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Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#81

Post by franktankbank »

imglorp wrote: post #68
andy99 wrote: post #24

It's easy to armchair quarterback these things, and in retrospect, the actions that innocent people should take are probably obvious. At the time I don't think it would be so easy. There is lots of pressure not to take action, because of the feeling you're overreacting, because you've had things explained to you in a way that minimizes or removes the criminality, and because your job is at stake. And crucially there…

I can only imagine someone with a family to feed who is tied to corporate health insurance, or an H1 visa, being coerced into some gray activities being unwilling to lose their job to remain ethical or legal. One of many reasons employers have a quiverful of ways to exploit and control workers.

And why some people have a problem working with H1 coworkers at all. Its a separate class of workers, same as offshore, its somehow hostile.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#82

Post by nerdsniper »

amelius wrote: post #27
sltr wrote: post #3

Software developers should sign a code of ethics, like other professions do and then cite it when asked to do unscrupulous things. This would work for activities that aren't illegal but still unethical, like defaulting user privacy choices to open/public. Citing professional organizations like ACM or IEEE would deter retaliation.

Yes, the Hippocratic Oath works quite well even if it has no legal underpinnings, so why not use the same idea for developers? Indeed ACM and IEEE could draft one.

Not taking away from your point, but just a PSA: For some reason "First, do no harm" is synonymous with "Hippocratic Oath" in pop-culture. Just a reminder that this is apocryphal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

Surgeons, in fact, often begin with harm. To replace a hip joint, they necessarily must begin by causing great trauma to the body by cutting it open and removing bone.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#83

Post by Yossarrian22 »

abxyz wrote: post #50
pjc50 wrote: post #32

> Frank was a student loan startup founded by Charlie Javice in 2016. In 2019, Javice was featured on the Forbes “30 under 30” There was a joke going around Twitter about "30 under 30 doing 30 to life", because the startups involved were getting more and more outlandish to the extent that bystanders suspected that fraud was going on. Became a Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-3…

> UK libel law routinely covers up all sorts of things which the public would benefit from having revealed, simply by the threat of an expensive lawsuit. It makes investigative journalism really uneconomic. No. The deference people have to the law as some sort of all knowing all powerful magic spell that can be cast to force silence at any time is to blame. Libel is publishing something you know to be untrue. The tru…

Then go publish an article about how much time the Prince of Wales spends with women that aren’t his wife

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#84

Post by scott_w »

nerdsniper wrote: post #77
scott_w wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a lot of fuss being made about these but, as time goes on, I'm very sceptical they can work. Looking at the Afghan data leak reported earlier this year: courts can make it practically difficult for most of the organisation to even know they're subject to court orders! The person updating the website asks "have we received a court order?" and the person under injunction must answer "not me." The website aut…

I'd think the CEO would know, would they not? And the CEO could tell the person updating the website: "Let's go ahead and remove the canary, we don't need it anymore." --> "OMG, did we get secretly subpoena'd?" ---> "No, not yet, but I just don't want to run the warrant canary anymore."

The only way the CEO finds out is if they're made privy to the injunction, at which point they become subject to it. Even an oblique hint could be a breach of the injunction.

Be honest: do you think a judge is stupid enough to believe you had the injunction explained to you by your legal counsel then, in a totally unrelated incident, thought "oh, I don't think we need the warrant canary any more."

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#85

Post by fred_is_fred »

moron4hire wrote: post #60

Many years ago, I was working for a consulting firm doing work for a, erhm, "large insurance provider headquartered in Illinois". I was building a tool their insurance adjusters could use to use GPS devices to check how far houses were from the coast line and deny flood coverage to anyone within a certain boundary. Note that this was during the time of Selective Availability, so GPS devices were only good to 100m pre…

Does this pre-date flood zone maps or something? That's a way better indicator of risk than miles from the coast.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#86

Post by criddell »

thyristan wrote: post #70
criddell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering could become a real profession with licensing like mechanical, electrical, chemical, civil, and other engineering professions. If you do something unethical, you could be sued for malpractice and lose your license to practice. The code of ethics for Professional Engineers works even though it isn’t any of the things you say are necessary.

Professional Engineers signed off on on broken dams ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster ), leaking chemical plants ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster ), exploding reactors and how (not) to operate them ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster ) and "high enough" sea walls ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident ). There are a ton more examples. All highly…

In the Brumadinho case, five engineers were arrested and charged and jailed. They are out of jail and a criminal case is ongoing.

In the Bhopal disaster, seven engineers and executives were convicted of causing death by negligence and give the maximum penalty (which was pretty weak).

The Chernobyl incident led to Anatoly Dyatlov to be jailed and getting a 10-year sentence.

For Fukushima, some people were charged with professional negligence causing death but they beat the charges in court.

Licensing will not make anybody competent. But it can help keep incompetent people out of our field. When Engineers screw up, their malpractice insurance may get too expensive for them to continue to work in the field. When management asks for something unethical, it gives a pretty good reason for pushing back.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#87

Post by WorldMaker »

thyristan wrote: post #70
criddell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering could become a real profession with licensing like mechanical, electrical, chemical, civil, and other engineering professions. If you do something unethical, you could be sued for malpractice and lose your license to practice. The code of ethics for Professional Engineers works even though it isn’t any of the things you say are necessary.

