That makes sense, but I'd argue that OP opened the door to actual moral questions by characterizing their ethical code as "don't do evil things for evil people"

That makes sense, but I'd argue that OP opened the door to actual moral questions by characterizing their ethical code as "don't do evil things for evil people". Even if ethical codes are a morality-neutral set of rules, that goes out the window when the rules themselves start adding explicit moral requirements. Even ignoring the fact that the article itself defines its rules in a moral context, I feel like GP's concerns over the content are equally valid even just as professional rules. I thought the part about cache validation was hyperbole, but no, it's literally right there in the article: "Stale stuff in a cache would be an ethics violation". I don't really see how this would be a remotely reasonable rule for an industrial ethical code that you describe. If we're putting "stale cache results" in the list of rules where breaking them doesn't "just mean you get fired", but that "you can never do that job for anybody ever again", we might as well just all just retire as software developers and take up a new trade; even the best programmers in the world accidentally write buggy code sometimes, so we'd be better off finding some other job on our own terms rather than waiting for inevitably getting "disbarred" (or whatever the equivalent term here would be).