At a previous job I joked that groups like that would place to attract / corral employees that should be cut during the next round of layoffs.

In theory these teams could do some good things, in reality it attracts or creates horrible people with INCREDIBLE efficiency / creates a cycle of endless meetings / recommendations... and it is endless because it is in their best interest to have an endless amount of "work" and inject themselves in a way that costs them nothing, and everyone else a great deal.

I figured these teams were the easiest place to find people who provide nothing at all / get in the way of folks doing things and almost always they don't accomplish their goals anyhow. They wouldn't even know if they did accomplish their goals anyway as these groups tend to center everything on their actions / the goal is them doing things endlessly.

Somehow word got back to them about the joke, they blamed the wrong person for the joke, tried to raise a hubbub with HR (to their credit HR told them to pound sand). And then they got all laid off ...

Probably best not to tell HR that there's a joke going around that your team should be laid off. Wouldn't want to give them any ideas.

But you need somehow oversight right? (specially for something as critical as social networks used by billions)

I'm a believer in some sort of cross-validation and quantification. The ethical impact of a technology should be quantified, and addressed if significantly negative (or promoted/incentivized if positive!) -- you can quantify number of users impacted, give various arguments, soft measures and estimates. Then, you can have other teams validate those estimates. After all said and done, you can again evaluate an intervention (on both ethical terms, and on the productivity and profitability of your company), and see if it was good or not. If a team is repeatedly giving bad advice, I think you can then address that (retraining, lay off, etc.?). Ethics is not impossible to do :)

I believe a certain generalization of this is needed for the entire society[1], to externally address good/bad technologies. A good example I cite all the time is Open source contributions. We still haven't found a good mechanism to pay OSS, despite the immense value it brings to society (openness itself has a value that direct sale couldn't capture). I'm a big believer in distributed evaluation and cross-evaluation: if we had distributed entities to evaluate impact of various ventures (for efficiency, properly categorized and subdivided into science, technology, social costs/benefits, environmental costs/benefits, etc.) we could apply the same logic to make society more adaptive, distributed, and less focused only on the single goal of profit. (I plan to elaborate this further, I think we are going to need to "patch" our current system in some sensible and careful ways to get a really good 3rd millennium!)

[1] Previously sketched this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28833230

I think the problem is that the way these groups work ends up being something other than intelligent oversight. It's a human problem.

They attract or breed people who see it as a great / easy job simply to provide oversight but have no investment / zero consequences for what happens. They can give tasks, eat up time, it costs them nothing, but costs everyone else tons of time.

They are also free of any consequences ... how do you know such a group did any good? It's entirely for them to define. "These products were ethical, and we made them that way." Easy to say.

IMO these kinds of questions are up to the folks in charge of the products, beyond just a random group deciding "is this ethical" as they actually also have to understand and know them. If the folks making the product can't handle it, that's the problem.

Perhaps if being ethical costs a lot of time, your business is unethical by design.

Or worse, you're cutting corners that should not be have been cut.

Now in terms of this particular abuse prevention case, the problem requires a serious social and technical solution that would be expensive for Twitter to implement, and would harm their revenue to boot...

> Teams like this attract a certain type of person, and it's not a builder.

Ditto for financial audit teams and so-called "IT security": all they do is block, I've never had anyone in either function build something or help me work faster, just additional processes and bureaucracy that slows down real work.

edit: I thought my sarcasm would be apparent, but Poe's law strikes again.

It's because security, audit, and ethics teams aren't judged by how much they enable others, they're judged by how many threats they block. I work at a well-known tech company but joined when they were still very small. Our original security "team", a team of 2 engineers, were highly plugged into the product and the concerns of the then-small engineering team. This team was always willing to help and enable builders to stay security conscious.

As we grew into a large company and our security team became an entire organization at the company, the org lost all connection with the product and became a more classic blocker-based team. The org lost empathy with the product and was judged on no product metrics, so naturally the culture in the org began to just be saying "no" to engineers all the time. A few of the earlier hires still try to help, but for the most part they just block.

"Fast" is not the only descriptor that should be applied to work where a financial audit might be involved. "Correct" probably has a few things to say. "Legal," too.

It's not their job to build, it's their job to ensure that what you build isn't crap on any number of fronts (security, compliance with regulations). You know, important things that impact your users (if you have the best software ever, but it leaks user PII in the HTML because you're a dickhead who wanted to build fast without any regard for security, that's not great).

Sure, if they helped you figure out a way to build, that would be fine. Far more often, I am just told to kill feature/bugfix/concept. At a past job, the security people were against the idea of self password reset at all.

The security team at my current company also refuse to allow self password resets. The only way is to call our service desk and give them your DoB and last 4 of your SSN... and they completely ignored me when I pointed out that for at least half the population the US that information is more or less public due to several data leaks.

I haven't worked much with financial teams, but the security teams I've worked with have absolutely helped build our products. They put practices & systems in place that made a golden path to getting software green-lit for production.

Same with QA. Fire those guys!

This, but non-ironically.

Security is a discrete objective with a distinct success / failure metric.

"Responsible innovation" is not discrete.

In simplest terms, one can judge if security is succeeding with a security audit. Either access is avaiable to the right parties, or not.

One cannot say with certainty if one is being a responsible innovator.

If your products are great bc they are are built quickly on top of a swiss cheese security policy, the security team is à blocker (or at worst, a delayer) of the company bankruptcy from fraud/fines/asset loss.

If responsible innovation is blocking product, its not certain what (if any consequences) there will be if the product is unblocked. Therein lies the problem

I used to feel the same when I worked for a bank. And then I worked at a place where security was so unregulated that TBs of data and millions of user’s accounts could be stolen just with a shared password and no one would notice

Ages ago, one of the managers on my team was complaining about how unhelpful the rest of the company was being (with our team's upcoming product release). I explained the job of everyone else in the building was to say "No" and their job was to get those people to say "Yes".

"But, but, but aren't we all on same side?!"

"Oh you sweet innocent child..."

Once this manager understood the rules, they did quite well playing the game.

I'm in a highly regulated industry segment and work in an information security related function. You've made my day.

You're welcome!

> financial audit teams and so-called "IT security"

They do fill a role that actually needs to be filled, though.

Yes. Does the GP think the same thing about security engineering teams? What about QA engineers?

Not really Poe's law. The statement may be exaggerated, but is also true to a degree.

> ...without a clear indicator of the author's intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.

