
We are complicit in our employer’s deeds - LaSombra
https://drewdevault.com/2020/05/05/We-are-complicit-in-our-employers-deeds.html
======
spaced-out
We technologists like to pretend we're powerful, that we could bring these
giant megacorps to their knees because those fancy suits need us, right?

No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like
Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for,
but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at
Amazon it not be because of the loss of that guy's engineering skills.

What would actually make the world a better place is if we recognized that
we're really just well paid technicians, and that the true power in society is
held by a relatively small number of people who hold a massive amount of
capital. We need to give up the fantasy that we can change things with
individual action, and start looking towards _collective_ , society-level
solutions to the problems today.

~~~
random9763
Engineers should begin to understand that they are not some enlightened beings
that have somehow grown beyond the need for workplace organization. They are
still cogs in the machine that can be replaced at any time; pricey cogs for
sure, and replacing them may take some time, but they are still cogs.

~~~
stjohnswarts
That's why you have to learn to live for your own "selfish" good as opposed to
giving yourself to your company. You use them like they use you. That's why I
have worked for an assortment of companies that HN would turn their noses up
to. I would never work with an "evil"company per se, but companies that don't
do "life changing" or "socially aware" software is perfectly okay with me.
Software is just a tool in my tool box to live the life that I want to live.
Let go of the rat race and find out who you are. A yacht, a sports-car, a
superb algorithm, a vapid partner on your arm, will never make you happy or
feel like you're living your best life. Don't let work become your life.
Otherwise you'll just be a burnt out programmer, salesperson, businessperson,
or whatever, it's not a field that's doing it to you, it's yourself.

------
zokier
I think there is one morally solid reason to stay at bad acting employer: if
you are actively driving change of the behavior you consider bad. I pick this
quote from Brays post:

> I escalated through the proper channels and by the book.

He only left after he felt he had exhausted his options of influence (This
being my interpretation).

Leaving just as a knee jerk reaction without making effort to change would be
bad, to me personally almost worse than remaining. Of course quitting can be
in many cases feel easier/more attractive than trying to navigate through the
office politics. But if you manage to flip even small corner of Google or
whatever to not do evil (as they used to say) that probably has more influence
to the wider society than you quitting.

Counterpoint being that you need to recognize if you are making that change or
not, and if you are not able to do so then quitting might be the right choice

~~~
empath75
That's a reasonable point of view, but I think your obligation extends
primarily to saving your own soul, as it were. It's not your responsibility to
make others do the right thing. If you think the organization is engaged in an
enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in
a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.

~~~
ardy42
> If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is
> fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less
> bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.

That reminds me of this article
([https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz-
bystand...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz-bystander-
theory.html)):

> Some people unwittingly help atrocities occur by cooperating in an attempt
> to mitigate a monstrous situation. History demonstrates that this is nearly
> always a miscalculation. During the Holocaust, Jewish councils organized
> life in the ghetto and compiled lists of Jews for deportation, often
> thinking that they were helping Jews manage a nightmare. Ultimately, they
> helped the Nazis murder Jews by maintaining order and providing the Gestapo
> with the names of people to be deported and murdered. In his memoir,
> “Legislating the Holocaust,” Bernhard Lösener, a lawyer in the Third Reich’s
> Ministry of the Interior, relays how he hurriedly traveled through the night
> to get to Nuremberg in time to write the Nuremberg race laws so that the
> rule of law would be preserved, and how he fought to have the race laws
> written to count as Jewish those with three Jewish grandparents rather than
> those with one drop of Jewish blood. He too made the mistake of
> participating in the atrocity in an attempt to minimize the damages caused
> by its perpetrators.

> Lösener remains the lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg race laws, lending a
> veneer of legality to a crime. Maybe someone else would have ignored the
> rule of law or written more draconian laws if he hadn’t, but maybe not. What
> we can decide is whether we will be a participant in terrible things done by
> terrible people. It never works to participate in the terrible thing in
> order to try to make it less bad. It’s tempting, and can seem like the right
> thing to do: Lösener’s race laws included fewer people than a one-drop rule
> would (though that had negligible effect). Adolf Eichmann reasoned
> similarly: “If this thing had to be done at all, it was better that it be
> done in good order.” History shows that when you participate in an atrocity
> together with the perpetrators, in an attempt to make it somehow a little
> less horrible, in the end you’re still participating in the atrocity — and
> it is no less horrible.

