How sure are you about that?
You may lose a small amount of jobs that would come your way, but you'd still likely have dozens of offers to choose from from companies that don't view you as 'tainted'.
Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much sense to punish the engineers when you invent ethical standards after-the-fact.
It doesn't, but it doesn't look great if those accomplishments end up having a negative impact on society. Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel algorithm to track people" on your resume?
> Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much sense to punish the engineers when you invent ethical standards after-the-fact.
I'll have to disagree with you there. Software engineers should have to deal with the ethical consequences of the work they've done. And these ethical standards are hardly "after-the-fact": the idea of a right to privacy has been around for a long time.
The great thing about writing resumes is that you can leave things off.
>Software engineers should have to deal with the ethical consequences of the work they've done.
Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report unethical behavior by companies then. You're arguing correctly on a moral ground, but you don't have good industry ethics without good legal precedents.
Otherwise the best chance you've got is to get media attention and now you're fighting the company's PR.
When you can point to "Defendant can no longer work in software development because of an ethical failure" cases, you will have a much stronger argument to get engineers to follow ethical guidelines (we're assuming those have been written down on something other than a Github-feelgood repo for that case).
I think Engineers who carry water for unethical companies probably get paid more. Your next employer would much rather hire you if you kept your head down during the PR Nightmare than if you made noise and created a problem for management.
Sure, but then you're diminishing the value of what you did. If someone asks you want you did at Facebook, it would be odd if you said "I'd rather not say", as would it if you had five years of blank in your resume.
> Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report unethical behavior by companies then.
I do agree that this is an issue that should be addressed.
I guess if you only worked on creepy and unsavory things, you'd be in a tough spot. Assuming you can't weasel-word your way out of the creepiness and make it more palatable.
If someone ultimately thinks that, you're back to "move on to the next company". And the consequences are paid then and there. But again, you can lean on the market's health to make those consequences really small.
You're assuming all employers (a) believe in and (b) care about Cambridge Analytica. That likely isn't the case.
It requires quite a leap to begin with, to believe that CA could actually "influence elections". But this is just the latest iteration of a very, very biased political viewpoint emanating from Dems-in-Denial. Back in Obama's time it was "elections can be bought with campaign spending", then it became "elections can be controlled with Twitter spam" and now it's "elections can be controlled through some vaguely specified process involving years-old data from Facebook profiles". The mechanism keeps changing but the underlying belief that voters who don't vote left-wing are just marionnettes on string remains.
If you don't believe that, and believe / know that voters make up their own minds consciously, based on the information they have, then this entire Facebook story would make no impact on your hiring decisions because the idea that Facebook is some sort of sordid unethical power broker seems ridiculous to begin with.
The vast majority of people do not consider advertising unethical. Nor do they consider social networks to be unethical.
I always struggle to figure out what classical rules of ethics Facebook (or Google) are supposed to have violated, but nobody can ever give me one. Instead there's a lot of begging the question.
If the algorithm is truly novel then yes, absolutely.
"I wrote software that took advantage of addictive behavior in new ways" "My new flagging mechanism, tailored to prevent users from leaving the platform, led to someone committing suicide after being unable to block an abuser" "My relevancy algorithm, based on what had the most engagement, led to a genocide"
I've made these purposefully extreme, but these are all based on reality. Making something "novel" isn't always a good thing.
I wouldn't put any of those on my resume, because they're ridiculous and don't represent the way people report their achievements. However, I would put the technology I developed on my resume that enabled any one of those things.
Personally, I'd be proud to have had significant involvement in the development of Facebook's data analysis and ingestion platform. I would not be proud of the Cambridge Analytica mistake in of itself, but that's because I don't conflate the underlying technology with a particularly grievous mistake that was happened because of the technology's existence.
Moreover, I contest your use of examples which are cartoonishly evil. I disagree with the fundamental premise that the technology is innately bad, or that your examples even remotely constitute an accurate portrayal of the internal culture at Facebook. I believe there are clear failures in Facebook's data analysis processes, but it's intellectually lazy and dishonest to misrepresent those failures using the obviously biased language in your examples. It's also unfair to mischaracterize the majority of people who work there as lacking in ethics.
You are correct that it doesn't. But our field also carries a lot less prestige, with most of it tied to the employer as opposed to our profession and skillsets.
This board often laments this fact.
I think adopting an Eichmann defense here is a big mistake and hurts our profession as a whole. We'd be indirectly surrendering a huge amount of autonomy. How can we have ownership over the positive outcome of what we create without also be willing to accept some of the responsibility for negative outcomes? When we wash our hands of these externaliities, to an outsider, it just looks like developers are nothing more than cogs in a machine, following orders. It just moves the glory up the food chain.
All occupations have the same ethical concerns, they're just a function of how much money can be made.
I think that's too strong of a word. It doesn't take a "sociopath" for a company to get to a bad place; merely the efforts of many engineers each doing something slightly immoral. Hopefully there are less of these now that they see what can happen to a company where such engineers work.