Tech backlash has come to Stanford

https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/stanford-tech-students-backlash-google-facebook-palantir.html

by ForHackernews • 7 years ago

173 209 7 years ago

taurath2• 7 years ago

I don't suppose this is really news, given that Facebook and Google are the Big Incumbents now. For many this is a Moral choice, and whether what you're doing is really helping out the world.

I'd say also, I currently perceive Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down". They're big enough and have enough resources to do anything they want, so it seems like there's gonna be a lot of people just hanging out and going the slow route.

choppaface• 7 years ago

It’s news when hiring stats come out, e.g. Stanford students are no longer accepting Palantir. For example, one report found that Facebook’s new grad acceptance rate has fallen below 50% this year: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/new...

These stats are important for disseminating competitive information about the job market to job seekers and small companies. If Google et al own all the salary and resume data, then they have an unfairly outsized effect on the market.

username902• 7 years ago

Why did you link an amp page?

kahnjw2• 7 years ago

I'd say also, I currently perceive Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down". They're big enough and have enough resources to do anything they want, so it seems like there's gonna be a lot of people just hanging out and going the slow route.

Having worked in a startup and midsize environment and now at Google my experience has been the opposite. Getting to focus intensely on one or two projects at a time allowed me to push the needle on velocity. I don't push as many LOC, sure, but that isn't how I measure impact or progress. At Google I can make measurable, verifiable impact using a development cycle the loops over a few days. It's very hard to do that even at midsize companies.

taurath2• 7 years ago

Thanks for sharing, that is reassuring. Do you think the focus is more of a specialization thing and having all the people around to deal with other specializations (IE, clear lines)?

crazygringo• 7 years ago

Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down"

I don't know where you've gotten that impression. Neither of those two companies got to where they are by having a culture of slowness.

Any team you're on doesn't have all of the company's financial resources at its whim -- rather the team has a set budget and quarterly objectives and everyone's breaking their back to meet them like in any other company. And if your team doesn't deliver, then your promotion won't happen... and most people are working towards that promotion.

There is absolutely nothing slow about it.

sp5275• 7 years ago

Lethargy isn't the issue. It's the growth plateau (after ~ year one) and stifled upward mobility that are the real dealbreakers, for some. The phrase "slow down" is imo accurate insofar as a fairly middling effort exerted by any sufficiently smart person will ensure continuity of employment at GooFace.

whatever_dude• 7 years ago

I don't know where you've gotten that impression. Neither of those two companies got to where they are by having a culture of slowness.

My visibility is limited (don't work at FB/Google), but I have several friends and ex-colleagues who do and I have to say, I have the same impression that it's a company for people to slow down.

They're already at the top of their game and I think assuming everybody there is an A-player is misguided. It's more likely you become another cog in a giant machine with limited reach for better or worse.

There's a lot of politics and while it's true everybody wants a promotion, it's clear to me (at least from my sources) that promotions are more about learning to play a game according to their rules rather than being a fast, high-achiever.

Not everybody wants to have financial resources at their whim. But some people are happy getting to the office 11am, moving a button 1px to the right then 1px to the left once in a while, and then leaving at 4pom. From what I heard, if you're ok with that, a place like Facebook or Google is great.

Again, I don't assume it's the norm, but I heard enough to make me think "slowing down" is very doable.

skybrian• 7 years ago

Ex-Googler here. I found working at Google to be slower pace than the previous startups I worked at due to the code review process (reviewers sometimes being in different time zones or just being slow for whatever reason) and the time to takes for tests to run. (Global presubmits often had to run overnight for example.)

You can get around it by having multiple changes going in parallel, but it's still a lot of overhead. I don't think it was just me either. This seemed to be a common complaint. Maybe it's fixed by now?

This is going to vary a lot depending on the team and where you are working in the stack. Lumping Google and Facebook together and saying "there is absolutely nothing slow about it" seems too strong, though.

tehlike4• 7 years ago

7 years ago, i worked with a really smart undergrad. I asked him if he would come to google, he said google is not cool. Went to spacex.

ummonk3• 7 years ago

SpaceX is notorious for chewing up starry-eyed new grads and spitting them out after they burn out from the lack of work life balance.

tehlike4• 7 years ago

Maybe, then maybe not.

