We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for, but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at Amazon it not be because of the loss of that guy's engineering skills.
What would actually make the world a better place is if we recognized that we're really just well paid technicians, and that the true power in society is held by a relatively small number of people who hold a massive amount of capital. We need to give up the fantasy that we can change things with individual action, and start looking towards collective, society-level solutions to the problems today.
— Charles de Gaulle.
-- misattributed to Napoleon, on staff promotions
Maybe if we call it a "guild" (like the screen actors guild) it'll be more palatable to software developers who fancy themselves beyond the need for something as blue-collar as a union.
Yes, in part. But it's almost always enabling collective action that benefits the (current) workers (and the union officials).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/United_S...
> Yes, in part. But it's almost always enabling collective action that benefits the (current) workers (and the union officials).
What's the problem with that? Corporations almost always enable collective action to primarily benefit (current) shareholders (and executive management).
This kind of thinking is exactly why Amazon warehouse workers are fed up.
You want to pass a law with the current pro-big-company politicians in power? Like the laws that companies ignore on a regular basis because the enforcement arm of has been dismembered? Even in cases where it hasn't been, the cost of complying with the law is often more expensive than breaking it and eating the fine.
Yeah passing a law sounds like it'll solve the problem real quick. /s
> You want to pass a law with the current pro-big-company politicians in power? Like the laws that companies ignore on a regular basis because the enforcement arm of has been dismembered? Even in cases where it hasn't been, the cost of complying with the law is often more expensive than breaking it and eating the fine.
There are a lot of problems to be solved, as your list shows. Cynicism-fueled paralysis isn't going to fix any of them. Neither will fixating on a few easy but known-ineffective methods of change (e.g. petitioning the local lord, er, company management to voluntarily do the right thing, even though the king, er, shareholders have other ideas).
The way hard problems are typically solved in a democracy is someone organizes a political movement that pushes for a platform of laws to solve them. Oftentimes those laws are more radical than what eventually gets passed, but that's bargaining.
You'll never get what you want if you make all your concessions even before you make your first offer.
What have you done?
So why would your top-down collective action be any different?
I think we've only ever seen things work sustainably when every individual adopts a particular set of behaviours, but maybe this is mostly just semantics?
A single engineer at Facebook will not make a difference today. 10 or 12 years ago they absolutely could have changed the course of the company.
Almost all collective change is spearheaded by the ideas and leadership of a few individuals.
Edit: to be a little less terse, in 1996 I quit working for Amazon. There were multiple reasons, some not connected with the company, but a number that were based on my perception of what sort of corporate culture it was going to be have. And yet ... here we are.
Is there anything I could have done in the 14 months I helped build the initial version of amazon to change how things turned out? Is there anything I could have done after that time if I had stayed? Employee #1 had similar misgivings but stayed for 5 years, and was arguably equally ineffective at altering the "nature of the beast".
So sometimes, even though it appears that we do have the power to either (a) withdraw our labor from an organization (b) remain and voice dissent, it ends up doing no good if the actual leadership is following a clearly defined (in their mind) path.
There will always be enablers for the sort of culture that a company like one of the FAANGs want to build.
The people who tend to get power are far from being the most qualified to shape society. People who are good at taking tend to be bad at giving. Shaping society in a good way requires an altruistic (not opportunistic) mindset. Opportunists will constantly see a way to profit and will not be able to resist the temptation. Their personal interests will always get mixed up in their philanthropy so it will never be truly effective. The faith which winners place in the virtues of capitalism is part of the problem.
Ultimately, profit is the product of exploitation. Most successful people will refuse to acknowledge this and that is why they tend to not be effective at shaping a healthy society.
(obviously, razor blades are not a particularly current example :)
It seems like you are painting a picture where Amazon was destined from the beginning to be dealing with the issues it is now. Were there no other possible futures? Were there not individuals who had a massive impact?
I'm related to someone who runs very fairly large warehousing operations across north america. His decisions have certainly been influenced by employees. Hell, I think I've changed his mind on an issue or two over dinner conversations.
I am sure that along the way there have been people inside the company who have shifted its direction towards "better" when viewed from the perspective of society as a whole and the majority of its employees, but those shifts are tiny compared to the momentum of Bezos' conception maintained by suites of VPs etc.
And remember, Bezos et al. almost certainly believe that they are doing the right thing. He might be richest man in the world, but he thinks he got that way by doing something good. He's not so stupid as to imagine the company has no downsides, but I am absolutely certain that he is absolutely certain that Amazon is a net positive for the world.
making a difference or not is a false dichotomy.
