Other Software > Developer's Corner
Ethics in Technology
wraith808:
New elements to the VW story shed interesting light (ideas.4brad.com
Makes some interesting points:
more on the initial topic i.e. the POV of the employee: the pressure from the top to succeed (or be fired) -- what do you do in this situation, what does a group (e.g. of engineers) do in this situation?
Which initially seems to be blaming the engineers as the source of the idea, but says this could have been at any level.
-tomos (October 13, 2015, 08:09 AM)
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Thanks for that Tomos... it does point to some of the things that I'd originally wanted to ask- but we've spiraled into talking about VW as a company, rather than the individuals, i.e.
The ingredients, in this model are:
* A hard driving culture of expected high performance, and doing what others thought was difficult or impossible.
* Promising the company you will deliver a hotly needed product in that culture.
* Realizing too late that you can’t deliver it.
* Panic, leading to cheating as the only solution in which you survive (at least for a while.)
*
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I ask, because I work in that type of environment. "Pay for Performance", "Stack Ranking", whatever you call it... it sucks. They make it even worse by the fact that even though time spent =/= performance, they equate it to that. If someone is working at 4AM, then then the question should be "Why?" not "Oh, they're really dedicated". You're supposed to plan for the standard- and do the out of the ordinary when necessary because the standard planning was wrong, and didn't take something into account. You shouldn't be rewarded for that.
Same thing with this situation. If someone made a wrong assumption- you don't cheat to make it go away. But, these kinds of cultures and pressures make people do what they know is wrong. And it can be hard to stay on the side of the angels if "everyone is doing it". Some ask about whether it's Ethical, and whether that even enters into it. Are those the kinds of questions we ask to make it so that we don't have to deal with the deeper issues IMO. Maybe "Ethics" is the wrong word. But if you're coding something to get around something that you know is a law... isn't that always wrong? Or why would you be coding around it and hiding it?
Those are the questions I'd wanted to to get to. Because even in not dealing with that, I have hard decisions quite a few times- should I speak up and be known as the 'negative nelly', even though the concerns are right? And be marginalized because of it?
One of the comments points to the actual dilemma:
Eventually, even when a project isn't going off the rails, you always start tuning for the benchmarks whether they are Spec, or 3DMark, or Common Core, whatever. That's fine, necessary even.
Eventually, you almost always wind up with cases of "this makes the benchmark better" and either "doesn't do squat in real life" (benign), or "and does something really sucky in real life" (malicious) and everything in between.
Almost never will your entire management chain appear in your cube (Ha! Fooled you, no one gets cubes anymore) in capes, top hats, and twisting their mustaches and go "BwaHaHa, we are Evil(tm), pursue plan Maximum-Deception!!!". Except maybe 3DMark, no really, look into that shit; people literally looked at the name of the binary running and did lo-res/fast rendering for that binary only; amazing.
No, what will happen is your manager will stare glassy eyed at a point 3 feet behind your head and state the the #1 priority is to get the very best performance on FooMark2000, get the best performance for all customer cases foreseen and unforeseen, shave 4 weeks off the promised schedule, and follow the 27 point Corporate Responsibility Achievement Partnership we were told about at onboarding and forced to recertify every 89 days.
If you inform your management chain that some of the above items are in conflict, they will blink rapidly to indicate duress, mutter something about the 27 points of CRAP, how Black Duck will catch it if it is a problem, and then scurry away and never make eye contact with you again.
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I've had that in real life- where we're coding a new state-of-the-art system upgrade, and all of a sudden realize that it's not as performant as it should be. It wasn't related to safety or anything, but the chills that go down your spine are pretty bad. In our case, we did investigation into the solutions, said, "Hey, these are the numbers. We can make them better, and have user stories on the backlog to do so. But they will push back the release. Or we can do it after." We left it at that with the higher ups, and they chose option C- not to do anything. Then when there were complaints, we pointed to that- and said we knew areas to increase performance. The fact that we'd done it the way that we did sort of covered us- but not really, though we were able to shuffle it off and get it fixed.
What do you do when confronted with those types of situations? Especially when everyone around you wants to circumvent them?
IainB:
^^ This all reminds me of what I wrote above:
...However, from experience, I predict that, in common with a great many people, approx. 80% (Pareto Principle) of the people who might read this comment will fail to accept or understand the truth of point 11, primarily because it runs contrary to conventional wisdom, and they will be unlikely to have seen the proof of it in Deming's "Red Beads" teaching experiment. ...
_________________
-IainB (October 10, 2015, 01:33 AM)
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Told you.
tomos:
I've had that in real life- where we're coding a new state-of-the-art system upgrade, and all of a sudden realize that it's not as performant as it should be. It wasn't related to safety or anything, but the chills that go down your spine are pretty bad. In our case, we did investigation into the solutions, said, "Hey, these are the numbers. We can make them better, and have user stories on the backlog to do so. But they will push back the release. Or we can do it after." We left it at that with the higher ups, and they chose option C- not to do anything. Then when there were complaints, we pointed to that- and said we knew areas to increase performance. The fact that we'd done it the way that we did sort of covered us- but not really, though we were able to shuffle it off and get it fixed.
What do you do when confronted with those types of situations? Especially when everyone around you wants to circumvent them?
-wraith808 (October 13, 2015, 03:34 PM)
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all I can do is sympathise, because I have no idea how I would react until confronted directly with such a situation.
Corporate systems seem to be largely dysfunctional. It would be lovely to work in an environment like Iain suggests, i.e. where leadership *leads*, rather than crushes.
In general, I would say to stay true to [what you think is right / gut feeling / yourself / **]. One has to do that, at least to a certain extent, but each situation is going to be different. Negative thinking / expectations in such a situation would weaken your position / conviction / expression. (No, I'm not saying to think naively, nor even to 'think positively' -- rather to be open to possibilities -- also where you would normally least expect them.)
Now,
if only I were better at following that life-advice myself :-)
** all of the above would be my approach, but that's another one that each person has to figure out for themselves.
MilesAhead:
Now, if only I were better at following that life-advice myself :-)
-tomos (October 14, 2015, 07:09 AM)
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Now now. Please don't lapse into unethical behavior yourself. We all know life would be too easy if we all acted on the advice we give others. Plus I am pretty sure it's against the Geneva Accords. :)
tomos:
Now, if only I were better at following that life-advice myself :-)
-tomos (October 14, 2015, 07:09 AM)
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Now now. Please don't lapse into unethical behavior yourself. We all know life would be too easy if we all acted on the advice we give others. Plus I am pretty sure it's against the Geneva Accords. :)
-MilesAhead (October 14, 2015, 07:12 AM)
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;D :P :D
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