17 ms·

Programmers confess unethical, illegal tasks asked of them

181 points by zeapo 10y ago

volkanh 10y ago
What makes a programmer different than any other person who needs to ask the same question to himself/herself? What about unethical weapons, medicine, sales practices?
- steveeq1 10y ago
  or legal tactics.
- yetihehe 10y ago
  That's what the article is saying, but in last sentence. According to author we should have associations like doctors, IEEE and Association for Computer Machinery is already starting to do this.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    And have been for years the late Daniel D. McCracken do work on this way back.
- bearcobra 10y ago
  Nothing really. I think that providing a general ethics lesson then combining it with industry specific examples helps give people a more complete understanding of what these conflicts look like.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  Everybody should ask these questions but in reality most people don't and go along with their leaders. Standing up for your values is inconvenient and often comes at a high cost if you are not independently wealthy.
  - devoply 10y ago
    Exactly. The problem is that everyone is beholden to money. If you do the right thing, you lose your job. And maybe even get blacklisted so you don't work again. Stuff like this is stuff of nightmares but it happens over and over again. Enough to make people think twice or thrice about going against the status quo.
    - maxxxxx 10y ago
      Its enough to believe you may lose your job. Most people can't afford to find out if that's really the case.
    - hash-set 10y ago
      But at least you can't give them your body and mind--that is the heart of resistance.
    - wallacoloo 10y ago
      It's not difficult to do at least some research of a company before you accept a job. Take the extra month to find a job with a company that's never had any scandals that you're uncomfortable with, one whose business model isn't built on violating their customer's privacies or being otherwise ethically dubious, and one who emphasizes ethical responsibility in their code of conduct. In other words, pay the cost upfront. It's not a sure way to ensure you never encounter these problems, but it will reduce the likelihood.
      - devoply 10y ago
        The market is either a supply market or a demand market. If you are in a job supply market, where there is more supply than demand, perhaps you can do that. If you are in a job demand market you can not do that. And sure this should be how a person exercises his morality. But I think most ethically dubious situations are not evident outright. Big companies spend a lot of money through P/R department to keep their images clean.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  It's a two step process. First we teach all the programmers to always be ethical. Then we teach everyone to program. Boom. No more problems.
- hash-set 10y ago
  Pretty much the whole Military Industrial Complex is unethical and I have avoided them in my career. But here's the thing I realized: There isn't a single industry out there that isn't getting some kind of government subsidy, tax break, or major handout. So we're all ethically compromised! But I still won't work for the war machine directly. I'd rather go hungry.
  - platz 10y ago
    Stepping in to alter what the 'free market' desires is not de-facto unethical.
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    Immoral yes. Unethical no. They do horrible things, but they do abide the rules placed upon them. Those rules are scant and toothless but that is a different question.
platz 10y ago
"He refused to do it but says, "there's always an engineer willing" to simply follow orders" Chad and Brad. Do you think doctors and engineers could have such high standards for themselves if, they didn't restrict access to their profession somehow? There is no desire to get rid of coding bootcamps on any side—negative costs are externalized to the consumer.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  It's not so much about limiting access as simply if Chad and Brad are too bound by law to refuse doing unethical things, there will be no (legally employable) engineer willing to "simply follow orders".
  - platz 10y ago
    > bound by law yes, this amounts to more or less, the same thing-at least interpreting in terms of adding constraints.
- vacri 10y ago
  I've worked with doctors that have been low on ethics. I used to be an EEG tech, and we got a cover neurologist in to diagnose some EEG recordings (the regular neuros were on leave). Despite the tech reports stating exactly when and where the abnormalities occurred in the 20-min recordings, along with annotations in the recording itself, this fucker just looked at the first minute, and if the abnormality wasn't there, just diagnosed it as 'normal', no abnormality. We had to get his batch of reporting redone by a neuro with a conscience. However, doctors hold together very strongly. This doctor and another doctor we worked with were acknowledged by our neuros as terrible and doing their patients a misservice, but none of our doctors even contemplated reporting them in any way. Long story short, there's 'bad orders' in medicine as well.
throwanem 10y ago
Other engineering disciplines provide infrastructure for their members to include ethical considerations in their analysis of their work, e.g. the Iron Ring [1]. There's a strong argument that our discipline can profit by their example. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
- auxym 10y ago
  The Iron Ring is mostly symbolic and a tradition, but protection of public is the whole idea behind the Professional Engineer licenses in a lot of countries (I'm mostly familiar with Canada). Unfortunately, laws seem awefully traditional and outdated, and at least some of the system has turned into a form of rent seeking. Even as a mechanical engineer, most of my work is not really considered as engineering work to the letter of the law, because the law was written in the 1960s with mostly civil works in mind. I get the feeling it's either going to take a long time or a huge catastrophy for legislators to catch up to licensing for professional software work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Do we need legislators and regulators to tell us to do our work with due care for those whose lives we affect in so doing? There's a role for them, to be sure. But as you say, and as we see from the history of other disciplines, that role is generally after the fact. We can, and I think must, ourselves create professional societies which can develop codes of ethical conduct and put incentives in place to uphold them. To a certain extent, that comes after the fact, too. But we're at the very least rapidly approaching a sufficiency of horrible examples from which to derive salutary lessons. I'd like to see us develop a sense of professional culture, as an industry, which gives us to think long and cautiously in those cases where we might produce yet another.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > Do we need legislators and regulators to tell us to do our work with due care for those whose lives we affect in so doing? We do, for our own protection. Doing so strikes the weapon from the hands of our managers - they can't push us into doing unethical work that easily because they know we're bound by law to refuse it. This is a case of Schelling-style strategy, where limiting your choice/freedom actually boosts your bargaining power.
sandworm101 10y ago
The article has completely missed several points. Computer Programmer, or coder, or whatever we want to call it, is not at this point a recognized "profession" with special protections/duties that come along with such a designation. Comparisons to engineers/doctors/lawyers is therefore nor appropriate. Professions are fields that grant members special abilities and protections beyond lay persons. They are officially trusted by society to do things that normal people are not allowed to do. Doctors cut people open. Engineers put their stamp on bridges carrying people. Lawyers hold client secrets. Nurses handle dangerous drugs. These professions are officially recognized in law. They have societies that too are recognized in law (State Medical/Bars etc). With this then comes the ban on anyone outside the profession performing such tasks. What would a world look like should "computer programmer" become a recognized profession as the article suggests? Will non-professionals be forbidden from writing code? Will we have state boards deciding how and by whom computer programing may be taught as they do law schools? Would hardware with open firmware be sold only to licensed professionals as we do with medicines? That's an absurd world. Programming isn't a profession because it simply could not exist as a profession. Professional associations and ethical standards certainly have a place in educating, but they should not be given the power to actually regulate behavior.
- rini17 10y ago
  Expecting licensed programmers' stamp on critical code is really such a stretch of imagination?
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  I agree with a lot of this. Without some kind of official sanctioning, programmers lack a mandate to push back on management, which makes it much harder. On the other hand, programmer is such a diverse topic that any kind of sanctioning is bound to be inappropriate for the vast majority of programmers. Kind of like making an electrical engineer know about civil engineering to get sanctioned as an "engineer" (I know this happens, but it doesn't make it very right; there even many different kinds of EE and so on...). Heck, when I was at Microsoft, we were subjected to yearly generic ethic training that was very difficult for us researchers to relate to. I would prefer some kind of universal professional ethics and responsibilities that wouldn't be related to your specific profession. Heck, being ethical applies to mathematicians, economists, journalists, musicians, programmers, engineers, and so on.
markharris99 10y ago
> "He refused to do it but says, "there's always an engineer willing" to simply follow orders" It's not just about that. If you are not in a first world country, then feeding your family and ensuring you have a roof over your head are more important than breaking your own ethics with developing software. As someone who lives in a first world country, the UK. I have I found ethics to be a sliding scale. We live in a world where gaps in the market will always be filled by someone. Frackers, Oil companys, GMO companies, Chemical companies, the list can go on and on. One side will say they are doing a public good. One other side will argue they are harming the planet and it's unethical for them to operate. The only way to really change things, is make a movement and vote with the collective wallet. The market will dictate what is acceptable and what is not. Per the article: I think the more programmers will adopt this attitude, companies will simply stop asking and move the project offshore. I know from experience, they have no such qualms.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  >> ... feeding your family and ensuring you have a roof over your head are more important than breaking your own ethics with developing software. That's why recognized professionals (ie lawyer/doctors etc) expect to be well-compensated. They are expected to quit, to walk away from unethical situations even where doing so means they loose out on work. This is why many professions do try to limit the number of members as flooding the market, lowering wages, will push some members to do things that damage the profession.
  - arjie 10y ago
    Well, it hardly works. If you want to find a doctor who'll give you Propofol so you can sleep, you can find one. There are enough doctors who'll also recommend you for a medical marijuana licence without actually diagnosing you with a condition that requires it. The rampant practice of advising you to get tests you don't need is also a sign that restricting supply does not mean doctors adhere to their ethical principles. Don't think I have a vendetta here against doctors. My parents are both surgeons, so trust me when I say my general feelings about medical professionals are overwhelmingly positive. Your argument just strikes me as disingenuous.
anigbrowl 10y ago
