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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

When I see stories like this, I think about what it must be like to be an engineer on the windows team. You get in, make your coffee in a fancy Microsoft-branded cup, and then a PM gives you the “actively shit on our customers” ticket. Presumably the engineers on the windows team are either in golden handcuffs, or actually derive sadistic pleasure from making the world worse for users, and making the field of software engineering less trustworthy.

Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer? Why is big tech so obsessed with torching their long-term reputation in exchange for a few usage share points in the short term? How do engineers sleep at night, knowing their role is to be a malignant, user-hostile, value-destroying force in the world?

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> Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer?

Facebook with creepier services and dark patterns (e.g onboarding literal children despite internal data pointing to adverse mental effects)

Google + ads that favor their own services

Everything on killedbygoogle.com

Apple's on-device file scanner

Spotify forcing auto-play on connected devices as a feature

Amazon charging $10 shipping for whole foods despite whole foods already making a healthy profit

BMW charging for apple carplay (this changed last year to Free I believe)

Mercedes and Tesla charging for vehicle DLC

everything that's ever required a library of Congress dmca exception to work around

Etc.

....it's life, unless you can seize political power and not be corrupted by the many machinations of corruption that have evolved in the US in the last few hundred years.

Maybe I should clarify that I was referring to the field of software generally, which definitely includes Facebook and the software parts of cars.

Some days it feels like the whole field is premised on taking advantage of people, not trying to make the world better for them. I am values-driven, so it just really hurts to see so much bad behavior in my chosen field (software). I don’t like the irrational “tech bro” hate that’s popular these days, but I’m a little more empathetic when I realize that most consumers have probably faced technology that is actively taking advantage of them. Uncool.

> Maybe I should clarify that I was referring to the field of software generally, which definitely includes Facebook and the software parts of cars.

> Some days it feels like the whole field is premised on taking advantage of people, not trying to make the world better for them.

Yeah, despite all the initial optimism, it seems one of the main consequences of connected software was to remove the technical barriers to whole classes of unscrupulous behavior that the market incentivizes.

When the OP said other fields, I think they meant other than technology.

Drug companies can be pretty user hostile. Epipens and their price hikes comes to mind.

Another example are perhaps printer companies? "Execute the jet some ink" protocol needs the exact inkjet cartridge they sell, other products are actively shielded. The technology is completely different, the effect is quite similar. Even the countermeasures are similar: changing protocol of weblinks to regular html can be compared to replying "am correct cartridge" signal.

> Epipens and their price hikes comes to mind.

Good example, especially considering the law was weaponized against only a relative newcomer to that game rather than all the existing players who'd been doing it for years.

I want to add headset manufacturers that include predetermined breaking points on even mid class products.

Funny how these things give in shortly after the 2y warranty ends.

Disclaimer: repeat victim of headphone breakage. Looking at you, Sennheiser.

not doubting you, but what models? my 10+ year old 555s and 280pros are still going strong. want to be sure to avoid whatever you bought when I end up replacing them.

Perhaps build quality standards changed or I'm a noob choosing the wrong devices?

IIRC it was some ~70€ chat headset (perhaps dumb from me to even get those). The HD599 started getting electrical problems (asymmetric hearing).

I also had a bit longer ago a Speedlink Medusa (my fault).

Now have Meze 99 Neo and gonna get a pair of DT 990 and hope for the best.

the headset doesn't surprise me, but that's pretty disappointing to hear about the hd599s. best of luck with your future cans!

Why dramaticize? It was probably someone assigned to "encourage user-retention". This was definitely a terrible, anti-competitive move, though.

Don't push the narrative that only "evil" people can do bad things. Then, since almost no one thinks they are evil themselves, no one will believe they're doing bad things.

> It was probably someone assigned to "encourage user-retention".

The ticket would certainly not be named "Ignore user's default browser choice", but only an extremely naive developer would believe this is good for their users. A developer that finds this objectionable would ask to be transferred to another team, but most won't.

I'm not saying that developers should refuse the work, just that they're not innocent about what they're doing.

how is OP dramatizing? It is making the world worse for users, and anyone intelligent enough to work on that team understands what they're doing, PR speak or not.

If you can work for FAANG you can work somewhere else and make a comfortable living, it's not like we're talking about someone doing shady work to put food on the table. Why do we not hold people accountable?

If someone shills for big oil or the tobacco industry we have no trouble pointing out how unethical it is.

> how is OP dramatizing?

