Impressive

What was you initial intentions when writing the code? Were you paid to do it for a specific project that was obviously used for “bad”?

You mean you published something on the internet under you real name (which the company probably didn’t notice)?

Thank you for this personal contribution. I like the Robin Hood angle of it.

the building maintenance technician also works for the evil company

Yes

you’re asking if they’re just as guilty as the software engineer that worked to create the evil product?

Or the opposite, if they are as free from guilt as the maintenance guy.

That’s kind of the origin of my question, does this thinking about the technician extends to someone more involved in the product made, such as an engineer?

I am talking about morality rather than legality. No doubts the owners are more guilty, but that’s an easy consensus here. I’m more interested in the opinion of the many software engineers who participate here.

I’m assuming they both work at same “evil” company.

Yes

Did the roof collapse despite numerous warnings from the maintenance staff about structural issues? If the worker failed to report outside the company, yes there is some fault on them for inaction.

Let’s say there is no issue regarding maintenance, everything is safe, the building technician is only “guilty” of helping an “evil” company run.

If the company ordered some cyrpto mining baked into their software, then the developer who accepted the task and implemented it would share guilt.

So it’s more about directly working on something bad?
I guess that means people working directly on the chain of personal data exploitation at the tech giants are more guilty.

Let’s take what may be the average software engineer on Lemmy or Reddit. So I would guess:

• Do they know the company is evil? Yes
• if so, do they agree with what the company is doing? Some yes, like the cutting edge tech, some no, like the personal data harvesting or undermining democracy.
• if not, do they have any viable alternate options? Yes, many other options but with less money making.

What makes you think they were super racist or Nazis?

You look them deep in the center of their eyes

Like in between the eyes or in the middle of one eye? If it’s one eye, do you pick one or do you switch? At which frequency?

Agreed, basically if you are moderate, you have to block 2 or 3 major instances to escape from extremist content. That’s very unwelcoming for new users.

What a perfect example of what the top comment meant. “You either 100% agree with us or you are a trumpist/fascist/nazi”, no in-between, no nuance, no moderation allowed.