November 30, 2016 at 9:04 am
jasona.work (11/30/2016)
The problem with covering such situations, or trying to enforce "ethical" behavior by laws is, people will ALWAYS find ways to skirt those laws without breaking them. So, frankly, perhaps a combination of things is required:1. Professional programmers need an organizational body (almost a guild) that for membership requires taking an ethics course, perhaps semi-annually.
2. Better protections for whistleblowers across the board.
I like this. We won't get everyone involved, or adhering to ethics, but I would like to see us at least have discussions about the topics.
November 30, 2016 at 9:07 am
Iwas Bornready (11/30/2016)
My dad was a used care salesman (an honest one).Does it really matter how the code is written as long as the finished product functions in a way that works well for the end user? Maybe it is sloppy code, but if doesn't affect the end user, what does it matter? Does every piece of code have to be the most optimized perfectly constructed code in the universe? So test the end product. Put it through its multiple tests. See where it fails and succeeds. Provide the reviews and let the user decide if it falls within the acceptable range for what they have to do. If sloppy code runs slow or buggy code makes the product fail in various areas, that will come out in the reviews. Seems to me the industry is already doing this.
I didn't mean to imply all used car salesman are crooked. I've known some good ones. Even bought multiple cars from some.
I like the idea of having some way of knowing what software should do, and what it does. It is up to the user to accept the performance/capabilities. After all, I do buy products that aren't "the best" or even great. I'll get tools from Harbor Freight, knowing they might not last a long time, but they do the job in the short term at savings.
November 30, 2016 at 9:12 am
Why does everyone always squawk about certification bodies (guilds, unions, etc.).
These, in my opinion, are worthless. Bureaucracy at its finest. Ethics classes only teach you what someone *else* decides is ethical, which is the problem, not the solution. 🙂 And worse, teaches the unethical how to game the system.
"Professional" programming standards, certifications, etc. are worthless too. Our industry changes so darn fast that by the time a particular language (or even techniques) could be nailed down developers have already moved on to the next Big Thing. Which needs new ethics classes...
Besides, every single industry has its own code of ethics. Nobody needs to say "don't embezzle", that may be ethics but it's also common sense. It's the subtle stuff ethics courses are needed for. So, do we then create ethics courses for particular industries?
Look how well that worked for lawyers. They absolutely have an iron-clad set of ethics. Based on semi-reasonable ideals, even. It's just lawyer ethics in no way correspond to *human* ethics as envisioned by most people.
And of course, the words "ethics" and "morals" are not synonymous *at all*.
Similar to the ways "just" and "legal" aren't.
November 30, 2016 at 9:16 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (11/30/2016)
jasona.work (11/30/2016)
The problem with covering such situations, or trying to enforce "ethical" behavior by laws is, people will ALWAYS find ways to skirt those laws without breaking them. So, frankly, perhaps a combination of things is required:1. Professional programmers need an organizational body (almost a guild) that for membership requires taking an ethics course, perhaps semi-annually.
2. Better protections for whistleblowers across the board.
I like this. We won't get everyone involved, or adhering to ethics, but I would like to see us at least have discussions about the topics.
I think the best part about something like this would be, if an employer wants to be seen as "ethical" when it comes to their software, they only hire guild (for lack of a better term) members. It's not foolproof by any means (everyone has a price, sadly) but it's a start.
Would it still be possible to create software that isn't ethical in the end? Absolutely, as was pointed out earlier, just have different teams all working on their piece of the pie, each team writing software that meets the requirements but when it's all combined, you get the VW / Audi emissions cheating. Or a bank application that takes the hundredth of a cent fractions and deposits them in the CEOs personal account instead of rounding them away (yes, I remember Superman III)
Arguably, this sort of organization could be a win-win for everyone, employers and coders.
November 30, 2016 at 9:21 am
roger.plowman (11/30/2016)
Why does everyone always squawk about certification bodies (guilds, unions, etc.).These, in my opinion, are worthless. Bureaucracy at its finest. Ethics classes only teach you what someone *else* decides is ethical, which is the problem, not the solution. 🙂 And worse, teaches the unethical how to game the system.
