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Comment by jhall1468 | Hacker News Reader

The moment you open that door you have created the ultimate scapegoat in every corporate decision. Now every engineer is personally responsible for corporate decisions. It's easy when you look at VW and Facebook, but the more nuanced these things get, the more that what your advocating for is that programmers have to be lawyers as well.

This horrible precedent and pushes the blame for everything downstairs. Meanwhile, corporate execs have the very corporate shielding you're advocating that engineers don't. Maybe you think they too shouldn't have such protections, but how you can advocate for personal liability for programmers without first implementing personal liability for executives is beyond me.

This so incredibly short-sighted.

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> This horrible precedent and pushes the blame for everything downstairs.

It’s already been set in other industries, the financial industry springs to mind.

Everybody in a bank is responsible for detecting and preventing money laundering. Failure to report money laundering if you suspect it is a criminal offence (this is true in the UK, I assume similar laws exist in the US). If your boss refuses to acknowledge your report, then you’re obligated to whistle blow.

There is no reason why a similar framework can’t exist elsewhere. A requirement that engineers report abuses of data, or corrupt behaviour, and an obligation to whistle blow of management refuse to acknowledge the issue.

These laws of-course place a heavy burden on C-suite execs, making it clear they can be held criminally liable for the misbehaviour of their organisation, even if they weren’t aware of. The simple act of not being aware of criminal behaviour is criminal.

Neither engineers not execs really make decisions to be good or evil. They implement the will of major shareholders who actually run the company. Satya Nadella has maybe 100s of millions, while the capitalization of MS is 1 trillion. This means that Satya isn't the decision maker. Only in small companies CEO and the owner is the same person.

this is complete nonsense that denies the factual agency these people absolutely have.

This is plain truth, not nonsense. You can go and start a corporation any time. If it appears successful, you need to hire a CEO and a bunch of other people. At that time you'll own nearly all preferred shares that give control. Despite CEO will get maybe 5% and will run the company, according to laws, preferreds will give you a final say in everything and you can fire that CEO at any time. This is even more true with big execs: they hold nowhere near 5%.

I don't advocate that corporate execs have shielding and the engineers don't. Where did you read that?

It sounds to me that you're misreading my comment on purpose, to make an us-vs-them argument that I fundamentally disagree with. This isn't about engineers vs bosses, it's about doing the right thing no matter what's on your business card.

The argument "if we can't shift the blame up, it'll automatically go down" simply doesn't make sense to me. You, and you alone, can choose to stop building evil shit.

I read that by the fact that you only talked about punishing engineers.

And I'm not misreading your comment on purpose, trust me I had to read it 4 times just to make sure I wasn't crazy and I was actually reading what I thought I was: someone advocating that bottom of the food chain employees be criminally liable for code they write.

You are making an us-vs-them argument, to be sure. Your "us" is consumers and your "them" are employees, rather than corporate executives that make the decisions.

I'm not a lawyer. I expect if I'm being asked to do something, it's been vetted by our corporate legal team. I should not be expected to know every aspect of criminal and civil law to protect myself from my employer.

What you are suggesting is absurd, but fortunately, I think most would agree with me on that.

Disagree. The idea that whatever you are asked to do has been vetted by others is an abdication of ethical responsibility. At present, a lot of what tech companies do is still legal, but that doesnt make it right. It's still legal because the maps of cyber law are largely still uncharted. An engineer working on a project that tracks user behavior without consent (for example) shouldn't be absolved or responsibility because their manager said it was okay.

Sometimes it is not clear cut.

Getting the same result in different ways can legal or not:

Obvious example:

Saving a x amount of money from taxes using a legal loophole is legal.

An exact equal company trying to save the exact same amount of money by lying to is doing something illegal.

Far less obvious example:

Around here (and possibly elsewhere, I don't know) if you make a drink from wine and spirits you have to pour the spirit first because increasing the strength of wine is illegal, but decreasing the strengt of spirits are OK.

A curious alcohol law with an interesting side effect. Where are you located?

Norway.

I thought it was an old joke, but someone I have reason to believe said it was true and you could get in trouble for it.

Last point is hilarious! Can't upvote that enough.

I'm not sure that moral responsibility for investigating the legality of instructions should rest with the employee, in cases where the instructions aren't clearly repugnant.

Consider the example of engineers getting the details of tax compliance in a payroll system wrong because their boss provided the wrong instructions. To my mind, they should not be at fault for this unless they demonstrably knew what they had been asked to do was illegal.

if you read it 4x and don't see his point, consider reading it another 4 times. you seem to be advocating that certain employees, "bottom of the food chain" in your parlance, aren't culpable for their actions whereas the parent was saying everyone is culpable for their actions

If that was your take away from what I said, I'd guess you could read my comment infinite times and fail to understand it.

[I expect if I'm being asked to do something, it's been vetted by our corporate legal team. I should not be expected to know every aspect of criminal and civil law to protect myself from my employer.]