------
codesections
I agree with this, _but also_ think that working for an employer that is
"making a negative impact on the world" might _sometimes_ be the right choice.
Specifically, it could be justified for two reasons:

First: you might have more impact on the organization from the inside than
from the outside (this is most relevant to people joining at a high/senior
level). For example, Google seems to be making privacy far, far worse. Yet
there are some people on the inside fighting to limit the privacy violations,
which leads to decisions like banning GPS tracking in their contact tracing
app[0]. Would the world be better or worse off if the _only_ people working at
Google were people who don't care at all about user privacy? I'm honestly not
sure, but I can at least see an argument that it might be even worse off.

Second: you might get something from the organization that lets you do good
that outweighs any harm you contribute to (this is more relevant to junior
employees). Many employers provide something (training, future job
opportunities, or a high enough income to open your own small business/non-
profit). A thoughtful employee can go into a "negative impact" employer with
eyes wide open and a plan to get something, and get out.

However, in either case, self awareness and a definite exit plan are _key_. As
Drew writes, once you are working at a "negative impact" employer,

> Doublethink quickly steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive
> dissonance, and you take another little step towards becoming the person you
> once swore never to be.

The way to avoid that sort of conative dissonance is 1) know that you'll
experience it and be on guard against it, and 2) know all along that you're
there temporarily and should never get too comfortable. Even then, you should
be realistic about how long you can maintain your personal values in face of a
very different culture. For a junior employee, I'd say two, maybe three years
should be the absolute limit before you get out.

[0]: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-
ap...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-apps-
idUSKBN22G28W)

~~~
snarf21
I agree that we have a moral line we can decide to cross at work or not. We
can step in and say "this isn't right". We all have our own limits. If a
company passes our line, we can decide to stay and be a dissenting voice in a
sea of "yes men" or we can move on.

The one thing that bugs me about a post like this is where does our complicity
end? Did Drew also change all his investments to divest from Amazon or
Facebook or other company that is making the world worse? Nestle is one of the
most evil companies in the world. Are we all boycotting all their products and
not investing in their companies? We can all do more to make the world a
better place but each individual has to decide their own thresholds. It is
impossible for each of us to stand against all the evils in the world. Most of
us have been very happy with 30% returns in our retirement even though we
secretly know it is driven by the same companies we claim must be stopped.
Most people just want to provide for their family and live their life. Not
everyone can (or wants to) be a social justice warrior. It is a very
complicated issue and I think we paint it too black and white at times.

~~~
ddevault
>Did Drew also change all his investments to divest from Amazon or Facebook or
other company that is making the world worse?

Yes.

>Nestle is one of the most evil companies in the world. Are we all boycotting
all their products and not investing in their companies?

Yes.

>Most of us have been very happy with 30% returns in our retirement even
though we secretly know it is driven by the same companies we claim must be
stopped.

Not me. I don't think this is right, and I don't appreciate the attempts at
the normalization this idea. Don't be the 'Good German'.

~~~
snarf21
I'm sorry if you took this as an attack. That is not my intention or point.
I'm not being a "Good German". I'm not saying we can't fight all evil so don't
fight any.

I'm merely discussing that we too often we make a stand against one "evil" and
not against others that are even easier. For a lot of people the line is what
becomes inconvenient. People are posting comments that Amazon should treat
people better while they spin up a new instance and order next day toilet
paper. This is important stuff to talk about. I doubt that most people who
agree with your actions and are posting support are also divesting the same
way you are. We can all do more and take more action against what is wrong. I
applaud your actions. The hard part is taking actions by a few and turning it
into a movement that causes rippling change.

~~~
esotericn
He's not taking it as an attack, he's pointing out that you are assuming that
everyone goes through life in this sort of 'morals-lite' way.

