Comment by fzil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fzil | Hacker News Reader

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> Why blame the greedy managers and owners at the top your overpriced pizza when you can blame the guy with a mortgage who did as he was told?

Nobody's absolving the managers or owners from their part in this issue. The point is that the guy with the mortgage decided that an extra room in his house or a bigger backyard is worth stealing from others. This isn't some ethically grey area, its outright theft that the engineer enabled.

> Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.

I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there. This seems quite probable, but still doesn't completely absolve the engineer from responsibility. All it does is reduce their share of blame.

>Nobody's absolving the managers

Whether consciously or not, scapegoating their minions does exactly that.

This is a pervasive feature of American culture where the most guilty parties with the most power who have the least defensible motives use FUD to spread the blame around and it actually works. People buy this shit and even internalize it - something this thread is a living testament to.

This is the same shit that happened when the CEO of Boeing tried to blame the dead pilots and subsequently tried to throw his engineers under the bus and each time where there was even a shade of doubt a ready cohort of people stood ready to defend the self serving FUD he pumped out.

>I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there.

Only at small companies have I ever been asked to build $evilfeature. At big companies I get asked to build $featurethatcouldbeabused. The bigger the impact and the more morally wrong it is the more feature indirection there will be.

Either way it's good to know that when somebody with the power to deprive me of my sole income asks me to build a kitchen knife they intend to stab someone with there's a willing crowd on hacker news ready to claim that they dont get to hog all of the blame because I technically could have refused to make that kitchen knife and joined the unemployment queue.

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