There are two basic approaches to work. You can be a minion or a professional.
If you're a minion, then you just build the volcano headquarters and the atomic missiles because, hey, it's your job. They don't pay you to think. Your job is to make your boss look good. You give 110% and think outside the box only when it's firmly inside the box of the primate dominance hierarchy you are embedded in.
Professionals, though, explicitly recognize they are part of a society. They owe something to the client/employer, but also to the public and the profession. For example, read through the preamble here: https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...
I see myself as a professional. I sell my labor, not my ethics. So what I would have lost by selling my ability to speak out about a problem? My integrity. My independence. My freedom. $40k is a lot of money, but it wasn't worth 40 years of shutting up about anything Twitter would want me to keep quiet about.
This is the same sort of worldview regarding professional ethics that led me to make my first discussion with any client free. It’s unethical (and bad business) to ask customers to pay my rates in order to explain their problems to me, it would be taking advantage of them to spend an hour or two, or even three, work out they’re either not a customer I want, or that I haven’t got the experience with the technology they are using, or that yes I could help them but their budget wouldn’t cover the time needed at the rate I charge… etc.
I borrowed this from the way quite a few lawyers work. Its served me well and garnered quite a bit of good will over the years, but at the end of the day I do it primarily because I sleep better knowing I’m not ripping people off and taking advantage of them.
You are a legit hero. Our society focuses exclusively on contributions that involve some dramatic moment, and doesn’t recognize those who show up for what’s right every day.
Thanks also for explicitly spelling out what it means to be a professional. (duty to profession and society as well as employer, written source, summary "sell my labor not my ethics")
I'm always ripping on people using the title Engineer when talking about software development. Your comment is a perfect example of how I would expect an Engineer to think about their work. I love it.
In many places, engineers are registered professionals along the lines of doctors or lawyers. As Wikipedia says:
> The foundational qualifications of an engineer typically include a four-year bachelor's degree in an engineering discipline, or in some jurisdictions, a master's degree in an engineering discipline plus four to six years of peer-reviewed professional practice (culminating in a project report or thesis) and passage of engineering board examinations. A professional Engineer is typically, is a person registered under an Engineering Council which is widely accepted.
Personally, I mostly refer to myself as a developer, not an engineer. Funnily, my great-grandfather came to America to work as an "engineer" in the Minnesota mines back when the standards for "engineer" were much looser. I imagine we'll have a similar process in the coming decades, where some sorts of software engineer will be licensed, and that you won't be able to call yourself by that term without getting into trouble.
The degree means something (assuming the school is accredited) but the title doesn't. Anybody can call themselves a Software Engineer.
For a very brief moment in time, some jurisdictions fought against the use of the title. In Canada Engineer is a protected title (like CPA) and they tried to hold Software Engineer to the same professional standards as other engineers (civil engineer, mechanical engineer, chemical engineer, etc...). This meant having a degree, working under a Professional Engineer for some period of time, then passing an exam demonstrating expertise and high ethical standards. I don't remember all the details, but I think Microsoft fought this and today Software Engineer doesn't imply anything in Canada.
If Software Engineer were a real profession, then you could be sued for malpractice and lose your ability to work in the field. It would also mean you have real power to push back against employers asking you to do illegal or unethical things. You would have personal liability and wouldn't be able to claim you were just following orders.
If you are talking about software engineer, then no you wouldn't have heard of that. You can't get a EUR ING designation as a software engineer (AFAIK).
Academic study just isn't sufficient to understand modern software development. One of the hallmarks of academia is how short-lived everything is. But many of the interesting issues in software development only become visible on long-lived projects. As a hiring manager, I consider fresh-out-of-school developers to be dangerous until proven otherwise.
I don't yet think software development is stable enough to turn it into proper engineering. But if it were, what I'd be looking for is a relatively high standard that includes both exams and a few thousand hours of supervised practical experience, similar to what they require of electricians or therapists.
Kudos to you, and glad you took the time to speak about your thoughts here. It's good for people to have exposure to later career challenges... and especially options they might not consider.
After a certain amount of money to cover life expenses + recreation, additional money has diminishing returns. Once one reaches that point, leading a fulfilling life becomes the next highest priority. I would speculate the kind of person who joins an anti-abuse team would not find accepting hush-money about the lack of anti-abuse systems to be something they would find aligning with their vision of a fulfilling life.
For me it's pretty dang high. Like on the order of 5-20 million USD in the bank. At some point I'm going to stop working. Rent and life expenses where I live currently are probably $100k a year (yes I could live on less or move, but that's part of the point).
