Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigation in N.Y.

Re:Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigati... by kerng on Friday April 26, 2019 @01:17AM (#19755026)

Interesting point, at first it sounded a bit harsh but thinking a bit about this.... in the end as software engineers we are the ones pulling the trigger and your statement highlights our ethical responsibilities.

The problem though is that software engineering doesnt require any licensing requirements, etc. so one can always refer to incompetence being the problem (ooops a bug) and might get away with it.

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Re:Facebook's Email-Harvesting Practice Is Under Investigati... by throwaway_9168 on Friday April 26, 2019 @03:53AM (#19755554)

Well, unlike other lowly developers, FB engineers know exactly what is and isn't the right kind of mistake to make in pursuit of a company's vision.

Someone who works at FB even came out and said so:

"Remember, what Facebook is doing has never been done before. There are going to be mistakes."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321420

So yeah, I think what that person is saying should be translated as:

"Please don't think twice about punishing rank-and-file FB engineers. We are so competent, all our mistakes have only been intentional ones."

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