Every single candidate refusing to work for fb makes a difference of size one.
If you don't listen, you get shown the door and they'll pay someone who will listen.
Techies, and everyone else, included.
Edit, re the enlightening discussion below:
You are complicit in your employer’s behaviour, more-so if you are reasonably able to find another job, but decide against it.
If you drive or ride in any sort of vehicle that uses gasoline, then you're helping big oil get away with the deepwater horizon oil spill. ... Or even if you purchase any good or service that was transported by a vehicle that uses gasoline.
By using gas you're normalizing a system that accepts oil extraction as necessary which furthers the dubious behavior of the people responsible for deepwater.
Also by not using gas or any good or service that uses gas then you're making yourself look crazy which also furthers the dubious behaviors of big oil.
So now that everyone is evil; it really doesn't matter if anyone is evil. Might as well catch fish and drown them with oil by hand. Either way dubious behavior is furthered, so why not.
You're going to need a lot more nuance and practicality to make a meaningful statement in this realm.
Filling your car with petrol and choosing to stay with a dubious firm are at opposite ends.
The difference, to me, is your ability to avoid the complicity.
It’s hard, for most, not to drive in their petrol-based car.
But for many techies, it’s not hard to choose a different tech firm.
Obviously what’s reasonable is up for debate.
I’d say leaving one firm for another firm, in a decent job market is definitely doable.
Not using your car, on the other hand, for lots of people, isn’t reasonable.
It is hard and probably not possible for some. But you still have some agency: you can use a bicycle or public transit when possible, buy a more fuel efficient car, etc. You’ll still use gas but less overall. Not as drastic as not using a drop of oil anymore but still something.
You communicate that you do not approve of the behaviour and will not help. By staying, you accomplish the opposite.
It's a small voice. But a society valuable voice. Society is a number of small voices.
The reason MLKs need to exist is because fewer people raise their voice.
For those interested his story is a pretty interesting example of a weird bumbling nerd who annoyed most people, transitioning into a sort GodFather of Collective Action. How he built such a large network of backers is as interesting as the tools he used and what results he produced.
Certainly, when I was considering going there, people pointed me to his writings, and overall the writings increased my positive impression of the idea of developing AWS, beyond my already positive impression from using it.
This also suggests one way in which we each could, perhaps should, make an individual difference: when we're working at an organization, we're implicitly endorsing and representing it to other prospective hires. We should hope that our presence there would make others want to work there more.
I couldn't agree more. It's quite tiresome to constantly hear about techbros somewhere "solving problems", "changing the world", achieving "disruption" yadda yadda yadda. You're building apps and websites, that's just about it. It just sounds unprofessional to describe yourself any differently. What's wrong with just being properly on-task as a well-oiled cog in some huge collective machinery?
How do con artists work? They let you think you have the upper hand while you are being taken to the cleaners. If you think of it this way it’s not just the sort of hubris that gets one into “trouble”, it’s the sort that gets one exploited.
More distressingly, this means that any work at a funky, independent, ethical company is merely laying the foundation for future unethicality, like Y2K Google.
The industry is known for contempt of the law, tax evasion, and oppression of the poor and minorities because this is what our society is known for.
Fantasies of personal power abound as we engage in cultural wars with our fellow citizens on personally important, but nationally and structurally irrelevant topics. We feel strongly about gender/animal/gun/vaccination/religious rights and engage in passionate debates and demonstrations as wealth, power, and freedom is gradually and inexorably stolen from all of us.
> I escalated through the proper channels and by the book.
He only left after he felt he had exhausted his options of influence (This being my interpretation).
Leaving just as a knee jerk reaction without making effort to change would be bad, to me personally almost worse than remaining. Of course quitting can be in many cases feel easier/more attractive than trying to navigate through the office politics. But if you manage to flip even small corner of Google or whatever to not do evil (as they used to say) that probably has more influence to the wider society than you quitting.
Counterpoint being that you need to recognize if you are making that change or not, and if you are not able to do so then quitting might be the right choice
That reminds me of this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz-bystand...):
> Some people unwittingly help atrocities occur by cooperating in an attempt to mitigate a monstrous situation. History demonstrates that this is nearly always a miscalculation. During the Holocaust, Jewish councils organized life in the ghetto and compiled lists of Jews for deportation, often thinking that they were helping Jews manage a nightmare. Ultimately, they helped the Nazis murder Jews by maintaining order and providing the Gestapo with the names of people to be deported and murdered. In his memoir, “Legislating the Holocaust,” Bernhard Lösener, a lawyer in the Third Reich’s Ministry of the Interior, relays how he hurriedly traveled through the night to get to Nuremberg in time to write the Nuremberg race laws so that the rule of law would be preserved, and how he fought to have the race laws written to count as Jewish those with three Jewish grandparents rather than those with one drop of Jewish blood. He too made the mistake of participating in the atrocity in an attempt to minimize the damages caused by its perpetrators.
