CraftHub Events
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2019–2025
46:24 · 27K views · May 17, 2019
Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.
HN commenters recommend it as a good talk on ethics in software engineering, and Cantrill himself cites it as capturing his views.
8 comments from Hacker News
Bryan Cantrill has a talk on YT on ethics in software [1]. And as I remember it the take away is that the way we think about problems isn't very conducive to obeying the law, or being good to people in general. And I've got to say the amount of people I see thinking of regulations, social norms or morals as « cruft » is pretty alarming. [1] this video
Bryan Cantrill (DTrace etc) has a good talk on ethics in software engineering[0]. Skip to 12:29 where he recalls Facebook in 2011 experimenting with users news feeds. [0] this video
This year's Cantrill talks include one on Ethical Dilemmas [0] and another on the "Moore's Law" paper [1]. Highly recommend both. [0] this video [1] [LINK]
> Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups. [...] So I reached out to some people and got in. After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very autistic smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work. [...] The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast. While I can attest that current day governments in general - some more, some less and I assume past governments as well - can be quite inefficient. I sometimes fantasize about making parts of it more lean and efficient because how hard could it be, right? And with the "right" kind of result evaluation it will not be that hard to score better than it does right now. But having silicon valley techbros apply their move fast and break stuff attitude to things that aren't tech startups has repeatedly resulted in awful results [1]. So I must say reading this passage is quite revealing in ways I think the author did not intend it to be. [1] this video
I am glad to see that many people are being correcting you, but just to put a sharp point on it: I am using that metaphor to condemn Ellison, not to condone or accept him. Unfortunately, since that talk in 2011, what was an aberration (albeit a broadly unspoken one) has since -- tragically -- become the norm. I refuse to accept this, however: I will continue to speak my truth about the moral decay in tech, and why we must hold ourselves to a higher standard.[0][1][2][3][4] And I obviously agree with your indignation that poor corporate behavior should not be the status quo! [0] Principles of Technology Leadership , [LINK] (2017) [1] Andreessen's Corollary: Ethical Dilemmas in Software Engineering , this video (2019) [2] (Anti-)application Video for YC120 , [LINK] (2019) [3] Coming Of Age , [LINK] (2022) [4] Intelligence is not Enough , [LINK] (2023)