"Most of the software that influences the behavior of human beings wasn’t created with strong ethical constructs around it. Software developers should ask themselves ethical questions like "who does this affect?", "who could get hurt by this?", and "who does this disadvantage or advantage?", try to answer them, and be comfortable with questions they can’t answer yet.
Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of Circonus, spoke about professional ethics for software developers atQCon London 2018. InfoQ is covering this conference with Q&As, presentations, summaries, and articles.
InfoQ interviewed Schlossnagle about the importance of ethics, what developers can do to incorporate ethical considerations, and asked him what the consequences of unethical software should be.
InfoQ: What makes ethics important for software developers?
Theo Schlossnagle: If you look around, the vast majority of people that are working today in our industry, writing code, making decisions that impact users, haven’t had an intense ethics course in their life. They haven’t taken an ethics course in high school, they haven’t taken an ethics course in college. It doesn’t mean that they don’t know ethics, ethics are pretty innate in human beings. There’s a playbook for discussing ethics; there’s a playbook for contemplating them; there’s not a playbook for answering them.The question is what your mental model is for making yourself answer those questions instead of just avoiding them and pretend they don’t exist.We have 30 years of software development, and the last 10 to 15 of those have been hyper-accelerated software development. We have software all over the place that influences the behavior of human beings, and we didn’t create that software with strong ethical constructs around it."
