
Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For? - siscia
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/technology/tech-workers-ask-censorship-surveillance.html
======
netcan
At least to some extent, this is a "Hegelian pendulum."

In the beginning there where black suited corporate drones. They coded black
and white "calculation solutions" for the enterprising enterprise.

Then came colour. Gates wanted cheap computers on every desk. Jobs wanted
colour computers for every artist. Mission. Meaning. This worked better,
especially if you needed employees to invent things. Can't invent the iPhone
wearing a suit writing business requiremnt compendiums.

Startups hired world changers and made a customer and emloyee happiness index.
Google wrote "Don't be evil" on a chalkboard. Gmail was better than outlook.
All was good.

Then some tension surfaced. Advertisers thought they would be happier tracking
users. Users thought this was creepy. Making generals happy did not make
employees happy. Someone erased "don't be evil" from the blackboard.

Back to square one.

Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open and
selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google instead of
a bank. Now, they use euphemisms and secrecy to avoid saying stuff that sounds
bad.

Btw... It's interesting how iconic "don't be evil" was as a slogan. They
couldn't live up to it, but that doesn't mean it didn't impact.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _Google (and "SV") have spent 2 decades telling everyone about their open
> and selfless ideologies. People bought it. They went to work for Google
> instead of a bank..._

Let's inject a little honesty into this discussion. People didn't flock to
google et al in droves because of google's selfless ideology. That was
coincidental.

People flocked to google because they wanted to get rich. _Especially_ in the
early days when google touted their "don't be evil" philosophy.

For the techies going to work for google, it was never about not being evil.
It was about getting rich.

We, as technologists, certainly knew and understood the dangers of companies
like Facebook and Google from early on. (Again, if we're being honest, that
understanding of the danger is one reason many of us don't even _have_ a
facebook.) But we compartmentalize. What we would put on our own home systems
rarely reflects what we would put on work systems if someone is paying us
enough money. What we would develop in hobby time is, again, very different
than what we would develop if someone is paying us a lot of money.

I get it. We have to feed our families. I'm not faulting anyone. I'm just
saying that it's a bit revisionist to put forth the "google/facebook/whoever
tricked us into working for them" narrative. Most of us understood what google
and facebook were going in.

~~~
mistrial9
good try but.. the Google'rs originally wanted to "index the worlds
information" .. very, very smart engineers are motivated by that alone. They
were _competitive_ and highly-achieving coders from Berkeley-Stanford-MIT-
CalTech-thatOtherOneIForget in an elite team environment.. There were ten
other well-funded companies trying to be search engines with lots of
publicity.. Google outperformed them..

In hindsight, after the money with so many zeroes, it is tempting to rewrite
history, but this short "it was the money" doesnt tell the story

~~~
bilbo0s
That techies were motivated by riches is not hindsight.

Google, pre-ipo, sucked in so much intellectual capital that other startups,
my own included, were having trouble getting access to the elite techies at
prices we could afford. Their salaries were _well_ above market, and their
options were clearly going to be worth more than everyone else' at the time.

And don't even get me started on Facebook. That one of facebook's early
investors was the VC wing of the CIA was an open secret. Yet techies _still_
flocked to them for the big paychecks and the options.

And good for those guys. For the vast majority of them, it worked out _REALLY_
well. I don't fault them for any of it.

I just think that you're putting on rose colored glasses here. It was clear
long before Google IPO'd, that there was a lot of money to be made. (That much
was even clear before keyword auctions as a matter of fact.) And everyone
wanted to be in on it. Everyone _still_ wants to get in on the hot startups.
Whether those startups are profitable or not. That's just the nature of this
business.

Now again, I'm not complaining. That's just how the tech startup industry
works. I get that. My issue is with everyone trying to turn it all around and
act like a giant gold rush never blinded everyone. As if all those techies
flocked to SV because it was all just about making the world a better place.
That's just not true.

~~~
netcan
This isn't an all-in-one or all-out thing. Of course money was a
consideration.

But, Google (and sv 2.0 generally) _did_ both present and to an extent, live
up to a certain ethic. Not perfectly, not without some hypocrisy but they did
have an ethic. The sold it to their employees (and others).

Today, they have trouble living up to it. People got disillusioned or upset.
That is what we're talking about it.

I agree that these people joined a company, not a monestary. But, 10 years ago
working at Google was easier to be proud of, on an ethical/esthetic level.

------
hasbroslasher
It's true that ultimately there aren't a whole lot of morally "good" things
you can do with your compsci degree at the moment. You can work in adtech or
building corporate software, ecommerce, etc. to sell plastic trinkets to
people and raise your company's stock price. Or you can do ML, which will
probably hurt poor people in the near to mid term and probably contribute
somewhat to the more Orwellian aspects of modern life. Or you can do some
third thing: some kind of applied tech a more physical engineering discipline
(energy, spaceships, robots, etc.) that might or might not do anything for the
common man.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the
US education system who go to work for Wall Street or in adtech/ecommerce
roles. We have the brains and energy and passion to solve alternative energy,
vertical farming, asteroid mining, carbon sequestration, and social democracy
overnight but our system deliberately misallocates resources to projects that
generate capital for the already wealthy instead of promoting one iota of
social good. Here's to hoping this is a start of that bigger, necessary
change.

