Hacker News Reader

> But if we don’t do our job right, people don’t get paid right, and while that may not have the same immediate impact as a doctor mistake, it’s... very much a real human impact.

As someone whose spouse is a teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District (where they had a disastrous rollout of new payroll and HR software), the effects are very, very real and concrete to me. Luckily, I work in tech and our could handle the problems, but many teachers live paycheck-to-paycheck. We know of teachers who have donated blood to get rent money because they weren’t paid, and one teacher died from cancer while being denied healthcare as a result of the HR software being borked. Total disaster with real, negative human consequences, unfortunately.

I don’t really think this is true anymore.

When a doctor messes up, their patient gets hurt. When we mess up, millions get inconvenienced. You can’t really say one is worse than the other. Take Twitter for example. You could say “so what, people can’t tweet for a while” but among those millions of users are a couple (like the Japanese tsunami twitter account) where lives can be lost if your service doesn’t perform adequately.

I work in financial services — if my bug causes a million people to lose money, what percentage of that million were on the border of suicide and my bug tipped them over the edge? Even if that number is 0.1 person / 1 million that means I can commit 10 such bugs in my lifetime before I’ve statistically taken a life.

Not saying this line of thinking is right or healthy, but it’s just not as black and white as “doctor can kill people, we can’t”.

I believe we are in complete agreement though, if you read through the entirety of the post? :)

My main point was indeed: "While we may not have as immediate and visible impact on people's health, we can and do have significant impact on people's well-being, and should think more consciously on such connections"

I wish more people thought like you. To be particularly relevant to your industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system?wprov=sfti1...

> "My wife is a doctor; when she does her job poorly people die! Cheer up, we just move code around".

I can't imagine the pressure to write this code:

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”

rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/

> we are too disconnected from consequences of our seemingly abstract, technical, impersonal work

i think it's important to be connected to your work (when it matters, like your former boss said), but I realized that we're all just human beings, and we each have a set capacity for such things

a few people may be able to knock out life-saving operation after operation and just pound a stiff drink before going back to the OR the next day for years on end, but the rest of us can only do that sort of thing for a year or two tops before 'shutting off' (or burning out)

going back and forth between 'boring, but dependable' and 'exciting, but mercurial' seems to keep my personal trajectory interesting at least :)

I think there's also a lot of engineers with a, shall we say, hands off attitude about ethics and the downstream effects of the software they are writing. Like it's "Boss told me to do it" or "Boss told me not to do it" and that's the end of the ethical quandary! Software engineers need to take at least partial responsibility for the code they are physically typing in and causing to come into existence. If that software is going to fail and cause harm to people, it's literally your job and responsibility as a professional engineer to raise that concern and stop it from shipping.

A lot of software teams have too much of a "JIRA ticket is closed, so my work here is done" attitude.

totally agree, i think the problem is deeper than an engineering problem; every industry can find a group of people "just doing their jobs"

thinking about it, the excuse is often "i gotta pay my mortgage / bills / child's college" , but I have a hard time pointing to self-inflicted debt as the root cause of human suffering

unless we just want to sweep it all under sin: "greed"

> there's also a lot of engineers with a, shall we say, hands off attitude about ethics and the downstream effects

Yeah. I know one (not involved in my projects thankfully) whose response to pointing out likely downstream problems is generally "that sounds like a 'their' problem rather than a 'me' problem".

And I'm quoting, as I've heard it from them often. :(

My expectations for people to take ethical responsibility generally scales with rank/level. It’s hard to fault a junior engineer for doing what they’re told; they might not even know about any harms they are doing, or maybe they’re economically vulnerable and can’t speak up for fear of losing their job.

On the other hand, a Director or Staff Engineer has my full blame for anything unethical that happens under their purview.

If it could save a person's life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.

https://libquotes.com/steve-jobs/quote/lbl2z6p

During boot time, one can sip one's coffee, glance at the newspaper, maybe tidy the desktop a little.

Who boots every day?

The Steve Jobs quote was from the 1980s. Back then, you really did boot daily (at least; it wasn't uncommon on both Macs and PCs in that era to need to reboot multiple times a day because applications could and did crash the system often).

I remember Mac OS crashing so much I found ways to resume the system from a crash state in some instances by pressing key combos and typing incantations into a shell of some sort.

I do, quite a few of my roommates in the past had as well.

We use desktop machines that consume a bit of juice. SSDs are fast, why not save the electricity/heat?

I feel this seems odd because of laptops and phones being overwhelmingly popular

The equivalence is useless. There was not 100 lives of productive work done in that time, there was just 5M instances of 10 seconds being saved.

"We made the planet 100 lives more productive" is just self-congratulatory.

Not many corporations do user research. Architects and developers should be attending these sessions.

Seeing with your own eyes, how average user of the system interacts with it is sobering for many. Sometimes it leads to fundamental changes in thinking and has overall positive effect on the product.