Many people actually do try as hard as possible, wherever practicable to do
the right thing, and restrict themselves in the process.

The distinctions then become whether they agree on the set of 'bad things',
not whether they do them or not.

If you think something is bad, like really bad, just stop doing it, you are
not some poverty-level sharecropping farmer, you have that choice.

------
screye
Tech has a tendency to view the world in isolation.

You can't work in fashion because it uses child labor. Rare metals used in
electronics are mined in places with terrible work conditions. Don't even get
me started on petroleum dependent industries.

What does that leave us with ?

Even companies that build apps or SAAS make their money from clients in these
industries or consumers who are as a majority employed by them. Just because
we establish a few degrees of separation from the problem, doesn't mean we
stop being complicit in it.

Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize
profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies. If
Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have enough
of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop.

Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility of
the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It should
be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and ban/punish gamers
who outright attempt to break the system (cheat).

It seems that the political left (which usually drives these movements) would
rather put the onus on the companies to change while taking millions in
lobbying money, than hold them accountable for their actions.

I recognize that the systemic favoring of republicans in the electoral system,
might force the left to keep appearances, lest be viewed as hostile to
businesses and lose the vital 5% of the swing electorate. But, that still
means, that the problem is lack of electoral reform and not 'Amazon being a
greedy company'.

~~~
ardy42
> Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize
> profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies.
> If Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have
> enough of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop.

> Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility
> of the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It
> should be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and
> ban/punish gamers who outright attempt to break the system (cheat).

Those aren't mutually exclusive, IMHO. Instead or in-addition to patching the
"exploits," the law could be changed to make it clear that companies have
obligations _besides_ solely delivering "value" to their shareholders (IIRC
that understanding of companies is actually pretty _recent_ ). Obviously it'd
take more work to figure out how to do that than an internet comment warrants,
but I'm not convinced it's impossible.

~~~
screye
> law could be changed to make it clear that companies have obligations
> besides solely delivering "value" to their shareholders

There in lies the problem. 'Making clear' means codifying it in law and
speaking of it in explicit terms rather than being abstract moral concepts.

But few want to talk policy. Because policy is hard. Really really hard.
Moralizing on the other hand is easy. Similarly, calling a certain policy bad
is a lot easier than suggesting a concrete alternative.

If for one, would love to ground all moral arguments in policy, instead of
talking about things in thin air. Sure, it will make discussions more
laborious, but at least at the end of them we will have gone somewhere.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
And yet you seem to be happy with "Public companies have a responsibility to
their share holders to maximize profit." being nominally "codified in law".

(I say nominally because it's not actually clear that this is codified in law,
just that there have been a number of lawsuits that have been decided as if it
is).

------
OneGuy123
Everyone will always prioritize the wellbeing of their own family VS some
random people in the company you work in.

Well-off devs like the guy who quit Amazon don't have $$$ issues, so he can
afford to do that.

Others don't, and that doesn't make them bad.

That makes them care for their family first.

~~~
Loughla
That was sort of the entire point of the writing. Because tech folks are in a
privileged class, they have the ability to move jobs based on morals. And
therefore they should. Not doing that, when you are making as much as you are
as a programmer at BIGCORP means you are complicit in the bad behavior.

That was the entire point. He addressed your concern in the first two
paragraphs.

~~~
lotsofpulp
If you were to ask my circle of friends and family, even bigcorp programmer
money isn’t sufficient to feel secure due to future economic volatility.
Especially if your goal is to make sure your kids get to live in the richer
neighborhoods and go to the richer schools, and so on and so forth.

And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the
portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you’re
in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds
for your kids.

I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had
FU money, which also means a few million in diversified assets other than my
house. Especially in the US, where quality healthcare is a minimum $20k per
year for a family in insurance premiums alone plus a few ten thousands in out
of pocket costs.

~~~
ddevault
The level of hubris shown here is obscene. The median household income in the
United States was $63,179 in 2018. Richer neighborhoods? Richer schools? Give
me a break. This is wanton greed on plain display, and blatant disregard for
the systemmic suppression of the poor that you are _directly enabling_ by
working at bigcorp.

