Code I’m Still Ashamed Of
medium.freecodecamp.com
medium.freecodecamp.com
It would need to avoid allowing the unscrupulous to (falsely) badmouth competitors.
Probably doesn't achieve much but it makes me feel better.
As for the terms and conditions violations, aka selling / using information - you're not going to get them. People stopped expecting privacy a while ago, and every conversation ive had on the subject the past three years always goes something along the lines of: "I always expect all my data to be given out and used"
If you don't want that to occur don't use the internet or use a company you trust. For example, I trust a university to keep my data secure because it's legally obligated to. Similarly, I trust most products I pay for, I don't trust pretty much any other app.
Instead, just add filters to drop everything from the email sender.
Or if you're like me, make an auto-responder that's directs to their CEO's inbox telling them to "Fuck Off Spammer". (I actually do this)
This is a prime example of how free capitalism will never regulate itself. Sure, you can vote with your dollar from what you know, but odds are you'll never find out about most of the crap a company pulls.
Too much regulation is obviously stifling to innovation as well. I don't have an answer, but I believe the solution lies somewhere in the middle, as with most things.
And just for an, albeit small, recent example [1], where there could easily exist better solutions, and the regulation could be worded more generally instead of giving specific mandates.
I'm sure there are more and much better examples, but as with everything we humans do, there are good practices and bad practices.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/14/502082110/...
Just to give you one example that hits very close to home: the EU parliament recently start this push for companies that provide OTT communication services (Whatsapp, Skype, Viber, etc...) to comply to phone companies regulations.
Among other things, this would mean that all of the companies that provide end-to-end encryption would simply have to stop doing it, given that phone companies need to be able to provide "Lawful Interception".
For instance, there's nothing in that sort of regulation that prohibits any innovation on encryption that would reconcile the user's reasonable expectation of privacy with the authorities' wish to have access to the user's communications.
And the issue of appropriate and adequate safeguards of such innovation so that the authorities themselves don't misuse it, is yet another issue altogether.
Encryption was an innovation. Communication that's private as a matter of technology rather than as a matter of legislation is an innovation.
Along the same lines: recording and time-shifting video and audio was an innovation. Enshrining the state of copyright law at the time would have prohibited it.
Innovation often does things that existing developers, users, and regulators didn't anticipate.
> For instance, there's nothing in that sort of regulation that prohibits any innovation on encryption that would reconcile the user's reasonable expectation of privacy with the authorities' wish to have access to the user's communications.
There's nothing in that sort of regulation that prohibits perpetual motion machines or time travel, either. The resolution of those two expectations is that one side loses and the other wins; the only question is which.
I don't believe that for a second. Innovation is constantly happening.
And as long as people are willing to give attention, time, money or a combination in exchange of something, it's highly likely that this 'something' will remain profitable and there lies the incentive to keep doing it.
For instance, if one were to work on a browser, who do you think has a greater incentive to allow adblocking: Firefox or Chrome?
Nitpick, but what the first comment said was that the signup happens regardless of whether you check/uncheck the box.
On the other hand, whistleblowing for misuse of customer data (which I'm sure is rampant) might be more effective.
The general public doesn't know how pervasive the problem is. They'd care more if they did.
> the money talks louder.
> If anyone has advice,
You might want to look at your communication style. Railing and yelling doesn't work if you want to persuade people.
Luckily the current regime seems to take a view far closer to mine, hopefully that will last beyond the current honeymoon period.
> If anyone has advice, I think this is a great thread to share thoughts.
The problem seems to be more-or-less endemic. Often the only solution is to break ranks and do the right thing against orders, or up sticks and go elsewhere, but these are very high risk strategies that most people wouldn't be able to justify when there is a mortgage to pay, especially as there is little chance the next place is much better.
I refused flatly. Phrased it as 'as a contractor I'd be liable. I don't have deep pockets'. So they just got an employee to do it, who had absolutely no compunctions about it.
Its not so much that a company wants to do wrong things. Its that there's always an engineer willing to do them.
To make a crude and polarizing comparison, especially since I happen to land somewhat on the other side of that argument:
You can't blame a tool (bat/knife/gun) for what its agent does with it. If one tool doesn't work for them, they'll get it done with something else.
As I opened with, yes, to some extent we all share the blame, but appealing to everyone to individually make the difference will never work, because it only takes a few to still get the (dirty) job done. If everyone played nice we wouldn't need any laws.