> Lösener remains the lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg race laws, lending a veneer of legality to a crime. Maybe someone else would have ignored the rule of law or written more draconian laws if he hadn’t, but maybe not. What we can decide is whether we will be a participant in terrible things done by terrible people. It never works to participate in the terrible thing in order to try to make it less bad. It’s tempting, and can seem like the right thing to do: Lösener’s race laws included fewer people than a one-drop rule would (though that had negligible effect). Adolf Eichmann reasoned similarly: “If this thing had to be done at all, it was better that it be done in good order.” History shows that when you participate in an atrocity together with the perpetrators, in an attempt to make it somehow a little less horrible, in the end you’re still participating in the atrocity — and it is no less horrible.
The culture and actions are set from top. If it is possible to change things, then great go for it. But make sure you are not staying for illusion of "navigating office politics" that amounts to being naive enabler moving himself more and more in the direction of the employer, convincing himself that more and more is actually fine.
> But if you manage to flip even small corner of Google or whatever to not do evil (as they used to say) that probably has more influence to the wider society than you quitting.
That is unlikely. For the record, I do not think that being employed in Google is inherently wrong. But you are not doing the world some kind service for working there. Just like working in startup does not mean you are changing the world.
First: you might have more impact on the organization from the inside than from the outside (this is most relevant to people joining at a high/senior level). For example, Google seems to be making privacy far, far worse. Yet there are some people on the inside fighting to limit the privacy violations, which leads to decisions like banning GPS tracking in their contact tracing app[0]. Would the world be better or worse off if the only people working at Google were people who don't care at all about user privacy? I'm honestly not sure, but I can at least see an argument that it might be even worse off.
Second: you might get something from the organization that lets you do good that outweighs any harm you contribute to (this is more relevant to junior employees). Many employers provide something (training, future job opportunities, or a high enough income to open your own small business/non-profit). A thoughtful employee can go into a "negative impact" employer with eyes wide open and a plan to get something, and get out.
However, in either case, self awareness and a definite exit plan are _key_. As Drew writes, once you are working at a "negative impact" employer,
> Doublethink quickly steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive dissonance, and you take another little step towards becoming the person you once swore never to be.
The way to avoid that sort of conative dissonance is 1) know that you'll experience it and be on guard against it, and 2) know all along that you're there temporarily and should never get too comfortable. Even then, you should be realistic about how long you can maintain your personal values in face of a very different culture. For a junior employee, I'd say two, maybe three years should be the absolute limit before you get out.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-ap...
I think it's important to distinguish between two types of changes: changes in factual information versus changes in values. If someone changes their mind because they have more information, then that's basically fine (it could be bad if the new information is wrong or misleading, of course, but there's no fundamental objection). And working at a company does sometimes lead to this sort of change (learning about confidential info, for example).
If someone changes their views based on something other than facts, though, it means that their values have changed: something that used to be important to them no longer is, or something else has grown in importance. In my experience, this sort of change is much more common when someone works for an employer for a long period of time – it's not that they have learned important new facts about that employer, it's just that they are now culturally "on the inside" and don't want to think ill of their friends and colleagues (there's that cognitive dissonance again).
You asked "who are we to tell them what's wrong and right?". I believe that we _can_ legitimately criticize someone else's value system, but that's getting into (admittedly contended) philosophy.
Instead of wading into the philosophical debate, I'll just say this: Most people don't want their values to change (that's almost what it means for something to be a "value": you value it!). And (imo) most people significantly underestimate the amount of values drift that can take place for purely social reasons. Given that I care about living up to my values, I don't want to hack my brain in ways that make me stop caring about those values. And that's just as true when the change to my brain comes from working ~5 years with basically decent folks as if it came from brain surgery. (And, imo, smart nerds are especially at risk of underestimating how much their values can drift based on their peer group.)
The one thing that bugs me about a post like this is where does our complicity end? Did Drew also change all his investments to divest from Amazon or Facebook or other company that is making the world worse? Nestle is one of the most evil companies in the world. Are we all boycotting all their products and not investing in their companies? We can all do more to make the world a better place but each individual has to decide their own thresholds. It is impossible for each of us to stand against all the evils in the world. Most of us have been very happy with 30% returns in our retirement even though we secretly know it is driven by the same companies we claim must be stopped. Most people just want to provide for their family and live their life. Not everyone can (or wants to) be a social justice warrior. It is a very complicated issue and I think we paint it too black and white at times.
