We are complicit in our employer’s deeds • Hacker News Board

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#51

Post by pjc50 » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:04 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #15

Loughla wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was sort of the entire point of the writing. Because tech folks are in a privileged class, they have the ability to move jobs based on morals. And therefore they should. Not doing that, when you are making as much as you are as a programmer at BIGCORP means you are complicit in the bad behavior. That was the entire point. He addressed your concern in the first two paragraphs.

If you were to ask my circle of friends and family, even bigcorp programmer money isn’t sufficient to feel secure due to future economic volatility. Especially if your goal is to make sure your kids get to live in the richer neighborhoods and go to the richer schools, and so on and so forth. And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/…

> I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had FU money

In other words, you feel that you cannot be secure unless you're in the, what, top 5% of the society? You can't have an entire society living on passive income until the AI revolution delivers.

And until you feel secure, everything is justified at work?

One of the real, hard, lessons of the coronavirus situation is that security is collective. You can hole up for a while, and avoid catching the virus yourself, but the economic effects will get everywhere.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#52

Post by chrismartin » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

GoToRO wrote: post #20

We need more developers start companies and not sell out.

I agree but I've seen this not work long-term. Entrepreneurs are inherently curious, distractible, and prone to move on to other projects. Any leader is prone to burnout.

I know a small company with a great founder who wanted to support clients, employees, and community as best he could. He did this for a decade, really well, then he got involved in other things which eventually consumed most of his time. For a few years he tried to hand the reins to his leadership team, but that didn't work very well so he sold the company. Now it's becoming just like everywhere else.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#53

Post by techslave » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #41

Uggghhhh, the entitlement of well paid and under qualified developers is loathsome. To everybody else who doesn’t share that entitlement it looks like gross ethnocentricity. Look, if you want all your crying and personal opinions to actually mean something start someplace rational. Start by asking (demanding) for a uniform of code of ethics. Every other professional industry has this, but not software. https://en.m.w…

https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#54

Post by zokier » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:08 PM UTC

I think there is one morally solid reason to stay at bad acting employer: if you are actively driving change of the behavior you consider bad. I pick this quote from Brays post:

> I escalated through the proper channels and by the book.

He only left after he felt he had exhausted his options of influence (This being my interpretation).

Leaving just as a knee jerk reaction without making effort to change would be bad, to me personally almost worse than remaining. Of course quitting can be in many cases feel easier/more attractive than trying to navigate through the office politics. But if you manage to flip even small corner of Google or whatever to not do evil (as they used to say) that probably has more influence to the wider society than you quitting.

Counterpoint being that you need to recognize if you are making that change or not, and if you are not able to do so then quitting might be the right choice

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#55

Post by pjc50 » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #27

spaced-out wrote: post #18

We technologists like to pretend we're powerful, that we could bring these giant megacorps to their knees because those fancy suits need us, right? No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for, but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at Amazon it not be because of the loss of th…

> “Graveyards are full of indispensable men”. — Charles de Gaulle.

"I can make a new major in ten minutes, but a regiment of artillery is difficult to replace"

-- misattributed to Napoleon, on staff promotions

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#56

Post by hprotagonist » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Distribute your attention and effort as a function of how effective your effort can be. How meaningful is my indirect effect? That's often a function of how many nodes are between you and the thing on the big whopping graph of interconnectedness, but not every time.

Figuring out your allocations is a lifelong optimization process. Sometimes it is extremely obvious, usually it's not.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#57

Post by pimterry » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #15

Loughla wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was sort of the entire point of the writing. Because tech folks are in a privileged class, they have the ability to move jobs based on morals. And therefore they should. Not doing that, when you are making as much as you are as a programmer at BIGCORP means you are complicit in the bad behavior. That was the entire point. He addressed your concern in the first two paragraphs.

If you were to ask my circle of friends and family, even bigcorp programmer money isn’t sufficient to feel secure due to future economic volatility. Especially if your goal is to make sure your kids get to live in the richer neighborhoods and go to the richer schools, and so on and so forth. And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/…

As a bigcorp programmer, you should absolutely have enough income to be secure from any real discomfort.

You're right, you're not secure from all possible reductions in peak earnings. You may sacrifice some potential income and future wealth by switching jobs. There will always be richer neighbourhoods & schools, so that may mean risking a sacrifice in future lifestyle. But that's not the kind of risk that the article is talking about.

Most people can't leave their jobs because if they do so then they immediately risk not making rent, not feeding themselves/their families, or losing healthcare entirely. In practice, that means they really do have no choice: very few people will give up food for the greater good, and it's not reasonable to expect them to.

Successful programmers are not in that position though. You absolutely have a choice. The choice you're describing is between optimizing for peak wealth or trading a small part of that wealth for the greater good, at no substantial cost to your lifestyle. If greater personal wealth is always more valuable to you than any greater good then perhaps this doesn't feel like a choice either, but you're well past most people's line for reasonably ethical behaviour at that point.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#58

Post by ghaff » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #40

spaced-out wrote: post #18

We technologists like to pretend we're powerful, that we could bring these giant megacorps to their knees because those fancy suits need us, right? No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for, but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at Amazon it not be because of the loss of th…

This is why unions exist: to enable collective action by workers. Maybe if we call it a "guild" (like the screen actors guild) it'll be more palatable to software developers who fancy themselves beyond the need for something as blue-collar as a union.

>This is why unions exist: to enable collective action by workers.

Yes, in part. But it's almost always enabling collective action that benefits the (current) workers (and the union officials).

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#59

Post by pjc50 » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

snarf21 wrote: post #42

codesections wrote: post #10

I agree with this, but also think that working for an employer that is "making a negative impact on the world" might _sometimes_ be the right choice. Specifically, it could be justified for two reasons: First: you might have more impact on the organization from the inside than from the outside (this is most relevant to people joining at a high/senior level). For example, Google seems to be making privacy far, far wor…

I agree that we have a moral line we can decide to cross at work or not. We can step in and say "this isn't right". We all have our own limits. If a company passes our line, we can decide to stay and be a dissenting voice in a sea of "yes men" or we can move on. The one thing that bugs me about a post like this is where does our complicity end? Did Drew also change all his investments to divest from Amazon or Faceboo…

The problem is that the political sphere has become so dysfunctional that we're forced to act through the economic one. Not that it's terribly effective either, but the opposite leaves you vulnerable to "not living your principles" attacks to drive you out of the political argument.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#60

Post by zokier » Tue, May 05, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #29

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #17

We are also complicit in our governments' deeds.

Yes, but much less so. We are coerced into participating in society on our governments terms, under threat of violence.

US citizens have excellent mobility also internationally. Valley engineers certainly can find jobs in e.g. Europe or other parts of the world (if they accept the cut in paycheck). Immigration is not a thing only for poor third world people.