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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

This isn't a direct comparison, but after World War II it was decided clearly that soldiers are not protected by saying "my boss told me to do it" when the commit war crimes or other atrocities. This is now called the Nuremberg defense and it holds no water at all.

The same principle applies here, in a general sense - but it's sufficiently different in practice, I wonder how it would be treated too.

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Hyperbole much ?

When a soldier is ordered to torture - its clearly wrong to do so. Its a question of human ethic.

Is it the responsibility of the software engineer to know the exact level of NO_2 0.001 or 0002 that he should be coded into their product ?

Also a software engineer doesn't exist in a vacuum. There is a whole testing regime. Why should the coder be solely responsible ?

Engineers aren't solely responsible, but... Did you software guys not take engineering ethics classes? You have a responsibility to society to consider health and safety of the public, even if it means losing your job.

We "software guys" aren't required to do anything at all aside from know how to make software. I can't even imagine how to change that, the tools to learn to make software are federated widely and universities have nothing like a monopoly on them.

Most 'software guys' have academic backgrounds in computer science, which typically doesn't include anything like engineering ethics. An outright 'Software Engineering' degree might include something like that, but it's definitely emphasized far less than it would be in something like mechanical or civil engineering.

My undergraduate curriculum in Computer Science had a "Professionalism in Computing" course where we discussed ethics. It is still a requirement: http://www.cs.vt.edu/undergraduate/courses/CS3604

Some schools require an ethic course and some do not for Computer Science degrees. I did at NCSU for my CS degree, but it's no where near universal.

My school had "Social Implications of Computing" but it was more focused on research ethics, reference citing, IP, privacy, and security type issues.

Also, since we are CS and not Professional Engineers, we did not have any ethical ceremony like Order of the Engineer.

Some type of Professional Ethics course is part of the ACM model curriculum for computer science (https://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations), but I think how that's fulfilled varies widely across universities.

This is kind of tricky, as I'm assuming that, unlike say a hard engineer that works on a Power Plant or a Bridge, they're not licensed as a Professional Engineer.

http://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe

In that case the organization would be responsible to a degree, but so would engineers that sign off on something like this. The coder shouldn't solely be responsible, but if you sniff something dirty in the water imo it's your moral responsibility to raise something, or resign. I hope that if I'm in a similar position (probably won't be because I don't work on anything that will kill a person if poorly engineered) that I would react appropriately.

That said, this guy is probably full of crap and is just throwing whoever he can under the bus to preserve whatever stock value is left.

By that reasoning we can order soldiers to torture if we simply fragment the process enough. One to strap in the left wrist, one to strap in the right wrist, one to switch on the gas to the blowtorch, etc.

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