I had no wlb for quite a while after school, by choice. Some people just like to do what they do.

skgoa2• 7 years ago

So he wasn't that smart after all.

tehlike4• 7 years ago

He was, he is

C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

I doubt that google is hiring many mech engineers or those targeting space/aerospace.

tehlike4• 7 years ago

This guy was a CS.

xxxpupugo2• 7 years ago

Drank the Kool Aid

compiler-guy2• 7 years ago

I did the Stanford thing a long time ago, but there were tech objectors even then. A comparatively small number of activists protesting this or that, “Do you really want to work for Microsoft/IBM/Oracle?” with most engineers just keeping their head down and studying.

This is nothing new.

zamfi• 7 years ago

I think what’s new is the rapid fall in the number of CS grads from Stanford (and other top schools) accepting offers from Facebook.

But I doubt it’s just about ethics. I remember when Facebook dethroned Google too.

nothal3• 7 years ago

The cynic in me thinks this is purely a factor of smart kids in tech realizing Facebook is old news and provides little path for differentiation (or rapid promotion). They better than anyone know the exciting startups their friends and friends of friends are starting especially compared to the tedium of a (cushy but) relatively non-challenging job at Facebook, Google, MS, etc. Plus, there's more chance for a moonshot 10/100/1000x at a company that's not already a behemoth. The smartest people I know are itching to work at startups. They could care less about FAANG.

bonestamp22• 7 years ago

Do you really want to work for Microsoft/IBM/Oracle?

Maybe the reason has changed though... why did they say this back then?

compiler-guy2• 7 years ago

They were all varying levels of evil at various times. People thought Microsoft was a predatory monopolist. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Oracle a sue-happy company run by a megalomaniac. “What’s the difference between god and Larry Ellison? God doesn’t think he is Larry Ellison.” IBM was a stuffy has-been with strong military-industrial ties. I have no good joke for IBM, which is part of IBM’s problem.

Google’s “Don’t be evil” really was in stark contrast to all that. (Whether lived or not is a separate thing. )

ng124• 7 years ago

For every politically woke CS student there are two dozen completely apolitical ones (and a sprinkling of wrongthinkers). I don't think Palantir is really desperate for applicants.

aliston3• 7 years ago

Stanford has also dumbed down its undergrad CS major, removing all of the old engineering requirements that tended to filter out the SJW types.

Edit: seems the downvoters don’t like what I have to say, but that doesn’t make it less true. Compare the graduation requirements for CS at Stanford from a few years ago to now - no compilers or os, no multivariable calculus, no pointers. They literally eliminated all the hard classes. As a result, the degree has become more liberal arts focused and the makeup of the class has changed in sync. I’d guess more than 50% of cs majors at Stanford we’re asian and foreign born just a few years ago - folks who you generally don’t see leading direct action protests.

likhuva2• 7 years ago

> seems the downvoters don’t like what I have to say, but that doesn’t make it less true.

Except that it isn't true. A quick look at https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/ug/Requirements.shtml paints a completely diffrent picture.

ineedasername2• 7 years ago

I see no connection between a person being a so-called "SJW" and an inability to perform more rigorous engineering work. I have no idea where you draw that connection from.

mitfahrener• 7 years ago

No worries. Us non-wokies will vote you up :)

tayo42• 7 years ago

sounds like they are aligning the degree with the realities of a programing career. did calculus really make you a better software engineer? Most development happens at such a high level that not knowing OS and compilers probably can get most people by. How much of development is made up of frontend js programmers, mobile developers, web developers writing php/wordpress stuff. If you do want to be good at it, it is a specialty.

If you do want to do science, there are still masters and phd programs. Undergrad is job prep for most people and colleges are doing a disservice by pretending it's not.

gaze5• 7 years ago

You’re literally just calling SJWs stupid in a roundabout way.

wnmurphy2• 7 years ago

You may be getting downvoted for applying a derogatory term commonly used to dismiss anyone with a conscience, and the privilege to actually exercise it.

raxxorrax3• 7 years ago

I don't like forced moralization as much as the next one but I think this is a bad development. Before computer science becoming something you could study, it was mostly bundled with philosophy in my country.

