Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhall1468 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com