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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.

Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."

In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.

He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.

By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tibman on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:59PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:59PM (#431478)

    I don't think that's it. Plenty of people die or suffer from bad mechanical design/implementation and there are few if any repercussions to the engineers. Exploding phones, cheating exhaust tests, highly vulnerable IoT devices, airbags that are basically shotguns, and so on. Engineers aren't liable for anything and they don't object to bad direction. Check out this car crash video. Both are Nissan but one is for the US market and the other for Mexico: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85OysZ_4lp0 [youtube.com] That's sick and should be illegal. Engineers designed that deathtrap for money and they aren't liable for a single person that has died.

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  • (Score: 1) by DBeemer on Thursday November 24 2016, @09:14AM

    by DBeemer (6398) on Thursday November 24 2016, @09:14AM (#432337)

    I'm a mechanical engineer and can only reply on my personal situation in hoisting equipment and food processing.
    But here in the Netherlands every engineer is responsible for the designs they create. If I design a machine or the responsible component that kills a person, I'm (in principle) personally responsible for the fault.
    Luckily, most companies here shield the individual employees and take responsibility as a company.

    I think all engineers should be aware of what could happen if their design fails, but if you are only working on small components it can be really hard to see.