I'm not a fan of the article's opening comparison to military hierarchy as an example of an organization that deploys weapons with ethics or discretion. As we've seen in (at least) the US, the military industrial complex determines when and where we fight, often at the expense of thousands of innocent lives.
Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
401–410 of 544 posts
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's completely the wrong comparison and context. The reason MCAS came about was because management wanted to try to fudge a larger engine into an outdated design created for a different purpose rather than do the engineering and certification necessary for the new requirements and to update the system. Management wanted to save money. Of course the engineering leadership did not want to fudge something -- they wan…
Which demonstrates the irrelevancy of a hippocratic oath for engineers. Because the complexity of the system is such that no single engineer understands it all, and thus no single engineer is (or feels) responsible. Blaming it on management is also irrelevant, since management merely takes the advice of engineers, and do financial/business trade offs to maximize profit. If the engineers cannot tell that MCAS system c…
Hippocratic oath for engineers is irrelevant, correct. But management does not take the advice of engineers. As I said, the engineers wanted to do proper engineering, but management wanted to save a buck, so they instructed engineering to fudge a cheap solution.
Its very common.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#403Maybe we need a hippocratic oat for microsoft CEO's. Or maybe there already is one, like the one we have for bankers. But somehow they are still corrupt, big surprise. Let's just accept people do bad things and empty promises are worthless. the penalty for oathbreaking in ancient greece was death or the extinction of the family line (harsh, i know). that's very different from modern 'oaths'.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be fine in some countries, but saying that you’ll make some organization sizes and structures illegal, barring other criminal activity, smells like a violation of the freedom of association.
Why is that a good freedom?
It doesn't matter if it's a good freedom, the chances of the US repealing the 1st Amendment any time soon are basically nil. You'd have a better chance of getting Apple/Amazon/Google to voluntarily split up their own companies out of the goodness of their own hearts -- it just isn't going to happen.
The only argument that actually matters here is whether or not restrictions on corporate structure actually do violate freedom of association or not.
I'm reasonably skeptical that they do, given that the 1st Amendment hasn't stopped us from enforcing antitrust and monopoly legislation in the past. Yeah yeah, Citizens United and all that, but we regulate companies all the time.
But I'd still want an actual lawyer to weigh in on that, I wouldn't feel confident saying that there aren't limits on how far we can go in that direction.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#405I feel like a lot of people here are missing the point of professional agreements or organizations like this: protecting the engineer from the consequence of saying "no" to something unethical. Almost every software engineer I talk to has a story about something they did early in their career that was ethically dubious. Hell, I work at a fairly senior level in medical software and I still feel like I'm taking risks by saying "no" to things that are clearly sketchy.
Also, it makes sure we have a ethical framework to work with. Right now, it's every engineer for themselves. You won't do something that sits in a legal gray area? Companies will find someone hungry enough to do it. If we're all staking our professional reputation on it, there will be fewer competent takers.
Personally, I think it will also be a step towards better legitimizing the profession and being more inclusive. Many folks have started equating Software Engineer with hyper-rationalist orthodox libertarianism and... the stereotype isn't far off from what's typically upvoted in these sorts of communities.
Anyway, them's my thoughts on this. I definitely support this sort of notion.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#406> In the top 10 Computer Science departments in the nation, there is only one that requires taking an ethics course to graduate
I'm not sure how well this meshes with the "you don't need a computer science degree to be a programmer" trend.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be I've quit jobs in the past because of ethical concerns about the way in which those above me have been acting. In one case this involved bribery of senior government officials to push through a project that put at risk the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people. If you go along with shit lik…
And I mean, that is good of you to have a moral backbone, unfortunately there are many people behind you that will do the same job in software and they can be located anywhere in the world.
> good of you to have a moral backbone
I don't want other people making decisions on morality for me. There are people who don't believe that software developers should develop software for the U.S. government because they don't like the way immigration law is being enforced. I'll make my own decisions about what is and isn't "moral", thanks.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#408I’m not a fan of comparisons to the Hippocratic oath. The greatest risk to AI ethics is not the ethics of software engineers but the ethics of the software engineering process. By the time tasks are handed to engineers, most of the ethical decisions have been made by product managers, designers, and business stakeholders who are focused on their own goals. Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before the…
This thread is littered with this attitude, that the developers don't actually have a seat at the table where "what to build" decisions are made.
This was not always the case.
How the hell did we let that happened?
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#409I’m not a fan of comparisons to the Hippocratic oath. The greatest risk to AI ethics is not the ethics of software engineers but the ethics of the software engineering process. By the time tasks are handed to engineers, most of the ethical decisions have been made by product managers, designers, and business stakeholders who are focused on their own goals. Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before the…
The oath should be for everybody involved in the process.
After the 2008 mortgage crisis, Netherland required everybody working at banks to take the banker's oath, which is mostly about balancing the interests of the 4 main stakeholders of the bank: shareholders, customers, employee, and society. It's pretty broad, it doesn't magically fix everything, but it does make everybody more aware of their responsibilities. Maybe software companies should require something similar, where everybody needs to be aware of their responsibilities towards, well, primarily user data, I guess. And that goes for not just software engineers themselves, but for everybody involved in the process.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
In sufficiently complex systems, you can always blame someone else if you're motivated to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IssR_J0QWr4 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 s…
So management bears no blame for requiring illegal work be done, on pain of termination? Said another way, engineers now need to be technical and legal experts in the business domain? (Remember employees in the US depend on the company for health insurance. Saying 'no' could cost a lot more than just ones position.) Most software engineers are not like doctors. We have little autonomy over what is created. Our respon…
We can take lessons from other engineering domains. Disregarding exemptions, engineers who design and build for “the public good” have someone who is ultimately responsible. A newly minted civil engineer, for example, may be low on the hierarchy but has to work under the direct supervision of a licensed Professional Engineer. That licensed PE is the one responsible, legally and ethically, for now just the “what” but also the “how”. They may work for a project manager but ultimately it’s their stamp that allows the build.
As someone who works in safety critical code nothing irks me more than when people absolve themselves by saying “I’m just a programmer, that’s not my job/problem”. We need to hold ourselves to a higher professional standard