You may also find your support tickets everywhere languishing and x months of CAPTCHA-hell on every website.
More to the point is trying to be an ethical island in an unethical society, You'd have to deal with constant attacks from the "anti-woke" crowd.
The code of ethics for Professional Engineers works even though it isn’t any of the things you say are necessary.
Licensed professions only serve to increase the scarcity of licensed professionals, drive up the price and thereby form an economic cartel. Neither does it prevent any of the aforementioned disasters, nor are the responsible professionals held liable.
"Licensed professionals" is one of those myths in software engineering cycles that won't die. A license won't make anyone competent. It will, however, provide them with an excuse to charge more, do less and ascribe any fuckups to "must be something else wrong, I did everything to board standards"...
In the Bhopal disaster, seven engineers and executives were convicted of causing death by negligence and give the maximum penalty (which was pretty weak).
The Chernobyl incident led to Anatoly Dyatlov to be jailed and getting a 10-year sentence.
For Fukushima, some people were charged with professional negligence causing death but they beat the charges in court.
Licensing will not make anybody competent. But it can help keep incompetent people out of our field. When Engineers screw up, their malpractice insurance may get too expensive for them to continue to work in the field. When management asks for something unethical, it gives a pretty good reason for pushing back.
The Chernobyl disaster is an operation mistake, which a Professional Engineer may have signed the process for operation, but an operational failure to follow process is not the Professional Engineer's fault. Sure, a professional will try to narrow processes to be as fool-proof as possible, but you can't entirely blame a professional that the planet is capable of generating far more fools than you can plan for.
The Fukushima disaster actually shows Professional Engineering consequences with multiple engineering groups doing analysis and investigations of what went wrong and whether or not to indict Professional Engineers involved in the construction. None of those moved to such indictments, but it was investigated at length. Three of the executives of the company were indicted as a part of those investigations (and then were judged "not guilty" in a Japanese court of law).
"Licensed professionals" is not a myth. A license isn't about making anyone competent, it is about applying consequence when they aren't. It's also about having your back when you are worried about possible consequences. "I can't do that because I would lose my license" is a threat companies have to take seriously. If your company wants to force you to pursue it anyway, you can take the issue to the Ethics Committee at your licensing board/professional organization and they can help you examine the legal, ethical, and moral implications in a way that could result in consequences to your company. If all of that is documented and the company still does it anyway it is easier to get legal consequences applied to company executives, such as real, deserved jail time.
But right now we have nothing. Surely, something is better than nothing. We can't have nothing and already be out of ideas.
The scope would necessarily be narrower and "permit" more unethical behavior but for violations to be enforced by peers it has to survive the eventual "oh you're making a big fuss over nothing, you won't lose your license" problem.
Unless you want this kind of arrangement for developers, the oath isn't any good.
Also, the Hippocratic Oath has tons of variants, nobody uses the original one anymore because there are things in there that went out of fashion over the last 2000 years. E.g. operating on people suffering from kidney stones used to be prohibited: "I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone[...]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath ). Similar prohibitions exist nowadays for abortions or euthanasia, but only in some places. In others, doctors are free to or even required to perform those. In software development, I would imagine even more variety in the allowed/prohibited-list.
If software had such a thing, it would be possible to achieve something similar. It is not the oath per se that keeps doctors on the righteous path, it is just as much the treath of not loosing your job - but having your professional status revoked (i.e. permamently loosing the ability to work).
On the other hand, reviewing code every now and then, it would be good if you could revoke programming privileges for ever for certain individuals.
I would like more 'philosophy' in CS education. Just that people are aware of the methods used against them helps alot. It is hard and takes time to discover stuff on your own. It took me like 5-10 years of working before I realized how the sausage is made.
At the end of the day you confront a jury and not a board of similarly positioned individuals.
This isn't the 90s anymore. Today there's practically nothing you can do in the modern world without interacting with software. Buying food, going to the hospital, travelling, communicating, voting, going to school, using anything electrical, anywhere. Our society is completely dependent on software at this point. The fact that there's no professional ethics code with the appropriate oversight for the development and maintenance of software is utterly insane.
The points you bring up about the Hippocratic Oath are important problems to solve, rather than reasons not to try.
Misconduct among doctors is rampant, special highlight on dentists:
Surgeons, in fact, often begin with harm. To replace a hip joint, they necessarily must begin by causing great trauma to the body by cutting it open and removing bone.
I had a burst appendix as a teenager, leading to peritonitis. To treat this, surgeons were going to operate laparoscopically to remove the appendix and fix remove any contamination in the peritoneum. Obviously this required damaging my skin, removing an organ etc. which in the strictest sense is harm. But doing nothing at all would obviously lead to sepsis and death, so this was still the least harmful intervention. During the surgery, it turned out that the laparoscopic method was hard to carry out due to obesity and other factors. The attending made the decision to convert to a laporotomy, doing even more harm to my skin and leaving me with a 30 cm scar on my stomach. But it was the right call because it maximised the chances of accomplishing the goal of the procedure(preventing imminent death), minimising the risk of serious complications.
And here I am almost 20 years later. I have a scar, I have some adhesions that occasionally cause moderate abdominal pain if I don't eat enough fibre, and perhaps my lymphatic system and gut flora are very minorly compromised in some nebulous way due to the lack of an appendix. On the other hand, I'm alive. So yes, they "did harm", but they also minimised harm. And they didn't do any unnecessary harm, to the best of their ability. And that's the point of the ethical principle.
This reads like a bad joke. Ever heard of the opoid crisis?
A) Software developers should be free to sign a code of ethics, or
B) Software developers should be compelled to sign a code of ethics, and be prevented from working if they refuse to sign, or
C) Something else.
1. The way most people here on HN, and most people in the US, understand it.
2. The way the laws in most of Canada (but not Alberta) define the term.
AIUI someone can design and develop software for pay in Canada without declaring themselves to be a 'software engineer' and without signing a code of ethics.
Is that correct?
* The development of the software required the application of engineering principles (ie. "a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software")
* The software concerns the public interest (ie. there is a reasonable expectation that failure or inappropriate functioning of the system would result in harm to life, health, property, economic interests, the public welfare or the environment).
In practice, LinkedIn is full of "software engineers" and anyone with a P. Eng uses it as a suffix.
For example, try disagreeing with the statement “SWEs should take reasonable effort to protect user data”
In all honesty, I haven't checked if it's true, but you can use AI to find a foreign law that fits and cite it word for word.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/
Once you link the actual law, it becomes more of a checklist and less of a principle though.
If the customers/bosses do not even allow those to be followed, what chance do you think some pro-social rules with actual costs have?
That can be reasonable for something like medicine or structural engineering. But is it appropriate for a developer cranking out Javascript or Excel macros? This is pulling up the drawbridge behind you, excluding anyone who comes to the profession through informal means - and in my generation, that meant almost everyone. It also means that you will need to determine how much of your time you dedicate to politics.
Of course I found out that he was going into our billing software and adding hours to me. I had to talk to a lawyer and he recommended I report it to the gao. I compromised by quitting and reporting it to the liaison on the project (a professor). It was very stressful because if I hadn't reported it he could say that I reported those hours, not him, and I could have ended up in prison.
I think the liaison just buried it in the end.
This is the attitude that lands otherwise-normal-seeming people in jail. They dgaf about you until they do. Maybe the prosecutor needs an easy win. Maybe they have a wealthy patron you offended. You don't know. And casual cheating becomes criminal very quickly.
