Code I’m Still Ashamed Of

This is tough to read. I've railed and yelled in meeting about ethics and have ultimately discovered that in nearly every case the money talks louder. I remember this company I worked with that had a sign up with a "add me to the newsletter" check box. When leading a ux review it was decided to switch it off by default. One day a friend of mine buzzed me to say she was annoyed at receiving mail even though she specifically made sure that that box was unchecked when signing up. I assumed it was a dev error and checked with the dev team and was told to go check with the CTO. When I did, the CTO said that it was exactly how he wanted it. I wasnt even manager level but I lost it and yelled at the CTO. I was simply told "we need our email signups and dont dare tell me how to do my job". I tried to look for support elsewhere in the company and all I discovered were at best some hushed mutterings in corners. Even laughs of me being on some kind of moral high horse. It hurt to know that the same people I know who did these things are now working on startups that scoop up massive amounts of people's location data. The same people who wrote tiny scripts to collate customer data to give to the sales teams who would give it to clients as part of a sales package even though the terms specifically said we don't share personal info. It bothers me that I don't even know how to fight it since all it takes is the next dev to come along and say yes to end months of protests against something unethical. I don't want regulation and lobbyists pushing their tech onto me as a solution. If anyone has advice, I think this is a great thread to share thoughts.

&gt;I advised her to get off the drug ASAP. Thankfully, she listened.<p>This bothers me, this isn&#x27;t how medicine works. While there&#x27;s very, very legitimate reasons to be critical of over prescribing and marketing, &quot;I heard about an adverse outcome in someone else that may or may not be related to a drug she was taking&quot; is not a good reason to recommending another person to stop treatment.<p>All medical interventions are a cost-benefit analysis and <i>all</i> medical interventions have risk, some more than others. Forgoing medical interventions also has risks and benefits. For all we know the risks were very minimal and the drug helped the sister. This could have been very harmful advice if the drug required, say, tapering down and the sister went off of it without assistance of a medical provider.<p>The author is themselves handing out incredibly rash and potentiality harmful advice.

This is why Software Engineering as a profession should be regulated and licensed just like other engineering fields - mechanical, civil, electrical, etc. Professional Engineers are bound by a code of ethics stressing first and foremost the welfare of the public. Engineers who behave unethically have their licenses revoked which can be a career-ending event. It is our responsibility as engineers to ensure that the code we ship does not negatively impact anyone&#x27;s health or safety; especially as software becomes more and more pervasive in society.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nspe.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;ethics&#x2F;code-ethics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nspe.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;ethics&#x2F;code-ethics</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ieee.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;governance&#x2F;p7-8.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ieee.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;governance&#x2F;p7-8.html</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peo.on.ca&#x2F;index.php?ci_id=1815&amp;la_id=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peo.on.ca&#x2F;index.php?ci_id=1815&amp;la_id=1</a>

I&#x27;m the chairman of the board of a local society of computer scientists. We have bylaws that describe a code of conduct for members governing their work.<p><pre><code> 1. Let honesty govern your work 2. Heed professional responsibility 3. Do not accept gain from a third party, except with full knowledge of your employer&#x2F;contract partner 4. Do not ever use confidential information from an employer of contract partner without informed consent 5. Increase your professional capabilities 6. Make sure your conduct is an exemplar of membership 7. Share your experience with other members </code></pre> We host meetings once or twice a month where members or guests hold lectures on varying IT topics.<p>I don&#x27;t know if tech in Iceland is such a small community that it tends to keep people honest or that transgressions like this happen all the time and are not spoken of. I like to think our members are ethical in their work.

An awkward situation, for sure. However, after a lady in my community killed herself (she was on some prescribed drug), a friend of mine in the industry explained his view.<p>Apparently, these drugs can cause some people to kill themselves. But they also cause some users to recover, meaning they&#x27;re less likely to commit suicide. It wasn&#x27;t clear how exactly this balance was measured, but the net effect can be positive.<p>Still raises some hard questions along the lines of the trolley experiment. Who gets to live, and who gets to die? And what about the fact that we don&#x27;t even know who it is that will get better or worse?<p>Regarding coding, the coder is only really able to quit because the market is good. Plenty of people along the same economic chain that led to this are in more precarious job circumstances.