That isn't just about chugging two beers and talking about the state of the world. Arguments are carefully crafted and (logical) consistency is valued that could for one help you with in your field and additionally allows you to look beyond the horizon on a lot of issues.

spamizbad3• 7 years ago

Stanford's admission rate has been dropping over the last decade, so I highly doubt newer students are any less qualified or capable.

In fact, I'd argue the opposite: The median student slated to graduate in 2023 is likely smarter and harder-working than median student who graduated in 2003.

qntty• 7 years ago

You're really flattening the diversity of people with a political consciousness. "Social justice" isn't the be-all end-all goal of politics.

alexandercrohde2• 7 years ago

I don't know if that's true among top-tier applicants. And even if the ratio were 24:1, it still not a meaningless gesture. It puts an economic pressure on a company when finding candidates is harder.

But really being able to be proud of the work you do in your life is its own reward.

rogerkirkness• 7 years ago

It's pretty meaningless, and top-tier at that level is fit based, the objective geniuses have a way of not working for other people for very long at all.

ng124• 7 years ago

I'd wager it's even more true among top-tier candidates. Anecdotally the best engineers I've ever worked with have been among the most uninterested in politics.

manfredo12• 7 years ago

I disagree. In my experience (graduated from Stanford in 2015) at least as many people, probably more, are put off by "woke" culture and corporate activism. Opinions that are commonly voiced are not necessarily widely held because people with strong opinions tend to speak a disproportionately large amount.

stonogo• 7 years ago

There is no such thing as "apolitical."

p1necone2• 7 years ago

Yes, in my experience people that say things like "no need to drag politics into this" really mean "no need to drag political opinions that are different from my own into this".

SamReidHughes2• 7 years ago

When I was a college student and in my early twenties I was aware that my opinions on political stuff changed a lot. So I didn't worry about politics much, I had an opinion about right and wrong but didn't take it seriously. That is apolitical.

inopinatus2• 7 years ago

    Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun  
    A man whose allegiance
    Is ruled by expedience
    Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
    "Nazi, Schmazi!" says Wernher von Braun

    Don't say that he's hypocritical
    Say rather that he's apolitical
    "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
    That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun

    Some have harsh words for this man of renown
    But some think our attitude
    Should be one of gratitude
    Like the widows and cripples in old London town
    Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

    You too may be a big hero
    Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
    "In German, und Englisch, I know how to count down
    Und I'm learning Chinese" says Wernher von Braun

-- Tom Lehrer, That Was The Year That Was, Reprise Records 1965.

flukus2• 7 years ago

Then political is a meaningless word, the results are the same.

throwaway8879• 7 years ago

You seem to be implying that being apolitical is a political position in itself, much like how atheism is a religion too.

Do you consider baldness a hairstyle?

d357r0y3r• 7 years ago

This is a more nuanced version of the "silence is violence" position. You're either an activist or you're part of the problem. You're either with us or against us.

It's a position that makes total sense and seems unassailably true to...well, people that are tuned in politically. People that don't care or don't connect the dots between politics and their actual life are pretty dang apolitical.

finolex1• 7 years ago

The article does say the percentage of people accepting full time offers from Facebook has dropped from 85% to 35-55%. I imagine its far worse for Palantir. Sure, they can always get more applicants from somewhere, but in all likelihood they definitely do feel the effects.

mellowdream2• 7 years ago

Anecdotally - I'm at a moderately liberal college for undergrad (what colleges aren't at least this much, I guess) - more than plenty of people are willing to at least intern at Palantir, Facebook, etc., especially with their initiatives for signing more women and poc on board. A lot have even accepted offers, and I haven't noticed any decline in these patterns over the past few years. Many young students still want to work at FANG companies and make sexy bank, everything else be damned.

Not that I necessarily know what my peers' moral integrity and political positions are like...

manfredo12• 7 years ago

The article does say the percentage of people accepting full time offers from Facebook has dropped from 85% to 35-55%. I imagine its far worse for Palantir.

Attributing this to politics seems like a premature conclusion. Another possibility is that there are an increased number of competitors that compensate well. Uber, AirBnb, and others.

