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0 points9999000009991y ago0 comments

Your solution is to regulate software instead of calling out bad actors?

What a dystopian future, curl without a permit?

Why are you blaming the rank and file employees. The buck stops with the employer. If anything fine the companies

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Asking people to be responsible for the damage they cause is called 'accountability' and not 'dystopia'.

Software is not just something someone uses for hobbies or for word processing or whatever. A bad design decision in some critical software can have just as much of an impact as a bad design decision in a bridge or an airplane. If we want to be called 'engineers' then we need to put more on the line than just a public apology when something goes wrong due to a decision someone actively made to save money or reduce the work involved. And of course it should involve the people who make those decisions and not just the grunt who implemented them.

But if the 'grunts' had the power to say 'no, I will not do this because it is insecure and my license is on the line' then that's a good thing. No?

999900000999OP1y ago

>But if the 'grunts' had the power to say 'no, I will not do this because it is insecure and my license is on the line' then that's a good thing. No?

This will never work in a global economy. If you outsource the software you're just begging companies to find someone making 15$ the fall guy.

Sounds pretty bad. Your manager tells you to do something stupid or your fired. You do so, and when it fails they blame you and your software engineering license is revoked. You can't find a job and now get to live in a homeless shelter.

Meaningful fines for companies is the only way to fix this.

Maybe... For some sensitive things like location data an expensive permit should be required. But this needs to be a corporate responsibility, not an individual one.

In your scenario bad companies are going to ruin the lives of their employees by making them risk their licenses.

Eisenstein1y ago

How do engineers manage it then? What about banks? Any regulated industry? It obviously works for some professions, why is software the exception?

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ImPostingOnHN1y ago

> A bad design decision in some critical software can have just as much of an impact as a bad design decision in a bridge or an airplane.

This is a better point than you realize. Blameless postmortems in IT are largely inspired by blameless postmortems from aerospace failures.

Eisenstein1y ago

If aerospace gets away with it then we should fix that as well.

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Eisenstein1y ago

Asking people to be responsible for the damage they cause is called 'accountability' and not 'dystopia'.

But if the 'grunts' had the power to say 'no, I will not do this because it is insecure and my license is on the line' then that's a good thing. No?

999900000999OP1y ago

>But if the 'grunts' had the power to say 'no, I will not do this because it is insecure and my license is on the line' then that's a good thing. No?

This will never work in a global economy. If you outsource the software you're just begging companies to find someone making 15$ the fall guy.

Meaningful fines for companies is the only way to fix this.

Maybe... For some sensitive things like location data an expensive permit should be required. But this needs to be a corporate responsibility, not an individual one.

In your scenario bad companies are going to ruin the lives of their employees by making them risk their licenses.

Eisenstein1y ago

How do engineers manage it then? What about banks? Any regulated industry? It obviously works for some professions, why is software the exception?

1 more reply

ImPostingOnHN1y ago

> A bad design decision in some critical software can have just as much of an impact as a bad design decision in a bridge or an airplane.

This is a better point than you realize. Blameless postmortems in IT are largely inspired by blameless postmortems from aerospace failures.

Eisenstein1y ago

If aerospace gets away with it then we should fix that as well.

1 more reply

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