Many years ago I automated an accounting procedure for Banker's Trust company, a large international financial firm. I was somewhat surprised they entrusted such a complex task to a mere contract worker. Essentially it looked at exchange and interest rates in the firm's many different operating jurisdictions each month so as to figure out the least efficient allocation of expenses/liabilities...so as to maximize deductible expenses for taxation purposes...or so I was told. This seemed odd to me but I was still in my early 20s and didn't know anything about finance - though I couldn't help noticing that I was being paid a few thousand pounds a month to automate a system that seemed to be saving the bank many millions. After I was done They relocated me to a tiny basement room and kept 'forgetting' to give me any new tasks until I quit out of boredom. Some years later it emerged that Banker's Trust had been ripping off their corporate clients wholesale. I've often wondered if I unwittingly helped them construct the tools with which to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankers_Trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankers_Trust My point here is not only that managers often request unethical behavior of their tech staff, but that the tech people often have no way of assessing the probity of what they're being asked to do. At the time I was only about 21 or 22 and all I knew was how to make big spreadsheets that ran really really fast; I had no insight into the integrity or otherwise of the accounting procedure they asked me to automate and I didn't really think about it until I had a functioning prototype a month or two in and realized that my little project was shuffling very large amounts of money around. I had been out of the job for a good while before I learned enough to wonder whether the underlying process was in fact fraudulent.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "After I was done They relocated me to a tiny basement room and kept 'forgetting' to give me any new tasks until I quit out of boredom." That sounds like a reward to me. If it weren't for the ethical cost you mention in the rest of your post, I'd take that job in a heartbeat. If someone wants to pay me for doing nothing, I can find plenty of things that interest me to do on their time. On the other hand, I guess "doing nothing" doesn't look too great on your resume. And if you don't learn new skills or work with new tech, that would cost you in the long run. But I could at least work on some open source projects or learn a new language or something. That way I could have something to show for my time, and have fun as well.
h4nkoslo 10y ago
"Ethics" codes are in practice a mechanism for a formal institutional body to exercise power over a profession. Case in point: "But what developers really need is an organization that governs and regulates their profession like other industries have" What this inevitably turns into is a collection of content-free truisms (eg "programmers shouldn't write programs that break the law") combined with credentialism ("we won't let you join the Society of Programmers without a degree in computer science, and it's 'unethical' to hire a non-SOP programmer to work on your project") and politically motivated de-credentialing ("we have determined your work on the Trump advertising program targeting white voters was implicitly racist; you're disbarred"). If you think the last part is silly, here's an article citing architects claiming it would be "unethical" to work on the border wall. http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wall-impossible-build-architects-2016-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wall-impossible-build-a...
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "If you think the last part is silly, here's an article citing architects claiming it would be "unethical" to work on the border wall." That reminds me of the American Psychological Association's (APA) position on torture: "Any direct or indirect participation in any act of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by psychologists is strictly prohibited. There are no exceptions."[1] This might seem unfortunate to some, or may smell to them of unwarranted political meddling. But I for one am glad these professions are taking these strong and clear ethical stances, and doing so on what I consider to be the "right" side (ie. anti-torture and anti-xenophobia). I'm also not sure how one could separate ethics from politics. Some people even believe that every action is political. [1] - http://www.apa.org/ethics/programs/position/ http://www.apa.org/ethics/programs/position/
  - h4nkoslo 10y ago
    You evidently think your livelihood should in principle be contingent on the desires of whomever controls the governing apparatus. If tomorrow you need a certification of racial purity, or a Temple recommend, in order to practice your profession, that's just how it shakes out. If everyone agreed on ethical codes, after all, we wouldn't need them. Why are people like you so desperate to hand someone else the whip hand? Do you actually think Your Kind Of Guy is going to be in power in perpetuity? Does it actually seem to you like these guys are reasoning from some set of elucidated & unchanging moral principles? Ironically the nightmarish story of how ineffective the APA's "ethics code" was should permanently disabuse you of the notion that they're useful for anything other than economic protectionism and occasionally crushing the outgroup du jour.
g051051 10y ago
I used to work for a place with serious ethics issues. We'd sell customized software packages along with a hardware solution, used by cities and counties. Once I was told that, per the contract, we were supposed to hand over the hardware and software for a system the next day. The software hadn't been customized or prepared in any way. Because of a loophole in the contract, it specified only delivery, not installation. So I was ordered to rent a van, load up the hardware, drive it and the software down to the county in question, and hand it all over. They handed me a data tape with the name of the county printed on it, we loaded the van, and sent I headed down. You can imagine how well it went. I got there, and the two heads of the project down there were waiting, and expecting not only to take delivery, but to see it all installed and working. I had to explain that wasn't my task, and they got more and more upset with me. I had to tell them to call my boss to get answers, because I was just a drone. After yelling at my boss, I was instructed to do minimal setup to verify the hardware worked. I did so, but then they insisted that I prove that the tape had the software. When I did, it unfortunately showed the wrong county name, because whoever had made the tape just took another installation tape and put the "wrong" name on it. I had to tap dance a bit there, but I finally got to leave. So, unhappy me (which meant nothing to my boss) and unhappy customers (which I got blamed for). Another time, they told me to put a label on a blank tape and ship it to a customer, to pretend to meet a delivery milestone. I refused. I think my boss did it himself.
- devoply 10y ago
  At the end of the day is the managerial class. They are the ones making the stuff go down, and then the code monkey gets blamed for their lack of ethics. Really? You tell us to jump, and we ask how high, and that's generally expected. And you expect us to bear the burden of ethics too. I don't think so. You want to hold anyone responsible, hold the people who gave the orders, who signed the contracts. Not the code monkey whose entire life is predicated upon carrying out orders as they are given.
  - unimpressive 10y ago
    Change the incentive structure. Punishment doesn't happen to those who are deserving, it happens to those who can't prevent it.
eklavya 10y ago
Reading the comments posted on the AWS vs GCE thread, I would say trolling the competitor? It's so obvious they are not even trying to hide it.
throwaway2016a 10y ago
When I was earning my CS degree, Ethics was a mandatory course. As it was for other engineering majors as well. Having been in the industry a while I think the worst thing I have been asked to do was participate in a program that installed our software on the user's machine without their consent. The CEO argued they did give their consent, which was technically true... they could uncheck the "Install partner apps" checkbox before clicking next but it wasn't very obvious. Thing is, that practice is (was? I hope) common everywhere from Yahoo, AOL, etc... so it was one of those "Everyone is doing it" things. I pushed back pretty hard but ended up losing the battle. In hindsight I wish I had walked. Ethics aside, none of the customers who got our app this way gave us very good reviews and their lifetime value was way less than customers acquired other ways.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  > When I was earning my CS degree, Ethics was a mandatory course. As it was for other engineering majors as well. Many of us didn't major in engineering, as the article states. There are no ethics classes in Math (what I studied in school). > In hindsight I wish I had walked. I have not yet had to make this choice, but I am specifically making sure my financial situation is in order enough that I wouldn't be tempted to go along with something blatantly illegal or unethical. I'm not completely sure if, in the moment, with the ability to pay rent on the line, if I could refuse in a situation like you mentioned. Luckily, I've never been asked to do anything too questionable.
  - throwaway2016a 10y ago
    > Many of us didn't major in engineering, as the article states. There are no ethics classes in Math (what I studied in school). That is a good point. To expand on that, many software developers don't have formal training at all. I didn't mean to imply that my experience is typical or even common. I know CS programs at other schools that do _not_ require ethics or have it as an optional elective so it's certainly not universal even within CS.
- hash-set 10y ago
  They ought to teach a history class as well--how IBM helped Hitler kill off Jews and Gypsies. And how the NSA and CIA illegally surveil us (and everyone in the world), and how technology doesn't give a single shit if we all live or all die. Then maybe people wouldn't go to work making Hellfire missiles or the drones that they get attached to because you are an accessory to murder when you do that.
maxander 10y ago
Short of a totalitarian technophobic regime taking power [1], there will always be idiots with compilers willing to do any terrible thing. There's no (non-dystopian) hope of regulating things at that point, but we don't really need to. Where regulations, or professional society codes or whatever else, could be usefully applied is where software gets loaded onto something important. You can write all the terrible code you like if it doesn't leave your office, but the moment you package it up and send it out to be installed on a thousand new aircraft (or a million internet-enabled toasters), you're at a ripe point for scrutiny. Can you attest who is responsible for what portions of the code? Have experts signed off on reasonable guarantees of security, safety, and correctness? At that stage, having your engineers be recognized members of a professional society that will hold their feet to the fire to stand by their word is useful. Not all code needs to have an engineer's stamp, but it doesn't make it into a specified set of "serious applications" without stamps. [1] Albeit not implausible, either.
jjawssd 10y ago
I find secret forum censorship including up/down vote rigging, post visibility weighting targeting a specific group, and secret shadow banning to be some of the most egregious ethics offenses programmers can commit. It's below bribe-taking on the ethics ladder, because at least one person directly benefits from a bribe.
- kefka 10y ago
  Are you trying to say something about Hacker News?
  - jjawssd 10y ago
    I believe the administrators and moderators of HN are more ethical than those of other popular social media sites, but of course I don't know how much I don't know about the inner workings of these organizations, so I'm just leaving you with something to think about.
    - kefka 10y ago
      Oh, indeed. I've had my own.. disagreements with the people here running the place. One of those very disagreements was what I thought was active targeting was in fact me triggering a spam filter or something. The underlying problem is HN should be more transparent in how people get on "shit lists"- hellbanning, no submit, and other statuses. I tended to like the Kur5hin style model, where every mod is linked to the user, and everyone can see it. Albeit, K5 is dead...
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  Interesting to see how the parent is being downvoted...
projektfu 10y ago
Journalistically, what are the ethics of scraping HN comments for your story? Was each commenter contacted to follow up in any way? Obviously you can't check out these stories very well.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  If they don't do it then buzzfeed will, and then they'd get the scoop.
exo762 10y ago
This is just typical case of responsibility erosion in hierarchical structures. Upper management devices a scheme, their underlings execute the scheme. One claim "we didn't really do that", other claim "we were just following orders and we don't know whole picture". Nothing new.
jknoepfler 10y ago