Charlie Javice, to get back to the core subject, seemed to genuinely think she was on the right side of the line. All she was doing was faking some numbers for investors, right? Nine times out of ten, investors have already bet on the company and want to see it do well, and even if they catch a founder fibbing are likely to see more value in suffering along with it than in blowing it up.
Except in this case the investor was JP Morgan, not an incubator, and they had the prosecutor in the rolodex.
Startup culture, our culture right here, absolutely encourages cheating. And it doesn't give you a clean instruction manual to figure out how to stay out of jail, because there isn't one. The point above, while technically about government contracting, is absolutely of a piece with the same dysfunction. I think a lot of people in our world need to spend a little more time in introspection.
Sadly, I suspect most or all of the investor class of people "in our world" have done this introspection. They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal things and potentially end up in jail, if it makes the odds of that company being a 100x exit - so long as the investors and their staff are all insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
The latter type of people don't become businessmen, of course, so the selection bias is for the businessmen to all be from the unworried people.
No legitimate business person I have ever met holds this position, if for no other reason than criminal acts pierce the corporate veil[0].
> ... so long as the investors and their staff are all insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
There is no such thing.
0 - https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/03/27/the-three-justifi...
> There is no such thing.
Sure there is. You can never request an illegal act, never commit an illegal act, but create a culture where others become incentivized to do illegal acts. This can be done in sufficiently subtle ways that it's impossible to prove it was intentional.
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest"
That is not subtle enough(anymore), if you want to disguise ordering murder.
I disagree. So do many state and federal RICO[0] laws. They were enacted for precisely this situation.
But you do you.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
EDIT:
Just so I am properly understanding your position, are you advocating for engaging in activities which would qualify as RICO crimes due to "how notoriously difficult they are to prosecute"?
RICO is hard to prosecute on a good day. If an organization is usually law-abiding and occasionally structures things such that some lower manager has a near-impossible goal to hit that is made easier with crime, then one gets crime occasionally.
And that's also not counting all the crimes like environmental dumping, which consistently yield zero prosecution and slap the company with a fine that's 4% of what the company saved by dumping their waste in a river.
Here's a recent example https://www.wjhl.com/news/national/campbell-soup-admits-to-d...
I didn't think so, but had to ask in order to ensure we have a common baseline.
> I'm just pointing out that there are ways for crime to happen, to even be encouraged, without really risking the investors. Your "no such thing" comment, while maybe true in a nonexistant legally ideal reality, does not reflect how things play out in real life.
I agree, there is always a way for criminal acts to be perpetrated, sometimes for years on end. My disagreement is with the encouragement portion having no risk to investors. As mentioned previously, criminal activities pierce the corporate veil[0], which can and do ensnare investors as well.
The complete quote to which I made my "[t]here is no such thing" comment is (with my initial quotation being the post-hyphenation fragment):
They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided
it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and
staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal
things and potentially end up in jail, if it makes the odds
of that company being a 100x exit - so long as the
investors and their staff are all insulated from the
illegal behavior and jail time risks.
Prosecutors are not stupid, nor are they robots incapable of reasoning and deduction. Quite to the contrary, they share many of the problem solving skills software engineers possess. And given a "big enough" problem, they will solve it via investigation and prosecutions.
As to what is chosen to prosecute and when, well, that is an entirely different discussion of which I am wholly unqualified to have.
0 - https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/03/27/the-three-justifi...
Well, sure, that's true. But only because that's a no-true-scotsman fallacy in incubation. All these perps are "legitimate business people" until they aren't. And they cross that rubicon, almost to a person, still believing that they're legitimate business people and that this is all a clever hack.
It looks obvious only in hindsight when you're looking at the indictment.
What gets them in trouble is the clever hacking, not a fundamental moral flaw. Or conversely, we need to start treating clevery hackery with a lot more suspicion. It's fine to "cheat cleverly" in software design. Outside that world it's got some pretty ugly externalities.
I think you've got that backwards. Crims gonna crim. A clever hacker will evaluate ALL the risks, whereas a moral flaw blinds people to risks. Doesn't mean somebody can't have both attributes.
I quite literally stole an education, and there's a college transcript to prove it. I was a clever hacker, and I worked hard; I was aided and abetted by the college administration, inducted into the Masters candidate ghetto as an honorary member. When they made it a felony I quit that path, and following Hunter S. Thompson's advice [0] I went into business so that I could continue learning "on the job". (Nowadays they call it "OPT". Served today with a very thin glaze of sarcasm.)
During that tenure I met people who wrote theses for a living, who appreciated my industriousness and offered to admit me to their fold. I drank with foreigners ("muslims") who wanted information I might have or be able to obtain; I suggested that they get their home countries to forge documents and and then get admitted as students.
I've quit jobs after an appropriate "honeymoon period" when I still hadn't been furnished documentation demonstrating that we had customers' permission to be doing what we were doing. I've quit jobs when government compliance was considered a game rather than a minimum standard of performance. [1]
I pass government background checks just fine; no reason I shouldn't. I get the "dgaf" attitude, but I strongly suggest getting it in writing. Doing things off the books is a cancer; and it's contagious, like that 10,000 year old dog cancer which now moves from host to host.
[0] "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
[1] If you need somebody who takes risk assessment seriously, we should talk.
Once more, this is a no-true-scotsman argument hanging on your added adjective "clever". All the frausters and criminals in the linked articles were "clever hackers" until they weren't. You probably are too.
Introspection and humility are among the hardest skills for hackers to develop (probably harder for us than for the general population, honestly, as our cheating gets rewarded!), and they're exactly what are being demanded here to keep us out of jail. And I'm pointing out the fallacies inherent in all the "it would never happen to me" argumentation.
> Well, sure, that's true. But only because that's a no-true-scotsman fallacy in incubation.
Which, by your own admission, makes it not a no-true-scotsman fallacy since it does not exist.
> All these perps are "legitimate business people" until they aren't.
This is a strawman fallacy[0] when considering the assertion to which I replied, which reads thusly:
They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided
it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and
staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal
things and potentially end up in jail ...
Post that gain and you will have a 100x flood of civil lawsuits to deal with. You may escape jail but I doubt you escape with the gains.
> All you had to do was report it to the liaison and keep punching the clock. Unless you were getting paid more because of the overages the enforcers dgaf about you.
That is not how fraudulent billing in a federal contract ends.
The DOJ prosecutors hammer the person documented as having submitted fraudulent billing and then go after everyone else involved. There is an outside chance in this case the innocent person originally identified does not get indicted and/or convicted of defrauding the government. But there is no doubt this process will cost the innocent person many thousands of dollars in legal fees just to stay out of prison.
The advice of "report it to the GAO" and then GTFO[0] is the way to go.
EDIT:
If a person continues to "keep punching the clock" knowing someone else is actively defrauding the government by "going into our billing software and adding hours to me", there is a nontrivial risk of being charged for conspiracy to defraud the US[1].
0 - https://www.dictionary.com/e/acronyms/gtfo/
1 - https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
People who work in the Valley for fifty, a hundred times more than the poorest in their own country often do not seem to feel the same way anymore.
This is not a question of abstract ethics, but a question of simple professional integrity. If the thing is bad and risks harms, you don’t do it.
