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Comment by tonetheman | Hacker News Reader

Programmers/technologist often work for those who only work money... ethics generally do not work in such places...

I actually had the exact same thought on different lines. A software code of ethics will be toothless without a financial code of ethics. But a financial CoE is antithetical to finance's goals.

Edit: to be clear that doesn't mean we shouldn't have one!

A code of ethics is backed by law at least for the most part (sometimes ethical and legal principles might even clash). And here is the biggest difference. For doctors or lawyers unethical behavior leads to losing the license to practice. There's no such thing for coding.

Do you believe there should be?

In principle (because the technicalities are way too complex to address here and now) there's no reason specific fields in programming couldn't require a license, like a clearance needed to work with sensitive data.

Coding is more and more used to build the backbone of future society. It's about time we recognize the criticality of the whole industry (not just the coders themselves). Having no ethics code for this is not very different from accepting when soldiers invoke the "superior orders" defense.

It may very well turn out that it simply can't be applied to this field but to get there you have to at least consider it first.

Lawyers also often work for those who only care about money. Ethics are still important in those cases.

Well that is still ethics. It largely my ethics too. Works for me. It might be different than yours but still.

Exactly this. If we create hardware and software ethically, that product will not make enough money. Capitalism is almost entirely add odds with ethical engineering practices.

Think about it. Imagine Facebook not doing anything evil. Never selling your data without your permission. Never spying on you. Putting lots of restrictions on advertisements to make sure they are all ok. Banning all the bad users. Reporting analytics accurately. Etc.

How would Facebook make any money? The only ethical sources of income would be to sell non evil ads (if you believe there even is such a thing) or to charge users money to have accounts like Netflix. Non-evil ads are not very effective, and with accurate analytics, they will not fetch a high price.

What other ethical business model is there? If operating ethically, they would be lucky to cover their operating costs. Giving any kind of ROI to investors would be impossible. The same applies to every Silicon Valley operation. Google, Twitter, etc. If they operate ethically and morally, they can't make enough money.

Of course, if the power were mine, I would force them to behave ethically anyway. I don't care if they all shut down. Gonna eat me some rich people.

You say it as if these companies shutting down would be a bad thing. These products exploit their users in ways the users and society at large does not yet understand.

If a product cant be profitable without abusing its power, it shouldn't exist.

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