"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Btw, that rule doesn't mean tangential topics aren't important—often they're more important than the thread topic. We have the rule to prevent interesting/unusual discussions from getting supplanted by boring/predictable ones.

were software engineers ever the ones at yelp doing shady things or bullying?

I'm not a Facebook fan, but I am hugely grateful for their contributions of React and GraphQL.

I think engineers should be considered dis-associated.

Engineers are special innocent snowflakes that would never do a bad thing?

Well they generally aren't responsible for the strategic decisions of the company.

But nobody said they are somehow immune from doing bad things. So nice strawman.

Engineers on the ground developing technologies generally aren't responsible for overarching business decisions, no.

I feel like this is an intricate argument.

Why are german soldiers held in a negative light even though the war decisions were by its commanders?

They aren't held in a negative light... After the war, they were forgiven and I think society in general has accepted that they were just following orders. The leaders definitely thought in a negative light.

This is not true. "Just following orders" was held to be not a valid defense in the Nuremberg trials: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

What the hell is wrong with you ?

Nazi soldiers killed innocent men, women and children en masse. The association with engineers who have done nothing unethical is really inappropriate and unnecessary.

So in your opinion if someome works on the infrastructure for surveillance capitalism that doesn't amount to tacit approval of the model?