Also, it looks like the drop is only across 1 specific year so it's heavily subject to noise:

the acceptance rate for full-time positions at Facebook from recent graduates of top-tier schools had fallen between 35 and 55 percent as of last December, down from an 85 percent acceptance rate for the 2017–18 school year.

If this were measured as as sliding window and showed consistent decline it'd be more convincing.

ummonk3• 7 years ago

How much of that is merely due to students interviewing at more places and thus getting multiple good offers though?

odiroot• 7 years ago

I don't understand why is Palantir singled out there. Compared to Facebook (maybe even Google) seems like a good company to work for.

randcraw3• 7 years ago

Palantir is heavily into surveillance and is used by many customers to secretly push their interests well past the fuzzy boundary of US privacy law, much like Facebook. The main difference is that Palantir heavily serves police and military customers on projects that are classified and thus criminal to reveal.

Any company whose business is to help federal and local police surveil the public while hiding these practices from public scrutiny and oversight worries me, and I think, should worry everyone in light of Snowden's revelations.

xxxpupugo2• 7 years ago

Exactly. I know people would work for Palantir specifically because it appeals to their political taste.

People are different and complicated, assuming a blank slate of tech people following certain ideology is ignorant at its best, stupid at its worst.

Smart people won't go to Google/Facebook? Think twice. Maybe they want to spend more time in exciting/shiny stuff when they still can afford to make mistakes. The difference here being they CAN join Facebook or Google at the right time.

Money definitely talks, let alone the problem/scope company like Facebook or Google could offer, that certain startup couldn't even dream about.

Clubber• 7 years ago

I lost my tech altruism after the Snowden revelations. I'd been in the business professionally since the mid 90s and as a hobbyist since the mid 80s. I still do it for a living because I gotta pay bills, but SV doesn't impress me as world changing, for the better anyway.

sp5275• 7 years ago

I had a similar epiphany, though I'm also a generally cynical person. It was always easier for me to believe that human nature would see us ultimately misuse technology for dystopian purposes. I also believe what's happened thus far is just the tip of the iceberg.

wideasleep1• 7 years ago

Reminds me of a SFGate story a few years back, tech whiz 'retires' to scrubbing barnacles off boat bottoms, and finds it more gratifying.

segmondy3• 7 years ago

Meh, do your part and fix it. We can fight tech with tech, case in point, cryptography, PGP, Signal, OpenBSD. Adblockers, the battle of privacy will be fought, won or lost with tech. Pick your side, but apathy doesn't help.

kjgkjhfkjf• 7 years ago

Idealism will lose some of its luster when the time comes for them to pay off their enormous student loans.

jdashg2• 7 years ago

Stanford's financial aid is /generous/. Most students aren't coming out drowning in debt, despite the high sticker-price.

raxxorrax3• 7 years ago

It is basically modern servitude and I hope not a model for future education.

jasonhansel6• 7 years ago

I honestly think that there should be some sort of ethics course required of CS students (like how MBA students are often required to take a class in business ethics, and doctors are required to learn medical ethics).

Engineers who behave unethically without asking questions aren't good engineers--at least, they're not the sort of engineers we want to be creating.

ganduG• 7 years ago

Most CS programs in the US have a mandatory ethics class.

clintonb• 7 years ago

Do you have data to support that claim? I did not have an explicit ethics subject at MIT. The closest we got was discussing Therac in 6.033.

weber111• 7 years ago

Nice idea in theory; in practice, it might be tricky to have the organizational incentives aligned to make sure such a course is rigorous enough to be useful, rather than yet another worthless and trivial humanities requirement (at my large public research university with a strong CS program, faculty essentially compete for students based on how little work their gen ed courses are---no joke---and our required CS ethics class was similarly light).

