Comment by brookst
7 days ago
Do you also take personal responsibility for your company’s hiring practices, investment strategy, and marketing content? None of that would exist without you.
I think anyone would agree that there’s a level of flagrantly where individuals should feel culpability and make the right choices (“write software to prescribe poison to groups we don’t like”).
But something like this? Two apps establishing a comms channel? How many millions of times does this get done per year with no ill intent or effect? Is every engineer supposed to demand to know l of the use cases, and cross reference to other projects they’re not working on?
At some point it’s only fair to say that individuals should exercise their conscience when they have enough information, but it is not incumbent on every engineer to demand justification for every project. That’s where the decision makers who do have the time, resources, and chatter to know better should be taking at least legal responsibility.
As a software developer no I don't feel responsible for those things, because I don't have any involvement with them as part of my job. But the people who work in HR, finance, and marketing are responsible for those things.
I agree that the junior engineer implementing a localhost listener on Android might not understand what it is going to be used for and might not even think to ask. But somewhere, a senior engineer or PM or manager knows, and yes as you say that's the point where responsibility can be assigned, and increasingly up the line from there.
When I was involved in the hiring pipeline, I absolutely felt a level of personal responsibility since I was directly contributing to the decision to hire or not hire an applicant. That's not to say I was willing to shoulder the entirety of the responsibility, but knowing that my decision would affect not only the applicant, but their potential future coworkers too, I did feel responsible for making sure I had as much information as I could get and that I was making the best decisions I could.