4 ms·

Those of you with a membership in ACM or IEEE, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on why you do. Those of you who don't, would you consider pledging yours

Those of you with a membership in ACM or IEEE, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on why you do. Those of you who don't, would you consider pledging yourself to a code of ethics if they met your requirements? What would those requirements be?

trentmb 11y ago
If it meant having a job or not, sure I guess.
- hlieberman 11y ago
  What if sticking to it meant that you'd have to resign? A code of ethics that you have to sign for work is one thing. A code of ethics that you hold above employment is quite another.
  - trentmb 11y ago
    On the spot? Probably not, no. I would begin looking for work elsewhere though, possibly in a different field.
  - slavik81 11y ago
    Programmers are well-paid and have excellent employment prospects. In the off chance I did encounter an unresolvable ethical issue, it would not be very hard to resign and find new employment elsewhere. Given how much better off I am than most other workers in this country, I think it's a small sacrifice. To address the thread topic, I'm a P.Eng, ACM member, and IEEE member.
    - hlieberman 11y ago
      Are you a P.Eng in software, or something else? (I know there are only a few places in the United States where you can even challenge the PE exam as a software engineer).
      - slavik81 11y ago
        I'm a Canadian. My degree is electrical, but my field of practice is software engineering.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  And this is the problem in a nutshell: "I'm okay with trying not to hurt people, as long as it pays better than hurting people does." I wonder if the real difference between software engineering and other engineering disciplines is that they have a culture of responsibility--of saying "hey, public safety is more important than money"--and we emphatically don't.
barrkel 11y ago
Shipping with bugs is a fact of life. Living with tech debt is an economic necessity because if you don't some other company will and they'll eat your lunch. The comparison with physical infrastructure doesn't really hold up. I've been a member of ACM primarily because I wanted easier access to ACM library papers, but not any more. I'm uninterested in turning software engineering into a gated discipline with a professional organisation acting as a monopoly keyholder. Software as a discipline affects too many areas of life for anything much more than a vague platitude as a code. Components may be used for good or evil in ways we can't control. Even something as potentially evil as Metasploit is also almost exactly the same thing you want to use to test for vulnerabilities (personally I would not write a plugin for it).
WildUtah 11y ago
If it were possible to commit programmers to a code of ethics, it would be possible to do what most professions do an organize to protect the careers and incomes of professionals. On top of the code of ethics would soon be refusing to work on any team with H1-Bs, just as doctors, lawyers, and accountants don't work with any peers who haven't passed the same qualification hurdles as they have. I don't like the idea of extensive central regulation, but it might well be better for programmers' lives.
- lambdapie 11y ago
  Economically putting up barriers for the sake of it (aside from valid issues of qualification required for the public good) is bad policy. It's good for the people who can get the qualification, but bad for everyone else. When you average it out, it's worse for society as a whole (this is roughly implied by the Welfare Theorem's of economics). Your argument that other professions do it is invalid. In fact the government should be more proactive in ensuring that professions only impose valid conditions on employment, and don't add spurious requirements in order to exclude people from the profession, in order to, as you say "protect [their] careers and incomes".
  - WildUtah 11y ago
    Programmers have to compete with doctors, lawyers, accountants, actuaries, nurses, dentists, schoolteachers, and pharmacists when we buy a house or seek to influence decisions of the companies where we work. We have to compete with them in income, prestige, bargaining power, moral influence, and credibility with financiers. We have to pay the higher wage rates they have achieved when we need their services. Unilateral disarmament has already led to a situation where 80,000 unregulated immigrants every year are competing with us while those regulated professions see few or none. We're not going to see them de-regulate in any of our lifetimes, because the theorems of economists don't persuade anyone -- except possibly computer programmers and we don't have any power or influence because we're not united to get any. So the best option is obviously to at least organize to get a fair shake. But so far there are few signs of that.
tsotha 11y ago
My ethics are my own. I see no reason to make a public spectacle out of it one way or another.
mannykannot 11y ago
I think you are putting the cart before the horse here, because current practice of software development is in a different universe than the one in which it is done as responsibly as you propose, and a developer's code of ethics is not the tool to move us there. There have been projects of the sort you propose (the space shuttle software comes to mind), but they are few and far between, and it simply not possible to quickly change the industry in general without completely replacing it. Putting aside the technical challenges, it simply is not economically feasible - we don't have the resources. The situation was very different with the Quebec bridge. At that time, the practice of quantitative engineering had advanced to the point where large, safe bridges could be reliably built, and all that was needed to make it happen was to deal with some human problems leading to sloppiness. The desired outcome was within grasp, and the public demanded it. Until the practice of software development reaches those points, a code of ethics is not going to make it happen. The department store collapse shows that engineering ethics need to be supported by society to be effective (and by support, I mean more than just lip service, and the support has to come from the people who set the agenda.) Edit: Let me explain further what I meant by 'quantitative engineering'. Bridge designs are analytically verified to ensure that they meet a formal set of safety requirements before they are built. In contrast, almost all software is built and then tested (and fixed, and tested...) against an informal specification (even in iterative and agile methods, the building of parts precedes their testing, as it must.) Analysis is relatively much less important, and is generally informal.