~~~
Kalium
I know! You're incredibly right! It's seems impossible that _so many_ smart,
educated, talented, passionate, hard-working people could fail to solve any
problem they put their minds to!

Yet, might it be worth considering that any individual human brain could
potentially be less than infinitely malleable in all possible aspects? I have
known blindingly brilliant artists who are utterly repulsed by basic
arithmetic, and equally brilliant mathematicians who cannot even begin to
grasp how _any_ person could be concerned with things as minor as governance
structure when there is _math_ to be done. It might be possible to press those
people into the service of what someone else deems social good, but I must
admit I am experiencing some doubts that they would universally consider it
socially good for them.

Beyond that, consider what selling trinkets and shipping things around the
globe has done. It's helped lift billions of people out of abject poverty. It
has made material well-being and food security possible on scales unimaginable
only a few centuries ago. It has done so more successfully, and more quickly,
than any effort explicitly directed at social good in human history. A critic
would point to the price paid, and posit that there might have been a better
option, but this critic is almost certainly making perfect the enemy of good
in pursuit of an ideal.

I get really bummed out that there are so many smart people coming out of the
US education system who struggle to recognize so many things in life. You're
_absolutely_ right - what's lost by chasing money for its own sake is one
such. It's just maybe worth considering that there could potentially be
others.

~~~
coolaliasbro
What do you believe to be the cause of that abject poverty?

~~~
hasbroslasher
I believe Western imperialism has something to do with it... While it's true
that capitalism has improved outcomes for some nations, it's also true that
capitalist exploitation in Africa and South America really messed up the way
their world works. It's made it so that free markets had something to fix
later on, not fixed a pre-existing problem with these countries.

People can choose what to believe and all, but it's pretty hard to look at
things like the African slave trade or Diamond mining in Zimbabwe or Sierra
Leone and find anything but capitalism and imperialism run amok.

~~~
Nasrudith
Look back further - while certainly not blameless they didn't start the fire -
humanity in general did. In South America even the Conquistadors even with
their vast advantages would have died if not for all of the other tribes sick
of their flower wars and getting captured for sacrifice. They also had an army
on their side. One they later betrayed and made an underclass but fifty men in
an unfamiliar territory would die eventually to their might. Africa had its
own warfare and ironically one of the most benign actions of trade helped set
up a collapse - trade with others is how advancement is driven and they wound
up benefiting from trade in more productive crops - some with precious metals
and ivory and some through slaves. That lead to a population boom and that
lead bloody wars of Shaka Zulu. The point being exploitation doesn't need any
outside actors and is the true enemy. The true cause of poverty and
backwardness is lack of growth.

This doesn't absolve the misdeeds of exploiters - indeed colonies end in
independence usually specifically because of mercantilist mismanagement
squanders the true potential of the country by seeing it only as a well of
land resources instead of an extension to nurture for mutual good but it is
important to recognize that getting out "the Imperialists" won't make things
better automatically and the wrong replacement can ironically be even worse.
As bad as the British were in Rwanda they never decided to genocide the Tutsis
even though their manipulations lead to it indirectly. Evil comes from within
and without "the tribe" and it is important to recognize that.

------
dekhn
I once produced an open source product while working for Berkeley Lab, which
is a DoE lab operated by UC. It does non-classified work. One day we got a
visit from a couple employees of Lawrence Livermore Labs (classified research)
and my manager glanced at their badges- he said something about "Q" and smiled
while asking what they worked on.

They said "multiphysics combustion codes" and my manager looked at me and said
"they run nuclear weapons simulations" (they didn't confirm).

After chatting for a while I realized they were using my code to manage
nuclear weapons simulations. That's a consequence of licenses like MIT and BSD
and Apache: you don't control who uses your software.

I came to terms with this a long time ago but it's still odd to think that I
can write software that my own government will use to ensure our destructive
weapons work as expected.

~~~
saltcured
Pretty much everyone working in the high-performance computing space has to
think about this. If you produce something truly useful, it may find its way
into use in those kinds of HPC workloads. At the same time, much of our
"civilian" use of HPC is being subsidized by those kinds of national security
workloads which fund a lot of research and infrastructure.

You might also think about it positively. At least they are blowing up nukes
in simulations instead of out in the desert somewhere upwind of a lot of
people... speaking of upwind, there is also significant oil and gas funding
behind a lot of geophysical science.

Addendum: as I recall, the Globus project was often funded by a mixture of NSF
and DoE grants and a large part of its core group was based out of a
midwestern national lab.

~~~
dekhn
I never said I thought there was anything wrong with doing nuclear simulations
testing. TBH I think it's an overall good.

Globus was mostly run out of Argonne National Lab, but it existed primarily to
support scientific computing and public research. We had a subcontract to
build pyGlobus since so many people wanted a Python interface (the Globus team
started in C++ and then switched to Java and a really, really bad RPC
technology called SOAP with WSDL for schema).

I've definitely come to terms with the modern compromise (in which a great
deal of scientific research is motivated and funded by defense).

------
yosefzeev
I find it surprising that educated people are "just now" doing this. What did
people think corporations were doing to the world? Open up your eyes and look
around and get your head out of the code and the bullshit slogans your
companies have sold you. It's obvious something has gone wrong and is going
on.

