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Comment by RScholar | Hacker News Reader

> Software developers are the wizards and shamans of the modern age. We ought to use our powers with the austerity and integrity such power implies.

This is one of the most powerful truths underlying the world we currently inhabit. The sooner we can agree to behave accordingly, the better our prospects for ripping the reigns of society from the hands of those whose only animating principles are avarice and exploitation.

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I still don't blame the developers, I blame government. It's not the job of rank and file workers to police companies. I wouldn't work for LN, but I'm not going to blame someone else for doing so. We've all gotta feed our families. (I realize there's a line somewhere, you wouldn't excuse a prison guard at Auschwitz the same way, but I can't get too worked up about a developer making a ticketing app even if I hate the ticketing company.)

Developed countries long ago came to the conclusion that companies should not be allowed to have monopolies because it is bad for society as a whole, and it's hard to think of a current monopoly as egregious as this one. There is absolutely no reason one company should have exclusive rights to 85% of large venues, also be an evebt promoter, and also be the ticket seller.

Anything their developers do is not the real issue, a society that allows this to happen in the first place is.

I mean would you say that developers who work for Facebook have crossed that line?

Depends on when they joined

No. Not even close.

...by doing what? FB is one of the largest employers of people on this site. If you ran a poll, I'd expect the majority to answer "no" to your question. Of the people who answered "yes", I bet the majority would still accept an offer from FB if it was just 20k more than the next best offer.

One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed.

Right? Wrong? Discuss.

https://xkcd.com/1390/

I don't see the issue. Every social media site does this, FB was just naive enough to share their research

And this just proved my point. During the Nazi regime, everyone was hating the jews. And everyone was doing fascism.

Now to bring this to a close, people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000 and have lost the ability to see a clear ethical violation will be holding the guns and guarding the gas chambers when the next Hitler comes along. Meditate on this.

Also this XKCD is dumb. Previously the feed was chronological post of friends which was definitely more ethical. But of course that didn't make people addicted enough.

If that proved your point, you didn’t have a point. If you can’t see the difference between genocide and lack of informed consent on a social network algorithm experiment you can’t be helped.

I’m all for moral relativism, but there’s no future in which Facebook’s current actions aren’t at least reasonably debatable, and no past in which Auschwitz was.

If you wanted an example of where the line gets blurry (it does sometimes, just not in either of these) I’d go with pharmaceuticals.

One thing I have learned from the internet is that if you mention the Nazis or the Jews, you lose, good day sir, even if you are right.

People are illogical.

Yeah I was only trying to give an extreme example of someone being unethical working an immoral job, contrasting that with, say, working for Ticketmaster, which, as much as I despise them, is hard to equate with the Holocaust, given that one killed millions of civilians and one just costs me a little money. I should have known better.

They seem very different to me and anymore, I almost think that’s a valid test of the reasonable person standard.

Did you get informed consent from me regarding the methods by which you constructed your comment? Or are you manipulating my emotions unethically?

> people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000

???

I said I don't find A/B tests unethical. Literally every tech company runs A/B tests just like that one. Why would I ask for 20k more?

> Previously the feed was chronological post of friends

Yeah, before they measured the impact of a good recommendation algorithm.

And back when you could log into Facebook and see a feed of all of your friends’ posts quickly. Facebook eventually got to the point where for most people the feed would have been much longer than the time they wanted to spend on site, and so showing them just the most recent few is somewhat random. Much better for engagement to show them posts they like.

The issue is the lack of informed consent. This is pretty basic ethical conduct of research stuff.

I have never seen a social media site ask for consent for A/B testing their new things. Everyone does this, I am pretty sure even the big news sites that wrote those headlines also does this without asking. The only thing facebook did differently was calling it research rather than A/B testing.

I can't put any facebook developer in the same bucket as a guard at a concentration camp.

Because a concentration camp guard would be jailed or killed for refusing service, but a FB dev would lose a few $thousand in opportunity?

Working at a faang level company is associated with a large enough increase in income that it could support a handful of families in developing countries. I don't know what purpose it serves to downplay just how substantial that amount of money is.

Textbook case of unethical conduct of research. The key here is lack of informed consent by the study participants.

The APA put out a press release about this study violated their code of ethics.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/06/informed-con...

I think that was wrong. At the same time, drawing lines of good/bad at the boundaries of the people working at facebook is, imo, not useful.

> I still don't blame the developers, I blame government.

Yes, but I think they still have some responsibility, even if they say "I was just following orders!" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

Everyone bears some responsibility if you've ever interacted with any entity that profits off of TM or helps TM make profit. I don't find it's particularly useful to spend any thought on what people with minuscule responsibility should do differently. It's just bike-shedding when there are important problems to solve.

