[sonofhans]

Not OP, but 40 years in software, so here’s your answer — abstraction is the essence of programming. Get good enough at this, with a poor moral compass, and you can justify your code doing anything with no accountability whatsoever.

Corporate software engineers learn early on that they’re only responsible for their keystrokes (e.g., bug tickets, code formatting), not for the effects of their work (e.g., more efficient distribution of child pornography).

Most developers are so inured to this that they react defensively by reflex to any suggestion that their code should have done _anything_ other than what it did. They’re not responsible, see?