~~~
lolive
Engineering abilities does not imply political awareness. Making things work
is surprisingly hard and (imho) a soul crushing process. You need a specific
kind of people's profile for that. From my experience, the presence of a
political vision alongside the engineering skills is much lower than expected.
When both are present, the political vision does not come from a kind of
enlightenment in the engineer's inner soul. But from a feedback loop coming
from accurate sources of informations.

~~~
EdgarVerona
Very true. It is also easy to be so wrapped up in the trappings of what you're
doing and the pleasure/sense of duty/sense of fulfillment you're getting from
the actual act of your work and the compensation around it that you stop
thinking about the consequences of your actions. This sounds terrible, but
it's really just a small variant on the banality of evil.

Solving problems, working on tight deadlines, and getting recognition, status,
and money are all things that make a person feel like what they're doing is
right. It gives an endorphin high, it's a sign that other people are
recognizing their work. I hesitate to use the word "addictive" in this
context, but it can certainly be compulsive. It's easy to lose sight of
whether what you're doing is what you _ought_ to be doing when the act of
doing it is so compelling, financially rewarding, and celebrated by others.

This isn't a justification; it is a warning to anyone coming into this field,
a warning that I wish I'd thought more about coming into it. This is something
we need to be vigilant about as engineers, because it's easy to look the other
way on questionable activities by your business when everything else in your
life is becoming enriched by it and they're telling you that the ethical
issues are for "their side of the business" to worry about. It is not. Do not
believe them. Understand where your paycheck is coming from, and make sure
that you continue to evaluate it as your company changes and ask yourself if
you're okay with it.

In my career, I have:

* Been lied to about the true purpose of a product we were building, and only realized the lie because another engineer was brave enough to call them out and force them to tell the truth. I was fully prepared to be the coward that didn't follow up on it and remain willfully ignorant, and his ethical bravery was the only thing that snapped me out of it.

* Seen a company's financial plan gradually change from an ethical one to an unethical one, and have seen good people struggle and contort themselves to justify it: including myself, for a time.

* Worked in fields where the profits gained by maintaining the status quo has created a desire for minimium compliance instead of continual improvements.

The mandatory ethics class I took for my CS degree never prepared me for what
to do, how to be vigilant, or how to take action when it is the company itself
that is the unethical one. I feel like we need to have open and honest
discussions with people coming into this field about this very real
possibility, and about the need to evaluate not just the compensation and
interesting problems being presented by a given business, but also the ways
that they earn money and whether it is something you find acceptable. And what
to do if that situation takes a turn for the worse.

The ACM has some high-level recommendations in their ethics statements, and I
think they're a good start. They should be required reading for all software
engineers.

[https://ethics.acm.org/](https://ethics.acm.org/)

I have been a coward. I have been an example of the banality of evil. And I
don't think I'm alone in this field: not by a long shot. We've got to pay
attention to the ethics of what we create, and we need to be much more brave
than we have been.

~~~
domador
Sounds like engineers (and people in general) are good at optimizing locally
(achieving what's good for me) and stink at optimizing globally (achieving
what's good for everyone in society).

~~~
EdgarVerona
Aye, I definitely think it's a human thing. I apologize, because I'm going to
use the word "addicting" in a non-scientific sense, but the normal use of the
word that best conveys the situation in my opinion. Solving problems is
addictive. Getting the rush of a job well done - regardless of _what_ that job
is - is addictive. Getting recognition is addictive. Having a comfortable
salary is addictive.

It's so easy for me to slip into those addictions and not pay attention to the
bigger picture. And I feel like I'm not the only one suffering from this
problem. In fact, I can see it empirically in the people who have worked at
the aforementioned jobs with me.

There needs to be a balance. A person doesn't need to be outright altruistic,
but focusing exclusively on local optimization allows for a sort of hedonistic
behavior set that can justify - and has historically justified - participation
as a cog in larger and harmful systems.

------
geebee
The NYTimes discusses this question in the context of ethics, but the hiring
process for software engineers, generally speaking, often avoids any
discussion of what will be built. I've interviewed at google and a few other
similar places, as well as smaller startups, and remarkably often, there was
almost no discussion of the company or product.

A tech interview goes like this "a list begins with an integer between 0 and
5. You then add a new set of integers that must sum to the value of the last
added integer. How many different possible lists of 100 integers can be
generated through this process?"

I've done this at so many companies. They don't talk about what you'll be
building. They don't want your opinion. You could go through two days of
whiteboard exam style interview questions and have no idea what the company
does. And you could get hired without ever answering a single question about
what the company does. It's remarkable, but it's actually designed to work
that way.

I think tht the outside world really doesn't quite understand what goes on in
tech interviews and tech hiring. If they did, they might know that the
indifference to ethics may stem from general programmer unawareness of what
the companies they work for actually do.

------
saosebastiao
Lately I've been experiencing some depression (under treatment), so maybe this
is just the state of my mind right now, but is anyone else growing more and
more cynical about the potential for changing the world, and adjusting their
moral philosophy to compensate?

I could barely impact how my former employer ran the company, and even though
I had the company's best interests at heart the whole time, I faced resistance
the entire way. Political change is even more out of reach. I grow tired of
obviously bad policy ideas being promoted because of political party consensus
(on "both" sides). I am exhausted of the generational warfare that is causing
newer generations to face an uphill battle for the rest of their lives, with
higher health care costs, higher housing costs, higher environmental costs,
higher education costs, and lower wages. I'm sick of inaction on important
issues, misguided action on petty issues, and the nonexistent potential for
small unpolitical changes that could have big impacts but won't ever see the
time of day because the need for political posturing doesn't allow for it
(like for example, a change to the metric system).

I feel trapped and helpless to change anything. And sometimes my feeling of
helplessness has made it so I can no longer muster the effort to care for
things that are so far beyond my control. I'm at the point on Maslow's
Hierarchy where taking care of my family's survival is the only important
thing anymore. I sometimes ponder whether I should just go out and get some
kind of unethical job that pays a ton of money (and there is no shortage of
those kinds of jobs for people of my talents) merely because it accomplishes
that goal more efficiently. But then I feel bad about entertaining that
thought. I don't really know what to do about it.

