[Aurornis]

From my experience, it’s more likely that the engineers who got far enough in the company to be working on this code believed that their willingness to work on nefarious tasks that others might refuse or whistle-blow made them a trusted asset within the company.

In industries like this there’s also a mindset of “Who cares, it’s all going to corporations anyway, why not send some of that money to the corporation that writes my paychecks?”

[TheNewsIsHere]

I have noticed that in addition to this perspective there are scores of developers who espouse the idea that “we just create, what people do with our work isn’t our business.”

I understand the utilitarian qualities of the argument, but I submit that there’s a reason that capital-E-Engineering credentials typically require some kind of education in ethics-in-design.

[baby_souffle]

> but I submit that there’s a reason that capital-E-Engineering credentials typically require some kind of education in ethics-in-design.

Or said differently: there’s a reason why software engineering jobs pay so well; no mandatory ethics training required!

[triceratops]

No. It's supply and demand.

[code_biologist]

I agree that we're responsible for what we create. I would also submit that corporate culture has been under intense selective pressure over the past 10 years to get good at creating compliance with ethically problematic software projects. I'm curious how many people left Google because they dropped the "don't be evil" motto.

There's lots of carrots (compensation, high quality desk jobs) and sticks (promotion structures, threat of offshoring). The really annoying and egregious aspects of corporate speak are easy targets for ire and take the heat, while the subtle euphemisms make the actual questionable projects easier to live with day to day.

[pixl97]

capital E engineers have numerous other laws that protect their position.

Civil/mechanical/electrical have countless codes that must be followed with the force of law.

When we say we want engineering standards for software developers we are also asking for standards and codes to be applied to software and all that entails.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, just to consider the ramifications of this at all levels.

[_DeadFred_]

This has been 'being considered' my entire career, so since the 90s at least. I have finally determined all the libertarian style 'thinking' over action is just stalling. They have stalled to the point that tech now smells bad to the majority of people, I wonder what comes when OUTSIDE influences decide enough. I feel like tech's 'self determinism' runways is running out and I'm kinda happy for it. Couldn't happen to a more deserving industry.

[petterroea]

I suspect you are right. It reminds me of the whole "at the government you can hack legally" argument used by government intelligence agencies to recruit hackers.

I think a lot of skilled engineers want interesting challenges where they break boundaries, and being in an environment that wants you to break those boundaries allows them to legitimize why they are doing it. That is, "someone else is taking moral responsibility, so I can do my technical challenge in peace"

[zaphirplane]

Do you know of anyone declining to work on a project For ethical in their view ( non military non killing) ?

I’ve led a sheltered life and never met one, people have told me they wouldn’t apply for a role with a company for ethical reasons maybe they even believed they would get the job

[neilv]

I know a lot of people who won't work for some companies for ethical reasons.

Though, sometimes the exact reason is muddied, since companies that are perceived as unethical in how they behave externally are often also perceived as unethical in how they behave towards employees. So you might object on pragmatic grounds of how you'd be treated, before you ever get to, say, altruistic grounds.

Also, sometimes fashion is involved. For example, many people wouldn't work for company X, because of popular ethical objections to what they do being in the news, but some of those people would probably work for an unknown company doing the same things, without thinking much about it.

But often it's just "I don't like what company Y is doing to people, and I wouldn't work on that, even if they treated employees really well, and it was really fashionable to work there".

(See, for example, the people who refused to work for Google after the end of Don't Be Evil honeymoon phase, even though they generally treated employees pretty well, and it was still fashionable to work there.)

[zoltanse]

Sure: A couple of years ago I joined a company doing outsourced system administration. Then it was suggested I should take care of a new client: a manufacturer of weapons with a quite shady reputation. There were already other issues I had noticed. But this was the red flag for me and I left after four weeks. My then team lead was pissed and complained I should have told beforehand that I don’t want to go down that route. But it never occured to me before that to compile a blacklist of things I won’t do. And I had been in business for more than 20 years when that happened.

[chanchowancho]

Yes! I once met a highly paid contract tech lead who had walked out of a lucrative contract with a supermarket after he became aware the new credit card product he was working on was to be exclusively targeted at customers in poor areas.

The moral fortitude on that man!

I applaud his actions, but genuinely do not know if I would have the stones to leave my job if I was in a similar position!

[SpaceNoodled]

Half of it is stones; the other half is cash.

[tyre]

I worked at LivingSocial back in 2012. I was 21 and didn’t know anything about marketing. The pitch was that daily deals helped small businesses get new customers who would then become recurring, which was good. I liked helping small businesses.

Over time I realized that the company knew this wasn’t really true. Daily deal customers weren’t likely to return. They went where the deals were. The influx of cash from daily deals was a marketing expense, almost always at a loss (most deals were 50%+ off and half of the remaining revenue went to LivingSocial), and buyers rarely returned so SMBs would never recoup their loses.

