Very strange worldview you have there, where engineers are somehow the conscience of the world, holding back greedy managers from breaking the law. Assessing whether a feature is legal isn't something an engineer can or should do.

You're arguing for diffusion of responsibility, and we've seen it leading to outcomes that screw the whole society.

Engineers, as everyone involved, should definitely assess whether what they're doing is legal or even ethical. Not everyone has a choice, or the luxury to stand for their principles, but that's a matter of means, there needs to be a will in the first place.

Absolutely. I'm not sure where this idea comes from, that engineers should be compliant, neutral "implementers" who should just turn off their conscience and implement whatever pops up on their JIRA list without any kind of assessment or objections on ethical or legal grounds. That's not what people in a serious profession do. It's also so weird to hear this idea from engineers themselves! Like, are you really advocating to remove your own agency over your work??

The role of legal oversight is elsewhere. Engineers are not equipped with the knowledge.

Obvious ethical issues are are different, like crimes against humanity level. Other than that, it's none of their business. There are institutions for that.

OK, maybe I'll concede the point on legal oversight. But I'd at least expect an engineer to be familiar enough with where the law intersects their work to push back on things obviously illegal.

Ethical issues are more likely to be encountered. And they don't even have to be "crimes against humanity" level. I'd expect a professional engineer to strongly push back on and/or refuse things like "write code to cheat a benchmark and make our product look better than it is" and "implement a dark pattern to trick the user into giving us personal information" and "increase our signup funnel by harvesting our users' address books and spamming our app to their contacts."

In case of conflict of conscience/taste of that sort, resignation is the proper action and finding a job that better aligns with one's values. If you suspect legal violations, you can also file a police report.

> resignation is the proper action

Why not act according to your conscience and get fired if your employer really feels like it ?

Otherwise, in many circumstances a simple "is this legal?" question in a chat or chain of emails that I'll be there in case of discovery will have tremendous effects on whether some dubious thing is done willy nilly.

Would you say the same about any other engineering discipline? Those with actual qualification standards?

Hmm, engineers are expected to know what is legal and not.

That's called lawyer. It's a special skill, not just intuition.

Ignorance is not a defense against getting arrested. Everyone with a drivers license is expected to know all traffic laws, even brand new ones. You’re expected to know all forms of theft and violence. And then you and I are absolutely expected to understand the basics of copyright and IP laws.

Lawyering is about being able to argue case law and keeping confidences. That’s how you lose your license, is doing those two things poorly.

For ensuring legal compliance, there is a compliance department. Yes you obviously can't drive violating the traffic rules even if your boss asks you to. But regulations that apply to corporations, compliance etc are specialized laws, you don't have to know those. And it is the corporation that is acting. The individual employee who typed the Java API cloning thing in Orace v Google wasn't on the hook at any point.

Those laws generally aren't high crimes. You know when you're committing crimes against humanity.

Some people pretend they don't. And pretend they don't feel the judgement of those around them.

There is asshole and user-hostile design that doesn't quite rise to Nuremberg levels where "I was following orders" obviously didn't and doesn't work. But below a certain level it does work.

Nope, you need to learn what an engineer is, not somebody who calls themself an engineer.

That's not the grunts either way. At a construction site, the guy digging the hole with the excavator doesn't have to know whether all the permit paperwork is in order or not.

The guy implementing some feature doesn't have to know whether gdpr compliance will be satisfied with it or not, that's for the manager to know who orders it to go into production.

Engineers (typically) don't dig holes themselves, engineers decide where the holes are to be dug, based on laws.

Software engineer is a fancy title but it often covers code monkeys who are more akin to the shovel guys. The guy who added the Booking.com fake flashing warnings that this room is being viewed by N people right now and other stuff (which the company got fined for) is not like some Engineer(TM) but just some web dev grunt. They can't be the one who shoulders the responsibility and indeed aren't.

Yeah you can call a degree whatever you want. You could also call the excavator operator an excavator engineer. It doesn't change their power lever inside the org.

> It doesn't change their power lever inside the org. help

I'm confused how you ended up there. My original assertion was the engineers should know the law.

Most engineers are required to explicitly take responsibility for the things they sign off, up to and including prison for sufficiently bad cases. Software “engineering” is the exception.

Yes, because it's not real engineering. The field is too variable and fast paced to be like civil engineering etc. Those have well defined codes because it is physics constrained. Each construction must be done separately at high cost. Software doesn't work like this. So there is much more flexibility and change and there's no stable best practice to regulate.

Information theory is its own sort of physics but that’s not the part that needs to be regulated. Psychologists are also licensed. That we still aren’t is a mystery to me at this point. Our stuff is now critical infrastructure. Not everyone works on that sort of things but enough of us do that at least part of the trade should be licensed.