I don't know, we hold other engineers responsible for the consequences of their work, personally I think the industry would be better off if we had more accountability for programmers.
Or think about people who build bridges. They just follow the orders they get from higher ups. Bridge collapses. The higher-ups should be held accountable not the workers. The question I think is did the engineer here just follow orders? Perhaps he understood very little about finance, only about programming.
I would guess the compensation structure at FTX included a lot of their own crypto tokens, since the company can mint those at no cost. And Alameda was a big holder of those FTT/Serum tokens.
So you're a software engineer who owns theoretically millions of dollars worth of FTT tokens, and then the boss comes to you and asks to make an exception for Alameda... Since you work at FTX, you're probably aware that Alameda holds and trades a lot of FTT. If you do the code change to make Alameda look better and maintain the value of your own crypto portfolio, there's no question that you're a part of the fraud.
A code change excluding a known, named entity from safety checks is more like rigging a bridge to explode when your enemy crosses the bridge.
Zero ambiguity.
That’s not the question — as in, it won’t be an element of any of the crimes he’s eventually charged with. The question is whether he was knowingly or recklessly involved in a scheme to defraud people.
And just generally, legal reasoning does frequently use analogies but they need to be tighter than the ones you’re using. This case isn’t much like building a faulty bridge.
Murder-in-first-degree means you didn't just recklessly cause the death of somebody, it means you did it intentionally, on purpose.
See Mens Rea, "Criminal Intent" https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea
Was this engineer knowingly and intentionally helping to commit the crime? We don't know because we haven't seen many details or testimonies in this case. He must be assumed innocent until proven guilty. And proving him guilty must include proving he had criminal intent, Mens Rea. The court of public opinion as in Hacker News is of course a different matter.
I think what's up to debate is to what extent the developers were lied to regarding the purpose of the code. Maybe they were told it was for testing purposes only, or the higher ups managed to convince them that it's ok despite them questioning it. I suppose those things will come up during investigation and will certainly affect their sentences, but I don't think they will be off the hook that easily.
Your gun analogy is not fair and it does not translate well to the actual situation at hand. A gun engineer is not responsible for all the deaths the weapon causes. But said engineer will be very much accountable if the weapon blows up in the wielder's hands during normal use (even though practically this might not be the case due to liability disclaimers and all that).
We have case studies where deaths were caused by shit software, where the engineer of that wrote the software is clearly the accountable one.
You could make this argument for literally every profession.