For consumer privacy in tech, can the buck stop at software engineers? That and more news and views from the week

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As Silicon Valley continues to iterate on its social conscience, who will have the most say over the moral direction of Big Tech? Maybe it'll be software engineers.

We're already seeing devs elbow out "evil" organizations from the open-source projects they're creating. And the engineers who orchestrated walkouts at Google over the company's labor policies have been in the news for weeks.

So how about tackling something like consumer privacy?

The public concern over how tech companies handle – or mishandle – people's private data has grown over recent years, culminating in Big Tech's home state designing the GDPR-like California Consumer Privacy Act that's set to kick off at the top of 2020. But for the parts of tech and parts of the country where that law doesn't go far enough, can it be the workers who write the code behind the services and software in question that take a stand to uphold privacy standards?

"You should think about consumer privacy with every single line of code in your IDE," said Brad S., a software engineering specialist at GE Aviation. "I think that every software engineer should start to be aware that they do play a role." 

Brad was one of a number of engineers on LinkedIn who wrote in for my prompt asking how software engineers do – or should – consider consumer privacy in the software they write. Plenty I heard from agree with his take.

"I tend to think of software engineering as a sort of lawyering," said Joshua Moore, senior software engineer at 2CP Holdings. "Often our clients and their clients can't reason out computer programs for themselves, which is why they hire us to do the work for them. Like doctors who study medicine on our behalf, and lawyers who study the law on our behalf, we have achieved a professional superiority in one specific field, and it is up to us to responsibly wield that power."

But David Gordon, systems engineer at Experimental Design, said that software engineers at large are far from reaching full mobilization on the topic of consumer privacy and other societal causes in tech, calling "pseudo-accountability" on the little bits of action we've seen so far.

"In my personal experience … Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general has a rather insulated culture where software developers are often oblivious to, or even willfully ignorant of, the societal consequences of what they create. This includes handling of personal data," said Gordon.

Android developer Ashique Chowdhury's comment plays to Gordon's point: "Responsibility of work is intrinsic to all fields. ... I would bring up any breach to this morality, but will still do my job. Unfortunately, cognizance alone isn't enough to solve a problem. Programmers are rarely put into these positions of power to decide matters like these."

Meanwhile, some who wrote in claim they do regularly flex their leverage at work when it comes to protecting consumer privacy in their code.

"As a software engineer … there have been request I’ve refused to execute because it would have bent my own moral compass," said Matthew D., programmer at Ergobaby.

"Working on Mobile Apps, often times I encounter 'permission settings' when working on new features. … [My peers and I] start discussions about what our users would think about the added permissions or lack of during the initial install/first run of the app we work on," said Gerald Soriano, an app developer at Progressive Insurance.

Others offered suggestions of what can be done moving forward: "Perhaps the solution is restricting construction of any API? Heuristic auditing of public traffic?" wrote Stephen Flynn, a senior web developer at Philips Respironics.

There are also some hard numbers that show at least one way software engineers are moving against privacy slanted tech companies: by making choices not to work at them. For example, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook saw its job acceptance rates from software engineer candidates drop to almost 50% from its 2016 heyday of nearly 90%, a CNBC report from this year showed.

"I passed on an opportunity with FB with their Reality Research Labs specifically because of this," Barron Barnett, an engineer at Aerospace, wrote on LinkedIn at the time.

"If there comes a project that would distort the respect for the privacy laws, and I could not convince the stakeholders the right thing to do, I would withdraw myself from the project," wrote senior data engineer Ian Tsoa on my latest prompt. "Sooner or later, such an organization would get into trouble anyway."

Do you think software engineers are uniquely positioned to help improve societal-tech problems like consumer privacy worries? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Tech updates...

• V8 8.0 was released
• Crystal 0.32.1 was released
• Dart 2.7 was released
• Node 13.5.0 was released

More from this week…

What's hurting your code quality at work? Forty percent of the software engineers surveyed for a new report by Diffblue said lack of automation and tight deadlines negatively affected their code-writing, with both responses sharing the top answer. That list also included things like insufficient testing (39%), lack of budget (31%) and over-reliance on third-party vendors (23%). Meanwhile, 83% of all the software developers surveyed said they feel that their company’s software quality could be improved. Diffblue CEO Mathew Lodge wrote an endorsement for more automation in software development to go along with the release of the report: "When robotic tasks can be assigned to machines, they should be—not only to retain a more satisfied and effective workforce in a time when top talent can be hard to find, but also to improve the quality of the code they create," Lodge said.

You can read what engineers on LinkedIn said hinders their code-writing the most here.

Here are the skills you need to be a software development consultant. Cristina Ruth, who has experience in both software development and software development consulting in her career, recently blogged that things like teaching chops, business understanding, technical agnosticism and a larger willingness to listen are what you need to shine in the latter role. "To be a successful developer consultant requires not only technical skills, but a myriad of interpersonal/business skills, which are harder to master," Ruth writes. You can read her full list of "14 Skills You Need To Be A Successful Developer Consultant" over at DEV. 

Have you done any consulting in software development? In what other ways does the job differ – good and bad – from day-to-day developing? Share your take in a comment below.

Is it always right to take developer cues from the companies who create the systems you're building for? In a recent edition of his Android development newsletter, Nate Ebel wrote about Google's relatively new Navigation Architecture Component for its mobile OS. Though the NAC looks to standardize and simplify how apps move from one screen to the next, that doesn't mean all devs will want to rewrite their apps to include it – especially if a dev believes the navigation solution they've already built for their app is better. Ebel says integrating the new Navigation component "might constitute a significant refactoring effort in an existing app," but he's found that "roughly 50%" of devs he's come across are using it anyway.

What do you think of standard OEM-type dev solutions in apps and software? Is it always smart to use them, or do you prefer to build exactly what you need? Leave your thoughts below.

What was the most interesting thing to you this week in software engineering? Please join the conversation in the comments below. See you after the holidays!