> McDonald became a fierce advocate of ethical decision-making
My hero, but also Don Quixote. I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig), especially in this crowd.
I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in these values. They had many other faults, but deficient institutional Integrity was not one of them.
> I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig),
This doesn’t match my experience at all. In my experience, the average person I’ve worked with also believes in personality integrity and is guided by a sense of ethics. One company I worked for started doing something clearly unethical, albeit legal, and the resulting backlash and exodus of engineers (including me) was a nice confirmation that most people I work with won’t tolerate unethical companies.
I have worked with people who take the idea of ethics to such an unreasonable extreme that they develop an ability to find fault with nearly everything. They come up with ways to rationalize their personal preferences as being the only ethical option, and they start finding ways to claim things they don’t like violate their personal integrity. One example that comes to mind is the security person who wanted our logins to expire so frequently that we had to log in multiple times per day. He insisted that anything less was below his personal standards for security and it would violate his personal integrity to allow it. Of course everybody loathed him, but not because they lacked personal integrity or ethics.
If you find yourself being a “hated minority” or people thinking you’re a “stuck up pig” for having basic ethics, you’re keeping some strange company. I’d get out of there as soon as possible.
Actually, that's this community. I do understand. Money is the only metric that matters, here, as it's really an entrepreneur forum. Everyone wants to be rich, and they aren't particularly tolerant of anything that might interfere with that.
But I'm not going anywhere. It's actually fun, here. I learn new stuff, all the time.
You in an earlier comment said that people believe that you are "a stuck-up prig". Are you sure it is due to your moral stance, and not because you are judgemental, and abrasive about it?
Perhaps if you would be less set in your mind about how you think everyone is you wouldn't come through as "a stuck-up prig". Maybe we would even find common grounds between us.
> Money is the only metric that matters, here, as it's really an entrepreneur forum. Everyone wants to be rich
This place is surprisingly mixed in that regard given its origin; a significant number of comments I see about Apple, about OpenAI, about Paul Graham, are essentially anti-capitalist.
The vibe I get seems predominately hacker-vibe rather than entrepreneur-vibe.
That said, I'm also well aware of the "orange site bad" meme, so this vibe I get may be biased by which links' I find interesting enough to look at the discussions of.
Yeah, it was a snarky comment, and not my proudest moment, but it does apply to a significant number of folks. I tend to enjoy the contributions from folks that don't have that priority.
The demoralizing part, is folks that are getting screwed by The Big Dogs, and totally reflect the behavior; even though TBD think of them as "subhuman."
I believe that it is. In my opinion and experience, any group of humans, interacting, on a regular basis, in a common venue, becomes a community.
I guess that it is a matter of definition.
I treat it as if it were a community, and that I am a member of that community, with rights and Responsibilities, thereof.
I know that lots of folks like to treat Internet (and, in some cases, IRL) communities as public toilets, but I'm not one of them. I feel that it is a privilege to hang out here, and don't want to piss in the punch bowl, so I'm rather careful about my interactions here.
I do find it a bit distressing, to see folks behaving like trolls, here. A lot of pretty heavy-duty folks participate on HN, but I guess the casual nature of the interactions, encourages folks to lose touch with that.
I think that it is really cool, that I could post a comment, and have an OG respond. I suspect that won't happen, too often, if I'm screeching and flinging poo.
Just like in-person communities, you'll have general consensus on some ideas and fierce disagreement in others. You'll have people who are kind and those who are hateful.
You can identify that there may be a trend within a community without declaring that everyone in the community thinks the exact same way. And you could also be wrong about that trend because the majority is silent on the issue and you bump up against the vocal minority.
Perhaps you can elaborate on what a community is, and how HN differs from one.
The topical interests, general characteristics, experiences and opinions of HN members are too diverse to qualify as a community, IMO. There may be subsets that could qualify as a community, and if you only look at certain kinds/topics of submissions it might feel like one, but they are mixed within a larger heterogeneous crowd here.
I feel that a community can def be heterogenous AF. I participate in exactly that type of (IRL) community, and it is worldwide.
It does require some common focus, and common agreement that the community is important.
I do believe that we have those, here. The "common focus" may not be immediately apparent, but I think everyone here shares a desire to be involved in technology; which can mean a few things, but I'll lay odds that we could find a definition that everyone could agree on.
I've left two companies over ethical concerns, but it's not as easy for most people implied here. Losing income can be challenging, especially if the industry is in a downturn.
Out of curiosity, did you leave those companies because the company's core business was unethical (or veered that direction over time), because leadership was generally unethical, or because specific incidents that forced your hand?
At a previous job I saw unethical choices made by my boss, but the company as a whole wasn't doing anything wrong. One of my coworkers was asked to do something unethical and he refused, but he wasn't punished and wasn't forced to choose between his ethics and the job.
Every time I had to leave for ethical reasons it was a leadership thing, mostly relating to how they treated other employees.
For instance, I joined a company that advertised itself as being fairly ethical (they even had a "no selling to military" type policy). However, after joining it was apparent that this wasn't the case. They really pushed transparent salaries, but then paid me way more than anyone else. There was a lot of sexism as well: despite one of my colleagues being just as skilled as I am, this colleague was given all the crap work because leadership didn't think they were as capable as I was. There was a lot of other stuff as well, but that's the big summary. I left after nine months.
The other company was similar, but it wasn't nearly as obvious at first. Over time it became very apparent that the founders cared more about boosting their own perception in the industry than they did the actual startup, and they also allowed the women in the company to be treated poorly. This company doesn't exist anymore.
