Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

Should probably start with a Hippocratic Oath for the c-suite execs.

What we need is more ethics courses and courses on historical business frauds/schemes as a graduation prerequisite for getting an MBA. For the persons leading the groups of software engineers.

I am honestly much more worried about terrible directives coming from c-suite persons, that result in ethically questionable apps and software.

In addition to ethics training and commitments from the persons doing the actual engineering work.

I think we also should finally abandon the idea that companies are only here to make a profit and should ignore all other factors when doing business. That doesn't mean they should make no profit at all but it means that they also should consider external costs as if they were internal ones. This is true for the environment, privacy, data protection, employees, and many other things.

What do you mean?

It's hard to see this as anything but a way for executives to foist responsibility upon software engineers when things go wrong (and of course, claim credit and profit when they go right) as other commenters have pointed out.

That said, this might actually work! If a software engineer can suffer personal harm by working for a business with iffy ethics, then they are incentivized to play it safe by avoiding working for those types of businesses -- thus correcting the market by internalizing the externalities. I doubt anyone would work for Facebook in a world with a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers that has real teeth.

Put another way: pointing to decision makers instead of individual engineers is a simple rephrasing of the Nuremberg defense, "I was just following orders!" It is obvious that we should hold leaders accountable. The question here is whether we hold individual software engineers accountable too (they're not mutually exclusive) and the answer is probably yes.