I just wanted to say I hope the OP isn&#x27;t beating themselves up about what happened. In terms of moral integrity I feel they did very well to, at a relatively young age, take the decision to quit. I understand the point of the article (we may be developers at the end of the chain, and there maybe lots of people legally and ethically responsible above us, but we can still stand up for what is right) but at the same time, until you read something like this, or are in the situation yourself, it is common for people not to appreciate the knock on of what we do. If the OP hadn&#x27;t made the quiz, someone else would have, this isn&#x27;t to say people can&#x27;t take a stand, but it is more to say no matter what they did that person would still be dead.<p>So my respect to the developer in question, I&#x27;m fairly sure I would have continued to work there. I would have just said to myself that these things happen, there are laws in place to protect people, if the laws aren&#x27;t good enough we should campaign for change, I&#x27;m just a developer move data around a machine, etc. But I sort of assume by time I get to my death bed, I&#x27;ll probably look back over my life and decide I made most decisions wrong, rather than work hard for success, fortune, etc. perhaps favouring compassion, helping others, charity work, etc. would have actually be a life better spent. So for the time being I&#x27;ll give credit to those who take the moral high ground!

Here is mine. The company was going to pitch investors very soon but its product is not ready yet. The CTO copied our competitor&#x27;s code (well, mangled javascript), replaced their name with ours, updated some public API to our company name. Then asked me to build upon that.<p>I said this is not acceptable but they said it is ok because they are not releasing it publicly, it is just for demo for investors. I am sure we are either violating copyright or telling lie to investors, and am surprised no one in the company think it is a problem. After all I have to do it, because I was just an intern.

&gt; “Yes. That’s what the requirements say to do. Everything leads to the client’s drug.”<p>Working in Pharma Advertising I have seen other devs in my company do exactly that.<p>I also found out recently that a company I made a website for bought a drug and raised the price 2,000%.<p>I&#x27;ve already started my new job search.

I have code I&#x27;m ashamed of as well. I was very young, and told the app was for a fairly innocent cause. After the fact, it became apparent the company was also selling it to a fairly controversial foreign government entity.<p>I think it&#x27;s worth standing up to this sort of thing, but good luck getting that new job if you stipulate they inform you before hand who they&#x27;re going to sell your code to. I&#x27;m not sure what the solution is if you don&#x27;t have a ton of leverage (and if you choose to turn down the job, someone will gladly take your place in this economy).<p>Interested in hearing other people&#x27;s suggestions.

Expected this to be a &quot;the code I never wrote&quot; thing, from there blog name.<p>Then thought it might be a &quot;lol look at my bad code that I wrote 6 years ago&quot;<p>Pleasantly surprised. For more, I recommend&quot;the gift of Fire&quot; by Sara Baase.

What I&#x27;ve discovered over the years is simply if you refuse to build it they&#x27;ll get someone else to do it, and someone else certainly will. That&#x27;s not too say you should, just that you as a developer have very little power to actually stop it.

good read. and kudos for coming out and opening the subject.<p>i personally think this is not just a developer issue, but affects every person living in a society. the quality of the society we live in depends on all of us doing as much as we can to achieve it. unfortunately, the living today is too precarious, and too many people cannot afford to be too ethical.<p>the sad thing about our industry to me is that sometimes it seems we give up before putting up any fight. we know how hard it is to control complex systems, how impossible it is to create a perfect system. so a lot of us decide, like that fox in Aesop&#x27;s fable, that it&#x27;s actually wrong to even try to do anything. if she can&#x27;t reach the grapes, then the grapes must be sour. this happens everywhere, but it strikes me in IT particularly if you look at a simple example - most IT people find it obvious, and live with it, that everything we do online is recorded and that it&#x27;s not that hard to spy on anyone. most regular people don&#x27;t fully grasp this, and get occasionally outraged. how many of us (i count myself in here) will then just wave their concerns away, and explain that they simply have no choice but to accept this future?

This is something I&#x27;ve wondered about.<p>What do you do if your boss asks you to do something which you believe to be legally questionable or unethical? For example, if you&#x27;re asked to do something which you thought might be illegal, but you don&#x27;t know for certain, would the best course of action be to hire a lawyer? Based on what I saw from the recent Volkswagen fiasco, it seems like the developer himself can be held liable. Is this correct?

