Software Engineering Ethics

'Contribute to society and to human well being'. So your personal ethics are only not present if you wear giant blinders around this statement. So many software devs hold positions that they could probably not defend ethically in casual conversation, it's an epidemic!

A while ago I suggested that engineers could have an ethics code just like lawyers or doctors and the opinion wasn’t very popular (although with no explicitly stated reason). I still don’t see a reason not to have one. If your company is selling your code and software to abusive states and it’s used to persecute journalists (for example) continuing to do that work there is no different than any unethical work from a doctor or lawyer. And software developers have a huge impact on our life these d

There can't be one because1. The ethical decisions that happen in the industry aren't made by the software engineers.2. The boundaries around those decision are very grey. Can I create a feature that breaches user's privacy? What if I don't build the feature but just write documentation for it? What if I do pure research but then my research is used for a morally questionable purpose by the company? What if my company does a bunch of shady things but not my department?

Yes. Software engineers taking ethics seriously and not letting technical enthusiasm blind them is news, not normality.

It's still ethically questionable. In fact I'm struggling to come up with a better example than facial recognition tech (except other mass surveillance). Maybe cutting corners while developing driverless cars that results in the death of a pedestrian.Almost every engineering discipline has a code of ethics [0][1][2][3]. It's time software "engineering" grew up and did the same.I rarely see ethics mentioned on HN, and granted, people's view differ. But it'

I don't even think it's always about "line go up". I've talked to real life engineers who evidently have no ethical bar whatsoever--if the technology is cool and complex and an interesting technical problem, they'll work on it, regardless of the real-world application. "Whether my code is used ethically is someone else's problem. I just love technical challenges!" You absolutely see this mentality on HN as well.

Software "engineers" could use a lot of this professional and ethical responsibility too.

Is there a code of ethics for programmers and engineers?

Software Engineers: but your ethics aren’t my ethics, and/or ethics get in the way of my paycheck.

You know, yes, this is morally bankrupt.This “if I don’t do it, someone else will do it” attitude really just highlights how much more ethics training do we need to have in part of becoming a software engineer.Try that attitude in the medical community, or civil engineering, or aviation engineering, or physics or chemistry, and see where that will get you.Computer Science as a field hasn’t encountered consequences: <a href="https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status&#x