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Slashdot Asks: Are You Ashamed of Your Code? (businessinsider.com)
Programmer and teacher Bill Sourour wrote a post last week called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of," where he recounts a story in which he was hired to write code for a pharmaceutical company. Little did he know at the time, he was being "duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug," recaps Business Insider. "He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it." Sourour was inspired to write the post after viewing a talk by Robert Martin, called "The Future of Programming," who argues that software developers need to figure out how to self-regulate themselves quickly as software becomes increasingly prevalent in many people's lives. Business Insider reports: "Let's decide what it means to be a programmer," Martin says in the video. "Civilization depends on us. Civilization doesn't understand this yet." His point is that in today's world, everything we do like buying things, making a phone call, driving cars, flying in planes, involves software. And dozens of people have already been killed by faulty software in cars, while hundreds of people have been killed from faulty software during air travel. "We are killing people," Martin says. "We did not get into this business to kill people. And this is only getting worse." Martin finished with a fire-and-brimstone call to action in which he warned that one day, some software developer will do something that will cause a disaster that kills tens of thousands of people. But Sourour points out that it's not just about accidentally killing people or deliberately polluting the air. Software has already been used by Wall Street firms to manipulate stock quotes. "This could not happen without some shady code that creates fake orders," Sourour says. We'd like to ask what your thoughts are on Sourour's post and whether or not you've ever had a similar experience. Have you ever felt ashamed of your code?
I thought "ashamed of code" would be e.g. using a for loop on a Java Collection rather than an Iterator; or using EJB methods to simply wrap database layer calls, instead of encapsulating business rules (because you see our project uses a 3-tier architecture because someone somewhere read it is a good thing to do); or not doing unit tests.
Writing code to put bread on the table for employers whose business ethics are questionable (or cut corners when it comes to generally accepted good software engineering practices) is to be expected. It's not as if these things are discussed at the hiring interview. And jumping ship at the drop of a hat when these things crop up is seldom practicable - a new round of interviews takes time, so does induction into a new workplace.
We are all prostitutes, either from the neck up or the neck down.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
The last thing programmers need is a power grubbing QA task manager on top of the idiot scrum manager, in addition to whoever else wants to run things. Quality starts with planning and thinking before coding and not rushing code out the door. A better approach would be not allowing non software people the ability to make statements of quality, cost and capability about software, via legal fiat. Let software engineers as individuals sign off on it.
Folks there's a lot less science, predictability and consensus in the legal profession. People need a license to cut hair. If software as a profession isn't to be regulated, neither of those professions should be as well.
Civil engineers design with a safety margin such that their building's don't fall down. I work with a bunch of them. Civil engineers dread the thought that their building falls down.
What does this mean in terms of software? Software crashes all the time.
Software systems tend to have really complex side effects. Suppose I design a blood pressure monitoring machine for a hospital. It and a hundred other devices let the hospital run much more efficiently. The hospital only needs 1/2 the number of nurses. Now, someone discovers a bug in security camera, penetrates the network, discovers hundreds of Windows XP Embedded devices, and turns the hospital into a malware farm. (Incidents like this have happened.)
The hospital is screwed. It can't suddenly double the number of nurses, and even if you did, the nurses are used to the automated equipment. They don't know how to fall back to the non-networked way of doing things instantly. They are out of practice.
How could an engineer sign off on a system like this?
On one hand, it is running standard and recommended software (like Windows). Software has went through the FDA approval process. However, on the flip side, the hospital is a sitting duck. These embedded devices are hopelessly insecure, and there is no way to secure them against modern network threats.
I don't think we have proper methods of describing and solving modern safety issues in embedded systems. We have no proper method of understanding safety with machines built in one country, running software written two different countries, and then running somewhere else. The safety interactions even in a relatively stand-alone machine can be very tough to understand. These network enabled threats make things really hard.
Doesn't this describe almost every job?
I mean, I generally agree with the article. But the article seems a little... self-aggrandising, doesn't it? As if to say "hey, we're just as important as doctors and engineers!"
The thing is... I kinda agree - programmers are very important and their actions can have serious consequences if done poorly or incorrectly. But like... plenty of other jobs are just like that too.
If the person stocking the shelves at your local grocery store doesn't clear out the expired stock, or maintain proper hygiene around fresh food, they could easily contribute to someone getting sick or spreading bacteria or a virus.
If the person selling gear at a bicycle store doesn't realize the wheel or frame is broken, or that a frame has been recalled due to a defect, they could easily contribute to someone being seriously injured.
If a school teacher ignores serious bullying or doesn't fact check the information they're teaching or doesn't make sure their students properly know how to do proper calculations, they could easily contribute to a serious mistake made by the student some time in the future.
If a salesperson helps someone get a loan approved when they've very much shown in all likelihood that they probably can't afford the monthly payments or that the loan is predatory in nature, they could easily contribute to that person's life taking a serious financial turn for the worse - and we all know how stressful and desperate people can get when they can't make ends meet.
Yes, programmers need to be aware of their moral compass - but so does everybody else to varying levels, pretty much. Generally speaking, just - don't be a dick, don't be apathetic and use some common sense. That'd go a long way for pretty much anybody in any situation.
That doesn't matter. Maybe getting rid of 2 of the 8 kept the company afloat so the other 6 didn't get laid off.
I am both a civil engineer and software "engineer." I have also visited Maryland. I can confirm that (a) civil engineers suck (despite the fact that civil engineering is often much less complex than software engineering), (b) Maryland's freeway design is weird (lots of super-tight parclos with really short merges), and (c) calling programmers "engineers" is a complete farce because compared to actual engineering, all coding is "cowboy coding." I don't care if you're "agile" or "waterfall" or how good your code review or QA is; the process is not rigorous enough to count as engineering.
Ironically, some of the worst cowboy coders I've worked with have been Professional Engineers...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The Reasonable question: Are you ashamed of your code's efficiency, documentation, clarity and reasonable brevity?
Unreasonable Question: Are you ashamed of your code because of some stupid SJW viewpoint?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.