>You get in, make your coffee in a fancy Microsoft-branded cup, and then a PM gives you the “actively shit on our customers” ticket. Presumably the engineers on the windows team are either in golden handcuffs, or actually derive sadistic pleasure from making the world worse for users, and making the field of software engineering less trustworthy."

is what I was referring to.

I despise this common attitude of letting “good people” off the hook.

If you work for one of these companies, there is no clever self-justification. You can either lie to yourself or own the truth. Doesn’t matter if you’re on some VR offshoot division of Facebook. You are part of all the terrible damage and death they cause.

>Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer?

Just last week I was reading about a court ruling proving a local bank overcharged interest on car loans, entire department knew, and they did this for years. Effectively stealing from people. The other day a retail store tried to get out of warranty obligation under the excuse that I don't have the receipt, even though I have the warranty card with serial number - a friend working in support said it was a common tactic to see if people would give up.

If you think this is an example of a morally questionable job I'd like to know what universe you live in.

There are people who make food. People who drive trucks. People who fly airplanes. People who do customer service. People who fill cavities. People who cure cancer. People who fill potholes. People who clean floors. People who cook meals. People who maintain transmission lines. People who build houses. I’d say that most jobs are in fact doing critical work to make the world better for people, even if in small ways like improving the dining experience.

I’ll also point out that in the case of the bank overcharging, it sounds like outright fraud (totally unacceptable) and the courts held them to account. It is shocking that fraud and corruption happen, but at least society seems to have a mechanism for dealing with it.

Software engineering isn’t morally questionable, if you aren’t going out of your way to make the world worse for people. There is no compelling reason to do that, so the vast majority of jobs should be perfectly reasonable. I love my job in part because I’m never asked to actively make my product worse, or work against users and customers. We’re imperfect and don’t always work as well as we could, but at least we’re working in the right direction.

> There are people who make food.

All ethical upstanding folk, Monsanto, Nestle, by their standards Microsoft are saints.

> People who drive trucks.

An industry know for their honesty and reliability, no organised crime involved ever.

It's shocking to me how much people here get outraged over relatively trivial stuff.

This is what happens when you do "data-driven" development. You need to improve the various metrics that telemetry gives you. I'm sure they have some "increase percentage of links opened using Edge" OKR.

Yup, in my experience any data driven goal setting steers teams towards short term wins, with potentially disastrous long term losses.

Long term value creation is a lot harder to prove, but I still always try to push for it. But most organisations can't deal with it, their decision making mechanisms are so broken that they need someone else (arbitrary data) to do the job...

> Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer

Health Insurance, look up the case of Allena Hansen. Her face was ripped off by a bear in the wilderness but somehow got herself to a fire station for an airlift. She said that dealing with Blue Cross Blue Shield afterwards was by far the worst part of the experience, because "having a face" is considered cosmetic.

I used to work for a smaller group insurer and I'll never forget how at every single all-hands meeting and innumerable company-wide emails for 5 years the CEO would dedicate 20 minutes to whining about pre-existing conditions getting deleted by Congress.

> Presumably the engineers on the windows team are either in golden handcuffs, or actually derive sadistic pleasure from making the world worse for users,

I think there is a 3rd and more likely possibility, namely, that they've either been brainwashed, or convinced themselves, that the actions they're taking are right & righteous.

> the actions they're taking are right

They are right for their bank accounts.

> How do engineers sleep at night, knowing their role is to be a malignant, user-hostile, value-destroying force in the world?

They sleep on their USD $200K/year bed (if college grad). Or if experienced with 5 years of experience, then their $400K/year bed.

I worked for a defence contractor for a few years until my conscience caught up. I regret that. I suspect some people never get there.

> When I see stories like this, I think about what it must be like to be an engineer on the windows team

In some cases, you find it highly objectionable, but because large corporate entities are authoritarian in nature and you don't want to risk getting fired, you complain but ultimately get the job done anyways. You don't get over it and keep it in a long list of things you find questionable before you decide it's time to change teams or companies. The "PM" in this equation likely feels the same as you, because no single PM at a large company like this has the authority to make decisions like this nor tell their dev team what to do (it's an influence role, not an authority role - authority is for folks with bigger paychecks).

Or you get paid and know about a more complicated/nuanced take that only people on the inside know about, so you do the work and move on because you probably don't care that much.

Isn't it more likely to be incompetence than malice? Perhaps the ticket said: "Implement Edge for Windows 11, make sure links will open in Edge." and not "screw some stuff up, then go play some golf".