This checks all the boxes on Poe's law:

  [x] Parody
  [x] Reductio ad absurdum intent
  [x] Extreme view
  [x] Mistaken as sincere

I strongly disagree. I worked at an analytics company that had and needed a privacy ethics department. They were great. It was a mix of lawyers, philosophers (degree in the subject), and former developers.

They consistently thought about the nuances of baking privacy into a product in a way that I didn't have the background or time for. Every time I worked with them, they helped me build a better product by helping me tweak the specs in a way that had minimal impact on our users (unless they were a bad actor) and strongly increased privacy protections. It was like having a specialized PM in the room

I don’t remember the source but there was a linked article here a while ago about how to effectively manage “blockers” like this. The example given was a med device company where the engineers hated the regulatory department who always told them no. Manager decided to actually increase engagement and bring on one person from the reg side to their meetings. At some point a person said “well we’d love to do this but no way would the FDA allow us to do it.” The regulatory employee basically said “do you even know the regulations? There’s a very easy pathway to doing exactly that.”

My boss once did a similar thing with the quality department. Suddenly we sailed through our DFMEAs. Some people do live to block others, but some are trying to do an important job. Engagement usually pays more than just whinging.

> Every time I worked with them, they helped me build a better product by helping me tweak the specs in a way that had minimal impact on our users (unless they were a bad actor) and strongly increased privacy protections. It was like having a specialized PM in the room

It sounds like they were focused on building product too, then, which is not at all what this is about.

What did the philosophers do on a day to day basis? I am curious, sounds like an interesting role.

I would think they'd more accurately be described as "ethicists" and probably fulfilled a function closer to a Business Analyst. Reviewing and transmitting requirements, gathering use-case data, reviewing standards & procedures, and working on "fit and function" type stuff.

They all did the same thing, they just came to it from a different background.

The day to day was reading the comms for a bunch of projects, finding places where you could be valuable, then reaching out to a bunch of project owners and convincing them to talk to you about the project.

I had them reach out once because I was working on a project that dealt with data for school children. We were exploring to see if we could use data help teachers intervene early and prevent bullying. They reached out to make sure we understood the legal implications of dealing with data for minors, and that we weren't just building a product that would encourage the administration to pigeonhole students.

After a brief conversation we got signoff and some great feedback on how to support positive outcomes while avoiding the risk of creating something that felt Orwellian

> philosophers

Sounds like something from Silicon Valley, the TV show.

This is also true for security teams and privacy teams and accessibility teams. Yet they are extremely important.

Good security and privacy teams do a lot of work to establish good practices and build frameworks and platforms for others to build upon.

The bad security teams just show up and expect to say criticize everything and stop other teams without providing workable alternatives.

The problem with having a team with a vague charter (“responsible innovation”) with unclear scope (e.g. not just security or just privacy) is that it’s really hard for them to feel like they’re building foundations for others to build upon. It’s too easy for them to fall back to roles where they see themselves as the gatekeepers and therefore backseat drivers of other teams. It becomes a back door for people to insert themselves into power structures because nobody is entirely sure where their charter begins and where it ends.

Of course. But good security teams also say "no you can't do that even though it would be the fastest path to market." And looking at a team that says "no" and saying "ugh these people aren't builder they are just getting in the way" is a great way to end up with a company that is irresponsible towards their users.

We can talk about whether this particular team is effective. We can talk about unclear scope (though, IMO, the scope here is no less clear than "privacy"). But the complaint that teams that put barriers in front of other teams are always bad is insufficient at best and downright dangerous at worst.

> But the complaint that teams that put barriers in front of other teams are always bad is insufficient at best and downright dangerous at worst.

Nobody made that complaint.

Please don't misrepresent my statement, which was specifically, "to justify your own existence, you have to put blockers in front of people who are actually trying to build things."

Good security teams build & they help others build as well. They build secure-by-default platforms, secure common libraries, and guidelines for others to follow with confidence. Working with a good security team means you're confident your product will get to market faster because, at launch time, you know you'll be green-lit since you followed the org's security best practices.

That kind of team doesn't have to invent blockers in order to justify its own existence.

You should edit your statement to include the word "invent" - that goes a long way towards describing the blockers you talk about as invalid, made up, not relevant to real business constraints, etc.

Definitely helps you make your point.

So then the followup question is, based on what do you make the claim that the team under discussion didn't build anything?

You admit that teams in this space can and do often build tools to make things secure by default or private by default, so why couldn't this team be involved inbuilding "responsible" by default?

Your argument here is basically that you believe security and privacy "blockers" are inherently of value, so a team enforcing them isn't 'inventing' blocks, but other teams are.

Very much disagree. Good security teams, good privacy teams and good accessibility teams should understand that their highest priority should always still be to ship product. Their job should just be to make sure that the product that ships is secure, ensures privacy and is accessible.

The difference between these things and something like a "Responsible Innovation Team" is that the goals of the latter are often poorly defined and amorphous. What does "Responsible Innovation" really even mean? But contrast that with, for example, security goals, which are primarily "don't get breached". Security folks, privacy folks and accessibility folks should all have a very well-defined job to do. For the other "PR-focused" teams, they usually have to make work up to justify their jobs.

Note that, obviously, it's also possible to have bad security people, for example, who only see their job as to throw up roadblocks and demand that your security checklist is ever-growing. I'd even say these are the majority of "security" people. But the good security people who are able to integrate themselves successfully into your product development processes are worth their weight in gold.

It seems that you could also see the responsible innovation team in the same light -- 'the product that ships should be innovating in a responsible way'.

Also IME none of these things are binaries -- a product could be more or less secure, privacy-respecting, and accessible, just as it could be seeking to innovate more or less responsibly. Different aspects of security, privacy, accessibility, and responsible innovation will be important at different times, depending on what's happening in the world.

The jobs are never as well-defined as you'd imagine.

Same with QA. Msft rolled QA and dev into a single role and (IMO) it was a detriment to the dev cycle. It's difficult to switch builder and blocker hats.

QA is an interesting one because many companies don't separate QA from development and it works pretty well. I think the main reason you can pull this off is because you can "do QA" by writing automated tests, so it still fits into the "builder" style of work that engineers prefer.

If you asked engineers to do a large amount of manual testing, they would either (a) tell you they were and then secretly automate it, (b) simply not do it, or (c) quit.

We used to have a large QA silo at a previous job. They did exactly that. We broke that down that by moving the QA engineers into the respective product teams - and kept them, there.

Turns out many kinds of businesses/product teams (including Microsoft's Windows team, I'd say, from personal user experience) need dedicated QA people because many worthwhile tests can't really be automated well enough with a reasonable effort, or if they can, it's something that often breaks and needs regular maintenance.

