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Comment by systems | Hacker News Reader

i am always surprised, that gambling sites and similar business with questionable morality

dont face hard time recruiting top engineers , i always though this would be a major concern

I used to do work in this space. As a freelancer, everything comes down to timeliness and money. Adult sites, in my case, always had money, always paid on time, and always had more work. I don't particularly care what you believe in, but I do care that I get paid for my work. For what it's worth, I don't believe adult affiliate networks I worked for were any more shady than the survey/adtech companies I've worked for.

In the UK it is less of an issue, because the industry is well-regulated and gambling (esp sports betting) is seen as an acceptable pastime akin to social drinking.

Occasionally people expressed disquiet, but since the main alternative in London is working for banks, there wasn't a great deal of choice. Personally I don't see the excessive advertising we are subject to as much better for society than gambling being available, but hey.

I was just in London, and it looks like they also plaster any gambling ads with "here's how you get help for a gambling addiction".

It also probably helps that the major player is called "ladbrokes"!

I saw a documentary about Pokies that suggested that this framing of gambling as being an individual's problem instead of a problem with an industry that is specifically designed to use weaknesses in human psychology to extract the maximum amount of money from them was a deliberate tactic to prevent useful legislation being passed, because it's then up to the gambler with the problem rather than the institution of gambling to control their gambling.

Never mind that those people are literally the least qualified to control their gambling addiction.

If anyone's interested, it was called "Ka-ching! Pokie Nation" http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/kaching-pokie-nation/

> Occasionally people expressed disquiet, but since the main alternative in London is working for banks, there wasn't a great deal of choice.

Did both. Gambling is very similar to finance.

Turns out that finance pays more and treats their employees better.

Have done both also, with the same experience... we may have worked for the same orgs :)

...working for banks...

Arguably worse than gambling or porn

They often have the most challenging problems around scale, security and performance. The "moral" aspect is a continuum and there are tens of thousands of engineers working in fields that some would call questionable (adtech, intelligence/surveillance, copyright enforcement, credit rating, hyper capitalist companies like Uber etc.)

I am a person employed at what you would call a gambling site.

I don't have a problem selling a good that is honest and that people are free not to consume. I also wouldn't have an issue with working for a company that provided porn or drugs, when they become legal.

I would have a problem working for an isp and selling peoples data.

As opposed to company like Uber being run by a first-class suspect of a human?

Honest question.

Do you think that they have "questionable morality" by the business nature (gambling, porn, etc) or for how they run the business (ex. dark patterns) ?

i had business nature in mind

Many engineers are in the business of providing dopamine hits to users, most aren't in businesses considered "questionable morality".

What's a little gambling compared to developing surveillance technology, capturing and selling customer data, writing missile guidance software, you name it... Our industry excels at solving problems, and "there is a moral dilemma separating me from cash" is a problem we're especially good at solving.

I did a bit of recruiting for a, not quite porn, porn site in the past. I'm in the Midwest so that probably affected it but I did run into a decent number of people who didn't want to work in the industry or at that company.

If the NSA can recruit some of the best mathematicians and hackers, I don't think porn/gambling sites should have any problem recruiting.

I suspect more people on this site wanted to grow up to be code breakers and spies than porn purveyors.

Gambling itself isn't immoral.

some people think it is

morality is subjective

If morality is subjective is itself up for debate. I personally think morality is absolute. There is only one system of morality which isn't arbitrary and allowing morals to be arbitrary strips the word of any meaning.

Do a google search for "moral dilemma" and you will find many examples where it is very difficult to come up with simplistic black and white opinions.

Such dilemmas leave me with the idea that it is very naive to think there is some kind of absolute morality.

That's because you are using an inconsistent set of morals. It's like saying "there is a largest number" and "for every x, there exists the larger number x + 1".

So most things people consider morals cannot all be simultaneously morals. Without self-consistanty you will end up with paradoxes like you mention.

OK, this is sure to be a waste of time, but I'll bite...

http://psychopixi.com/uncategorized/25-moral-dilemmas/

Let's just start at the top. Please give your absolute morality solution that has "self-consistanty" (sic) to "The trapped mining crew".

> Heather is part of a four-person mining expedition. There is a cave-in and the four of them are trapped in the mine. A rock has crushed the legs of one of her crew members and he will die without medical attention. She’s established radio contact with the rescue team and learned it will be 36 hours before the first drill can reach the space she is trapped in.

She is able to calculate that this space has just enough oxygen for three people to survive for 36 hours, but definitely not enough for four people. The only way to save the other crew members is to refuse medical aid to the injured crew member so that there will be just enough oxygen for the rest of the crew to survive.

Should Heather allow the injured crew member to die in order to save the lives of the remaining crew members?

I'm not going to explain my whole moral system here and derive all the consequences out of it relevant to this scenario.

Maybe if you point out what aspect of my claim you take issue with, I could answer it briefly.

Well I've already said that I think it's naive to think there could be an absolute morality, and I've also given you a specific example of a situation where I suspect your moral system probably falls down.

You've just declined to offer any explanation of what your system would propose in that situation.

So I guess the aspect of your claim that I doubt is the mere existence of your self-consistent and absolute moral system at all?

Okay, there are 2 parts:

1. The consistency: it's just one rule, so it should be able to drive decisions without much ambiguity.

2. The "absoluteness": if it's unique as the only workable self-consistent moral system, that should suffice. Perhaps there are others, though I suspect they have one of these features:

a. they drive equivalent decisions FAPP

b. they are unstable and eventually won't be able to continue; either the hosts die or move onto another system

I admit I haven't proven this to be the case, but I suspect it's true, or at least something along these lines. Certainly the opposite hasn't been proven.

>1. The consistency: it's just one rule

...Which is?

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