Even government software has issues (Vienna). I paid a €100+ fine for not having a ticket, even though I spent time going through the purchase flow. I have 100s of tickets purchased. Live agent and support agent just shrugged and told me I don't know how to use the app, washed their hands of any responsibility or need for understanding.

It's like there's no way to make the software human and humans in the loop have a crutch to lean on to not behave as a human. When I contacted the dev team directly, they shrugged too. No refund.

To me it feels like software is the place where society can just exercise its cruelty and indifference, or maybe it is a reflection of society, it's probably just like humans are. What we think software should behave like is not human.

I had more pleasant experiences with London/UK train ticket edge cases and felt like the system is built to deal with user/server errors.

That’s just reflection of your culture. I.e. I come from Eastern Europe where cheating is so engrained and “i made an oopsie” would never fly. Beurocracy is face to face and takes ages

Now living in NZ I get tons of slack for something like “verify youre local for free museum entry” or “get your passport by post”. Life is so much easier when societal trust is high.

Societal trust is extremely valuable. Policy decisions that weaken it should be scrutinised extremely strictly.

"Developers are blameless" is a uniquely HN take, for obvious site demographic reasons.

I see a worthwhile product as a stool with at least three legs: Technical feasibility, business viability, and ethical acceptability. Take one leg away and the stool should fail. Yet, HN commenters endlessly discuss/debate the first two and largely ignore the third. I think we all have a duty to work on projects that are ethically sound (defining that is a whole other discussion). There are plenty of companies out there and plenty of products to work on--it's not like we have to pick an evil one in order to survive and "feed our families."

Yeah, but only one of those legs controls the money. At least in the US, no money means no food, no shelter, no healthcare, etc, so it is not a viable choice for most. So rightfully most of the blame should be assigned to those that control the money: management and executives. Rarely hear of required ethics guidelines and handwringing about ethics from the MBA types.

I'll accept a share of developer blame in places with strong unions and the ability for workers to strike.

And the developer job market has changed. We can act like everyone can just go get a job that pays well somewhere else, but I’ve got friends who are very senior developers who’ve been laid off and had a hard time finding a good job in recent years.

The market isn’t what it once was and while overall still good, we do all have bills to pay.

I guess I'd turn it around and ask those developers: Are there any projects you wouldn't do, no matter how much you needed the money, because you found them ethically unacceptable? If the answer is yes, then they actually agree with me, and we're maybe just discussing where the evilness threshold line should be drawn. I don't know many actual people who would say "No, I would willingly work on absolutely any project, no matter how harmful or depraved it is, as long as I get paid," but then again maybe I don't know enough truly desperate people.

Sure, but the issue is, someone might not think ticket master is evil. And I’d argue the things they do that should at least be illegal (in my view) have nothing to do with developers.

Take away their exclusive rights (on both sides of the business) to 80+% of large live music venues and they’re just another ticket platform.

There should be more choices rather than "find another company". The problem is that it is an economically valid argument to say "if I don't, someone else will".

I believe that professions should have codes of ethics, and people should be expected to adhere to those codes of ethics. Right now there is no licensing or apprenticeship or registration associated with the profession of "software developer". There are some organizations that issue professional certifications in adjacent areas (MCSE, CISSP, etc.) that have codes of ethics associated with them, but I rarely see disciplinary action associated with them, and in any case employability is not linked to these certifications.

Conversely, lawyers have bar associations that evaluate complaints and can withdraw permission to practice.

Doctors have the Hippocratic Oath, but I'm not sure that it's enforced for medical licensure. However doctors do have medical licensing boards and licenses can be revoked.

Pilots have revocable licenses but I'm not sure they have a code of ethics.

Civil engineers have codes of ethics and licensure, but licensure revocation appears associated with legal malpractice, not ethical malpractice.

In any case, there are societal mechanisms that could be used to associate codes of ethics with software developers, if we as a profession and a society chose to, which I'm not optimistic will happen.

I dont think it’s a truth.

Shamans and wizards (never heard this used to describe anyone in history but let’s assume it’s just any kind of supposed magic user) were people at the top tier of their societies in terms of political power. Not kings or chieftains, but above everyone else.

Programmers are just making a living selling their labor power like every other office drone in the world. We’re one of the most common lines of work out there.

If you want the mysticism angle, we are like those kids they used to catch “witches”.

Are there any documented examples of societies where "magics", "shamans" or "wizards" were at the top of the hierarchy? I gotta say, I'm an avid reader of Ancient History and Anthropology and the closest I can think of is the Priest-Kings of Sumeria and your garden variety theocracy and the latter is much more of a priestly bureeacracy than anything else...

Perhaps not at the top in terms of day to day decision making and wealth, but the first that came to mind would be celtic druids and bards.

I'd love to know more, can you point me to some sources?

