Comment by thyristan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thyristan | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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 ). 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com