> Who teaches developers that it's okay to work for anyone as long as the tech is cool and the salary is great?
Who teaches them otherwise?
Absent parental/primary-school-instilled ethics, rather a lot of engineers operate in a bubble of like-minded (and similarly-employed) people, making large amounts of money, and are often insulated (voluntarily, deliberately, or accidentally) from the impact of their work.
What could be changed to improve on that situation? I've heard simplistic suggestions to "sue the C-class until they learn/abandon the incredibly lucrative profit motive", "fire/imprison engineers whose changes harm people", and "make the bridge-builder stand under bridge they built" (whatever that means in a software context). Those seem utopian. What tangible, plausible changes can be made to improve on developer accountability (for their work) and discernment (about prospective employers)?
Make your new hires watch the multiple camera feeds and lidar of that woman being run over again and again until they really really understand that they're working on life-critical systems.
That might help if you're making something that, if broken/misused, can directly physically harm people.
What about if you're making a social media app, and the ethics are less clear-cut? It's not like you can show every new hire footage of Trump and drive home the negative impact of data mining/sharing--the causal link is tenuous, the viewer might sympathize politically, or they just might not care about politics.
Ethics in the abstract is very hard to teach; object lessons are easy.
Even nerds understand that one painful social experience can have lasting negative effects.
It’s blinders. Plain and simple. I’ve worked with too many developers who will pander for money. A few that tried to shame me for not being on board (my life skills tell me calling someone a whore in a team meeting is a bad career move but it doesn’t stop me from staring at them and thinking it). When enough money is on the line principles get set aside. We like to think our cohort are above this sort of thing but the evidence clearly doesn’t support it.
Who teaches them otherwise?
Absent parental/primary-school-instilled ethics, rather a lot of engineers operate in a bubble of like-minded (and similarly-employed) people, making large amounts of money, and are often insulated (voluntarily, deliberately, or accidentally) from the impact of their work.
What could be changed to improve on that situation? I've heard simplistic suggestions to "sue the C-class until they learn/abandon the incredibly lucrative profit motive", "fire/imprison engineers whose changes harm people", and "make the bridge-builder stand under bridge they built" (whatever that means in a software context). Those seem utopian. What tangible, plausible changes can be made to improve on developer accountability (for their work) and discernment (about prospective employers)?