Invictus0• 7 years ago

Perhaps, then, we should stop calling CS programs strong when they only specialize in churning out obedient code monkeys.

ajdlinux• 7 years ago

And not just rigorous enough, but also engaging enough that even the "apolitical" students find it interesting. (The students who naturally find an ethics course interesting are the ones who will still find it useful but ultimately need it least.)

astrange• 7 years ago

There usually is one, although mine was basically "remember not to kill anyone."

malandrew2• 7 years ago

10 years ago I’d agree with you, but now? Not so much. Such a class would quickly be taken over by SJW-types and turned into advocacy instead of a class with a more philosophical demeanor where there is room for debate and disagreement people generally practice the principle of charity.

jasonhansel6• 7 years ago

I don't think that these are mutually exclusive.

ReptileMan5• 7 years ago

Why? Engineers have functioning brains. They can decide on their own what is ethical or not. And act accordingly.

jasonhansel6• 7 years ago

Yes, but they may decide incorrectly. Plenty of inethical people have "functioning brains"; they just lack the necessary knowledge.

ummonk3• 7 years ago

I mean, given how ethically MBAs act, it seems the ethics course isn't really all that effective...

Areading314• 7 years ago

I don't think that would do anything at all. People aren't going to learn ethics from a class. Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason to single out CS students, as many ethical decisions in tech are made by business people anyway.

jgmjgm• 7 years ago

Some people really do learn from classes. I'm not being facetious. Sometimes teaching you can actually see that students have never considered certain things and for them it is a revelation of sorts.

To understand this you have to also take on board that ethics is difficult. The media often gives us simplified versions of situations after the fact and we can't help but feel the "right" choice was always obvious. But in reality, as an ethical conflict develops those involved often feel helpless as the problem continues to grow. No one risks stopping it precisely because they don't have the intellectual framework to deal with or understand the developing complex ethical dilemma until it is too large for a single individual to take on.

I get where you are coming from though. I'm just saying that some people aren't lucky enough to have come from that place. Education does often make the difference for well meaning people not otherwise exposed to a good moral foundation.

diN0bot• 7 years ago

There are plenty of things I didn't fully understand as a student, not just academic things but self-realization "youth is wasted on the young" type learnings, which I suspect impacts all of us

BUT, I bet if you look at the data, things like DARE and driver's ed and sex ed v abstinance education have measurable, statistical impacts on what people believe and how they act.

ALSO, there are plenty of jobs out there for technical work. Each of us decides what people and organizations we are comfortable supporting with our labor. It's not a perfectly free decision, and there are plenty of individual trade-offs to make, but we're hardly passive players.

deepakhj• 7 years ago

We had a required ethics course at my college.

pieix• 7 years ago

In my experience business ethics courses encourage behavior that is a far cry from what the rest of us would consider ethical — effectively boiling down to “generating the most value for shareholders”.

tomhoward• 7 years ago

I have trouble with the notion that a single class during tertiary studies is what will make the difference between ethical or unethical behaviour.

Ethical behaviour is - or should be - learned and refined over a lifetime, via parents, peers, all levels of education, employers, wider society and one's own contemplation.

I'm suspicious of the inclusion of ethics classes in MBA courses, given the kind of work many MBAs end up doing. I suspect it can create a mindset in which anything you convince yourself is OK according to what you learned in your ethics class is acceptable, which is a very weak and inconsistent standard.

To be clear, I'm fully supportive of the idea that engineers and everyone else in tech companies should behave ethically. I'm just not sure ethics classes will achieve that outcome.

If engineers, or any employees, are behaving unethically, it's because there's a misalignment between the employee's own short-term incentives (i.e., keeping their job, getting a promotion/raise), and societally-beneficial objectives. It'll take more than an ethics class to fix that.

jasonhansel6• 7 years ago

Yes, it may not be sufficient. But what we need is not only to change the short-term incentives, but to encourage employees to disregard these incentives when it is morally necessary to do so.

ckris• 7 years ago

I am not so sure. It is hard to teach ethics, but you can have ethics as a basis for a framework. Most MBAs will be very aware of something like compliance or labour law. And if know that framework you can critique them. Not every hardware engineer understand the importance of ethics, but they mostly accept the regulations or principles derived from ethics. In tech we don't really have that, so it is often a non-starter to begin with. The exception being GDPR, but you have probably noticed how messy those discussions are.

johnsimer• 7 years ago

There's research (and common sense) showing that ethics is taught by example moreso than by words/books/lessons

randcraw3• 7 years ago

In my case, I never seriously thought about several hot button social issues that were ethically troubled until I took a course on ethics. They simply didn't intersect with my life, nor did I expect them to. Only once I was in the class did I stop and think about costs incurred by choices and policies and their outcomes, much less how I might simply ask "What choice is more just (or less unjust)?"