After seeing the amount of shoddy, insecure, dangerous code that gets shipped into production at a supposedly high-quality code shop, I've become increasingly of a mind that software engineers need to professionalize. I try to project a professional ethic in the workplace of not shipping broken or harmful shit, which extends to refusing to cut corners on testing, automation, and maintainability. I think it's important that I exercise professional integrity because I personally have the luxury of being able to afford being fired. If I lose my job because I refuse to do something, nothing bad will happen to me: - I am a citizen in my country of residence (can't lose green card / etc.) - I have a deep financial safety net - I live in an area with high demand for my skills (if I spent more than a month looking for a job I would be shocked). Not everyone is in this position. I respect that, so I'd like to use my privilege to make it more of a professional norm. I think not shipping shit extends to everything from the obviously immoral to code that will hurt the customer (or their customers) because it is insecure or unmaintainable.
- nullc 10y ago
  https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-professional-conduct https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-profess...
  - raphman 10y ago
    The same ACM that didn't care about a well-known security hole at a contractor's site - affecting thousands of scientists - for several years [1]? The same ACM that calls verbatim plagiarism "sloppy scholarship" [2]? The same ACM that doesn't seem to have an official position on excessive state surveillance [3]? I am no longer a member. [1] https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/sheridan-security/ https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/sheridan-secu... [2] https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/acm-ethics-plagiarism/ https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/acm-ethics-pl... [3] http://www.acm.org/public-policy/public-policy-statements http://www.acm.org/public-policy/public-policy-statements (in contrast, the German Chapter of the ACM / Gesellschaft for Informatik has condemned excessive surveillance multiple times in the past)
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
You cannot be a profession if you have a hiring manager, a boss who can fire you or no central professional body that can take away your right to program. Software engineering is not not not a profession. It is a form of literacy. People write down lies and untruths and abominations, using the great gift of literacy. And society assumes that as everyone else it literate those who write down lies do not automatically have an advantage We do, but creating a software literacy profession is not the right solution Edit: let me adjust this. Professionalism is meant to be about minimum standards of performance expected from any member of the profession (it is a way of saying we the profession ensure you get at least the baseline service no matter who you hire) The ethics of professionalism are usually well enforced in areas of individual criminal mesbehaviour (i.e. Accountants who dip into their clients accounts get barred) However the issues discussed here are more areas of regulation than criminality. Yes making software that drives a tesla into a truck is bad, but that was not an actual requirement - it was a failure in the whole industry to decide what is the right thing to do. Different regulators in different industries and countries will let different standards (i.e. With LIdar / without) - and unethical companies can play arbitrage. Arguing that a spec for a online game fails to meet regulations might work, but individually saying younundersrand the regulations better than the various hierarchies above you is unlikely to work. So I have lost my trainnof thought but - TPP is actually supposed to be where regulatory arbitrage is defeated. We need something like it back - All professions face ethical issues at all levels (I would argue that most issues in software (privacy, self driving cars, armoured robots) are issues we as societies have not decided upon yet so individuals are just applying their own judgement (this is the don't work for a tobacco company question) - and other professions stuff this up as well - banking did it spectacularly so. So, yes we should raise the minimum standards but questions of ethics are something for the profession as a whole to decide, (I will not code a self driving car that does not have LIdar out to 100 yards behind, and my professional body will support me, is an ethical stance yes, but really it's a post hoc regulation)
mooneater 10y ago
"dozens of people have already been killed by faulty software in cars, while hundreds of people have been killed from faulty software during air travel" If facebook really did cause T. to get elected, fb programmers may be responsible for orders of magnitude more suffering and/or death than the above.
- erikb 10y ago
  Please don't misunderstand the lack of support as lack of anti-Trump support. The comment just reads quite illogic and not very constructive.
  - mooneater 10y ago
    But truth is inherently constructive. What I am saying, is that software with political implications, can have far greater effects than software which directly controls physical objects. Not sure how this is illogical, but open to hearing views. It would be nice if downvoters explained their view, in addition to downvoting.
- mooneater 10y ago
  In addition to downvoting me, please let me know why. Is it: a) You do not agree that fb (and its fake news epidemic) contributed to Trump's victory b) You do not agree that Trump will increase suffering and/or death c) You do not feel the above points are worth considering or relevant to the topic at hand d) Something else?
Pica_soO 10y ago
Code and architecture could be anonymously peer-reviewed like in science, but then of course everyone is paranoid of having his secret sauce in the open. Open sauce, that would be a great idea.
mrweasel 10y ago
Why is the focus on the unethical work of programmers? How about addressing the root cause: People are doing unethical thing as part of their job. Either because they either don't understand the issue or due to their financial situation. Apparently we have all accepted that business people in general are going to be unethical to the point where there is no fighting it or expectation that it's fixable. How about we address the real issue: The unethical business practises of some company and the people who run them. But no, let us once again leave it to the developers to fix the problems.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Ethics is unfortunately a privilege of workers who can afford it. Programmers are in demand, so they can stand up to their managers and refuse to do something they deem unethical. Most of the world doesn't have that choice however. The grocery shop clerk can't refuse to wash meat with detergent because they can't afford to lose the job. The customer support person on the phone can't refuse to blatantly lie to customers because they can't afford to lose the job. The more friends I have in "normal" jobs, the more I see that it's not an exception - very many, if not most, small businesses are run by liars and frauds, and are forcing their workers to do unethical things.
  - grzm 10y ago
    I'm with you on the tension between employment and professional ethics. The small business characterization... given the number of small businesses, "many" can be true but the implication that it's a large is off. You do make the qualification "if not most". Is your impression that it's close to 50%? Larger than in larger businesses? In some ways I'd think large business might have an easier time with forcing workers to behave in some way unethically. Losing a single worker for refusing to do something unethical doesn't have as much impact on their business as a whole. I wouldn't go too far with this argument without doing some research, thought. Just a thought experiment. I'm not denying the experience of your friends. I just am unsure of how far this goes towards advancing an argument that an interestingly large number of "small businesses are run by liars and frauds", which I'm admittedly not sure you're making. Which is why I'm asking :)
lambdasquirrel 10y ago
Once I worked with a company that didn't use cross-validation, and gave accuracy numbers based on its training data. I guess that's more on what's now called data science though, rather than programming.
Anthony-G 10y ago
For those who read the comments first, this article essentially consists of a synopsis of a previous HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12965589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12965589
macrolide 10y ago
I don't believe for one second that xenophobia against Muslims, or protecting your country from illegal immigrants, is in any way unethical. Perhaps you have nothing to lose, but the rest of us have a country to defend.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  Muslims and Mexican immigrants (admit it, that's who all the "illegal immigrants" rhetoric is aimed at) aren't a threat to the USA. If anything, they'll make the USA greater than its ever been, just like the millions of other immigrants have come before them have. Aside from the Native Americans, who the settlers genocided, virtually every "great" American has been either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. Everything you see around you in the USA was built by immigrants or their offspring. Whether they had some paperwork when they achieved what they did is beside the point. Jewish immigrants, Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Polish immigrants, Chinese immigrants, or Japanese immigrants were all widely vilified and discriminated against in the past (and some still are) and seen as threats to the country. Mexican immigrants and Muslims are just the latest target in this long and ugly history of xenophobia. Some people somehow can't see past sensational headlines and tired anti-immigrant rhetoric recycled from the mouths of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis through the right-wing media, whose nudge-nudge, wink-wink racism and bigotry can not conceal their hatred from anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the history of this country, or the others where their ilk have shown their face. It's really a sad and shameful day when such KKK rhetoric is not only given a hearing in the mainstream media, but is starting to become the mainstream, to the extent of electing a President who might as well be wearing a white hood and burning a cross.
  - macrolide 10y ago
    It's not the Mexicans who destroyed the WTC on 9/11. It's the Muslims. Have you wondered what thoughts go on in their minds? It's of victory for ISIS and death to atheists. You may be a very tolerant person, but many Muslims are the exact opposite. Don't get me wrong - I'd be okay with them if they only gave up their crazy beliefs. You should see the amount of freedoms that have been lost in the UK due to the overwhelming presence of Muslims there. I for one don't want the US to fall victim to the same. It's easy to preach tolerance when sitting comfortably, but when your ass is on fire, you won't see it the same way.
macrolide 10y ago
The next time you're forced to do something illegal, simply report it to everyone in the world, preferably as anonymously as possible and with as much evidence as possible. If you don't fight it, who will?
- dvtv75 10y ago
  It's not always that simple. I know of someone who did that with one workplace. Massive taxpayer fraud going on, millions taken from public funding and redirected to business bank accounts. Evidence provided included where and when to look, amounts stolen, that kind of thing. What they didn't know at the time was the person who was signing the checks was an ex-employee who had moved up the rung into regulatory, and was responsible for receiving the letter. No investigation, in fact they got a big increase in the level of funding. The fraud still goes on. Nobody there knows who sent the letter, because if they did the author would have received a visit from some associates and probably be in a care facility somewhere, or possibly even dead.
  - macrolide 10y ago
    The info should've been revealed not just to that one regulator, but to the whole world, i.e. on Facebook, Youtube, Wikileaks, and a hundred people by email, while taking care to remain anonymous.
agentultra 10y ago