~~~
bcrosby95
Do people that make the median household income in the USA feel secure? If
they don't, your statistic is irrelevant. And in my experience they don't,
especially if they live in higher cost of living areas where most of the tech
jobs are.

~~~
ddevault
No, you're not understanding my point. I'm contrasting this income with the
one the OP says they want. The median household works hard for 60K, but the OP
is suspending their ethical judgement until they have "a few hundred thousand
in passive income". You don't need 6x the median income to feel secure.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> Apple builds walled gardens and makes targeted attacks on open standards,

This is where the article lost me. There is a saying called "keeping your
powder dry". If you express outrage at everything, soon your outrage has no
meaning. Whatever your position on open source, I think you would admit that
this behavior is in a whole other category than having poor worker safety,
retaliating against whistleblowers, or conducting mass surveillance.

I do think that one of the reasons we are so ineffective in our protest is
that they devolve into a diffuse rage against the machine where we protest a
dozen different behaviors. One of the reasons the NRA is so effective is that
they focus on one thing: gun rights. If you really want to influence politics,
you need to be laser focused on an issue. See also prohibition.

------
door99
The answer to employer abuse is not isolated people refusing to work at big
tech companies. You have very little power alone and while refusing to work
for a company you find objectionable may ease your conscience, it does little
to affect change (unless you’re in a position with a lot of power like Tim).
The solution is organization —- forming a union, or banding together behind a
political organization or political campaign to affect change. Both of these
run very counter to many tech workers’ individualist mindsets but ate much
more effective than individual refusal.

~~~
gbear605
We need a combination of individual refusal and collective organization. With
organization across the industry, we can achieve global purposes, while
individual refusal can still make important marginal improvements.

------
linuxftw
Politicians, and by extension, the people that voted for them, have been
creating this environment for decades. Only mega corporations can survive. The
reasons are many, and they include low tariffs, high domestic regulation (ever
try to start a business and deal with tax law, incorporating, etc),
exploitative visa programs, binding arbitration employment agreements, free
unlimited capital to the banking class (Discount Window access, NIRP and ZIRP,
outright monetizing private debt by the central banks), most importantly,
patents and copyrights enforced by the state.

I mean, the list is endless. Every facet of our society is built to protect
the largest businesses, creating an environment that smaller, ethical
companies simply can't compete in.

Every election cycle it's the same thing. They divide people across their
little pet issues, keep the two party system in place through ballot access,
overturning ranked choice, while waging wars in foreign lands and extracting
all the wealth they can.

Stop voting for the same stuff. Get over yourself and your fickle positions.
Vote for real change.

------
rickyplouis
The industrial revolution was a period of unprecedented growth for our country
and the world as a whole. It ushered in a new era, built immense fortunes, and
led to the creation of critical infrastructure that we still use hundreds of
years later. But with the great achievements came the unparalleled
exploitation of the poor, minorities and even children, resulting in some of
the most progressive labor laws ever developed. History rightly criticizes the
robber barons and clearly illuminates the miseries they inflicted upon mankind
for their wealth.

Software engineers are going to be faced with the same moral reckoning that
the industrialists of the past faced, it’s inevitable. So it’s worth wondering
if this time we will take some moral leadership and actually build a world
that benefits humanity, or merely profit from it.

------
smitty1e
If BIGCORP is acting outside of labor laws, then there should be legal action.

If the law doesn't explicitly outlaw BIGCORP's actions (yet), and we all kinda
know that it should, then opposing BIGCORP is the correct thing to do.

If Amazon is acting legally, yet in an ugly way, to suppress workers
organizing, it seems hard to complain.

Now, if Amazon workers exercise the right of free association in their spare
time to stick it to JeffB, well, it sounds like he's got a problem.

~~~
ddevault
BIGCORP writes the labor laws.

[https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-
lobbying/clients/summary...](https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-
lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2019&id=D000023883)

~~~
smitty1e
Well, if our political system is worth much, then it behooves us to elect some
people who can, you know, write laws.