"Professional" programming standards, certifications, etc. are worthless too. Our industry changes so darn fast that by the time a particular language (or even techniques) could be nailed down developers have already moved on to the next Big Thing. Which needs new ethics classes...
Besides, every single industry has its own code of ethics. Nobody needs to say "don't embezzle", that may be ethics but it's also common sense. It's the subtle stuff ethics courses are needed for. So, do we then create ethics courses for particular industries?
Look how well that worked for lawyers. They absolutely have an iron-clad set of ethics. Based on semi-reasonable ideals, even. It's just lawyer ethics in no way correspond to *human* ethics as envisioned by most people.
And of course, the words "ethics" and "morals" are not synonymous *at all*.
Similar to the ways "just" and "legal" aren't.
So...do nothing? Don't attempt to improve?
November 30, 2016 at 9:24 am
jasona.work (11/30/2016)
I think the best part about something like this would be, if an employer wants to be seen as "ethical" when it comes to their software, they only hire guild (for lack of a better term) members. It's not foolproof by any means (everyone has a price, sadly) but it's a start.
Would it still be possible to create software that isn't ethical in the end? Absolutely, as was pointed out earlier, just have different teams all working on their piece of the pie, each team writing software that meets the requirements but when it's all combined, you get the VW / Audi emissions cheating. Or a bank application that takes the hundredth of a cent fractions and deposits them in the CEOs personal account instead of rounding them away (yes, I remember Superman III)
Arguably, this sort of organization could be a win-win for everyone, employers and coders.
That's an interesting idea. If more companies made decisions like this, it might help. Certainly there are some companies that want to hire MVPs, or other certified people.
November 30, 2016 at 9:28 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (11/30/2016)
roger.plowman (11/30/2016)
Why does everyone always squawk about certification bodies (guilds, unions, etc.).These, in my opinion, are worthless. Bureaucracy at its finest. Ethics classes only teach you what someone *else* decides is ethical, which is the problem, not the solution. 🙂 And worse, teaches the unethical how to game the system.
"Professional" programming standards, certifications, etc. are worthless too. Our industry changes so darn fast that by the time a particular language (or even techniques) could be nailed down developers have already moved on to the next Big Thing. Which needs new ethics classes...
Besides, every single industry has its own code of ethics. Nobody needs to say "don't embezzle", that may be ethics but it's also common sense. It's the subtle stuff ethics courses are needed for. So, do we then create ethics courses for particular industries?
Look how well that worked for lawyers. They absolutely have an iron-clad set of ethics. Based on semi-reasonable ideals, even. It's just lawyer ethics in no way correspond to *human* ethics as envisioned by most people.
And of course, the words "ethics" and "morals" are not synonymous *at all*.
Similar to the ways "just" and "legal" aren't.
So...do nothing? Don't attempt to improve?
Don't do things that don't work. We've been down the certification road before, many times. It never works well. A guild/union wouldn't work any better and would introduce all sorts of barriers to new IT people. Such organizations quickly become hide-bound and get in the way rather than help.
Not only that, the entire guild system (and its grand-child the union) is an attempt at monopolistic protectionism. It's all about control and restriction, who is allowed to profit and who controls the guild ultimately controls who works and who doesn't, the pace of progress and the direction it takes.
Sound good to you? 🙂
November 30, 2016 at 9:30 am
David.Poole (11/30/2016)
What I'd like to see is a framework to support whistle blowers.By all means insist on evidence but whistle blowers need protection. Most companies have a whistle blower policy but does it result in timely and appropriate action?
Has anyone blown the whistle and NOT had to leave the company shortly afterwards? Did the act of whistle blowing damage your long term career?
