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Comment by _anshulk | Hacker News Reader

I am not a linkedin employee but I wonder what an employee should do or in this case have done when business was insisting on developing such a feature?

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Stir the debate, escalate it to management, make your co-workers aware of the wrongdoing. If it's shoved under the carpet, leave, maybe write a blog post.

However, most people care more about their job than their values and for that reason, remain quiet. As long as the paycheck's comin' in, u kno.

You've probably heard of a story like this before recently, just on a bigger scale.

I'd argue that software engineers are some of the most resistant people in the workforce to these kinds of moral high-wire acts. That's simply because they have way more job security than others. They can pick and choose companies with which they are in moral agreement and jump ship when something they disagree with is forced upon them.

You'd think so, but it took a decade until Snowden was the first one of these 10,000 engineers to speak up.

That's because it's super easy to rationalize things like this. From the outside, hearing about Intro for the first time, our initial reaction may be "WTF?". But from inside the company it was a slow boil. You know that you mean no harm, and the people you work with are good people, and they mean no harm either. And hey, you're taking all these precautions like using separate servers, and getting security audit checks. And hey, isn't this a clever way to add a cool feature?

Before you know it, it's too late to say "no". Something that may have started as a good idea has transformed into a monster. Human cognitive biases will then kick into action and save you from admitting to yourself that you're part of the problem.

That's an excellent description, gradual escalation.

For that reason, there need to be very strong company values.

Further, every engineer needs to be very reflective and have very strong values themselves, because most companies don't have these strong values.

This should be started to be taught at universities now, so that young engineers have some guidance to start out with. Engineer Ethics Lecture 1.

The thing is, Linkedin bought Rapportive for $15 million.

Link: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/linkedin-picks-up-rapportiv...

So most of the preconceived uses for their technology were already hashed out and approved prior to purchase...

Even if that wasn't the case, the technology needs to be integrated somehow in the form of a product.

So as a low level employee, what are you expected to do? Be known as a bad and difficult employee? Quit? Even if you quit, others will happily take your place.

As non employees of LinkedIn we can expose this behavior as unacceptable and deceitful.

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