Protect Both Your Ethics and Your Job in the Modern World of Programming

Recently programmer Bill Sourour delivered a viral blog post entitled ‘Code I’m Still Ashamed Of’. It told of his time at a pharmaceutical company, where he was somewhat conned into helping the company skirt advertising laws, persuading more women to take a particular drug which ended up having some serious side effects. Decades later, the episode still eats away at him.

Medium: @BillSourour

Programming ethics is inherently prone to hazy grey areas, both ethical and otherwise. So how do programmers ensure that they are colouring within the moral lines?

The Complex Case of Programmer Morality

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society, has a basic code of ethics for its members to abide by. It goes a little something like this:

1)      Contribute to society and human well-being

2)      Avoid harm to others

3)      Be honest and trustworthy

4)      Give proper credit for intellectual property

5)      Respect the privacy of others

6)      Honour confidentiality

As noble and worthy as these inclusions are, they’re still vague and open to interpretation. And while many an ethical precedent will have been set for the common issues that arise from working in I.T., they don’t help those who find themselves on the leading edge of programming innovation, or in a situation such as Bill’s, where all the facts only come to light after the event.

The Need to Self-Police

Due to the lack of government regulation and even applicable laws and statutes, when it comes to ethical dilemmas, it’s simply up to those in the industry to self-police. The abstract nature of computer programming means that no matter what the situation, it’s likely that there won’t be a concrete answer for it. It’s simply up to each programmer to use codes of ethics such as ACM’s as a guide, to go with their gut on the more difficult calls, and to have the courage to stand up to those that are asking for unprincipled or dishonest work.

But, as can be seen in the comments section of Bill Sourour’s article, when someone asks a programmer to do something unethical and the programmer refuses, the business will usually just find someone else that will. And these guns for hire, it seems, aren’t exactly in short supply.

Top Tips to Avoid Moral Programming Quandaries

One of the best ways to avoid these sorts of situations, as so eloquently pointed out by Kate Liotta in this piece, is to not work for companies prone to them in the first place.

While Kate talks of using the interview process to identify potential employees that might be prone to untoward behaviour, those on the other side of the interview desk can also use the hiring process to identify any potential moral questionability within the company. Ask hypotheticals based around situations such as Bill Sourour’s. Look for mannerisms in the interviewers (aloofness, obstinance) that might lend themselves to unethical behaviour.

Create a personal code of conduct, taking cues from ACM and other big businesses. If you advise your employer of this personal code of conduct, particularly as part of the interview process, they’ll have no choice but to respect it.

The most important tip? If something does occur that makes you uncomfortable, don’t stay silent. While the temptation will certainly be there to put your head down and not make a fuss, those that have chosen that particular path will tell you that producing a questionable piece of programming is something that can stay with you for the rest of your life. Sure, you may feel more secure in the short-term, but the long-term effects of making such a decision cannot be ignored. Talk to your superiors. Talk to bodies like the ACM. Start a conversation that gets these sorts of issues out into the open, rather than hidden in the shadows as they so often are.

A self-policing system of programming ethics may not be the ideal, but for now it’s all that we’ve got.

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