It’s part of why I work for myself now; it’s not difficult to spot people who do not have a strong sense of ethics and simply not work for them. I work in a couple of fields where there are many non-ethical players, and can do so with a clear conscience.
'In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
Apropos to the article, as a programmer for this feature, what you are actually asked to do is write a greybanning engine. It can take various features (geofence, denylist of phone numbers/emails/device identifiers/payment, etc.) and use it to calculate a score that applies a greybanning policy. The policy may be that the cars in the app are now fake, the ride will never come, your CC is "denied", etc.
Nothing illegal or unethical about this feature, as written, but it is a "dual-use" technology.
The feature has been used to literally save lives. There were taxi-affiliated people in South America that would call an Uber and then, at best, trash the car and beat the driver. At worst, they'd kill the driver. Those people need to be greybanned, along with scammers, criminals, and abusive people of all sorts.
The local market administrators, however, definitely might ban users that the know to be police ticketing the drivers, might ban any account signup from the police station, might ban city credit cards, etc.
You, as the programmer on this feature, can't defend against that unethical use of it.
If you work at the insurance company and get asked to write a rules engine but not the rules, this same thing applies to you.
In this instance nothing intentionally illegal was being attempted. However, had the original claim been made it could have been considered fraud. In these sorts of situations I always ensure that the company put me in contact with the professionals that can indemnify both the company and me from any wrong doing. Provided we tell the truth.
There is lots of pressure not to take action, because of the feeling you're overreacting, because you've had things explained to you in a way that minimizes or removes the criminality, and because your job is at stake.
And crucially there is never some black and white issue. If your employer told you to murder someone, it would be easy to say no and know you did the right thing. If they tell you to incrementally go along with some grey area thing you're not sure the legal status of, it's way harder to know what to do.
People still have to be accountable for their actions of course, ignorance is no excuse. But we all should hope we're never in such a situation to begin with rather than thinking we'll know how and when to act.
The three example given are quite black and white ...
https://leanpub.com/unethical-software-engineering/
Covert Surveillance
EMAIL PIXEL INJECTOR
STEALTHY INPUT LOGGER
Monetization at all costs
AGGRESSIVE ADVERTISER
AD BLOCKER DETECTOR
PAY TO WIN
ADDICTION PEDDLER
ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY HOARDER
DRM RUG PULLER
OBSOLESCENCE PLANNER
Digital Fraud
CYBERSQUATTER
SNEAKY TERMS DEGRADER
INTEROPERABILITY BREAKER
Ranking Manipulation
FAKE REVIEW GENERATOR
SEARCH RANKING KICKBACKER
Unethical Artificial Intelligence Practices
TRAINING DATA HARVESTER
BOT PRETENDER
DECEPTIVE DEEPFAKERI would not have been surprised if the 5 million user thing was couched as some sort of "we need to generate some realistic test data to load test our systems <WINK WINK> - please create 5 million accounts very similar to these paying ones, remember this is testing so they need to be as realistic and believable as possible <WINK WINK>".
If I got that request (perhaps without the winking!) come down the line through the usual channels I'd probably have gone along with it without realising it was for anything nefarious. ...but then would that be a viable defense?!
Context is everything.
OTOH if somebody sent a message saying, 'Hey we need to increase our apparent paying users in order to defraud some potential investors.' then obviously you've become part of a criminal conspiracy, but I think nobody would ever* overtly say that.
I can see the situation you're describing, sorta. Though if it was me and someone asked me to generate a list of 5 million real-ish user accounts in a report, I'd immediately ask why. If it's to commit fraud or lie to investors, I would be like hell no! If we're doing load testing or something legit, for sure. But I feel like benign use-cases of generating 5 million accounts would not include the "make it look real" aspect.
I also don't think the Reddit comparison makes sense, since Reddit didn't seek to sell the company at the time based on the # of users. Growth hacking is one thing, lying to investors about users is another. Because this data point was a key decision factor for a financial transaction, this fake information/lie becomes fraud.
One of many reasons employers have a quiverful of ways to exploit and control workers.
If you're serious about anything, you do more than hope. You do diligence on your prospective employer before going to work for them. You think through a litany of contingencies and prepare a plan of action for each. Jobs in this industry are uniquely amenable to this by virtue of their relatively higher compensation and the autonomy often afforded to employees. If you spend an hour every day on HN, you can spend an hour meditating upon your conscience.
Predicting one's response to stressful and unexpected circumstances is hard. So try to anticipate circumstances and cultivate relevant virtues in advance.
The transition in Hungary was really seamless. Step-by-step. The Tavares report was still mainly about possibilities. The laws and the new constitution were already there to use them, but they still didn't use their full force. They could pretend that it's a democracy. They still pretend it, and most Hungarians still believe it, even when the government rules by decree for over a decade now, with elections with not equal playing field at all (opposition needs to win over 10% to be 50-50 with the ruling party).
And they're on the next phase. There is a new opposition leader, and it's way more difficult to pretend democracy now. The most interesting is Orban's used to be supporters. They switched like nothing. One day, an opposition adjacent podcaster was satan itself, the next day, "she's all right after all". One of my friend and his siblings argued against Orban with their parents for more than a decade, then the switch was instant. The parents will still choose badly next time, for the bad reasons, and they will allow to happen this again. When MAGA collapses, you can expect the same thing. There won't be any self reflection.
There was a joke going around Twitter about "30 under 30 doing 30 to life", because the startups involved were getting more and more outlandish to the extent that bystanders suspected that fraud was going on. Became a Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-u...
Of course, a fraud can stay afloat for a lot longer than you expect. The really tricky case is when you're ordered to do something illegal or unethical for which there is substantial political cover. An executive order, for example. You cannot rely on anyone to back you up simply because of the letter of the law.
Also:
> The reality was that this was a very deliberate double charge. I could not share this fact at the time – as the company threatened me with libel after I informed them of this detail
UK libel law routinely covers up all sorts of things which the public would benefit from having revealed, simply by the threat of an expensive lawsuit. It makes investigative journalism really uneconomic.
But the worst horror stories date from before it was last reformed, in 2013, I think, and I feel the need to patriotically point out that Australian libel law is even worse!
Bad is bad.
One later got into the Sunday Times rich list (the under 40 section, IIRC) during the dot com bubble, by the simple expedient of lying. He claimed to be working on encryption software that was hugely valuable and said it was valued in billions. He actually owned a smallish local computer shop. He later fled the country claiming MI5 were persecuting him for developing such good encryption software.
TO be fair, he seems to have fooled financial institutions too. He bought a Ferarri (presumably on credit) and Amex gave him a black card (which he tastefully put a picture of on the company website). It did not take a lot to see through the fraud, the actual business was decribed on the website.
The other person I got introduced to around the same time for the same reason turned out to be a member of a terrorist organisation. Not banned here at the time, but still not someone I particularly wanted to meet.
That's probably a good starting point for a dive into that question.
The person updating the website asks "have we received a court order?" and the person under injunction must answer "not me." The website author isn't lying, but the website contains incorrect information (as the result of a legally-enforced lie).
You could ask your lawyer but, once again, they'd also answer "no we haven't" because answering anything else is contempt of court at best.
Be honest: do you think a judge is stupid enough to believe you had the injunction explained to you by your legal counsel then, in a totally unrelated incident, thought "oh, I don't think we need the warrant canary any more."