Past the flippancy, this is a huge undertaking.

Half the political battle is showing up; the other half is staying engaged.

------
rtodea
Morality isn't a binary thing.

If we adopt consequentialism, how do we quantify all the good things amongst
the bad ones?

Please note that just because the bad ones are most vocal, doesn't mean they
will outweigh the good ones.

~~~
nogabebop23
>> Morality isn't a binary thing.

It is when you're young and know everything

------
chrismartin
Nobody makes enough money to pay multiple-six-figures developer salaries
without people being exploited somewhere, and any $bigcorp is generally
incapable of acting in a way that doesn't maximize shareholder value (except
as needed to comply with laws). If you want to quit $bigcorp in protest,
$bigcorp2 across the street has its own ethical problems.

There is a lot of important software work to be done for the world that
doesn't enable mass surveillance, doesn't exploit addictive behavior, and
doesn't degrade worker protections or evade taxes. It also doesn't pay
multiple-six-figures. You'll just have to live like all of your non-tech
friends.

------
underdeserver
Things aren't so black and white. By some people's standards, Amazon has been
exploiting warehouse workers for quite a while now (unpaid bathroom breaks and
so on). By others', Amazon warehouses provide jobs to poor communities.

Facebook may be bad for privacy, but communities of all sorts get together and
old friends reconnect on their platforms. Instagram brings beauty to lots of
people. Remember how things were before that? I do. It was much worse. Is it
worth the price? That's for everyone to decide for themselves (and for
lawmakers to enforce).

But saying that all bigcorps are evil and nobody should work for them is a
VERY simplistic view of the world.

------
_curious_
Thanks for writing this out, there's no disputing the truth in your words.
Individual courage can also be found from others, like in the case of Tim's
sendoff, no doubt he inspired others to stand up for what they believe in.

------
CalRobert
Debt and healthcare are used to ensure that you don't have the freedom to walk
away from immorality.

If you're in debt for your (or your kids' and/or partner's) house or
education, or depend upon your employer for healthcare, you are not free to
walk away. You might be able to switch jobs for something less objectionable,
but so long as "not doing the immoral thing" means "my kid might not get
treated for their cancer" just walking away is an option for a vanishingly
small number of people.

~~~
ddevault
Author here. I did not say "just walk away". This is what I said:

>A good software engineer with only a couple of years of experience under
their belt can expect to have an offer within 1 or 2 months of starting their
search.

~~~
CalRobert
A fair point, leaving with a job offer is much different. For what it's worth
I still found it easiest to speak out when young, debt free, and single.

------
hprotagonist
_We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly._

Distribute your attention and effort as a function of how effective your
effort can be. How meaningful is my indirect effect? That's often a function
of how many nodes are between you and the thing on the big whopping graph of
interconnectedness, but not every time.

Figuring out your allocations is a lifelong optimization process. Sometimes it
is extremely obvious, usually it's not.

------
cryptica
I've been trying desperately to avoid working for big corporations because
they are against my personal beliefs. So far I have mostly succeeded. I only
worked for corporations for 1 year out of 12 in total in my career. It's been
really tough to avoid and getting tougher.

I think if I'm faced with the prospect of not being able to retire, I will
have to join one. I will have to knowingly participate in making the world a
worse place but at least I will have tried.

------
rob74
This really got me thinking... of course, what Amazon is doing is bad, I don't
want to deny that - OTOH, for a tech company, they _are_ an easy target - for
example, Google doesn't have as many low-paid workers, so we don't know if
they would treat them more fairly. How about the contractors hired by Facebook
to weed out the worst posts by extremists, terrorists and other lunatics so
our sensitive eyeballs aren't confronted with them? Is that better because
they aren't directly employed by Facebook? Maybe Amazon should divest its
warehouses so they're not so much in the public eye anymore? If you start to
think about these things, where do you stop? Tax evasion? I guess every tech
company is guilty of that, because shareholders _expect_ them to find and
exploit every possible loophole. In the end, probably the only companies you
can morally work for are non-profits like Mozilla et al. - which is probably
easier to do after raking in half a million per year for some years at a less
morally sound company...