I'm sorry it's just a vague intuition from watching a lot of documentaries about the Celts and very light internet research.

But generally speaking Druids had an oral tradition of maintaining knowledge in Celtic society. They had inter-tribe gatherings and went through long and difficult training.

Specifically also law. So they had at least the power of judges and to some degree law makers.

Perhaps you can find out more with some of these keywords.

Yeah, we are more like masons. We have useful skills that enable building impressive things, but at the end of the day we are building someone else's cathedral.

I think you don't know what you think you know. My mom is a shaman type. These types often live at the outskirts of society where no well-to-do person would like to be seen. Zero political power but enough utility to keep at an arm's distance -- further if possible while not needed.

> Shamans and wizards (never heard this used to describe anyone in history but let’s assume it’s just any kind of supposed magic user) were people at the top tier of their societies in terms of political power. Not kings or chieftains, but above everyone else.

I don't know where you came by such a notion; Shamans, "Wizards", witches, "wise women/men", are usually shunned from society such that they tend to live near the outskirts of towns or cities, nobody really wants to live close to them; and when "bad things happen" tend to be the first ones to get blamed for it; then they also are commonly used as scapegoats for whatever political, economic or religious effort some corrupt officials try to push.

That doesn't sound very societal top-tier to me.

We're definitely not witches or wizards, at most we are scholars or [specialized] craftsmen. "Knowledge workers" if you will. Not as unlikable as the wise folk that live towards the edge of town, and not as at risk of getting tied to a post and lit on fire because the bishop believes we commune with unclean spirits.

> and not as at risk of getting tied to a post and lit on fire because the bishop believes we commune with unclean spirits

We're on our way to get there, though, with that "can't solve social problems with technology" infectious meme, and the other one that makes the public blame programmers for socially-problematic tech, while ignoring or praising the business people who imagined, commissioned, and decided to deploy those technologies.

Perhaps they were referring to a time when nomadic people started settling into "villages," before organize religion solidified?

Agreed. We're the blacksmiths making armor and swords and horseshoes.

Programmers being analogous to wizards or martial artists made more sense back when one used to need to train years or decades to become one.

With age comes wisdom.

There has been a lot of good that came from making coding more accessible; I'm not trying to gatekeep. But I do think that this is one instance where the outcome is worse. The martial arts masters still unquestionably exist among us. It's just that they're now surrounded by younger, less-wise people with guns. Both types can fight an army, but only one has the wisdom to know when it's better not to.

Yes I think there is truth to this. Something I have seen lately with Rust for example, is because the language is harder to learn, the discourse, tutorials, libraries are all much higher quality.

>Programmers being analogous to wizards or martial artists made more sense back when one used to need to train years or decades to become one.

You can be a shitty wizard with only one year of training, same goes for programmers.

that's kind of exactly OP's point. you can get hired and call yourself a "programmer" after a year of training today ... that was not true in quite the same way 30/40 years ago. and we're in agreement that someone with a year of training is probably not all that good.

>you can get hired and call yourself a "programmer" after a year of training today

That might be true 3 or 4 years ago, but I find that difficult to believe in the current job market. All the programming jobs that have come across my screen lately require a 4-year CS degree. Companies aren't hiring noobs lately. They're laying off more than hiring.

The fact we have had less than benevolent wizards and shamans, why would we expect to have modern day equivalent of only benevolent coders? It's such a fairy tale level of expectation that it seems childish. Spending any energy in trying to make real world a fairy tale is just wasted.

It's okay to shame bad actors.

In fact, society would likely be better off if e brought back more public shaming

I think that this is predicated upon a reasonably well informed and educated public. And my estimation is that the general populous is not informed enough on cryptography to be in a position to shame Ticketmaster engineers.

Also, my impression is that there is already copious amounts of public shaming. Some social media sites seem largely devoted to that. And unfortunately, I don't think most people fully deserve the verdict that they get in the court of public opinion.

This is certainly not true. Can you name an existing or historical shame-based society that you would actually want to live in?

We wouldn't. You might expect that on an indivudual level. But at a society level, I would expect any company that's doing things that are specifically allowed by our goverment (who did approve the Ticketmaster Live Nation Merger) to get their jobs filled just like any other. I think Ticketmaster is evil, another developer might not. That's fine, they're not killing people or dumping toxic chemicals into reservoirs, we can agree to disagree.

My outrage is directed entirely at the government agencies whose job it was to stop this, not the developers making a ticketing app.

Ultimately developers type the code in and hit "deploy." They have to share at least a fraction of the blame and accept at least a fraction of the outrage. Without them, the product wouldn't exist.

There's a lot of blame to be spread around though. The developers themselves, their management chain all the way up to the decision makers, shareholders that demand ever increasing profits, governments who provide the legal framework and allow these huge, destructive companies. Everyone should get their share of the blame.

