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Yes, the Hippocratic Oath works quite well even if it has no legal underpinnings, so why not use the same idea for developers? Indeed ACM and IEEE could draft o

Yes, the Hippocratic Oath works quite well even if it has no legal underpinnings, so why not use the same idea for developers? Indeed ACM and IEEE could draft one.

thyristan 1y ago
It only works because doctors have a self-governing body of other doctors as an oversight, usually called a chamber, board, Kammer, etc. This chamber is responsible for licensing doctors to perform medicine and has the power to withdraw that license upon violations of the Hippocratic Oath, other ethical violations and other professional misconduct or malpractice. Unless you want this kind of arrangement for developers, the oath isn't any good. Also, the Hippocratic Oath has tons of variants, nobody uses the original one anymore because there are things in there that went out of fashion over the last 2000 years. E.g. operating on people suffering from kidney stones used to be prohibited: "I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone[...]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath ). Similar prohibitions exist nowadays for abortions or euthanasia, but only in some places. In others, doctors are free to or even required to perform those. In software development, I would imagine even more variety in the allowed/prohibited-list.
- bmez 1y ago
  not only, in most countries operating as a physician requires a license to operate. It can be revoked if the professional violates the terms of the license. If software had such a thing, it would be possible to achieve something similar. It is not the oath per se that keeps doctors on the righteous path, it is just as much the treath of not loosing your job - but having your professional status revoked (i.e. permamently loosing the ability to work). On the other hand, reviewing code every now and then, it would be good if you could revoke programming privileges for ever for certain individuals.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  Our board would be packed with Scrum lords smacking down on missing field entries in Jira tickets. I would like more 'philosophy' in CS education. Just that people are aware of the methods used against them helps alot. It is hard and takes time to discover stuff on your own. It took me like 5-10 years of working before I realized how the sausage is made.
- themafia 1y ago
  There is a ridiculously huge body of law covering medical practice. The AMA is just window dressing over an industry trade group. At the end of the day you confront a jury and not a board of similarly positioned individuals.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
  I absolutely want this arrangement for developers. We need to grow up as a profession, and take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. This isn't the 90s anymore. Today there's practically nothing you can do in the modern world without interacting with software. Buying food, going to the hospital, travelling, communicating, voting, going to school, using anything electrical, anywhere. Our society is completely dependent on software at this point. The fact that there's no professional ethics code with the appropriate oversight for the development and maintenance of software is utterly insane. The points you bring up about the Hippocratic Oath are important problems to solve, rather than reasons not to try.
Traubenfuchs 1y ago
Are you kidding? Misconduct among doctors is rampant, special highlight on dentists: https://archive.ph/70Zk5 https://archive.ph/70Zk5
- ekianjo 1y ago
  Yeah some people choose to wear rosy glasses when it comes to the medical profession. They can see corruption around them but they can't imagine it exists in every walks of life. Kind of gell-man amnesia.
carefulfungi 1y ago
The ACM has long had a code of ethics. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
dooglius 1y ago
Why do you believe it works? I don't particularly get the sense it has any effect whatsoever, particularly in cases where doctors are pressured to do harm. (There's also a lot of ambiguity left in what constitutes "harm")
nerdsniper 1y ago
Not taking away from your point, but just a PSA: For some reason "First, do no harm" is synonymous with "Hippocratic Oath" in pop-culture. Just a reminder that this is apocryphal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath Surgeons, in fact, often begin with harm. To replace a hip joint, they necessarily must begin by causing great trauma to the body by cutting it open and removing bone.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
  That's far too literal an interpretation of harm. The point isn't to never do any kind of "physical harm". It's about doing the least amount of harm possible/necessary in any situation, where doing nothing can also be seen as causing harm. I had a burst appendix as a teenager, leading to peritonitis. To treat this, surgeons were going to operate laparoscopically to remove the appendix and fix remove any contamination in the peritoneum. Obviously this required damaging my skin, removing an organ etc. which in the strictest sense is harm. But doing nothing at all would obviously lead to sepsis and death, so this was still the least harmful intervention. During the surgery, it turned out that the laparoscopic method was hard to carry out due to obesity and other factors. The attending made the decision to convert to a laporotomy, doing even more harm to my skin and leaving me with a 30 cm scar on my stomach. But it was the right call because it maximised the chances of accomplishing the goal of the procedure(preventing imminent death), minimising the risk of serious complications. And here I am almost 20 years later. I have a scar, I have some adhesions that occasionally cause moderate abdominal pain if I don't eat enough fibre, and perhaps my lymphatic system and gut flora are very minorly compromised in some nebulous way due to the lack of an appendix. On the other hand, I'm alive. So yes, they "did harm", but they also minimised harm. And they didn't do any unnecessary harm, to the best of their ability. And that's the point of the ethical principle.
GrumpyYoungMan 1y ago
Casual of research shows that the ACM's Code of Ethics can be traced back to its Guidelines for Professional Conduct in Information Processing dating back to 1966 (https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics/1966-acm-code https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics/1966-acm-code) and the IEEE's Code of Ethics can be traced back to a precursor organization's Code of Professional Conduct dating to 1912.
ekianjo 1y ago
> the Hippocratic Oath works quite well This reads like a bad joke. Ever heard of the opoid crisis?
kukkeliskuu 1y ago
I remember reading that no med schools in the U.S. use the actual Hippocratic Oath anymore, although it seens that most schools have sone form of oath.

