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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Reading this again something new jumped out at me:

> "I mean it as - software that doesn’t really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer."

No. The "developer" is often as much a clueless victim and tool of other forces who misuse her work.

Malware, in it's broadest sense, has become an industrial scale venture. Technological abuse exists at a system scale.

In some ways that's positive, because developers and end-users, being much wiser in 2023 than in 1993 can unite against a common foe. But that won't be easy. The key lies in building relations between developers and end users that completely bypass the "at scale" bandits.

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> No. The "developer" is often as much a clueless victim and tool of other forces who misuse her work.

Eh. It's implausible to me that we're simultaneously both highly paid geniuses and clueless tools.

Fundamentally, I think we need to decide whether we are professionals or minions. Professionals being people who have not just a duty to the paycheck, but also to the profession and society at large. See, for example, the ACM/IEEE code of ethics for software: https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...

If somebody wants to say, "Yup, I'm a minion, just going to build the volcano lair and the atomic rockets, and I'm not going to worry about where they'll come down," I will at least commend them for their honesty. But otherwise, I think we need to act like professionals and take responsibility for being clueful about the impacts of our work. Between the need for software and the rise of remote work, our negotiating power with employers has never been stronger. Let's use it for something beyond foosball tables.

> It's implausible to me that we're simultaneously both highly paid geniuses and clueless tools.

It can happen to the best of us [1].

    "" I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military
    service as a member of this country's most agile military force,
    the Marine Corps.  I served in all commissioned ranks from Second
    Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most
    of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for
    Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a
    gangster for capitalism. "" - Gen. Smedley Butler

[1] https://man.fas.org/smedley.htm

Honestly, that's not a great example. Re-evaluating your ethical impact on the world is not the same as understanding the direct consequences of your daily work. Both are important, but really different. After all we are not discussing some more abstract issues of modern software propagating capitalistic values (we are all "the system", etc, etc).

> Honestly, that's not a great example. Re-evaluating your ethical impact on the world is not the same as understanding the direct consequences of your daily work. Both are important, but really different.

Why does the difference matter again?

Because looking back at the decades of your work while being retired is just a sweet ethical exercise with very few direct personal and financial consequences.

If you are an engineer employing dark UX patterns _today_ you must look at yourself and evaluate the ethics of your work _today_. This will likely have direct personal and financial consequences.

So the stakes are completely different.

I always took it that Butler underwent an epiphany after years of believing something else. Maybe it was a case of eyes wide open. Nonetheless your distinction stands and yes it's very significant. I wonder how many developers are being hoodwinked and how many are just not being very honest with themselves.

I might be wrong, but I always lean towards this being the result of prioritization. Most engineers know the difference but prioritize other aspects than ethical. I am not even judging that, just describing. After all, implementing a dark UX pattern that will inconvenience some unknown to you users is not as high priority as providing to your own family.

It's a different mindset. When you're in uniform, under oath, you don't speak out, you salute and do what you're ordered to. When you retire, you take the uniform off and are your own man again.

I think Butler had a harder problem. His job was to produce violence and threats of violence. It's harder to know whether that's truly used for good ends than, say, a web form.

Yes. I think this is exactly the issue. We can't on one hand say we're cogs in a wheel, and on the other complain about the state that we are in. The choice begins with us. Don't work for companies that produce software that is unethical. Do what ever it takes.

> act like professionals and take responsibility for being clueful about the impacts of our work.

Well said.

I think there's a lot of work to do before we can even figure out what those impacts are and how to work in such a way as to minimise the harms. Something along the lines of a Hippocratic Oath to "do no harm".

Replace 'harm' with 'evil' and I thing you've got something there....

> No. The "developer" is often as much a clueless victim and tool of other forces who misuse her work.

its reductive to assign or reject blame.

“developer” is the same to the user, if its the product manager of the company, QA, the CEO or the person writing the code.

it would be easy for me to point blame on the person writing code for a variety of reasons: because ultimately not pushing back on bad behaviour is making their lives easier, see also: using electron, sticking in all the analytics systems under the sun, using framework du jour, etc.

but i wont; in this context “developer” is the company that produced the software; not the individual: customers do not understand the distinction

I hear you dijit. In speaking to the HN crew I'm hoping that people understand what I mean by developer.

TBH I never actually liked that word and have previously attacked it - or rather us using it about ourselves for the reasons you point to here... it's deflationary.

This. None of this software is prioritizing the developer.

It's prioritizing value extraction.

It's capitalism in it's worst, most naked form. Advertising spend is worth more than a quality product - because we've inverted the classic information problem: Information is no longer scarce and valuable, it's flooding out everything and is mostly worthless noise.

Making sensible, educated decisions becomes increasingly harder, and you're presented with an environment designed to cause choice paralysis until you finally cave and just buy the item at the top of list presented to you by Google/Amazon/Apple/Walmart/Etc.

That item will be terrible, but it's paid the right protection money to the monopolies (sorry! advertising spend) to keep its spot.

--- Can developers win in those situations? Sure - sometimes. But most times they're some poor contracting team paid literal peanuts to create this product, then immediately go through "staffing reductions" to the bare minimum needed for legally required product support. The developers are not the root cause of this - although they are also not absolved.

Most software written will not be used. Nobody will buy it, or even download it if it is free. (Or even FOSS free.)

The stuff people complain about is all the rest.

But maybe the reason they are complaining about it has to do with how the purveyors figured out how to get it into people's hands. Enough hands to sustain the product.

We can almost entirely blame this on the end users. Users vote for software and hardware with their purchase and use decisions.

Whenever you have a problem with anything, you're a victim of the poor decision making of a million unsophisticated consumers who voted for that piece of crap to have the revenue stream and funding so that it garnered your attention too.

Consumer behavior itself basically creates a barrier of entry to the existence of viable alternatives.

It seems like a vicious circle to me. End-users are effected by the technology in society. TV, Facebook and TikTok plays a part in dumbing down people. Where does it start and where does it end?

It seems like we need to create enclaves of positive potential to reboot humanity.

So then who is the abuser? The users and the developers are the victims. PMs are likely also the victims of their higher-ups, their higher-ups are the victims of the CEO, the CEO is the victim of the shareholders, the shareholders are... the users. So that's a full circle: the users are abusing themselves.

"Everyone" is (at least potentially). That's also why I disagree that "voting with your wallet doesn't work" : it is part of the solution too !

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