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Comment by nxtfari | Hacker News Reader

Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just like Factorio and it feels good to see the number go up. In-jokes and dark humor fly and it all feels not real and just like a game. Sometimes on purpose by management, sometimes automatic as a coping mechanism. Defense (my field) is very much the same way.

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Engineers are completely blindsided by technology. I work with some brilliant people, technically speaking, but in some cases they seem to have 0 awareness towards the things they are building and how that affects the people using the things that we built. I had a couple of months ago an engineer that's working on various AI things in our company telling me how we can use and build an AI tool to rate the performance of people in the company and people that use our platform (let's say similar to all these mini-job platforms) just to know who to fire if they are not efficient. At no point in time was he thinking of the people, all he could think of was the algorithm and AI and how amazing it could be to do this.

I also sometimes think about how to make computers supervise/control human activity. It's like a inner engineering rush, but then I come back to my senses and think of how outraged I would be. However for some colleagues, as long as is not affecting them, they don't see any issue with such propositions.

Jeff Goldblum said it best “so preoccupied if they could, they never stopped to think if they should”

> Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company

I used to be in a mobile application team for a bank, where I had genuine meetings with the loans department where it was discussed if we truly wanted to make it easy and obvious to users how they could pay their loans on time (their logic was that those who default and have to pay extra fees were the banks "best" customers).

We obviously pushed back hard on that. But I can imagine these scenarios playing out in other places and with other results.

In my new credit card app I can set if I want to repay 3%, 5% or 100% at the end of the month. If I set it to 100%, I have to pay $2 per month. Banking is already actively hostile against the customer.

You have to pay more money when you pay the total amount you owe? That's just evil.

In some locations banks are allowed to charge you for the interests they will loose out on when their clients pay more of the principal.

In other locations this has been deemed illegal and/or only allowed above a certain amount (think 10-15% of total remaining principal).

I do not agree with this being an ok practice (to charge).

Banks make money on interest. Perhaps the principle itself is the issue, if it's legal to earn money on loans, no surprise a bank incentive is to make you take loan, and have you keep them for as long as it can.

Typically a mortgage does not allow over repayments. Why? It would get people in the nasty habit (from the perspective of the bank) to pay back a little more every month with the spare they've got.

Of course you can pay a fee to overpay.

Mortgages have amortization schedules, Banks love it when you pay more as it only reduces the tail end of your loan. You still pay the interest up front.

Not all banks are the same, some have other incentives to pay off early.

With my mortgage, interest is monthly on the remaining principal and paying extra in a month is entirely on the principal - it reduces the total interest paid, so the bank gets less.

Yes, I think that's standard in the U.S.

The idea that you pay the interest up front is a very common misunderstanding of how mortgages work and more broadly the concept of an amortization schedule.

Yeah, I see people describe it like that all the time, it's never corrected, and doesn't match how I always thought mortgages in general work (and definitely doesn't match mine), so I'm never entirely sure if it's a different system from another country or just a version of the blind leading the blind. Which is why I made my comment so specific to myself.

The parent of that comment mentioning "a fee to overpay" is one I've never even heard of before. Definitely not the case here, free to pay down the principal as much as I want whenever I want as long as the current interest for the month is paid first.

Banks don't care at all how or when you pay your mortgage. They only originate and service the loan. The loan is sold to Fannie & Freddie and isn't on the banks' books anymore.

Only credit unions and small regional banks still hold mortgages on their books. The overwhelming majority(90%+) of mortgages are agency - ie sold to the federal government.

If we're talking normal credit cards in the US, you technically are getting a 30 day loan for free, no interest if paid in full every month.

I don't see a issue if credit cards charged 30d interest on balance, but if mine did that I would drop it instantly.

...which is to say nothing of the interchange fees they earned on that "free loan"

What country is this?

I believe this to be illegal in the USA but would not be shocked if a rule change was slipped into some random unrelated bill.

Which bank is this?

À major one.

By definition, usury/interest based banking is hostile against the customer.

Not shocking, their ethical responsibility is to do what’s right to make profit for the shareholders, not to do what’s best for the customer.

Relevant quote from Screwtape Letters:

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

> designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people

Why do we think engineers are some special class of people who can't do bad things?

It’s not a special class, but teams of engineers tend to spook together and are more likely to discuss topics “uncomfortable” to the employer (but not to unionise, apparently). If the degradation of fellow humans is too on the nose for the engineers, they will make noise and move.

IMO: historically engineers have had a little bit more leverage to negotiate, so IF they did not think something was right to do, they MIGHT have pushed back. So the likelyhood of wanting to do bad things might be the same, but the agency was a bit higher in terms of the Employer/Employee relationship.

