this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Why's everyone blaming the engineers lol, pretty sure they're just doing what they're told right?
Exactly, headline should be more like "Google executives want Google engineers to make ad-blocking (near) impossible"
Isn't Google famous for giving a large amount of creative freedom to their engineers (and having a lot of dead published products as a result)? Also, Google engineers are not exactly stuck at their job with little hope of finding anything else to survive.
a decade ago.
I believe that policy was reduced or removed many years ago. Around the time when all the cool new projects stopped, and Google scrubbed "don't be evil" from their site and company philosophy.
Just following orders is not the ironclad excuse some of you seem to think it is.
I mean shit, they aren't launching nukes here
Look dude, I hate advertising as much as anyone. I don't want any TV and most streaming services have wedged in some form of advertising nowadays and I avoid all that.
But equating engineers trying to solve a problem like engineers figuring out how to block ads isn't really equivalent to murder.
People only get held accountable for their actions and choices when the consequences are equivalent to murder? Their bosses hold some of the blame, sure, but they are not blameless and pretending they are just enables shit like this to keep happening.
They're still bad people, but this kind of blame has to run uphill. The devs only have the option of quitting, not necessarily of not doing what they're told.
That being said, I bet there are some Very Good Boys who enthusiastically and proactively suggest some evil shit to the execs.
Doing what you're told does not relieve you of responsibility for the results of your actions
The author is the type of person to classify a software engineer making $300,00 per year the same as the CEO of google who makes $2,000,000 per year and gets another $200,000,000 in stock options.
The software engineering is not rich. The CEO is rich. But they are both held responsible for problems by the ignorant. And this is the class war CEOs want us fighting. If we are fighting each other, we aren't fighting them.
Ah yes, because "just following orders" has worked out so well in the past.
That's right, I just godwin'd this bitch.
The engineers are not blame free, and can do super shady shit too. For example, the issues with the WebHID "broswer" APIs.
Software engineers have ethics classes, I'd imagine this would fall highly under unethical, just under building software for the military which google employees have protested in the past.
We do?
It was required for my degree, I'm sure it is required at more than just my university lol
Your anecdote is not universal.
Sure, its not taught everywhere, it is still something discussed among peers and taught at some institutions. Otherwise, you wouldn't be seeing engineers doing walkouts and protesting companies decisions.
Not my university. Outside of the engineering classes and prequisites for engineering classes, we only had to take rhetoric and a foreign language.
That's disappointing to hear. Talked about ethics throughout my courses and one was half the class. Hopefully more professors and instructions sprinkle it in there at least.
No they don't.
Losing your ad blocker on chrome is "just under" software designed to kill people? Lol really? Oh the oppression
Sure it won't kill people like programming drones, but it is still unethical and would affect ~5 billion people negatively.
Right, but you said "just under". There's a preeetty fuckin wide gap between blocking ad blockers and dropping bombs guy.
I'm not saying concerns aren't valid, I just took your comment to be calling it almost comparable to military software.
"..., it's just under..." means the same thing, but I think you mean "it's just under" as in "although, it's under" rather than "just" being a measurement?
Yeah not intending it as a measurement; this comes to mind in situations like this
Because it is still unclear if this is an official project requested by Google or just some engineers working alone until Google adopts the project.
The chances that a swashbuckling crew of rogue engineers organized a secret skunkworks project to implement their heartfelt, idealistic vision of an adblocker free web are… low.
This is exactly something an engineer who works at Google would want to work on, finding new ways to enrich Google is literally their job and there would be great personal benefit from coming up with the best way to implement this DRM crap for profit
True, but it's not zero