If I were a whistle-blower, personally I wouldn't want to remain with my employer. Even if executive management and HR were (fully or technically) supportive, the emotional climate would still not be good. I guess it would be sort of like the scenario where if you reported your friend to police for a serious crime, would you subsequently try to patch things up with them, or would you move on to another relationship. I guess being a whistle-blower could be used as a launching point for another career, like writing a book or reinventing yourself as an IT security consultant, but no doubt you would have to accept that some bridges with your former co-workers would be burned beyond repair.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
November 30, 2016 at 9:44 am
Eric M Russell (11/30/2016)
Brad Allison (11/30/2016)
This topic is very timely and interesting as just yesterday I heard that the Breitbart company now wants to capitalize on working with data within the White House and the government now. 🙁Big Data has given us the NSA's PRISM surveillance program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
IoT has given us refrigerators and toilets which monitor our every "movement" and cause global internet outages.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/hacked-cameras-dvrs-powered-todays-massive-internet-outage/
Social Media has helped elect team Trump/Breitbart to President Of The United States.
Somebody remind me again what practical benefits we're getting from all this?
And Google, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook all had various biases, influence and heavy-handedness during the campaign. And the media went insane. Not to mention the revelations from WikiLeaks that probably decided the outcome of the election. Which begs lots of ethical and moral questions.
November 30, 2016 at 10:05 am
Eric M Russell (11/30/2016)
David.Poole (11/30/2016)
What I'd like to see is a framework to support whistle blowers.By all means insist on evidence but whistle blowers need protection. Most companies have a whistle blower policy but does it result in timely and appropriate action?
Has anyone blown the whistle and NOT had to leave the company shortly afterwards? Did the act of whistle blowing damage your long term career?
If I were a whistle-blower, personally I wouldn't want to remain with my employer. Even if executive management and HR were (fully or technically) supportive, the emotional climate would still not be good. I guess it would be sort of like the scenario where if you reported your friend to police for a serious crime, would you subsequently try to patch things up with them, or would you move on to another relationship. I guess being a whistle-blower could be used as a launching point for another career, like writing a book or reinventing yourself as an IT security consultant, but no doubt you would have to accept that some bridges with your former co-workers would be burned beyond repair.
So true. Bridges will be burned. And if you work in a narrow industry or narrow market, this will do irreversible damage to your (current) career; so any whistleblower has to be prepared to pay a price. No protection can prevent that.
By the way, I find this topic oddly on time, as I am currently living through one of those patches: Am I going to succumb to pressure?
Well, it is not my first time, and it won't be the last - but they are all different, because the situations are different.
This time it is not about pressure to do or enable something unethical or even illegal. It is a professional dilemma: Powerful people in the organization hand out orders which crashes against the opinions of subject matter experts. Maybe for political reasons; I wouldn't know as I am not read in on that. What I do know is that I am currently coding against my will and on a tight time-schedule, and spend the evenings trying to find a way to lessen the damage done to the existing code. Because one main objection I have is due to the mess I create, which will be difficult to explain to auditors and difficult to maintain in future versions of the code when additional requests come in.
And that leads to another good point raised by other posters: Rarely do you have the overview to even realize that what you are doing is compromising something or giving someone (e.g. the company or the one giving instructions) an advantage they shouldn't have had, and wouldn't have got, had they asked in plain language.
Personally I rely on auditors. Their work is important! Because their very existence takes the edge off how far some people will go. I just wished there existed more auditors with technical insight to go digging for answers in the right places.
November 30, 2016 at 10:15 am
Oh WOW, Steve, have you brought up a big topic! I'm sure we all have something to say about this.
First I'd like to mention that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) several years ago, published a guideline for programmers addressing the issue of ethics. So someone has addressed this and done so I'd say at least 20 years ago. (BTW, I'd use to be a member of the ACM, but had to drop that many years ago due to cost. I don't know how that guideline has evolved since then, if indeed it has.)
I have I'm afraid to say, been involved in such a thing, also many years ago. It was at a job with about 4 other developers, where we were going to do a presentation on how progress to higher ups. We were trying to move from some really old data access technology (I can't even remember what it was) to ODBC. None of us knew ODBC at that time so we weren't prepared by the time the presentation was due to take place. As it happened we were working for a tyrant and bully. He had doctored up some screen imagines of the data we would pull out of a database so they would look like the application we were supposed to have had working at the time. It was all a lie, but he threaten all of us. I was most vulnerable as I was still under probation, the only bread winner and had very young children at home. It was either participate in the presentation or be fired. I told him that I couldn't in good conscience stand before his superiors and tell them the "screens" they were seeing were from a program that we were supposed to have written by then. He gave me the alternative of sitting at the computer and run the display. That was more acceptable to me because at least I wasn't speaking. But I still felt bad about it. So the 5 of us make our boss look good to his bosses, in a deceitful way.
