Sadly, I've worked with software engineers who had absolutely no ethical qualm with implementing basically anything their boss wanted them to implement. Dark patterns, Benchmark cheating, Excessive user data collection, I'm sure they wouldn't even balk at writing Malware or Ransomware. This is why ethical engineers opting out of the project or job will never work: There's always someone lined up willing to write the unethical code.
I recommend that everyone read Stanley Milgram's book Obedience to Authority about his fake shock experiments.
Some people simply suspend moral judgement entirely in circumstances where someone else is calling the shots. They no more regard themselves as culpable for the bad outcomes as they do an automobile operated by a drunk driver. At a certain point, many people just switch off the moralizing, automatically assigning all of the responsibility to the order-giver.
It's an interesting phenomenon. A side effect, I find, is that people get very very upset when you name and shame individual employees doing unethical things at work that are legal and fall under the umbrella of "corporate initiatives" such as implementing antipatterns. The guilt for such seems to be perceived to fall with management or "product people", not developers, even though the developers are the ones who wrote the code.
Same for, say, warfighters. People don't regard the conscripted infantrymen at fault for the deaths, even though it is often literally their hand on the trigger.
I recommend the the article about the infantry men who did not shoot https://www.americanheritage.com/secret-soldiers-who-didnt-s...
Or better yet the book humankind from rutger bregman. Who wrote a whole chapter about why this experiment does not support this conclusion
I think, the reason for that, is that management/leadership gets compensated fairly well for it. If this management doesn't have any particular talent or skills that can justify their compensation, then it's the responsibility that they are holding.