Yes.
>Nestle is one of the most evil companies in the world. Are we all boycotting all their products and not investing in their companies?
Yes.
>Most of us have been very happy with 30% returns in our retirement even though we secretly know it is driven by the same companies we claim must be stopped.
Not me. I don't think this is right, and I don't appreciate the attempts at the normalization this idea. Don't be the 'Good German'.
I'm merely discussing that we too often we make a stand against one "evil" and not against others that are even easier. For a lot of people the line is what becomes inconvenient. People are posting comments that Amazon should treat people better while they spin up a new instance and order next day toilet paper. This is important stuff to talk about. I doubt that most people who agree with your actions and are posting support are also divesting the same way you are. We can all do more and take more action against what is wrong. I applaud your actions. The hard part is taking actions by a few and turning it into a movement that causes rippling change.
Many people actually do try as hard as possible, wherever practicable to do the right thing, and restrict themselves in the process.
The distinctions then become whether they agree on the set of 'bad things', not whether they do them or not.
If you think something is bad, like really bad, just stop doing it, you are not some poverty-level sharecropping farmer, you have that choice.
Everyone makes those choices, even you. Be happy with your decision, but while you judge other people as "good germans" recognize that you are a good german too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080583
>There's a pretty damn big difference between throwing out $5 of food while someone across the Earth starves, and in directly making the software which opresses millions of people, raising millions of dollars for the people responsible, and pocketing huge salaries for yourself.
Working for bigcorp as a software engineer is pretty long on that spectrum.
Just draw any line, anywhere; and everyone can draw a different line for themselves. Acknowledging that there is evil is the first step to improvement, and that happens when you draw a line.
The real problematic attitude is to say there is no evil, or if there is evil it is not my responsibility and my decision framework will not include any ethical calculations. Sadly, there are far too many people with this attitude, probably the majority, who make it impossible for the rest to improve the world.
Ot, but I'm not sure I get this: google maps tracks most people all the time. Are they suddenly concerned about the privacy implications when it's about a temporary, non commercial product meant to manage a pandemic and handled by democratically elected governments instead of a multinational corporation?
You can't work in fashion because it uses child labor. Rare metals used in electronics are mined in places with terrible work conditions. Don't even get me started on petroleum dependent industries.
What does that leave us with ?
Even companies that build apps or SAAS make their money from clients in these industries or consumers who are as a majority employed by them. Just because we establish a few degrees of separation from the problem, doesn't mean we stop being complicit in it.
Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies. If Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have enough of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop.
Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility of the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It should be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and ban/punish gamers who outright attempt to break the system (cheat).
It seems that the political left (which usually drives these movements) would rather put the onus on the companies to change while taking millions in lobbying money, than hold them accountable for their actions.
I recognize that the systemic favoring of republicans in the electoral system, might force the left to keep appearances, lest be viewed as hostile to businesses and lose the vital 5% of the swing electorate. But, that still means, that the problem is lack of electoral reform and not 'Amazon being a greedy company'.
> Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility of the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It should be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and ban/punish gamers who outright attempt to break the system (cheat).
Those aren't mutually exclusive, IMHO. Instead or in-addition to patching the "exploits," the law could be changed to make it clear that companies have obligations besides solely delivering "value" to their shareholders (IIRC that understanding of companies is actually pretty recent). Obviously it'd take more work to figure out how to do that than an internet comment warrants, but I'm not convinced it's impossible.
There in lies the problem. 'Making clear' means codifying it in law and speaking of it in explicit terms rather than being abstract moral concepts.
But few want to talk policy. Because policy is hard. Really really hard. Moralizing on the other hand is easy. Similarly, calling a certain policy bad is a lot easier than suggesting a concrete alternative.
If for one, would love to ground all moral arguments in policy, instead of talking about things in thin air. Sure, it will make discussions more laborious, but at least at the end of them we will have gone somewhere.
(I say nominally because it's not actually clear that this is codified in law, just that there have been a number of lawsuits that have been decided as if it is).
Or even illegal, as long as the risk of getting caught and or penalty if caught are sufficiently low compared to the benefit.
Well-off devs like the guy who quit Amazon don't have $$$ issues, so he can afford to do that.
Others don't, and that doesn't make them bad.
That makes them care for their family first.
