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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if there were some sort of industry protection for engineers who do refuse unethical tasks. At present, I'd expect you'd get fired pretty quickly if you said no (at a lot of companies).

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Most "software engineers" don't have licenses/credentials backing up their job title, anyway. Compared to other industries, it's lightly regulated at best. So long as that's the case, I think the current balance, which includes the possibility that a programmer will be dismissed for failure to comply, is reasonable. From an HR and PR standpoint, companies who do so will be facing the threat of blowback related to disclosure that a programmer was fired for using their judgment on an ethics question rather than taking orders. That's not nothing.

> That's not nothing

Any thoughts on how most ignored the "software engineer" from Google and his thoughts on their AI? [0] I know personally I tended to ignore it and let it get buried. However, in this sort of context I do wonder what would make something like that actually effective in persuading others.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...

Software engineers tend to be pretty anti-union (or at least, union-agnostic).

This is among the kinds of protections unions grant industry professionals in other industries.

Yeah I think this ties into not only the fact that we are highly paid, but also how unions generally form. When everyone works at a factory and have similar positions, you can stand outside and hand out flyers and have face to face conversations. With programmers, you might have a few others on your team that match your job description, then PMs, managers, designers, etc. Imagine trying to get a portion of the engineers at a midsize company together and you won't even have enough power to do anything but get yourselves fired.

To me, this is why if you want a more ethically bound software industry, you need regulation, not unionization.

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