I suspect that in the Windows case they simply stopped testing those troublesome cases.

Agreed. QA is really helpful for anything UX/UIrelated (where the alternative is often experimentation, which really is only good for changing already existing things, and not necessarily ideal for new things). Or if something is so big, complex, and crusty like Windows, where it’d be a Sisyphean task to go back and add automated testing everywhere it could theoretically be useful, it’s a lot better as a stopgap than idealistically declaring you don’t need QA since in theory you could automate things (if you were willing to spend 2000 person-years on it).

In case you're confused about the downvote(s):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730380

Does Microsoft no longer have STEs and SDETs?

IIRC, the STE role was eliminated in 2006 or so.

In 2014, for most divisions, the SDET role was rolled into the function of SDEs, reportedly resulting in drastic attrition of the converted SDETs. The exception was the operating systems division, which was reported to have laid off all of its SDETs at that time.

IMO, security and accessibility are more objective ends than "responsible innovation" which can be plagued by bias and personal agendas.

I think these are all examples of teams that can have concrete goals: accessibility teams can be enforcing a standard or regulation (like WCAG), privacy teams can be auditing for compliance to GDPR or COPPA, security teams can be monitoring for security updates, pen-testing, and auditing for compliance to standards like PCI DSS.

"Responsible Innovation" is kind of nebulous and I would expect it to be problematic unless given clear rules of engagement and supplied with a strong leader.

That said, somebody needs to be responsible for dealing with the endless stream of products that are deeply flawed out of the box: builtin racism, builtin stalking/harassment tools, "0-day" doxing of existing users ...

Consider privacy. I'd wager that most people on HN would prefer it if major social media and advertising companies were doing more than waiting for legislation and implementing the bare minimum. "Privacy" in the aggregate is vague rather than concrete. Similarly, you could imagine a team who is responsible for addressing actual policy concerns around things like amplifying sectarian violence and also having a broader and more vague mission around "harm".

I think most privacy teams are responsible for compliance to legislation and, hence, have clearly defined, concrete goals. Are you disagreeing?

One would hope the goal of a privacy team would be to work to improve and maintain privacy, even if they are not strictly legally compelled to do so in the specific case.

No. I am saying that privacy teams often go beyond that and that this "beyond" is in the vague and ill defined territory.

Legal is the barest.minimum,.and at times actually can force bad practice to boot. (e.g. UK Network Security Guidance)

Thing is, any way Twitter can innovate in a way that would bring income is likely unethical. Either it will try to increase engagement by polarizing people - increasing heat; selling user data; showing advertising or additional worse things.

Yep, blockers like:

- should we do this?

- who do we hurt by doing this?

- oh god people are hurting why are we still doing this?

Did you come up with the list or do you actually know what that team actually did? I think only the latter provides a valuable entry point for discussion. In the case of the former, we end up fighting each others imagined scenarios - and imagination is limitless. It sure leads to a lot of discussion, none of it bound by reality though.

It would be nice, but would require an inside person to dare make potentially traceable (by their contents alone) public comments so it's unlikely, to know what the team actually tried to do, did do, and what it achieved. Without actual facts the discussion will just end up a free-for-all.

I think it's safe to assume that the team did the thing that it was assigned to do and that it was named for. It's certainly makes more sense to discuss that than to announce that we have no ability to discuss anything unless we were personally both on the team and managing the team, and were involved in making the decision to cut the team.

edit: I'm sorry, we do get to discuss how they were probably wrecker nutcases stifling people who actually build things in order to make up for their own inadequacies and inability to do the same. It's only assuming that the ethics team worked on ethics that is out of bounds.

An awful lot of people are making comments based on the assumption that such a team exists only to invent problems. It's worth at least one person interjecting that Facebook is causing at least some problems and that a team like this could have a place, even if nobody knows precisely what this team did.

Many people are taking it for granted that Facebook should have no interest in reducing harm. I'm glad somebody pushed back on that.

Funny that the "you don't actually know" critique comes in response not to the nakedly disparaging post that kicked this off, but the comment arguing for responsible software development.

We of course don't know enough of the specifics, because Facebook works hard to keep it that way. But we do know that Facebook has a body count. If you're looking for a "valuable entry point for discussion", maybe start with Facebook's well-documented harms.

And because I Ctrl+F-ed it and couldn’t find anything, one of those documented harms is the Rohingya Genocide. Putting this here so that we know what we’re talking about.

Seeing devs non-ironically complain about internal departments like this one which was set up in order not to let that happen again kind of saddens me a lot. No, productivity and work is not more important than making sure that that work doesn’t enable a genocide campaign in a specific corner of the world.

Yeah, when I say that Facebook has a body count, I'm not kidding. Facebook touches people's lives in so many ways that it's hard to even estimate the total number. But it seems the barest ethical minimum to say, "Hey, is there a way to be sure this next feature is responsible for zero deaths?"

> "Hey, is there a way to be sure this next feature is responsible for zero deaths?"

What makes you think this possible? I don't see where Facebook is particularly responsible here. Telephones and radios have been used to coordinate assassinations and genocides. Movies have been used to justify invasions. Why isn't anyone burning the effigies of Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, and Thomas Edison?

Sorry, explain to me how Marconi directly profited from the Rwandan genocide?

In any case, perfection is rarely possible but often an excellent goal to aim for. For example, consider child car fatalities. We might not immediately get it to zero, but that is no reason to say, "Fuck it, they can always have more kids."

I think people fundamentally disagree here. I would attribute the entire (read 100%) responsibility for the Rohingya Genocide or other similar events to the perpetrators. Facebook is just another tool, and its creators bear no more blame for the actions of their users in the real world than the manufactures of the vehicles driven by the Burmese military.

Responsibility is not zero sum. The people who pulled the triggers? Responsible. The people who gave those people the orders? Responsible. People who told them where to find the people they killed? Responsible. Arms dealers who sold them the guns? If they had any inkling that this was a possible outcome, then they share in the responsibility. The people behind the legacy media efforts that whipped people into a frenzy? Responsible. And so on.

Facebook is not like a screwdriver, a simple, neutral tool that is occasionally used to harm. Facebook is an incredibly complex tool for connecting humans, a tool with all sorts of biases that shape the nature and velocity of social interaction.

People have known for decades that online communication systems enable harm. This was a well-understood fact long before Facebook existed. Facebook is morally responsible for that harm (as are the perps, etc, etc). Something they understand perfectly well because they do a lot to mitigate that harm while crowing about how socially responsible they are being.

