> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this.
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.
The opposite of performative action is even worse: nihilism or even active support of atrocities.
Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.
This is exactly the problem: Software developers are not a professional class, we are hired goons with no professional organization nor a code of professional ethics.
This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.
Yeah, and read the responses to your comments: "but, but, 'professional' is a state of mind, not just a piece of paper" and some crap, completely missing the point. Professionals push back with "I'll lose my license/certification/disbarred". Software developers push back with "yes, sir, how high, sir?" or "I quit".
It was once a respected technology, and being a mechanic or factory worker was a high-paying job.
Now you have Jiffy Lube and some pimply kid in a polo!
Polofication
Has come for many industries...
And if retail was done the same way as it was 20 years ago, some kid in a polo shirt at Office Depot would be making small business websites using ChatGPT with a 1-hour turn-around time. Pay at the register, with your printer paper.
But Idk, I don't actually agree with you...
I think "software engineering" is such a spectrum now, a wide field of its own, that you can have deep research roles, high art, fashion, accounting, and executive-level work that involve it (which may have nothing to do with "consumer web design") that it's hard to make that blanket statement.
For example, the software engineer working on the computer in a Tesla, or the software on the displays in the BART train, or the banking infrastructure for Bank of America, is a lot more like a "real engineer" than the developer putting a marketing site on Vercel, or an iOS game on the App Store (each of which is vastly different work in their own right).
Everything is software now, every engineer is a software engineer now to some degree.
Nothing that you say is responsive to my point. None of your so-called engineers at Tesla has ever said, "I'm sorry Mr. Musk, we won't deploy those features because it's against the Software Engineering Code to do beta-testing on live vehicles where it harms users and endangers members of the public. You can fire us, but you'll get the same answer from the next engineer you call into this office."
Absolutely, and real professions with real professional ethical standards have considered such questions[0] and taken informed positions on them. Nothing of the kind exists for programmers.
If voting was so powerful, couldn't we just vote these problems away? While we're at it, vote away excessively high rent, or vote to prevent companies from hiring immigrant labor instead of locals.
And yet - I never see these items on the ballot! Huh. Why is that?
It seems like rent strikes do work though. And mass denial of anything on your ships after you spent the gas seems to make things pretty annoying for you guys :)
> special authority in debate
All normally functioning humans want to preserve life, liberty, and prosperity worldwide. You guys are the outliers. You're the weird ones with your "chosen" special authority that nobody believes or respects at all.
I didn't say voting would work, only not ruling that out; I said those other approaches would not work. It's possible nothing works.
Voting does work if enough voters feel strongly about something. Look at the policians scurrying about now that they're seeing the deeply negative polling on data centers.
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.