Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

capitalandgrowth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 544 posts

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#451

Post by watwut »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #440
madrox wrote: post #8

I’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…

> Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be. 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. That isn’t setting us up for success. The nazi officers who committed most of the atrocities used similar arguments. "I was just following orders!" I expect better…

But we still blame the Nazi leadership the most. The nazi officers you talk about here were also in fact management typically.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#452

Post by 52-6F-62 »

xnyan wrote: post #419
coffeefirst wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here's a prospective from someone who became a software dev in my late 20s after other jobs. Relatively speaking, if you can write working code and show up on time, you have a lot of leverage in getting and keeping employment, more than most other middle to upper middle class professions. This means org politics has less effect on you, and less incentive to get involved. As a dev you can, but don't have to, think as…

To extend upon this (though personally I feel a little differently than yourself, but inclusive of how you feel as well):

My personal experience has seen individual contributing software developers have little voice in the matter regardless. Outside of "tech"-forward companies they are of little consequence in the larger political structure of a company.

I've seen it and been it—speak up about a desired direction, voice concerns about a decided direction, concerns about faulty legacy software, etc. Those voices, unless amplified by political clout mean little to nothing to anyone else.

In a lot of organizations, title is everything when it comes to moving discussion.

So my thinking, if we're continuing the comparison to the medical profession, is hierarchies must follow similarly.

A head of Surgery in a hospital ward is going to be a doctor. Hospital directors are going to be doctors. Sure, the CEO may not be, but they rely on the expertise of their directors. If the directors don't follow the same code as the rest of the professionals under them, then they can theoretically impose any ethics they choose and the onus falls to the IC/surgeon/etc which for the intended purposes of the oath/license/regulation at all is tenuous.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#453

Post by kittiepryde »

chii wrote: post #206
ilaksh wrote: post #181

Earlier 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…

So..

if the engineering leadership said, this is not a good idea. Management said, it saves money.

Engineering failed to convince management. Management didn't have the understanding that it was a bad idea.

It is now, no one's fault?

If management merely takes the advice of engineers ( and other who specialize in the things that they do not ), and they choose to ignore it because they do not understand the things they do not specialize in. I believe it's a reasonable to assume that management is more at fault than engineering ( I'm not sure they're is a situation here where any party is fault less )

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#454

Post by munchbunny »

sfvisser wrote: post #336
toohotatopic wrote: post #201

How about a Hippocratic Oath for business leaders? This is shifting the responsibility from management towards the engineers. It's not the engineers who pulled the trigger at Facebook - or Microsoft. They build the weapons. Management fires them. This is a hypocritic ode. If somebody is acting unethically at MS then it is management. All the innovation that is not happening because MS is abusing their position. Two t…

If you’re in management at an engineering dept/co and make decisions about what is going to be engineered and how that’s going to be deployed you are in engineering yourself and should obviously take the oath yourself. Not saying I’m in favor of this oath, just that it seems silly to distinguish different roles in the engineering process.

I don't think the exercise of drawing the line between "engineering" and "not engineering" is a useful one here. The actual decisions and the pressure to perform for the job crosses disciplines up at the top of the management hierarchy.

The broader point is that in most companies engineering decisions don't come purely from the engineering department. They are often decisions made as part of bigger projects or efforts. For example, it's probably not up to engineers in most companies whether the any of the tech giants sell to the military. If it is, it's up to people who were engineers at some point and might still exist up at the top of the "product" part of the company, but who for all intents and purposes stopped writing any code or even managing anyone who writes code a long, long time ago.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#456

Post by jki275 »

ivanche wrote: post #303
bjo590 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any and all responsibility they take is then also shared with every person that is above them in the hierarchy. Currently, if I write software that performs illegal actions -- let's say software that allows me to use unlicensed Adobe products -- at the request of my boss and their boss, all three of us would be legally liable.

It seems you're conflating illegal and unethical.

Illegal and unethical can be the same -- they don't have to be, but it's not wrong to discuss cases where they are.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#457

Post by throw7 »

"Software Engineers" are not the problem. They'll do what their told. That Microsoft President should look higher up the food chain (stuff rots from the head chief). Also the analogy to having a UCMJ-type legal system for "Software Engineers" is just bonkers.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#458

Post by kazinator »

What the Microsoft President said:

"We need a Hippocratic oath for software engineers"

What it would be useful for the Microsoft President to say:

"We need a Hippocratic oath for software engineers, marketing, sales, accounting, customer support, management, senior executive staff, board of directors, ..."

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#459

Post by randomdata »

ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #312
01100011 wrote: post #17

Software engineering isn't medicine. It isn't that difficult to learn and you can wield many of the advantages without much training. If software folks refuse to assist with morally questionable tasks, those tasks will be compartmentalized and the unethical components will be handed off to people willing to do the job. Sadly, just about everyone in ML/AI is contributing to an easily weaponized technology. Every time…

> Software engineering isn't medicine. It isn't that difficult to learn I would never hire someone that treats software engineering as something easier that medicine or other branches of engineering.

Easy to say when you've never hired anyone.

The parent is right. Software engineering is advantaged by a much more simplistic feedback loop. Software's "Hello, World" is validated in milliseconds. Medicine's "Hello, World" could take 30 years of clinical trials to ensure that you haven't killed anyone. It is easy because it is quick, allowing a greater understanding within an equal amount of time.

In fact, the adage of years of experience comes from learning that actually take years to encounter different circumstances and see the results play out in order to fully understand what you're dealing with. This is almost never a problem for software engineers, especially in the learning phase. Software engineers can gain "years of experience" each day by seeing the results of what they are doing in practically real-time.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#460

Post by eat_veggies »

coding123 wrote: post #443

So reading the comments. I am on the side of having business owners taking some kind of oath, not software engineers. If a software engineer was programming IE around the time that MS was hit by regulators years ago, and this "software engineer" oath was in place, would the software engineers being asked to code a web browser be at fault for the wrong-doings of the company? It just seems wrong for someone that has be…

There are not two sides, because both management and engineering should face consequences for building harmful software. And I'm not sure it's appropriate to test these "what ifs" as if looking for logical flaws in such a system, because a well-functioning court and jury should easily be able answer these questions, and I'm sure you had the "correct" answers in mind when you wrote them. Whether or not our courts and juries are currently well-functioning enough to support something like this is a different question, but we should strive for it.

In any case, we already have laws like this! And they're not controversial! If you commit war crimes by killing people with a shovel under the orders of your superiors, both you and your superiors are responsible, but the manufacturer of the shovel obviously isn't responsible for what you did unless they advertised the shovel's skull-bashing capabilities.

Post reply on HN