Once I figured this out, I decided to leave even though I would miss my equity cliff by a month. I ended up joining ZenPayroll (now Gusto) early on because they were helping SMBs with a real problem (payroll was a fking nightmare back then.)

[sgerenser]

Even if you had got the LivingSocial equity, it probably would have ended up worthless anyway, right?

[BugsJustFindMe]

Hello. I have. The first time, I was offered a job working on missile guidance systems. I told them I would not work on weapons, so they offered me a job working on something else instead. Then they asked me to move to another project that would require getting government security clearance. I said I wouldn't do that either because I was not willing to make the required promises to my government, so they gave me other projects that didn't require it. It's really not that hard to have a penny's worth of a moral compass if your skill has any kind of value. I think maybe the problem is people who only have value to companies that only hire people without any morals.

[freeopinion]

Beyond that, I now accept that many employers screen candidates with questions like, "Have you ever been fired?". Answering the why with, "I refuse to do things I consider to be unethical" is typically enough to screen you out.

While this can be irritating, I have come to see it as a good thing. It helps me screen out candidate employers. It is taxing to work in an environment that constantly challenges your ethics. Imagine having access to all your customers' supposedly private emails and being tasked with mining them without your customers' knowledge. Imagine being tasked with adding an obscurely worded line item to the monthly bill of all customers that your logging indicates haven't accessed their billing statement in the last 12 months.

Now imagine working at a job where you are tasked to find all customers who haven't used an optional paid feature in the last 12 months and notifying them that there might be an opportunity to reduce the amount you bill them. Imagine working for an insurance coop that actively scours for ways to charge members less money without compromising their protection and without taking advantage of somebody else.

Imagine that your personal life choices automatically disqualify you from exploitative employers and lead you to more fulfilling employment. This is a real thing that many people don't have to imagine. They live it.

[lazide]

The issue of course is what if your personal life choices automatically disqualify you from (defacto) all employers and you end up not even being able to afford a van down by the River?

That is what anxiety based thinking produces.

[fernandotakai]

>Do you know of anyone declining to work on a project For ethical in their view ( non military non killing) ?

o/

i was offered a high paying job, with relocation to a 1st world country (at the time, i was living in a 3rd world country with high murder rates), to a industry that i consider quite shady (and it's not military and not around killing -- i have no issues with both of those). i politely refused.

most of my friends, at the time, told me that they would've have accepted without even thinking, but for me, it's just not worth it.

[mattclarkdotnet]

I know lots of people who had the offer to work in gambling but chose not to take it for moral reasons

[yetihehe]

I had an offer to work in gambling as a young inexperienced student, fortunately they didn't hire me because I was too inexperienced. I can imagine how my career would move if my first working experience was in such company. Some people might be like that.

[Marsymars]

Well kinda trivially, asides from secular ethics, you'll find that typical Muslims decline a number of jobs/projects for ethical reasons.

[_DeadFred_]

As do Christians. Jews. Hindus.

I was asked to help with creating what seemed like a human trafficking app to Christian me, but that to the Muslim founder was 'just an app to get the best payment for an arranged marriage' and just improving something that he said already happened all the time in his culture (he was from Pakistan I don't know if that is actually a thing there or he was just trying to justify his messed up app).

[Marsymars]

> As do Christians. Jews. Hindus.

Yes, absolutely. To elaborate a bit though, if you live in the West, Muslim ethics are more likely to stick out when applied to our regular practices. e.g. I know a Muslim programmer who declined to participate in a project involving billing interest to customers. (Which is decidedly non military and non killing, as posed by the post I was replying to.)

[moron4hire]

I quit a job on contract with a major insurance provider because they asked me to perform a truncate instead of a rounding operation in a formula without any mathematically sound reason for choosing the truncate over the rounding. I figured out they wanted truncating because it would lead to more people being denied flood coverage than rounding would.

[itsdesmond]

This is a real long look in the mirror moment.

[Tepix]

I think most people avoid this situation one step earlier by choosing the company they work for. I.e. do you accept a job in adtech, military, adult industry, etc.

I think pretty much everyone has an internal red line, of course they will vary a lot and may even move over time.

[square_usual]

I've often been contacted by recruiters for companies in the gambling (in India it's called "skill-based web gaming") or the crypto/web3 space, and I've always denied those for ethical reasons.

[Joeboy]

I've dodged multiple work opportunities on ethical grounds, although I can only think of one time where it was a big deal (I think we had to turn down a client because I declined to work on it).

[jbreckmckye]

Sure, it happens all the time. Speaking personally, for example, I walked out of an interview when I realised it was for The Sun's betting site (Sun Bet)

[immibis]

And they are right. It's not like anyone outside of the affiliate marketing "industry" was hurt by this - noting that some of your parasocials are likely to be in that "industry" and so you feel hurt on their behalf.

[hinkley]

Henchmen I think is the word you're looking for.