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>Every software engineer I’ve worked with has had a strong sense of personal values and ethics, but the organizations we work for can take actions that are at odds with these. I’d like to highlight a few of the key challenges you’ll face and provide feedback for living your personal values. Most importantly, it’s critical that you think about the impact of your work and consciously set your personal values in advance of inevitable future challenges.

I'd agree with this assessment of developers. However I've come into these exact moral dilemmas myself in the line of working for various companies doing web programming. How did I resolve them? By making the decision that affected my own bottom line favorably. When looked at in isolation, it's impossible for a single developer to say no to the incentives of doing "evil" work. It won't be until the field of software engineering really matures and develops a set of standards bodies like other professions that engineers will have some sort of protection. Physicians can refuse to perform a procedure they're told to in the name of protecting their medical license. A software engineer should likewise be held to the same standard.

> I'd agree with this assessment of developers. However I've come into these exact moral dilemmas myself in the line of working for various companies doing web programming. How did I resolve them? By making the decision that affected my own bottom line favorably.

That would be _not_ having a strong sense of personal values and ethics. If your good morals always lose out to the promise of more money, that's you not having good morals. Just own up to it instead of pretending the real culprit here is a lack of governing bodies that should be protecting you from all the evil money out there.

You cannot build the world based on the strength of individuals' moral spine, because a) there's plenty of people with weak ones who will happily outcompete individuals refusing unethical work, and - the more important - b) people respond to incentives. For instance, we have the law and the police even though people in general seem naturally good - they exist to counterbalance incentives that make people do bad things. Saying "just own up to it instead of pretending the real culprit here is a lack of governing bodies that should be protecting you from all the evil money out there" ignores the most basic fact about humans - people do respond to incentives.

Moral dilemmas don't look like "do I accept this high salary for doing evil, or prefer a slightly smaller salary for not doing evil". Moral dilemma is what a hypothetical Jane faces, after one of her parents died and the second is unemployed, when she has to provide for the parent and her younger siblings, while also trying to start her own life with her fiancée. For her, abandoning a high-paying salary that is actually eaten up entirely to let two families live in stability and with dignity, is not a trivial problem. The idea of having support of governing bodies is to turn such life-quality-threatening situations into easy choices, so that people don't get severely punished for doing the right thing.

Also: ethics can be, and is, used to abuse people. In Poland, we have this situation with paramedics, nurses and doctors on residency, who are severely overworked (to the point it's a serious health threat, and causes an occasional suicide), severely underpaid, and on top of that they're told by everyone that they can't protest because that would mean providing worse care for patients, which is obviously unethical.

This is a great post. However, it seems also that it is impossible to build the world based solely on official policy and law. We need people to continually make moral decisions in their own lives, to the best of their ability. This involves making sacrifices and ignoring incentives at times.

How do we find this balance? I'm not sure. I think we may always be searching for it.

This is were abstractions like religion come into play. Unfortunately it's taking awhile for them to modernize and adjust to the point where they're culturally relevant again so we can stop socially shaming people who participate in religious groups/orginaizations. But I do believe we as a society have, of late, over-zealously crusaded against the religious archetype in a rather naive stance that science will lead the way...

I agree. What I mean is recognition of human nature. We do respond to incentives, there's no working around that (at least for now; maybe we'll have some mind-engineering tech in the future). We want people to do good, and to achieve this we need to both strengthen individual sense of morality and shape the incentives and engineer systems that protect from pressure - because we recognize no human is immune to incentives.

Will we find the right balance? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. The balance we have now is dynamic - people do bad things, but not enough of them to cause a societal collapse. Incentives are recursive, too - institutions are formed not out of abstract thinking, but because there were enough bad things happening on that some people had a powerful incentive to stop them.

Fully agree, I just wanted to stress both aspects. I do think the systemic and incentive based side of things is more difficult to understand, so it's good to articulate those concepts. Either way, I think it's important to keep having these conversations.

It is possible to say no to the incentives of doing evil work; I would describe those who say no as the people with "a strong sense of personal values and ethics". This phrase has no meaning if you apply it to people who routinely violate their own beliefs in order to make more money, especially in a highly-compensated profession with a booming job market and plenty of available positions that don't require unethical behavior.

Every job I've had wanted to work me to the bone. I'd violate my personal ethics for stress-free work that'd pay my mortgage.

That's fine, but ultimately how can you look down on people like Trump, Ajit Pai, or the CEO of Comcast? They're sacrificing ethical decisions for money, same as you.

Only difference is they're getting "fuck you" money and you're barely getting enough to buy a house. Kinda lame to sell out for so little IMO.

As long you don't complain about these types of people, then whatever, but if you do you need to take a harder look in the mirror!

Ah, I get it. The "my leaders should have more integrity than me" mentality. Well guess what? One day you may be a leader...and you'll still have your crap, anti-social mentality.

Nuclear missiles, land mines, biological weapons, torture research, etc has all been carried out by willing and often motivated engineers or doctors.

I'm skeptical something that hasn't worked in other fields is going to fix our woes in software.

Probably because it was interesting and cutting edge, and so they rationalized it to themselves, like humans are so good at doing.

As a profession, we need a set of ethical standards.

I tell companies I "Won't build products that hurt people."

You wouldn't be surprised how many doors this closes.

Every software engineer I’ve worked with has had a strong sense of personal values and ethics, but the organizations we work for can take actions that are at odds with these.

Do they though? I've noticed a trend where the strength of some developers' beliefs are proportional to how unethical the products they're paid to build are.

This makes me suspect that for many people, the ethical stance they take is a coping mechanism for excusing their own actions with the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense.

This sounds like the new govt policy being introduced in China to publicly shame loan defaulters

http://fortune.com/2017/10/11/china-debt-evaders-loans-black...

I am curious as to what your issue is with the loan setup. Inn my mind out is an alternative to a traditional loan, how is that bad?

It felt like a modern day scarlet letter, instead of a innovative new way to deliver cheaper loans. There are other techniques to deliver cheaper loans, which don't lead to social ostracism (and which don't violate any social network terms of services).

because your tricking poor investors into thinking the returns would be better. "Most" people that don't pay usually don't pay because they can't pay. And people that don't live up to their obligations and can pay will probably sue you for your predatory lending and cruel loan terms.

It is bad for the same reason that 100% interest loans are bad.

They are predatory on poor people, and they trick people into accepting something when they don't really understand the consequences or "believe" them.

A person may incorrectly accept a loan like this, while being under the mistaken assumption that they aren't at risk of the consequences. Sometimes people just make bad decisions.

It is really immoral to take advantage of someone like that.

Social connections (social capital?) is also how poor people survive everyday setbacks that others would pay their way out of, a “social stockade” would be debilitating.

Debilitating your debtor IMHO seems counterproductive for getting a loan repaid. But is the harm it would cause even an unforeseen coincidence - the guy might have heard some of the studies on how crucial social connections are in poverty and gone "aha! Here's something that truly matters to them, it could be wielded as a cheap big stick in loan repayments"