You might disagree with most ethicists on this, as well as with Facebook itself. But you'll have an uphill struggle. Even the example you pick, vehicles, doesn't work, because car manufacturers have spent decades working to mitigate opportunities for the tools they create to cause harm. Now that cars are getting smarter, that harm reduction will include preventing drivers from running the cars into people.

Responsibility is zero sum, or any conversations about it are meaningless. This is quite handily illustrated by your comment actually - where does it end? How much of an "inkling" must people have to carry responsibility? It doesn't sound like a question of fact exactly.

The only way to objectively agree about responsibility is to use an actor/agent model, where actors are entirely responsible for their actions, and only actions which directly harm others are considered. Otherwise we're discussing which butterflies are responsible for which hurricanes. I'm happy to be wrong here, but I just don't see an alternative framework that can realistically, objectively, draw actionable boundaries around responsibility for action. This by the way is the model that is used in common law.

Facebook being a complex tool strengthens my point. Should providers of complex tools be responsible for every possible use of them? Is it not possible to provide a complex tool "as is" without warranty? Wouldn't constraining tool makers in this way be fundamentally harmful?

> online communication systems enable harm... Facebook is morally responsible for that harm

Everything can be seen to "enable harm". Facebook being morally responsible is not a statement of fact, it's an opinion. Facebook's actions to mitigate are a) to evade/delay regulatory action, b) to maintain their public image or c) by a small group of activist employees. Only a) and b) align with their fiduciary duty to shareholders.

> Responsibility is zero sum, or any conversations about it are meaningless.

That's incorrect. I'd suggest you start with Dekker's "Field Guide to 'Human Error", which looks at airplane safety. Airplanes are only as safe as they are because many different people and groups see themselves as responsible. Your supposedly "objective" model, if followed, would drastically increase deaths.

"The National Transportation Safety Board is an independent federal agency charged by Congress with investigating every civil aviation accident in the United States and significant accidents in other modes of transportation — highway, marine, pipeline , and railroad."

The reason airplanes are safe is because the government is doing its job to regulate the space.

That might be a reason, but it is not the reason.

Prior to the establishment of NTSB in the Air Commerce Act of 1926, aviation accidents were common [1]. Congress determined that it was necessary to establish an investigation and regulation framework immediately at the beginning of the era of commercial aviation and this has been enormously successful. Many times Congress does not act fast enough to prevent harms (meat packing, banking, pharmaceuticals), but when they do get around to doing their job safety improves. Individual companies must be compelled to act subordinate to federal or state regulatory frameworks, and to not act as vigilantes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

Oh, so post hoc ergo propter hoc?

I'm not saying the NTSB isn't important. But it's far from the only reason that we have fewer crashes. Government regulation can be helpful in improving standards, but they set a minimum bar. Aviation's high levels of current safety are a collaboration between many, many people. Starting with individual pilots, engineers, and maintenance techs, going up through collaborative relationships, through companies and civil society organizations, and up through national and international regulatory agencies. All of these people are taking responsibility for safety.

From your comments in this thread, I think that you believe that safety is a collective effort and that there is no single individual or entity directly responsible for enforcing a culture of accountability, is that right?

If so, how do you explain the catastrophic failures in construction, food safety, and banking prior to the top-down government oversight of those industries?

That is not in fact how I'd sum up my thoughts. "Enforcing a culture of accountability" is valuable, but neither necessary nor sufficient for safety depending on context. Food safety's an obvious example there. People still get sick from food. And plenty of restaurants and manufacturers would never cause illness if government oversight were to vanish.

Every aviation accident post mortem I've read assigns finds a finite list of causes and contributing factors. Each system/person has strong ownership that is responsible for making the recommended changes. These post mortem reports also explicitly do not find civil or criminal liability - that is a zero-sum process.

Liability is indeed strict zero sum. But you're confusing that with moral responsibility, which isn't.

They serve two different purposes. The former comes out of a zero-sum, adversarial setting where the goal is to figure out who pays for a past harm. The latter comes from a positive-sum collaborative setting where everybody is trying to improve future outcomes.

If I release a new product tomorrow, I'm responsible for what happens. As are the people who use it. But if somebody dies, then liability may be allocated only to one of us or to both in some proportion.

Again, read Dekker.

"Responsibility" is semantically a bit nebulous, but seems to me much more related to "liability" than "continuous improvement". The question "Who is responsible?" reads a lot more like "Who is liable?" than "How did this bad thing happen?". If you release a new product, you may be accountable to your org for how it performs, but (IMO) you're not morally responsible for the actions of others using it. If your new product is a choking hazard you're not guilty of manslaughter.

"morally responsible" ~= "guilty"

> If your new product is a choking hazard you're not guilty of manslaughter.

But you are still imho (morally) responsible for the deaths occurring out of the use of your product (this is where we would probably disagree). Even if you were not legally guilty.

I like another example that to me clarified the distinction between these concepts better.

Imagine one morning, you open your front door and find a baby having been placed there somewhen during the night. The child is still alive. You are not guilty in any way for the baby's fate, but now that you have seen it you are responsible for ensuring that it gets help. You would be guilty if you would allow it to freeze to death or similar.

> You would be guilty if you would allow it to freeze to death or similar.

This significantly varies by jurisdiction, and isn't settled at all. I don't think being present makes you responsible either. Unappealing as it may seem, you should indeed be able to pull up a chair, have some popcorn, and watch the baby freeze. People should only bear obligations they explicitly consented to. I don't think anyone has the moral authority to impose such an involuntary obligation on anyone else.

Modelling society as a constrained adversarial relationship between fundamentally opposed and competing groups is more accurate than assuming there is "one team" that knows a fundamental "good" or "right" and that the rest of us just need to "see it". People who perform honour killing or preside over slavery are just as sure of their moral superiority as you are. What we need is a world where we can coexist peacefully, not one where we are all united under one religion of moral correctness.

All communication systems enable harm, and more generally all systems that allow people to interact enable harm. In the US, the true responsibility for regulating harms lies with the duly elected government exercising its regulatory powers on behalf of the people. It does not lay with the unelected unaccountable members of Responsible Innovation Teams and Online Safety Teams. This form of tyranny persists because the majority of our representatives established their power bases before the advent of the Internet. Hopefully, in the next decade or two, we will be able to effectively subjugate and regulate the King Georges of the large social platforms.

