this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Forced to implement is the wrong term - they were tasked with designing it. They can't just swap one person out for another - losing the lead dev or designer would be delay or kill the effort
They could've pushed back - software ethics is a required course for very good reason - but it's easy to never ask if you should do something and skip straight to how. It gets easier to skip that piece every time, and the company isn't going to respect it - we need outside pressure so they can point to us and say "this will have repercussions"
They don't deserve death threats, but trashing everything they push on GitHub is fair. Measured steady pressure - save the most extreme stuff for upper management and shareholders
For the engineers you have to make them understand they did bad and they should feel bad, they need to feel that their peers have lost respect for them, not that this is the public lashing out
Your notion is just wrong. First of all engineers can't push back on something like this. They can try to push back on stuff that might be wrong for the product, that is not performant or potentially break stuff, but not on something that can make the company so much money. If this is the roadmap, they must align, they are being paid (tons of money) to implement the company's vision.
Second of all, you are looking at this as a consumer perspective. They are part of the company and most likely heavily invested in it. And if such thing will increase the company's revenue, it will icrease theirs too. They won't feel bad trust me, they know where they are and what they're doing.
That's where the ethics part comes into play. They're not being ethical.