Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

But ultimately there's always a software engineer involved in the creation of software - and that's not true of any of the other roles you mentioned. Since software engineers are necessary and sufficient to produce software, they should always be held responsible, and any oath should fall on engineers.

> To say it’s on the engineer to do no harm puts them in the tenuous position of doing the job or being replaced by someone who will.

Well, yes - if there were no tradeoffs there would be no point in having an oath to begin with. But there are software engineers today, including some on HN, who do things more harmful and unethical than medical malpractice, and they are personally culpable for the decision to do so - just as their replacements would be if they refused. I would also like to see laws criminalizing those individual engineers' conduct - maybe you're alluding to the same thing? - but an oath is a good start.

It isn't taking a five why's approach to the problem of ethical failures in the industry. It won't fix root cause problems.

We don't need a Hippocratic oath for Software Engineers. We need laws and regulations around some things. And then the government needs to penalize C-level execs, the board, and major shareholders for violating them.

The problem is that laws apply to individual without significant financial resources, sporadically to the truly wealthy, almost never to corporations, and never to the shareholders.

Trying to fix a broken system with a "Hippocratic oath" for software developers is like trying to fix school shootings by making sure the doctors will save the school shooters as much as the victims.

Microsoft could still be profitable and fix way more bugs in the software than they do - they choose the higher profit margin over "the good of humanity" all day every day, and it is the executives and major shareholders that make that own that decision.