It's very easy to just anthropomorphise everything and say "ha, that one is evil with evil intentions and sadistic joy", but it's far more likely that it either wasn't actually designed to work like that and it's simply some crappy default behaviour, or there is some marketing VP who went beyond his scope and forced an implementation detail 4 layers deep in the organisation. Then that one might be bad, (but still just incompetent - even just checking historical cases would have shown that to be a bad idea) but all engineers, all managers, all POs? Unlikely.

> Implement Edge for Windows 11, make sure links will open in Edge.

This was already done.

The new ticket would have said something like: "Stop users from being able to override the special links that only work in Edge. Make very sure that users have no way of working around this behavior even if they really want to."

Or, another possibility, "special links, that specifically call for edge browser, are opening in unsupported browsers, causing apps to fail"

Mostly they're just Bing searches.

At the scale of Windows, "mostly" isn't very useful.

Do you have an example of a link actually needing Edge? And the point is whole categories don't. Search. Weather. News.

That's a bit too much speculation for me. If there was some technical detail that would show exactly that, sure, but in this case it just seems to be a missing option.

A bit like:

- "openInBrowser(url)" (the mistake)

- "openInEdge(url)" (the malice)

- "openInDefaultBrowser(url)" (the one configured by the end-user).

I have no idea what they are doing under the hood, but I'm pretty sure some of it can be easily identified for being a mistake, malice or something else. But because I don't know, and apparently neither do most people here, speculation on the effect being the main intent or a side-effect alone is iffy at best. The functional outcome remains the same of course, and I'd rather start out with calling it a bug than anything else. If Microsoft then comes out calling it "works as intended" then yes, that's just nasty.

The article explained the details. Microsoft apps put microsoft-edge:// in front of links to make them open in Edge since Windows 10. People worked around it by having another app handle the microsoft-edge protocol. Now Microsoft broke that.

That's what it explained yes, but that doesn't cover the protocol handler on the shell side at all. Either it's a protocol with a protocol handler or it isn't.

Your meaning is entirely unclear. It was a protocol users could configure like the rest. Now they can't.

Yes, that is the functional description, and I was writing about the technical implementation. User overrides work on protocols, but if it's not a user override anymore it makes sense that it wouldn't apply the settings since there is nothing to apply to.

Just because it "looks" the same doesn't mean it is the same. There is a vague reference about a few KiB of added compiled code and the fact that it's an insider build, but other than that just an exploration of previously valid avenues that no longer apply, and the bundled outrage of assumptions based on a whole lot of nothing.

I don't know what the actual implementation is, the article on the website doesn't seem to know, and neither do you. So all we can do is speculate, and it appears some people choose unproductive outrage over technical exploration.

The details you dismissed established it wasn't accidentally hard coded. And Microsoft admitted it was intentional.[1]

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-doubles-down-on-its-...

I don't use Windows, but according to the article, this is a new update. Edge was already built-in a lot of shortcuts in Windows 11, but people used tools like EdgeDeflector to circumvent that. The new update prevented that from happening, resulting in an error message when trying to do it. Seems like a deliberate choice to me.

Maybe that would be true if they hadn't already been making it harder and harder to not use edge as the default in windows for the past few years.

> a PM gives you the “actively shit on our customers” ticket.

There usually isn't a "make the product worse" ticket. It's often more a matter of not having enough time to do it the interoperable way.

That's not to say "actively shit on our customers" tickets don't exist, just that it happens so often because of far less sinister, far more mundane reasons.

This is a pretty clear example of the "make the product worse" ticket, though. The interoperable way has been in use for decades—it's just "use an http:// link like everyone else"—but this is them spending extra time to deliberately prevent interoperability

> Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer

Every field. The seller-buyer relationship is supposed to be adversarial. This is why competition is so important, and why ignoring anticompetitive practices is so damaging: the only way to prevent companies from throwing punches your way is to be able to punch back.

To me it seems like many industries dominated by multinational companies are clearly not acting in the best interest of their customers. Tobacco, Pharma, Food, Electronics, Fashion to name a few.

I'd be interested to know if you assume the opposite, that companies in general act in the interest of their customers?

It's the PMs from Google

It's the PM culture that everyone has adopted from Google for sure. Along with their grotesque hiring methodology and inordinate respect for the likes of Kubernetes. Clever mediocrity is not the same as genius.

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