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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1601 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Uber's 5.6 Seconds of Incompetence

    It's possible the self-driving dev teams were following a "move fast and break things" mantra, but I doubt it, we have more mundane explanations like company structure and pressure at all company layers to demonstrate progress.

A software team... had no safety department. They had literally no one responsible for safety. They hired a safety officer... seven months after they killed someone. That is chapter and verse a "move fast and break things" culture: they found their need for a subsystem of development after their lack of that subsystem caused a critical failure. A critical failure involving a fatality. You're prevaricating: you're arguing that this is somehow a "structure" problem when their "structure" was "software development and nothing else." Boeing's problem was they wanted things fast - that's what "no training requirements" means. And Facebook abandoned "move fast and break things" after they'd rolled Beacon out and gotten pilloried by everyone on the Internet and press. However, they doubled down on this approach to Libra which, contrary to your ignorance, is a sovereign currency controlled wholly by Facebook designed to be beyond the regulation or purvey of the host nations it is used within.

I get that you want this to not be about software developers' penchant for the callous disregard of human life, but what you're mostly doing is illustrating your naivete of the design process and software engineers' historical roles of completely disregarding consequences are very well embodied in the mantra "move fast and break things."

There was a time when you couldn't hurt people with software. Your very arguments are illustrating that you think that time is now. The evidence of the situation illustrates that it never has been. And this is why it's easy to hate software developers.





caelum20  ·  1569 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Are software developers necessarily any more dangerous than anyone else with influence in large and uncaring companies?

I believe Facebook is particularly less responsible than other companies, they're probably way up there with Uber in terms of controversey to revenue + employees ratio.

The company I work in I believe is an example of a particularly responsible primarily tech one from the top down, with 10x the employees and 5x the revenue of Facebook. If you search Facebook controversies there is this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook and if you search controversies for this company than there is nothing substantial since WW2.

I do agree that it is easy to get locked into the code and forget about the real world, but I think most of these issues come from the almost charlatan nature of these two companies. It is nice to hear others complaining about that move fast and break things crap. FB got lucky with 1 product being the place to find people and hasn't done much worthwhile since, besides maybe React which is a pretty elegant MVC framework in technicality but I don't like how much they tout it as something revolutionary where it's just a less opinionated Angular /fbrant

TheCookieMonster  ·  1601 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I wasn't defending Uber or suggesting they weren't negligent