Somebody has to take a stand. In Canada they have an Engineering oath and code of ethics. We should all aspire to be our better selves. After all, we're not being executed; we'll just have to find another contract.
Ideally I absolutely agree with you, and we should all strive for the best and make a stand wherever possible, but the cynic in me believes that it can never completely solve the issues, just shift the burden to someone else down the line.
So there is no particular person in a corporation that has direct incentive to be responsible.
Not to be nit-picky but in this situation the company specifically asked you to do the wrong thing it wanted done.
Even if you're not interested in the financial reward you should still report it because you could be literally saving someone's life (possibly even that of your own) down the road.
[0] http://johnsonandbell.com/alerts-blog/employment/statutory-a...
This is one of the reasons some industries create professional associations or trade unions. It is hard to argue against pressure from your boss, so when ethics issues start to become common, you need a reasonably reliable way to apply opposing pressure.
A professional association with a code of ethics offers a standard excuse that you swore an oath against e.g. knowingly creating software that is designed to be fraudulent.
Alternatively, a minimal trade union that was chartered to only address ethics problems can create an incentive (under threat of collective action by the union) to not even ask for anything unethical. I know that it's popular to have a low opinion of unions, but it's important to remember that they are just a tool. If all you need is pressure against unethical requests, that should only need a tiny, mostly hands-off union.
> all it takes is the next dev to come along and say yes
Sure, but that's at least it wouldn't be your ethical problem anymore. Even if a more willing replacement is found, that takes at least some time and resources, and it sends a clear message that some behavior isn't appropriate. If you don't send that message, you're just conditioning the responsible people to do more ask for more unethical things it the future.
> I don't want regulation and lobbyists pushing their tech onto me as a solution.
If regulation could work well as a solution to a specific type of problem, it might be a good idea to get there first. Get to the politicians before the lobbyists carrying cash, a clear and brief explanation of the problem, and your proposed regulation.
However, this may not be a useful approach in some situations. I think some sort of collective organization is usually a better approach, but it's worth at least considering the regulatory approach.
I've been thinking about this recently. Less on the trade union (even if that might make more sense, in the vein of actual leverage), and more on the professional association side. I've been long-enamoured with the Canadian Engineering 'Iron Ring' ceremony. I don't know how much actual leverage that bestows, but something similar in such an infrastructural discipline as software development seems appropriate.
I love it. I have yet to take the ring off. It's a great way to initiate conversations about ethics and a great way to tangibly emphasize my personal pursuit in being ethical.
I'm a software dev. with a background in a different engineering discipline and there isn't much reason for me to join an engineering professional association in Canada. Unlike, say, civil, where you have to be licensed to perform some of the duties, nothing in a software engineer position actually requires a license.
They have it in the US too:
A better approach might be to have a consumer advocacy organization/site that allows devs to anonymously leak and publicly shame the bad practices of their employers. Somewhat like the proliferate Business Software Alliance ads that used to say, "If your employer is using pirated software, report them in confidence at ~place. If we catch them, you'll get a reward".
The answer is "yes". There is no reason to assume that a union representing employees would be any more motivated by customers' interests than the employers themselves would be. (And there are plenty of actions by real-life unions in other industries suggesting otherwise.)
If that's true, then they're almost certainly violating federal law. Instead of ranting about ethics, you should calmly explain to the CTO that what they are doing might be in violation of federal laws and regulations. Possibly laws related to spam. But if this practice contradicts the company's privacy policy (or if the privacy policy is vague enough and the user's intention and expectation of an opt-out is clear enough), then the company you worked for is almost certainly in violation of its contractual obligations to its users. The FTC is starting to take this sort of thing more seriously -- see https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/protecting-c... for examples of enforcement actions.
If I ever find myself in a situation where I'm tasked with making the commit on a "feature" like this, I would explain that I can provide technical assistance (up to and including writing/testing the code), but due to my professional ethical responsibilities, management will have to find another engineer to actually make the commit, deploy the code, and close the ticket. And I would also print out an email that proves I expressed my dissent and management dismissed my concerns.
IANAL.
I am not arguing that dark patterns don't work in general, I just don't think this is a good example.
Maybe I was wrong.
I've read about Y Combinator actually encouraging some of its startups to violate laws (in the "hack the system" sense, not in criminal violations sense).
If you think about it, many of the top startups do: Uber, AirBnB (and others that are losing like Zenefits, FanDuel or DraftKings).
See: https://blog.placeit.net/startups-ignored-law-won/
It's, sadly, one of the only effective ways to get them to be discussed or modified, laws have a lot of inertia going for them.