College is about not only learning deliberately but allowing serendipity to open your mind to the unexpected. In my experience, budding engineers are among the last of us to become aware of social costs vs benefits and alternative perspectives. Without a required course to open their eyes, it's likely that many young techies will leap into life's choices before they look.

IMO, college is exactly the right time for all students to confront the cost of living an unexamined life.

bonestamp22• 7 years ago

learned and refined over a lifetime

Absolutely. But, what if someone's parents, peers, etc have never really introduced the foundational ideas? I mean, most people are taught ethical rules, but they're often taught as rules and not ideology that should be applied broadly. Also, most parents aren't equipped to teach some of the ethical dilemmas that we face with social media and big data. Having a course on some of these things should be another building block for many, but also a backstop for those who have never given it any thought at all.

sexydefinesher• 7 years ago

My career really started taking off once I started reading about moral relativism and nihilism.

tuesdayrain• 7 years ago

Does anyone seriously behave unethically because they don't know how to behave otherwise? I have a feeling that it's virtually always a conscious decision where someone prioritizes their own benefit over any cost to others, not that they just didn't know what the "right" decision was. Curious if anyone has experience a major change in mindset after taking an ethics course.

hombre_fatal• 7 years ago

We had to take a required ethics course at UT after a student went to ridiculous lengths to lie during the senior year recruiting process. It was obviously just something faculty came up with in a scramble to save face. I suppose OP’s suggestion makes sense if you consider that there are people who seriously think an ethics course does anything, so you might as well wear the badge to one-up fellow applicants. Kind of like those certifications you find online.

bitL• 7 years ago

Yes, it's known that psychopaths don't have an internal moral frame of reference and learn about what is acceptable by observing others, then replaying those learned scripts during social interactions, while not caring about them at all.

solveit2• 7 years ago

It would be great if the industry could agree on an actionable code of ethics first. But I don't think this would be easy.

ghaff• 7 years ago

Actionable is always questionable even for those professions, like medicine, where it's well known there is one.

However, code of ethics do exist in software and other engineering:

https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

philpem2• 7 years ago

There was a year-long module on engineering ethics included in my M.Eng. degree course. We discussed the usual "software engineering failure" stories - THERAC-20 and so on.

In my experience - the overwhelming majority of students just wanted to pass the module, had no intention of contributing. I asked a friend in the same class what he thought of it, and he responded:

"What does it matter? I'm going to be working for a company, and they'll have rich lawyers. Any problem can be made to go away with enough money. All I need to care about is my pay cheque."

Last time I looked at LinkedIn he was working at one of the FAANG companies.

fhsm• 7 years ago

Was it the Therac-25 or the Therac-20? I thought 20s were unaffected.

cc81• 7 years ago

When I was studying and we talked about that and other software failure incidents in a class my experience was more that most did not want to work on projects where failure had such a huge impact (i.e. death) or the discussion was about how can one avoid it from an engineering perspective. No one was flippant about consequences or talked about lawyers.

I also do know that people have been discussing AI, ethics and consequences in that same class now as I know the teacher. I don't now the outcome but I think people at least recognize the potential problems.

cm2187• 7 years ago

Well, define ethics. The protesters mentioned in the article seem to think that even providing software to law enforcement is unethical (like many google employees seem to think that providing software to the US armed forces is unethical). I don't think that a Silicon Valley definition of ethics will gather much consensus.

randcraw3• 7 years ago

But SV doesn't get to redefine ethics. They have to confront the same problems, criteria, and choices as the rest of us.

For example, I used to contract to the US military in the DC area. That work invited many of the same concerns that SV does -- privacy, security, freedom of speech, acting preserve and defend the Constitution's principles. Today I work for a big pharmaceutical. Comparable concerns apply here too -- honesty, doing no harm, serving people in need, improving and extending their lives.

