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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> FB controversy doesn't erase technological accomplishments of individuals

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.

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>Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel algorithm to track people" on your resume?

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).

This is exactly right. In fact, Engineers can't blow the whistle on a company that's violating privacy law without harming our careers.

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.

> The great thing about writing resumes is that you can leave things off.

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.

>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.

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.

it doesn't look great if those accomplishments end up having a negative impact on society

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.

You're assuming that I'm even referring to Cambridge Analytica. I'm talking about the general sentiment towards Facebook in general as being an unethical company, of which the "leak" of data to Cambridge Analytica is a small part. There are other bad-faith things that Facebook has done, especially with regards to their users' privacy, that certainly have a negative impact on society.

So replace "Cambridge Analytics" with "ads".

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.

> Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel algorithm to track people" on your resume?

If the algorithm is truly novel then yes, absolutely.

So where do you draw the line? How many of these would you put on your resume?

"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 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 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.

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