Re:Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Softw...
by didibus on Monday August 10, 2020 @02:01AM
(#24106050)
> Since software engineers are necessary and sufficient to produce software, they should always be held responsible, and any oath should fall on engineers.
That's not true in any way. Lots of software is written by people who don't even have a degree, others by some who have a computer science degree, but not an engineering one, etc.
The other issue is that software is rarely unethical. The unethical bit often comes from the way it is used.
And I'd have to agree with OP. In an idealist world you could assume software engineers would all be ready to quit their job at any sight of unethical affair, even say, launching something to production with a known vulnerability, or without anything but the most rigorous security review process having passed. But in practice, you're not going to achieve this result, unless you put a framework to incentivize software engineers towards being ethical. If you allowed them to sue their employer, and made it that they more often win the lawsuit, for asking them to build something unethical, or insisting that they do so even after the SE said it was unethical, or to retaliate in any way to an SE refusing to build something on ground of ethics, then you'd maybe start to see results. Otherwise, won't happen, and you've only created a scape goat to make it even easier for companies to push for unethical software, since they can now just blame SE they coerce into building it anyways.
That's not true in any way. Lots of software is written by people who don't even have a degree, others by some who have a computer science degree, but not an engineering one, etc.
The other issue is that software is rarely unethical. The unethical bit often comes from the way it is used.
And I'd have to agree with OP. In an idealist world you could assume software engineers would all be ready to quit their job at any sight of unethical affair, even say, launching something to production with a known vulnerability, or without anything but the most rigorous security review process having passed. But in practice, you're not going to achieve this result, unless you put a framework to incentivize software engineers towards being ethical. If you allowed them to sue their employer, and made it that they more often win the lawsuit, for asking them to build something unethical, or insisting that they do so even after the SE said it was unethical, or to retaliate in any way to an SE refusing to build something on ground of ethics, then you'd maybe start to see results. Otherwise, won't happen, and you've only created a scape goat to make it even easier for companies to push for unethical software, since they can now just blame SE they coerce into building it anyways.