Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenizer | Hacker News Reader

I think one good thing to come out of this is that the public worldview of banking and finance, at least from the perspective of young adults, is that bankers are greedy, lying, POS.

I mean, I can't imagine being in finance and bragging about it to other types of people. Every article related to this stuff always has one line, and I quote:

"Should more bankers be in prison?"

Hopefully this will sort itself out in 20 years, but I'm curious if any of you think bankers SHOULDN'T have more liability when it comes to unlawful, or even legally gray practices. I mean, as tech people, don't we all mostly adhere to a code of ethics?

View on HN

I think it's baseless self-aggrandizement to assert that tech people are any more ethical than bankers. How many contractors are there that bilk customers for huge projects that end up over time and over budget? If we're talking about "gray areas" how many people work at places like Google and Facebook, which make a living monetizing the sale of privacy from people who mostly don't realize what's going on (especially kids and teenagers). Hell, Silicon Valley 2.0 is built on advertising--not exactly a morally righteous industry. How many tech people work in the defense industry, or oil and gas, or other industries plagued by questionable behavior? Stopping short of that: what engineer hasn't ever sat working on a project and thought "geez, this really isn't what the customer needs?" Who hasn't been working on a feature and thought "man, this doesn't live up to what the sales people sold the customer?" There is a ton of software out there that's over-billed (to be generous), and somebody wrote it.

Look, I think bankers who broke the law should be punished. But at the end of the day, there is a lot of blame to go around. Average people benefited tremendously from the low mortgage interest rates enabled by mortgage-backed securities. They bought big houses they couldn't afford and took out huge HELOCs to buy cheap Chinese crap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com