~~~
MattGaiser
A company which automated away all the menial jobs and work would probably get
better publicity than one that paid people to do it.

------
CurtHagenlocher
We are also complicit in our governments' deeds.

~~~
ddevault
Yes, but much less so. We are coerced into participating in society on our
governments terms, under threat of violence.

~~~
zokier
US citizens have excellent mobility also internationally. Valley engineers
certainly can find jobs in e.g. Europe or other parts of the world (if they
accept the cut in paycheck). Immigration is not a thing only for poor third
world people.

~~~
ddevault
I almost agree with you... but it's not always that simple. I personally have
little faith left in America, and would love to move somewhere else, but I
have one fatal problem: I don't have a degree. Hardly any countries with
better political prospects than America are interested in giving visas to
anyone without one.

But even for those who do, a change of nationality is much more traumatic than
a change of career. You risk leaving basically all of your family and friends
behind, spending years integrating into a culture where you may not speak the
language, and abnormally large expenses for moving and establishing yourself
there... while I don't entirely disagree with you, it's not really on the same
level as the arguments I'm presenting about career choices.

------
adverbly
> Doublethink quickly steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive
> dissonance, and you take another little step towards becoming the person you
> once swore never to be.

Engineers in Canada are awarded an iron ring on graduation. It is worn on the
writing hand's pinkey and meant to remind the engineer of their ethical
obligations any time they sign a document.

I rarely wear mine because of exactly these kinds of mental gymnastics you
describe. One never thinks they are being unethical because one changes their
definition of ethical over time.

Instead of the ring, I kept the small slip of paper they give you at
graduation. The symbol of the ring changes, but the words on that page never
do. Here are a couple example sections: "my care I will not deny towards the
honour, use, stability, and perfection of any works to which I may be called
to set my hand." And "in the hour of my temptations, weakness, and weariness,
the memory of this, my obligation".

------
yters
What if everyone with a sense of morality dropped out of big corps and
government, leaving only the apathetic and evil? Is that more likely to turn
the big corps and gov into forces of good, or evil?

------
jlbnjmn
Well written, I agree.

I've been thinking a lot lately about two different aspects of this same
problem.

We are complicit in our vendor's deeds. If businesses stopped buying ads and
server time from these companies, the situation would change rapidly.

We are complicit in our entertainer's deeds. If individuals stopped viewing or
engaging with content on these platforms, especially paid content, the
situation would change rapidly.

What's someone with a 7-digit annual ad spend to do? (Avoiding social ads is
easy, search ads are harder to replace.)

------
indymike
Screening for cultural fit is a common strategy by many of these companies -
FAANG companies especially. Culture includes morals and the actions you are
willing to take or not take to do what is right or wrong. If you've been
screened out for cultural fit, it may not be your age or race or other
demographic. It may be because you will not be compatible with the value
system at the company. Who you hire today dictates what your culture will be
in 1-2 years.

------
starpilot
John Carmack and Yann LeCun really need to explain themselves for working for
a data collection firm that aids the GOP.

~~~
p1esk
Why? More specifically, why should they care about your opinion?

------
dennis_jeeves
More accurately your parents are complicit in your employer's deeds :) . If
you were born rich you don't have to stick to any employer.

------
GoToRO
We need more developers start companies and not sell out.

~~~
chrismartin
I agree but I've seen this not work long-term. Entrepreneurs are inherently
curious, distractible, and prone to move on to other projects. Any leader is
prone to burnout.

I know a small company with a great founder who wanted to support clients,
employees, and community as best he could. He did this for a decade, really
well, then he got involved in other things which eventually consumed most of
his time. For a few years he tried to hand the reins to his leadership team,
but that didn't work very well so he sold the company. Now it's becoming just
like everywhere else.

~~~
jlbnjmn
A decade of it working is a success! It doesn't have to last forever to have
been a great benefit to many people.

