Comment by foofie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foofie | Hacker News Reader

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> An engineer "signing off" on something actually means something, with actual stakes.

It's all about the social impact of a mistake.

The reason "engineers" sign off stuff is not because they are engineers. It's because society frowns upon people dying due to a faulty building, wants to see those responsible for the disaster punished and not be behind another project again.

Society's response to ensuring incompetent professionals can't sign off on stuff is to manage an Allowlist of individuals who can sign off, and have mechanisms in place to remove from the Allowlist those who screwed up badly.

These Allowlist are things like professional engineering institutions, and someone who is registered in the Allowlist is called engineer.

Now, does the software engineering world have anything of the sort in terms of importance in a society? No. A service crashing or a bug being sneaked into a codebase does not motivate a strong response from society demanding some people do not ever get behind a keyboard again.

> ... does not motivate a strong response from society ...

Is it not time things change?

How many lives have been destroyed by shoddy software? UK post office scandal? Therac-25? Leaked personal, intimate or payment data?

> Is it not time things change?

No.

There is absolutely no use case for misuse of any mundane service or desktop app that comes even close to match the impact on society of an apartment building collapsing and killing occupants.

> How many lives have been destroyed by shoddy software?

In relative terms, if you compare any grievance you might have with the sheer volume of services and applications running 24/7 all over the world... Zero dot zero percent.

You can't even make a case against using free software developed by amateur volunteers in production environments.

Social media would like a word. The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media. To say nothing of the corrosive force on democracy and our ability to make sense of the world as a society.

A building collapsing might kill 10 people. A rare tragedy. Social media impacts billions. Even if you want to downplay the negative impact on each person, the total impact across the globe is massive.

Software has eaten the world, for good and ill. I think it’s high time we treated it seriously and took some responsibility for how our work impacts society.

> The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media.

In what country? In what year comapred against what base year?

Disclaimer - not Australia anytime betwwen 1910 and now:

https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/de...

In the USofA:

    Adolescent suicides rose from 8.4 per 100,000 during the 2012-2014 timeframe to 10.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2018-2020, according to the new edition of America's Health Rankings Health of Women and Children Reportopens in a new tab or window from the United Health Foundation.

https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2022-he...

So if it tripled there then, teasing out just teen girls, there must have been a reference point from which it tripled ...

Or is this just over zealous hyperbole?

> Or is this just over zealous hyperbole?

I'm referencing Jonathan Haidt's work: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-...

But regardless, I find it pretty ridiculous to claim that us software engineers don't have a massive impact on the world. We've inserted software into every crevice of human civilisation, from my washing machine and how I interact with loved ones, all the way up to global finance and voting systems. You think technology companies would be the largest industry on the planet if we didn't have an impact on people's lives?

Leaving the social media point aside, all I'm arguing is that when harm actually occurs due to negligence, companies needs to actually be held responsible. Just like in every other industry that doesn't have convenient EULAs to protect them from liability. For example, if Medibank leaks the health records of all of their customers, they should be punished in some way as a result - either fined by a regulatory agency or sued by their customers. Right now, they shift all of the harm caused by negligent behaviour onto their customers. And as a result, they have no incentive to actually fix their crappy software.

I don't want companies the world over to look at things like that and say "Well, I guess Medibank got away with leaking all their customer's data. Lets invest even less time and effort into information security". I don't want my data getting leaked to be a natural and inevitable consequence of using someone's app.

Even from a selfish point of view, people will slowly use less and less information technology as a result, because they have no ability to know which companies they can trust. This is already happening in the IoT space. And thats ultimately terrible for our industry.

Oh, social media companies have an enormous impact on the world - through decisions made at C-suite and senior management level about what to demand of software engineers and how to deploy that work.

The impact by software engineers perhaps falls more in the "failed to whistle blow" category than the "evil Dr. Strangelove" box .. save for those very few that actually rise to a position of signifigance in strategic decision making.

That aside, the teen girl suicide rate underpinning your reference seems to be about 2x, from 2.8 per 100K (ish) circa 2000 to 5.5 per 100K in 2017

Jonathan Haidt links to this paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27358...

which doesn't include the figures. The full reproduced JAMA Research Letter from 2019 with figures and all is here: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1001/jama.2019.5054

As a research letter from JAMA I take that as fair reporting of some raw CDC data - I don't know how representative that result is in the fullness of reflection, normalisation, and other things that happen with data over time. To be clear I'm not quibblling and I thank you for the link.

Haidt also makes clear that Correlation does not prove causation and argues that No other suspect is equally plausible.

I'm 100% willing to align myself with the "social media as it stands is a scourge on humanity and young minds (for the most part)" camp.

I'm equally onboard with corporations are shit at personal data security and should be held with feet to the fire until they improve.

The link to mental health and suicide rates is far from shown, and could have any number of confounding factors.

Perhaps a better example would be the situation in Myanmar. It has been shown beyond doubt that it was in fact a genocide in the full meaning of the term, and that it was made much worse by Facebook.

Both by design where their algorithms are designed to maximize the impact of this type of social contagion, but also by their manned staff which were either unwilling or not allowed to help. Both situations are equally bad.

> I'm referencing Jonathan Haidt's work

Why not link to real numbers though? Haidt doesn't understand the numbers, misquotes them out of context, and mangles the data.

Not to mention building software that decides who gets health care, insurance or mortgage and discriminates based on bugs and faulty premises. And we're not even at Tesla killing people with software bugs.

> . The suicide rates of teen girls have tripled since the introduction of social media.

This is simply false.

> misuse of any mundane service or desktop app

That's way, way over-trivializing the issue.

Self-driving cars absolutely will kill someone. The driver may be at fault for being distracted, but as long as the system allows for distracted drivers, the software is the process. See: Aviation post-mortems.

Medical equipment is another example. We do not need to go as far as Therac, there has been a number of near-misses which in the absence of independent post-mortems, are never recorded anywhere.

Drones and autonomous warfare also occupies many developers.

Social scoring systems, and taxation and payment systems, should also not be trivialized. Even if they do not make spectacular media coverage, they absolutely kill people. No indenpendent post-mortems to be seen, blameless or otherwise.

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