I wouldn't say they are grossly underpaid as much as I'd say executives (not necessarily all management) is grossly overpaid. The market has failed us.
People tell me to not look at someone else's plate to see how much more they have than I do but it doesn't make sense when so much wealth/power is concentrated at the top.
Btw, I don't make FAANG level salaries so I can't speak for them. I still believe there is a magic number like maybe 10, 50, or up to 100 which is a multiplier of the minimum wage above which the income tax must be 90%+
So for example, if the magic number is 50 and minimum wage is $15, then $15 * 50 * 2000 (a year), then income above 1.5M would be subject to the highest level bracket. I sincerely believe the magic number should be no greater than 100.
The fact that you refer to it as a magic number implies that this at best wishful thinking.
I agree. It is wishful thinking at the moment but it isn't entirely unreasonable. This is about individual income tax and not corporate income tax (which is a completely different thing altogether which I can't tax like individual income even in my make-believe world [0]).
I think individual income tax changes I propose are very reasonable. I'd say if you are wealthy, my proposal is very much preferable to a wealth tax.
[0] For example, according to https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WMT/financials?ltr=1 the trailing twelve months, Walmart total revenue was ~523B, cost of revenue ~394B, and the most important bottom line, income before tax was only ~$20B. Ideally, we should be taxing revenue with no regard to expenses but there is no good way I can think of to do that other than drastically decreasing the tax rate to max out at about 2% so this is a different discussion altogether and likely not very fruitful.
They (FAANG engineers) absolutely earn a salary which would allow them to live a ordinary life with much to spare, but the world is full of people who don't want to be ordinary.
That was the entire point. He addressed your concern in the first two paragraphs.
And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you’re in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds for your kids.
I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had FU money, which also means a few million in diversified assets other than my house. Especially in the US, where quality healthcare is a minimum $20k per year for a family in insurance premiums alone plus a few ten thousands in out of pocket costs.
Neither income nor wealth growth are zero sum games. This whole post reads like a bunch of excuses.
I find refusing to "build the tools of oppression" more defensible on utilitarian grounds than denying to even use such tools (apart from practical considerations, that is e.g. vendor lockdown, privacy issues etc).
And yet you already claim to be boycotting evil corporations, which in my eyes amounts to pretty much that.
I suppose I can buy the "we shouldn't normalize morally wrong behaviour" as long as it remains defensible on utilitarian grounds i.e. working for megacorps. But I have a hard time seeing my use of e.g. google translate as morally wrong.
In other words, you feel that you cannot be secure unless you're in the, what, top 5% of the society? You can't have an entire society living on passive income until the AI revolution delivers.
And until you feel secure, everything is justified at work?
One of the real, hard, lessons of the coronavirus situation is that security is collective. You can hole up for a while, and avoid catching the virus yourself, but the economic effects will get everywhere.
Hence the need for FU money because the collective decisions are/will be lousy. You do not want to be dependent on the collective for security.
Your sentence really sounds like just an 'I got mine, so forget everyone else' sort of statement.
Your FU money doesn't mean a damned thing if societal norms die due to a pandemic or disaster. If anything, they'll just make you a target for the actual collective when it gets bad.
You can't help yourself, by yourself, if the whole world is crumbling. You have to be dependent on the collective for security. That's the literal point of a society existing. We have societal norms and collective good for a reason.
We used to kill a lot of the rich people, every so often, in history. Why have we forgotten that?
We aren't talking about a French revolution type event here. In anything from Katrina to the Great Depression to even this current pandemic, financial security was/is crucial for maintaining your own well being.
And in the modern world where you can travel, it needs to be a truly global collapse for couple hundred thousand saved to not offer a path to safety.
You're right, you're not secure from all possible reductions in peak earnings. You may sacrifice some potential income and future wealth by switching jobs. There will always be richer neighbourhoods & schools, so that may mean risking a sacrifice in future lifestyle. But that's not the kind of risk that the article is talking about.
Most people can't leave their jobs because if they do so then they immediately risk not making rent, not feeding themselves/their families, or losing healthcare entirely. In practice, that means they really do have no choice: very few people will give up food for the greater good, and it's not reasonable to expect them to.
Successful programmers are not in that position though. You absolutely have a choice. The choice you're describing is between optimizing for peak wealth or trading a small part of that wealth for the greater good, at no substantial cost to your lifestyle. If greater personal wealth is always more valuable to you than any greater good then perhaps this doesn't feel like a choice either, but you're well past most people's line for reasonably ethical behaviour at that point.
I personally wouldn’t do it without talking things over with mine but if I felt strongly about leaving a job on ethical grounds I’m pretty sure my family would support that decision. You are after all just another member of the family that also needs support.
