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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.
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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Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do
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The Official Colorado State Vegetable is now the "state legislator".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:20AM
Those people following orders in Nazi Germany had more at stake than just their wallets. Same for the soldiers doing all that bad stuff for the the North Korean regime.
Their situation is even more difficult than yours. In the NK case their families would probably be imprisoned for life if not killed: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/654167/North-Korea-prison-camps-American-Otto-Warmbier [express.co.uk]
It's as I've long believed. Only a minority are good. And a larger minority are bad. The rest will just do what the rest are doing (e.g. follow orders). FWIW I doubt I fall in the good group :).