Ethics of Software Engineering

30 Nov 2017

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Introduction

What ethics means to me is how a society’s norms and beliefs affects how a person carries out a task. So what may seem like the ethic thing to do in one place may not be the ethic thing to do in another. However, for software engineering I think ethics and morals can become hazey depending on the situation. Such as taking on an important job, under stress and pressure, a software engineer can find themselves letting unethical things slide.

Situation

In “The code I’m still ashamed of”, Bill Sourour illustrates his past as a software engineer working for a marketing firm founded by a medical doctor. Sourour was tasked with implementing a quiz for a website that determines what type of drug to prescribe the user based on the answers of a series of questions. However, the client’s specifications was for the outcome of the quiz to always recommend the company’s drug. He later receives news that the drug he built the website for may be responsible for the death of a young girl.

My Stance

I feel that what Sourour has done was unethical. In his article he mentions that the specifications bothered him but he still went with it. The reasoning to that was because he had a job to do. This shows that under stress and pressure we sometimes let things slide. While rigging the results of the quiz was not illegal it is unethical because it doesn’t consider the dangers this may have on certain individuals who may not respond well to the drug. In his case, the individual ends up suiciding. We aren’t robots so we shouldn’t just do what we’re told to do. If something does not seem right, appropriate actions must be done to right the situation because as humans we have a standard of ethics we must abide to. Otherwise we may as well not be human.