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Comment by impoppy | Hacker News Reader

I used to work in a company that made similar tech for some other country. And boy, did I both hate and love my job! I wanted to quit a lot of times, but every time my manager would stop me. “If you ain’t gonna do this job, some other engineer will pick it,” they said. And it is true. I loved my coworkers, I loved technical challenges and all the features we were implementing. How blown off I was seeing results of facial search I made myself. Just imagine — I take a picture of you right now or find it somewhere in your Facebook or Instagram, upload it to the system and a second later I’ll be already knowing what exactly, where exactly and when exactly you were doing or going. Tech-wise it was amazing. But I betrayed myself and everyone around me. I hated how I worked against myself and my fellow citizens. And I have no idea how to prevent others from working against ourselves.

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I always hate that excuse. “If you don’t do it, someone else will.”

Great, let them try. We need the people with morals to stand up against doing this kind of work. At the very least it shrinks the talent pool and hopefully stymies efforts to get state surveillance off the ground. Working on it because someone else would “get the chance to” is really just tantamount to completely selfish disregard.

Imagine doing something amazing that wasn’t used to oppress people…

> We need the people with morals to stand up against doing this kind of work. At the very least it shrinks the talent pool

Very much this. But taking a stand first requires some agonising self-searching, educational leaps, being able to talk to others about it. It requires no less than a change in culture. But it is the most promising counter to tyranny. As Stalin sound in the Soviet Union, without the engineers it all falls apart. This is what I mean by "digital literacy 2.0". I hope some of you will read "Ethics for Hackers" when I get it out, and that we can get technical civics and ethics as part of every CS course.

I was one of these people, a moral ethics voice operating as the principal engineer of a leading enterprise FR system (ranked in top 5 by FRVT multiple years). I received major pushback on my opinions, had orders to no longer make professional contacts outside the company, and was given overworking deadlines when opportunities to influence deployments or expectations arose. My big issue with FR is the lack of training, such that high school educated operators are given the impression the software is far more accurate than it is, and that the software has an authority it does not. For these reasons, and the generalized software work/life balance abuse that industry demands, I quit a few years ago.

This argument could and was used endless times here when it became clear that companies like google and especially facebook are not OK in any meaningful way, and never will be. Few left, but most enjoyed that sweet 300k+ paycheck even if the know very well they can't buy morals for any amount of money. You don't hear about these companies struggling to find talent, so unfortunately its not that effective.

There is only one way to live if you want to be long term happy with who you see in the mirror, and countless ways otherwise...

> but every time my manager would stop me. “If you ain’t gonna do this job, some other engineer will pick it,” they said.

Your manager knew about the ethical issues and pressured you to continue to do this type of work. Your manager is a bad and manipulative person.

If you are having a moral dilemma, the next guy will probably have one too. We are all human and all have moral dilemmas. If there was no manager, who's super power is manipulation, the job might have never been completed.

"some other engineer will pick it", and CEOs are paid hundreds millions because "nobody can else could do their job"!

I think it is usually accompanied by an implication that your replacement may have fewer reservations than you do, constructing a moral dilemma.

It's like when a political figure resigns for ethical reasons. Does the message of the resignation really have more impact than having someone inside the organisation working for what they believe in, however futile it may be? There's never a shortage of sycophants.

I did this work, knowingly, because how else is one to know the true nature of these technologies if one remains outside? How else to know if the industry has ethically minded leaders or is corrupt to the core. Well, it is mixed, of course, but there are ethically minded people in high places, trying to do the right thing.

Plus, I now know a huge host of circumvention techniques.

This is how aerospace engineers justify working at missile companies. "Well if I don't do it, someone else get paid to do it". Maybe just don't make unethical tech. Start a hotdog stand instead, more useful to society.

“Just following orders”

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