Code is run more than read

I wish more companies realized your last point.

> I believe this is a different problem than the essay is speaking about.

Hardly. I'll quote the last paragraph and the three inequalities:

> There’s a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable, and I think that explains the increasing discomfort of many software professionals. And while we can’t just go back to ignoring the economic realities of our discipline, perhaps we should take a stronger ethical stand not to harm users. Acknowledging that the user may not always come before the business, but that the business shouldn’t unconditionally come first, either:

    user > ops > dev
    biz > ops > dev
    biz ≹ user

First, I want to emphasize "perhaps we should take a stronger ethical stand not to harm users". The author did a nice job of "throwing it our faces" but the underlying ethical currents are indeed there.

Second, "the user may not always come before the business, but that the business shouldn’t unconditionally come first". This is very much aligned with my question "what are the norms and rules we need _such that_ businesses operate in some realm of sensibility?"

...

Ok, putting aside debates around the author's intent or 'valid scope' of this discussion (which by the way, is a rather organic thing, computed lazily by the participants, rather than by fiat), I'd like to add some additional thoughts...

In much of the software world there is a mentality of "We'll figure out Problem X (such as a particular problem of scaling) if we get to that point." I'll make this claim: naively deferring any such problems that pertain to ethics are fraught. Of course there are practical considerations and people are not angels! For precisely these reasons, ethics must be something we study and put into practice before other constraints start to lock in a suboptimal path.

I often look at ethics from a consequentialist point of view that includes probabilities of system behavior. This could be thought of as computing an 'expected future value' for a particular present decision.

If one applies such an ethical model, I think the impacts of choices become clearer. And it becomes harder to use false-choice reasoning to demonize others and exonerate ourselves. For example, if a particular business model has a significant probability of harming people, one cannot claim ignorance much less complete innocence when those harms happen. They were no surprise, at least to people who pay attention and follow the probabilities.

Ascribing blame is quite difficult. I like to think of blame as being a question largely of statistical inference. [1] But even if we all agreed to a set of ethical standards, the statistical inference problem (multicollinearity for example) would remain. There is plenty of blame to go around, so to speak. But certain actions (very highly influenced by mental models and circumstances) contribute more than others. [2]

To what degree is ignorance an ethical defense? This is a tough one. Not all people nor entities have the same computational horsepower nor awareness. I don't have the answers, but I have not yet found a well-known ethicist in the public eye that speaks in these terms to a broad audience. To me, the lack of such a voice means I need to find more people like that and/or contribute my voice to the conversation. The current language around ethics feels incredibly naive to my ears.

[1] I agree that for most people, ethical rules of thumb get us 'most of the way there'. But these heuristics are imperfect.

[2] To be clear, I see blame as often overused. I care relatively less about blaming a person for mistakes. I care much more about what a person's character tells us about how they will behave in the future. That said, a corporate entity is not a person deserving of such generosity. Corporate entities are not first-class entities deserving human-rights level protection. A legal entity is a derivative entity; one created in the context of laws which should rightly function to better the society in which it is formed. A corporate entity can rightly be judged / evaluated in terms of its behaviors and internal structure and what this entails for its future likely behavior. We don't expect corporate entities to be charities, for sure, but we also didn't consciously design the legal environment so that corporate entities can actively undermine the conditions for a thriving society with impunity.

Your point isn't a bad one, but it's really a separate topic. Assuming we aren't deailing with deliberate obfuscation, most code can be read by people who can be bothered to try, and there are always code formatters if necessary.

> the users we interacted with (that usually had no say in whether our solution was bought to them or our competitors') were happier and recommended to their managers (where they could) buying more stuff from us

And then the happy users switch to another company and start recommending your stuff to their new managers. It's an extra source of leads and sales :-)

The biggest stakeholder is change and accumulated cruft. The usefulness of code also drifts over time as the users, business, or paradigms/ecosystem changes. Most new code should be considered throw away until it's proven useful to end users. Once useful it can merged into 'stable' tree that should have high standards. Ideally 'stable' is capped at a certain size per the number of engineers and so to move code in requires refactoring or deleting dead or less useful code. The balance you want is to maintain high velocity but also allow for maintainability and core stability.