He is probably in the wrong on many counts, still I find worrying the implications of that line.
I am a programmer. I am not a security expert. I can have opinions on security concerns, but they carry less weight both within and outside my company because I am not a professional security engineer. I can still recognize obvious problems, but I would correctly not be trusted to roll my own encryption.
The only time you might want to listen to a security engineer is when they percieve a problem that the builder doesnt and even then my professional experience with security engineers is way too many are boys who cry wolf and parrot whatever the sweeping tools say.
Phrased another way i would trust an engineer who put up a bridge if they said the bridge had issues over an inspector whose paycheck is very much dependent on not finding issues.
Google AI Ethicist "inspection" though....
That depends quite a bit on what was being discussed. If it's the engineer's work specifically, and what they did and why, that's one thing. If it's an engineer making claims about specific encryption algorithms that they chose to use or not use in the software they wrote which is contradicted by a security professional, you should probably trust he security professional.
This seems to me a case of the latter. A software engineer making claims about things that are not their subject of authority, or at least not what they were hired for, and thus have less reason to be listened to about by their employer.
I am not convinced this is true AI. But if and when true AI happens, and a lot of engineers claim that the machines are suffering horribly, we should take that seriously, regardless of whether the engineers have been accredited to recognize suffering in others.
I'm a software engineer, but if I went to talk to a reporter about UI issues in a product, ignoring the obvious correct dismissal, I have nothing to do with anything UI related (I haven't worked on UI level anything in it must be the vicinity of a decade, and the UI stuff I did do was a super specific subset). If I'm presented as "an engineer working on Z" talking about UI, it would be reasonable to assume that I was a person who knew what they were talking about.
Hence a company X might reasonably feel that they need to clarify what I actually did (or did not) do.
>If you're a reporter and someone from company X comes to you saying they have important issues involving issue Y in product Z, you'll probably assume that they have significant expertise in issue Y - even if their involvement is only in some unrelated subcomponent of the actual product.
At most companies, that scenario is probably going to get you in trouble if Company X hasn't actually OKd you to talk to that reporter. There's probably some grey area where you just wrote something on social media--but that's a reason to be cautious on social media.
There are very few companies that are likely to be ok with random employees talking to media, maybe not the same result as a FAANG, but I can't see avoiding any repercussions (e.g if a bank employee goes off and talks to the news presenting themselves as a rep from the bank, I don't see that going well)
* frowned == new job