Funny how here's HN, a site full of Software Engineers complaining about ad bombardment, and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer! We (as a profession) are the ones doing this! "Oh, but boss told me to do it!" some will say, as if it's a good excuse. Regardless of which manager told which developer to do it, at the end of the day, a developer typed in the code and pushed it to prod. We're at least partially to blame for what the web has become.
This is completely meaningless. In any population big enough theres going to be a high variance in behaviours, including morality. Expecting all individuals in a huge collective to all behave "good" with little / no inforcement is incredibly naive at best and dangerous at worst.
Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too -
> and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer!
Many ads are designed by creatives and placed and run by dedicated non-software engineering people, including deciding how many are run and their placement (i.e. bombardment or not). Sure engineers programmed the platform, but then you're just blaming the post office for the content of the mail, or the ISP for the content of the internet. What do you expect the software engineers to do? Limit 1 ad per page programatically and then every software engineer on earth must agree to enforce that limit and no matter how much pressure their superiors put on them, everybody holds the line?
This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers because of their life situation (it can still be a minority, and ad bombardment emerges)?
> This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers
By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that type of behavior (bombardment of ads, surveillance capitalism, etc) and changing the culture
I don't understand your point. You say you want to change the culture, and that this has successfully been done in the case of crime, but this is blatantly false: every country has prisons with many criminals in them. In the US in particular (since most HNers probably live there), there are well over 1 million people in custody according to a quick google search, and over 5 million in corrections (so I assume most of those are on parole). Obviously, changing the culture hasn't worked, for there to be so many prisoners, and crimes committed so often that so many police officers are constantly needed. If your "change the culture" thing had worked, you wouldn't need police, or at least not many.
Changing bad behavior by corporations (esp. adtech/advertisers) is likely to be about as successful: it's not going to be done by "changing" the culture, but only by changing the laws, and then enforcing those laws and punishing offenders. Just like a rapist sees nothing wrong with raping a person, or a serial killer sees nothing wrong with murdering many strangers, or a "porch pirate" sees nothing wrong with stealing your Amazon delivery, an ad-tech corporation sees nothing wrong with feeding you psychologically manipulative advertising and blatant malware in search of profit.
> You say you want to change the culture, and that this has successfully been done in the case of crime,
No. They did not. They explicity said "mostly works".
> but this is blatantly false:
Of course it is. You set up a blantantly false strawman. Please don't use obviously piss weak rhetorical tactics, they make you look bad.
> every country has prisons with many criminals
And every country has varying incarceration rates, they are not all equal.
What should be looked at is countries by cultural attitudes towards crime and incarceration rates .. and the harder question of just how innately criminal imprisoned people are in various countries and whether they are just there from systemic features of a culture.
Again, there are no one size fits all answers and people aren't homogenous.
> If your "change the culture" thing had worked, you wouldn't need police, or at least not many.
Who said that police are not part of the culture?
I'm not arguing whether or not we need police, I'm arguing that if we come to a consensus (i.e., we agree that surveillance capitalism, etc, is not ok), then we can stop the problem. That may mean we even criminalize certain behaviors if we believe it is necessary. But the foundation is consensus. So let's do that- I firmly believe that surveillance capitalism and the bombardment of ads is not ok. What about you?
How many software engineers here work in defensive cybersecurity? Well, why they do they have jobs? Because of other software engineers who work on the offensive side.
I guess all the cybersecurity engineers should just quit because they're the ones to blame for all the malware...
Similarly, the only reason humans work as police is because humans commit crimes. So humans are really to blame for this problem.
No, it's not bad faith at all. He's trying to use a collective blame argument: "software engineers" as a group are supposedly to blame for adware, in his argument, rather than a small minority of software engineers. It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.
Just to clarify what I mean is it is a little bit of both: 1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct, and 2. (some) Individuals are actively doing it by actually building the bombardment code.
I feel the same way about software for war fighting, which obviously has higher stakes. The profession itself doesn't push back on the ethics of it AND individual practitioners are actively developing death-dealing software.
>1. Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct,
You're acting like the profession has some kind of central authority. It does not. It's like asking for agreed-upon ethical standards for dog walkers; you're not going to get it, because there's nothing resembling a centralized organization, nor any kind of licensing for this profession.
>I feel the same way about software for war fighting,
If you want to eliminate software for war fighting, this is a fool's errand. Weapons for war are absolutely necessary, unless you want to be a victim to some dictator who doesn't agree with your ethical principles. History is full of examples of peaceful people who couldn't withstand an assault by other people who didn't believe in peace. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that eliminating warfare (and the military apparatus for it: armies and navies etc.) is impossible as long as separate countries exist. Only if we manage to either conquer everyone or get everyone to agree to join a single planetary government can war really be eliminated. And that assumes that hostile aliens won't ever be a problem.
> Our profession is collectively allowing this by not having a widely agreed-upon ethical standard for conduct
Even if there was some centralized group that created an ethical standard for conduct, do you really think that that would escape the influence of software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. that have a vested interest in advertisement? Or that every software engineer would follow such a standard of conduct?
The idea that Russian and Chinese software engineers working for troll farms, bot farms, government cyberwarfare groups, etc. are going to follow an international ethical standard of conduct is completely laughable.
> It's absolutely no different than blaming all <minority group> for the crimes committed by a few <minority group> members, and paint them all with the same brush.
Members of a minority group, such as race or religion or sexual orientation are generally members of that group by birth, not by choice.
Members of the group 'software engineers' are members of that group by (career) choice.
"Every single one of those ads were programmed by... a human! We (as humans) are the ones doing this!"
See? That logic doesn't work so well. "Software engineers" are not a singular entity nor a homogeneous group. To maintain the status quo, it doesn't take more than just a few SWEs willing to implement ads and/or invasive tracking.