"I have been only following orders" had stopped being a valid defense quite a long time ago.

The top comment referenced a line in the article criticizing both 'engineers and tech titans' and then only addressed the first half with a 'poor me' argument, which seems to have distorted this entire thread.

That's you. I've quit jobs before because I was not willing to do something that went against my principles. I think it's pretty simple to ask yourself how you'd feel if you were on the opposite end of some questionable corporate action and later found out that you had been deceived or exploited.

I made no mention of my personal ethics. I said vetted legally. Rest assured your principles almost certainly do not align exactly with the law. You may do something illegal without the knowledge you have. You may have contributed to some illegal because you weren't privy to the sum of the parts.

Which is exactly why this is such a horrible idea.

Yeah but there are a ton of protections for that legal situation, and there's lots of things that are legal but deeply unethical because laws are unjust. This is an primarily an ethical issue.

It's kinda like asking all the ICE (internal combustion engine) engineers at ford, toyota, nissan, dodge, etc... to stop working on ICE right now because of climate change. Now they can do that, and ask to be re-assigned to EVs, but you can bet they can't replace all those jobs with EV jobs. (at least immediately, maybe in 10 to 20 years)

First off, I'm referring to significantly more unethical stuff than making an ICE.

But even then, the programmers working on ICEs can find a different job in a heartbeat.

I'm not asking the other people working at these, or any, companies to do the same. I'm asking people with top in-demand skills to start considering the ethics of their jobs.

>But even then, the programmers working on ICEs can find a different job in a heartbeat.

Not even close.

As a former embedded software engineer for the automotive sector, moving to another industry was a very difficult task, as in automotive you pidgenhole yourself in some tech that's specific to this industry and is outdated or not used everywhere else.

Thank God I got out in time.

No. Programmers don't have to be lawyers but they do have to make ethical decisions and be willing to enforce them (by walking away from money offers to do something that violates their principles).

Sure, executives will always try to push the blame downstairs. That's why you should be willing to sell them out if necessary.

There is an enormous difference between making ethical decisions and being prosecuted which this advocated for.

There’s a reason we have vocabulary for this kind of situations, ie. Nuremberg Defense.

>Now every engineer is personally responsible for corporate decisions.

This is the entire point. If the "corporate decision" involves doing bad things, and then you go ahead and implement those bad things as an engineer...you deserve to be held responsible for your part in it.

> you deserve to be held responsible for your part in it.

... as long as you are aware of it or should have been aware of it.

Because making the crowbar is part of the crime?

No, I don't think that makes a lot of sense. Many young engineers can't see societal potential in what they do. They see solving the technical problem and completing the task.

Senior engineers with a lot more experience have insight into "why" but that's often the point when they're given responsibility to guide others.

The "should we do this?" question rests on the shoulders of those with insight that faces the outside world, and not just the programmer's editor on the screen. That's management.

What do I know about it? Was an engineer (programmer), and now I run teams of engineers. I often have to direct them on how not to solve a problem, for reasons of customer privacy, security, or responsibility, as much as to what problem we must solve.

Responsibility increases the higher up you go in the management chain.

> Many young engineers can't see societal potential in what they do.

Then they are defective citizens. Citizenry before a job is just not that complicated.

Everyone is complicit in dirty work and I've very happily fired clients and quit jobs for being dirty. Do thou likewise or have your fellow citizens find you wanting for it. It's not hard.

The problem here is dirty isn't well-defined. You are playing the moral superiority card without knowing what your particular moral/ethical line is.

Seems HN is primarily comprised of people without families that can just quit their job and it's not big deal, all in the name of their particular set of moral standards. You can tell when they say things like "it's not hard" when deciding to quit their job.

For the fast majority of people, it is hard. Most peoples ethical guidelines shift rapidly when the alternative means harming their loved ones.

It's definitely not hard to proclaim things aren't hard. Reality is often different.

Yup. We could argue every bit of marketing is evil. So much of it is targeted at children or people that are otherwise easy to convince to buy shit they probably don't need, and based on US retirement savings, probably can't afford.

I worked in free to play games for a time and I rationalized you could get entertainment value up to a point and if you wanted more you paid. However, we all know certain people can't stop at that point. Same reason why casinos flourish.

Ethics CAN be clear cut but even things like drones or surveillance equipment can have both good and evil applications.

My spouse is an engineer and we often talk about the engineering ethics module where students were taught to think about such things using examples like the Ford Pinto, the O-rings on the space shuttle etc.

If you had worked at Ford and designed, say, the steering wheel or transmission of the Pinto, you might well be excused for not appreciating the flaws in its design. But if you were one of the engineers that was asked to put the gas tank up near the rear fender where it was much likelier to rupture in the event of a wholly foreseeable collision, then you had a responsibility to consider and push back against cost-saving measures that were likely to jeopardize riders' safety.

In general, if a manager is telling you not to worry about something, it's shady.

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