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Comment by kerng | Hacker News Reader

One of the good things about HN is that the engineers working and building these features are likely reading these posts too, I'm curious how one implements these things. Are engineers (some of the brightest ones) not realizing that some of their actions are ethically questionable, or is the big picture not visible to the average engineer in a large company like FB? I assume that many have the exact same reaction and don't think it's okat when discussing this topic - can hardly see anyone defending the current status quo.

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I have seen about 10% of my graduating cs class getting headhunted by Palantir Technologies.

From that sample size I'd estimate the percentage of engineers who don't care about ethics to be at least around 10%.

I'd love to work there..

In an ideal world, engineers would be perfectly ethical. But, you know, said hyperbolically, sociopaths can be engineers too. You should not induce from your own values to people in general.

Even apart from people without any values.. most engineers don’t hang out on HN, and don’t care much about global scale politics. They care about things that affect them in a very immediate way - family wellbeing, friends, coworkers, and how to pay the bills. I think many don’t infer how much of an impact their actions actually have, since they are „only spokes in the wheel“.

Yeah, most people see the world like this:

* Turn up to job. Nice people, good desk, good canteen. Benefits good.

* Work is interesting - working on cutting edge, dynamic web experiences that are changing the way we interact with people.

* Solved a knotty engineering problem today. Was very pleased, boss was impressed.

* Shipped product today. New sprint starts tomorrow. No defects!

The actual implications of any one feature, the borders between personal data and pure engineering problems blur. Your effort is only a small part of hundreds of effort-hours taken to ship and maintain a product. The decisions about where the lines are drawn were taken months or years ago by people who may or may not be at the company and who were also probably just trying to solve the problem that was in front of them.

You, the engineer, are never sat alone in a room with a user story that breaks GDPR for a product that is fully compliant. The future of the product never rests with you and only you.

Your post resonated with me, and it might be the social construct of being part of a large organization that allows these things to happen without any single one individual feeling responsible or in the wrong.

Years ago I remember hearing about the Normalization of Deviance and in many ways that's exactly what we see. Even Facebook's argument of others do the same is in alignment with such normalization. If everyone at jumps in a well, would Facebook to the same?

I recommend the book "Moral Mazes" for more on this subject.

Afaik software will be sane untill Lawyers and Finance execs are involved. Once they are into your company no more great software.

Zuckerberg is/was an engineer.

Is this a parody of the engineer's mindset?

One thing that always stands out to me on HN is how obsessed Silicon Valley is with money, from top to bottom. There's plenty people on here that would happily implement invasive tracking if they were compensated well enough for it.

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