To be clear, we're not talking about risking food & shelter here. We're talking about risking one fewer skiing holiday a year, or buying the house with the slightly smaller swimming pool.
Building tools for mass surveillance, undermining employment regulations worldwide, addicting people to abusive tech, exploiting warehouse workers, breaking the law, propping up authoritarian governments. There's nothing you can think of that you'd put above your family's luxuries?
Grouping together millionaires with software developers working at Google doesn't make sense to me.
This whole debate is about drawing a line in the sand about morality that is convenient for the author. The same exact arguments could be made for any number of things anybody does every single day.
Hint hint.
That is, from any objective viewpoint, absurd. Moreover, it's a recipe for talking yourself into an ever-extended stay in a situation that, fundamentally, doesn't comport with your values. I don't say this to attack the OP – I've seen the same process happen to good people, seen people feel "poor/underpaid" while making $200k.
Instead, my focus is on the other people. Pay attention to OP, and realize just how powerful an influence the right (wrong) "circle of friends and family" can be. Imo, you should think very carefully before spending your life around a circle that would cause you to think financial security requires $7 million.
So every job switch is rolling the dice and wading through no-mans land. Sure devs can move back to their home country, but that could mean uprooting their lives or even be potentially life-threathening. Moving jobs can be painful, up-rooting lives to move back is a much more terrifying prospect.
The point of my article is that you should be held accountable for things which are within your control, and for US citizens working as programmers, the choice of where to work is very much within their control.
It's an extremely privileged view to have. Especially given that exactly 0 companies, anywhere, will do everything you agree with.
That's one of the side effects of a strong hiring field in technology. You can, in fact, in most cases, put your butt in a seat that aligns with your values. To act like that isn't the reality for most individuals involved in the tech industry, especially in SV, is disingenuous at best.
Source/reasoning for my views: I am not in a position that I can move jobs based on values. Luckily, 75% of my values align with my institution.
A high salary today is meaningless if you are out of a job tomorrow.
That line of thinking is very disingenuous. Every worker probably has at least a few disagreements, morally speaking, with their leadership. That's how the world works.
Obtuse? Nice try.
This argument only holds water when you're making a lot of money relative to the cost of living where you live.
Most software engineers, even at FANG, aren't really earning that much relative to cost of living. A $70k salary in most of the rest of the country buys you a better quality of life and allows you to better support your family than $180k in the SF Bay Area. You also need to remember that as you go up in salary, the government takes more and more of each incremental dollar.
My older brother for example is an out of work chef and married to a nurse and lives in another state. He has a nicer house and is raising two kids, while my partner and I gross about 3-4x what they are earning.
This is where the article lost me. There is a saying called "keeping your powder dry". If you express outrage at everything, soon your outrage has no meaning. Whatever your position on open source, I think you would admit that this behavior is in a whole other category than having poor worker safety, retaliating against whistleblowers, or conducting mass surveillance.
I do think that one of the reasons we are so ineffective in our protest is that they devolve into a diffuse rage against the machine where we protest a dozen different behaviors. One of the reasons the NRA is so effective is that they focus on one thing: gun rights. If you really want to influence politics, you need to be laser focused on an issue. See also prohibition.
I mean, the list is endless. Every facet of our society is built to protect the largest businesses, creating an environment that smaller, ethical companies simply can't compete in.
Every election cycle it's the same thing. They divide people across their little pet issues, keep the two party system in place through ballot access, overturning ranked choice, while waging wars in foreign lands and extracting all the wealth they can.
Stop voting for the same stuff. Get over yourself and your fickle positions. Vote for real change.
Software engineers are going to be faced with the same moral reckoning that the industrialists of the past faced, it’s inevitable. So it’s worth wondering if this time we will take some moral leadership and actually build a world that benefits humanity, or merely profit from it.
If the law doesn't explicitly outlaw BIGCORP's actions (yet), and we all kinda know that it should, then opposing BIGCORP is the correct thing to do.
If Amazon is acting legally, yet in an ugly way, to suppress workers organizing, it seems hard to complain.
Now, if Amazon workers exercise the right of free association in their spare time to stick it to JeffB, well, it sounds like he's got a problem.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
Past the flippancy, this is a huge undertaking.
Half the political battle is showing up; the other half is staying engaged.
Similar to how the FAA regulates the airline industry and let Boeing murder two plane loads of people?
Or are you suggesting a more parliamentary governance, where the Speaker of the House is the head of state?
