6 ms·

How do you enforce that? How do you avoid it making software even costlier to build by several orders of magnitude? How do you make sure that outsourced develop

by GuiA 10y ago

How do you enforce that? How do you avoid it making software even costlier to build by several orders of magnitude? How do you make sure that outsourced developers that will inevitably be used due to this rise in cost follow the code of ethics?

tptacek 10y ago
How do ASME members enforce their code of ethics? How do doctors enforce the Hippocratic Oath? We should resist the temptation of assuming that just because software development is new, the professional ethics problems we face are novel or especially challenging.
- yarou 10y ago
  IMO, you'd be solving the wrong problem. The real problem that needs to be solved is licensing software engineers. This comes with the added benefit of standardizing competence. If lawyers and doctors need licensing, why shouldn't we also have a licensing body for software engineers? Then you get the ethics enforcement for free.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I'm happy to take on one problem at a time.
- stale2002 10y ago
  The issue is that very few people would be willing to be treated by an unlicensed doctor. The same is not true for software and will NEVER be true for software. Nobody is ever going to care if the guy fiddling around with CSS and HTML to make a marketing landing page is licensed or not. Hell, I know small startups that will pay a bright high school student to do stuff like that. Vast swafts of software engineering can be reduced to basic crud web dev that a bootcamper college dropout is capable of doing. There is no "high school intern" level equivalent of medical work that the world has a massive shortage of.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    The code of ethics doesn't even have to be enforced by employers. All it takes is for a sufficient number of senior developers to adopt it, and then companies that want reliable access to senior talent will be required to reckon with their code of ethics.
    - stale2002 10y ago
      Thats a fair point, for sure. But if that is the case, senior devs would have to have some reason to join this organization, as it only seems to put you at a disadvantage. Lawyers are only in their professional org because it is enforced against them. There'd have to be some negative effect to "defecting" by not joining the org. Self enforced maybe? Devs refusing to hire other devs that aren't in the org? Possibly.
      - tptacek 10y ago
        I'd join a professional organization that committed me to the three ethical rules I proposed downthread. Why would I do that? By your logic, it would serve only to put me at a disadvantage. And yet: I'm pretty senior as engineers go, and still happy to sign up?
  - morgante 10y ago
    > The issue is that very few people would be willing to be treated by an unlicensed doctor. That's true today, mainly due to centuries of work to professionalize medicine. There was a time in history where much of treatment was basically the equivalent of high school crud work. More importantly, I don't think we need to worry about the random fiddlers. They're not the ones building massive databases. It's the people working at places like Google and Facebook.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > The issue is that very few people would be willing to be treated by an unlicensed doctor. The size of the "alternative medicine" industry begs to differ.
morgante 10y ago
> How do you enforce that? Target the big players (large tech companies) so that they'll only hire people who are members of the developer guild. We're not going to prevent people from ever building software, but permanently taking employment at Google/Facebook/etc. off the table would be a strong deterrent. > How do you avoid it making software even costlier to build by several orders of magnitude? Why do you think that following ethics would make software much costlier to build? You're the one making the assumption so you need to give evidence.
- legostormtroopr 10y ago
  > only hire people who are members of the developer guild Like a union? Except without benefits, only obligations. And not joining will get you black balled. Sounds neat - sign me up.
  - morgante 10y ago
    No, specifically not like a union in that there's no collective bargaining. I feel like people are acting deliberately obtuse. This isn't some radical proposal. Doctors have professional associations (with ethics requirements). So do lawyers. So do librarians. We're professionals—it's time to act like it. Also, being bound to a professional code of ethics is a benefit. It pre-commits you so that if your boss tries to get you to do something unethical you have substantially more leverage to refuse. Try getting an attorney to do something which would get them disbarred—they'll refuse, even if you're offering a ton of money.
    - GuiA 10y ago
      We have a professional organization, it's been around for over half a century, it has a code of ethics, it's called the ACM. Now what? > Try getting an attorney to do something which would get them disbarred ... so do you want or do you not want a bar exam for software?
      - morgante 10y ago
idlewords 10y ago
Librarians follow a code of patron privacy that they take incredibly seriously. It doesn't result in non-code librarians being smuggled in from Ukraine. I'm not sure why you think a basic code of professional ethics would add so much cost to software development.
- GuiA 10y ago
  If you want to enforce it and have oversight at any basic level, for example the way it might be done in law, then you need a licensing of some form, and it's going to add overhead and delays = costs. There's much we can learn from librarians, but it's clear that the comparisons between library practice and software engineering are going to be tenuous. Are hundreds of librarians ever tasked with building multi hundred million dollar systems + ongoing maintenance etc? I can think of a few perhaps (BNF, LOC, etc) but it's nowhere near the same magnitude or scope as software. I have a hard time seeing how you can get all the benefits of a code of ethics in a field as money heavy as software without none of the overhead that unionizing/licensing/etc would bring. Not that I am fundamentally against unionizing. But then, why would a company choose a costly, slow US union over cheap, fast overseas engineers?
  - idlewords 10y ago
    The Library of Congress has an annual budget north of $600M. https://www.loc.gov/portals/static/about/reports-and-budgets/documents/financial-reports/fy15.pdf https://www.loc.gov/portals/static/about/reports-and-budgets...
    - GuiA 10y ago
      Right, and that's one of the largest libraries in the world - the definition of an outlier. $600M annual budget makes no one bat an eye in the software world. I don't fundamentally disagree with you, but I need to hear more than "let's just do like librarians do" because the similarities are tenuous.
      - idlewords 10y ago

by GuiA 10y ago

tptacek 10y ago

How do ASME members enforce their code of ethics? How do doctors enforce the Hippocratic Oath? We should resist the temptation of assuming that just because software development is new, the professional ethics problems we face are novel or especially challenging.

