Comment by hoppp
7 days ago
Its unethical for sure, seems like some engineers will do anything for their salary, but if they don't do it somebody else will and it is an exciting technical challenge.
Its better to blame the management and higher ups or zuck himself directly. Blame the people who finance it and profit from it, not the people who coded it. Follow the money
> Its unethical for sure, seems like some engineers will do anything for their salary, but if they don't do it somebody else will and it is an exciting technical challenge.
I remember finding this out as a very junior engineer straight out of university. I was once asked to write code to cheat at a benchmark to make my company's product look better than it actually was. I had deep misgivings about this, but as a brand new junior developer, I was very hesitant to speak up. Eventually I told my manager I didn't feel comfortable with the ethics of working on that project, and he was totally cool with it! He said "No problem, we'll take that task out of your queue and give it to "Jim", he'll do it instead." Jim was thrilled and wrote the benchmarking cheating code himself.
There's always someone willing to do it.
In other more heavily regulated industries, whistleblowers are fortunately compensated and protected for raising such ethical issues. I wonder how far tech can go before we start to see similar government agencies and rules put in place to do the same.
Or blame them all. “If I don’t do it someone else will” hasn’t been accepted as an excuse historically, I don’t see a good reason to change that now.
(also, is it an exciting technical challenge? It’s a POST request to localhost!)
and they call themselves "engineer"