Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

Doctors no longer take the Hippocratic Oath (because it is incompatible with a lot of difficult situations doctors are placed in).

But more to the point: Why are we trying to shift focus from the wrongs large multi-nationals do to individual software engineers? Plus what would the result be if this "oath" conflicts with a manager's instructions?

Maybe we should start with Microsoft, Google, Comcast, Oracle, and similar taking an oath to do no harm, before we push engineers under the bus for not fighting hard enough against what they're ordered to do.

We should aim for having a "Hippocratic Oath" in place for the CEO's, board, and other business leadership too.

They're the one's who's "interesting" ethics are responsible for the things mentioned in the article.

The engineers wouldn't generally even attempt to implement the concerns in the article unless directed by their organisational higher-ups.

That's the whole point of a professional code of ethics. If you want to protect people for behaving ethically, that's government's job (c.f. whistleblower laws et. al.).

This sits a layer down in the defense-in-depth stack. And the idea is that if there's a recognized code, and consensus on what constitutes a violation, that employers will conform because if they don't they'll risk not just one "activist" employee leaving but most of them, out of a shared sense of communal ethics.

Would it work? No idea. My experience is that software people tend to be pretty squishy on matters of personal ethics.

"Engineering ethics" is a fallacy as it implies that engineers have high level influence on the goals set by organizations. If lockheed martin trained all of its missile engineers in ethics would they suddenly start building bombs that burst with flowers? Obviously not. Engineers are paid to design things against a very specific set of requirements. If an average engineer pushes back on ethical grounds they will simply be replaced.

> Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be.

I agree to a very limited extent about the hierarchical nature of a typical corporation, but I also disagree. Software engineers at a certain level of their career and with relatively uncommon skills can pick and choose what companies they want to work at. In my opinion people of good moral character and conscience need to be prepared to refuse to accept a position at companies known to engage in activities against their principles. And further need to be prepared to resign if they are asked to do something clearly unethical.

From my particular specialization in network engineering, I would never accept a role at an ISP in an environment where I had to implement something like the GFW in China, or further walled-garden/censorship of the global Internet. It's directly contradictory to my principles. I sincerely hope that the best and the brightest of my colleagues would never choose to aid and abet internet-fuckery by autocratic regimes. If people from my field look at a project and could reasonably say "Vint Cerf would be really disappointed if he saw me implementing this...", I hope they will choose to walk away.