The Afghan data leak scandal is a great example of where it made sense to use a super-injunction at first but also where its application continued long past when it should have done for (frankly) political reasons. Lewis Goodall's reporting on this is pretty excellent and fairly balanced, in my opinion.
No. The deference people have to the law as some sort of all knowing all powerful magic spell that can be cast to force silence at any time is to blame. Libel is publishing something you know to be untrue. The truth cannot be libel.
If you want to speak the truth, if you want to act in service of the greater good, you must take the risk that you will attract attention from people who do not want you to speak the truth. And those people may use whatever power they have to suppress you, whether that's judicial or extrajudicial. That's not caused by any specific legal system, it's how people behave.
Investigative journalism is uneconomic the world over. The U.K. has some of the best investigative journalism in the world. The U.K. legal system is far from perfect, but it is wrong to say that in this case, the U.K.'s libel laws (for all their flaws) kept this information secret.
The irony is that the greatest suppressor of the truth is comments like yours which scare people into silence about the truth.
> The costs in this case were significant, with Vardy being ordered to pay a substantial proportion of Rooney’s legal fees. Initially, the court ordered Vardy to pay £1.5 million in costs, earlier this month, it was revealed that Vardy had been ordered to pay an additional £100,000, bringing the total to £1.6 million.
https://www.matrixlaw.co.uk/news/noel-clarke-ordered-to-pay-...
> In August, after a six week trial, the High Court upheld the Guardian’s defences of truth and public interest speech.
> The trial judge, Steyn J, has now ordered Mr Clarke to pay £3m on account within 28 days, in respect of a likely eventual costs liability of over £6m.
Those are cases where the defence won. But in those cases, (a) they have to front the legal fees themselves for a period of several years during the action and (b) there is a real risk that the person who filed the libel action may not be able to pay it.
It very risky for an individual to defend a libel action, so almost everyone folds instantly on receiving a letter, or settles.
An exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_v_Hopkins - peak Twitter, sadly. Fortunately in this case justice prevailed and Katie Hopkins lost her house and life savings.
Nothing like some of the real horror stories, but still a significant chilling effect.
You do not need to "defend" against a "spurious defamation letter". The (very profitable) business of sending legal letters is based on the misunderstanding of the law that is perpetuated online. Legal letters are to law firms what bandwidth is to cloud hosting providers: free money.
A response to a "spurious defamation letter" does not cost "high four figures". Substantive does not refer to the cost of the response. Substantive means that it addresses the substance of the complaint.
The "high four figures" you spent for a lawyer to respond (I disagree with the word "defend") to a legal threat was unnecessary. You paid a bunch of money for some low-paid legal assistants to fill out a template, and then a high-paid solicitor to sign off on it.
As an individual, you can respond substantively to a legal threat for free. And even if you choose not to respond, courts are not punitive, the standard that courts hold individuals to are different to the standards they hold law firms to. A court will not rule in a claimant's favour in a libel case because an individual didn't follow procedure correctly.
If you, as an individual, make a truthful statement about A Big Corporation and A Big Corporation spends £100,000 on a team of lawyers to write an angry letter to you demanding you retract, a simple single-sentence self-composed response of "The statement is true, I will not retract." is substantive.
Despite what catastrophisers like yourself (catastrophisers who are encouraged by participants in the legal system who profit from this misapprehension) might suggest, civil courts are interested in adjudicating fairness, not trapping individuals in an endless legal quagmire.
Can you share examples of individuals who have been sanctioned by the U.K. courts for anything that comes close to not engaging in the Pre-Action Protocol?
"The statement is true, I will not retract" is not substantive and is effectively calling the bluff. If they take it beyond a letter, those costs will balloon further.
The "Defendant’s Response to Letter of Claim" section is very clear that it is actually that simple. The burden is almost entirely on the claimant, the defendant has very little to do. Can you provide any evidence that any individual has ever been sanctioned by a U.K. court for either not filing a response, or not filing a substantive response?
You are saying that "costs will balloon further" but you haven't yet established there are any costs. How can costs that do not exist balloon? Any individual could satisfy the "Pre-action Protocol for Media and Communications Claims" with ease, no expense necessary.
The courts are very kind to people who choose to represent themselves, especially when the litigants are obviously abusing the system to try and silence individuals. The point you're making seems to be that you must spend money to defend against spurious defamation claims so I have asked you to provide any evidence of a case where an individual is accused of libel and has suffered because they chose not to spend money.
I am not trolling. I disagree with the suggestion that the U.K. libel laws create an environment where people are scared to speak truth because there is a real threat of an expensive lawsuit. My position is that the fear people have of expensive lawsuits comes from other people fear mongering, in comments like yours, either based on a misunderstanding of a case they've seen publicised or because of information they've been given by legal professionals in a different context.
No, the chilling effect of UK defamation laws is not an artefact of scaremongering. No, you have not discovered the secret truth hidden by the legal profession. Yes, defamation cases are a real threat and expensive to defend as the burden of proof lies on the defendant, not the allegedly defamed.
Wow.
> In May 2018, Hopkins won an IPSO case against the Daily Mirror for claiming that she had been detained in South Africa in February 2018 for taking ketamine. The Mirror updated the headline to say that she had been detained for spreading racial hatred, and included a correction in the article.
Pick your battles, eh
Noel Clarke's legal team were working on a no-win no-fee basis (before they saw the writing on the wall and dropped him as a client, leading him to represent himself). The Guardian had no obligation to spend over £6 million on their defence, it was a choice they made. Indeed, one could argue that The Guardian chose to spend so much to send a message to those that consider baseless libel legal action in future, that The Guardian is willing to spend any amount of money to defend itself.
If you are an individual who posts the truth online, and you are sued for libel, you can spend very little on mounting a defence (you may even choose to represent yourself for free). Whether the litigant spends thousands, millions or billions on their action against you is immaterial as it is their cost, not yours.
As for Jack Monroe vs. Hopkins, Jack Monroe is a fraud. Justice did not prevail, although Hopkins losing her house was a nice treat.
I'm pretty sure the truth wasn't even a defense in UK libel law before 2013. It was entirely about whether you had the intent to harm someone. If you want to disrupt a thief's business, that's intent to harm someone, as a lot of people who wrote about quack doctors found out.
Nice ideals. I mean that. But pure altruism at great cost is a lot harder than you imagine.
Firstly, personal costs can be high even before full-blown whistleblowing, the struggles of which are well reported. The best case is usually that you're looking for a new job. It is clear to me that that's better than committing a crime or gravely unethical action, but not everyone always has good alternatives, enough financial safety, and no major economic responsibilities to cover at home.
This also goes for mental costs: I have previously come close to burnout spending months trying to rectify a clearly very bad and doomed situation. The only reward at the other end was the bitter vindication of seeing a project I deeply cared about crash and burn from afar after cutting my losses. And I personally know people who suffered far greater damage and took longer to recover from it, even in cases where they merely uncovered some big skeleton in the closet that was not even the fault of anyone currently in charge or clearly malicious. In many cases, management will be somewhere between actively complicit and themselves stuck in a bad situation with barely enough (perceived) agency to fix things the right way, which doesn't help.
