"Moral integrity" doesn't really have anything to apply to to the day-to-day work of an engineer. A moral compass can't work without a magnetic field of context.
Considering most engineers' main concern is just to meet a spec and get it shipped, I don't really see how the burden of ethical justification falls to them, when they don't even necessarily know how it'll be used. Can't really see how they could act as moral gatekeepers in a corporate structure.
There is nothing inherently virtuous about talented engineers, and in fact some of the most talented engineers I’ve come across in the industry have very loose morals.
Again, maybe you do. You are not everyone. Stop assuming things to make your argument stronger. You know exactly nothing about 99.9999% of the engineers at these companies and their lives and their needs. You also do not know what they care about and if their morality lines up with yours (which you have decided to be the global "right" morality, for some reason)
It's only a very small minority of engineers who do. Unless you're a PE and you get to sign off on large development projects, there's no real accountability.
No matter how much teeth a governing body has, it's always going to be gun shy about denying people their livelihood. They're only going to go after the most egregious and flagrant problems. As long as the transgressions are mild, they pose no real danger to those who want to violate whatever ethics code are in place.
At the end of the day, some engineer has to sit down and say "I'm going to make this evil thing because the boss is paying me to do it". That's a breach of ethics. That emergent behavior is enabled, at every step, by complacency.
In an ideal world, engineers would be perfectly ethical. But, you know, said hyperbolically, sociopaths can be engineers too. You should not induce from your own values to people in general.
Even apart from people without any values.. most engineers don’t hang out on HN, and don’t care much about global scale politics. They care about things that affect them in a very immediate way - family wellbeing, friends, coworkers, and how to pay the bills. I think many don’t infer how much of an impact their actions actually have, since they are „only spokes in the wheel“.
While this another angle, I was referring to the fact that many people will see these engineers as immoral and spineless. I know that I would not hire the person who drew that smiley face or any of their accomplices.
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