People working at Facebook and Google lie to themselves that they're doing something important while working for a "cool" tech company. They're ignorant to the fact that these companies make their entire revenue from advertisements.
Also realized engineers are not revolutionaries. We like to work on things that a textbook talks about. The kind of problems these articles talk about most engineers have no idea how to solve. And it's in our nature to say so and shrink away from such problem.
Look at Elon Musk today talking about how depressing it would be not to goto space. Poverty and War are depressing too but Engineers know how to build rockets better than they know how to address poverty and peace.
What ends up happening is the space we shrink away from gets filled with characters who don't know what they are doing. They compensate by pandering to the public and buying time mostly for themselves to retire to a nice little island.
Having said all that as an Engineer reaching his retirement I feel quite disappointed in the culture we have left behind for the next generation.
Colonizing Mars would require engineers to develop more than just rockets. At some point political-economic models of colonies would have to be developed, in order to determine whether colonies will be economically sustainable without subsidies from Earth. Asking people to imagine how these colonies should be organized, and how to measure whether they will be economically sustainable, requires them to consider economic and political ideas which could be later applied to the problems of poverty and political instability on Earth.
One potential model that could work well for Mars in order to reduce political tensions between competing colonies and to establish a clear and efficient mechanism for financing territorial public services is cellular democracy:
I'm not sure what country you're in, but here, these 10 digit numbers and their various prefixes (NPAs AKA "area codes") are literally burned into the consciousness of most citizens, without them even realizing it. Additionally, all modern cellular services here are still following it in some sense or other, making it an example of highly entrenched technical debt. I'm pretty sure that the design of this system bled heavily into most other countries' telephone networks as well.
A small number of engineers probably drew up this plan on a chalkboard in the 1940s at AT&T, without a clue as to the magnitude of future ramifications.
As a profession, software engineers have very weak ethical standards. We have no Hippocratic oath, we have no iron ring. We might not be happy about it, but we'll release code that we know to be dangerously buggy, we'll cooperate with surveillance agencies, we'll design systems that exploit users, we'll build products that are sold to the governments of Saudi Arabia or Libya.
If software engineers were collectivised, we could refuse to do all of this shady stuff. Any software engineer tasked with doing something unethical could simply say "I'm not doing that, I'd lose my license". By establishing a professional body equivalent to the Bar Association or the General Medical Council, we could throw a giant wrench in the machinery of evil.
It's easy to take a stand when you either have a lot of sway or you're a critical component. It's not so easy when you've got people to feed and there are 100 people in line to take your spot.
In an ideal world, engineers and developers alike could really reshape a lot of business practices. For example, developers could say no to creating dark patterns, and engineers could say no to building with substandard parts. Both could say no to unrealistic deadlines that force shoddy workmanship and ugly shortcuts. Too bad that if you won't do it, someone else will gladly do it in your place.
The only way to realistically do it is to put up with it, and then change the culture of the company once you've gotten high enough in the chain. That can take years, and there is no guaranteed payoff. Of course, the other method is to create a union, a coalition of developers, or even an external organization (the EFF, Wikileaks) to back up developers or apply pressure. Doing that is a monumental task in and of itself.
I am not disagreeing with you. In fact, I encourage this behavior. It's hard for a lot of people to do it in practice though.
I've been thinking a lot recently about Xerox PARC - a unique situation where smart people were given a wide degree of latitude, and the result was they came up with some world-changing things.
I understand that businesses have a legitimate right to work toward their end (the bottom line) - but in this rapidly changing world I think responsible people need to step up and say "enough is enough, we make these things, and here's how WE want to make them."
Even at startups - the incentives are such that oftentimes user privacy is compromised. The economic model of ads supporting software is profitable but is it really the way we want to work?
Unfortunately we may be too far down this road. People don't generally want/expect to pay for software. I think this is limiting and troublesome in the long term.
