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drdaemantoday at 12:07 AM0 repliesview on HN

I’m afraid you don’t understand humans. Yeah, if you completely strip every detail you get a picture like that, a very convenient one to blow all the righteous steam on some amorphous homogeneous “programmers” mass. World is not simple, it’s the opposite of that.

When a poor lad comes on a work visa and is elevated from a literal poverty to a somewhat decent standard of living, would you expect them to stand up and make sure some camera recordings can’t be used in a way they aren’t supposed to be used? Do you expect them to even consider if their management may abuse that some years in the future (when the code is an unholy mess of duct tape and all the effort goes into making it work for the stated purpose), when their mind is all busy thinking about bills, health, family abroad, and the general sense of doom impending with pandemics and wars and extreme corruption all around? Nah, that lad’s also being exploited here, not exploiting others. Not that any sins are absolved but he’s a lot less of a monster than your comment paints. And there are corporations with tens of thousands of such lads and lasses and other folks. And that’s just one of myriad of possible nuances that break the trope of evil programmers screwing the world up.

Blame the rot that starts at the head, it’d be at least a bit more accurate.

> I can’t think of another profession

That’s because you framed the criteria so narrowly that it includes almost only programmers. And even then you still confused between management and implementors. And even then you’re forgetting the management, who’s definitely more to blame than workers.