Did this cause anyone physical harm? No. But it still didn't feel right. And the weird thing about it is that within a couple of months we learned how to access databases using ODBC so the app we were supposed to have finished could have been shown, if our boss had just asked for a 2 month delay.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
November 30, 2016 at 10:17 am
David.Poole (11/30/2016)
What I'd like to see is a framework to support whistle blowers.By all means insist on evidence but whistle blowers need protection. Most companies have a whistle blower policy but does it result in timely and appropriate action?
Has anyone blown the whistle and NOT had to leave the company shortly afterwards? Did the act of whistle blowing damage your long term career?
Here! Here!
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
November 30, 2016 at 11:38 am
roger.plowman (11/30/2016)
Don't do things that don't work. We've been down the certification road before, many times. It never works well. A guild/union wouldn't work any better and would introduce all sorts of barriers to new IT people. Such organizations quickly become hide-bound and get in the way rather than help.
Not only that, the entire guild system (and its grand-child the union) is an attempt at monopolistic protectionism. It's all about control and restriction, who is allowed to profit and who controls the guild ultimately controls who works and who doesn't, the pace of progress and the direction it takes.
Sound good to you? 🙂
Not really. Plenty of industries have built certifications and methods of evaluating the work of people. They aren't perfect, but they do work well. I'd like to think we could do that in IT with more maturity. I'm ever hopeful.
November 30, 2016 at 11:54 am
Rod at work (11/30/2016)
First I'd like to mention that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) several years ago, published a guideline for programmers addressing the issue of ethics. So someone has addressed this and done so I'd say at least 20 years ago.
A lot of professional societies have addressed this over the years, mostly long before 20 years ago.
The current ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct was produced by the ethics code revision committee (who added some material from the draft IFIP code of ethics to the ACM code) and adopted by the ACM Council in 1992, but ACM had a code of ethics long before that revision. It had one way back when I was first an ACM member (I joined in about 1972, but left some time later when I decided to restrict my professional society memberships to European societies only). I remember discussions of professional ethics at the first IFIP Conference I attended (1968), and recall the IEEE having one when I was dithering between joining ACM and joining IEEE and didn't choose IEEE.
Every serious professional society has a code of ethics and professional conduct. Apart from the ACM, the IEEE, and the IFIP the three main Britsh professional societies relevant to computing (IMA, BCS, IET) all have codes of ethics. Some companies are quite serious about employee membership of such associations - for example there may be a limit on seniority of positions than can be held without appropriate profesional membership - and some companies are corporate members of such associations.
Personally I've been bound by professional codes of ethics since 1966. During most of my career my employer was a company with corporate membership of a professional society and bound by its code of ethics.
However, these codes won't have much effect while companies are free to ignore them, and free to choose not to employ people bound by these codes, people with no training at all are free to call themselves "software engineers" or "data scientists", and some members of our profession detest professional societies and claim (without any supporting evidence at all, so clearly they have no interest in ethics) that they are, or will inevitably mutate into, some sort of extreme left-wing trade union interested only in getting power for their organisers and doing barely enough to keep their members happily unaware of the damage the organisers are intent on doing to society. Of course there has been no sign of the ACM, the IEEE, the IMA, the IEE, the IET, the BCS or indeed any professional society working in the STEM area drifting towards any such mutation, but that doesn't prevent those who want to ensure that professional ethics remains something they can ignore from bad-mouthing such societies and their codes.
Tom
November 30, 2016 at 4:45 pm
I've a sneaking suspicion that the law is mainly for the benefit of lawyers rather than the persons under dispute.
Quangos are not for the benefit of those for whom the Quango is purported to be formed.
Democratic institutions are not for the benefit of the people.
At best these are to present a polite fiction of action in the face of injustice.
I've learned the hard way to get hard copies of any requests for inappropriate behaviour. You never know when you might be called on to justify a course of action in a court of law
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