Those of you with a membership in ACM or IEEE, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on why you do.
Those of you who don't, would you consider pledging yourself to a code of ethics if they met your requirements? What would those requirements be?
Those of you who don't, would you consider pledging yourself to a code of ethics if they met your requirements? What would those requirements be?
I've been a member of ACM primarily because I wanted easier access to ACM library papers, but not any more. I'm uninterested in turning software engineering into a gated discipline with a professional organisation acting as a monopoly keyholder.
Software as a discipline affects too many areas of life for anything much more than a vague platitude as a code. Components may be used for good or evil in ways we can't control. Even something as potentially evil as Metasploit is also almost exactly the same thing you want to use to test for vulnerabilities (personally I would not write a plugin for it).
I don't like the idea of extensive central regulation, but it might well be better for programmers' lives.
Your argument that other professions do it is invalid. In fact the government should be more proactive in ensuring that professions only impose valid conditions on employment, and don't add spurious requirements in order to exclude people from the profession, in order to, as you say "protect [their] careers and incomes".
Unilateral disarmament has already led to a situation where 80,000 unregulated immigrants every year are competing with us while those regulated professions see few or none. We're not going to see them de-regulate in any of our lifetimes, because the theorems of economists don't persuade anyone -- except possibly computer programmers and we don't have any power or influence because we're not united to get any. So the best option is obviously to at least organize to get a fair shake. But so far there are few signs of that.
There have been projects of the sort you propose (the space shuttle software comes to mind), but they are few and far between, and it simply not possible to quickly change the industry in general without completely replacing it. Putting aside the technical challenges, it simply is not economically feasible - we don't have the resources.
The situation was very different with the Quebec bridge. At that time, the practice of quantitative engineering had advanced to the point where large, safe bridges could be reliably built, and all that was needed to make it happen was to deal with some human problems leading to sloppiness. The desired outcome was within grasp, and the public demanded it. Until the practice of software development reaches those points, a code of ethics is not going to make it happen. The department store collapse shows that engineering ethics need to be supported by society to be effective (and by support, I mean more than just lip service, and the support has to come from the people who set the agenda.)
Edit: Let me explain further what I meant by 'quantitative engineering'. Bridge designs are analytically verified to ensure that they meet a formal set of safety requirements before they are built. In contrast, almost all software is built and then tested (and fixed, and tested...) against an informal specification (even in iterative and agile methods, the building of parts precedes their testing, as it must.) Analysis is relatively much less important, and is generally informal.
To address the thread topic, I'm a P.Eng, ACM member, and IEEE member.
I wonder if the real difference between software engineering and other engineering disciplines is that they have a culture of responsibility--of saying "hey, public safety is more important than money"--and we emphatically don't.