I'm definitely not happy about the ethics in the above case, though.
Another thing I was going to add is that some CEOs knowingly violate the laws and incorporate that into their risk models (cost of fine + lawyers weighted by chance of it happening), it's usually a lot more cost effective to violate them (The CTO in the above example might have done such cost/benefit calculation).
Leak it to the press.
Bold strategy.
One would hope laws about fraud would cover this situation.
Don't get me wrong: it's unethical. But I don't think, "I didn't check the box that said 'add me to the newsletter' and they sent me a newsletter anyway" is particularly powerful.
This bothers me, this isn't how medicine works. While there's very, very legitimate reasons to be critical of over prescribing and marketing, "I heard about an adverse outcome in someone else that may or may not be related to a drug she was taking" is not a good reason to recommending another person to stop treatment.
All medical interventions are a cost-benefit analysis and all medical interventions have risk, some more than others. Forgoing medical interventions also has risks and benefits. For all we know the risks were very minimal and the drug helped the sister. This could have been very harmful advice if the drug required, say, tapering down and the sister went off of it without assistance of a medical provider.
The author is themselves handing out incredibly rash and potentiality harmful advice.
In the article:
“The quiz doesn’t work,” she said.
“Oh. What’s broken?” I asked.
“Well, it seems that no matter what I do, the quiz recommends the client’s drug as the best possible treatment. The only exception is if I say I’m allergic. Or if I say I am already taking it.”
The author is apparently upset about assisting in giving what they believe to be improper medical advice so they proceeded to give improper medical advice themselves.
There's also a huge logical flaw to go from "this drug had a side effect that may have caused death in one person" to "this drug is inappropriate for my sister"
What if other options were therapy or surgery?
The author should probably speak to a professional therapist who can help him process this event and understand that he shares no responsibility for the complication that caused a user of the drug, who may have benefited substantially before the complication occurred, to commit suicide.
The problem with the quiz was that no matter how you answered, unless you said you were already taking the drug or explicitly allergic to it, the recommended solution was the drug. In other words, this was presented as a way to suss out which of various treatments would be appropriate, but it actually only recommended one.
If this was OTC I may see more cause for concern, but as an Rx drug, any such suppositions would still require a doctor's signoff.
We'd all prefer not to be involved in the mass manipulation of marketing/advertising at all, but that's not real life. As far as this goes, from the details in the article, it doesn't sound like an egregiously wrong thing.
It also sounds like the author was at peace with it until he learned that someone who took the medication had committed suicide. That's certainly some misdirected angst. This was almost definitely an antidepressant medication, and those require careful balancing and coordination by medical professionals. The guy who helped put together a marketing site for a drug that helps hundreds of millions of people is not responsible for the cases where incompetent medical practitioners prescribed it incorrectly.
The author answers this objection [0] on the Reddit thread [1] about his "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of" post:
devmastery[S] 15 points 4 days ago
I hear you. To clarify...
What actually happened is that she spoke to her doctor about being uncomfortable with the way the medicine was making her feel and he was able to recommend a more traditional medication that had been on the market much longer and did not end up having the same effect. Her transition was medically supervised. And she's doing great.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5d56fo/the_cod...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5d56fo/the_cod...
https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics
For comparison, the prescription drug market is extremely heavily regulated, but that doesn't seem to have helped in this story.
I may agree, reluctantly, with the first half of this sentence, but I don't agree with the second half.
Whatever happens with code and how we regulate it, we must start with the understanding that it is not like other engineering fields. It's so different that I believe it should be considered a separate field entirely. Actuaries and engineers both need to know a lot of math, but they are not the same fields, and there's no need to regulate them similarly. Engineers don't get to tell actuaries what to do. They shouldn't get to tell software developers what to do either.
One reason I'm so resistant to this is that I was a math major (though I did get an MS in industrial engineering), and I've seen what are essentially mathematical innovations patented under a legal regime that considers mathematics unpatentable to the point where it specifically excludes mathematics from the academic background that qualifies a person to review patents. The quality of patent review reflects the deliberately self-inflicted absence of advanced mathematics degree holders. I guess our best hope is that some of the physics majors will handle this?
This is exactly what you should expect from a cartel: expanding domain, limiting competition.
I am positive that the governing bodies for the "other engineering" fields would be delighted to get control over software, but they shouldn't get it.
