Sure, the actual blame may fall on whoever decided to hire all those telemarketers to defraud the elderly but... they're also just trying to have a job. The ceo is just trying to have a profitable company. The shareholders are just trying to have a pension. Consumers are just trying to shop conveniently.
From the perspective of the complainer, the thing is the part of the thing that they see. Telemarketing is telemarketers. Software is the UX. Mindless bureaucracy is the person standing in front of them. Etc.
If you're going to come to the defence of anyone, defend someone who is standing in front of the disgruntled consumer, earning peanuts. Developers are generally well paid, mobile and don't ever face the person they're driving crazy.
Anyway, developers (and software companies) put themselves on this high status pedestal in the early 2000s. The web was full of developer philosophy touting developer agency, morals, and such. Comes around. Goes around. Chickens roust. Pick yours cliche.
Exactly the point I am trying to make. People complain about telemarketers all the time but they actually do know that those people are just trying to get by and have no actual choice.
Developers think other developers are just able to say "f you" to their boss and leave the job and get a new one next day, but this is not the reality. Is this a reality for the majority of audience of HN? Can they do that? Because I can't.
"More" agency is not full agency, but if we're thinking in shades of grey, then I think it's a substantial delta. The stuff developers read and ideas they care about have influence.
For example, agile, TDD, and other buzzword methods for managing software teams started by gaining traction among developers. There is no equivalent for telemarketers. No one cares what they read or think. You can spy on their screen, time their toilet breaks, etc. Software companies do not want developers to think they are bullshit. They don't care either way for CS agents.
It is a matter of degrees though. It's not like an average developer can say no! to some crappy verification step that higher-ups promised their payment processor. I'd also say that agency is waning in the era of big tech.
At the end of the day, it's the developer who types in the code and pushes. Developers should share the blame for what they create. It's not just those mean horrible managers forcing us all to write bad UX. It's your choice as a developer to type git commit.
I don't think this opinion comes out of privilege. It you have no subject matter control over your work, you're not a developer--you're a typist.
I didn't actually suggest that. All I said was that people should leave bad jobs. That doesn't have to happen overnight. However, if you recognise that your job is bad and you're not actively looking for a new one then you've made a choice to stay. You've decided that something is worth staying in the job for. At that point everything that you do in the job that's bad, like implementing features that are awful for users, is on you. That's your responsibility. You've chosen (for example) a higher wage at the expense of making thousands of people miserable. You need to own that.
I agree that developers have agency, but (a) most of the stuff this video is parodying is near universal. FB, Google, Spotify, Amazon etc. all have this stuff. (b) If you are going to make "the moral choice" then UI clunkiness might not be the issue you care about most. Maybe you care about UI clunkiness, basic labor rights for lower end employees, environmental morals, monopolies, tax evasion, etc.
Choices are complex.
I can't speak for other people, but personally I don't believe it's only developers who should leave jobs they feel are bad. Everyone who works in a job that's a net negative should strive to leave that job. The difference between a developer and a telemarketer is that the is a huge shortage of developers so it's not that hard to find a new role, and it's generally relatively well paid so having the resources to change job is much less of a problem, so any developer who stays in a job that's awful is clearly making a choice to do that.
FWIW I'm also an advocate of systems like UBI and negative income tax that would enable more people to make moral choices about the work they do.
More to the original point.. if this is the case, the developers arguably aren't developers. The developer is whoever made these highly specific specs.
Honestly, IMO, this is illusionary. There is rarely, if ever, such thing as a spec other than the code itself that leaves no decisions to whoever writes code.