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Tell HN: Duty of care

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Re: Tell HN: Duty of care

#31

Post by 015a »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

I think the fact that software "engineering" (and, yes, those are meant to be scare quotes) doesn't have the same level of rigor of other engineering disciplines is what is truly at fault here. Most other professional engineering disciplines have clear, codified rules of ethics. If the Chairman of a public company told a building engineer "Can you get rid of a few of these bolts on this beam here? I don't like the wa…

I think you're totally right. But I also think: If an alien visited our planet and saw the same decision being made, its reasonable that they may ask: Wait, why can't you just do this in software? Is your software really that bad?

Point being; the software industry is deeply dysfunctional; and the best people who aren't steeped in software every day can do to influence their decision making process is to trust and listen to the people who are. Software engineering is as much Engineering Software as it is Navigating The Absolute Dysfunction of our Software Landscape; actually now that I type that, I think its significantly more the latter.

I don't know if anyone is trying to fix this, or at least do better. I really hope so. I've been on major teams at three systemically critical internet companies and its not getting better; its getting worse. It scares the living daylight out of me that the biggest thing holding everything together is PagerDuty.

Re: Tell HN: Duty of care

#32

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

SentinelLdnma wrote: post #16
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

I think the fact that software "engineering" (and, yes, those are meant to be scare quotes) doesn't have the same level of rigor of other engineering disciplines is what is truly at fault here. Most other professional engineering disciplines have clear, codified rules of ethics. If the Chairman of a public company told a building engineer "Can you get rid of a few of these bolts on this beam here? I don't like the wa…

I took an Ethics for Engineers course as an elective in college (sometime during the stone age). Wrote a paper on Therac-25. Had I not, I may not even been cognizant of the risk involved. A single week lecture on this topic could move the needle. Or regulators like FDA could demand to see corporate training materials given to software "engineers" (I concur on the quotes) on how to promote product safety.

I'm glad Ethics for Engineers wasn't an elective but mandatory when I was in school.

Re: Tell HN: Duty of care

#34

Post by namibj »

As long as it doesn't need to be panic-safe UI where the operator needs to operate even if panicking, such a request could be granted, at considerate cost (severe engineering and likely compute hardware costs to station equivalent/suitable levels of reliability), which should make the entity bankrolling the project shudder and take back their unreasonable request.

Re: Tell HN: Duty of care

#35

Post by gumby »

In the USA FDA would need to approve such a change for a device that could possibly kill the patient. And would be unlikely to say yes.

I once designed a hardware state machine out of TTL (no CPU, except a network interface that could only passively read and transmit the state) to ensure that a pressure vessel was safe (and this was ahead of the mechanical safety devices). Regularly someone would ask why we had this large device and didn't just replace it with a tiny MPU.

Re: Tell HN: Duty of care

#37

Post by [deleted] »

SentinelLdnma wrote: post #7
remarkEon wrote: post #4

But why did they want to remove The Big Red Button? Sorry if that’s a dumb question.

Not at all a dumb question. But the answer will be. The Big Boss Man hated the way it looked. He once spent 30 minutes telling a graphics designer what a worthless piece of sh* he was where everyone on the floor could hear. Corporate equivalent of a terrorist.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Duty of care

#38

Post by artwr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

I think the fact that software "engineering" (and, yes, those are meant to be scare quotes) doesn't have the same level of rigor of other engineering disciplines is what is truly at fault here. Most other professional engineering disciplines have clear, codified rules of ethics. If the Chairman of a public company told a building engineer "Can you get rid of a few of these bolts on this beam here? I don't like the wa…

Both the ACM [0] and IEEE [1] have published Codes of Ethics, but I agree they have little teeth.

[0] https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics [1] https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

Re: Tell HN: Duty of care

#40

Post by dehrmann »

015a wrote: post #31
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

I think the fact that software "engineering" (and, yes, those are meant to be scare quotes) doesn't have the same level of rigor of other engineering disciplines is what is truly at fault here. Most other professional engineering disciplines have clear, codified rules of ethics. If the Chairman of a public company told a building engineer "Can you get rid of a few of these bolts on this beam here? I don't like the wa…

I think you're totally right. But I also think: If an alien visited our planet and saw the same decision being made, its reasonable that they may ask: Wait, why can't you just do this in software? Is your software really that bad? Point being; the software industry is deeply dysfunctional; and the best people who aren't steeped in software every day can do to influence their decision making process is to trust and li…

> Wait, why can't you just do this in software? Is your software really that bad?

Fly-by-wire in airplanes is pretty good, but it still has its problems, and a lot of verification work goes into it, probably more than embedded Windows.

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