This is also why I resist the term "software engineer". Some consider it an appropriation of the title "engineer", and sure, I agree, that's fine (I'm sure they'll get all up in arms about sound engineers in recording studios next, right?). But the appropriation that really concerns me here is the term "software". It ain't yours. Paws off.
I agree 100% with the above sentence. But I do not think that implies regulation and licensing to be the appropriate solution, at least not universally. Perhaps it is appropriate to require licensing to write code for life-support systems, vehicles, or other systems on which all other engineering requires licensing. But not to write code for Twitter. Not to tweak the PHP on your Wordpress site. Not for the vast pile of code that may be meaningful to the author, but is trivial when considering its risk to the health of the general public.
I do not think it would be acceptable to intentionally write unethical code in _any_ of those problem spaces. ;-)
https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/opinions/opinions/49cornyn/...
1. Let honesty govern your work
2. Heed professional responsibility
3. Do not accept gain from a third party, except with full knowledge of your employer/contract partner
4. Do not ever use confidential information from an employer of contract partner without informed consent
5. Increase your professional capabilities
6. Make sure your conduct is an exemplar of membership
7. Share your experience with other members
I don't know if tech in Iceland is such a small community that it tends to keep people honest or that transgressions like this happen all the time and are not spoken of. I like to think our members are ethical in their work.
The question was why only the employment points were broken out. Why not also break out the most important points regarding user-focused ethics instead of just relying on the catch-all for them?
Apparently, these drugs can cause some people to kill themselves. But they also cause some users to recover, meaning they're less likely to commit suicide. It wasn't clear how exactly this balance was measured, but the net effect can be positive.
Still raises some hard questions along the lines of the trolley experiment. Who gets to live, and who gets to die? And what about the fact that we don't even know who it is that will get better or worse?
Regarding coding, the coder is only really able to quit because the market is good. Plenty of people along the same economic chain that led to this are in more precarious job circumstances.
That can certainly be the case; of course, once we develop websites with the purpose of having as many people as possible take those drugs, their likelihood of being harmed grows and their likelihood of recover go down.
So my respect to the developer in question, I'm fairly sure I would have continued to work there. I would have just said to myself that these things happen, there are laws in place to protect people, if the laws aren't good enough we should campaign for change, I'm just a developer move data around a machine, etc. But I sort of assume by time I get to my death bed, I'll probably look back over my life and decide I made most decisions wrong, rather than work hard for success, fortune, etc. perhaps favouring compassion, helping others, charity work, etc. would have actually be a life better spent. So for the time being I'll give credit to those who take the moral high ground!
I said this is not acceptable but they said it is ok because they are not releasing it publicly, it is just for demo for investors. I am sure we are either violating copyright or telling lie to investors, and am surprised no one in the company think it is a problem. After all I have to do it, because I was just an intern.
Based on your description they are looking for a scapegoat. If this comes out, they definitely point towards you while saying that they were not aware of this, must be interns initiative.
Working in Pharma Advertising I have seen other devs in my company do exactly that.
I also found out recently that a company I made a website for bought a drug and raised the price 2,000%.
I've already started my new job search.
I think it's worth standing up to this sort of thing, but good luck getting that new job if you stipulate they inform you before hand who they're going to sell your code to. I'm not sure what the solution is if you don't have a ton of leverage (and if you choose to turn down the job, someone will gladly take your place in this economy).
Interested in hearing other people's suggestions.
http://www.bcs.org/category/6030#publicinterest
That said, there's no real obligation to be a BCS member, and most people aren't, which somewhat defangs their CoC: like you say, if you refuse the work, someone else will do it. Still, it's a good symbolic gesture, and perhaps points the way to go.
Then thought it might be a "lol look at my bad code that I wrote 6 years ago"
Pleasantly surprised. For more, I recommend"the gift of Fire" by Sara Baase.
i personally think this is not just a developer issue, but affects every person living in a society. the quality of the society we live in depends on all of us doing as much as we can to achieve it. unfortunately, the living today is too precarious, and too many people cannot afford to be too ethical.
the sad thing about our industry to me is that sometimes it seems we give up before putting up any fight. we know how hard it is to control complex systems, how impossible it is to create a perfect system. so a lot of us decide, like that fox in Aesop's fable, that it's actually wrong to even try to do anything. if she can't reach the grapes, then the grapes must be sour. this happens everywhere, but it strikes me in IT particularly if you look at a simple example - most IT people find it obvious, and live with it, that everything we do online is recorded and that it's not that hard to spy on anyone. most regular people don't fully grasp this, and get occasionally outraged. how many of us (i count myself in here) will then just wave their concerns away, and explain that they simply have no choice but to accept this future?