Let's say I stop working at 65 and I live to 85. That means I need at least 2 million dollars in the bank to keep spending $100k a year and it assumes I die at 85. If I happen to live to 95 or 105 I'd be S.O.L. Also add in escalting medical expenses, inflation, other issues and 5 million in the bank is IMO the minimum I'd need to feel I could discard other money and stop worrying about it.
And that assumes I stop working at 65. If I was trying to stop earlier that would go up. I get at some I could theoretically live off the interest.
My point is, at least for me
> a certain amount of money to cover life expenses + recreation, additional money has diminishing returns.
Is generally false. It's usually part of the "if you make $75k a year, more won't make you happier" but IMO that's not true because I'm screwed if that $75k a year stops.
Also, source of that point is often misquoted. It says happiness doesn't increase with more money. But life satisfaction does increase forever with more money. Here's an article pointing out the original study did say satisfaction increased as well as a new study that says happiness increase too.
If I had even more money I'd angel invest. I think that would be pretty fulfilling. If I had even more money there's all kinds of projects I'd like to fund. I expect I'd be pretty proud to fund them.
I never said more money doesn't make you happier. I said more money has diminishing returns, and other things become more important. Even you are only able to suggest things that bring you personal fulfillment as a way you can use more money. This actually supports my point that it makes sense for someone to decline money that doesn't bring them fulfillment if fulfillment is what they're going for.
Maybe, but as someone that turned down $6 million because of my conscience (sold stock solely because I didn't like feeling guilty holding it and it's gone up 4x-6x since then), I could do a ton of good things for others if I had that $6 million.
It's not like we're talking about killing babies. Where' talking about signing an NDA or in my case not being 100% on board with a company's behavior in ways that are arguably ambiguous. As an example, if I had New York Times stock and was upset at their hypocrosy of complaining about ad supported companies while themselves being an ad supported company. Whether ads on NYT are good or bad is an debatable point. The point being, nothing the company who's stock I was holding was unambigously evil. But I chose my conscience over arguably trivial issues. In this particular case I think it was a mistake. If the company had been truely evil (by my definition of evil) then I'd be more okay with my decision.
I am sorry, but no, you did NOT turn down $6M. You have made an investment decision that cost you imaginary gains. This is a big difference from turning down a $6M paycheck
It's not as different as you're making out. There was no reason to believe it would go down (Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc were all going up). I fully expected it to go up. I knew I was likely to lose money by not just keeping the stock. I choose to sell 100% for conscience. I had no other reason to sell. Plenty of money in my bank accounts.
Bad comparison. You'd actually have to spend money to buy into a bet. I already owned the stocks. And further there's the reason. I didn't sell to cash out, I sold solely to stop feeling bad anytime a company's stock I owned did something questionable. It's very comparable, especially given the company in question. I even expected it to go up at the time. It would only have have to go up a few 2% to equal 40k.
This implies that the poster is the kind of person who doesn't find fulfillment in making choices that align with their ethics system unless the world also aligns with their ethics system. Like I said before, I don't think someone who would join an anti-abuse team follows this behavior pattern.
Additionally, the belief in one's own moral choices and behavior is often one of the important steps in finding fulfillment in yourself. If your fulfillment is reliant on external validation, you will always be found wanting.
Yeah that was my point, the thread was about being offered 40k to be quiet, but the thing I'm wondering is be quiet about what? Might as well take the 40k if there was nothing actually scandalous going on
I suspect you're looking at it from either a nihilistic "let the world burn, I just want to get mine" perspective, or (probably more likely?) a perspective heavily influenced by consequentialist ethics ("is the good I can do by being able to talk about these things worth more, in a net-good-in-the-world kind of way, than $40K? I'm not sure enough that it is, to justify turning down the money"). Or maybe a blend of the two (most folks get a bit selfish and let their ethics slide at least some, when sufficiently-large dollar values start to get thrown around, after all)
There are other perspectives, though. Here's a starting point for one of the big categories of thinking that might lead one to turn down $40K essentially just on principle:
For what it's worth, I'm at root a consequentialist, but see virtue framings as cognitively much more tractable given both the weird feedback loops of one's own psychology and the immense computational cost of trying to predict consequences over coming decades.
I can imagine answers, but I've never been in that situation. There are may be things I won't think of.
This is why I'm asking - my first instinct is take the money so I'd like to fully understand the thinking of the opposite side.
In any case thanks for replying.