There are laws put the onus on banks to proactively determine that their services aren't used to fund terrorism and multiple funky/opaque processes in banking specifically for that purpose. It kind of makes sense to me to have social media companies upheld to a similar standard that they are not used to organize terrorism or other war crimes.

I'm not sure I agree with these laws. They are very difficult to actually enforce to an objective standard. They also transfer the burden of law enforcement away from police departments and on to private organizations. What it translates to in practice is a bunch of (mostly irrelevant) mandatory training for employees, and an approval from an auditor who isn't very familiar with the business. I think police (and no one else) should do policing.

> What it translates to in practice is a bunch of (mostly irrelevant) mandatory training for employees, and an approval from an auditor who isn't very familiar with the business.

In the context of ensuring a bank doesn't transfer money to terrorists, this is completely wrong. Banks have a whole list of operations and processes, and failing this is enforced by actual jail time. This is why "know your customer" exists in banking. In the context of terrorism, there is no police enforcement regarding terrorists; often, we are talking military enforcement.

Yes, but my point is that "transferring money to someone" is not a true crime. It doesn't have a victim. And yes, our governments should use military/diplomatic channels to fight terrorism directly - that's what they're for.

> Yes, but my point is that "transferring money to someone" is not a true crime. It doesn't have a victim.

This is also incorrect. Transferring money to a terrorist organization is a crime because countries have declared it illegal. Of course well-funded terrorists have victims and enablement of well-funded terrorism has clear victims.

And yes, the government is using military and diplomatic channels to fight terrorism directly-- by ensuring the resources they have access to are limited.

You realize that other groups already do policing? IRS, EPA, OSHA, USPS, hell the secret service will get involved if you are forging currency.

There are two possible things you could mean by that.

One is that you think a lot of things just shouldn't be enforced, and that we should allow a lot more harm than we do now. Genocide?

The other is that you think we should have a lot more police to take over the harm-reducing regulatory actions now in place. That we should take the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of social media moderators now working, but make them government employees and give them guns.

I can't decide which is more cartoonishly evil.

I don't see why people working in an office need guns, but yes, enforcement of laws should be done by... law enforcement. This isn't too controversial really, if I make a credible threat to someone online, it's a criminal matter for the police. Just as if I had sent it in the mail. The same should be true for all other types of crime (fraud, money laundering, etc.). Police should (and do) conduct investigations and arrest offenders.

Social media moderators exist to protect the public image of the platform, and enforce community guidelines. They should not be burdened with law enforcement simply because we can't be arsed to do proper police work.

Facebook could have chosen to be a completely neutral platform. They could have followed the ISP model, making Facebook another platform like email, RSS, or http. They just had to not make editorial decisions - leave the feed sorted by recency, and only remove illegal material. This is what safe harbor provisions assumed a company would do, allowing platforms who simply pass information between parties to avoid liability for that information.

But they wanted to be valued higher, so they explicitly chose to instead step into the editor's role and became responsible for the content on the platform.

Here’s a good example where engineers needed a team like this:

- should we name this device we want to put in every house after one of the most common American female names?!

engineers and ceo: I see no issue with that!

Several millions people named Alexa now have everyone from toddlers to their friends yelling their name ordering them to do stupid tasks and “Alex stop” repeatedly.

The name cratered in popularity for good reason.

Yet Amazon still has not renamed their dumb speaker

I think you're misplacing blame for this, I don't think the engineers are the root cause of this problem. Why don't these devices let people set their own custom codephrases? I suspect that wouldn't fly with management/marketing etc, who want to create a marketable brand out of the codeword. In fact I'm virtually certain that engineers at amazon weren't the ones who chose the name "Alexa" in the first place, that decision probably went through a dozen squared meetings and committees of marketers and PR people.

They have since 2021, expanding the set to "Alexa", "Amazon", "Computer", and "Echo". [0]

Nonetheless, defaults are incredibly powerful. [1]

[0] https://www.rd.com/list/how-to-change-alexas-name/ [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-power-of-defaults/

Alexa was only the 32nd most popular name in the US for girls. A little over 6k babies were named Alexa in the US prior to the speaker's launch.

The "Alexa stop" thing, is it a real or invented harm?

My name happens to match the lead character of Karate Kid and I constantly asked to do the crane pose when I was 7. Doesn't seem to have traumatized me.

> Alexa was only the 32nd most popular name in the US for girls.

32nd most popular is not exactly obscure. Why did they have to give the computer a human name in the first place? Probably because it helps people form some sort of parasocial relationship to the product, which is gross, but probably good for business.

I used to work there, after the launch (and therefore, of the name). One of the reasons given was that Alexa was a distinctly suitable word for proper recognition by the ASR model embedded on the device software.

Also probably because it was good for business.

The popularity of the name cratered after launch. That doesn’t signify anything to you?

That anecdote is nice but honestly it sounds like you survived a less frequent and more temporary somewhat similar but much milder version so now you’re stating everyone else needs to get over themselves?

What does it signify? Annoyance? Yes. Harm, such that it required a committee of enlighted priests to have blocked it? Where is the evidence for it?

For illustrative purposes: Dan stop! Dan stop! Dan set timer for 50 minutes. Timer set for 15 minutes. Dan stop! Dan cancel timer! Dan set timer for Fiifttyy minutes” Dan turn off kitchen light” Dan set thermostat to 68. Dan play Music.

Your name is now Kleenexified to mean robotic female servant, no harm!

It doesn’t seem like you googled or looked into how people named Alexa actually feel before pronouncing how they should feel.

This comment chain really shows why these responsibility vetting teams are needed, a lot of corporate workers are not empathetic or considerate beyond their immediate siloed task and assume everyone should react exactly the same as they did to only very tangentially similar experiences.

I'm pretty sure that a Product Manager made the final call on the name of the device. Some DS nerds might have given a list of names that could be used and presented some stats on the accuracy of the device recognizing the name, but the PM probably made the final call.

Already a pretty bad list. It should at least be "how can we do thing we want to do in a responsible way."

You can guarantee no harm by doing nothing but that's not a good enough answer.

If I consult with you on how to kill my wife in a responsible way, I hope you'll tell me that there's no way for me to kill my wife in a responsible way.

My experience is that most people in engineering organizations are not sociopaths, but some are.

The problem is trying to get people that think everything you listed is obvious and boring to spend 40 hours a week staying out of the way 99% of the time, but also being politically savvy enough to get a few CxO’s fired each year.

Also, since the office is normally doing nothing (unless the office has already completely failed), the people in it need to do all of that, and continuously justify their department’s existence when their quarterly status updates range from “did nothing” to “cut revenue by 5% but potentially avoided congressional hearings 5 years from now” to the career-killing “tattled to the board and tried to get the CEO fired”.

