How can engineers working on this even look at themselves without being ashamed?
For the record: I'm a graphics driver engineer myself.
For the record: I'm a graphics driver engineer myself.
Same how can Google/Meta engineers work at the biggest user tracking ad empires and not be ashamed.
What do you expect them to do? Quit their jobs in protest? Other engineers who need that money will gladly do it. Everyone has their price, not everyone has the luxury of being so picky with their carriers, especially when it comes to having a big name like Intel on your resume. You go to work, implement the tickets assigned to you, then go home, without vocalizing on the ethics of the big picture, is what the vast majority of employees do.
If you want this practice to end you have to legally regulate it, the free market alone doesn't work in favor of the end user's privacy. Without laws and regulations in place, if Intel won't do it, all the other companies would. It's why regulations are important.
Plus, I think half of HN userbase built their wealth or currently works for FAANG companies that make their money from spying, tracking or monetizing user data for ads, so the stone you threw will break a lot of glass here. How do you think they justify it other than "I like money"? So why single out only Intel engineers for what is common place around these parts?
If they can't bring themselves to do what's right, the least they can do is be ashamed of what they're doing.
> So why single out only Intel engineers for what is common place around these parts?
Because this particular example is about Intel. When other companies that do this come into the spotlight, then the same criticism is levelled at the devs enabling them as well. Big picture, Intel's not being singled out.
It isn't. Nobody criticizes those who work at Google or Meta here. There's more talk about maximizing your TC there, than telling people not to work there.
Double standards, probably because Intel doesn't pay as good as Google/Meta so it's easy to throw stones where you don't plan to work anyway, but people stay quiet when it comes to places where they earn their wealth.
What can I say? I see such criticism frequently. I even pile onto it from time to time.
Sure they are. I've seen comments like these aimed at workers of those companies far more than workers at Intel. There have even been entire threads about whether or not having Meta or Google on your CV hurts you, and should hurt you.
For Nvidia you're expected to pay $1000 for a graphics card and then they will collect data on you and send it to their servers even though you didn't choose to use their online services at all.
It probably requires not thinking about it and just following the plan laid out by the PM, which a lot of people are very good at.
How many of us click accept on those annoying cookie dialogs or have an extension do it for them?
And how many take the time to find the reject button and/or install appropriate extensions that will do the rejection?
I'm in the second category but I'm sure the first one is the majority, mostly because they just don't care.
I was never particularly privacy conscious. I was “normal”. Now that my fucking GPU driver spies on me, I think I’m rightfully becoming slowly paranoid about it.
The Yuppie Nuremberg Defense, I've got a mortgage to pay.
I put considerable thought into the ethics of storing data and letting that data get inaccurate and harming people. Same with providing that information to people whose goals actively cause harm.
But I'm here for the war, not the individual battles. I raise objections and sometimes I can make a difference. This is one I'm going to lose most of the time. So I say my bit and do my job in a way that causes as little damage as possible because the next person won't.
Meanwhile, I get paid and live another day to make a difference somewhere else.
And yes, I know exactly where that reasoning leads. I wrote a story with an assassin justifying his actions the same way. There are limits in the amount of damage I'm willing to contribute to, telemetry doesn't cross that line.
So, upper management, government agencies, finance departments, and marketing departments.
These aren't engineering decisions but marketing ones. The role of an engineer is to engineer a solution, not make business decisions. The decision to turn telemetry on by default was not taken by an engineer, so engineers at intel shouldn't feel ashamed of anything at first place.
And this lack of accountability is exactly why our world is the way it is. Just remember anyone can justify evil behavior if they try hard enough. Why? because people are not basically good by nature. They are basically evil by nature. Observe any 2-3 year old throwing a fit and you might begin to grasp the concept.
There is no "lack of accountability" anywhere in that story. Nothing done here was illegal, nor "evil" which is an unnecessary hyperbole.
No argument, resorts to personal attacks.
Yes, they should, because it's those engineers that are implementing the decision. It doesn't matter even a little whether or not they were one of the decisionmakers.
The engineers implementing things like this should be deeply ashamed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
No need to say that how easy it is to brush off that kind of argumentation for the fallacy it is.
In this case, it was a relevant comparison. Court cases involving former concentration camp staff have established that "I just work here" is not a particularly strong defense. If your work enables harmful actions, and if you are aware of it, you may be found responsible for the consequences. Even if you don't participate directly in it. Even if you could face adverse consequences (including death) for refusing to do your job. And even if someone else would likely just take your place.
No it wasn't a relevant comparison, no genocide is happening because someone turned on telemetry by default, this is completely unhinged.
If you're so outraged by all this then you should give these engineers alternative opportunities of work that don't involve telemetry. Can you do that?
These workers CHOSE to work for FAANG. Nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you choose the $300k a year FAANG job over the $200k a year non-FAANG job. Hell, even IN FAANG, Netflix isn't really doing anything unethical. Sometimes taking the high road means less personal profit.
Intel isn't a FAANG to begin with, second, I'm asking you again, are you creating alternative opportunities for the people who would refuse to do their jobs because it goes against your sense of morals? What are these opportunities of work you've built for these people? Answer that question. If you can't answer that, then who are you to judge? Not everybody can afford your grandstanding.
Edit for FirmwareBurner: I will, after you point out the part of my comment in which I claim that some F500 companies aren't greedy.
The way our capitalist economy functions and CEO compensations are set, encourages nothing but greed and short therm profits at the expense of everything else.
The demand for returns comes from equity owners, such as people with 401k and pension funds.
This is before taking into account how these things are taxed.
Edit: you changed your comment :) I answered the previous version.
Edit 2: and even a pension fund could take their dividends and reinvest them. But I guess that would be too much work.
> Yes but if your numbers are constant you can still pay dividends, as long as you're profitable,
Is this not where the money for share buybacks comes from? The business can choose to pay dividends (cash), or it can spend the cash on buying back its shares. Either way, it should offset equally.
>while if you need to provide capital gains you need to increase the numbers so the share price will go up.
This does not make sense. The share price depends on supply and demand of the share. If the business is doing share buybacks, then there is less supply and more demand for the shares, hence share price increase.
Anyway, my point is the pressure for growth has nothing to do with share buybacks versus dividends. Investors like more money than less money just like anyone else does. One could even say all these taxpayer underfunded pension plans for government employees that have long assumed 8%+ growth to meet their obligations are “pressuring” businesses for growth.
The origin of the pressure is likely a shift from shareholders being primarily people who want to hold onto a given stock for many years, and be rewarded through dividends, to being primarily financially-oriented institutions who want to buy low and sell high constantly.
And yes, that was my point.