Ethics are universal, no matter where you live or what you do.

specialist• 7 years ago

"Well, define ethics."

An ethics curriculum would help you with that task.

tnecniv• 7 years ago

In the US, if you go to an ABET accredited engineering school, you are required to take an ethics class. Computer Science, however, is not an engineering discipline as far as ABET is concerned, so CS majors often don't have an ethics requirement.

The content of the ethics class is different than you may think though. There isn't really an engineering version of the Hippocratic Oath, and the instructor normally realizes that he or she isn't going to instill a sense of ethics into a bunch of bored 20-somethings in three months if they haven't developed one already. Instead, the class tends to focus on choices you might face as an engineer, why they are hard, and the outcomes for both you and society at large.

jasonhansel6• 7 years ago

I think that such a class, if required of software engineers, would be a great idea.

bytematic• 7 years ago

Highly Agree! I took a tech ethics class and learned so much about the basics of ethics, it really framed the world differently. I followed that up by taking a tech focused philosphy class which expanded on using those ethics basics in applied difficult tech industry questions. Just two classes, probably 6 credit hours total, and I have greatly expanded my mind. I also took a basic sociology course that was about information disparity in america which focused on race, class, etc. that probably helped as well. I so wish I could build a curriculum for modern CS

nharada• 7 years ago

Lots of people here conflating "teaching what is right vs wrong" and "teaching how to consider what is right vs wrong". Ethics classes are typically the latter.

killjoywashere2• 7 years ago

I can say, as someone currently hiring, that more than one applicant(1) has cited our focus on cancer, and not killer robots, as a compelling factor in applying. People in the killer robot jobs are actively looking for ways out. As an aside, the killer robot jobs tend to pay about 10-15% under market, at least according to Glassdoor.

What makes the comparison somewhat interesting, I think, is that we are still a military group, in military installations. We just happen to be hunting cancer because people in the military also get cancer.

(1) We're mainly talking STEM BS to PhD, mostly under 40.

MarkMarine• 7 years ago

Pretty sure you’re not supposed to discriminate by age when hiring

nothal3• 7 years ago

He was describing the candidates he sees this behavior from. I don't think it's discrimination to observe obvious information.

a_imho• 7 years ago

Blocked for the GDPR conscious.

jmngomes• 7 years ago

https://outline.com/tWekNd

yoyo4658sld• 7 years ago

I was the first full-time engineer at the previous company that I worked for. We were acquired by one of the companies mentioned in this article. During the acquisition, employees were given the choice to simply not join the acquiring company. I pondered on it a lot given my ideological beliefs and stances. For practical reasons, I decided to join while a close colleague opted out…looking back, for a number of reasons (first-hand knowledge/exposure/experiences that I prefer to not dive into), I wish I had done the same.

This was a bit of time ago and I am no longer employed by said company.

I applaud these students for standing up for what they believe in.

ravenstine• 7 years ago

While there's definitely backlash happening against companies like Google and Facebook, I have another theory.

New graduates are less interested in these companies because they don't represent their generation. When I was a kid, the idea of working for these companies was cool not only because they had cool products but because they were relatively new and were something relevant to be a part of.

Today, these companies aren't so cool to graduates because they're old school in tech years. Facebook and Google are massive companies where your impact will probably be a drop in the ocean. In a lot of ways, they're the IBM and Xerox of today; why would a kid in the 70s or the 80s want to work for those stuffy and slow-moving corporations when they could work for Apple or Microsoft? Maybe millennial still view these companies the way they did in their youth, but I doubt that Gen Z see them as the exciting new thing. Young people naturally want to do something new and don't want to exist merely to be the Atlas of the same world their elders built.

zzzcpan• 7 years ago

Probably. Also in the early days Google was publishing things that were at the forefront of tech, which was interesting to everyone in tech. But over the years they got bigger, started to lag behind, putting out boring crap for strategic reasons. Big companies just cannot advance tech and be seen as exciting, as they are the ones trying to hold it back to keep getting those massive profits.

segmondy3• 7 years ago

The founders were also young! Today to the 18 or 22yrs old, Google founders are old men!

Tech backlash has come to Stanford

Related Stories