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Computer Science differs from the Medical field in that you never know what someone else might do with your work. In medicine at any given moment you know wheth

Computer Science differs from the Medical field in that you never know what someone else might do with your work. In medicine at any given moment you know whether or not you are acting in the patients best interest. Doctors still make mistakes of course, but they still know their intent. Now lets say I write a program to encrypt messages between two parties because their government is censoring free speech. Here my intentions are good. However, someone else could use that system to organize terrorist activities. It was never my intent but still it is my work being used to aid criminals. That's where the line gets blurry. In medicine, actions have immediate effect. They either help or hurt the patient. In computer science the same program can be both a blessing and a curse.

corobo 10y ago
In medicine you may be treating someone who may later go on to commit war crimes, it doesn't mean you're causing harm by proxy. The oath just says "help this person" it doesn't say "help this person if"
- nostrademons 10y ago
  The irony is that public condemnation usually goes the opposite way for software developers. For a doctor, their client is the patient, and they are bound by oath to help that patient. If the patient goes on to do horrible crimes, that's on the patient, not on the doctor. For a software engineer, the client is either their customer or the employer, and the equivalent oath would be to always act in their customer/employer's best interest. Most developers already do this - they typically don't continue to get paid if they don't. But the moral dilemmas that surround software are often of the form "You write software that massively violates peoples' privacy, gets people to click on ads, wastes peoples' time, etc." If an NSA developer did an IAmA and said "Yes, I write code to spy on people because I have a responsibility to the people that pay my salary", they'd be vilified, and more than a few people would likely say "No, you have a responsibility to the American people to stop doing what you're doing." If a doctor were to say "I refuse to treat this NSA engineer because he is harming humanity", he would be similarly vilified.
Terribledactyl 10y ago
I would say it's even blurrier than that. Some developers are making right next to the users, UI/Frontend stuff, other developers are back in the stack, or even further back building the tools other developers use. Who's the oath protecting there?

corobo 10y ago

In medicine you may be treating someone who may later go on to commit war crimes, it doesn't mean you're causing harm by proxy. The oath just says "help this person" it doesn't say "help this person if"

nostrademons 10y ago
The irony is that public condemnation usually goes the opposite way for software developers. For a doctor, their client is the patient, and they are bound by oath to help that patient. If the patient goes on to do horrible crimes, that's on the patient, not on the doctor. For a software engineer, the client is either their customer or the employer, and the equivalent oath would be to always act in their customer/employer's best interest. Most developers already do this - they typically don't continue to get paid if they don't. But the moral dilemmas that surround software are often of the form "You write software that massively violates peoples' privacy, gets people to click on ads, wastes peoples' time, etc." If an NSA developer did an IAmA and said "Yes, I write code to spy on people because I have a responsibility to the people that pay my salary", they'd be vilified, and more than a few people would likely say "No, you have a responsibility to the American people to stop doing what you're doing." If a doctor were to say "I refuse to treat this NSA engineer because he is harming humanity", he would be similarly vilified.

Terribledactyl 10y ago

I would say it's even blurrier than that. Some developers are making right next to the users, UI/Frontend stuff, other developers are back in the stack, or even further back building the tools other developers use. Who's the oath protecting there?