Yes, the Hippocratic Oath works quite well even if it has no legal underpinnings, so why not use the same idea for developers? Indeed ACM and IEEE could draft one.

thyristan 1y ago

It only works because doctors have a self-governing body of other doctors as an oversight, usually called a chamber, board, Kammer, etc. This chamber is responsible for licensing doctors to perform medicine and has the power to withdraw that license upon violations of the Hippocratic Oath, other ethical violations and other professional misconduct or malpractice. Unless you want this kind of arrangement for developers, the oath isn't any good. Also, the Hippocratic Oath has tons of variants, nobody uses the original one anymore because there are things in there that went out of fashion over the last 2000 years. E.g. operating on people suffering from kidney stones used to be prohibited: "I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone[...]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath ). Similar prohibitions exist nowadays for abortions or euthanasia, but only in some places. In others, doctors are free to or even required to perform those. In software development, I would imagine even more variety in the allowed/prohibited-list.

bmez 1y ago
not only, in most countries operating as a physician requires a license to operate. It can be revoked if the professional violates the terms of the license. If software had such a thing, it would be possible to achieve something similar. It is not the oath per se that keeps doctors on the righteous path, it is just as much the treath of not loosing your job - but having your professional status revoked (i.e. permamently loosing the ability to work). On the other hand, reviewing code every now and then, it would be good if you could revoke programming privileges for ever for certain individuals.
rightbyte 1y ago
Our board would be packed with Scrum lords smacking down on missing field entries in Jira tickets. I would like more 'philosophy' in CS education. Just that people are aware of the methods used against them helps alot. It is hard and takes time to discover stuff on your own. It took me like 5-10 years of working before I realized how the sausage is made.
themafia 1y ago
There is a ridiculously huge body of law covering medical practice. The AMA is just window dressing over an industry trade group. At the end of the day you confront a jury and not a board of similarly positioned individuals.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
I absolutely want this arrangement for developers. We need to grow up as a profession, and take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. This isn't the 90s anymore. Today there's practically nothing you can do in the modern world without interacting with software. Buying food, going to the hospital, travelling, communicating, voting, going to school, using anything electrical, anywhere. Our society is completely dependent on software at this point. The fact that there's no professional ethics code with the appropriate oversight for the development and maintenance of software is utterly insane. The points you bring up about the Hippocratic Oath are important problems to solve, rather than reasons not to try.

Traubenfuchs 1y ago

Are you kidding? Misconduct among doctors is rampant, special highlight on dentists: https://archive.ph/70Zk5 https://archive.ph/70Zk5

ekianjo 1y ago
Yeah some people choose to wear rosy glasses when it comes to the medical profession. They can see corruption around them but they can't imagine it exists in every walks of life. Kind of gell-man amnesia.

carefulfungi 1y ago

The ACM has long had a code of ethics. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

dooglius 1y ago

Why do you believe it works? I don't particularly get the sense it has any effect whatsoever, particularly in cases where doctors are pressured to do harm. (There's also a lot of ambiguity left in what constitutes "harm")

nerdsniper 1y ago

Not taking away from your point, but just a PSA: For some reason "First, do no harm" is synonymous with "Hippocratic Oath" in pop-culture. Just a reminder that this is apocryphal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath Surgeons, in fact, often begin with harm. To replace a hip joint, they necessarily must begin by causing great trauma to the body by cutting it open and removing bone.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
That's far too literal an interpretation of harm. The point isn't to never do any kind of "physical harm". It's about doing the least amount of harm possible/necessary in any situation, where doing nothing can also be seen as causing harm. I had a burst appendix as a teenager, leading to peritonitis. To treat this, surgeons were going to operate laparoscopically to remove the appendix and fix remove any contamination in the peritoneum. Obviously this required damaging my skin, removing an organ etc. which in the strictest sense is harm. But doing nothing at all would obviously lead to sepsis and death, so this was still the least harmful intervention. During the surgery, it turned out that the laparoscopic method was hard to carry out due to obesity and other factors. The attending made the decision to convert to a laporotomy, doing even more harm to my skin and leaving me with a 30 cm scar on my stomach. But it was the right call because it maximised the chances of accomplishing the goal of the procedure(preventing imminent death), minimising the risk of serious complications. And here I am almost 20 years later. I have a scar, I have some adhesions that occasionally cause moderate abdominal pain if I don't eat enough fibre, and perhaps my lymphatic system and gut flora are very minorly compromised in some nebulous way due to the lack of an appendix. On the other hand, I'm alive. So yes, they "did harm", but they also minimised harm. And they didn't do any unnecessary harm, to the best of their ability. And that's the point of the ethical principle.

GrumpyYoungMan 1y ago

Casual of research shows that the ACM's Code of Ethics can be traced back to its Guidelines for Professional Conduct in Information Processing dating back to 1966 (https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics/1966-acm-code https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics/1966-acm-code) and the IEEE's Code of Ethics can be traced back to a precursor organization's Code of Professional Conduct dating to 1912.

ekianjo 1y ago

> the Hippocratic Oath works quite well This reads like a bad joke. Ever heard of the opoid crisis?

kukkeliskuu 1y ago

I remember reading that no med schools in the U.S. use the actual Hippocratic Oath anymore, although it seens that most schools have sone form of oath.