I should mention that these were all startups I worked at, and I was always fairly highly positioned in the company. This meant I generally reported directly to the founders themselves. If it was something like a middle management issue I'd have tried to escalate it up to resolve it before just leaving, but if that doesn't work I'm financially stable enough to just leave.
Well it's weird for me, because I was one of the people being treated better (I'm a guy). I just don't want to work with assholes, so when I see people being assholes to other people and leadership doesn't take it seriously then I leave.
> One example that comes to mind is the security person who wanted our logins to expire so frequently that we had to log in multiple times per day. He insisted that anything less was below his personal standards for security and it would violate his personal integrity to allow it. Of course everybody loathed him, but not because they lacked personal integrity or ethics.
Speaking as a "security person", I passionately despise people like this because they make my life so much more difficult by poisoning the well. There are times in security where you need to drop the hammer, but it's precisely because of these situations that you need to build up the overall good will with your team of working with them. When you tell your team "this needs to be done immediately, and it's blocking", you need to have built up enough trust that they realize you're not throwing yet another TPS report at them, this time it's actually serious, and they do it immediately, as opposed to fighting/escalating.
And yes, like the original poster, most of them think they're the main character in an suspense-thriller where they're The Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when really they're the stuck-up side relief character in someone else's romcom, at best.
> And yes, like the original poster, most of them think they're the main character in an suspense-thriller where they're The Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when really they're the stuck-up side relief character in someone else's romcom, at best.
At the current state of the art for self-driving, this simply is not true. Humans are much better, on average. That's why the vast majority of cars are still driven by humans.
The technology will keep improving, and at some point one would expect that it will be more reliable than humans. But it's significantly less reliable now.
Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains.
PS: I'm not claiming that every single transport need can be solved by trains, but they do dramatically reduce the cost in human life. Yes, they have to be part of a mix of other solutions, such as denser housing. Yes, you can have bad actors that don't maintain their rail and underpay/understaff their engineers which leads to derailments, etc. I say this because the utopia of not having to drive, not caring about sleepiness, ill health, or intoxication, not having to finance or repair a vehicle or buy insurance, not renting parking spots, all that is available today without having to invent new lidar sensors or machine vision. You can just live in London or Tokyo.
> Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains.
Not for everyone, we didn't. Self-driving cars have the potential to serve people who don't want to restrict themselves to going places trains can take them.
> You can just live in London or Tokyo.
Not everyone either can or wants to live in such places. If I prefer to live in a less dense area and have a car, the risk is mine to take. And if at some point a self-driving car can drive me more reliably than I can drive myself, I will gladly let it do so.
A lot of the reason, is cultural. Trains are a standard part of life. Most shows have significant scenes on commuter trains, as do ads. Probably wouldn’t apply to nations like the US.
> the million people being killed by human drivers every year?
If self-driving cars at their current level of reliability were as common as human drivers, they would be killing much more than a million people a year.
When I am satisfied that a self-driving car is more reliable than I am, I will have no problem letting it take me places instead of driving myself. But not until then.
That comment was about self-driving cars? Here I was thinking it was about Israeli arms manufacturers testing their intentionally-lethal robots on Palestine before selling them to the USA.
I’m not saying they should, but that there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things.
The right way asks for community buy in, follows safety procedures, is transparent and forthcoming about failures, is honest about capabilities and limitations.
The wrong way says “I can do what I want, I’m not asking permission, if you don’t like it sue me” The wrong way throws the safety playbook out the window and puts untrained operators in charge of untested deadly machines. The wrong way doesn’t ask for community input, obfuscates and dissembles when challenged, is capricious, vindictive, and ultimately (this is the most crucial part) not effective compared to the right way of doing things.
Given a choice between the safe thing to do and the thing that will please Musk, Tesla will always choose the latter.
"I'm sorry ModernMech, but you're in violation of our CoC with your overly negative and toxic tone. We're going to go ahead, close your issue, and merge the PR to add Torment Nexus integration."
This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in your head.
It isn't though it's not really even one industry. It's used by every industry and some of that is a cesspool and some solutions/products are purely tech based cessools.
If you get to see some of the details, defense (US) is expensive but there is very little profit compared to other industry. There is epic amount of inefficiencies which is where all that cost is eaten.
Or anything in manufacturing or food/beverage (see Nestle and water rights) production. I think most of tech has it pretty good. Tech has the potential for incredible amounts of bad, but this is limited to the handful that dominate social media (see Facebook and the civil war in Ethiopia) or, I don't know, the ones selling surveillance software to governments and law enforcement.
I thought ICT was terrible, so I decided I'd try the industrial side of things.
Ok, on the one hand, getting to play with cool robots, and eg using an actual forklift for debugging? Absolutely priceless, wouldn't trade it for the world.
But the ethical side of things? There's definitely ethics, don't get me wrong. Especially on the hardware side - necessary for safety after all. But the way software is sold and treated is ... different.
My response when I'm told that in an interview is to ask specifically how that trait has caused problems for them. Quickly separates someone who's actually put thought into it from someone who is just trying to skate by.
That sounds funny, but being a perfectionist IS actually a problem. You'll often waste time and effort making something perfect when "good enough" is all that's required.
My hero, but also Don Quixote. I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig), especially in this crowd.
I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in these values. They had many other faults, but deficient institutional Integrity was not one of them.