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Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

This post is about corporate politics, not "shipping projects." To wit:

  If you ship something users hate and makes no money, but 
  your leadership team is happy, you still shipped. You can 
  feel any way you like about that, but it’s true. If you 
  don’t like it, you should probably go work for companies 
  that really care how happy their users are.

When the stated goal is to make leadership happy and not solving customer problems such that customers are "happy", that is pretty much the definition of politics. As subsequently identified therein:

  Engineers who think shipping means delivering a spec or 
  deploying code will repeatedly engineer their way into 
  failed ships.

I would question the ethics of engineers whom employ a strategy of preferring politics over delivering solutions.

EDIT: clarified the ethical question.

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Like everything else, writing code doesn't exist in a vacuum.. There will always be interconnected constraints and requirements, and you simply cannot "deliver a spec" and think that's all there is to it.

And that has nothing to do with ethics.. The spec is outdated by the time it makes its way to you, and odds are it was flawed from the start in some way.

And again this isn't because someone is bad at their job, it's because the business reality and conditions are constantly changing.

And so someone needs to be keeping an eye on both of those things and steering the code delivery parts of the work to stay aligned with those changing business conditions.

To your comment about politics: I would say that from a high enough viewpoint "happy customers" should converge with "happy leadership" even if it doesn't happen every single time you ship something..

If those two things don't converge, the company won't be around for long and then politics won't matter much, will they?

It is not always a yes or no. “Executive high leadership” can approve of 60% customer friendly stuff and 40% bs. And if some engineer is pouring his heart and soul to make a x% good thing that would be a benefit then it might still be rejected or worse, if engineer is in bad terms with managers he has pretty much no chance.

> If those two things don't converge, the company won't be around for long and then politics won't matter much, will they?

Have you ever worked at a big company? The level of dysfunction that can be sustained over years or decades at a place with decent market foothold is staggering.

I work at a big company now.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule..

Let's reframe as "trending up" and "trending down" based on customer happiness then..

Over a long enough time horizon, and generally speaking, I still believe I am correct.

“Let’s reframe the question to where I’m right”

Sure, take a worse-case interpretation of my words, this is the Internet after all.

We're all posting short messages here, not essays.. There is so much room for choosing to interpret each other in different ways.. So it's inevitable that we'll be misinterpreted sometimes.

And yes, I did try to reframe to better make my point, because I do think I'm right.

Welcome to HN, but a word of advice, this kind of snipey low-value shitpost is typically not welcome here.

> To your comment about politics: I would say that from a high enough viewpoint "happy customers" should converge with "happy leadership" even if it doesn't happen every single time you ship something..

To look at a concrete example, with the quality issues Boeing has been having in the recent years, we can claim "happy leaders" diverged from "happy customers".

Yet Boeing will still be around for a long time, and failures can be catastrophic. Whistle blowers who came out since can be said to have advocated for "happy customers" against "happy leaders" but were suppressed.

Yes of course there are exceptions to the rule, always.

At Boeing, ‘happy (wealthy) leaders’ diverged from ‘alive customers’.

What I asserted was:

  When the stated goal is to make leadership happy and not 
  solving customer problems such that customers are "happy", 
  that is pretty much the definition of politics.

This has nothing to do with "writing code", "outdated specs", "people being bad at their job", or changing market conditions.

It is a decision each engineer makes when performing their job.

Ethics are not situational. An individual either values and adheres to them or does not. Specifically excluded from this position are mistakes people make and then strive to not repeat, as no one is perfect.

Fair enough! I see your point.. But then I would submit that this is too narrow of a view to take in a complex interconnected enterprise, and that anyone who works this way will end up more behind than ahead.

I'll stand by my first line that nothing exists in a vacuum.

If you only make decisions in isolation or without broader context, whether based on ethics or otherwise, then you will inevitably make the wrong decision, I would argue, more often than not.

Context matters, and the same decision made at different times and in different situations can have completely different outcomes or impacts.

What if "making the customer happy" costs so much money that it puts the company out of business? Do you still focus on only making the customer happy?

What if you have to piss off your customers, for a period of time, to save the business so you can get back to making the customer happy eventually?

Or a less dramatic scenario, what if making the customer happy makes your co-workers' jobs hell, for reasons outside your, or their, control? Is customer happiness then still your singular focus at all cost? Because then you're a shit co-worker in my view.

Is your only responsibility to the customer, or do you feel any responsibility towards your co-workers and/or their jobs & livelihoods?

Life and work are messy and complicated, and everything is a series of trade-offs.

I’m still not seeing your ethical problem for MAJORITY of software deliverables. You literally cannot always deliver things to make customers happy in software and if you aren’t in agreement with your leadership and product teams of what you deliver you are going to have a bad time.

Companies from startups to large enterprises deliver solutions that 0 to some customers use that was mainly to appease whatever vision your leadership has. AI chatbots in websites are a big one that I can think of.

> "happy customers" should converge with "happy leadership"

This is the exact opposite of what we're seeing with Enshittification at the moment.

Customers are locked in to a platform and then made completely miserable by management who have goals utterly unaligned with customer happiness.

100% agreed.. But I still believe that over a long enough time horizon, enshittification will take those companies down. Value extraction is by nature a limited time strategy.

Most companies who choose to do this are taking advantage of a period of market or segment domination where they know users don't have good alternative options, and will tolerate some level of garbage because they still want the service or product.

Note that highly competitive industries or market segments typically don't see as much enshittification...

this is a bizarre take.

you work for the company, not for your abstract imagination of what users want. if you genuinely feel the company isn't aligned with users, then try to change that.

it's not unethical (per se, obviously don't build bombs for them) to please your employer.