Secondly, short of "going to war" and dedicating your entire life to changing something, saving yourself is usually the best you can hope for. That's obviously better than being complicit and possibly liable. I also like being able to sleep at night knowing I have principles. But if you have the righteousness to refuse to become complicit, it's quite frustrating to come to terms with the fact that you mostly won't be able to set things straight properly unless you are in a very influential position. I know that's often not really my responsibility if I'm not higher up, but it still doesn't sit right with me that I can't do more.
I recommend planning for this (if you can). Set money aside sufficient to cover your costs until you can get another job so that you can quit at any time. Negotiate your deals so that you don't end up with substantial golden handcuffs (i.e. cash > equity, especially with long vesting periods).
This helps a lot with maintaining an ethical position, but is also helpful for other negotiations. Effectively you are maintaining a good BATNA[1].
[1]: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/valuation/wh...
The client saw my first version where I marked an "indeterminate" buffer zone to account for the precision problem. They complained it was "confusing" and insisted I use the raw value without any buffer. Oh, and also, round the numbers in such a way to put all indeterminate points inside the denial zone. This would effectively add hundreds of square miles to the denial zone. A denial zone set by law, i.e. this was the some the government was allowing the insurance company to blanket deny flood coverage.
Giving them the benefit of doubt, I explained that the proposed changes didn't make mathematical sense and would over count people near the edge of the denial zone. I had access to some market data at the time and was able to estimate it would be a few thousand extra homes. They did the standard "avoid acknowledging the issue" whenever someone is trying to pressure you into doing something unethical it illegal.
I told my boss at the consulting company. He started putting the screws on me. Told me we needed to do this. Told me my job was on the line. Intimated it would be hard to find a new job considering the client was the largest employer in the area. Told me he could get anyone to do it.
I had two weeks of PTO planned, during which I was supposed to come back to Pennsylvania and move my stuff out to Illinois. After my PTO, I was supposed to show back up in Illinois. Instead, I went to our HQ in PA (much to the surprise of everyone, "what are you doing here"), told the CEO what happened, and when he doubled down on doing the wrong thing, I quit on the spot, no notice period.
I learned later they did not "get anyone to do it". My actions put the contract in a lurch, the client dropped my former employer, and cancelled the project.
I feel pretty good about that one.
There have been other issues since then, but I've noticed a pattern. They always happen at places I had to talk myself into joining. There were red flags and I rationalized them away, "well, I'm just over reacting. I don't have any evidence anything is wrong here. It's just the way people talk that's bothering me. And I really need this job." Since I've gotten more stable and better about not taking jobs that show red flags, somehow the ethical issues seem to have magically gone away.
Lori A. Beer was the CIO at the time. Now at JP Morgan.
Make decisions to harm others, don't be surprised if it blows back in kind. Golden Rule is there for a reason. Treat others as you would have them do unto you.
If you benefit from receiving stolen property, does the law force you to return it? One way of interpreting your scare quotes is that the executives turned a health insurer into a law violating company.
Obviously there are burdens of proof and this is most likely not possible to prosecute (it sounds like the health insurer has already shrunk and based on the date of the anecdote above, I’m guessing the relevant statutes of limitations have expired.
The general answer to that is: it depends on a lot of factors, but sometimes yes and sometimes no. The specific answer varies between jurisdictions, I think even between different US states and certainly between countries. It's often relevant whether you knew or should reasonably have known at the time of purchase that the property was stolen.
To be clear, I'm not expressing any kind of personal opinion here - I'm saying how the world actually works. Sometimes that matches what you are advocating, but sometimes not.
Of course, in both the mindset you advocate and in the other mindset, you have a claim against the person who stole your car, for sure, as well as anyone else who knowingly trafficked in the stolen goods.
Sometimes the relevant rules are different for real property vs personal property, and sometimes it matters whether the property's ownership has been registered in some register which the purchaser can verify before purchase. I don't think US car title records are generally publicly verifiable.
It's also usually relevant how the property was stolen - theft in the sense of actual larceny often has harsher consequences for the eventual bona fide purchaser (and more protections for the original owner) than if the property was stolen by fraudulently inducing the original owner to sign a deed of sale.
I'm avoiding giving specifics here because, again, the details vary by jurisdiction and by the particular facts and circumstances.
Remember, every person working for an insurer has unparalleled access to data on what the effects of their decision is going to be. You can't claim ignorance once you've seen the glorified spreadsheets that run these companies.
Not really; attainder occurs when you're convicted by a legislator as opposed to a judge.
But true, attainder is not directly related to kin punishment.
For people in specific classes that benefit from networks and status: it is not.
It should be default. If you abuse your power and position, it should have cascading effects not just for you but people that benefited from it.
This idea that only one person at fault when there are 10's of people that hide behind the crime is just non-sense and has done immeasurable damage to society.
And I stress again: it should be income bracket/class based. The higher you are, the harder the fall.
Go after the guilty party and revert whatever benefits they got. If money went to dependents, that money is to be seized. But those who received the money are not at fault per se. Unless they helped in the crime, then they are obviously guilty too, but not of receiving fund but for helping committing a crime.
You can even see the evidence in many of the sister comments here.
Loopholes and lawfare are the tools of the corrupt
Laws are like code: It only seems perfect until it meets the real world. And the complications only seem frivolous until it's your ass on the line.
We really don't in reality. The manner in which even the existing laws are enforced leaves a lot to be desired.
Propensity to do harm through crime, violence, etc. is largely a genetic attribute.
Take a violent drug lord for example. Do you really want a woman capable of loving him allowed to continue on as if nothing happened?
"ever again"
For good reason, modern law systems rarely issue punishments that last a lifetime. People can and do change, and something stupid (and illegal) you did 30 years ago shouldn't be held over your head today. These are rare cases for the absolutely worst crimes. For anything else, you receive a punishment, be it money or months/years in jail, and after that, you deserve a chance to live a life without ongoing punishment. Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy enough.
Obviously fining you 5$ for stealing 100 is not gonna work.
Not to punish per se, but to prevent them from doing more harm to the public.
The solution is not harder punishments for those that are punished, but punishing more of them.
Punishing more of them is easily said, when the crime is much harder to prove than shoplifting for example. And I'm skipping the fact that the shoplifter will be represented by an overworked public defender while the exec has a team of lawyers lined up that probably are payed by the company that got richer off illegal behavior
No, it's not. We don't catch everybody guilty of petty theft, but those we do catch still don't end up in prison for life.
There was a time when we chopped their right hand off, but I'm glad those days are behind us.
(Reading many of the reactions here though, we are just a thin layer of judges away from mob rule.)
You do understand how the petty theft criminal represented by a public defender is at a disadvantage to the white collar criminal with an army of lawyers paid by the company?
"We should just catch more of them" is like saying we should just solve our energy problem by making nuclear fusion work. Sure, everyone agrees with that but that's just wishful thinking
Petty theft is done for different reasons to white collar crime. I agree with you that the punishment is not a deterrence for small offences.
I think there's a lot of deterrence coming from the Enron case where people actually went to jail. That's just too rare because you quickly get into questions of intent. And to prove intent is really hard.
Your note about 'proving intent is really hard' is kind of the underlying reason - white collar criminals tend to believe they will never be caught/convicted. So making sentences more severe for those who are caught and convicted doesn't actually impact those future criminals, because their calculations say there's no risk of it being applied to them.
If you tear apart whatever guarantees human rights exist on your places just so your can impose unreasonable punishment to nobody, then don't act surprised when somebody else uses it against real people you sympathize with. (And yeah, if you are from the US or some other place where lifelong punishment is common, you should be fighting to fix this, not to add support to it.)