I hear what you’re saying, there are definitely just amoral engineers who truly don’t care. I think the plurality though (and this goes for all disciplines, not just engineering) will start to feel queasy if the impact is too clear and visible. Those people need to stay with the program, as there aren’t enough purely amoral engineers/marketers/PMs/etc to keep the ship afloat alone.

One reason we might assume "engineers" tend to operate with better ethical frameworks is that (in Australia at least) you generally have to register for accreditation via a large organisation like Engineers Australia, IChemE, etc, to actually practice professionally. These organisations have standard codes of ethics that, if breached, can result in your removal and an inability to continue professional practice.

Naturally, software engineering has none of this, and in most cases explicitly doesn't want it.

But that's one reason I can think of.

I used to think that based on my friend bubble, but I've met some coworkers who are real selfish assholes that have shattered this belief.

Typically no skin in the game. Same goes for any employee on a salary or hourly wage.

The real parasites come out when stock options do.

I had to take Computer Ethics as part of my degree, but it didn't really anticipate the sort of problems that software engineers run into today. It mostly focused on Therac-25 and integer overflows. Indeed, letting your integer overflow kill a bunch of people is horrifying and is something we should avoid. But we have a much wider reach than people thought at the time. Software is pervasive throughout society and touches every area of life: food delivery and banking are among the examples listed in this thread, and were never touched on in any class I took.

Software didn't create the gig economy or the microloan economy, but as engineers, we had the opportunity to step up and say "hmm, this doesn't seem right, I don't think we should do that". We didn't.

AI is a whole 'nother can of worms. I watched a lot of my friends deactivate social media over the holiday as their pictures got posted to Twitter and got live AI edited by Grok into things that horrify them. You probably wouldn't have gotten an A in Computer Ethics if you said "yeah, we should publicly show women nude pictures of themselves if someone asks in the comments section", but here we are.

It's not great. As a field, we have been remiss in our duty to society.

> I do think it’s believable

My believability is stretched by them disclosing they "put in my two weeks yesterday." That's highly identifiable and incongruent with "posting...from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop."

Yeah ... If true, that's almost enough to identify them. Probably 5 people max at each food delivery company that could be, and their supposed role would be enough to single them out if the company can correctly guess it's talking about them

Doesn’t mean it’s real fact. Deceit is almost required if you’re posting something like this.

There are two datapoints in the text. One is the 2 weeks notice, the other is that they knew of this since 8 months ago. If this were me, I would give random made up information of this kind to throw off anyone trying to investigate this. Also, this is not that far from what we already know from whistleblowers of similar gig economy companies so my believability is not stretched at all.

Other comments pointed out the semi-obvious use of AI due to em dashes.

I'm honestly at a point where every suspicious aspect of that post could as well be counted as a countermeasure to getting caught. Said engineer could still be working at the company or could've left years ago. In my opinion the mentioned financial adjustments could've been a discussion topic for higher ups far far earlier than 2025.

Considering how ruthless Uber has acted thorough the years[0] I am almost 100% sure other startups with similar opportunities have at the very least committed crimes on a similar scale to the linked Reddit confession.

Bonus option: The Reddit account starts astroturfing in a few weeks and this was just a run-of-the-mill bot automation to gain karma which happened to overlap with HN interests.

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

Counterpoint: I've been using em dashes and bulleted lists in my writing (especially in work emails) since around 2015. There are dozens of us! Or maybe I'm just an LLM in a meat suit — who knows at this point.

Em dashes are also historically a useful writing tool in English going back 100+ years, and plenty of real people use them.

I love em dashes — they're the greatest — it makes me very sad that LLMs have tarnished their reputation.

Back in the days before LLMs, I went out of my way to set up the Compose key on Linux, just so I could do cool things like —, ®, ™, and ¹ quickly!

Where did AIs learn those em dashes from?

> Defense (my field) is very much the same way.

First step here in terms of terminology is to call it "defense" instead of "weapon technology to maim or kill human beings". Having said that, I do believe we need weapon technology to maim and kill human beings.

It is defense against others making weapon technology to maim or kill human beings

Hannah Arendt wrote the fantastic "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" about exactly this observation. That one of the principal enablers of the Holocaust seemed obsessed, not with the effects or outcomes of murdering Jews, but simply the expediency of doing it.

If you're interested in the subject I can very much recommend reading it. I can also recommend "The Ethic of Expediency" which deals with the same subject, but attempts to indict all technical writing instead. I personally changed my writing style after reading it to inject more humanity into it.

Big fan of Arendt. I will check this out, thanks!

It certainly seems to be in the ballpark of things that have been done before :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42456715 "Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app"

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