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Here is a good, related article I think you should read.

https://emersion.fr/blog/2020/saying-no-to-unethical-tasks/

Thanks, I have read that before and skimmed through it again just now. It's a good article. Was there a specific point from it you wanted to highlight?

Your comment seemed to convey that employees are powerless over their own actions in the context of a large corporation when given unethical tasks, such as fulfilling the requirement of "the user is not allowed to say no".

People should not do things they believe to be unethical. You do, as an employee, have the autonomy to say no to unethical tasks. You are therefore not blameless when you perform unethical tasks, because you chose not to say no.

It's a great read, and honestly I wish something like that (or an Ethics class) was required in order to graduate with a CompSci degree. We all have agency and the ability to say "no" to implementing bad ideas, but if you suggest that on HN, they look at you like you have antlers growing out of your head.

I've quit jobs where I believed the project I was asked to work on were unethical, and that I had no other choice at the company. My first job out of university, I was asked to write code to cheat on an industry benchmark. I was 19 years old but I still somehow conjured up the courage to tell my manager that I would not feel comfortable working on that.

But you see senior engineers here with 20 years of experience just shrugging and saying "Well, boss told me to do it so I have no choice!"

Just my experience, but I absolutely had to take an ethics class to get my CS degree. Not just any ethics class either, but one focused specifically on real-world implications of the work software engineers do, with breakout labs to discuss various case studies and evaluate different choices based on established ethical frameworks. The textbook used was 'Computers, Ethics, and Society,' and I reflect on that course more than most courses I completed in college

> Your comment seemed to convey that employees are powerless over their own actions

The main point I was making is in the first paragraph. I was responding to what was essentially a call for random individuals to be identified and harassed because of their potential connection to some user-hostile software. I politely recommended/requested to not take such actions. I think if you have an opinion or concerns about a software/product/design/practice you should try to turn it into a meaningful contribution and express your thoughts in some way that you deem appropriate and helpful. If your preferred method of expressing your thoughts is shaming and harassing people, or other generally violent and harmful acts then you should keep your thoughts to yourself. The same applies to calling for others to act in such a manner.

> People should not do things they believe to be unethical. You do, as an employee, have the autonomy to say no to unethical tasks. You are therefore not blameless when you perform unethical tasks, because you chose not to say no.

You're not really disagreeing with anything I said (other than in intensity) but I'll respond to this directly.

People generally don't go out of their way to do things they believe to be wrong ("unethical"). People do tend to cross their own boundaries more easily when under pressure.

Different people have different levels of autonomy in life and at work. It's normal to find it difficult to say no to your manager.

Playing a part in some project does assign some responsibility to you. The smaller the part, the smaller the responsibility. Blaming an individual contributor for systemic problems with a project is unfair and a bad way to fix the problems.

Scale and context is important. Many/most things are issues of degrees. Applying your extremely rigid framework to a scenario with the scale of a single employee at Microsoft is bizarre/comedic.

Um, I didn't find that very informative. Did the feature get implemented anyway? Should everyone expect the same kindness from their management?

> They're not responsible for the giant evil megacorp that employs them.

Of course they are! People aren't magically born hired to some giant company... they choose to--hell: they even fight to!--work there because they like making more money than they could at another job, in no small part as these jobs involve doing some evil things that extract more value from the world.

> They all got told what the software was supposed to do and they tried to make the software to do what it was supposed to do, because that's what their job is.

First off: who is telling them? Microsoft isn't some AI: it can't tell anyone what to do as it has no agency of its own... people had to make every single decision and take every single action that you are attributing to "Microsoft". They can't "all" be told what the software is supposed to do: someone--often someone low in the org chart, fascinatingly, but this sometimes could actually be someone high up--had to come up with the idea and do the telling.

Second: no... just because "that's your job" isn't an excuse to just do whatever your boss wants you to do, even when you disagree with it; that is a ridiculous level of blame shifting. If you don't want to be held responsible and you somehow can't quit then you should at least be helping in protest of whatever you are finding yourself doing.

> The user isn't allowed to truly say "no, never"...

I mean, why not? Well, because someone, somewhere--a person, with a name, whether they were high or low in the ranks--decided it was more profitable to take agency from users, and then a scant handful of other people were willing to go along with that decision in exchange for everyone being paid their share of the spoils.

(BTW: I would totally accept an argument that this button is a silly example to care deeply about. I'm not attached to the example myself: I was replying to someone else who cared about this and so am adopting this frame. There are much much worse decisions being made by Apple and Google these days.)

> I would totally accept an argument that this button is a silly example to care deeply about.

I'm not trying to make an argument about that feature. I think it's a good, overt example of Microsoft's attitude towards Windows users. There are many others like it and many are more and less offensive.

> I mean, why not?

You seem to have missed my point here (my bad). In the hypothetical scenario (the key points of which you are repeating) the imaginary UX team did their job well, by making the outcome of each choice more clear than they would/could have been and possibly even giving the user more than zero choice in the first place.

> Of course they are! [responsible for the company that employs them]

Of course they're not! It's obviously not that simple.

You seem to be making/repeating a "no one is holding a gun to their head" argument. There's not really any way to argue with that, because it's such an extreme point of view to hold. So I'll just say:

Yes, people make choices. I thought we all knew that. I also thought that we all knew that there are any number of complicating factors involved in any one of those choices. I think you should consider that not everyone has the power or opportunity to do whatever they want to at any point in time.

> They're doing their job/s. They're not responsible for the giant evil megacorp that employs them.

That sounds an awful lot like "I was just following orders" :/