On the other hand, you could be pushing for those people being punished at all, by reasonable crimes that your law probably already recognizes or that could be added without rotting your society. But yeah, maybe that's too much.
On the one hand I don't want the bar to this discipline raised. On the other hand, I don't want people like us (metaphorically) building bridges that tip every two hundredth car into the river.
(source: https://www.mpts-uk.org/-/media/mpts-documents/dc4432-guidan...)
White collar crime gets basically no punishment, and looking at career of those people they usually end up falling upwards.
For such cases banning them from being in a management position for X years would be a nice discouragement.
I mean the article literally says the engineer could have been sent to prison for 75 years for his role in the fraud(effectively a lifetime sentence).
execs and upper management who instigate such incidents? almost no real punishment ever happens.
> Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy enough.
Like, seriously? These people do not feel bad, there is no heavy burden. They are proud of how they earned money, feel like any prosecution is grave injustice and would do it again.
Widely immoral people, whether in politics or business, dont feel sorry for who they are. They made those decisions because there was no moral dilema for them.
Others who want to earn money and are likewise ambivalent about the means will see a felony conviction for causing grievous public harm in the pursuit of giant piles of money as an endorsement and hire the "reformed" exec at the first opportunity.
In other words, once you've carried out your sentence, in 99% of the cases it's done and behind you, and you can go on living a normal life without anyone else needing to know.
Not sure how that's relevant.
In Türkiye, certain crimes disbar you from running for election (and you're required to have a university degree).
And say its 2 17 year olds, and you take nude pictures to send to your partner. Now, having sex is legal here, but a picture? Thats possessing 'child sexual assault imagery'. Nobody would think 17 year olds are 'children'. Even the law routinely charges them as adults.
And getting a felony at all follows you around, unless you can pay the danegeld to have it removed. Of course, staying clean isn't sufficient. Paying $10k or more is.
I happen to disagree. I think these crimes (and many others) should follow you more or less permanently.
My opinions on what "should" be the case have just as much validity as yours.
Please be self aware when you are making baseless moral claims.
A bit of self-awareness would suit yourself well. I didn't make any moral clas, baseless or not.
Or do you just claim this because that's your gut feeling?
If "targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext" is accurate - I'm curious how that compares to the absolutely worst crimes to you.
If you are saying that twentysomething founders should not be held accountable for the mistakes of their "youth," then you might be inclined hold the investors personally accountable for funding them--similar to parents being liable for their teenagers' driving mishaps.
I am disinclined to believe that Javice and his ilk are very much corrected by the Department of Corrections or later life experiences.
And it is absolutely reasonable that a crime committed in the course of your profession could prevent you ever working in that profession again.
People don't really care about drug addicts and gay folks, though (there's a fairly significant number of folks that think they "deserve" it), so it didn't get as much attention.
I used to work for a large drug distributor both pre and during the opioid epidemic.
At the time (pre-SUPPORT Act), distributors weren’t required to notify the DEA about anomalous ordering so we didn’t provide data to law enforcement unless they sent a subpoena.
To increase profits, we identified our best customers of opioids and updated our inventory tracking system to send rebates and early warning notifications to providers so they’d buy more earlier.
Each provider has a sales rep (territory) mapped so we could figure out bonuses easily.
We the software engineering team were paid well for it, but not as much as the sales reps who got a percentage of the buy.
In the case of Purdue and oxycontin, the culpability has in fact been established in court as well.
As for the coders, I find it hard to believe that they were so ignorant, naïve, or unintelligent that they had absolutely no idea what was going on. I just don't buy it.
Sure we could say it was obvious they were pushing lots of pills. But this was a legal product.
Someone working for an NFL team trying to sell tickets , or for Starbucks trying to promote frappucinos, … these actions seem fine. We know the risks, but we acknowledge and move on.
But if it turns out that new data, 3 years from now, shows some huge uptick in head injuries among college players. Or high school. And we can attribute this to the influence of pro leagues, well…. The actions of the people participating in the enterprise now get considered in a different light.
Or if we gain new (as if we need it) data on the impact of sugar and caffeine on young people, then people who work for Starbucks or McDonald’s or basically any prepared food business, … we will judge them differently ?
People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.
What do we do then? Refuse to take any action for fear of some possible future negative impact ?
It’s not appropriate to judge this way. We learn as we go, and we can say “if we knew then, what we know now…” but it’s not clear in the moment. A difficult line to draw.
In that case, they totally did. The people who pushed leaded gasoline knew it was dangerous, but they did it anyway! By the 1920s–30s, it was already well known in medicine that lead caused neurological damage, especially in children. Workers at DuPont and Standard Oil plants developed hallucinations, seizures, and many died. What's abhorrent was where industry executives and some government allies downplayed or suppressed evidence of the harms.
Patient took medication and were responsible for their health.
Doctors wrote the scripts and have the ultimate responsibility to the patients.
Pharmacies dispensed the medications as instructed by the scripts.
Big Pharma (Sackler) makes and markets the drugs.
Distribution is only responsible for making sure drugs arrive efficiently to their location. I would work for a drug distributor again if the pay were better.
Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.
I appreciate the reply none the less.
You mentioned targeted rebates, which feel a lot more "active". My personal ethical barrier seems to be where its a direct interaction with the problem domain. e.g. I'll work on a tool for email marketing, which incidentally gets used by gambling orgs, but I wouldn't work directly on say, Roulette software.
A bit of an ironic statement, given that this post is you blaming everyone except yourself for the role you played in deepening the opioid crisis to increase profits.
There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.
And its also why some of the anarchist folks I hang out with say there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And definitely in areas, they're completely correct.
I tend to agree too. It’s incredibly hard to do much in the US without bumping into some ugly part of capitalism because the ugly parts constitute the majority.
The exact same question can be asked to developers who help target gamblers with attempts to push them deeper into addiction.
I fail to see the relevance of bringing up a different, and also unethical example, but I'll answer anyway. If GP said that they used to spend their time optimising software to be as addictive as possible in order to drive people into gambling addiction, destroying their lives and taking all their money while doing it, I would ask the same question.
But it's only a slight difference. I don't think people who work at predatory apps/gambling systems should be able to sleep at night either. Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.
But if you work for one of those pay-to-win apps and find some customers are spending thousands of dollars on it (whales), you know you're being immoral.
The “occasional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I associate sports betting with the much more dangerous side of gambling than any kind of P2W system.
There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.
The former almost certainly causes much less societal damage than working for a pharma company that strives to get the whole population addicted to opioids, due to the scale constraints that come with running an underground business vs. an "above board" one.
Why do you think that gambling companies pay above the industry average for the required skillset?
Because luckily there are many other people with me who won't work for them, so they have a smaller pool of candidates and need to pay more.
Almost everyone is contributing to terrible activities. Just different degrees of bad.
Yes, voluntarily working in an industry where that "degree" is undeniably magnitudes higher than average just for personal gain, does make you quite the awful human. And "helping maximize the number of pills pushed to confirmed opioid addicts" is indeed a large number of standard deviations of "terrible" removed from the work the average person does.
Yup, working on recommender sysrems at places like Meta is also quite high up there. Luckily the number of people who do this kind of work is minuscule when taken as part of the global population. Even more luckily, thousands of people on HN alone will forego such jobs even if it means earning less. I've done so myself.