I believe the future of this industry lies with us building it into a capital-P profession and all that it entails. I don't buy the O'Hanian view that we should continue innovating, "without their permission." I don't think software necessarily has to come with the risk of killing people in order for it to cause significant harm. We've seen how innocuous software can cause significant harm to civil liberties and put under-represented people at risk. We've seen how software vulnerabilities put the financial industry and peoples' future at risk. At best we inconvenience a user. At worst... well we don't have to imagine that. I think it's enough that we take some responsibility for what we create into our own hands. We're going to be bad at regulating our industry at first. It may harm startups for a while. However I think it's important for professional software developers to be licensed, projects insured, and liability enforced. How will self-taught developers fit into the system? I don't know... I'm self taught myself. However I am looking towards going back to school and seeing what I need to do to be licensed... there is a government-backed program where I live. I just hope that when the time comes and I stick to my guns that there will be an organization behind me with the power to litigate for my job. Too many times I've been asked to put my professional opinion aside... as it's just an opinion after all... in the name of business/progress/innovation. I'd rather be beholden to the profession than to my employer (and I think many employers are smart enough to realize the benefits of this arrangement).
- microcolonel 10y ago
  What are you even talking about? Regulating the "software industry" is like regulating the "literature industry". The potential for harm is entirely based on where the product is used. If somebody runs Microsoft Windows XP on the main brake control computer on a high speed train, that is irresponsible. If somebody runs Microsoft Windows XP in a VM to try out Bonzi Buddy one more time, that is hilarious. If you speak a mean letter on stage as a comedy act, that is hilarious. If you send a mean letter to a depressed person, that is irresponsible. If you use computers to retain PII, then it is your managerial responsibility to ensure that the PII is stored responsibly. Just as you have the responsibility not to leave printouts of that PII in public dumpsters, or post them on Bristol Board in the public square. This is a very personal topic to me, because I am being paid handsomely to write software for the financial industry at the age of 19, because I can create massive wealth for them; and if software were a regulated profession, I may never have become a software developer at all. I may have just offed myself after failing in school. >...while hundreds of people have been killed from faulty software during air travel. Notably, some of the points mentioned in the talk referenced in the article are already basically "solved issues". There hasn't been a software-attributed catastrophic aircraft failure in quite a while, and the most recent one we know about was the crash of a pre-production Airbus test aircraft. That aircraft's software hadn't yet passed the standard verification procedures and standards. Every industry has its own priorities and needs, regulating the hard skill will only lower the quality of software developers.
partycoder 10y ago
Shipping broken software is a business model in many companies. Features are easy to sell, non-functional requirements are harder to sell. I am against shipping broken software. If you bought a car that is malfunctioning and you are expected to take it to the mechanic to get it working, would that not be unethical?
- grzm 10y ago
  Depends on how you define broken and what the company's priorities are. I know I lean towards "fix bugs first, then new features", but bugs/features need to be prioritized just like which bugs to fix first, and which features to implement first. And you have to ship something sometime.
cperciva 10y ago
To borrow a line: Software Engineering would be a very good idea. Every time I talk to "real" engineers about what goes on in computing, they're completely dumbfounded. Nobody has ultimate responsibility for signing off on a design? Changes get made without any independent analysis, or without any analysis at all beyond "well it seems to work"? When something fails, people routinely shrug their shoulders and move on without performing any post-mortem?
pascalxus 10y ago
The main point of this article is absolutely completely wrong. The product owner is responsible for every product feature specification that happens in their product, not the engineer. The engineer is just a tool you use to construct the product. He follows the spec to the letter. He's no more guilty than a hammer would be. It's not up to the hammer/engineer to know what or what shouldn't be implemented, they're not the ones making the judgement call. They're job is to execute the roadmap/product specification as it's written. They can provide feedback, make suggestions and inform the owner of any risks both moral and technical, but ultimately it's not their decision and not their responsibility. Now, if the engineer were the product owner, then of course, he is responsible. I think this author doesn't fully understand how software is developed and doesn't understand or differentiate between the roles of product managers/product owners and software engineers.
- gnud 10y ago
  Just following orders, eh? There are, of course, systems that can be used in both good and evil ways. But when your boss says 'just write code that detects when the car is being tested, and when it's being driven normally', you know it's sketchy, and you should refuse. I know this is easy to say and hard to do. But it's still something we should talk about, and that programmers should think about, before we get asked to do something, not after.
- gyardley 10y ago
  Nonsense. 'Just following orders' does not remove your moral culpability.
  - pascalxus 10y ago
    There are limits of course. An engineer shouldn't program a printer to explode and kill anybody. But, the volkswagon disaster is still firmly within the realm of product owner responsibility.
erikb 10y ago
Anybody knows what you can do if your boss asks something illegal of you like stealing money from other people, or if he basically asks to steal money from yourself? Would be interested in US and German law, if someone knows.
ocschwar 10y ago
This is why we have the concept of a "professional engineer." This is why we require building designs and other engineering documents to be signed by a PE. It's not just that you know enough of your field for your signature to matter. It's that by signing, you are putting your reputation and even your freedom at risk. As it is right now, if you write code that does something illegal or unethical, the blame WILL go to you. There may or may not be an email record of you being told to do this, but there will be no question of YOUR intent, and you can be sure that your bosses will do whatever it takes to get all the liability put on you, because with source code, there can be no question of intent. (Well, in older times you could obfuscate intent in the source code, but that option went away with K&R C) So it might as well be time to standardize the software engineering form of the professional engineer exam and licensing procedure, and start requiring that software PEs review code.
wccrawford 10y ago
I was once asked by a boss to write code that I felt was unethical. I don't remember exactly what it was now. I do remember that I managed to convince them not to do it by finding a (probably) better way that didn't challenge my ethics. Had I not managed to convince them to do it ethically, I don't know what they'd have done. But I'd already told them that I wouldn't do anything unethical when they hired me, and I told them that their solution to that problem was unethical. It wasn't even anything important. It was only "a little unethical" and wouldn't have really affected many people negatively. But the line for me isn't how unethical it is, just that it's unethical at all. I simply don't need that in my life, no matter the price. I wish more people would draw the line where I do, but I do understand the conflict and why they might choose otherwise.
deleted 10y ago
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ClearAsMud 10y ago
Programmers are not lawyers, and this isn't Edward Snowden. There is a logical train of legality and one can debate the ethics of a task most likely with the owner, or legal counsel. The other option is to get release of liability which is not uncommon in realms where developers are asked to do things that are shady. If they don't have the fortitude to stand up and say something .. then just walk away.
Michie 10y ago
> "But what developers really need is an organization that governs and regulates their profession like other industries have, both Martin and Sourour believe. Currently nothing like that exists although both the Association for Computer Machinery and the IEEE have made a start, with ethics documents and, in some cases, training." I don't think the solution for this is to have an organization that regulates programmers to make sure a programmer will become ethical. No matter how much ethics you teach someone to become ethical, it is in their own volition to act upon a task that is provided. What will you do it if a programmer suddenly decides to be unethical or agreed upon doing an unethical task related to work? Remove their license to become programmers? Ban them to use the computers? Put them in jail? Shouldn't the management be responsible for their decisions, too? Why are all the blame here being focus on the programmers? Why don't you teach "Ethics" to those who are pushing the programmers to do such a task? Yes, the programmers have the big decision to do it or not. But regulating them isn't the solution that would make their decisions ethical. What if the younger generation wanted to code? Will you stop them from learning it because they are not allowed to learn it unless they are in school? Or they are not even allowed to ship code because they don't have a license or it is not under the standards made by the organization? Remember programmers are people. Same with all the human beings in this world who makes moral decisions on their own. Their beliefs, attitude and principles in life are nurtured based on how they were brought up not because they took an ethics class in College. If a programmer violated a law because of his actions, then treat them as a person who has violated the law.
naevius 10y ago
I work in e-commerce, have for 10+ years now. Without a doubt I'm going to Hell, even though, literally, every day, I refuse to do what everything customer's ask of me. Eventually, because of pressure from management or the customer, you will do something you're ashamed of or worse. When you have two small children to feed and your jobs on the line or you need the money it's hard to hold the line. Now that I'm older and the stakes are lower I can give the fuck-off more frequently, and I feel better about myself on the whole, but early on I wasn't so resolute. Here are the things I've been asked to do and refused, so they just went to someone else to get it done. - Disable the back button coming from a Google search (Don't want them going to a competitor's site). - Change the default selection for being included in spam list from no to yes. - Export email lists ignoring the "include me in spam lists" selection. - If someone has purchased before, save their credit card information, and if they add something to their cart ever again, charge them immediately, and them make refunds difficult. - Make the RMA / refund page throw an error the first time, to try and discourage returns. It'd work the 2nd time. - Add a "pay with cash discount" wish is really a credit card surcharge because the request to pay in cash is never approved. - Doctor the math for discounts so unless a customer double-checks they won't notice the ~25 cent discrepancy. - Take donations for a cause with fine print (literally, like 3pt type) that says only a small percentage gets donated. - Intentional violation of credit card rules, such as storing the customer's credit card without their knowledge, sending credit cards numbers through email unencrypted, refusing to honor recurring payment cancellations, and so on. - Ship by a slower shipping method than what the customer is charged for. This list could go on for literally hundreds of entries. The point is that, yes, as the programmer, we are the last line of defense. The stories here with people working in the health care industry just break my heart - so much more at stake then people's money. One piece of advice I can offer. When you refuse, and they go hire someone somewhere else to do the dirty work, you can always report them anonymously afterward. The satisfaction of seeing them having their credit card processing or merchant account yanked can give you some solace. But in the end, I don't know if it's a winnable war. I want to say this very carefully, because I in no way wish to disparage programmers from other countries, but what I've seen, over and over, is that if I won't do it, there is always someone in another country, for cheap, who will. I'm sure they've got two kids too, and they need the money. There will always be someone ready to do the wrong thing, for whatever reason.