It's nice to think that might be true, but there are always plenty more devs willing to work on anything for a paycheck than there are devs with strict morals. There's a lot of egos, but at the end of the day, no matter who you are, you are not irreplaceable.

It’s interesting, the more we agree and hold strong, the higher the demand grows for engineers who would help some companies create their hellscape. The incentive will grow higher and higher until people break rank. And you start over.

I cannot agree more. And this is exactly why the old Google motto of "don't be evil" was so important. And the decline of Google is highly correlated with the removal of this motto from its culture.

I sincerely hope all tech companies can take a page from old Google and truly instill an innate rejection of evil among all software engineers.

I personally think we are more like "plumbers but with JSON". I have principles and apply them but I don't expect the others to do that

architect+builder+plumber.

The suits at TM couldn't build the app+backend, even if they could hire someone to maintain and replace parts of it.

> The sooner we can agree to behave accordingly

People don't code out of a sense of duty, they do so to earn money, so there is no mechanism to enforce "behavior."

> our prospects for ripping the reigns of society

There are too many industries that take the mantle of improving society on their back. This is a mistake. There is no natural representative mechanism that ensures your actions are aligned to required outcomes.

This should probably be left to congress. If you're concerned that they won't do it then that should immediately suggest the appropriate course of action to you.

> of those whose only animating principles are avarice and exploitation.

Short term thinking cannot lead to long term rewards without abject manipulation of the marketplace.

Congress is useless, along with the rest of the planetary corporate-fascist oligarch facsimiles of democracy.

If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom, we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society.

Open source implementations of:

Universal cryptographic identification

Decentralized voluntary anonymous voting, verifiable by every voter

Sovereign algorithmic monetary policy

Liquid representation

Complete digitization of all necessary information to audit any authorities, at any time

Full release of privacy for any "public official" -- service to society should be a burden, not a privilege

This, and much, much more can ALL be done with software. An entirely new paradigm of society, with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine.

Our rights digitized, our privacy, speech, and pursuit of happiness made into software.

I would say software may have an impact, and the thinking of this impact extends far beyond the next quarter of profits. This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond. A continuously evolving, open source mechanism of human governance.

> If software engineers united behind true ideals of freedom

You'd have better luck trying to remove jealousy from the human heart. If you can suggest a mechanism for actually making this happen, enforcing it in the face of economic incentives, and measuring it's actual impact then I'll take the ride with you. Until then it is an absolute fools errand.

> we could automate the entire stack of "leadership" and raise the floor of society.

Autonomous societies have been tried before. They have no mechanism to correctly align their long term objectives so none of them have ever lasted. Planning to build another one based on nothing other than assumption is flawed.

> with freedom unalienably encoded into the fabric of the social machine.

Guns exist. The social machine is secondary to force. You have no plan for this.

> This mindset can extend into a multi-planetary society and beyond.

Older people sell younger people pure unadulterated fantasies in order to extract cheap labor from them.

> If you can suggest a mechanism for actually making this happen, enforcing it in the face of economic incentives, and measuring it's actual impact then I'll take the ride with you.

Except it's not truth.

You want truth?

The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold, makes the rules."

Truth is that money is all that matters. Nothing else in the world of business matters not relationships, not customers, not Boards of Directors or CEOs. Money.

Until a person realizes this, they will be forever caught in a cycle of thought that is not truth.

"Follow the money!" is the best way to see how society works, and is why every government wants their hands in our money. Meaningful change in this world requires money. No amount of idealism or 'using our powers' can change that.

Do the wizards have 'F-Off' money? No. Will they ever? No.

This is a wild take. Software developers do the dirty work. We're one step below wall street.

This is not only a truth of the world we currently inhabit, it has always been a truth, of all the worlds we have inhabited. Power and greed go hand in hand for a reason and the struggle to find the balance is, and will always be present.

It was not true of this world 150 years ago that any person with sufficient learning could tap buttons to create an experience to be found in the hand of the majority of living humans.

I agree power and greed go hand in hand - absolute power corrupts, absolutely - but this bit? This is new.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Kingmakers-Developers-Conquered-W... ("The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World")

https://web.archive.org/web/20200915000000*/https://try.newr... [pdf]

Ah yes, The Roads Must Roll.

It's worth remembering that folks who can be bought, can be bought off and spend a lot of time enjoying their riches while true believers are somewhat more difficult to convince and don't take any time off.

That's important because all of the big evils have been perpetrated by true believers in pursuit of their "one true way." (Yes, some large evils have been perpetrated by folks chasing money. I'm talking about things like wholesale slaughter of as many people as they could lay their hands on.)

"In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells"

t. Introduction of SICP

The worst are the programmers of the mobile games for kids.

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