I reported it and quit but they managed to stay in business and keep getting government contracts.
One of the disgruntled doctors from that company made a whole website about some of their fraud: https://hiller.whitecollarcrooks.com/
They also bragged to us about how one of their daughters was dating a Glassdoor exec and had him take down all their bad reviews.
I guess there are some differences though. When a new pusher shows up in your territory you sue him, not going for a drive by.
Too many people are trained to not rock the boat and not ask questions. I'm always "that guy" in pretty much every meeting I'm in. Some people like me, but many don't. It's tough. On the occasions that all my questions are already answered or I have nothing more to say it's obvious how relieved people are. It would be so easy to just be a yes man and please people all the time, but I just can't. It's easy to see how selecting for people who aren't like me would lead to an organisation that is essentially psychopathic.
I guess my point is: why is gender at all relevant here?
Therefore, if you are, you should leave that company, pronto. They're weird and probably desperate, and it is likely to get even worse. It's not normal. Get out, quickly.
If you're not sure something illegal is happening, you could do both. The lawyer might tell you what questions to get answered, to inform what you do next.
(But don't do talk to anyone at the company if you think there is any risk that they will try to neutralize you as a weak link. "The coverup is worse than the crime" happens in organizations with shitty people, and you might have just discovered an especially shitty person.)
As an engineer, I once told a company that it was about to accidentally do something that I suspected was seriously illegal. They were able to prevent it from happening, in time. Problem solved, no wrongdoing occurred, and no one had to quit, nor go to federal prison.
Longer ago, I once told an organization about some bad things, using the appropriate internal channels. And then I had to keep going up the chain of command, when each level would suppress it, and sometimes even retaliate. Which was a rare opportunity to realize that an organization had infected its org chart with a high degree of shittiness. I'm now a big fan of people consulting a lawyer.
On another occasion, not necessarily "illegal" was averted, but at least "big liability" was. I had reverse-engineered a customer's security-related protocol, for an integration, and found a grave vulnerability. (Critical info that must be inside the cryptographic signature envelope, was outside of it, meaning that an attacker could replay a captured message later, with changed data.) To interoperate with the customer's system, I'd need to implement the security thing in an unambiguously wrong and insecure way. So I told the appropriate person on my end, and thankfully they handled it well, and figured out how to break the news to the customer.
That time, to be sure the appropriate person understood the severity, I mentioned that, in a different engineering field (including one in the application domain), I would "lose my license or go to jail" for implementing that.
Occasionally, I briefly muse that our field could use the obligations and authority of Professional Engineers. But moments later, I realize that our field went too long without that, and I can't imagine that being implemented with integrity at this point.
Simply, deny to carry out the work UNLESS you are directly and clearly instructed to by EMAIL. Oh, and be sure to make this request by email as well, as a record. So send an email saying "hey i was told to do that and i am concerned about the legality, please give me clear instructions over email"
This will calm them down.
huh...
It can indeed be a tricky problem to do in a manner that’s both fast and accurate, but it’s absolutely possible once you have the right datasets, which aren’t even that large. U.S. ZIP codes, telephone area codes (with enough out-of-place ones to mimic people who’ve moved and kept their cell phone number), common names, and a word list will get you rows that look plausible. Matching street addresses requires a much larger dataset, but again, it’s not impossible.
Because it is not just bosses that might try to pressure you into taking unethical actions, it is also the state itself.
For my part, I have a plan, and I've told my boss enough to trust him to read between the lines and revoke my access to make it impossible for me to turn over customer data without a warrant.
Like "I hate the color purple, so if you ever see me in a purple baseball cap..." or something similar?
You need to find a way to bring some of your other rights into balance (and conflict with) those of the state, to bring professionals who have a duty to protect your confidence to your defense.
The power of the state is asymmetric warfare against an individual, which is what they count on. You need leverage from other competing lawful protections working on your side.
There was a whole thing about it a while ago, gov said "we are listening to your feedback" and then did it anyway.
Of course our system is actually worse in some ways - forgotten a password, they don't believe you (parks and rec style) "Believe it or not, straight to jail" (iirc it's a max of two years).
I don't get nervous easily but it made my stomach turn, my palms started sweating. I told my boss, we told our boss, who went and pulled the CEO out of a meeting. I was given signed documentation on company letterhead that stated I raised the issue and also detailed how our company had informed the customer, along with a modest cash bonus and they bought me most of the furniture in my house (no taxes!)
The company came back to us and said "we know, we built it like that on purpose". Incredulous but reassured that both myself and my employer were not facing any liability, I finished the product and it shipped. Predictably this was exploited within a few years and made national news when it was used against prominent political figures.
There are still no legal mechanisms in place to enforce any kind of security for this class of product.
I take it you are an Oak man, then ? [Harvey Keitel voice]
It could only be worse if it included "click here NOW!"
Rygian•4mo ago
I fully understand why this is true, but it seems to ignore any retaliative measures that the management could take against the person who says no.
With the benefit of hindsight, any such retaliation would be weaker than ending up in an orange suit. But the person has to find the guts to say "no" without that hindsight.
OskarS•4mo ago
The exception is if you fear literal physical violence against you or others, or are being blackmailed or something, then of course you are being coerced and have no choice. But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion.
Not saying it's easy, it's a horrible situation to be put in and I have huge amounts of sympathy for a person who has to experience this. No one is perfect and act with faultless ethics at all times. But hard or not, it is your duty as a citizen not to violate the law.
overscore•4mo ago
When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally.
> The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it.
This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only excusable, it's the only moral action.
philipallstar•4mo ago
This is the time when your ethics are tested. Anyone can do the right thing when they're getting paid for it.
tpoacher•4mo ago
> There was a lesson to learn from the holocaust. We're always reminded that: "Never forget, we've learned our lesson." "What was the lesson?" That's the question. The lesson is, "You're the Nazi". No-one wants to learn that; If you were there, that would have been you. You might think "Well, I'd be Oskar Schindler and I'd be rescuing the Jews." It's like, no, afraid not. You'd at least not be saying anything. And you might also be actively participating. You might also enjoy it.
Hindsight theoretical morality is very different from experience on the ground, where peer pressure, stress, uncertainty, exploding situations and fog of war come into the mix.
DennisP•4mo ago
It's not like it's impossible. The Nazis arrested 800,000 Germans for active resistance activities, and several hundred thousand Germans deserted the military, many of those defecting to the Allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism
It wasn't a huge percentage, but we don't know how many actively resisted without getting caught, or resisted in more passive ways. And that was resistance against the Nazis, who had no qualms about killing resistors. Risking or quitting your job to not only do what's right, but avoid getting in trouble with your government, isn't in the same ballpark.
rurban•4mo ago
throwaway173738•4mo ago
bjt•4mo ago
What benefit do you think he's trying to get from it? I'm honestly trying to figure out the nefarious angle and coming up blank.
It seems to me like a very similar sentiment to that great "are we the baddies?" sketch from Mitchell and Webb. [1] I see both as an exercise in moral humility.
