Guilty? Why are you using criminal law language in context of wage slavery?
Who collects the surplus value of labour, rent seeks and directs the extraction racket? Start there.
You should really think about why you are framing these questions in such a manner.
I am talking about morality rather than legality. No doubts the owners are more guilty, but that’s an easy consensus here. I’m more interested in the opinion of the many software engineers who participate here.
More
Much more
So fucking much more
I’m assuming they both work at same “evil” company.
The guilt would depend on the crime.
Did the roof collapse despite numerous warnings from the maintenance staff about structural issues? If the worker failed to report outside the company, yes there is some fault on them for inaction.
If the company ordered some cyrpto mining baked into their software, then the developer who accepted the task and implemented it would share guilt.
I’m assuming they both work at same “evil” company.
Yes
Did the roof collapse despite numerous warnings from the maintenance staff about structural issues? If the worker failed to report outside the company, yes there is some fault on them for inaction.
Let’s say there is no issue regarding maintenance, everything is safe, the building technician is only “guilty” of helping an “evil” company run.
If the company ordered some cyrpto mining baked into their software, then the developer who accepted the task and implemented it would share guilt.
So it’s more about directly working on something bad?
I guess that means people working directly on the chain of personal data exploitation at the tech giants are more guilty.
Guilty of what? Making a living?
My god guys, these purity tests will reveal nothing, but destroy everything
Evil, it says it right in the title
My god guys, this lack of reading comprehension will destroy everything
Who decides what’s evil? You?
If your moral compass is broken that sounds like a you problem
Having seen other comments of yours in other threads though I do know I’m more qualified than you to decide, at least, so sure I’ll do it
Good people working for evil companies and occasionally sneaking in good things is better than evil people working for evil companies and never doing anything good.
I’ve never worked at an ethical software company despite only being at three different places in my career. Even something innocouous like an office productivity app is probably automating an office admin out of their job.
It depends on what kind of evil.
There are evil things that only CEO’s or sales can do, like unfair competition. Then both the dev and the maintenance guy are not guilty.
But if it’s done by software, then the dev might be guilty, depending on his personal part of it.
If a company is doing all kinds of evil and everybody knows it, then both are to blame.
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On the face of it, no because it depends on who is making the decisions.
Is the building maintenance staff suggesting locking the fire escape against code? No, it will be someone else with authority.
depends on who is making the decisions.
Both have made the decision to work at that company…?
More so.
You’re not giving any context here, but a guy taking care of the building is usually not connected at all to the business. I’ve always seen them as contracted from a company that does exactly that. They don’t know what the business is doing and have no responsibility for it.
As a software developer, I once interviewed with a spam company. I guess it was pretty obvious what I thought of them, so I did not get the job. I would have gone for it, because I needed the job, but would not have been b happy and would have used my time to find work somewhere more acceptable
At large enough companies, for any given component, many or most engineers will also have nothing to do with it. It could be that you work on an observably tool kit or some such and how no clue how evil X product works. I hesitate to blame engineers either. But management, or c-suite; those are the bad guys.
I mean you’d have to think the software is probably doing more damage than changing light bulbs so yeah I guess so.
The billionaires are guilty, not the people.
You’re oversimplifying things. If the evil overlord ™ demands to build weapons of mass destruction, is the proud engineer with a family of 5 who designs them innocent?
When I was in high school, I excelled in math and science, so I was pushed super hard to go into engineering for college. I ended up changing majors eventually, but holy shit did I not understand just how strong the engineering school -> “defense” industry pipeline is. They recruit engineering students hard
It was an eye-opening experience, realizing just how many people were comfortable working for these companies as long as they got a fat paycheck
‘only following orders’
Well this whole thing is going down a rabbithole, but personal accountability should factor in.
I think there’s a big difference between the person pulling the trigger and the person assembling the gun, even if ultimately both of their actions were required for a murder to happen.
Well that’s what they invented companies for!
(ok well I know that wasn’t the objective at the beginning but it was developed that way)
Neither are guilty of anything more than surviving.
What the fuck are you doing trying to create scenarios where you can blame the workers? This is exactly what the ownership class wants, for people to create bullshit purity tests that further divide the proletariat. There is no ethical job under capitalism, nothing that can be done without a drop of malice, because our system has been designed to maximize cruelty.
Cruelty is a byproduct, growth and capital are the systems goals.
There is merit to the question, just following orders and all that.
More, but not much more. Presumably the developers have more capability to get another job elsewhere and are less constrained by economic neccessity. Even then though their amount of “guilt” is tiny compared to those in decision making roles.
You’d be surprised, I’ve written a long comment about it but I’ve been trying to get another job for around two years now and it’s been completely impossible. Part of it is because I don’t have any formal education in the field (despite years of experience), but a lot of it is that the developer job market went to absolute shit after COVID and all that’s left now is nothing but evil companies.
My options for applications are basically AI startups, crypto start ups, banks and tech companies that are too competitive to ever give me an interview even if they’re somehow ethical.
Maybe, I started a new job 9 months ago going down on the evil scale, but I was meaning in general not specific to now or anywhere in particular. It might not be a great time to get a new job as a dev, but you still almost certainly have more freedom to do so than a janitor.
Short answer: yes
Long answer: yyyyeeessssss
