10 ms·

Makes you wonder, is Ethics even a required course in a typical software engineering curriculum?

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• navait 9y ago
  ABET requires an ethics course.
• draw_down 9y ago
  *business curriculum
• IIIIIIIIIIII 9y ago
  It doesn't matter how many ethics courses are offered and taken. The only thing I ever retweeted on my otherwise completely empty and unused Twitter account so that I could copy and paste it when needed: "For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives." You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood, not in university courses. Most of the rest is the quote above. University classes talk to and train parts of the brain whose involvement in the ethics of your decisions is minimal.
  • podviaznikov 9y ago
    > "For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives." This is a great insight. Where does it come from? Your thought or someone else?
  • gizmo686 9y ago
    >You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood. The ethical questions a software engineer (or almost any professional) faces are not "basic". More specifically, the "basic" ethics we learn as children relate to direct interpersonal relations and small group dynamics (including excessive deference to authority, which "good" ethics must unlearn). These lessons to not prepare us to deal with questions that involve millions of people whom we know very little about.
    • sideshowb 9y ago
      This. My Cambridge CS degree (graduated 2002) included a short ethics course with some interesting problems of this nature.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • wpietri 9y ago
      Truth. Most people I have worked with know how not to be dicks. And if you put them in a situation where the human impact of something is obvious, they'll have the right reactions. The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph up and to the right.
      • IIIIIIIIIIII 9y ago
        > The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph up and to the right. And that is where I refer back to my comment: Pretty much nobody will become the whistleblower or the guy who prevents their company (or their country) from landing that billion dollar arms sale or from raising drug prices to levels unaffordable to many sick people even if they are perfectly well aware of how bad it is. There is one Snowden outlier for a million other people. "If I don't do it somebody else will" is just one of numerous rationalizations (and it even is actually correct). Statistically speaking the impact of ethics education vs. incentives is like 1 : 1 billion or worse.
  • westoncb 9y ago
    I pretty much agree with this perspective on ethics, but I think there is an important component missing. An individual person doesn't have fixed ethical responses; you'll find a huge amount of variation based on the person's estimate of what they lack at the moment. Take someone with poor ethics who's sated and they'll behave better than someone with excellent ethics who's starving. This has an impact on your quote because the urgency with which one pursues these rational incentives is going to depend on that person's estimate of their need (i.e. how much they perceive themselves to be lacking, in a very broad sense which includes needs of kin, emotional needs, etc.).
  • beguiledfoil 9y ago
    >"For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives." Words to live by if you've never encountered a problem you can't solve with A*...
  • anigbrowl 9y ago
    I take your point, but not everyone learns the same lessons in childhood; furthermore, ethical analysis is not always so simple as it appears. You may intuitively know that one course is right while another is wrong, but lack the vocabulary to articulate why to someone else. Politicians and other social technologists profit from such conceptual illiteracy. I've never taken an ethics course myself, but we discussed ethical problems extensively when I was in high school and I've read numerous books on the subject. It's taken me until middle age to be able to easily recognize and debunk unethical rhetorical strategies and philosophical positions, and I'm sure than in 10 and 20 years I'll bemoan my present lack of sophistication.
    • IIIIIIIIIIII 9y ago
      Whenever a police officer beats someone up of shoots an unarmed guy there quickly are the "they need more training" comments. Pretty much all of these stories including the one here is about basic decency, not about complex matters, and that is what I address. You can always invent some complex outlandish scenario, but this isn't what this is about right here.
      • anigbrowl 9y ago
        Phrases like 'basic decency' and 'human nature' are what people fall back on when they can't articulate why a particular ethical position is desirable. This makes you vulnerable in an argument, because when your terms are vague your opponent can project different meanings onto those phrases and you won't have a comeback. Intuition is an excellent guide for your own actions, but it's not by itself persuasive. You need to dig deeper and figure out what are the bases of 'basic decency.' Don't worry, it won't stop working for taking it apart and putting it back together again. Go back to Plato and look how Socrates keeps peeling back layer after layer of unstated assumptions to reveal the core truths.
  • mcrad 9y ago
    I'm impressed by your enlightened childhood. see also: https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics
    • IIIIIIIIIIII 9y ago
      As I said to somebody else's weird reply: The question is, why do you invent stuff I didn't say? Is this show you get your highs? People like you are one of the major annoyances of online discussion. I didn't say anything about my childhood. Stop making stuff up, troll.
  • cgmg 9y ago
    Why is thinking and responding rationally a bad thing? If you want to create change in the world, you need rational thinking, not wishful thinking.
    • pembrook 9y ago
      The problem isn't the rational response. It's the incentives. Poor incentives are created by misguided policy or a lack of policy in many areas. Most of the troubles we have with Healthcare in the US is due to very poor incentive structures. I'll never understand why people were surprised when investors realized they could buy niche lifesaving drugs and raise their prices by 6,000% since insurance providers would pay for them regardless. Obviously they would do that. The system was never designed to reduce the incentive to not do that (ie. making it illegal). The problem isn't "unethical" people. Trusting people to act ethically without any disincentives (ie. Jail/fines/social stigma/etc) is like trusting your toddler to run safely around a busy intersection.
    • IIIIIIIIIIII 9y ago
      > Why is thinking and responding rationally a bad thing? The question is, why do you invent stuff I didn't say? Is this show you get your highs? People like you are one of the major annoyances of online discussion.
