Item — HN Reader

>> Claiming that people you've never met are sufficiently financially secure to risk their livelihood for your protest movement is the kind of hubris I hope to never have.

I don't understand your agressiveness towards me, this is a conversation, we can talk and disagree without insulting.

I don't know every developer at Google or their situation but the idea that they're victims of a system that forces their hand is a stretch. There's people resisting changes they don't want at every step of the soci-economical ladder in different countries across countries and cultures. I can 100% understand a single person not being able to do so given their life circustances, but we're talking about a change across an organisation that probably encompases 100s of people, this is not resting on a single person. As I said in my original post, there's doctors in poorer countries with better ethics, what's different about developers?

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> I don't understand your agressiveness towards me, this is a conversation, we can talk and disagree without insulting.

I agree wholeheartedly, and if I really wanted to insult you, I wouldn't bother replying to you at all. You're clearly putting some thought into this, and I respect that, but I think your take is really bad.

I work in the gambling industry. Each weekday, I start my laptop with the knowledge that thousands of people will be hurt by the work I do. Not just the people who play the games, but their families, their children, and, in some cases, their employers who are embezzled from. But my employer treats me better than any other employer I've had, and not just in terms of money (even though I'm not well paid as far as software engineers go). My first career was as a schoolteacher - the poster child of the ethical career - and my fellow teachers treated me like dog shit, in numerous schools: people will do awful things to each other when they believe they're acting for 'the greater good'.

I don't think we can argue that the software engineers at Google are acting unethically because we don't know what choices they have, and we don't know what obligations they have outside their work. I'm not sure that we can argue that 'software freedom' is beneficial to everyone outside a small elite of power users. As much as we can argue that what Google has decided is bad for us as individuals, I don't think we have enough information to morally condemn the people who made and implemented that decision.