------
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
> _This is why I hold my peers accountable for working at companies which are
> making a negative impact on the world around them._

Oh these are the rules now? Judging other people is easy. You can look at
almost anyone and find something you don’t like about them: sweatshop
sneakers, ignorance of their history, consumer waste, eating meat from
commercial farms... don’t you know people around the world are starving and
you’re throwing out food?

Finding faults in others is easy and helps change exactly nothing. Turning it
inward in self examination is the hard part.

~~~
ddevault
There's a pretty damn big difference between throwing out $5 of food while
someone across the Earth starves, and in directly making the software which
opresses millions of people, raising millions of dollars for the people
responsible, and pocketing huge salaries for yourself.

>As a general rule, it costs a business your salary × 1.5 to employ you, given
the overhead of benefits, HR, training, and so on. When you’re making a cool
half-million annual salary from $bigcorp, it’s because they expect to make at
least ¾ of a million that they wouldn’t be making without you. It does not
make economic sense for them to hire you if this weren’t the case.

~~~
matchbok
Oppresses millions? Please, if you are going to try to make that argument,
spare us the hyperbole.

~~~
ddevault
The extensive use of lobbying to disenfranchise voters in favor of corporate
agendas alone oppresses millions of people. This is no hyperbole.

------
matchbok
So much virtue signaling and holier-than-thou in this article. Really
embarrassing to read. We make ethical judgements everyday, from eating an
apple to driving a car. Does the author use a smartphone built by low-income
folks across the ocean? How about other tech, using rare earth minerals mined
in horrific conditions?

The hypocrisy is astounding.

------
foolinaround
when every single company seems to have some flaw (like the FAANG examples the
article gives), now, the techies might have less choices to work for.

------
guyzero
If you eat vegetables in the US, they were probably picked by farmworkers paid
below minimum wage who are probably do not have legal work authorization. If
you eat meat, in addition to having killed an animal (which isn't an ethical
issue for everyone) meat processing plants continue to be the source of
endless health and safety violations and which also exploit immigrants, both
legal and illegal.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And by extension, there is
no ethical employment under capitalism.

The notion that you can get a single job that somehow places you outside
society and the economy and puts you above other workers morally or ethically
is fiction. By all means, seek to minimize your impact or make your own
ethical choices, but there is no choice without some sort of ethical
compromise.

~~~
kungtotte
You can choose fair trade products over the alternatives, you can forgo meat
entirely or mostly and be selective about where you source it, you can choose
not to put money in Nestlé's pocket and you can choose not to work for Google.

You don't have to be perfect in order to make better, more ethical, choices.

Yes, you're entirely correct that living a perfectly ethical life is nearly
impossible.

That's still no excuse for not putting in the effort.

------
roosterdawn
The Tim Bray blog post, while well written and respectable, was still in my
mind contentious and arguable. I unfortunately can't make that same call here.
It's taken me a while to realize this, but I have begun to filter out reading
thoughts that aren't fully formed, and I think this is one of them.

The author brings up the Nuremberg defense[1] as an example of complicity
which is indefensible, but this is rhetorically quite hollow. If you go a
little bit further into political theory and consider Arendt's conception of
the banality of evil[2], and furthermore the idea of a panopticon[3], you very
quickly come to the philosophical impasse between individual culpability and
agency and systematic mechanisms and the political.

What is this impasse? Plainly, I think it is that the individual has nearly
zero agency alone, and only has power when effectively organizing into groups.
That makes arguments like these functionally useless (or even "usefully
idiotic"[5]), because they fundamentally misattribute the locus of value
production, capture of capital and political clout onto the individual, in
what Marx would call the petite bourgeoisie[4].

This misattribution misses the asymmetric distribution of power towards the
top of organizational hierarchies, especially within the size of large mega-
corporations. If this author were correct and engineers were truly accountable
for the work of their employers, what is the unique labor that managers and
executives contribute to the corporation that ICs do not provide? And who has
the power to make and override decisions at a corporate policy level? It's
transparently obvious that corporations are intentionally set up divide labor
such that decision making agency is allocated towards executive leadership and
management, and that line level ICs serve to execute on those decisions but do
not have the agency to veto decisions they disagree with.