181 points by zeapo 10y ago

What makes a programmer different than any other person who needs to ask the same question to himself/herself? What about unethical weapons, medicine, sales practices?

steveeq1 10y ago
or legal tactics.
yetihehe 10y ago
That's what the article is saying, but in last sentence. According to author we should have associations like doctors, IEEE and Association for Computer Machinery is already starting to do this.
- walshemj 10y ago
  And have been for years the late Daniel D. McCracken do work on this way back.
bearcobra 10y ago
Nothing really. I think that providing a general ethics lesson then combining it with industry specific examples helps give people a more complete understanding of what these conflicts look like.
maxxxxx 10y ago
Everybody should ask these questions but in reality most people don't and go along with their leaders. Standing up for your values is inconvenient and often comes at a high cost if you are not independently wealthy.
- devoply 10y ago
  Exactly. The problem is that everyone is beholden to money. If you do the right thing, you lose your job. And maybe even get blacklisted so you don't work again. Stuff like this is stuff of nightmares but it happens over and over again. Enough to make people think twice or thrice about going against the status quo.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    Its enough to believe you may lose your job. Most people can't afford to find out if that's really the case.
  - hash-set 10y ago
    But at least you can't give them your body and mind--that is the heart of resistance.
  - wallacoloo 10y ago
    It's not difficult to do at least some research of a company before you accept a job. Take the extra month to find a job with a company that's never had any scandals that you're uncomfortable with, one whose business model isn't built on violating their customer's privacies or being otherwise ethically dubious, and one who emphasizes ethical responsibility in their code of conduct. In other words, pay the cost upfront. It's not a sure way to ensure you never encounter these problems, but it will reduce the likelihood.
    - devoply 10y ago
      The market is either a supply market or a demand market. If you are in a job supply market, where there is more supply than demand, perhaps you can do that. If you are in a job demand market you can not do that. And sure this should be how a person exercises his morality. But I think most ethically dubious situations are not evident outright. Big companies spend a lot of money through P/R department to keep their images clean.
tedunangst 10y ago
It's a two step process. First we teach all the programmers to always be ethical. Then we teach everyone to program. Boom. No more problems.
hash-set 10y ago
Pretty much the whole Military Industrial Complex is unethical and I have avoided them in my career. But here's the thing I realized: There isn't a single industry out there that isn't getting some kind of government subsidy, tax break, or major handout. So we're all ethically compromised! But I still won't work for the war machine directly. I'd rather go hungry.
- platz 10y ago
  Stepping in to alter what the 'free market' desires is not de-facto unethical.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  Immoral yes. Unethical no. They do horrible things, but they do abide the rules placed upon them. Those rules are scant and toothless but that is a different question.

platz 10y ago

"He refused to do it but says, "there's always an engineer willing" to simply follow orders" Chad and Brad. Do you think doctors and engineers could have such high standards for themselves if, they didn't restrict access to their profession somehow? There is no desire to get rid of coding bootcamps on any side—negative costs are externalized to the consumer.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
It's not so much about limiting access as simply if Chad and Brad are too bound by law to refuse doing unethical things, there will be no (legally employable) engineer willing to "simply follow orders".
- platz 10y ago
  > bound by law yes, this amounts to more or less, the same thing-at least interpreting in terms of adding constraints.
vacri 10y ago
I've worked with doctors that have been low on ethics. I used to be an EEG tech, and we got a cover neurologist in to diagnose some EEG recordings (the regular neuros were on leave). Despite the tech reports stating exactly when and where the abnormalities occurred in the 20-min recordings, along with annotations in the recording itself, this fucker just looked at the first minute, and if the abnormality wasn't there, just diagnosed it as 'normal', no abnormality. We had to get his batch of reporting redone by a neuro with a conscience. However, doctors hold together very strongly. This doctor and another doctor we worked with were acknowledged by our neuros as terrible and doing their patients a misservice, but none of our doctors even contemplated reporting them in any way. Long story short, there's 'bad orders' in medicine as well.

throwanem 10y ago

Other engineering disciplines provide infrastructure for their members to include ethical considerations in their analysis of their work, e.g. the Iron Ring [1]. There's a strong argument that our discipline can profit by their example. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

auxym 10y ago
The Iron Ring is mostly symbolic and a tradition, but protection of public is the whole idea behind the Professional Engineer licenses in a lot of countries (I'm mostly familiar with Canada). Unfortunately, laws seem awefully traditional and outdated, and at least some of the system has turned into a form of rent seeking. Even as a mechanical engineer, most of my work is not really considered as engineering work to the letter of the law, because the law was written in the 1960s with mostly civil works in mind. I get the feeling it's either going to take a long time or a huge catastrophy for legislators to catch up to licensing for professional software work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...
- throwanem 10y ago
  Do we need legislators and regulators to tell us to do our work with due care for those whose lives we affect in so doing? There's a role for them, to be sure. But as you say, and as we see from the history of other disciplines, that role is generally after the fact. We can, and I think must, ourselves create professional societies which can develop codes of ethical conduct and put incentives in place to uphold them. To a certain extent, that comes after the fact, too. But we're at the very least rapidly approaching a sufficiency of horrible examples from which to derive salutary lessons. I'd like to see us develop a sense of professional culture, as an industry, which gives us to think long and cautiously in those cases where we might produce yet another.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Do we need legislators and regulators to tell us to do our work with due care for those whose lives we affect in so doing? We do, for our own protection. Doing so strikes the weapon from the hands of our managers - they can't push us into doing unethical work that easily because they know we're bound by law to refuse it. This is a case of Schelling-style strategy, where limiting your choice/freedom actually boosts your bargaining power.

sandworm101 10y ago

The article has completely missed several points. Computer Programmer, or coder, or whatever we want to call it, is not at this point a recognized "profession" with special protections/duties that come along with such a designation. Comparisons to engineers/doctors/lawyers is therefore nor appropriate. Professions are fields that grant members special abilities and protections beyond lay persons. They are officially trusted by society to do things that normal people are not allowed to do. Doctors cut people open. Engineers put their stamp on bridges carrying people. Lawyers hold client secrets. Nurses handle dangerous drugs. These professions are officially recognized in law. They have societies that too are recognized in law (State Medical/Bars etc). With this then comes the ban on anyone outside the profession performing such tasks. What would a world look like should "computer programmer" become a recognized profession as the article suggests? Will non-professionals be forbidden from writing code? Will we have state boards deciding how and by whom computer programing may be taught as they do law schools? Would hardware with open firmware be sold only to licensed professionals as we do with medicines? That's an absurd world. Programming isn't a profession because it simply could not exist as a profession. Professional associations and ethical standards certainly have a place in educating, but they should not be given the power to actually regulate behavior.

rini17 10y ago
Expecting licensed programmers' stamp on critical code is really such a stretch of imagination?
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
I agree with a lot of this. Without some kind of official sanctioning, programmers lack a mandate to push back on management, which makes it much harder. On the other hand, programmer is such a diverse topic that any kind of sanctioning is bound to be inappropriate for the vast majority of programmers. Kind of like making an electrical engineer know about civil engineering to get sanctioned as an "engineer" (I know this happens, but it doesn't make it very right; there even many different kinds of EE and so on...). Heck, when I was at Microsoft, we were subjected to yearly generic ethic training that was very difficult for us researchers to relate to. I would prefer some kind of universal professional ethics and responsibilities that wouldn't be related to your specific profession. Heck, being ethical applies to mathematicians, economists, journalists, musicians, programmers, engineers, and so on.

markharris99 10y ago

> "He refused to do it but says, "there's always an engineer willing" to simply follow orders" It's not just about that. If you are not in a first world country, then feeding your family and ensuring you have a roof over your head are more important than breaking your own ethics with developing software. As someone who lives in a first world country, the UK. I have I found ethics to be a sliding scale. We live in a world where gaps in the market will always be filled by someone. Frackers, Oil companys, GMO companies, Chemical companies, the list can go on and on. One side will say they are doing a public good. One other side will argue they are harming the planet and it's unethical for them to operate. The only way to really change things, is make a movement and vote with the collective wallet. The market will dictate what is acceptable and what is not. Per the article: I think the more programmers will adopt this attitude, companies will simply stop asking and move the project offshore. I know from experience, they have no such qualms.

sandworm101 10y ago
>> ... feeding your family and ensuring you have a roof over your head are more important than breaking your own ethics with developing software. That's why recognized professionals (ie lawyer/doctors etc) expect to be well-compensated. They are expected to quit, to walk away from unethical situations even where doing so means they loose out on work. This is why many professions do try to limit the number of members as flooding the market, lowering wages, will push some members to do things that damage the profession.
- arjie 10y ago
  Well, it hardly works. If you want to find a doctor who'll give you Propofol so you can sleep, you can find one. There are enough doctors who'll also recommend you for a medical marijuana licence without actually diagnosing you with a condition that requires it. The rampant practice of advising you to get tests you don't need is also a sign that restricting supply does not mean doctors adhere to their ethical principles. Don't think I have a vendetta here against doctors. My parents are both surgeons, so trust me when I say my general feelings about medical professionals are overwhelmingly positive. Your argument just strikes me as disingenuous.