> it's not unethical (per se, obviously don't build bombs for them) to please your employer.

What are the ethics of pleasing your managers and/or executives at the expense of your employer?

I've been in a really stressful position for the past 6 months. Things that I would've walked out over a few years ago are now things that, for various reasons, I kinda have to choke down.

My entire concept of "what is ethical?" has undergone a transformation. It's not about my ideals any longer, or about feelings, or about how gentle or aggressive management acts in negotiations. It's about much deeper things-- like when I'm asked to support something I find distasteful, I need to really investigate whether, in context, it's actually something which violates my conscience. You know what? It almost never does.

These are the two questions that matter most in my view: 1) Am I honestly being required to do something that harms someone worse than the status quo, and 2) Is anyone around me having a medical emergency - including certain serious psychological issues - that I can help with? Aside from those two things, there's a lot of ugly crap that you can still keep trucking through.

Many people, particularly (but not only) younger ones, are oversensitive to things they simply don't like but that aren't actually wrong in any major way. You've got to choose your battles.

That seems like a very narrow-minded view of the role of engineers in society. At the end of the day we aspire to solve problems that make the world better—I'm certainly not going to fault individuals for following the money, but to dismiss the ethical dimension completely is unreasonable in my opinion.

In the Military, soldiers have an ethical duty not to follow an order that is illegal. It is called duty to disobey.

In civilian life, you have a duty to disobey if what your employer asks of you will unnecessarily harm people. For example, shipping a broken insecure product that handles PII/PHI/etc is absolutely unethical, and possibly illegal (though often the legal consequences are minor, if not irrelevant). Your bosses will absolutely ask you to do illegal and/or unethical shit, so you always need to be aware of where the line is, both legally and ethically.

It's not always clear where the line is. With AI work, the line has already been crossed several times (things like discrimination in output resulting in innocent people being hurt). Do not do whatever your company asks for. Do push back when you see a problem. Don't ship something that could hurt someone. If you're not sure, ask or find out.

> an ethical duty not to follow an order that is illegal

I'm not sure that has to be said, but yes, don't do illegal stuff.

You then push this question further outside the legal/illegal bounds.

Ethical is not the same as legal. Legal actions can be unethical and ethical actions can be illegal.

The Nuremberg trials established this after WW2: just obeying orders is not sufficient [0]. This is why modern militaries have a duty to disobey.

It's the same in civilian life: you have a personal duty to disobey an instruction that you personally consider to be unethical. You cannot hide behind "I was just obeying the law". You absolutely should break the law if you consider that law to be unethical. It is your personal responsibility to decide this.

So yes, you should do illegal stuff if not doing said illegal stuff would be unethical.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_principles

That's a separate point, sure.

"soldiers have an ethical duty not to follow an order that is illegal"

And, putting it that way, a legal duty not to follow an order that is unethical.

My point is that us Software Engineers have the same duty, in my opinion. If some pointy-haired boss tells us to build something that will cause misery for our users, I think we have an ethical duty to refuse to do it.

The Company is an imaginary construct. The reality is that there is a group of people with common goals who work together towards those goals. Very often those goals are simply making money by any means possible. Working with them doesn't absolve anyone from responsibility.

Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups.

All the bad connotations we get from the word are because humans are humans. There is no better model that works in any kind of society/ organization/ group other than "politics".

Somebody "ethics" may not be the same as others. (Is it ethic to spend a lot of money and deliver something that does not fit the expectations of the ones that provided the money? It may be easy to make users happy - just give them free movies, etc.)

The problem is if you deliver something and the people it's meant to serve don't know about it, or can't use it, or it doesn't actually solve their real problem, you didn't "ship" in the sense the article is talking about.

I suppose it's possible to pass all those thresholds and management still doesn't like it. But it's important to ask yourself if that's really the case or if you did something wrong and failed to ship something fit for purpose.

> I would question the ethics of engineers whom employ a strategy of preferring politics over delivering solutions.

This too harsh. There's nothing unethical about delivering what your manager tells you instead of what you believe the customers need. Going rogue — as opposed to doing what you're told — is not necessarily the ethical choice.

IMO there are enough "not particularly ethical" tech companies are out there that we shouldn't be giving awards for blindly doing whatever your corporate overlords say. You have a choice every day what you contribute to the world.

Exactly. This is basically "enshittification" [1] in its truest form.

Look at Boeing for example, I bet leadership was very happy with the fat stock bonuses and I also bet a lot of engineers "shipped" products following the author definition of shipping.

So much so that the "if it's not Boeing I'm not going" became "if it's Boeing I'm not going".

Personal take, but if you are only playing politics you are a politician and not an engineer.

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

> I would question the ethics of engineers whom employ a strategy of preferring politics over delivering solutions.

Hopefully there is not misalignment between satisfying leadership goals and delivering end-user solutions.

But if there is, I hardly classify that as an "ethical" dilemma for the team members.

>> I would question the ethics of engineers whom employ a strategy of preferring politics over delivering solutions.

> Hopefully there is not misalignment between satisfying leadership goals and delivering end-user solutions.

This is precisely the situation I identified. Reproducing a quote from the article:

  If you ship something users hate and makes no money, but 
  your leadership team is happy, you still shipped.

> But if there is, I hardly classify that as an "ethical" dilemma for the team members.

If not having to choose between corporate politics and delivering solutions, then what would qualify as an ethical dilemma for an engineer?

I feel that you don't trust leadership teams very much.

Some people care about the goals of the company, some people care about the company. Who cares about the company, gets promoted.

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