession) are the ones doing this! "Oh, but boss told me to do it!" some will say, as if it's a good excuse. Regardless of which manager told which developer to do it, at the end of the day, a developer typed in the code and pushed it to prod. We're at least partially to blame for what the web has become.

[mr_toad]

Despite what management might think we are not interchangeable parts.

[malux85]

This is completely meaningless. In any population big enough theres going to be a high variance in behaviours, including morality. Expecting all individuals in a huge collective to all behave "good" with little / no inforcement is incredibly naive at best and dangerous at worst.

Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too - > and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer!

Many ads are designed by creatives and placed and run by dedicated non-software engineering people, including deciding how many are run and their placement (i.e. bombardment or not). Sure engineers programmed the platform, but then you're just blaming the post office for the content of the mail, or the ISP for the content of the internet. What do you expect the software engineers to do? Limit 1 ad per page programatically and then every software engineer on earth must agree to enforce that limit and no matter how much pressure their superiors put on them, everybody holds the line?

This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers because of their life situation (it can still be a minority, and ad bombardment emerges)?

[beedeebeedee]

> This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers

By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that type of behavior (bombardment of ads, surveillance capitalism, etc) and changing the culture

[bell-cot]

> By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that...

That sounds cool...but such coordinated, idealistic behavior never occurs in human beings.

[beedeebeedee]

Yes it does- it happens all the time. It happens through talking about it publicly and coming to agreement.

[shiroiushi]

Maybe we can apply this line of reasoning to crime too...

[beedeebeedee]

We do, and it mostly works

[shiroiushi]

So there's no criminals now? News to me!

[beedeebeedee]

There are still criminals, but did you commit a crime today? How about your friends and family?

[shiroiushi]

How many software engineers here work in defensive cybersecurity? Well, why they do they have jobs? Because of other software engineers who work on the offensive side.

I guess all the cybersecurity engineers should just quit because they're the ones to blame for all the malware...

Similarly, the only reason humans work as police is because humans commit crimes. So humans are really to blame for this problem.

[BadHumans]

I don't agree with their overall point but this is an either oblivious or bad faith take on their statement.

[shiroiushi]

No, it's not bad faith at all. He's trying to use a collective blame argument: "software engineers" as a group are supposedly to blame for adware, in his argument, rather than a small minority of software engineers. It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.

[ryandrake]

Just to clarify what I mean is it is a little bit of both: 1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct, and 2. (some) Individuals are actively doing it by actually building the bombardment code.

I feel the same way about software for war fighting, which obviously has higher stakes. The profession itself doesn't push back on the ethics of it AND individual practitioners are actively developing death-dealing software.

[shiroiushi]

>1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct,

You're acting like the profession has some kind of central authority. It does not. It's like asking for agreed-upon ethical standards for dog walkers; you're not going to get it, because there's nothing resembling a centralized organization, nor any kind of licensing for this profession.

>I feel the same way about software for war fighting,

If you want to eliminate software for war fighting, this is a fool's errand. Weapons for war are absolutely necessary, unless you want to be a victim to some dictator who doesn't agree with your ethical principles. History is full of examples of peaceful people who couldn't withstand an assault by other people who didn't believe in peace. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that eliminating warfare (and the military apparatus for it: armies and navies etc.) is impossible as long as separate countries exist. Only if we manage to either conquer everyone or get everyone to agree to join a single planetary government can war really be eliminated. And that assumes that hostile aliens won't ever be a problem.

[thayne]

> Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct

Even if there was some centralized group that created an ethical standard for conduct, do you really think that that would escape the influence of software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. that have a vested interest in advertisement? Or that every software engineer would follow such a standard of conduct?

[shiroiushi]

The idea that Russian and Chinese software engineers working for troll farms, bot farms, government cyberwarfare groups, etc. are going to follow an international ethical standard of conduct is completely laughable.

[oska]

> It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.

Members of a minority group, such as race or religion or sexual orientation are generally members of that group by birth, not by choice.

Members of the group 'software engineers' are members of that group by (career) choice.

[yura]

"Every single one of those ads were programmed by... a human! We (as humans) are the ones doing this!"

See? That logic doesn't work so well. "Software engineers" are not a singular entity nor a homogeneous group. To maintain the status quo, it doesn't take more than just a few SWEs willing to implement ads and/or invasive tracking.

[Loughla]

Your argument is a little lacking. Software engineers are directly responsible, is the difference.

The people on this site are a group of humans uniquely equipped to actually speak and interact with the people responsible for this bullshit.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Humans are directly responsible, too, so the difference you cite, simply isn't there.

> The people on this site are a group of humans uniquely equipped to actually speak and interact with the people responsible for this bullshit.

There's not any method whatsoever for the people on this site to force all ad software developers to stop developing ad software.

[notfed]

> every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer

Your key point here is a tautology; it doesn't really lead to any insight.