yarou 10y ago
IMO, you'd be solving the wrong problem. The real problem that needs to be solved is licensing software engineers. This comes with the added benefit of standardizing competence. If lawyers and doctors need licensing, why shouldn't we also have a licensing body for software engineers? Then you get the ethics enforcement for free.
- tptacek 10y ago
  I'm happy to take on one problem at a time.
stale2002 10y ago
The issue is that very few people would be willing to be treated by an unlicensed doctor. The same is not true for software and will NEVER be true for software. Nobody is ever going to care if the guy fiddling around with CSS and HTML to make a marketing landing page is licensed or not. Hell, I know small startups that will pay a bright high school student to do stuff like that. Vast swafts of software engineering can be reduced to basic crud web dev that a bootcamper college dropout is capable of doing. There is no "high school intern" level equivalent of medical work that the world has a massive shortage of.
- tptacek 10y ago
  The code of ethics doesn't even have to be enforced by employers. All it takes is for a sufficient number of senior developers to adopt it, and then companies that want reliable access to senior talent will be required to reckon with their code of ethics.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    Thats a fair point, for sure. But if that is the case, senior devs would have to have some reason to join this organization, as it only seems to put you at a disadvantage. Lawyers are only in their professional org because it is enforced against them. There'd have to be some negative effect to "defecting" by not joining the org. Self enforced maybe? Devs refusing to hire other devs that aren't in the org? Possibly.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      I'd join a professional organization that committed me to the three ethical rules I proposed downthread. Why would I do that? By your logic, it would serve only to put me at a disadvantage. And yet: I'm pretty senior as engineers go, and still happy to sign up?
- morgante 10y ago
  > The issue is that very few people would be willing to be treated by an unlicensed doctor. That's true today, mainly due to centuries of work to professionalize medicine. There was a time in history where much of treatment was basically the equivalent of high school crud work. More importantly, I don't think we need to worry about the random fiddlers. They're not the ones building massive databases. It's the people working at places like Google and Facebook.
- flukus 10y ago
  > The issue is that very few people would be willing to be treated by an unlicensed doctor. The size of the "alternative medicine" industry begs to differ.

morgante 10y ago

> How do you enforce that? Target the big players (large tech companies) so that they'll only hire people who are members of the developer guild. We're not going to prevent people from ever building software, but permanently taking employment at Google/Facebook/etc. off the table would be a strong deterrent. > How do you avoid it making software even costlier to build by several orders of magnitude? Why do you think that following ethics would make software much costlier to build? You're the one making the assumption so you need to give evidence.

legostormtroopr 10y ago
> only hire people who are members of the developer guild Like a union? Except without benefits, only obligations. And not joining will get you black balled. Sounds neat - sign me up.
- morgante 10y ago
  No, specifically not like a union in that there's no collective bargaining. I feel like people are acting deliberately obtuse. This isn't some radical proposal. Doctors have professional associations (with ethics requirements). So do lawyers. So do librarians. We're professionals—it's time to act like it. Also, being bound to a professional code of ethics is a benefit. It pre-commits you so that if your boss tries to get you to do something unethical you have substantially more leverage to refuse. Try getting an attorney to do something which would get them disbarred—they'll refuse, even if you're offering a ton of money.
  - GuiA 10y ago
    We have a professional organization, it's been around for over half a century, it has a code of ethics, it's called the ACM. Now what? > Try getting an attorney to do something which would get them disbarred ... so do you want or do you not want a bar exam for software?
    - morgante 10y ago

idlewords 10y ago

Librarians follow a code of patron privacy that they take incredibly seriously. It doesn't result in non-code librarians being smuggled in from Ukraine. I'm not sure why you think a basic code of professional ethics would add so much cost to software development.

GuiA 10y ago
If you want to enforce it and have oversight at any basic level, for example the way it might be done in law, then you need a licensing of some form, and it's going to add overhead and delays = costs. There's much we can learn from librarians, but it's clear that the comparisons between library practice and software engineering are going to be tenuous. Are hundreds of librarians ever tasked with building multi hundred million dollar systems + ongoing maintenance etc? I can think of a few perhaps (BNF, LOC, etc) but it's nowhere near the same magnitude or scope as software. I have a hard time seeing how you can get all the benefits of a code of ethics in a field as money heavy as software without none of the overhead that unionizing/licensing/etc would bring. Not that I am fundamentally against unionizing. But then, why would a company choose a costly, slow US union over cheap, fast overseas engineers?
- idlewords 10y ago
  The Library of Congress has an annual budget north of $600M. https://www.loc.gov/portals/static/about/reports-and-budgets/documents/financial-reports/fy15.pdf https://www.loc.gov/portals/static/about/reports-and-budgets...
  - GuiA 10y ago
    Right, and that's one of the largest libraries in the world - the definition of an outlier. $600M annual budget makes no one bat an eye in the software world. I don't fundamentally disagree with you, but I need to hear more than "let's just do like librarians do" because the similarities are tenuous.
    - idlewords 10y ago