~~~
Domenic_S
This is either going to resonate with you or seem totally out of left field,
but I'm going to say it anyway: everything you're saying is unconscious
defense against changing _yourself_. You don't need to affect policy on a
national level to change the world. Changing the world can be as simple as
putting the phone away and being present for your family, or volunteering at a
local soup kitchen. Cleaning up the side of the highway or mowing an elderly
neighbor's lawn. You can make a positive change for people in your own
neighborhood.

This is where the defense comes in; acknowledging that there are things you
can do _today_ means acknowledging that you're not doing those things which
means you have to set up a straw man for yourself of world-sized problems that
you can't fix so that you don't feel bad about not doing anything. We all have
this heuristic in our minds whether we know it or not: feeling good > feeling
bad, but feeling bad > the effort of changing yourself. So we accept feeling
bad, and do mental gymnastics (I can't change America to the metric system, so
I guess there's no point in doing anything) to minimize.

My advice: don't overthink it. Don't worry about doing something with your
life. Just do something with your day!

~~~
brokenmachine
Well put. I'll try to keep that in mind too.

------
michaelt
I think this makes a good deal of sense.

The tech job market is extremely buoyant in the present age, meaning very few
programmers are in a position where they have to settle for a job they dislike
just to make ends meet.

I mean, every tech company talks about wanting engaged, passionate, proud
employees - so why settle for doing work you can't take pride in when you
could switch to work you could be proud of, and probably get a raise while
you're at it?

~~~
gms
Because you can’t get a raise - the big companies pay the most money.

~~~
huangc10
Not necessarily true. There are some series A/B startups that offer extremely
competitive salaries and stock options for top talent.

And also, I think he/she means if you can't get behind what Facebook is doing,
maybe jump to Apple who "supposedly" have security and privacy as their top
priorities and in the mean time receive a raise.

~~~
gambiting
>>There are some series A/B startups that offer extremely competitive salaries
and stock options for top talent.

Not everyone is top talent though - and I don't think there's anything wrong
with being an average programmer and not wanting to work on morally wrong
projects.

~~~
sokoloff
Agreed, of course, but also don't think anyone suggested that there was
anything wrong with it.

------
dotdi
Every person, tech or not, should evaluate what their work is contributing to
and they should evaluate if they can ethically and morally accept what the
company is doing or standing for.

In the end, I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and be accountable
for my actions, even if that would mean to forego money, prestige, etc.

~~~
jimktrains2
> Every person, tech or not, should evaluate what their work is contributing
> to and they should evaluate if they can ethically and morally accept what
> the company is doing or standing for.

> In the end, I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and be
> accountable for my actions, even if that would mean to forego money,
> prestige, etc.

How would you like people to square this with providing for their families? No
offense to coal miners or well operators, but I don't think they're willing to
destitute their families over climate change -- what's a better world for
their grandchildren if their children die starving in the miners arms?

More to the point, I think the problem is "we as a society", not the
individual. We're not willing to give slight inconveniences for massive
increases in energy efficency. Look at how we design our cities and
communities. People drive 2+ton vehicles upwards of 2 hours each day to go to
work instead of living closer to the office and biking or taking public
transport. (Many first and second ring suburbs of many/most/all cities have
decent (or better) school systems than in the exurbs.)

Do we really need to consume all of the plastic junk or waste nearly as much
food as we do? Do we need to be so wasteful of energy in our homes? Do we need
to keep stores and offices frozen in the dead of summer? There is a lot of
really low hanging fruit (that people as a whole are unwilling to do because
it's the slightest of inconvenience or expects them to acknowledge the world
they live in), before we ask people to give up their jobs.

