Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.e

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  • 73 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Why shouldn’t we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?

    I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.

    Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.

    Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.


  • Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic. How to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.

    How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers? How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software?

    How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue? Especially in critical systems like a plane, how do you guard against that operator doing the wrong thing? I’m thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots’ natural inclination was to grab the yoke and pull up, which unknowingly fought the autopilot and caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque and added further confusion in a life-and-death situation.

    When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code? Just for physical safety? What about Dark Patterns? How do you recognize them and do you have an ethical responsibility to refuse implementation? Should your accreditation as an engineer rely on that refusal, giving you systemic external support when you do so?

    None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using. They all come down to generic logical and ethical reasoning.

    Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves “engineers”, we should bear the same responsibility. Obviously not every software developer needs to have such high standards, but that’s why software engineer should mean something.



  • My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.

    It’s why I kind of wish that “engineer” was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.



  • I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.

    Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.

    In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.

    Your example is a really really good one.