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mnsHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Engineers are completely blindsided by technology

Engineers are completely blindsided by technology. I work with some brilliant people, technically speaking, but in some cases they seem to have 0 awareness towards the things they are building and how that affects the people using the things that we built. I had a couple of months ago an engineer that's working on various AI things in our company telling me how we can use and build an AI tool to rate the performance of people in the company and people that use our platform (let's say similar to all these mini-job platforms) just to know who to fire if they are not efficient. At no point in time was he thinking of the people, all he could think of was the algorithm and AI and how amazing it could be to do this.

Original discussionI'm a developer for a major food delivery app296 source comments · at import
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nxtfariHN

Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just like Factorio and it feels good to see the number go up. In-jokes and dark humor fly and it all feels not real and just like a game. Sometimes on purpose by management, sometimes automatic as a coping mechanism. Defense (my field) is very much the same way.

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GlawenHN

I also sometimes think about how to make computers supervise/control human activity. It's like a inner engineering rush, but then I come back to my senses and think of how outraged I would be. However for some colleagues, as long as is not affecting them, they don't see any issue with such propositions.

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fuckinpuppersHN

Jeff Goldblum said it best “so preoccupied if they could, they never stopped to think if they should”

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