| ▲ | Ancalagon 6 hours ago |
| Why do so many engineers willingly build things bad for society? |
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| ▲ | mikestew 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Because it generally pays well. I'd wax philosophically, but you can come to your own conclusions from that little nugget. |
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| ▲ | popalchemist 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Enough said. Since the "death of God" (per Nietzsche - the collapse of the metaphysics underpinning our morals and therefore cultural norms and behaviors) the modus operandi has been the utilitarian "get what's yours." Reprehensible. Additionally, people are typically only "gifted" on one domain -- if one's gifted enough in the domain of intellect to become a SWE, they're typically lacking elsewhere, whether that be in moral scruples or the ability to discern social things such as when they're working for sociopaths. | | |
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| ▲ | konart 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Because they do not believe it is bad? Because they believe that it's going to be build anyone by someone else? Because they are not entirely aware of what they are building? |
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| ▲ | kaashif 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Money can be exchanged for services. Hope this helps. | |
| ▲ | Ancalagon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | All these bright engineers can’t figure out the bigger picture of what they’re building? “Hey boss man, why does this database ‘tracked_individuals’ have columns for license plate numbers, home addresses, and political affiliations?” Give me a break | | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, many of them don't. They're fed convincing cover-stories like "we need this to stop CSAM" or "this prevents terrorism", and then put on a security theater about E2EE and military-grade cryptography. They sleep like a baby because most of them genuinely think they're the good guys, hell, even people on HN appear to buy the obvious lie whenever Client Side Scanning or Flock is brought up. You can hire sociopaths to work the ~1% of jobs that require a complete understanding of your moral bankruptcy. Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, none of these people ever apologized for their ethical flexibility because it's precisely what qualifies them for such a lucrative job. Persona can be a shell org with 20 evil engineers while their partners absentmindedly do the integration work. |
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| ▲ | krapp 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because they're paid enough to retire at 30. |
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| ▲ | snarf21 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It is mostly a combination of Sinclair's Law and "I have nothing to hide" mindset. |
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| ▲ | biophysboy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Many tech execs operate under the thesis that china & the democratic party are existential threats that warrant a surveillance/military/police ramp up. Meanwhile, many tech employees are credulous and frequently adopt self-serving geopolitical narratives. The current macro trends don't help (huge defense budgets, bad labor market power, China is in fact more powerful) Edit:forgot the most obvious... money |
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| ▲ | FrustratedMonky 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Evil pays more. A common theme in a lot of movies, books, et.. |
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| ▲ | bombdailer 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Because the highest values of our society are non-values. |
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| ▲ | GorbachevyChase 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The tribe won’t eat their own… probably. |
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| ▲ | ej88 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| surprised nobody responded with the most straightforward, occams razor explanation they think what they're doing is actually good for society not everyone is in the hackerspace libertarian / socialist sphere i used to work for a place that used persona despite it adding extra friction to signups (literally resulting in less paying customers to the dismay of PMs) because it was worth it to combat fraud. theres a tradeoff in everything |
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| ▲ | globalnode 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| also theyre subject to the same anonymity many other internet users have and so dont feel any consequences for their actions. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Oh boy! I've always wanted to work at [microsoft, apple, google, etc.]!" |
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| ▲ | mikestew 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Those aren't the companies OP is necessarily talking about. "I've always wanted to work at Persona!", said no one, ever. | | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | All of them are complicit. You only need ~50 greedy sociopaths to work at Persona, and 10,000 dumb-as-rocks engineers hyped to work at Microsoft/OpenAI and "stop the bad guys" or whatever the boogeyman du-jour is. We saw it with Bitlocker, we saw it with Client Side Scanning, we see it with Salt Typhoon. Most people that work on weaponized surveillance systems are entirely apathetic, or see themselves as righteous. Even when the system is known to be bugged, obviously flawed, or outright controlled by a foreign adversary. | | |
| ▲ | globalnode 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | oh thats a good point, kind of like the military or how propaganda demonizes the enemy during a war, its us vs them. |
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| ▲ | Nezteb 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_apples Immoral boot-licking human engineers are indistinguishable from LLMs. |
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| ▲ | Ancalagon 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | What's crazy is I know engineers like this in real life - and they're good engineers! So I know they do exist, but their existence to serve their company or CEO no matter what is completely foreign to me. Like, you're smart enough to understand that large codebase and generally function as a member of society, but you've completely given up your higher level decision making for someone or something that would throw you away in an instant. |
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