What do you do if your boss asks you to do something which you believe to be legally questionable or unethical? For example, if you're asked to do something which you thought might be illegal, but you don't know for certain, would the best course of action be to hire a lawyer? Based on what I saw from the recent Volkswagen fiasco, it seems like the developer himself can be held liable. Is this correct?
I'd get advice. It doesn't mean you need to spend money on a lawyer necessarily, you can often write college/uni professors and get decent answers. If not, heck, I'd even ask the relevant Reddit sub-forum. At any rate, the idea is to go ask people who are more likely to objectively answer your concerns as opposed to the employers.
When asked in my interviews why I left I stated clearly that I was asked to do something unethical and resigned as a result when "forced", it was taken positively.
As for legal recourse, yes you should consult with a lawyer if you've been asked to do something you think is illegal (they can help you report your company to the appropriate authorities). Some larger companies have internal methods of reporting issues, but given the recent activities of Wells Fargo I wouldn't recommend outing yourself as someone who is considering reporting on your company.
As for developers being held responsible, I don't think that most cases will pan out like that (it's not your job as a developer to question whether your manager has checked with your company's legal team). However you should definitely not "just follow orders" if you've been asked to do something you find to be shady or illegal.
Easy: I ring the anonymous freephone number that's on posters around our offices expressly set up for this exact purpose.
To anyone who is concerned about these questions, and has a position of influence at your company: could your reports answer this question so quickly and easily? If not, why not?
I always said no, and management always reacted professionally and accepted it. Maybe they just don't know software or privacy laws that well.
Having a clean conscience trumps all, and in the end you will have troubles, not your management.
The conclusion of this? If you said NO, someone in India would have made it, for likely less money. The only winning end game would be to e-mail the FDA and hope that the right political party and lobbyists are currently in control of the agency.
I mean yes, sure, I realize the author blames himself for the death of that poor girl. But how could he possibly have known? It's neither his job nor his responsibility to know anything about the side effects of this drug. His job was to built a website, according to the wishes of his employer. And so he did.
Hindsight is 20/20, it's easy to say afterwards that what he did was unethical. But to me this seems more like bad luck.
On the other hand... as a general rule, I don't really want software developers deciding what to code based on their personal medical opinions. That can cut both ways.
If the author felt it was unethical at the time (and he says it didn't really cross his mind), the best he could have done would have been to quit. Then, of course, someone else would have taken his place. Perhaps his conscience would have been cleaner, but I doubt any girls would have been saved. The stark reality is that ethical quandaries like this call for an all-or-nothing approach; either you're disturbed enough to report their actions to the authorities, or you don't do anything at all. You can quit, but that won't save anyone, so you're not really helping. (Unless you're irreplaceable, of course.)
There's another important element to the author's story: the sketchy questionnaire and the drug's harmful side effects weren't really linked in any way. Marketing is marketing; as the author says, he knew the job of the site was to promote the drug. Shady questionnaire or not, that's not inherently problematic. If the pharma company misled its customers on the side effects or knew the drug wasn't safe, that's an entirely separate issue that the author simply could not have known of. Drugs are complicated business, and they can be helpful, dangerous, important, and abused all at the same time.
The "last line of defense" statement was a powerful one, but not one I feel I can really agree with. It's often said that pharmacists are the last line of defense for prescription drugs, and that's how it should be; they actually have the training to know what they're doing. Software engineers might be a knowledgeable bunch, but they're not so knowledgeable they should be making calls outside their expertise.
However, I should add that: > Perhaps his conscience would have been cleaner Is a big deal. Obviously, it is up to the individual to determine the proper course of action for themselves, but I disagree with the line of thought that 'you should stay in unethical situations because someone else will be there and at least this way you can create change.' Rather, you ought to act authentically and with honestly.
With regards to advertising, I'm from the UK so we don't get much medical advertising, but in the US it is crazy. Half the adverts in commercial breaks seem to be for medicines with half a dozen potential side effects.
> Then, if a visitor could prove they had a prescription, they were given access to a patient portal with more specific info about the drug.
I assume that it was just further information about the drug. In the UK only a doctor can prescribe controlled medicines. I assume it's the same in Canada... if so it's for the doctor, who has had years of training in this field, to prescribe the correct drug. Yes, some drugs cause side effects for some people, and medicines need to be adjusted/changed as a result. We don't know how many people died as a result of the medicine, but that's what government regulation should deal with not allowing untested drugs to be sold.