For example, developers do pay for MS toolkit despite alternatives. Certain architects and designers pay for Autodesk software. Or 3D modelling even despite existence of Blender. There are quite a few of music software options that are strictly paid. Higher end video authoring software. Numeric and statistical packages. Electronics design and simulation software. Games... Heck, people still pay for office suites.
What we don't see is people paying for CRUD as much as they used to.
What matters is that the software in question is truly great for doing something, competition is not to big and that the enterprise users ultimately catch on. Of course few start-ups want to tangle with that.
This is true for exactly 0 engineers at Google and Facebook. Every single one of them could easily find another job if they wanted to leave.
I think you guys seriously need to consider the possibility that these people are actually OK with what they're doing and simply have different values and priorities than you do.
> It's hard for a lot of people to do it in practice though.
The world of development exists outside of the tech giants. There are more people doing dev work outside of those giant companies that are still making an impact.
I don't deny that there can be apathy. Some people show up, do what they're told, and collect money without regards as to what they're doing.
> I don't deny that there can be apathy
I'm not talking about apathy, I'm talking about actually understanding and being OK with what you're doing. Google and Facebook have just short of 90,000 employees between them (not all of them engineers, of course) - it's extremely misanthropic to assume that they are all either apathetic or consciously doing evil.
A very large number of people understand and are largely perfectly OK with the substance of what Facebook and Google are doing.
My wife has an electrical engineering degree and she had to take ethics courses and pass an exam in them as part of her credentialing process, which in turn shaped her career decisions significantly. I find it troubling that ethics are not considered a very important topic in software development or indeed many spheres of business activity.
It's not that I expect people to necessarily share my opinions; what distresses me is that many arguments I encounter from contrary positions are so utterly shallow that you can tell the person hasn't really thought about such issues very much. Positivism has a great deal to answer for.
As long as we avoid physiological tricks like the flashing of frames you can't consciously see type thing (I know that is questionable to having an effect) its a good thing. I get shown products/services I might like to buy, in return I get free emails, news and videos etc. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
I can't imagine something that has had the positive impact on my education and entertainment like google.
Take youtube alone- if google did nothing else, they've enabled a infinite compendium of how-tos on almost every topic imaginable to everyone on the planet, free of charge.
That is _amazing_.
I also think the amount of important things Google is doing has decreasing drastically. Chrome is the last major completely-in-house product I recall Google has released, that wasn't sourced from an acquisition. (That isn't to say acquisitions don't count for anything, but clearly they were able to develop their special sauce outside of Google, so Google is not required to do that thing.)
Then the government can easily target those, just go and hack, or confiscate the server that has the stuff of key opposition people. And no one will even know. Sure, those people, that 10 people will. But that's it. No one else will notice. Yes, a newspaper might write about it, and what?
Now, if Gmail disappears, people notice.
And Google has a very competent security team. Small groups don't and won't.
And so far Apple choose to sort of stand up for data protection. Google too, tries to do things securely (project zero, fuzzing, and so on) and fight NSLs and whatevers to a certain point. MS also went to court against DoJ over gag orders.
But what does that mean when they'll face a very underhanded administration, where things will just have to be done, when boots on the door first and you can maybe win in court later. (See also retroactive immunity, see also how long it took to stop "accumulating" maybe-terrorists in Guantanamo.)
But we also forget how bad other places have it. I've already mentioned China, but Turkey and Russia is the poster child for how things are going when you appoint friends to every position for more than 10 years, they have an incentive to please you and automatically side with you (and we haven't even talked about the obscene amount of money disappearing in the pockets of those friends).
People died because of money and conservative/fundamentalist ideology in Russia with the total blessing of the state/regime (I like the phrase `power structure` better.)
All in all, I think worrying about data is laughable, because when they are coming for data, a lot more is already long lost. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=VK_(social_networ... ) - that is people have to be vigilantly scrutinizing every other actor in a democracy, not just data miners (data-enhanced service providers), anyhow, to keep them honest.