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Are we the baddies?
Are you really making the world a better place and the pressure you’re under not to
When building software products it’s easy to lose sight of why you’re doing it, what you’re trying to achieve and whether you’re doing any good. A theme that runs through the industry is “we’re making the world a better place”. But are we really? There’s an amazing Mitchell and Webb sketch where they explore this. I struggled a lot with this in my career. I’ve been asked to build things that I thought weren’t in the user interest (“No I will not build you an engine to spam your customers”). I’ve had to deal with how shady people abuse the Internet to take advantage of other people. I’ve been asked to do things I considered against the law (and then been foribidden from raising it with the legal team). I’ve felt uncomfortable at the ethical decisions my employer has been making (and even been touted as someone who resigned over it).
The act of building products puts us under a lot of competing pressures, each of these comes with a set of pressures can push us into a bad direction:
- We want to build cool things. People become software engineers because they like building things. We are good at solving problems and answering the question “can we build this?”. We’re not good at answering the question “should we build this?”. At Google, many products don’t see the light of day…