trentmb 11y ago

If it meant having a job or not, sure I guess.

hlieberman 11y ago
What if sticking to it meant that you'd have to resign? A code of ethics that you have to sign for work is one thing. A code of ethics that you hold above employment is quite another.
- trentmb 11y ago
  On the spot? Probably not, no. I would begin looking for work elsewhere though, possibly in a different field.
- slavik81 11y ago
  Programmers are well-paid and have excellent employment prospects. In the off chance I did encounter an unresolvable ethical issue, it would not be very hard to resign and find new employment elsewhere. Given how much better off I am than most other workers in this country, I think it's a small sacrifice. To address the thread topic, I'm a P.Eng, ACM member, and IEEE member.
  - hlieberman 11y ago
    Are you a P.Eng in software, or something else? (I know there are only a few places in the United States where you can even challenge the PE exam as a software engineer).
    - slavik81 11y ago
      I'm a Canadian. My degree is electrical, but my field of practice is software engineering.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
And this is the problem in a nutshell: "I'm okay with trying not to hurt people, as long as it pays better than hurting people does." I wonder if the real difference between software engineering and other engineering disciplines is that they have a culture of responsibility--of saying "hey, public safety is more important than money"--and we emphatically don't.

barrkel 11y ago

Shipping with bugs is a fact of life. Living with tech debt is an economic necessity because if you don't some other company will and they'll eat your lunch. The comparison with physical infrastructure doesn't really hold up. I've been a member of ACM primarily because I wanted easier access to ACM library papers, but not any more. I'm uninterested in turning software engineering into a gated discipline with a professional organisation acting as a monopoly keyholder. Software as a discipline affects too many areas of life for anything much more than a vague platitude as a code. Components may be used for good or evil in ways we can't control. Even something as potentially evil as Metasploit is also almost exactly the same thing you want to use to test for vulnerabilities (personally I would not write a plugin for it).

WildUtah 11y ago

If it were possible to commit programmers to a code of ethics, it would be possible to do what most professions do an organize to protect the careers and incomes of professionals. On top of the code of ethics would soon be refusing to work on any team with H1-Bs, just as doctors, lawyers, and accountants don't work with any peers who haven't passed the same qualification hurdles as they have. I don't like the idea of extensive central regulation, but it might well be better for programmers' lives.

lambdapie 11y ago
Economically putting up barriers for the sake of it (aside from valid issues of qualification required for the public good) is bad policy. It's good for the people who can get the qualification, but bad for everyone else. When you average it out, it's worse for society as a whole (this is roughly implied by the Welfare Theorem's of economics). Your argument that other professions do it is invalid. In fact the government should be more proactive in ensuring that professions only impose valid conditions on employment, and don't add spurious requirements in order to exclude people from the profession, in order to, as you say "protect [their] careers and incomes".
- WildUtah 11y ago
  Programmers have to compete with doctors, lawyers, accountants, actuaries, nurses, dentists, schoolteachers, and pharmacists when we buy a house or seek to influence decisions of the companies where we work. We have to compete with them in income, prestige, bargaining power, moral influence, and credibility with financiers. We have to pay the higher wage rates they have achieved when we need their services. Unilateral disarmament has already led to a situation where 80,000 unregulated immigrants every year are competing with us while those regulated professions see few or none. We're not going to see them de-regulate in any of our lifetimes, because the theorems of economists don't persuade anyone -- except possibly computer programmers and we don't have any power or influence because we're not united to get any. So the best option is obviously to at least organize to get a fair shake. But so far there are few signs of that.

tsotha 11y ago

My ethics are my own. I see no reason to make a public spectacle out of it one way or another.

mannykannot 11y ago

I think you are putting the cart before the horse here, because current practice of software development is in a different universe than the one in which it is done as responsibly as you propose, and a developer's code of ethics is not the tool to move us there. There have been projects of the sort you propose (the space shuttle software comes to mind), but they are few and far between, and it simply not possible to quickly change the industry in general without completely replacing it. Putting aside the technical challenges, it simply is not economically feasible - we don't have the resources. The situation was very different with the Quebec bridge. At that time, the practice of quantitative engineering had advanced to the point where large, safe bridges could be reliably built, and all that was needed to make it happen was to deal with some human problems leading to sloppiness. The desired outcome was within grasp, and the public demanded it. Until the practice of software development reaches those points, a code of ethics is not going to make it happen. The department store collapse shows that engineering ethics need to be supported by society to be effective (and by support, I mean more than just lip service, and the support has to come from the people who set the agenda.) Edit: Let me explain further what I meant by 'quantitative engineering'. Bridge designs are analytically verified to ensure that they meet a formal set of safety requirements before they are built. In contrast, almost all software is built and then tested (and fixed, and tested...) against an informal specification (even in iterative and agile methods, the building of parts precedes their testing, as it must.) Analysis is relatively much less important, and is generally informal.