anigbrowl 10y ago

Many years ago I automated an accounting procedure for Banker's Trust company, a large international financial firm. I was somewhat surprised they entrusted such a complex task to a mere contract worker. Essentially it looked at exchange and interest rates in the firm's many different operating jurisdictions each month so as to figure out the least efficient allocation of expenses/liabilities...so as to maximize deductible expenses for taxation purposes...or so I was told. This seemed odd to me but I was still in my early 20s and didn't know anything about finance - though I couldn't help noticing that I was being paid a few thousand pounds a month to automate a system that seemed to be saving the bank many millions. After I was done They relocated me to a tiny basement room and kept 'forgetting' to give me any new tasks until I quit out of boredom. Some years later it emerged that Banker's Trust had been ripping off their corporate clients wholesale. I've often wondered if I unwittingly helped them construct the tools with which to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankers_Trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankers_Trust My point here is not only that managers often request unethical behavior of their tech staff, but that the tech people often have no way of assessing the probity of what they're being asked to do. At the time I was only about 21 or 22 and all I knew was how to make big spreadsheets that ran really really fast; I had no insight into the integrity or otherwise of the accounting procedure they asked me to automate and I didn't really think about it until I had a functioning prototype a month or two in and realized that my little project was shuffling very large amounts of money around. I had been out of the job for a good while before I learned enough to wonder whether the underlying process was in fact fraudulent.

pmoriarty 10y ago
"After I was done They relocated me to a tiny basement room and kept 'forgetting' to give me any new tasks until I quit out of boredom." That sounds like a reward to me. If it weren't for the ethical cost you mention in the rest of your post, I'd take that job in a heartbeat. If someone wants to pay me for doing nothing, I can find plenty of things that interest me to do on their time. On the other hand, I guess "doing nothing" doesn't look too great on your resume. And if you don't learn new skills or work with new tech, that would cost you in the long run. But I could at least work on some open source projects or learn a new language or something. That way I could have something to show for my time, and have fun as well.

h4nkoslo 10y ago

"Ethics" codes are in practice a mechanism for a formal institutional body to exercise power over a profession. Case in point: "But what developers really need is an organization that governs and regulates their profession like other industries have" What this inevitably turns into is a collection of content-free truisms (eg "programmers shouldn't write programs that break the law") combined with credentialism ("we won't let you join the Society of Programmers without a degree in computer science, and it's 'unethical' to hire a non-SOP programmer to work on your project") and politically motivated de-credentialing ("we have determined your work on the Trump advertising program targeting white voters was implicitly racist; you're disbarred"). If you think the last part is silly, here's an article citing architects claiming it would be "unethical" to work on the border wall. http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wall-impossible-build-architects-2016-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wall-impossible-build-a...

pmoriarty 10y ago
"If you think the last part is silly, here's an article citing architects claiming it would be "unethical" to work on the border wall." That reminds me of the American Psychological Association's (APA) position on torture: "Any direct or indirect participation in any act of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by psychologists is strictly prohibited. There are no exceptions."[1] This might seem unfortunate to some, or may smell to them of unwarranted political meddling. But I for one am glad these professions are taking these strong and clear ethical stances, and doing so on what I consider to be the "right" side (ie. anti-torture and anti-xenophobia). I'm also not sure how one could separate ethics from politics. Some people even believe that every action is political. [1] - http://www.apa.org/ethics/programs/position/ http://www.apa.org/ethics/programs/position/
- h4nkoslo 10y ago
  You evidently think your livelihood should in principle be contingent on the desires of whomever controls the governing apparatus. If tomorrow you need a certification of racial purity, or a Temple recommend, in order to practice your profession, that's just how it shakes out. If everyone agreed on ethical codes, after all, we wouldn't need them. Why are people like you so desperate to hand someone else the whip hand? Do you actually think Your Kind Of Guy is going to be in power in perpetuity? Does it actually seem to you like these guys are reasoning from some set of elucidated & unchanging moral principles? Ironically the nightmarish story of how ineffective the APA's "ethics code" was should permanently disabuse you of the notion that they're useful for anything other than economic protectionism and occasionally crushing the outgroup du jour.

g051051 10y ago

I used to work for a place with serious ethics issues. We'd sell customized software packages along with a hardware solution, used by cities and counties. Once I was told that, per the contract, we were supposed to hand over the hardware and software for a system the next day. The software hadn't been customized or prepared in any way. Because of a loophole in the contract, it specified only delivery, not installation. So I was ordered to rent a van, load up the hardware, drive it and the software down to the county in question, and hand it all over. They handed me a data tape with the name of the county printed on it, we loaded the van, and sent I headed down. You can imagine how well it went. I got there, and the two heads of the project down there were waiting, and expecting not only to take delivery, but to see it all installed and working. I had to explain that wasn't my task, and they got more and more upset with me. I had to tell them to call my boss to get answers, because I was just a drone. After yelling at my boss, I was instructed to do minimal setup to verify the hardware worked. I did so, but then they insisted that I prove that the tape had the software. When I did, it unfortunately showed the wrong county name, because whoever had made the tape just took another installation tape and put the "wrong" name on it. I had to tap dance a bit there, but I finally got to leave. So, unhappy me (which meant nothing to my boss) and unhappy customers (which I got blamed for). Another time, they told me to put a label on a blank tape and ship it to a customer, to pretend to meet a delivery milestone. I refused. I think my boss did it himself.

devoply 10y ago
At the end of the day is the managerial class. They are the ones making the stuff go down, and then the code monkey gets blamed for their lack of ethics. Really? You tell us to jump, and we ask how high, and that's generally expected. And you expect us to bear the burden of ethics too. I don't think so. You want to hold anyone responsible, hold the people who gave the orders, who signed the contracts. Not the code monkey whose entire life is predicated upon carrying out orders as they are given.
- unimpressive 10y ago
  Change the incentive structure. Punishment doesn't happen to those who are deserving, it happens to those who can't prevent it.

eklavya 10y ago

Reading the comments posted on the AWS vs GCE thread, I would say trolling the competitor? It's so obvious they are not even trying to hide it.

throwaway2016a 10y ago

When I was earning my CS degree, Ethics was a mandatory course. As it was for other engineering majors as well. Having been in the industry a while I think the worst thing I have been asked to do was participate in a program that installed our software on the user's machine without their consent. The CEO argued they did give their consent, which was technically true... they could uncheck the "Install partner apps" checkbox before clicking next but it wasn't very obvious. Thing is, that practice is (was? I hope) common everywhere from Yahoo, AOL, etc... so it was one of those "Everyone is doing it" things. I pushed back pretty hard but ended up losing the battle. In hindsight I wish I had walked. Ethics aside, none of the customers who got our app this way gave us very good reviews and their lifetime value was way less than customers acquired other ways.

pmiller2 10y ago
> When I was earning my CS degree, Ethics was a mandatory course. As it was for other engineering majors as well. Many of us didn't major in engineering, as the article states. There are no ethics classes in Math (what I studied in school). > In hindsight I wish I had walked. I have not yet had to make this choice, but I am specifically making sure my financial situation is in order enough that I wouldn't be tempted to go along with something blatantly illegal or unethical. I'm not completely sure if, in the moment, with the ability to pay rent on the line, if I could refuse in a situation like you mentioned. Luckily, I've never been asked to do anything too questionable.
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  > Many of us didn't major in engineering, as the article states. There are no ethics classes in Math (what I studied in school). That is a good point. To expand on that, many software developers don't have formal training at all. I didn't mean to imply that my experience is typical or even common. I know CS programs at other schools that do _not_ require ethics or have it as an optional elective so it's certainly not universal even within CS.
hash-set 10y ago
They ought to teach a history class as well--how IBM helped Hitler kill off Jews and Gypsies. And how the NSA and CIA illegally surveil us (and everyone in the world), and how technology doesn't give a single shit if we all live or all die. Then maybe people wouldn't go to work making Hellfire missiles or the drones that they get attached to because you are an accessory to murder when you do that.

maxander 10y ago

Short of a totalitarian technophobic regime taking power [1], there will always be idiots with compilers willing to do any terrible thing. There's no (non-dystopian) hope of regulating things at that point, but we don't really need to. Where regulations, or professional society codes or whatever else, could be usefully applied is where software gets loaded onto something important. You can write all the terrible code you like if it doesn't leave your office, but the moment you package it up and send it out to be installed on a thousand new aircraft (or a million internet-enabled toasters), you're at a ripe point for scrutiny. Can you attest who is responsible for what portions of the code? Have experts signed off on reasonable guarantees of security, safety, and correctness? At that stage, having your engineers be recognized members of a professional society that will hold their feet to the fire to stand by their word is useful. Not all code needs to have an engineer's stamp, but it doesn't make it into a specified set of "serious applications" without stamps. [1] Albeit not implausible, either.

jjawssd 10y ago

I find secret forum censorship including up/down vote rigging, post visibility weighting targeting a specific group, and secret shadow banning to be some of the most egregious ethics offenses programmers can commit. It's below bribe-taking on the ethics ladder, because at least one person directly benefits from a bribe.

kefka 10y ago
Are you trying to say something about Hacker News?
- jjawssd 10y ago
  I believe the administrators and moderators of HN are more ethical than those of other popular social media sites, but of course I don't know how much I don't know about the inner workings of these organizations, so I'm just leaving you with something to think about.
  - kefka 10y ago
    Oh, indeed. I've had my own.. disagreements with the people here running the place. One of those very disagreements was what I thought was active targeting was in fact me triggering a spam filter or something. The underlying problem is HN should be more transparent in how people get on "shit lists"- hellbanning, no submit, and other statuses. I tended to like the Kur5hin style model, where every mod is linked to the user, and everyone can see it. Albeit, K5 is dead...
eeZah7Ux 10y ago
Interesting to see how the parent is being downvoted...

projektfu 10y ago

Journalistically, what are the ethics of scraping HN comments for your story? Was each commenter contacted to follow up in any way? Obviously you can't check out these stories very well.

ikeboy 10y ago
If they don't do it then buzzfeed will, and then they'd get the scoop.