I was asked a couple of time to write illegal code or hand over log data to management which they are not allowed to see. In Europe we still have working privacy protection laws, you know.<p>I always said no, and management always reacted professionally and accepted it. Maybe they just don&#x27;t know software or privacy laws that well.<p>Having a clean conscience trumps all, and in the end you will have troubles, not your management.

Every single CS student should read this.

This reminds me of issues we face in the legal profession. Lawyers have convinced ourselves, through elaborate rationalization, that every person deserves legal representation. Yet lawyers clearly make decisions about what kind of work they want to do, and what kind of clients they are comfortable representing. For example, most divorce lawyers tend to specialize in representing husbands or wives (not both), and most employment and labor lawyers either represent the company or the employee consistently, etc. But on the other hand, many defense lawyers become prosecutors, and vice versa. The key is that whatever role we like to take, we make ethical decisions within that role. If I am a prosecutor, I work for the people and my job is to &quot;do justice&quot;. If I defend accused criminals, my job is to advocate zealously for the accused b&#x2F;c anyone may be falsely accused. This system relies on discretion -- that is, the individual professional is free to decide whether to pursue a matter or take on a client. Unfortunately discretion does not exist in most software development efforts. Unless you are contributing to free software on a voluntary basis, it is likely that you will be called upon from time to time to support businesses that you don&#x27;t like. This is a hard problem and I don&#x27;t think there is an easy answer. If anything, the answer may require that you forego many of the economic trappings of success if you wish to live an ethical life. I don&#x27;t expect anyone to make that decision, although I admire those who do. Not so much the Richard Stallmans who can live on their celebrity, but the people who adhere to those ideals and do not have celebrity to fall back on when they can&#x27;t make their rent.

I was asked to scrape details of 50k+ people from LinkedIn and load them into essentially a spam cannon because, you guessed it, we needed the e-mail signups. And follow-up sales calls. So, probably illegal (because spam), generally horrible behaviour, and also a huge violation of LI&#x27;s terms of service. I said no. Fortunately if I didn&#x27;t program it in that company nobody was going to do it and all I had to put up with was snark.

I don&#x27;t get it.<p>I mean yes, sure, I realize the author blames himself for the death of that poor girl. But how could he possibly have known? It&#x27;s neither his job nor his responsibility to know anything about the side effects of this drug. His job was to built a website, according to the wishes of his employer. And so he did.<p>Hindsight is 20&#x2F;20, it&#x27;s easy to say afterwards that what he did was unethical. But to me this seems more like bad luck.

Applying the term engineer to software is a problem here, there is a lot of law attached to the term, and proper lines between being a Software &quot;Developer&quot; and being a Software &quot;Engineer&quot; have not been drawn yet. I have found that some corporate entities insist on calling an engineer anyone developing software, just so they can point the blame and liability at some employees, like VW tried. Liscensing as an engineer requires at least an ABET BS degree in Engineering, plus tests and years of junior time, but corporations throw this word about like confeti, conferring it on any employee they like. In the licensed world this title indeed means both criminal and civil financial liability in the case of errors. It is strongly advised to use the title Developer, and avoid the title Engineer, unless one wishes to work in harms way of prosecution from some error that harms someone.

There is a problem with software engineers. Narcissism.<p>Its disturbing how many software discussion boards routinely refer to other people as dumb or ignorant.<p>It&#x27;s as if everyone should leave their area of expertise and become software engineers.<p>This kind of hubris that allows some to think they are better than others only paves the way for people to dehumanize others and behave unethically.<p>And we have seen after decades of posing as champions of freedom and liberty nearly the entire industry has been co-opted into the surveillance economy or state surveillance programs without so much as a murmur with Snowden left holding the baby of these pretensions.

I have been asked to do unethical-but-not-illegal things in the past, and in response I (unwittingly) delivered something ethical under the guise of being the requested item. Still dubious ethics, but just between me and the client, not anybody outside.<p>The most common request is to knock off another site. You can hit the save button, or copy code, but what I do is code up a better similar design from scratch. The result is a superior product so everybody is happy, but I would never take code that wasn&#x27;t open source. I don&#x27;t even peek at their code during this process!

