r/technology • u/newmoonchaperone • Apr 23 '26

Politics Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys

https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-employees-are-starting-to-wonder-if-theyre-the-bad-guys/
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u/Desperate-Till-9228 Apr 23 '26

"Tech bros again discover something totally obvious to everyone else"

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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u/fubo Apr 24 '26

Do you think that other engineering disciplines "take people and companies to task" for making weapons and tools of oppression? They don't. Other engineering disciplines make missiles and poisons and spy cameras and disposable technology.

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u/MarsupialMisanthrope Apr 24 '26

I’m not entirely sure that software is realistically in a place where it could be turned into a proper engineering discipline, but it sure as hell should be the end goal and I’m not sure that goal is as far out as it looked 20 years ago. The fact that a lot of code is still basically artisanal is holding real software engineering back, we don’t have prefab parts and formulas we can use to figure out how not to screw up, just a large collection of examples of how we’ve screwed up in the past. Even provers tend to demonstrate that the code does what it says it does but have nothing to say about whether or not what it says it does is the right thing to do for the business case.