exo762 10y ago

This is just typical case of responsibility erosion in hierarchical structures. Upper management devices a scheme, their underlings execute the scheme. One claim "we didn't really do that", other claim "we were just following orders and we don't know whole picture". Nothing new.

jknoepfler 10y ago

After seeing the amount of shoddy, insecure, dangerous code that gets shipped into production at a supposedly high-quality code shop, I've become increasingly of a mind that software engineers need to professionalize. I try to project a professional ethic in the workplace of not shipping broken or harmful shit, which extends to refusing to cut corners on testing, automation, and maintainability. I think it's important that I exercise professional integrity because I personally have the luxury of being able to afford being fired. If I lose my job because I refuse to do something, nothing bad will happen to me: - I am a citizen in my country of residence (can't lose green card / etc.) - I have a deep financial safety net - I live in an area with high demand for my skills (if I spent more than a month looking for a job I would be shocked). Not everyone is in this position. I respect that, so I'd like to use my privilege to make it more of a professional norm. I think not shipping shit extends to everything from the obviously immoral to code that will hurt the customer (or their customers) because it is insecure or unmaintainable.

nullc 10y ago
https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-professional-conduct https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-profess...
- raphman 10y ago
  The same ACM that didn't care about a well-known security hole at a contractor's site - affecting thousands of scientists - for several years [1]? The same ACM that calls verbatim plagiarism "sloppy scholarship" [2]? The same ACM that doesn't seem to have an official position on excessive state surveillance [3]? I am no longer a member. [1] https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/sheridan-security/ https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/sheridan-secu... [2] https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/acm-ethics-plagiarism/ https://raphaelwimmer.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/acm-ethics-pl... [3] http://www.acm.org/public-policy/public-policy-statements http://www.acm.org/public-policy/public-policy-statements (in contrast, the German Chapter of the ACM / Gesellschaft for Informatik has condemned excessive surveillance multiple times in the past)

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

You cannot be a profession if you have a hiring manager, a boss who can fire you or no central professional body that can take away your right to program. Software engineering is not not not a profession. It is a form of literacy. People write down lies and untruths and abominations, using the great gift of literacy. And society assumes that as everyone else it literate those who write down lies do not automatically have an advantage We do, but creating a software literacy profession is not the right solution Edit: let me adjust this. Professionalism is meant to be about minimum standards of performance expected from any member of the profession (it is a way of saying we the profession ensure you get at least the baseline service no matter who you hire) The ethics of professionalism are usually well enforced in areas of individual criminal mesbehaviour (i.e. Accountants who dip into their clients accounts get barred) However the issues discussed here are more areas of regulation than criminality. Yes making software that drives a tesla into a truck is bad, but that was not an actual requirement - it was a failure in the whole industry to decide what is the right thing to do. Different regulators in different industries and countries will let different standards (i.e. With LIdar / without) - and unethical companies can play arbitrage. Arguing that a spec for a online game fails to meet regulations might work, but individually saying younundersrand the regulations better than the various hierarchies above you is unlikely to work. So I have lost my trainnof thought but - TPP is actually supposed to be where regulatory arbitrage is defeated. We need something like it back - All professions face ethical issues at all levels (I would argue that most issues in software (privacy, self driving cars, armoured robots) are issues we as societies have not decided upon yet so individuals are just applying their own judgement (this is the don't work for a tobacco company question) - and other professions stuff this up as well - banking did it spectacularly so. So, yes we should raise the minimum standards but questions of ethics are something for the profession as a whole to decide, (I will not code a self driving car that does not have LIdar out to 100 yards behind, and my professional body will support me, is an ethical stance yes, but really it's a post hoc regulation)

mooneater 10y ago

"dozens of people have already been killed by faulty software in cars, while hundreds of people have been killed from faulty software during air travel" If facebook really did cause T. to get elected, fb programmers may be responsible for orders of magnitude more suffering and/or death than the above.

erikb 10y ago
Please don't misunderstand the lack of support as lack of anti-Trump support. The comment just reads quite illogic and not very constructive.
- mooneater 10y ago
  But truth is inherently constructive. What I am saying, is that software with political implications, can have far greater effects than software which directly controls physical objects. Not sure how this is illogical, but open to hearing views. It would be nice if downvoters explained their view, in addition to downvoting.
mooneater 10y ago
In addition to downvoting me, please let me know why. Is it: a) You do not agree that fb (and its fake news epidemic) contributed to Trump's victory b) You do not agree that Trump will increase suffering and/or death c) You do not feel the above points are worth considering or relevant to the topic at hand d) Something else?

Pica_soO 10y ago

Code and architecture could be anonymously peer-reviewed like in science, but then of course everyone is paranoid of having his secret sauce in the open. Open sauce, that would be a great idea.

mrweasel 10y ago

Why is the focus on the unethical work of programmers? How about addressing the root cause: People are doing unethical thing as part of their job. Either because they either don't understand the issue or due to their financial situation. Apparently we have all accepted that business people in general are going to be unethical to the point where there is no fighting it or expectation that it's fixable. How about we address the real issue: The unethical business practises of some company and the people who run them. But no, let us once again leave it to the developers to fix the problems.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Ethics is unfortunately a privilege of workers who can afford it. Programmers are in demand, so they can stand up to their managers and refuse to do something they deem unethical. Most of the world doesn't have that choice however. The grocery shop clerk can't refuse to wash meat with detergent because they can't afford to lose the job. The customer support person on the phone can't refuse to blatantly lie to customers because they can't afford to lose the job. The more friends I have in "normal" jobs, the more I see that it's not an exception - very many, if not most, small businesses are run by liars and frauds, and are forcing their workers to do unethical things.
- grzm 10y ago
  I'm with you on the tension between employment and professional ethics. The small business characterization... given the number of small businesses, "many" can be true but the implication that it's a large is off. You do make the qualification "if not most". Is your impression that it's close to 50%? Larger than in larger businesses? In some ways I'd think large business might have an easier time with forcing workers to behave in some way unethically. Losing a single worker for refusing to do something unethical doesn't have as much impact on their business as a whole. I wouldn't go too far with this argument without doing some research, thought. Just a thought experiment. I'm not denying the experience of your friends. I just am unsure of how far this goes towards advancing an argument that an interestingly large number of "small businesses are run by liars and frauds", which I'm admittedly not sure you're making. Which is why I'm asking :)

lambdasquirrel 10y ago

Once I worked with a company that didn't use cross-validation, and gave accuracy numbers based on its training data. I guess that's more on what's now called data science though, rather than programming.

Anthony-G 10y ago

For those who read the comments first, this article essentially consists of a synopsis of a previous HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12965589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12965589

macrolide 10y ago

I don't believe for one second that xenophobia against Muslims, or protecting your country from illegal immigrants, is in any way unethical. Perhaps you have nothing to lose, but the rest of us have a country to defend.

pmoriarty 10y ago
Muslims and Mexican immigrants (admit it, that's who all the "illegal immigrants" rhetoric is aimed at) aren't a threat to the USA. If anything, they'll make the USA greater than its ever been, just like the millions of other immigrants have come before them have. Aside from the Native Americans, who the settlers genocided, virtually every "great" American has been either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. Everything you see around you in the USA was built by immigrants or their offspring. Whether they had some paperwork when they achieved what they did is beside the point. Jewish immigrants, Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Polish immigrants, Chinese immigrants, or Japanese immigrants were all widely vilified and discriminated against in the past (and some still are) and seen as threats to the country. Mexican immigrants and Muslims are just the latest target in this long and ugly history of xenophobia. Some people somehow can't see past sensational headlines and tired anti-immigrant rhetoric recycled from the mouths of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis through the right-wing media, whose nudge-nudge, wink-wink racism and bigotry can not conceal their hatred from anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the history of this country, or the others where their ilk have shown their face. It's really a sad and shameful day when such KKK rhetoric is not only given a hearing in the mainstream media, but is starting to become the mainstream, to the extent of electing a President who might as well be wearing a white hood and burning a cross.
- macrolide 10y ago
  It's not the Mexicans who destroyed the WTC on 9/11. It's the Muslims. Have you wondered what thoughts go on in their minds? It's of victory for ISIS and death to atheists. You may be a very tolerant person, but many Muslims are the exact opposite. Don't get me wrong - I'd be okay with them if they only gave up their crazy beliefs. You should see the amount of freedoms that have been lost in the UK due to the overwhelming presence of Muslims there. I for one don't want the US to fall victim to the same. It's easy to preach tolerance when sitting comfortably, but when your ass is on fire, you won't see it the same way.

macrolide 10y ago

The next time you're forced to do something illegal, simply report it to everyone in the world, preferably as anonymously as possible and with as much evidence as possible. If you don't fight it, who will?

dvtv75 10y ago
It's not always that simple. I know of someone who did that with one workplace. Massive taxpayer fraud going on, millions taken from public funding and redirected to business bank accounts. Evidence provided included where and when to look, amounts stolen, that kind of thing. What they didn't know at the time was the person who was signing the checks was an ex-employee who had moved up the rung into regulatory, and was responsible for receiving the letter. No investigation, in fact they got a big increase in the level of funding. The fraud still goes on. Nobody there knows who sent the letter, because if they did the author would have received a visit from some associates and probably be in a care facility somewhere, or possibly even dead.
- macrolide 10y ago
  The info should've been revealed not just to that one regulator, but to the whole world, i.e. on Facebook, Youtube, Wikileaks, and a hundred people by email, while taking care to remain anonymous.