<p><pre><code> &gt; As developers, we are often one of the last lines of &gt; defense [sic] against potentially dangerous and &gt; unethical practices </code></pre> I think this article is a prime example of how professional institutions can be just as important in software engineering as other fields more typically associated with such bodies.<p>Just because software isn&#x27;t a physical entity like a bridge that can physically collapse on someone, it seems to be the view of many that a professional body with guidance on ethics, best practice, et al. has no relevance.

That page has the most blocks that I have seen uBlock Origin do - over 120.

As others have said, the biggest culprit here is the law that allows prescription drugs to be pushed in this way.<p>Was the drug in question an SSRI by any chance? If so, that is terrifying.

I have seen bad code in my life. Some cases developers don&#x27;t care about the code ethics OR they are not intelligent&#x2F;experienced enough to write a good code.<p>But in many cases its the mistake of product managers or leads. When the product goals&#x2F;specs are not clear, the design changes very often and you have to meet the tight deadlines. This leads to redundant and inefficient code which is very difficult to clean up and maintain.

A lot of drugs have severe side effects. And of course, if a drug is popular enough, there always will be a couple of extremely severe cases.<p>Does it mean that those drugs are bad? Does it mean that the recovery of millions of patients is outweighted by one where the doctor probably shouldn&#x27;t have prescribed it in the first place because the patient was already predisposed to depression or depressed in the first place?

The major side effect of making coding easier is more people will. Some will have fewer scruples about ethics. So as coding tools get easier to use, more such dishonest coding will show up.<p>I think a solution, alongside our personal integrity, is watching for it. Whether we be Google, or a lone, random programmer, we could any of us chance to ferret out such a nasty site and shine the bright light of day on it.

Earlier this year while looking for work, I received an offer to start on a project that would scan innocent travelers (through client&#x27;s airports) and build dossiers on them looking for criminal connections.<p>I&#x27;m proud to say I declined and included the fancy word &quot;repugnant&quot; in my reply.

This is a very tough thing to address if you&#x27;re a security researcher say for the government. The likes become blurry on what is ethical and what&#x27;s needed for keeping weapons that can protect us..

In practice, liability is the yardstick of ethics. Anyone caught in the &quot;unethical&#x2F;not liable&quot; zone is alone. Which for most of us results in shame. For a few others, it results in pride.

Thanks for the story.<p>I feel this has been an issue for other types of jobs so far, but this example points out how <i>easy</i> is to be borderline with ethics...which <i>may</i> itself be a non-ethical choice IMHO

I was reading the comments of the article and I came across an interesting thought.<p>Whilst we in first world countries may be able to protest against our employers or try and steer them away from non-ethical actions.<p>What happens when the employer takes away the assignment in question and gives the work to an off-shore company, who&#x27;s only obligation is to get paid? Where the developers of said off-shore company&#x27;s obligation is to get paid so they can eat?<p>Do you think off-shore developers are going to have the same moral stances of a first world developer? I don&#x27;t think so.<p>I know there are a couple of voices in this thread who think they can be that knight in shining armor, a bit like Don Quixote. However, you can&#x27;t rail too much. Lest you find yourself outcast, side-lined or even fired?<p>I thought it was an interesting situation to ponder.

Amazing how much backlash there was at the idea of legally requiring software to explain its decisions, but this is one example out of many that makes it clear that we either require it or people will die from software with bad intentions. To me, the idea of trusting software authors or companies without the accompanying legal framework to ensure that it isn&#x27;t blind trust is absolutely insane. I should hope VW (amongst many other companies) has proven that beyond any doubts.

If he hadn&#x27;t coded it, someone else would have. The most effective way to change the world, in my opinion, is to push for political and social changes that change incentives in a manner that reduces the number of unethical economic niches that exist. Sacrificing your own employment opportunities out of principle has next to no effect on the larger picture, and if anything, will reduce your own ability to shape things in a positive direction in the future.

My take on this: If someone reads garbage advertisement information on a random website and takes this medication solely because of that, they fail to do the most basic thinking and scrutiny. The gene pool won&#x27;t miss these people. I know, it&#x27;s harsh and cynical, but it&#x27;s the truth (oh boy, this opinion will be unpopular, I already feel it in my bones). If everyone had to take responsibility for such thoughtless behaviour of other people, we couldn&#x27;t do anything anymore.<p>However, I do see major moral implications of writing code for things like cars, rockets, robots, pacemakers, etc. This is where the true responsibility of software engineers lies.