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We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

drewdevault.com

111–120 of 192 posts

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#111
post #54

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,…

That's a reasonable point of view, but I think your obligation extends primarily to saving your own soul, as it were. It's not your responsibility to make others do the right thing. If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.

> If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.

That reminds me of this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz-bystand...):

> Some people unwittingly help atrocities occur by cooperating in an attempt to mitigate a monstrous situation. History demonstrates that this is nearly always a miscalculation. During the Holocaust, Jewish councils organized life in the ghetto and compiled lists of Jews for deportation, often thinking that they were helping Jews manage a nightmare. Ultimately, they helped the Nazis murder Jews by maintaining order and providing the Gestapo with the names of people to be deported and murdered. In his memoir, “Legislating the Holocaust,” Bernhard Lösener, a lawyer in the Third Reich’s Ministry of the Interior, relays how he hurriedly traveled through the night to get to Nuremberg in time to write the Nuremberg race laws so that the rule of law would be preserved, and how he fought to have the race laws written to count as Jewish those with three Jewish grandparents rather than those with one drop of Jewish blood. He too made the mistake of participating in the atrocity in an attempt to minimize the damages caused by its perpetrators.

> Lösener remains the lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg race laws, lending a veneer of legality to a crime. Maybe someone else would have ignored the rule of law or written more draconian laws if he hadn’t, but maybe not. What we can decide is whether we will be a participant in terrible things done by terrible people. It never works to participate in the terrible thing in order to try to make it less bad. It’s tempting, and can seem like the right thing to do: Lösener’s race laws included fewer people than a one-drop rule would (though that had negligible effect). Adolf Eichmann reasoned similarly: “If this thing had to be done at all, it was better that it be done in good order.” History shows that when you participate in an atrocity together with the perpetrators, in an attempt to make it somehow a little less horrible, in the end you’re still participating in the atrocity — and it is no less horrible.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#112

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…

What is an ocean, but a sea of drops? It starts with employees speaking up individually. Raise your voice and be heard. Upper management won't learn moral lessons on their own; they need to hear employees nagging them to be better people.

Or, what if we passed a law that required companies to give a certain percentage of their board seats to elected employee representatives? Then, employees wouldn't just have to hope their voice is heard, they can make management listen.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#113

> This is why I hold my peers accountable for working at companies which are making a negative impact on the world around them. Oh these are the rules now? Judging other people is easy. You can look at almost anyone and find something you don’t like about them: sweatshop sneakers, ignorance of their history, consumer waste, eating meat from commercial farms... don’t you know people around the world are starving and y…

There's a pretty damn big difference between throwing out $5 of food while someone across the Earth starves, and in directly making the software which opresses millions of people, raising millions of dollars for the people responsible, and pocketing huge salaries for yourself. >As a general rule, it costs a business your salary × 1.5 to employ you, given the overhead of benefits, HR, training, and so on. When you’re…

Oppresses millions? Please, if you are going to try to make that argument, spare us the hyperbole.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#116
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Hence the need for FU money because the collective decisions are/will be lousy. You do not want to be dependent on the collective for security.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#117
post #9

If BIGCORP is acting outside of labor laws, then there should be legal action. If the law doesn't explicitly outlaw BIGCORP's actions (yet), and we all kinda know that it should, then opposing BIGCORP is the correct thing to do. If Amazon is acting legally, yet in an ugly way, to suppress workers organizing, it seems hard to complain. Now, if Amazon workers exercise the right of free association in their spare time t…

> If BIGCORP is acting outside of labor laws, then there should be legal action. Similar to how the FAA regulates the airline industry and let Boeing murder two plane loads of people?

Taking your bait: sure. The government is bad. Not too sure where that leaves us, though.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh, did you declare an oath to those when you were hired? No, these were never mentioned during your hiring process or ever provided to you by your employer? Then that is just some animal's shit on a wall as irrelevant as wealthy software engineers quitting their jobs in protest. Honestly, what happens you violate those? What are the actual repercussions to you? Then they aren't a code of ethics that applies to you…

I think whatever valid points you might have are getting lost in your attempts at rhetoric. You may want to reconsider the relevance of the article you linked yourself, given that it contains the phrase > The Hippocratic Oath has been eclipsed as a document of professional ethics by more extensive, regularly updated ethical codes issued by national medical associations and that, to my knowledge, it's not considered l…

> and that, to my knowledge, it's not considered legally binding.

Violating the oath is grounds for immediate revocation of license which eliminates lawful practice forever whether or not professional. The actions that produced that violation may not be a lawful violation, but they typically are.

What in software is of similar consequence?

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very myopic view. Very few people have the luxury of quitting a job because they don't agree with 100% of things their company is doing. It's an extremely privileged view to have. Especially given that exactly 0 companies, anywhere, will do everything you agree with.

I think I have justified my argument that we do have the luxury of quitting in TFA, within the first two paragraphs.

Again, maybe you do. You are not everyone. Stop assuming things to make your argument stronger. You know exactly nothing about 99.9999% of the engineers at these companies and their lives and their needs. You also do not know what they care about and if their morality lines up with yours (which you have decided to be the global "right" morality, for some reason)

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#120

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…

Companies like Amazon were not always in the position you've described. It took decades to get there. And there would have been numerous opportunities along the way where a single engineer could have had a massive impact.

A single engineer at Facebook will not make a difference today. 10 or 12 years ago they absolutely could have changed the course of the company.

Almost all collective change is spearheaded by the ideas and leadership of a few individuals.

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