This is obvious to anyone who has ever worked at a mega-corporation, enough so
that I wonder if the author has. If they have not, then the post amounts
merely to speculation about something the author doesn't have enough firsthand
experience with to credibly analyze. That doesn't mean it should have never
been written, but I certainly got no value from it.

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

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_banality_of_evil)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Criticism_and_use_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Criticism_and_use_as_metaphor)

[4][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie)

[5][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot)

------
C4stor
As usual, someone suggests that _other people_ change their way of life
because it's bad, without any impact on himself of course.

It's really easy to preach without having any skin in the game isn't it ?

------
austincheney
Uggghhhh, the entitlement of well paid and under qualified developers is
loathsome. To everybody else who doesn’t share that entitlement it looks like
gross ethnocentricity.

Look, if you want all your crying and personal opinions to actually mean
something start someplace rational. Start by asking (demanding) for a uniform
of code of ethics. Every other professional industry has this, but not
software.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism)

~~~
techslave
[https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics](https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics)

[https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html](https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html)

~~~
austincheney
Sigh, did you declare an oath to those when you were hired? No, these were
never mentioned during your hiring process or ever provided to you by your
employer? Then that is just some animal's shit on a wall as irrelevant as
wealthy software engineers quitting their jobs in protest.

Honestly, what happens you violate those? What are the actual repercussions to
you? Then they aren't a code of ethics that applies to you.

As a medical doctor if you violate the Hippocratic Oath you will certainly
lose your license to practice medicine and probably go to jail.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath)

~~~
striking
I think whatever valid points you might have are getting lost in your attempts
at rhetoric.

You may want to reconsider the relevance of the article you linked yourself,
given that it contains the phrase

> The Hippocratic Oath has been eclipsed as a document of professional ethics
> by more extensive, regularly updated ethical codes issued by national
> medical associations

and that, to my knowledge, it's not considered legally binding.

In fact, you could consider it as similar to the ACM Code of Ethics, as both
are not legally binding and yet they both do a pretty good job of mentioning a
list of commonly made mistakes that people make that could get them in trouble
(legally or morally or ethically) as well as processes for avoiding such
mistakes.

~~~
austincheney
> and that, to my knowledge, it's not considered legally binding.

Violating the oath is grounds for immediate revocation of license which
eliminates lawful practice forever whether or not professional. The actions
that produced that violation may not be a lawful violation, but they typically
are.

What in software is of similar consequence?

~~~
striking
From your previously linked article:

> There is no direct punishment for breaking the Hippocratic Oath, although an
> arguable equivalent in modern times is medical malpractice

and from "The Hippocratic Oath as Literary Text: A Dialogue Between Law and
Medicine"[1]

> Still today, the Oath continues to demand that physicians maintain ethics
> higher than those expected of society in general,[18] and it remains a code
> of professional identity that marks off "proper" medicine from various forms
> of alternative healing practices.'[19]

Later,

> This Part examines judicial opinions that allow doctors to perform [a
> lengthy list of acts and the cases in which they were allowed]. These
> opinions directly contradict specific portions of the Hippocratic Oath.

(that section later goes on to discuss that the oath is inextricably tied to
the analysis of medical ethics, and so it retains its share of
social/moral/ethical relevance even if it is not always legally relevant...
which in my opinion is not incomparable to how we should approach the ACM Code
of Ethics.)

I personally don't understand where you see a difference.

1: Lisa R. Hasday, The Hippocratic Oath as Literary Text: A Dialogue Between
Law and Medicine, 2 Yale J. Health Pol'y L. & Ethics (2002). Available at:
[https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjhple/vol2/iss2/4](https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjhple/vol2/iss2/4)

~~~
austincheney
> I personally don't understand where you see a difference.

It doesn't matter what difference I see or what my opinions are. It only
matters in how you practice your profession. In practical terms this
difference is distinguished with one word: _licensing_.

If you wish to be taken seriously have credentials that certify credibility.
This is a solved problem... just not in software. As an unlicensed
unaccredited software developer you shouldn't take my opinions too seriously
as I won't take yours.

