SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.)
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Programmers Talk About the Unethical and Illegal Things They’ve Been Asked To Do
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 78 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday November 24 2016, @02:56AM
Beats the shit outta me. Swine are intelligent and fiercely opportunistic omnivores, though, and the phrase implies that swine have somewhat of a predatory nature and will eat meat despite not being hungry.
Although that doesn't still apply to the presentation vs. content divide without bad intent on the behalf of the content developer.
It would have better fit the public perception if it were in response to one of the pro-banking comments, one which implied that people who get gyp'd by bankers are suckers -- and that viewpoint is not entirely wrong. People chose to sign that contract, and unless they're Khalid Sheikh Mohammed under threat of a full back-waxing, chances are that thier dreams were too big for reality and they alone were the only one who forced their hand.