If we adopt consequentialism, how do we quantify all the good things amongst the bad ones?
Please note that just because the bad ones are most vocal, doesn't mean they will outweigh the good ones.
It is when you're young and know everything
There is a lot of important software work to be done for the world that doesn't enable mass surveillance, doesn't exploit addictive behavior, and doesn't degrade worker protections or evade taxes. It also doesn't pay multiple-six-figures. You'll just have to live like all of your non-tech friends.
Facebook may be bad for privacy, but communities of all sorts get together and old friends reconnect on their platforms. Instagram brings beauty to lots of people. Remember how things were before that? I do. It was much worse. Is it worth the price? That's for everyone to decide for themselves (and for lawmakers to enforce).
But saying that all bigcorps are evil and nobody should work for them is a VERY simplistic view of the world.
If you're in debt for your (or your kids' and/or partner's) house or education, or depend upon your employer for healthcare, you are not free to walk away. You might be able to switch jobs for something less objectionable, but so long as "not doing the immoral thing" means "my kid might not get treated for their cancer" just walking away is an option for a vanishingly small number of people.
>A good software engineer with only a couple of years of experience under their belt can expect to have an offer within 1 or 2 months of starting their search.
Distribute your attention and effort as a function of how effective your effort can be. How meaningful is my indirect effect? That's often a function of how many nodes are between you and the thing on the big whopping graph of interconnectedness, but not every time.
Figuring out your allocations is a lifelong optimization process. Sometimes it is extremely obvious, usually it's not.
I think if I'm faced with the prospect of not being able to retire, I will have to join one. I will have to knowingly participate in making the world a worse place but at least I will have tried.
But even for those who do, a change of nationality is much more traumatic than a change of career. You risk leaving basically all of your family and friends behind, spending years integrating into a culture where you may not speak the language, and abnormally large expenses for moving and establishing yourself there... while I don't entirely disagree with you, it's not really on the same level as the arguments I'm presenting about career choices.
Engineers in Canada are awarded an iron ring on graduation. It is worn on the writing hand's pinkey and meant to remind the engineer of their ethical obligations any time they sign a document.
I rarely wear mine because of exactly these kinds of mental gymnastics you describe. One never thinks they are being unethical because one changes their definition of ethical over time.
Instead of the ring, I kept the small slip of paper they give you at graduation. The symbol of the ring changes, but the words on that page never do. Here are a couple example sections: "my care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability, and perfection of any works to which I may be called to set my hand." And "in the hour of my temptations, weakness, and weariness, the memory of this, my obligation".
I've been thinking a lot lately about two different aspects of this same problem.
We are complicit in our vendor's deeds. If businesses stopped buying ads and server time from these companies, the situation would change rapidly.
We are complicit in our entertainer's deeds. If individuals stopped viewing or engaging with content on these platforms, especially paid content, the situation would change rapidly.
What's someone with a 7-digit annual ad spend to do? (Avoiding social ads is easy, search ads are harder to replace.)
While I don't know your position on the questions above, and they might sound accusatory, I think it's probably fair for possible customers to understand how, after you've taken a stand that employer/employee relationships should come under a broader moral scrutiny, if you consider that the vendor/customer relationship falls under the same rubric. If so, how do you do your vetting or how might possible customers self-qualify under such conditions?
I know a small company with a great founder who wanted to support clients, employees, and community as best he could. He did this for a decade, really well, then he got involved in other things which eventually consumed most of his time. For a few years he tried to hand the reins to his leadership team, but that didn't work very well so he sold the company. Now it's becoming just like everywhere else.
Oh these are the rules now? Judging other people is easy. You can look at almost anyone and find something you don’t like about them: sweatshop sneakers, ignorance of their history, consumer waste, eating meat from commercial farms... don’t you know people around the world are starving and you’re throwing out food?
Finding faults in others is easy and helps change exactly nothing. Turning it inward in self examination is the hard part.
>As a general rule, it costs a business your salary × 1.5 to employ you, given the overhead of benefits, HR, training, and so on. When you’re making a cool half-million annual salary from $bigcorp, it’s because they expect to make at least ¾ of a million that they wouldn’t be making without you. It does not make economic sense for them to hire you if this weren’t the case.
The hypocrisy is astounding.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And by extension, there is no ethical employment under capitalism.
The notion that you can get a single job that somehow places you outside society and the economy and puts you above other workers morally or ethically is fiction. By all means, seek to minimize your impact or make your own ethical choices, but there is no choice without some sort of ethical compromise.
You don't have to be perfect in order to make better, more ethical, choices.
