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We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

drewdevault.com

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Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#131

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

screye wrote: post #102
ardy42 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies. If Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have enough of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop. > Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility of the player to not exploit the rules of…

> law could be changed to make it clear that companies have obligations besides solely delivering "value" to their shareholders There in lies the problem. 'Making clear' means codifying it in law and speaking of it in explicit terms rather than being abstract moral concepts. But few want to talk policy. Because policy is hard. Really really hard. Moralizing on the other hand is easy. Similarly, calling a certain poli…

And yet you seem to be happy with "Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize profit." being nominally "codified in law".

(I say nominally because it's not actually clear that this is codified in law, just that there have been a number of lawsuits that have been decided as if it is).

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#132

Post by ddevault »

matchbok wrote: post #113
ddevault wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The extensive use of lobbying to disenfranchise voters in favor of corporate agendas alone oppresses millions of people. This is no hyperbole.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#133

Post by linuxftw »

smitty1e wrote: post #117
linuxftw wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Reduce and eliminate the government as much as possible. Does the US Federal government need to exist in any form? Somehow the UK is able to exist as an independent state.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#134

Post by mywittyname »

ori_b wrote: post #123
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…

The corporations are their workers. The suits are only powerful because we collectively chose to listen to them.

The suits control the purse strings, that's why they are powerful.

If you don't listen, you get shown the door and they'll pay someone who will listen.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#135

Post by pimterry »

matchbok wrote: post #91
pimterry wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 articl…

Simply not true, at all. When supporting a family that comes first. Always.

You're saying no matter how much money you have, 10x the average national income, 100x, 1000x, there's no way you would risk _any_ loss of income by leaving your software developer job, regardless of what you were asked to do. Is that right?

To be clear, we're not talking about risking food & shelter here. We're talking about risking one fewer skiing holiday a year, or buying the house with the slightly smaller swimming pool.

Building tools for mass surveillance, undermining employment regulations worldwide, addicting people to abusive tech, exploiting warehouse workers, breaking the law, propping up authoritarian governments. There's nothing you can think of that you'd put above your family's luxuries?

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#136

Post by ddevault »

zokier wrote: post #60
ddevault wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I almost agree with you... but it's not always that simple. I personally have little faith left in America, and would love to move somewhere else, but I have one fatal problem: I don't have a degree. Hardly any countries with better political prospects than America are interested in giving visas to anyone without one.

But even for those who do, a change of nationality is much more traumatic than a change of career. You risk leaving basically all of your family and friends behind, spending years integrating into a culture where you may not speak the language, and abnormally large expenses for moving and establishing yourself there... while I don't entirely disagree with you, it's not really on the same level as the arguments I'm presenting about career choices.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#137

Post by op03 »

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…

That's pretty much what Gandhi felt too, before he got kicked off the train.

For those interested his story is a pretty interesting example of a weird bumbling nerd who annoyed most people, transitioning into a sort GodFather of Collective Action. How he built such a large network of backers is as interesting as the tools he used and what results he produced.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#138

Post by mywittyname »

Jasper_ wrote: post #38
tensor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People making FAANG level salaries on this site routinely complain that they are "grossly" underpaid.

Engineers who think they deserve more than anybody else because computer typing creates infinite value will always complain. While I can't speak to everyone's financial situation (cost of living differ from person to person), I do not imagine anybody working as an engineer at FAANG is living paycheck to paycheck, or is behind on their bills.

You don't have a very effective imagination. Lots of people you perceive as wealthy are in debt up to their eyeballs. Even famous movie stars and political elites have financial troubles.

They (FAANG engineers) absolutely earn a salary which would allow them to live a ordinary life with much to spare, but the world is full of people who don't want to be ordinary.

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#139

Post by striking »

austincheney wrote: post #118
striking wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From your previously linked article:

> There is no direct punishment for breaking the Hippocratic Oath, although an arguable equivalent in modern times is medical malpractice

and from "The Hippocratic Oath as Literary Text: A Dialogue Between Law and Medicine"[1]

> Still today, the Oath continues to demand that physicians maintain ethics higher than those expected of society in general,[18] and it remains a code of professional identity that marks off "proper" medicine from various forms of alternative healing practices.'[19]

Later,

> This Part examines judicial opinions that allow doctors to perform [a lengthy list of acts and the cases in which they were allowed]. These opinions directly contradict specific portions of the Hippocratic Oath.

(that section later goes on to discuss that the oath is inextricably tied to the analysis of medical ethics, and so it retains its share of social/moral/ethical relevance even if it is not always legally relevant... which in my opinion is not incomparable to how we should approach the ACM Code of Ethics.)

I personally don't understand where you see a difference.

1: Lisa R. Hasday, The Hippocratic Oath as Literary Text: A Dialogue Between Law and Medicine, 2 Yale J. Health Pol'y L. & Ethics (2002). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjhple/vol2/iss2/4

Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds

#140

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

techslave wrote: post #53
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

Developers with active ACM memberships are rarer than hen's teeth, let alone IEEE members.
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