See the Milgram experiment, or the Asch experiment. Most people do cave to pressure from authorities and the group. Everybody believes they're they exception. Statistically, most of them are wrong.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
justinclift•4mo ago
What's your take on that?
sethammons•4mo ago
I don't necessarily agree. I think he is pointing out that people morally grandstand and the majority will not act out how they say they would.
immibis•4mo ago
1718627440•4mo ago
darth_avocado•4mo ago
cess11•4mo ago
Or, for a more obscure example, that Antigone should just have said 'yes daddy' and left it at that with the play ending somewhere in the initial conversation with Ismene.
barney54•4mo ago
thyristan•4mo ago
throwaway173738•4mo ago
OskarS•4mo ago
skeeter2020•4mo ago
nkrisc•4mo ago
ndriscoll•4mo ago
Not that it's much of an excuse for everyone else either, but with people in the professional-managerial class it's absurd.
closewith•4mo ago
Becoming a whistleblower or refusing unethical demands can also lead to being blacklisted, as in most industries, loyalty is valued more highly than ethics.
LadyCailin•4mo ago
closewith•4mo ago
collinmcnulty•4mo ago
closewith•4mo ago
crazygringo•4mo ago
You're not going to be of much use to your family in jail.
It's still a difficult decision, but it's not just your job vs your morality. It's your job vs morality+potential jail.
We dish out criminal sentences precisely in order to affect the equation like this, because we know people don't always act on morality alone.
freehorse•4mo ago
Wow. This is incredibly dangerous way of thinking. Are any “downstream outcomes” justified as moral in such a case? How about outcomes involving people dying eg due to safety or quality rules broken? People may do things like that “to feed their kids” but that does not make it ethical, especially when we actually talk about preservation of certain social status rather than real survival.
surgical_fire•4mo ago
We are not talking about luxury here. A lot of people depend on their salary to pay rent and put food on the table. This is even more pressing if you have a family that depends on you, if you are in need of healthcare, etc.
What your post fails to recognize is that in the current system, labor is already a form of coercion. You need to work because the option is homelessness and starvation.
If you can avoid those even when unemployed, you are extremely privileged.
em-bee•4mo ago
that would be all developed countries except the united states
rfrey•4mo ago
em-bee•4mo ago
nowadays even in china everyone gets healthcare, working or not, so we are talking about almost a quarter of the worlds population.
snypher•4mo ago
throwaway-0001•4mo ago
Based on the latest available data (mostly 2023) and current population estimates:
* *UK:* ~56.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 178) * *Australia:* ~45.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 220) [using 2021 census data] * *Germany:* ~31.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 323) * *USA:* ~19.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 515)
The per capita distinction is more significant than the raw numbers suggest.
(Note: Methodologies for counting vary by country, which can affect direct comparisons.)
albumen•4mo ago
More research shows the U.S. rate looks lower largely because it uses a narrow, one-night "Point In Time" measure that excludes many precarious living situations other countries intentionally count. If you harmonise definitions, the U.S. does not outperform high-safety-net countries; on unsheltered homelessness in particular, it fares worse.
In UK official usage, being legally homeless often includes people the state is actively accommodating; it is not limited to street homelessness like the US PIT figure. In Australia, their figures include couch surfing (staying temporarily with other households and those in “severely crowded” dwellings). In Germany, apart from again having a more expansive definition of homelessness, their figures also include ~130k Ukrainian refugees.
Just one example: the US figures should at least include >1.2 million students experiencing homelessness.
em-bee•4mo ago
array_key_first•4mo ago
For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc.
This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enough.
DennisP•4mo ago
tverbeure•4mo ago
DennisP•4mo ago
Note also that I'm talking about highly-paid software engineers, not about people in general. Lots of people in the US make way less money than senior software engineers, and they manage to get by. Live at that level and secure your emergency funds first, and you'll be a lot more comfortable dealing with any ethical quandaries at work.
tverbeure•4mo ago
And I’m talking about my SWE neighbors in SV who have a desire to buy their own house just like almost everybody else. It’s just wrong to claim they have a spending issue.
They may be highly paid, but the house prices are commensurately higher too.
It is nearly impossible in the US in general to buy a house without taking on some amount of financial risk. It has nothing to do with being wasteful with money.
dmoy•4mo ago
DennisP•4mo ago
You yourself said that for the people you know who bought a house without that, "a job loss would be devastating." So you seem to agree with me and the personal finance advisors.
I did not say they had "a spending issue" or that they were "wasteful with money." Those were your terms just now. I simply said they should have rethought. You're turning that into some moral judgement, when all I'm saying is that it's bad strategy.
KittenInABox•4mo ago
No, I'm pretty sure this is getting less and less true actually. Credit card debt is at an all time high. Homelessness is rising. Medical debt is crushing.
renewiltord•4mo ago
testing22321•4mo ago
renewiltord•4mo ago
Filligree•4mo ago
testing22321•4mo ago
basisword•4mo ago
watwut•4mo ago
Seriously, we hear the "but the job, but the potential pay raise" exactly as often in a good economy from people having large salaries.
They have choice. They are choosing the fraud over ... still high salary but just not that high.
qwertytyyuu•4mo ago
mettamage•4mo ago
exe34•4mo ago
it depends how many friends and family you have in the area that can host your whole family that is now homeless. it depends how much disruption you are willing to inflict on your kids definitely right now as opposed to maybe in the future.
swiftcoder•4mo ago
For a junior engineer it may not be that hard to fly under the radar, but senior/staff level folks tend to be well known by the execs. And execs talk, they call their friends to vet future hires... burn your execs, and maybe you don't work in that town again
scaramanga•4mo ago
Like, anyone who would work with some of my previous employers, are places I wouldn't want to work anyway. It's a big wide world out there.
phatskat•4mo ago
Quite. One of my first gigs was at a large real-estate aggregator. The people were great but the highest levels of the company did
- A pet “adoption” site, in quotes because to my knowledge the pets weren’t real and it was a subscription service with no means of cancellation outside of a voicemail box - A kind of Craigslist-esque site for selling home improvement services that was wildly vulnerable to XSS - I discovered that during an unannounced client demo when my own manager had said “you guys try to break it” - We were a PHP shop from the beginning. One day, engineering gets pulled into a meeting room and told that they’ve been developing 2.0 in an office downtown, with a separate team, in ColdFusion. They fired the lead engineer on the spot and most of us left or got fired shortly thereafter. They did offer to train us in CF, but the bad blood was too thick for my taste.
All that is to say, if I ever get wind of the owner or CEO being involved anywhere that I’m working, I’ll probably be walking.
pydry•4mo ago
creer•4mo ago
- Firing someone has large costs to the employer. You have the job because you are needed. Same for side-lining someone or not promoting them.
- Firing someone removes the final incentives against that person reporting the deed to the govt. It pushes that person toward reporting instead of softer "negotiated" steps such as continuing to argue for legal alternatives or discussing it with an intermediate rather than outright reporting. And many corporate legal or accounting people are amazing at finding alternative ways to achieve the same result in a not-illegal manner.
- A lawyer can help you much more once there is retaliation. The company might end up fighting both the fraud reporting AND the retaliation.
Just firing someone is not a great "solution" for the company.
Letting you believe that they will ... that's very powerful.
(and probably all this is caveat: in countries where retaliation is illegal enough and commonly taken to court or settled. which is not worldwide.)
themafia•4mo ago
eur0pa•4mo ago
pavel_lishin•4mo ago
Not that I would recommend a night's stay at a local lockup (2/5 stars, the beds are awful, the toilet facilities are worse, and the roommates leave much to be desired), but doing so certainly puts things in perspective going forward.