Ask HN: Do you think the software industry has a good culture of whistleblowing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think the software industry has a good culture of whistleblowing?

E.g, do developers from within regularly expose dark patterns and monetization tactics, or wholesale bad ideas (bad spiritually, bad as in you wouldn’t do it yourself if you were in charge …) If not, what do you think is stopping them other than money?

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I think most of the whistles to be blown are like paper cuts, nobody's going to sacrifice their job over one papercut but nobody is singularly responsible for them all either. The threshold for something happening if a whistle were blown is very different to my standards too - I wouldn't leave security issues to rot on the backlog, I wouldn't lubricate easy and unlimited spending in a child's app, but a lot has to happen for a company to be accountable for these things.

Whistleblowing is not magic. Most of the time experienced people already know where the issues are, how long or what it takes to handle issues when everyone is not aligned etc And certain kinds of problems when you push or force people into the "right" position, when they arent ready, all sorts of new problems emerge. Cuz you know people will fake it, lie about it, cover their ass, find others to blame etc. Larger the org more unpredictable the consequences.

No industry seems to have a good culture that supports whistle blowing

if you mean blowing one's own whistle or tooting one's own horn, yes. if you mean done for not some form of personal reward, while we have had our occasional moments we are not generally known for being in the position where any one or few of us can make much of a difference; by the time most projects get to that point in any STEM field it is usually too late to unconvince someone else of its worth or value unless it is really egregious. at some point what we considered shocking becomes/became something people got used to. Add to that that since many of us are somewhat personally risk averse, for various reasons, we often do not stop things when we should.

As examples: The dod warned against prediction markets in 1995-1997, and we had ai winters for REASONS, but now people are just refusing to do anything but talk about how dangerous things are as they push more r&d cash outlay, and essentially embrace the apocalypse.

does whistleblowing matter? or do people just want PR?

the flock thing was interesting and it is good we are pushing against centralized surveillance, but noone seems to want to pull down the billions of pages of pii of almost only americans or get rid of google map pictures. it's funny remembering the brouhaha of the original google map rovers logging wireless access point (WAP) info long long ago.

whistleblowing is a crap word, incidentally.

vc needs to get a conscience. and i don't mean donate or do carbon credit-type lies.

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