The topic of ethics barely comes up at all, possibly because it’s not really relevant for most day-to-day work. But it does make me wonder, has anyone here ever been in a situation where you were forced suggested to do something ethically questionable, or denied a project or position on ethical grounds?
Ethics and engineering oaths have come up several times on lobste.rs. For reference:
Fascinating! I do remember the “Programmer’s Oath” being posted a while ago. Too bad we are far too decentralized to achieve anything like that.
I have promised to follow this one.
As of yet, I’ve never been in a situation where I have to go and re-read it to help make a decision…
On a couple of occasions I’ve shown it to customers when they suggest that we lock administrators out of a system (I mean a traditional system that might, you know, run out of disk space!).
https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/code_of_ethics_diploma_english.pdf
The question of ethics or morals seems to come up occasionally. The smog-gate issue, self driving cars killing people, etc. I’m a programmer so I feel both sides of this issue e.g. While my animal brain wants blood for the programmers that wrote the code for these things, my thoughtful brain would never want to be blamed for something “out of my control.” The banality of evil by Hannah Arendt is a good read, it talks about how normal people do terrible terrible things. While I think you can point to high profile individuals like Uncle Bob, Bret Victor, etc. that would have the luxury of authority and context to be “ethical.” I think your general run of the mill programmer would not. Also this ethical conundrum is not isolated to programming. Other fields that seem to have issues are Medical and Financial off the top of my head.
At a prior job many years ago, I was shocked at the terrible practices used to “secure” a password. It was some home-grown pseudo hash that was just terrible and trivial to break. After I had updated that code to use industry standard techniques, a request came in from LEO to crack the password of a device used in a case for a drug dealer (drugs are bad, mmmmkay). I happily cracked the password and got a letter of thanks. I was young. Today I would probably refuse on moral grounds but I wonder, given the same situation of negligently bad password securing practices, what I would do.
“Margin Call” in an underrated film that delas oh-so-briefly, but, speaking from experience, meaningfully and realistically, on issues of ethics and morality, as seen through the lens of the (corporate side) of the Very Large Financial Institution, and is well worth a watch.
I’ve seen that one actually, it’s really good! I also really liked a similar German documentary about the ethics behind modern investment banking from the perspective of someone who worked at Deutsche Bank.