Software Engineers Are Not Politicians

https://alexwennerberg.com/blog/2025-11-28-engineering.html

by ptx • 8 months ago

3 4 8 months ago

salawat2• 8 months ago

Software Engineers cannot afford to not be politicians at some level. Once you let someone run off with the primitives to make a system, there is no taking it back. You are writing the probability space on which policymakers can build whatever nightmarish they're salivating over this week.

I want to emphasize. There is no neutrality from this. The profession is inherently political, and the more you try put your head in the sand and ignore that fact, the more you hand the reins to someone else to make that decision for you.

alexwennerberg2• 8 months ago

I agree, "politics" exist in any human institution. The issue is when political maneuvering becomes the sole or primary role of a software engineer -- that is a symptom of dysfunction. The primary role of a software engineer should be software engineering.

salawat2• 8 months ago

The primary role of a software engineer should be software engineering.

No. Before you were a software engineer, you were a member of society, choosing what to do, what not to, and who to trust. The software engineer exists on top of that person. We might want to constrain ourselves to that column of work, software engineering, but it is plain to see in just the last year where so many unethical systems have been unified and exploited that it is not sufficient to simply hand these powerful computational primitives out willy nilly without taking into account what is desired to be done with them. Politics is not above your pay grade, it is becoming the essence of your pay grade, because it is through technology that normal political systems are being upended or coopted beyond any intention of their designs, into which at their time of design, was factored in a degree of friction we remove in leaps and bounds, destabilizing the human systems underneath.

If you haven't been thinking a little bit about the ethics/political consequences of what you're working on, you haven't been doing your job.

Software Engineers Are Not Politicians

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