Do you think coal miners, well operators, or big box retail associates
wouldn't want a safer or more fulfilling job? We need to look at our excess
consumption before pointing fingers at people for taking a job we find dirty
(in the moral sense.)

~~~
drb91
> How would you like people to square this with providing for their families?

With a capable human brain, like we all have! Just because a decision is hard
doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to make the right one—all people
making decisions have been faced with this, including many people commonly
considered evil.

Computers are levers, and developers are the fulcrum. We have quite a bit of
negotiation power.

Finally, I think it’s naive to think that these systemic problems can be
addressed with concerted individual effort, not by addressing the underlying
problems. Maybe I have some sympathy for the coal miners after all.

~~~
jimktrains2
You're still begging the question. How does one choose between doing something
supports a questionably moral company (and what isn't a company without any
moral baggage?) and keeping your family fed and warm?

> Just because a decision is hard doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to
> make the right [choice]

I think this is telling: you believe there is a correct choice in all
situations, from all points of view.

I have no problems installing Google Analytics or AdWords on a site if my
employer asks me to, but I personally run with ad blockers. The "right"
decision in my case is to keep my family fed and warm because I don't think I
can find a position at a company that doesn't do advertising or analytics and
my own attempts to start my own companies have failed. I'm not willing to take
the risk of long-term unemployment or to take a significantly lower paying job
at a company that does the exact same thing (e.g. advertising).

So please tell me why my decision is unequivocally wrong, especially in light
of the ability of anyone to run an adblocker and that we adhere to all
relevant regulations, e.g. GDPR. Additionally, please tell me where I (and
everyone who doesn't like advertising) can find a living wage from a company
that does not advertise or perform analytics (or do any other morally
questionable activity).

~~~
drb91
The decisions we make in life, and our difficulty making them, defines us. I
can’t help you define your morality here.

~~~
jimktrains2
You're still begging the question and acting like there is a fixed morality.

~~~
s73v3r_
Nobody is begging any question. The answer is that it is for YOU to decide.
I'm sorry if that's not a simple, yes/no answer for you, but the world isn't
like that.

~~~
jimktrains2
I'm really at a loss to understand your reply.

My original question was "How would you like people to square [being
accountable for the actions of their employer] with providing for their
families?"

You've yet to say anything except implying that there is a single, black-and-
white moral compass that everyone is capable of following in its entirety.
There are no employers that have no moral shortcomings. Telling people that
they're immoral for not destitute themselves is rather pointless and leads to
a nowhere discussion because it started nowhere.

Moreover, it's a fairly pointless expectation that everyone is I don't know
what country you live in, but I can ask with certainty the same with respect
to citizenship: How can you be a citizen of a country that's perpetrated
atrocities. In that case, it's even more clear that there is no option --
there is no country that hasn't committed atrocities.

~~~
s73v3r_
"My original question was "How would you like people to square [being
accountable for the actions of their employer] with providing for their
families?""

And the answer to that is, "It is up to those people to decide that. No one
else can do it for them."

"You've yet to say anything except implying that there is a single, black-and-
white moral compass that everyone is capable of following in its entirety. "

Wrong. Nobody but you has done that. You are the one demanding answers for how
people square these things."

------
amanaplanacanal
Unfortunately, the core business of Facebook, Twitter, and Google (driving
engagement) is probably contributing to tearing the US apart politically. It's
not just individual projects, it's at the very core of what they are. I don't
see a happy ending here. I assume that the same thing is happening in other
countries.

~~~
elihu
It turns out that a lot of deep-pocketed organizations are willing to pay a
lot of money to tech companies in exchange for the capability to manipulate
large populations of people.

The notion of a technology company selling products or services directly to
customers hasn't gone away, but it's starting to feel quaint and nostalgic,
like it belongs in a Norman Rockwell illustration.

------
fsloth
For the over the decade I've been a software engineer I've always strived to
work in products with a value proposition for the end user that I can
understand.

I can't understand how anyone could work without this understanding and not
get their soul crushed. Maybe I'm just sensitive or underpaid.

~~~
isodude
Sometimes your don't have the luxury to choose your work.

~~~
enraged_camel
Yes, but this is a much more rare scenario for techies than other white collar
professionals.

~~~
isodude
Well that depends doesn't it. If you got skill and motivation to choose
between gigs, that's fine, you'll most likely just start your own if you don't
find anything fitting. Those you hear alot about.

Succeeding is not easier in tech than anything else, given that success means
doing exactly what you want and feeling good about it.

I do interview people and try to find techies that fit in our org, but it's
tough even if there's available people.

------
jimmy1
Unpopular opinion: this is why the "dudebros" and their like keep getting
hired. They are more than happy to do their work, accept their salary, and
move on, and not have to turn everything into "changing the world"

~~~
strikelaserclaw
Even before the "dudebros", i'd argue most scientists and engineers didn't
really care too much about the moral implications of their work. Guns, bombs
etc... were all invented by brilliant minds, we'd like to think we as a
society have collectively evolved cause we have small machines in our hands
with all the world's knowledge but esp in the usa, looking outside you see
that nothing has really changed that much in the way humans think.

~~~
zeveb
> most scientists and engineers didn't really care too much about the moral
> implications of their work

Have you considered that they might care very much about the moral
implications of their work — and be _proud_ to contribute to their nation's
armed might?

~~~
stronglikedan
> to contribute to their nation's armed might

I would extend that to the hope for peace through strength (might).