Yes, you're entirely correct that living a perfectly ethical life is nearly impossible.
That's still no excuse for not putting in the effort.
The author brings up the Nuremberg defense[1] as an example of complicity which is indefensible, but this is rhetorically quite hollow. If you go a little bit further into political theory and consider Arendt's conception of the banality of evil[2], and furthermore the idea of a panopticon[3], you very quickly come to the philosophical impasse between individual culpability and agency and systematic mechanisms and the political.
What is this impasse? Plainly, I think it is that the individual has nearly zero agency alone, and only has power when effectively organizing into groups. That makes arguments like these functionally useless (or even "usefully idiotic"[5]), because they fundamentally misattribute the locus of value production, capture of capital and political clout onto the individual, in what Marx would call the petite bourgeoisie[4].
This misattribution misses the asymmetric distribution of power towards the top of organizational hierarchies, especially within the size of large mega-corporations. If this author were correct and engineers were truly accountable for the work of their employers, what is the unique labor that managers and executives contribute to the corporation that ICs do not provide? And who has the power to make and override decisions at a corporate policy level? It's transparently obvious that corporations are intentionally set up divide labor such that decision making agency is allocated towards executive leadership and management, and that line level ICs serve to execute on those decisions but do not have the agency to veto decisions they disagree with.
This is obvious to anyone who has ever worked at a mega-corporation, enough so that I wonder if the author has. If they have not, then the post amounts merely to speculation about something the author doesn't have enough firsthand experience with to credibly analyze. That doesn't mean it should have never been written, but I certainly got no value from it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Criticism_and_use_a...
It's really easy to preach without having any skin in the game isn't it ?
Look, if you want all your crying and personal opinions to actually mean something start someplace rational. Start by asking (demanding) for a uniform of code of ethics. Every other professional industry has this, but not software.
Honestly, what happens you violate those? What are the actual repercussions to you? Then they aren't a code of ethics that applies to you.
As a medical doctor if you violate the Hippocratic Oath you will certainly lose your license to practice medicine and probably go to jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
You may want to reconsider the relevance of the article you linked yourself, given that it contains the phrase
> The Hippocratic Oath has been eclipsed as a document of professional ethics by more extensive, regularly updated ethical codes issued by national medical associations
and that, to my knowledge, it's not considered legally binding.
In fact, you could consider it as similar to the ACM Code of Ethics, as both are not legally binding and yet they both do a pretty good job of mentioning a list of commonly made mistakes that people make that could get them in trouble (legally or morally or ethically) as well as processes for avoiding such mistakes.
Violating the oath is grounds for immediate revocation of license which eliminates lawful practice forever whether or not professional. The actions that produced that violation may not be a lawful violation, but they typically are.
What in software is of similar consequence?
> There is no direct punishment for breaking the Hippocratic Oath, although an arguable equivalent in modern times is medical malpractice
and from "The Hippocratic Oath as Literary Text: A Dialogue Between Law and Medicine"[1]
> Still today, the Oath continues to demand that physicians maintain ethics higher than those expected of society in general,[18] and it remains a code of professional identity that marks off "proper" medicine from various forms of alternative healing practices.'[19]
Later,
> This Part examines judicial opinions that allow doctors to perform [a lengthy list of acts and the cases in which they were allowed]. These opinions directly contradict specific portions of the Hippocratic Oath.
(that section later goes on to discuss that the oath is inextricably tied to the analysis of medical ethics, and so it retains its share of social/moral/ethical relevance even if it is not always legally relevant... which in my opinion is not incomparable to how we should approach the ACM Code of Ethics.)
I personally don't understand where you see a difference.
1: Lisa R. Hasday, The Hippocratic Oath as Literary Text: A Dialogue Between Law and Medicine, 2 Yale J. Health Pol'y L. & Ethics (2002). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjhple/vol2/iss2/4
It doesn't matter what difference I see or what my opinions are. It only matters in how you practice your profession. In practical terms this difference is distinguished with one word: licensing.
If you wish to be taken seriously have credentials that certify credibility. This is a solved problem... just not in software. As an unlicensed unaccredited software developer you shouldn't take my opinions too seriously as I won't take yours.
> An essential aim of computing professionals is to minimize negative consequences of computing, including threats to health, safety, personal security, and privacy. When the interests of multiple groups conflict, the needs of those less advantaged should be given increased attention and priority.
Or, y'know, you might not know what that word means at all.
Probably because you never asked. It would be strange to alienate people in your profession with a protest action and then expect them to whisper loving notions in your ear, much less from people not in your profession who don't care about your silly little opinions.