• squegles 9y ago
  I graduated with a CS degree last year and Computer Ethics was indeed a required course.
• jandrese 9y ago
  I had a required ethics course to get my CS degree, and I graduated in 2000. The course was surprisingly contentious. A lot of students saw it as a waste of time or just an easy GPA booster. It did have some weird content, like a Meyers-Briggs day, but overall I thought it was worthwhile.
• tnecniv 9y ago
  Doesn't matter My ABET accredited ethics course in college took the attitude that ethics (for some definition of ethics) can't be taught in a semester at college so we'll just inform you about consequences of different choices engineers have made in different situations.
  • anigbrowl 9y ago
    Ew :-(
    • logfromblammo 9y ago
      I guess ethics is like jazz.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• randcraw 9y ago
  Software engineers don't make corporate policy. If Amazon or Facebook or Google decide to take advantage of their insider info on consumers to victimize them, that decision maker will be the CEO and the board, not lowly S/W developers. The most SWEs can do with their ethics is avoid or leave employers that have a history of such abuses. And clearly that is not happening.
  • gizmo686 9y ago
    There are still more mundane questions about engineering ethics. Your boss is pushing you to get a feature done by the end of the week, but doing it properly would take at least a month. You could finish it, but doing so would lead to increased maintenance costs, inconvenience/costs to downstream users/ etc. What are your ethical obligations here. Blindly listen to your boss, make sure your boss is aware of the engineering trade-offs being made and has made an informed decision on the timeline, refuse to deploy sub-par code, quit, leak about poor engineering practices, publicy shame about poor engineering practices?
    • logfromblammo 9y ago
      You make sure your boss is aware of the trade-offs, but once the decision has been made, you carry it out to the best of your ability. In the long run, you don't get paid unless the business makes money, and examples abound that show getting to market first is often more valuable than getting there with the best product. If that bothers you, talk to a union rep, because few businesses in existence would rather do the right thing if doing the wrong thing makes an extra buck. If the money flows in, those maintenance costs will keep you employed; if it doesn't, those costs won't need to be paid. You don't refuse to deploy, you don't leak, and you don't shame. If you feel as you you ethically must do any of those, quit first. (Don't mention your intentions to HR at your exit interview.)
      • gizmo686 9y ago
        What if you think it will cost the bussiness money, but will improve your bosses standing (for example, the damage will not be blamed on you boss), do you go to your boss's boss? What if you don't question that the change will make money for the business, but have ethical concerns about it (either because of its effect on users, competition, third parties, etc). How do you decide if you have ethical concerns? What if you are writing firmware for brakes that is going to get deployed to thousands of cars? >If that bothers you, talk to a union rep What union? Even if there was a union, this entirely avoids the central question: what behavior is ethically concerning? >If you feel as you you ethically must do any of those, quit first. This answer entirely avoids the ethical question of '(when) should you do any of those things'. All it says is "quit first" (a position which solidifies your moral high-ground, but which I do not agree with from a purely ethical standpoint).
• BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  If I can get paid 20K more designing an algorithm that adjusts prices on a more individual level, am I any less ethical than the person saving $2 by ignoring any of the ethical concerns buying the cheaper shirts?
  • wpietri 9y ago
    Definitely. Professionals carry a greater ethical burden than people do in everyday actions. Ditto for systems designers vs systems users. More power means more responsibility.
    • BearGoesChirp 9y ago
      Have we considered the 'unethicalness' of the different actions? The pricing system is only going to be used by consenting individuals engaging in transactions of money for goods/services. Compare this to what goes into the cheapest clothing, perhaps involving forced labor, child labor, poverty wages, or lethal work conditions. This also seems to assume there is an inherent wrongness in discriminating what price is offered, which many wouldn't find unethical (especially if the discrimination isn't based on protected classes). I feel that the 'definitely' comes from a personal system of ethics that is by no means shared with others. A system that, at least to other systems, might be unethical to enforce on others. I don't see how a single course in an engineering degree can even begin to fix this. I aced my ethics course but consider it a waste of time, not because ethics is a waste of time, but because what the course presented was so light as to be useless. Imagine giving a one semester intro to programming with javascript to MDs; that's what it felt like.
      • wpietri 9y ago
        Heh. I will note that plenty of people will defend both cases on the ground of "consenting individuals". Including the things like indentured servitude, child labor, poverty wages, and dangerous work conditions. Anyhow, I agree that other people may judge the situation differently than me. (I'm sure that for a given ethical conclusion, there's always some ethical system that disagrees, so if you're after certainty, you've picked the wrong topic.) You asked; I answered. If you don't like the answer, just fill out the refund form. Intro courses aren't meant to fix anything. They're meant to wake people up to the topic and prepare them to dig further, either in other classes or on their own. If you're arguing that more should be mandatory, I could get behind that. If, on the other hand, you're arguing that no education is better than some education, I'm not persuaded.
• anigbrowl 9y ago
  The downvotes your comment is receiving are a reminder that ethical consciousness threatens the interests of some actors.
• kruhft 9y ago
  In Canada, an (Computer) Engineer, you are required to take Engineering Ethics courses. Not so for Compute Science.
• Clubber 9y ago
  Is replacing people with automation at $0.10 on the dollar ethical? That, in a nutshell is what software developers do.