------
mindgam3
[Reposting my comment shared on the earlier thread, I guess this one wasn’t
marked as dupe]

“In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, M.I.T. and other top colleges
signed a pledge saying they would turn down job interviews with Google unless
the company dropped its Project Maven contract. (Google said that month that
it would not renew the contract once it expired.) “We are students opposed to
the weaponization of technology by companies like Google and Microsoft,” the
pledge stated. “Our dream is to be a positive force in the world. We refuse to
be complicit in this gross misuse of power.”

This is an incredibly powerful statement. A bunch of students getting together
brought Google to its knees.

Now these brave students might consider standing up en masse to Facebook and
its rapidly shrinking signing bonuses before FB moves too fast and breaks
reality again.

~~~
jiveturkey
I'm confused on both of your points.

1\. How is this powerful, in the slightest? 100 students is less than a
rounding error.

2\. How are these students in any way brave?

~~~
mindgam3
1\. Powerful in terms of impact. Google discontinued the project, no doubt due
in some part to the protest.

2\. Brave in turning down lucrative job offers for moral reasons. Many, many
engineers currently work at Big Tech co’s with similar doubts and fears. But
to risk your salary and job security on ethical grounds, that’s what I call
brave.

~~~
dx87
What you posted doesn't say they turned down job offers, it says they weren't
going to interview at Google. Realistically, the only risk to them is if a
company goes out of their way to look for that pledge during the hiring
process, then decides not to hire them. They didn't lose a job or any income
from what they did.

~~~
mindgam3
That’s a fair distinction. Still, choosing not to interview at one of the top
2 highest-paying employers does indicate some sacrifice. I’m not saying we
should nominate these guys for the Nobel peace prize, but their stance does
merit some respect.

------
qubax
We do? Maybe a tiny fringe does. Most tech workers want to know the same thing
nytimes employees do. The salary and benefits. That's it. That's what workers
care about at the end of the day.

Does the nytimes tech team ask "Why are we spamming HN everyday for"? I doubt
it. They just do what they are paid to do.

The same thing for all tech workers and all workers in general. The
construction worker building a luxury tower isn't asking "why are we building
this for". He just wants to get paid and paid well.

"Do no evil" is no more real in the tech world as "fair and balanced" or "all
the news fit to print" is real in the news world. It's just empty slogans for
PR.

------
dubya123
They sure have strong opinions about working on Government projects but none
of them have any issues creating tech that intrusively monitors and
manipulates people for the purposes of serving them advertisements. What
heroes they are...

~~~
prolikewh0a
You can directly blame the people who developed this stuff, the programmers,
most perfectly able to move jobs with no real loss in economic stability.

I think it's one of the most immoral and unethical jobs that could be taken
today.

------
blueadept111
This trend is nothing more than a reflection of the fact that unemployment is
at record lows. It does not represent a new, heightened morality in employees
(that would persist even if the job market soured, for example).

------
pleasecalllater
For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to
exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen.
At the end they will do everything for money.

~~~
artellectual
That has been the answer for last era. I think that’s why tech workers are
starting to ask what we’re building it for. Because we’re here at this point
because building “for money” is no longer good enough. Because what’s the
point of having money when we’re cancer ridden and polluting our planet, and
despite living in a rich planet people are starving, and the very resources
that feed us are being destroyed. What’s the point of a pile of money when
there is nothing else left?

~~~
ekianjo
> despite living in a rich planet people are starving

A overused rhetoric that does not hold much ground when you realize that
poverty is decreasing fast everywhere around, and faster than we expected it
to.

[https://ourworldindata.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/World-...](https://ourworldindata.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/World-Poverty-Since-1820.png)

~~~
wazoox
The way we measure a "decreasing poverty" is extremely laden politically (like
most things that are supposedly "neutrally evaluated" are supposed to be, just
because they're represented as spreadsheets of numbers).

We consider that a villager living from subsistence farming and therefore
having almost no use for money to be part of the very poor, less than 1$/day
crowd.

Take this same peasant and send it working for some multinational company
harvesting cocoa or sugar cane, under horrible, exploitative conditions for 2$
a day, and bam! poverty has been halved!

Ditto if you send him and his family in some shanty town collecting plastic on
a rubbish pile, feeding on refuse : he's now making 3$ a day, poverty
decreased again!

What is called "lifting out of poverty" is actually "making them a cog of a
worldwide, money-based economy". That's a mixed blessing, to say the least.

~~~
closeparen
If subsistence farming is preferable to being a cog in a market economy, why
aren’t people switching in the opposite direction?

~~~
balt_s
Assume you live in a "first-world" nation, how do you propose to become a
subsistence farmer?

~~~
Nasrudith
Buy cheap land out in the middle of nowhere and start farming enough to
provide food for yourself and some excess to pay expenses. There is a reason
people don't do that.

------
anoncoward111
You are building it for your salary, for shareholders, both private and
public, and users.

There tends to be people who will screw over one or two of those groups to
enrich the other group.

------
pjmlp
Now?!

Tech is not only about coding away in a cubicle, what the company does is part
of the job.

~~~
alexgmcm
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my
department!" says Wernher von Braun

------
carapace
_Computers are war machines._

They have other uses but their primary use has always been war. (Specifically
code-cracking and modeling nuclear physics for weapon design.)

