My experience with both engineers and code monkeys is that they are largely less empathic than the rest of the world. This is probably due in no small part that they tend to be from middle and upper middle class families and have been told their entire lives about how special they are. They then move directly into jobs with middle and upper middle class wages and are largely shielded from social injustice, partly because most of them are white and male, and partly because they are able to afford to live in areas where exposure to the justice system is largely a thing you hear about on the news.

If you want to talk about justice or lack thereof, talk to a criminal defense attorney. I know several who went to law school determined to become prosecutors, and changed their minds when they realized how screwed up the system is. When I asked one about a specific case, he said that the guy was guilty as all hell, but the police department and the DA had violated the defendant's rights. His reasoning is that if the justice system is corrupt, then it's better for the guilty to go free until society makes the necessary changes. The system needs to be better than the people it condemns in order for there to be any justice.

> I spent a great chunk of the book focused on the sovereigns that cyberspace would enable — geek driven sovereigns, as the law of those spaces would be code. And as a lawyer too often disappointed by the limited justice within my own field, I was hopeful that maybe here, something better would be built.

Justice requires empathy, and empathy is a character trait that humanity is not well-endowed with. Certainly not engineers, as a class, nor lawyers. Ironically, both groups of people skew towards having the same failing, which is using rules and axioms as a crutch to avoid exercising empathy.

While I agree that the GP paints with an overly large brush, I think the core of his argument could be that, as engineers and coders, we think of and create things based on __rules__. Something is either in your collection or isn't. The bridge can hold that much weight or it won't. My program's tests pass or fail. The rocket has enough delta-v to make orbit or doesn't. There is no "maybe" in MANY aspects of what we do as engineers or as programmers. Much of our work involves making sure that rules are kept inviolable, etc.

In contrast, acting on empathy often involves deciding to bend, suspend, or redefine rules or exceptions to them. No TV after 6, except on weekends. It's okay to leave time-out if the two year old needs to use the potty. (This has been especially apparent to me as a parent, hence my examples ;))

Un-empathetic behavior by admins or developers of a system like the one described here can probably partly be explained by a thought process like this:

- Cheating must never happen, or be ruthlessly punished, to protect the "good" players - We can undo / fix things, but we need some proof, since cheaters could say that they had $ZZZ in our system. - screenshots are about the only proof that a user could provide - Ergo, screenshots required to get things restored.

Like most security theater, the goals could very well be good (stop cheaters). The trouble is, in a case like this where the devs/admins were clearly at fault, good customer service should trump that. I think most of us agree that restoring what customers have lost -- even if it means some cheaters get back more than they had -- would restore a lot more goodwill from the community than taking a hard line to prevent cheaters will.

I definitely agree - taking a hard line on cheaters is a great way to lose your community, literally.

I got featured by Blizzard for my Starcraft II map and banned by an overzealous bot in the same week for "hacking." Tried to contact support, but no one apparently cared. Never played since.

This isn't an engineering or moral problem though. It's a business problem. They're clearly making a bad business decision by refusing to acknowledge the importance of active community players over hackers. This problem could have been solved fairly with reasonable rules, but clearly was not.

Don't take my comment as a slight on engineers. I have an engineering degree, practiced as one, and half my friends are still engineers. But they skew logical/mathematical, and that makes them, generally, less empathetic than average.