401–402 of 402 posts
I'm not sure Singh should be held accountable. He is a programmer. He coded what his boss told him to. This isn't like coding a bomb to kill people, where the programmer clearly has an ethical choice. Singh was an employee, whose bosses had the job of ensuring what they asked him to do was legal, and he was not obliged to consider the ethics or legality with full view of the "big picture" nor even know or take the "b…
Wrong reply
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineers are responsible for strictly technical failures. When a piece of software does what a representative of company management asks for it hasn't failed. Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws.
> Software engineers are not lawyers and they are bad at interpreting laws. Right, so if something seems sketchy ("please ignore these specific deductions when calculating our holdings") , get a lawyer - or CEO or CFO or whatever - to say in writing that it's fine. And if something seems actually illegal ("just run the blood test results out-of-spec and report them anyway") just don't do it. Nothing absolves you of s…