As a thought experiment, try to imagine an alternate reality where WWII never
happened and Alan Turing is just an obscure British _queer_ mathematician.
Would he have spawned the systems we have today? Or perhaps Konrad Zuse?

War drives the information revolution. We're in the middle of WWIII now.

If you don't want to contribute to the war machine you have to _leave computer
industry_ and take up gardening, specifically _applied ecology_ such as
"Permaculture".

------
kareemsabri
I think we're in a bear market for technology, in terms of people's
sentiments. Possibly for America as well. I don't really think it's justified
though. Most people seem to think you can only go work for FAANG if you have a
CS degree, cause they're in the news all the time. If those companies conflict
with your morals, there are lots of problems in the world that can benefit
from technology. A look through the YC batch every few months has a wide
variety of companies, many of which would benefit humanity if successful.

------
mc32
Some tech workers. Not all, not most. This is more or less an editorial trying
to get tech workers to think about implications, presumably to make them
susceptible to politization so they can be more manipulated by news.

China presents a quandary, no doubt. On the one hand we have self
determination and sovereignty, on the other hand we have “western values” and
so forth. Not long ago “internationalists” argued for the former, but given
that that would result in something contra, they now prefer “western values”
which they used to argue against (i.e. relativism).

~~~
prolikewh0a
>This is more or less an editorial trying to get tech workers to think about
implications, presumably to make them susceptible to politization so they can
be more manipulated by news.

So you'd rather have an uninformed tech job force with no opinions, just walk
into a private government every day which strips every right you have along
with having absolutely no morals or ethics so you can live in a 34th story
downtown penthouse with a mini australian shepherd and a Tesla?

You realize the tech workers literally do all of the tech work, which actually
makes the company run and function, right? Why should they just be drones with
no say?

This is exactly the problem. Do we just do this _solely_ for money? Maybe the
world would be a better place if workers had a say instead of shareholders and
executives who are only in their positions to make extraordinary amounts of
money in absolutely any way, morals & ethics often aside.

~~~
mc32
I’m not for tech workers becoming drones. I'm for them being informed. I’m not
for them to be moulded by mass media who see them as a tool to carry out their
vision or idea if what’s right or wrong.

You see, if informed tech workers were to make contrarian decisions, let’s say
with regard to domestic issues in the US and while informed they made a
Libertarian decision, this decision would be derided never the less because it
would deviate from mass media concensus.

Who decides and should decide about, for example produce?

Should the produce lady at the supermarket make the decision to stock
conventional or organic, or consumer denand, of the owner/cooperative?

The produce lady gets paid to put whatever the buyer gets. The burger flipper
doesn't decide ti buy frizen or from this or that ranch.

We get paid to do a job.

~~~
prolikewh0a
I don't see any "mass media" effecting tech workers. A lot of us are pretty
smart & can critically think. I see employee's not aligning morally with drone
& censorship projects which is absolutely 100% not a bad thing.

I am fortunate to work for a company that I know of does nothing immoral or
unethical, but refuse to work for Amazon, Google, or Facebook regardless of
their recruiting efforts because I know I don't align with them morally or
ethically.

~~~
mc32
Fair enough. At this point I would not work for either as well. But that’s how
to make decisions, not by politicizing the work environment.

~~~
prolikewh0a
>not by politicizing the work environment.

What type of politics should be allowed at work? What about talks about
workers rights, wages? What about conversation on ethics & morals behind
projects they themselves are contributing to?

Do Libertarians believe authoritarian private governments akin to communist
dictatorships (employers) can strip your rights when you clock in?

~~~
mc32
Are Chinese companies in China under duress? Are they protesting? Whats the
consensus of the Chinese hoi polloi?

China is not “the west”, their foundational philosophy is very different than
ours. We can’t expect their decisions to be exactly like ours.

Would I want to live under their confitions? No. Do Chinese on the other hand
object? It’s still playing itself out.

------
negamax
Really interesting money vs ethics discussion. Everyone who can choose ethics,
congratulations. Everyone who can’t, it’s a social failure that you have to
make tough choice for financial goals.

------
golergka
Each time a topic like this get posted to HN, I feel like a broken record
repeating the same thing over and over.

There are many very talented software developers that have very different
political and ethical opinions than those described here. They work for
military and intelligence of their respective countries, enjoy it, and believe
that they're doing it for greater good. You can debate whether they're right
or not, but please, don't forget that they exist - and that there are a LOT of
them.

------
huangc10
I think people should do what they want and I find these articles meaningless.
Don't like your company's values? Great, find another job. It's as simple as
that.

Let's not shame people for wanting to stick with a company. Everyone has their
reasons to stay whether it's money, values, working environment, co-workers or
personal reasons. If you really cared, shouldn't you try to change the company
from within? Isn't that the best place to start?

~~~
matz1
Whatever the issue is you can always find haters, I think its better to make
oneself immune to this.

------
friedman23
> According to Dr. Poulson, Mr. Dean said that Google complied with
> surveillance requests from the federal government and asked rhetorically if
> the company should leave the United States market in protest.

How clueless can you be? People can and will die if you cooperate and share
private information on your users with the Chinese government.

------
CPLX
This isn’t a novel concept. Didn’t anyone see Real Genius?

------
drasticmeasures
Google management gave too much freedom and independence to its techies and
now they think they run the company.

