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Comment by jareklupinski | Hacker News Reader

> 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 :)

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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"

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.

> 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. :(

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