Professional Engineers signed off on on broken dams ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster ), leaking chemical plants ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster ), exploding reactors and how (not) to operate them ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster ) and "high enough" sea walls ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident ). There are a ton more examples. All highly…

That's a weird set of anecdotes you've chosen. The first half of those incidents are in fact the opposite of what you seem to be complaining about: finding the Professional Engineers that signed off on the mistakes in the project is hard to do because they happened in countries that failed to regulate Professional Engineering licenses.

The Chernobyl disaster is an operation mistake, which a Professional Engineer may have signed the process for operation, but an operational failure to follow process is not the Professional Engineer's fault. Sure, a professional will try to narrow processes to be as fool-proof as possible, but you can't entirely blame a professional that the planet is capable of generating far more fools than you can plan for.

The Fukushima disaster actually shows Professional Engineering consequences with multiple engineering groups doing analysis and investigations of what went wrong and whether or not to indict Professional Engineers involved in the construction. None of those moved to such indictments, but it was investigated at length. Three of the executives of the company were indicted as a part of those investigations (and then were judged "not guilty" in a Japanese court of law).

"Licensed professionals" is not a myth. A license isn't about making anyone competent, it is about applying consequence when they aren't. It's also about having your back when you are worried about possible consequences. "I can't do that because I would lose my license" is a threat companies have to take seriously. If your company wants to force you to pursue it anyway, you can take the issue to the Ethics Committee at your licensing board/professional organization and they can help you examine the legal, ethical, and moral implications in a way that could result in consequences to your company. If all of that is documented and the company still does it anyway it is easier to get legal consequences applied to company executives, such as real, deserved jail time.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#88

Post by WorldMaker »

mrheosuper wrote: post #25
sltr wrote: post #3

Software developers should sign a code of ethics, like other professions do and then cite it when asked to do unscrupulous things. This would work for activities that aren't illegal but still unethical, like defaulting user privacy choices to open/public. Citing professional organizations like ACM or IEEE would deter retaliation.

I wonder how would that work when you are working for companies like Lockheed Martin, knowing your code will be used in weapon that may kill innocent people.

Presumably similar to how it works for the professional Mechanical Engineers and Electrical Engineers they already employ. Ethics are subjective and nuanced. Ethics are also different from morals. Some people can live with the moral quandary that their work may do harm to innocent people and still have the ethical belief that they are doing the right thing generally and that their work does more good than harm. (I'm not one of those people myself with regards to the military-industrial complex, but I respect my friends that are have sat with their morals and weighed them into the ethical frameworks of how they do their jobs and what they feel about doing their jobs ethically.)

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#89

Post by abxyz »

closewith wrote: post #78
abxyz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and still cost high four figures to defend You do not need to "defend" against a "spurious defamation letter". The (very profitable) business of sending legal letters is based on the misunderstanding of the law that is perpetuated online. Legal letters are to law firms what bandwidth is to cloud hosting providers: free money.

In the UK, under the UK Civil Procedure Rules, you are expected to engage in the Pre-Action Protocol and provide a substantive response within 14 days, and failure to do so can effect you credibility and standing in court. So you do not have to respond, but not doing so risks sanction from the court for non-engagement.

You're proving my point. You are catastrophising.

A response to a "spurious defamation letter" does not cost "high four figures". Substantive does not refer to the cost of the response. Substantive means that it addresses the substance of the complaint.

The "high four figures" you spent for a lawyer to respond (I disagree with the word "defend") to a legal threat was unnecessary. You paid a bunch of money for some low-paid legal assistants to fill out a template, and then a high-paid solicitor to sign off on it.

As an individual, you can respond substantively to a legal threat for free. And even if you choose not to respond, courts are not punitive, the standard that courts hold individuals to are different to the standards they hold law firms to. A court will not rule in a claimant's favour in a libel case because an individual didn't follow procedure correctly.

If you, as an individual, make a truthful statement about A Big Corporation and A Big Corporation spends £100,000 on a team of lawyers to write an angry letter to you demanding you retract, a simple single-sentence self-composed response of "The statement is true, I will not retract." is substantive.

Despite what catastrophisers like yourself (catastrophisers who are encouraged by participants in the legal system who profit from this misapprehension) might suggest, civil courts are interested in adjudicating fairness, not trapping individuals in an endless legal quagmire.

Can you share examples of individuals who have been sanctioned by the U.K. courts for anything that comes close to not engaging in the Pre-Action Protocol?

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#90

Post by abxyz »

Yossarrian22 wrote: post #83
abxyz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UK libel law routinely covers up all sorts of things which the public would benefit from having revealed, simply by the threat of an expensive lawsuit. It makes investigative journalism really uneconomic. No. The deference people have to the law as some sort of all knowing all powerful magic spell that can be cast to force silence at any time is to blame. Libel is publishing something you know to be untrue. The tru…

Then go publish an article about how much time the Prince of Wales spends with women that aren’t his wife

Sure, send me the evidence and I’ll publish it.
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