~~~
Apocryphon
Well, that’s what happens when you have an engineering-driven organization.

------
ageek123
The article gives no measure of how many tech workers have adopted this
mindset. It seems to largely be a narrative driven by journalists and a
relatively small number of activists in some of the more high-profile tech
companies (who are simultaneously pushing a number of unrelated issues like
unionization, diversity, deplatforming conservatives, #resisting, and
introducing identity politics into hiring and promotion decisions).

~~~
cableshaft
Yeah, that seems to be how the media writes stories now. They overhear a
friend of theirs mention something (or maybe somehow dream up the idea on
their own), say "gee, that'd make a good article!", find 2 or 3 individual
examples, preferably anecdotes, so they can pad the article length and make it
seem legitimate, don't bother trying to show evidence for their hypothesis
with any facts (or find some tangential fact about something else that they
can invent some sort of bridge between that and their idea), and write the
article. If the headline can be more salacious, the better.

I keep seeing more and more articles written this way nowadays. It gets really
annoying to see an interesting headline, click it hoping to read a good
argument for their case, and then feeling I just wasted my time.

------
evadne
I work in EdTech and would like to think that there is always $ for the kids.

------
wayanon
“We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology..” \- good luck
with that! have they wondered which government departments financed the growth
of tech in the Cold War ?

------
el3ctron
since when capitalism wants workers to be aware? oh yeah, since China
Communist party do a demonstration on technologycal superiority. Problem for
capitalism is that a system where workers are awakened is called SOCIALISM.

------
KaiserPro
_bold statement alert_

if you don't know what your company is doing, and your intricate part in that
dance, you are not really providing value to the company, or more importantly
to yourself.

 _/ bold statement_

How can you make decisions if you don't understand the business impact? How do
you know what if that optimization is worth the cost of implementation? If you
don't know the impact of a product release on your customers, what are you
really doing?

To say that as a tech person "I don't know the business side" you are being
deliberately ignorant. "business" is simple[1]. You are being just as annoying
at those useless managers who demand x feature yesterday and don't bother to
think about the ramifications.

1)It really is, you are trying to make people give you cash for something.
that might be things like food, or vapour (ie initial coin offerings). The
mechanics are the same, monetary units in exchange for goods or services. To
attach a special mystique to the process is to give power to charlatans. (see
repacking of subprime debt)

TL;DR:

If you don't know what your buisness does, you are like the idiot manager
dilbert.

~~~
mLuby
Not necessarily true in big companies. A devops middle manager doesn't need to
know whether the company is building widgets or dohickies; their job is to
keep the software running securely. CTO/VP Eng should certainly know more
about business priorities.

At smaller companies it is more important. Also can improve morale.

~~~
KaiserPro
so how do you negotiate SLAs?

How do you know what level of security is required?

How do you prioritise requests?

How do you know which team to ask favours from?

How do you get more money for your department?

How do you avoid the poop-gravity interaction cycle?

All of this is intrinsically linked to the business logic/goals of the
company.

For example: Our team worked with $cashCow team to reduce time to live by x
percent. We have saved the company y percent a year. Now give our team more
cash we can do it for other teams.

That requires a basic understanding of the business, and its priorities, so
you can support the most important internal users and make them more
efficient.

~~~
mLuby
poop-gravity whaaa?

------
onetimemanytime
Workers can ask, until 2008 happens again. Then, free sodas and a lot of
workers will go. Ask then :)

------
amelius
I suspect there are plenty of people working on nasty adtech still ...

Also, tech workers can often be replaced by others (e.g. Asians) who have
different standards when offered the same salary.

------
sys_64738
What the widget does or whom it is for is not my main concern. What is my
concern is interesting puzzles for problem solving before I move on to the
next widget. Widget building at a startup in not it as I won't make a profit.
I want to see the money in my bank account every two weeks so I can put food
on the table.

In the words of Jerry McGuire: Show me the $$$!

------
vinayms
The idealism of a bunch of engineers won't make the slightest difference,
except may be appease their own sense of morality, as long as there are enough
engineers willing to be tech-whores. In this regard, the supply exceeds the
demand.

Technology is the proverbial knife which can cut a fruit to feed and can also
cut a throat to terrorize. Take the current darling of tech, AI/ML. If you are
working on this, at a megacorp especially, you should realize that sooner or
later it will be used for nefarious activities. But should that stop you from
contributing to the field? Would database engineers rue the fact that their
products are used to store child porn?

My point is, unless something as explicit as the ones depicted in the article
happens, its highly unlikely to know what the tech you are developing is going
to be adapted for besides the one it was designed and built for. The google
employee notes it themselves. Having ethical concerns is always advisable, but
constantly wanting to know if the tech will be used by evil doers (which is
not same as wanting to know more about a specific requirement that looks
questionable) just makes one come across as a dick because no one except the
powers that be would know that.

I hope engineers don't go from being sheep to full on hippies, but choose the
rational middle path instead.