If you know how to hire zero-drama, product- and profit-focused people that can effectively do that sort of thing, consider a job as an executive recruiter.

inventing harms to prevent like arsonist firefighters.

And here I thought it was a given that everyone understood the harm of social media, for example, to children and teenagers.

But they actually care about

> [getting] the Facebook dating team’s ... to avoid including a filter that would let users target or exclude potential love interests of a particular race

you see, you have to just ignore those people in the feed, you can't filter them, its better and not racist that way. and who knows, you might become not racist if you see a pretty girl/boy you like, but actually that's probably just racist fetishizing

responsible innovation is doing the same dei doublespeak

That's exactly why I'm skeptical of whether a team like this could have been addressing real harms. If I heard about a nutrition team at Frito-Lay, I would assume they're working on nonsense until proven otherwise, because how could you meaningfully improve nutrition under the constraint that your company needs to sell lots of potato chips?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#:~:text=....

We have verifiable evidence of Facebook as a platform being used to instigate genocide[0] among other issues. Dismissing a concern that a platform could be used for harm against children as fallacious reasoning is a fallacy fallacy if you have no additional points to add to the discussion as to why you feel that is relevant.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934

I'm no fan of Facebook but I have a hard time understanding why Facebook is singled out for this. If what FB did is illegal, then they can be charged for their crimes.

However if we're critizing from purely a moral standpoint, how is this any different than claiming that cell phone carriers should be preventing this type of thing over phone calls or texts?

For the record, I don't find that to be a convincing argument either but it's the inconsistency of perspective that irks me.

That’s fair but again the post in question was essentially responding with “fallacy” and no further comment or context.

The Rwandan genocide was spawned by radio propaganda from RTLM. Classifying social media as especially harmful to children when damage can be made from any sort of mass media is disingenuous.

'blockers' like "have moderation staff speak the language of the country you operate in"? feature velocity is not an inherent good

'Move fast and incite genocide' https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...

Yep, Facebook incited genocide - not the actual people who made the posts - Facebook. Lay the blame at the feet of the perpetrators, not the makers of the tools they used. This is like blaming Mercedes for the holocaust because they made Hitler's car(s).

I'm really confused by this because there are most certainly cases where companies are responsible not to provide goods or services to war criminals or terrorists, by law. So it's already established that yes, you can blame the makers of the tools that perpetrators used.

I wouldn't conflate the offloading of policing functions on to private corporations with the assignment of moral responsibility.

Mercedes didn't have an easy way to detect and shut off violence they just decided not to use. I understand the point you're trying to make, but following that logic, should there be no moderation anywhere, for anything then, if it's ultimately only the poster's fault if they post something illegal like "let's all go to bob's house at 123 lane and kill him?"

As it works out, I would say it’s more in the vein of blaming IBM for their culpability in the Holocaust, not Mercedes, although clearly Meta’s role was nowhere near as awful as IBM’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Can I ask why? The Nazis could no more perpetrate the holocaust without cars than they could without computers.

I think the difference here is like between a German soldier who was ordered to do various things ultimately playing part in perpetration of Holocaust and/or other Hitler regime's crimes without possibly knowing/seeing/understanding the whole picture - after all millions of Germans did actively participated in Hitler regime - and say a USA person who would intentionally go there to join the SS to participate in it.

They are bullshit jobs for the overproduced elite who demand high status. Now they are going to find out these are only viable in the bull market.

Are you saying that the "builders" at facebook are salt-of-the earth plebeians? That has not been my experience.

>overproduced elite How many elite should there be?

Roughly speaking, the amount that can be absorbed into the power structure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

> How many elite should there be?

The number we have today minus those unemployed minus those on responsible innovation teams. (Using the broad definition of elites, which captures pretty much everyone who went to college.)

Enough to staff all Starbucks outlets in the country. /s

If the goal is to stay in business long term, thoughtless 'building' isn't worth much.

Steve Jobs: "focus is about saying no"

Mark Zuckerberg: "move fast and breaks things"

Facebook is the world's least-trusted, most-reviled brand. They earned it by building garbage.

> They earned it by building garbage.

No one (aside from engineers) cares about what facebook built. Facebook had scandal after scandal and on top of it, everyone's grandparents signed up so teenagers couldn't post all of the screwed up stuff they were doing anymore. Posting there turned into a mix of corporate scrutiny (especially prospective employers) mixed with the old forwards from grandma emails you used to get in the late 90s/early 2000s.

That's why facebook is dying.

I see most of FB's "scandals" (eg: dark patterns, illegal ad-buying filters, API over-sharing with third parties) and flaws (re: "teenagers couldn't post" without pinging grandpa) as the result of garbage product design.

At a glance, our comments appear to differ substantively. At closer inspection, the only disagreement we have is what to include in the 'building garbage' bucket.

In case I misused language, I can rephrase my original point: FB is in a bad place today not because FB was ever slow to build, but because what FB did build was too often bad for users (for that matter: bad for humanity).

I'm going to have to disagree.

They built an amazing product... for a world that had only teenagers on social media. This was the truth for quite a while, and was true of the world they created their product in. They just never really updated their product to account for the new reality. Sure, they changed the algorithm a ton and re-tweaked the UI, but the algorithm and the UI weren't the product. The experience people had on the site was the product.

They're sort of like IBM's mainframe division. Mainframes are kind of cool if you ever get to tinker around with their hardware, and they're impressive engineering marvels (so are facebooks systems). But the world has changed since IBM was on top, and they don't fit what most people need anymore.

Misleading privacy controls, privacy-negligent API, FB Beacon... these FB features date back quite a few years, and were terrible for users. That is the sense in which I say it's bad design.

If I make a pizza with tasty, fresh ingredients - but then top it off with rotten fish guts and mouse turds – it's a garbage pizza.

None of those are the product. Once again, the product is the experience using the website. Those are implementation details that only weird nerds like you and I are concerned about 99% of the time. The privacy loss that most end users (or former end users) are worried about is their parents/spouse/employers being on facebook. These are not things facebook built, but consequences of the social graph changing.

And those "features" are all fine in a world where the internet is mostly young twenty-somethings with no power, as the internet was in the early-mid 2000s. Also for a product where you can just put in a fake name, as we could back in the day.