agentultra 10y ago

I believe the future of this industry lies with us building it into a capital-P profession and all that it entails. I don't buy the O'Hanian view that we should continue innovating, "without their permission." I don't think software necessarily has to come with the risk of killing people in order for it to cause significant harm. We've seen how innocuous software can cause significant harm to civil liberties and put under-represented people at risk. We've seen how software vulnerabilities put the financial industry and peoples' future at risk. At best we inconvenience a user. At worst... well we don't have to imagine that. I think it's enough that we take some responsibility for what we create into our own hands. We're going to be bad at regulating our industry at first. It may harm startups for a while. However I think it's important for professional software developers to be licensed, projects insured, and liability enforced. How will self-taught developers fit into the system? I don't know... I'm self taught myself. However I am looking towards going back to school and seeing what I need to do to be licensed... there is a government-backed program where I live. I just hope that when the time comes and I stick to my guns that there will be an organization behind me with the power to litigate for my job. Too many times I've been asked to put my professional opinion aside... as it's just an opinion after all... in the name of business/progress/innovation. I'd rather be beholden to the profession than to my employer (and I think many employers are smart enough to realize the benefits of this arrangement).

microcolonel 10y ago
What are you even talking about? Regulating the "software industry" is like regulating the "literature industry". The potential for harm is entirely based on where the product is used. If somebody runs Microsoft Windows XP on the main brake control computer on a high speed train, that is irresponsible. If somebody runs Microsoft Windows XP in a VM to try out Bonzi Buddy one more time, that is hilarious. If you speak a mean letter on stage as a comedy act, that is hilarious. If you send a mean letter to a depressed person, that is irresponsible. If you use computers to retain PII, then it is your managerial responsibility to ensure that the PII is stored responsibly. Just as you have the responsibility not to leave printouts of that PII in public dumpsters, or post them on Bristol Board in the public square. This is a very personal topic to me, because I am being paid handsomely to write software for the financial industry at the age of 19, because I can create massive wealth for them; and if software were a regulated profession, I may never have become a software developer at all. I may have just offed myself after failing in school. >...while hundreds of people have been killed from faulty software during air travel. Notably, some of the points mentioned in the talk referenced in the article are already basically "solved issues". There hasn't been a software-attributed catastrophic aircraft failure in quite a while, and the most recent one we know about was the crash of a pre-production Airbus test aircraft. That aircraft's software hadn't yet passed the standard verification procedures and standards. Every industry has its own priorities and needs, regulating the hard skill will only lower the quality of software developers.

partycoder 10y ago

Shipping broken software is a business model in many companies. Features are easy to sell, non-functional requirements are harder to sell. I am against shipping broken software. If you bought a car that is malfunctioning and you are expected to take it to the mechanic to get it working, would that not be unethical?

grzm 10y ago
Depends on how you define broken and what the company's priorities are. I know I lean towards "fix bugs first, then new features", but bugs/features need to be prioritized just like which bugs to fix first, and which features to implement first. And you have to ship something sometime.

cperciva 10y ago

To borrow a line: Software Engineering would be a very good idea. Every time I talk to "real" engineers about what goes on in computing, they're completely dumbfounded. Nobody has ultimate responsibility for signing off on a design? Changes get made without any independent analysis, or without any analysis at all beyond "well it seems to work"? When something fails, people routinely shrug their shoulders and move on without performing any post-mortem?

pascalxus 10y ago

The main point of this article is absolutely completely wrong. The product owner is responsible for every product feature specification that happens in their product, not the engineer. The engineer is just a tool you use to construct the product. He follows the spec to the letter. He's no more guilty than a hammer would be. It's not up to the hammer/engineer to know what or what shouldn't be implemented, they're not the ones making the judgement call. They're job is to execute the roadmap/product specification as it's written. They can provide feedback, make suggestions and inform the owner of any risks both moral and technical, but ultimately it's not their decision and not their responsibility. Now, if the engineer were the product owner, then of course, he is responsible. I think this author doesn't fully understand how software is developed and doesn't understand or differentiate between the roles of product managers/product owners and software engineers.

gnud 10y ago
Just following orders, eh? There are, of course, systems that can be used in both good and evil ways. But when your boss says 'just write code that detects when the car is being tested, and when it's being driven normally', you know it's sketchy, and you should refuse. I know this is easy to say and hard to do. But it's still something we should talk about, and that programmers should think about, before we get asked to do something, not after.
gyardley 10y ago
Nonsense. 'Just following orders' does not remove your moral culpability.
- pascalxus 10y ago
  There are limits of course. An engineer shouldn't program a printer to explode and kill anybody. But, the volkswagon disaster is still firmly within the realm of product owner responsibility.

erikb 10y ago

Anybody knows what you can do if your boss asks something illegal of you like stealing money from other people, or if he basically asks to steal money from yourself? Would be interested in US and German law, if someone knows.

ocschwar 10y ago

This is why we have the concept of a "professional engineer." This is why we require building designs and other engineering documents to be signed by a PE. It's not just that you know enough of your field for your signature to matter. It's that by signing, you are putting your reputation and even your freedom at risk. As it is right now, if you write code that does something illegal or unethical, the blame WILL go to you. There may or may not be an email record of you being told to do this, but there will be no question of YOUR intent, and you can be sure that your bosses will do whatever it takes to get all the liability put on you, because with source code, there can be no question of intent. (Well, in older times you could obfuscate intent in the source code, but that option went away with K&R C) So it might as well be time to standardize the software engineering form of the professional engineer exam and licensing procedure, and start requiring that software PEs review code.

wccrawford 10y ago

I was once asked by a boss to write code that I felt was unethical. I don't remember exactly what it was now. I do remember that I managed to convince them not to do it by finding a (probably) better way that didn't challenge my ethics. Had I not managed to convince them to do it ethically, I don't know what they'd have done. But I'd already told them that I wouldn't do anything unethical when they hired me, and I told them that their solution to that problem was unethical. It wasn't even anything important. It was only "a little unethical" and wouldn't have really affected many people negatively. But the line for me isn't how unethical it is, just that it's unethical at all. I simply don't need that in my life, no matter the price. I wish more people would draw the line where I do, but I do understand the conflict and why they might choose otherwise.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ClearAsMud 10y ago

Programmers are not lawyers, and this isn't Edward Snowden. There is a logical train of legality and one can debate the ethics of a task most likely with the owner, or legal counsel. The other option is to get release of liability which is not uncommon in realms where developers are asked to do things that are shady. If they don't have the fortitude to stand up and say something .. then just walk away.

Michie 10y ago

> "But what developers really need is an organization that governs and regulates their profession like other industries have, both Martin and Sourour believe. Currently nothing like that exists although both the Association for Computer Machinery and the IEEE have made a start, with ethics documents and, in some cases, training." I don't think the solution for this is to have an organization that regulates programmers to make sure a programmer will become ethical. No matter how much ethics you teach someone to become ethical, it is in their own volition to act upon a task that is provided. What will you do it if a programmer suddenly decides to be unethical or agreed upon doing an unethical task related to work? Remove their license to become programmers? Ban them to use the computers? Put them in jail? Shouldn't the management be responsible for their decisions, too? Why are all the blame here being focus on the programmers? Why don't you teach "Ethics" to those who are pushing the programmers to do such a task? Yes, the programmers have the big decision to do it or not. But regulating them isn't the solution that would make their decisions ethical. What if the younger generation wanted to code? Will you stop them from learning it because they are not allowed to learn it unless they are in school? Or they are not even allowed to ship code because they don't have a license or it is not under the standards made by the organization? Remember programmers are people. Same with all the human beings in this world who makes moral decisions on their own. Their beliefs, attitude and principles in life are nurtured based on how they were brought up not because they took an ethics class in College. If a programmer violated a law because of his actions, then treat them as a person who has violated the law.

naevius 10y ago

I work in e-commerce, have for 10+ years now. Without a doubt I'm going to Hell, even though, literally, every day, I refuse to do what everything customer's ask of me. Eventually, because of pressure from management or the customer, you will do something you're ashamed of or worse. When you have two small children to feed and your jobs on the line or you need the money it's hard to hold the line. Now that I'm older and the stakes are lower I can give the fuck-off more frequently, and I feel better about myself on the whole, but early on I wasn't so resolute. Here are the things I've been asked to do and refused, so they just went to someone else to get it done. - Disable the back button coming from a Google search (Don't want them going to a competitor's site). - Change the default selection for being included in spam list from no to yes. - Export email lists ignoring the "include me in spam lists" selection. - If someone has purchased before, save their credit card information, and if they add something to their cart ever again, charge them immediately, and them make refunds difficult. - Make the RMA / refund page throw an error the first time, to try and discourage returns. It'd work the 2nd time. - Add a "pay with cash discount" wish is really a credit card surcharge because the request to pay in cash is never approved. - Doctor the math for discounts so unless a customer double-checks they won't notice the ~25 cent discrepancy. - Take donations for a cause with fine print (literally, like 3pt type) that says only a small percentage gets donated. - Intentional violation of credit card rules, such as storing the customer's credit card without their knowledge, sending credit cards numbers through email unencrypted, refusing to honor recurring payment cancellations, and so on. - Ship by a slower shipping method than what the customer is charged for. This list could go on for literally hundreds of entries. The point is that, yes, as the programmer, we are the last line of defense. The stories here with people working in the health care industry just break my heart - so much more at stake then people's money. One piece of advice I can offer. When you refuse, and they go hire someone somewhere else to do the dirty work, you can always report them anonymously afterward. The satisfaction of seeing them having their credit card processing or merchant account yanked can give you some solace. But in the end, I don't know if it's a winnable war. I want to say this very carefully, because I in no way wish to disparage programmers from other countries, but what I've seen, over and over, is that if I won't do it, there is always someone in another country, for cheap, who will. I'm sure they've got two kids too, and they need the money. There will always be someone ready to do the wrong thing, for whatever reason.