> We’re approaching a time where software will drive the vehicle that transports your family to soccer practice. There are already AI programs that help doctors diagnose disease. It’s not hard to imagine them recommending prescription drugs soon, too.
For me this was the most (and only) important paragraph of the post.
"The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not."
-Philip K Dick
The survey is a trick to make the site look unbiased. To look like it just happened to tell you to take that particular drug from that particular company, with other options available if you selected different things.
The ethical way to implement it would have been to just have a website that was obviously by that company, no survey, just saying "do you have problems with {x}/{y}/{z}? {Our product} may be right for you. Not to be taken if you have {some allergies etc}."
Its disturbing how many software discussion boards routinely refer to other people as dumb or ignorant.
It's as if everyone should leave their area of expertise and become software engineers.
This kind of hubris that allows some to think they are better than others only paves the way for people to dehumanize others and behave unethically.
And we have seen after decades of posing as champions of freedom and liberty nearly the entire industry has been co-opted into the surveillance economy or state surveillance programs without so much as a murmur with Snowden left holding the baby of these pretensions.
The most common request is to knock off another site. You can hit the save button, or copy code, but what I do is code up a better similar design from scratch. The result is a superior product so everybody is happy, but I would never take code that wasn't open source. I don't even peek at their code during this process!
> As developers, we are often one of the last lines of
> defense [sic] against potentially dangerous and
> unethical practices
Just because software isn't a physical entity like a bridge that can physically collapse on someone, it seems to be the view of many that a professional body with guidance on ethics, best practice, et al. has no relevance.
Was the drug in question an SSRI by any chance? If so, that is terrifying.
But in many cases its the mistake of product managers or leads. When the product goals/specs are not clear, the design changes very often and you have to meet the tight deadlines. This leads to redundant and inefficient code which is very difficult to clean up and maintain.
Does it mean that those drugs are bad? Does it mean that the recovery of millions of patients is outweighted by one where the doctor probably shouldn't have prescribed it in the first place because the patient was already predisposed to depression or depressed in the first place?
Honestly, the article could be written about someone doing a marketing campaign for facebook and then hearing about a teenager committing suicide due to facebook. We would all find that absurd, but it is functionally equivalent here. Facebook has been sued for the suicide of teenagers, just like the drug company.
You don't think presenting a questionnaire and having every answer being the drug in question, regardless of the choices made, at the very least hints at it being incorrectly promoted?
Seriously?
(The problem likely being that doctors don't want to argue with their patients too much)
Is it something people do, go to their doctors and say "that drugs looks great because I've seen it on TV/some online quiz told me I need it, please write me a prescription"?
I think a solution, alongside our personal integrity, is watching for it. Whether we be Google, or a lone, random programmer, we could any of us chance to ferret out such a nasty site and shine the bright light of day on it.
I'm proud to say I declined and included the fancy word "repugnant" in my reply.
I feel this has been an issue for other types of jobs so far, but this example points out how easy is to be borderline with ethics...which may itself be a non-ethical choice IMHO
Whilst we in first world countries may be able to protest against our employers or try and steer them away from non-ethical actions.
What happens when the employer takes away the assignment in question and gives the work to an off-shore company, who's only obligation is to get paid? Where the developers of said off-shore company's obligation is to get paid so they can eat?
Do you think off-shore developers are going to have the same moral stances of a first world developer? I don't think so.
I know there are a couple of voices in this thread who think they can be that knight in shining armor, a bit like Don Quixote. However, you can't rail too much. Lest you find yourself outcast, side-lined or even fired?
I thought it was an interesting situation to ponder.
It's not as if first world developers (or employers) are on average more ethical than off-shore ones. You could have made the same point without being derisive of off-shore developers.
well you can all down vote me, but we could all decide to just be nice to each other, we have enough tech and resources to house and feed everyone in the world
That being said, sometimes (more often than not?) acting on principle and making the strategically best decision for the world, align, so I'm not saying one should never act according to principle.
At his level at the time, sure. Anyone can write a web quiz. But I would think that a lot of the most significant ethical challenges developers face would be in much more specialized areas.
Safety-critical systems often have real-time and embedded components, for example. The regulations for safety-critical software vary a lot between industries, too, which makes it even harder to find a replacement for someone who leaves for ethical reasons.
However, I do see major moral implications of writing code for things like cars, rockets, robots, pacemakers, etc. This is where the true responsibility of software engineers lies.