So apparently we do disagree substantively:

  those "features" are all fine in a world where the 
  internet is mostly young twenty-somethings with no power

No matter a FB user's age, it is a problem to implement a dark pattern that leaks private information. There are countless illustrations of that, but one obvious one is how it resulted in many early FB users falling victim to financial fraud (eg: http://givemebackmycredit.com/blog/2011/04/facebook-and-iden...). As for Beacon, it was clearly poisonous from the start (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon).

I closed my FB account in 2011 specifically because the design of the site abused its users in countless outrageous ways (come to think of it: "Are you sure you want to close your account? [These friends] will miss you").

I really don't see us coming to any agreement. It's been fifteen years and, while FB has pumped out plenty of LoC, FB has never shown an iota of respect for its users. No surprise then that the brand is dirt, and Zuckerberg has to spin fairytales about how its 'metaverse' will stem the decline. Their ability to execute is not the problem; the demographics of their user base is not the problem; the product itself is the problem.

Sometimes putting blockers in front of people is absolutely what's needed. It's a common tactic for compliance and security - both of which can completely tank your company if not handled correctly. I suspect it's especially true if there are people with the skills to build who claim they are the only ones that are "actually trying to build things." Likely they don't have the right level of understanding of what needs to be built.

The idea is that those blockers or objections are valid. Something is going wrong if they continually raise issues which do not meet the organisations goals.

That said, it does sound like a strange function to allocate to a specific team.

I don't know what this team is or did. However, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park, if everyone is preoccupied with building things, who will be the one that stops and thinks whether they should?

IME, they don't have the authority to invent/implement blockers. Instead, they attend/hold conferences, give talks, and write documents that nobody acts on. In theory, it's a good way for a company to advertise/lobby to the think-tank set. Clearly that hasn't played out for FB, hence disbanding the team.

Exactly. This is the right explanation.

Well put. Intentions can start off genuine, where the non builder truly believes the processes and barriers they set up improve building (and early on it's usually true), but it easily morphs into a tool for maintaining power and influence regardless of the value add.

Sometimes that's what you need.

EDIT: I don't know about these specific people or whether the blockers they put in place are justified. However, I've definitely worked with developers who obviously prefer to just write code until something works with little regard to the reliability, efficiency, security, or maintainability of their output. I spent almost all of my time cleaning up messes rather than getting to build anything new myself. It's a terrible experience.

> regard to the reliability, efficiency, security, or maintainability

Yeah, that's not what this team was responsible for, though. That's what an enterprise architecture team ought to be responsible for, but rarely are.

Good god, as if "builder" was the only type of person that has value.

Most "builders" are, if not constrained, like cancer cells. Unlimited consumption & growth without a counterbalance. In order to justify their own existence, they need to continue to churn out things without concern of what they consume, what use their product has.

Maybe, just maybe, there's value in having different kinds of personalities - unchecked by itself, pretty much every tendency is ruinous.

People who produce things are cancer. Got it.

Also, false dichotomy there saying a "responsible innovation" team is needed to limit the building of products with no use; that's a solved problem. We have markets for that.

Thomas Midgley Jr. was an impressively prolific builder. Navigators are just as important as drivers. You need both, not either in exclusion.

The people who choose to build things (it's not a binary quality, everyone can build, some are better) are not taking moral responsibility for the things they are building.

It is hurting society. What is to be done? That is the issue at the heart of this headline.

What?? The internet is extremely toxic. If you don't have supervision while building your app, it will attract the most horrifying people like this one time someone almost convinced me that the age of consent should be abolished but I just realized they were abusing my naivety and gaslighting me. We need platforms developed lawfully and keep making sure users are liable to prevent that.

This is always a vicious cycle that starts with good intent but spirals into an oppressive regime.

1) It's starts after the product launch post-mortem 2) Team creates a process to improve avoiding future mistakes 3) Process innocently includes ability to hard block any product changes without someone or some group's approval 4) Politics emerges behind the scenes from those with social capital to get around the hard blocks 5) New process to make things "more fair" by adding more hard blocking rules, usually resulting in lots of pointless meetings and paperwork to justify new process and show upper management that things are working as intended 6) More politics as teams start hiring for people who are able to get around the heavy process by being "good at the game" 7) New team is formed around the process because it's now a full time job 8) People good at politics join this new team and everyone else is pulled into pointless meetings and handed paperwork 9) Rinse and repeat

The problem I've always observed is that these systems are put in place with the best intent to offer guidance so that company, employees and consumers can all benefit by building the right best thing. However, the systems are given blocking abilities that after time do more damage than good.

You'd think, if something were not blocking no one would listen, and maybe you're right. I definitely have no idea how teams can avoid this spiral trap, however, I don't think it's a bad thing to sunset process like this after a while. Just like Google is willing to throw away products on a whim, we should be willing to throw away process teams on a whim.

100% this.

It's very much in the spirit of "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". There's no better way for someone to justify their existence than creating problems but appearing to solve problems for other people. Compliance, security, etc. These things are usually necessary but it does attract a certain kind of person who seems predisposed to empire building through obstacle creation.

You see the same thing with people who become moderators. I saw this years ago on Stack Overflow. You see it on Wikipedia. You see it on reddit. You have to be constantly vigilant that these people don't get out of hand. These people end up treating the process as the goal rather than the means to an end.

I remember when the moderators starting closing SO topics as "not constructive". There were a ton of questions like "should I do X or Y?" and the mods decided one day to start closing these became there was no definitive answer. You can list the advantages and disadvantages of each option and list the factors to consider. That can be incredibly value. Can this descend into a flamewar? Absolutely. But just kill the flamewars and the people who start them. No point throwing out the baby with the bath water.

> I remember when the moderators starting closing SO topics as "not constructive".

I don't think that was a decision made by the mods, I think that's policy created by SO. I really like that it's so focused, clearly defines what is on and off topic, and strictly enforces that policy. You're right, such discussion can be very valuable, but if these policies didn't exist or weren't enforced, I don't think the site would be nearly as useful. Doesn't mean that the people with closed questions are bad, or the conversation can't be had in chat or a different site.

> Can this descend into a flamewar? Absolutely. But just kill the flamewars and the people who start them.

Meanwhile the strong contributors get tired of dealing with (even more) toxicity and move on, the signal:noise ratio drops, and it turns into just another (ostensibly) programming-focused forum. Not to mention that the more time mods spend dealing with toxic behavior, the less time they have for work that improves the content of the site.

> I don't think that was a decision made by the mods, I think that's policy created by SO.

