Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

> Doctors no longer take the Hippocratic Oath

You have incorrect information. A an abridged or modernized version of the oath is still taken upon graduation of most American MD schools.

We need a Hippocratic Oath for those that manage and deploy capital.

A Hippocratic Oath for only Software Engineers is addressing the symptom, not the cause.

Most of us don't wake up and think, "How can I make user's life worse today?".

We need to fix the incentives if we want to fix the behavior.

We need to give Software Engineers writing spyware the option to say no and still feed their families. We need saying," This is unethical and I can't help," to be a valid second option.

It’s unfortunate, perhaps to the point of irrelevance, that a need for ethics was raised and then summarily limited to AI.

Software, all software, needs an ethical standard and it currently has nothing remotely close in common practice. This will be a hard sell though, because most developers have no idea what ethics are, why they would be needed, or how they apply to practice. Frequently when the idea of ethics are raised the response is hostility and often framed in terms that are purely imaginative.

When people in other industries ask me what’s required to be a software developer I always tell them it’s just a matter of charming an interviewer. There is no education requirement, no licensing/certification, no standard skill definition, no internship or agency, and certainly no ethical standard. It’s always amusing to watch their response.

Or the graduating class writes their own oath

This seems out of touch with the reality of these large firms. Management is pretty distributed, decision-making is distributed, and your manager is likely also an engineer, or used to be one. Many people work on tools that are general-purpose, in different levels of the stack. Someone working on keeping the data center running doesn't deal with what the applications actually do.

Also, people change positions fairly often and avoid work in areas they consider to be unethical. This means that the people in a position to actually make the call are people who don't find it unethical, because the people who would be concerned about it avoided the whole area. Like, if you don't want to work in ads, you'll probably find a job in some other division, or at least not directly on something you consider unethical. The people who came up with AMP (to pick something controversial on Hacker News) were true believers who sold it to management.

But people still care about the company's reputation as a whole, and as a result you get conflict between the people not actually working on the controversial thing and the people who are, but that mostly results in a lot of drama and cynicism.

The politics is complicated. I can't think of a generic oath that you couldn't rationalize your way out of.