Ethical Development (aka Why We’re All Spoiled Brats)

Shawn Guenther
Jul 22, 2017 · 6 min read

As I was writing my last article I couldn’t help but feel like it needed an opposition. A couple people told me the same after they’d read it. Well, because all PMs are of split minds: here, after a fashion, is that counterpoint.

Walking on Sunshine

On a tour through a Google facility a few months ago I saw painted on the wall — in a very cool graffiti style, because this is Google— the words “Permissionless Development” with a few guiding bullets. The idea was that you build first, flesh out the idea later because your passion as a maker will lead to great things as long as your motives are pure.

This is a superb philosophy, but — and accuse me of cynicism or a bleeding heart here — the immediate reaction when I read it was to build another poster in my mind entitled “Ethical Development.” That is: just because you can doesn’t mean you should, even when your motives are pure. Seems bold to challenge a theory that likely cost more than I’ll make in 10 years to develop, but I’m going to do it anyway.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Sir Ken Robinson

Back in Time

We like to cast a sideways glance at the way things used to be done. I threw down the gauntlet against the past in writing a week ago. But do you know what the old ways gave us? The foundations of a world that allowed the conception of the new ways. Pyramids, castles, empires, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, vehicles, bombs, hairspray, almost every food recipe that sustained humanity from antiquity… these are all things “built” under an inherently waterfall cycle. Don’t believe me?

Have you ever walked through Versailles, Louis XIV’s glorious crib? I doubt very much that the chefs of Versailles tried out phases of new recipes on a man called “the only King of France grand enough to hold that title.” No, you and your sous chefs choked down those iterations internally until you could provide the King something worthy of his admiration.

Ever seen the Great Pyramids of Giza? Think those were rev 5.7? I think not. You don’t scrawl an algorithm into a textbook and release another next quarter that’s “more right.”

“Say ‘what’ again. I dare you. I double dare you. Say ‘what’ one more ******* time” — Jules

Glitter

The truth is that waterfall is not evil. In fact, no matter how agile you are you are still waterfall over very short distances. Sometimes you have to hold on until it’s perfect before you let a message, a product, a book, a painting out into the world. Iteration is wonderful, but the idea has given birth to as many atrocities as jaw-dropping beauties.

I have, in my master bedroom, a 37" CRT television. It was made in the previous century, let’s leave it at that. It has outlived two PCs and 3 flat-panel monitors in the last decade. I have a refrigerator in my garage that my wife inherited from her grandparents that is older than I am and which has outlived a refrigerator and a wine cooler that were barely 5 years old.

“They just don’t make 'em like they used to” — every human born prior to 1980

There was a quality borne of the rigid, methodical clockwork of history that cannot be argued. We now live devoid of that, in a disposable world with disposable cars, disposable homes, and disposable relationships.

Runaway

The digital nomad is the epitome of this notion of the temporary, proving that our very way of habitation is disposable. You can literally take your consumerism with you anywhere in the world. Tell me that doesn’t give you pause, even for a second. Tell me our technological privilege doesn’t make you the least part sorrowful.

Video game creators discovered, not many years ago, the awesome responsibility that comes with their profession. Starcraft, Farmville, Everquest, Pokemon Go, and World of Warcraft have claimed jobs, families, even lives in some very terrible awful horrible cases. Were these corrupt developers seeking to control the minds of the weak for population control? Of course not; in fact they were trying to do the opposite by creating a method of escaping what can be a painful and chaotic world, for a brief time, to relieve stress.

The sobering reality of addiction has caused the entire industry to pause in order to consider the weight of their ability: at the height of Farmville’s popularity a handful of coders had a control over the time management of millions that would make the Pied Piper cry.

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” — the apostle Paul (more or less)

Shut Up And Smile

Now I’m not arguing that people have no personal responsibility, nor am I claiming that we’re going to read how a guy went on a 21-day Coursera bender and died, or that a woman’s Duolingo obsession has rendered her catatonic from linguistic overload. But I am saying we must recognize that as we pay tribute to our craft and our science by creating awesome things for ourselves and our users we owe a higher responsibility to humanity as a whole. Creating for people and creating for users is not the same thing.

What we build and how we build it must pay homage to this fact. When, as a coder, I neglect to write a unit test case because I’m trying to finish today I have not only given the finger to my coworkers who have to clean up after me, but I’ve short-changed my users, set a terrible precedent for my junior programmers, and in some very slight way I have ensured that my product is a little less durable, a little more temporary in the world.

As a PM when I neglect design in my UI because it’s tedious or I don’t like my designer I risk not only the users' joy in my product, but I tangibly endanger the jobs and livelihoods of every person I work with. As an executive when I concern myself more with what my boss thinks of me than what my team needs from me I endanger their jobs and my own, as well as that of my boss and every vendor or client who depends on the output of my business.

“All we need is Love and beer.” — Bowling for Soup

You Got It

Ultimately this is what I mean when I try to force this phrase — Ethical Development — down your throat. I mean that if you are involved in the making of a thing in any way — paintings, wallpaper, books, highways, lawn sculptures, children, neural networks, hyperloops, firewalls… whatever — then you are obligated not to what you think, feel, envision, or need, but to what we all do as a unit.

“Can’t we all just get along?” — Rodney King

We are one organism, humanity. Fight against that all you want, but what you do affects my world and I yours. Our laziness, sloppiness, rashness, and abandon sloshes out onto those around us and it stains for a very long time. Often for generations.

Our aim must be higher than to the next great product, but rather to the next small step toward a more whole, healed, and stable human condition. If that seems too broad a brush then you start as the pyramid builders did: with the small work, the work no one wants to do. The work you typically have to be whipped to do.

Talk to that designer, write that test case, take a minute to teach that intern why clocking in on time matters, think about how that site looks on a $50 phone, explain to that salesperson why you need to do research before building her feature, and really think about if that UX workflow makes sense. These things combine to make the world we live in. Is it really so much to ask that we focus on these things simply for the quality of it?

Shawn Guenther

Written by

Product manager, maker, and functional team guru

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