There was little to no direction from the top, at least at that time. Mods were just self-appointed community members who organized in such a way to impose their will on the community. It was pretty classic tyranny of the minority. Many of the more prolific contributors (of which I was one at the time) were deeply frustrated by this. It was a frequent topic on Meta SO.

You saw these waves of subtle policy changes if you tracked edits to your contributions. Suddenly there'd be a bunch of edits all based on some new formatting policy and a lot of it was just pointless busywork.

Some people just fall into this trap of elevating the process to where the process becomes a goal and is treated of equal (or even higher) value to the content it's applied to. Moderation is important and has a place but, left to their own devices, moderators will create work for themselves just based on their idle capacity. You need to avoid this.

> get tired of dealing with (even more) toxicity

And then "toxicity" just gets redefined to an always leftward-moving definition of anything "right-wing". Every time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... comes to mind as another good example of this dynamic.

For another, the ever expanding administrative overhead of colleges is a large contributor to driving tuition increases. See https://stanfordreview.org/read-my-lips-no-new-administrator... for an idea of how bad the problem is getting.

I didn’t expect to see such a concise and spot-on statement in these comments. Thank you.

Maybe if the builders stopped building shitty things, we wouldn’t need teams like this.

The elephant in the room just broke thru the door....

Gotta love mocking people who were just fired.

Pretty much any time a major tech company announces layoffs the peanut gallery shows up talking about how everyone getting cut is lazy/dead weight.

In reality it's far more likely they had the misfortune of being assigned to teams that weren't core to the business' operation or driving revenue or some Exec/VP lost a political battle and their department got the axe.

It’s a classic post hoc rationalization that happens when folks are fully committed to loving business and bosses over actual people’s well-being. It’s gross.

For sure.

To be fair, organizations select for people who love the business and its leaders over people who are willing to point out when the emperor has no clothes. Sort of the same way that in subcultures where abuse is common, the people who remain are selected for those who will support abusers and blame the abused.

So I get how it happens, and why people like to victim-blame as a way of making themselves feel better about their choices. But it's still thoroughly gross.

We are very hypocritical that way. You can get upvotes for being glad you were laid off, you can get upvotes for saying the people who got laid off were bad people anyway.

So when is the appropriate time to mock them? When they are employed making high six figures to invent harms and then ways to reduce them?

Why are you insisting they're inventing harms? Do you have evidence to support this? Are you just opposed to the idea of ethics?

I have a creepy feeling that this entire thread has been infested by Facebook insiders who are working on something that is awful, and lobbied and heckled to get the people fired who were telling them it was awful. No one else would have this sort of venom.

How about we just don't mock people?

Mockery is a very powerful tool to speak truth to power.

It's kind of nice to watch people who call you names for a large amount of money get fired, yes.

I'm not a fan in general, but in this context understanding the team's mindset seems relevant to understanding what the practical effects of this cut will be. Should we expect Facebook to innovate less responsibly in general, or was this team working towards alignment with specific cultural attitudes? For example, the article describes how the team stopped Facebook Dating from adding a race filter and saw that as one of their proud accomplishments - this seems like more of a values judgment than a question of responsibility, since it's not a question that's anywhere near settled in broader society.

Attacks on character should have justification in the comment, not merely a reference to a Twitter existence.

> these people are also nutcases.

In what way?

"Zvika Krieger is a subversive ritualist and radical traditionalist who is passionate about harnessing ancient wisdom to create modern meaning, fostering mindfulness and authentic connection amidst digital distraction, and bridging the sacred and profane. Zvika is the Spiritual Leader of Chochmat HaLev, a progressive spiritual community in Berkeley, CA for embodied prayer, heart-centered connections, and mystical experiences. "

One of them is an apparent cult leader, for example.

> subversive ritualist and radical traditionalist

This sounds like the person I’d put in charge of a department designed to run in circles.

If they were a deacon in their church, you wouldn't blink at it.

Many people in this industry would blink at that. I recall a whole lot of people on HN blinking at the christian beliefs (among other things) of the guy at Google who said the text generator was alive.

His resume has some impressive accomplishments, but has enough BS that it makes me suspicious of what teaching courses on ethical design actually entails.

It's weird that you assume "builder" means "programmer." At a healthy software company, most roles are builder roles:

- designer

- product manager

- marketer

- sales

- customer success

Each of these roles delivers something additive. They make the product easier or nicer to use, make it address the market better, or even just make people aware that it exists. Marketers build complex promotional structures to gain users. Salespeople put together actual accounts paying actual money so the product can continue to improve. Customer success helps people use the product, and a good CS team filters high-signal feedback back to the product & engineering orgs.

People in all of these roles (and more) are building the product. If their roles were cut, the product would be worse: uglier, slower, less useful, less used, less purchased, and less successful.

However, there are roles that attract folks who don't want to build. It's smart to get rid of them.

You can try to sell me on it emotionally but it isn’t going to happen.

Economic trade is just something humans do. Babbling about it in rambling fluffy semantics is not what gives rise to economic activity.

A lot of these builders should build themselves into fuller better rounded people than office workers who memorized an emotional caricature they use to extract attention from others. HR, marketing, etc exist to insulate financiers, give off an air of building big ideas, but it’s layers of indirection so the financier can avoid real work.

The majority don’t have to import your relative emotional context anymore than they have to import a preachers religion.

That’s what’s going down with the economy; the majority are tired of the over hyped coddled office worker. This is just the start of the barnacle shedding. Source? Data models forecasting economic “plot lines” I collate with others to inform investment choices, not a bunch of high emotion semantic gibberish intended to sell me on a relative perspective.

SEs and otherwise, too many are addicted to an emotional confidence game that is sapping agency in other contexts. This is low hanging fruit being shed, but ML will come for content creators and SEs sooner than most expect; it’s all electron state in machines. Generating data/code as a job will be automated; that is a stated goal of many powers that be in tech.

I’m not the only one who sees it; in a 2 year old interview Gabe Newell was calling ML content creation an extinction level event that’s right around the corner.

More and more “builders” of hype and ephemera are going to be receiving the wake up call as the months and years progress. Building layers of indirection as a career is not long for this world.

But more simply; “software builders” is not language I see as constrained to SE. Like you said it takes a village to build a software business. I think you inferred a bit much.

Nothing in the comment you’re replying to mentioned software engineers. They claim people building things are unlikely to spend time in “responsible innovation” teams. That’s true if one’s building rockets, medicines or cat GIF sorters.

> But building the software is not hard.

This reminds me of 400lb men who can't walk up the stairs without getting winded yelling "are you kidding me???" at the TV when they see NFL quarterbacks throw a bad pass.