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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?
We're waiting for a response.
Hell, no. I ain't ashamed of my code, and if a man says something bad about my code, there's gonna be some blood spilt.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
I've at times had to code up things I haven't been happy with, but rather than refuse to do it, I tried to modularize stuff so it could be fixed later when management changed.
This is, I think, better than refusing, and having someone else code it up. To quote Mordin Solus, "someone else might have gotten it wrong".
(And in at least one occasion, that worked -- for one product I worked on, we managed to safely and quickly kill the "phone home" DRM before it got out into the wild. Felt filthy working on it, felt good to bury it.)
I am ashamed of some of the code that's been written in programming languages I've written
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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.
I worked (briefly) in a call center where we handled people who had called an 800 number. We asked a series of questions that we read from and filled out on an HTML page.
I suspected something was fishy and looked at the source -- it was exactly like what Bill Sourour had coded -- it didn't matter how people answered, the same non-result in the end.
People thought the number would help them, but it was used to harvest information, nothing else. One of the most screwed up environments I've ever worked in.
I come here for the love
If we're talking about how are code was used, I remember in high school (many moons ago) writing Turbo Pascal programs and Lotus 123 macros for a shipping department of a sizable company that hadn't yet computerized. I was brought in by the manager of the shipping department because he could hire a high-schooler when he couldn't get authorization to computerize from within the internal IT department (which was busy sinking the company with some massively expensive software controlling the manufacturing).
Anyway, I was very proud of allowing my boss to get all the data that he wanted, and he was very, very pleased that his department now had some means of seeing what was going on.
I distinctly remember when he called me in and thanked me. Due to my program, he'd had enough data to improve efficiency 25%!
I glowed.
Now he'd been able to let go 2 out of the 8 drivers they had.
I stood there speechless.
There were real people underneath those numbers.
I've seen some shady things, and it was ALWAYS in a setting full of people too junior to ask questions. Junior people are sometimes naive, and will believe management when told that certain shady things are normal. Junior people may have no resume to speak of and are basically forced to look good at their first real job. Junior people may not be able to afford to quit without having something else lined up, and don't want to be marked as job-hoppers. Senior people have the marketability to leave, and the experience to see through BS. They may also have enough savings to quit out of principle and take a sabbatical, or the ability to shift gears to their side business. I don't really know how to solve the problem, given that young adults need to eat regardless of their ethics. I do know that the problem is hardly contained to computing. Maybe we gravitate to this field because we love logic, but the rest of the world isn't logical. We still have to deal with human nature in this field too.
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.
What does this mean in terms of software? Software crashes all the time.
Not in safety critical applications. Writing software for them is a different beast.
How could an engineer sign off on a system like this?
With the proper documentation.
I don't think we have proper methods of describing and solving modern safety issues in embedded systems.
Google for machine safety standards. IEC 60601-1 seems to be a good starting point for medical devices.
I've only written code for industrial machinery so I can't say for sure if it contains the necessary information. You typically have to go through quite a lot of standards to figure out the full requirements.
You have to document not only how the software will handle all plausible input cases but also how the device won't endanger anyone in the case of common hardware failures.
Some electromechanical devices can be assumed to not fail if you never approach half the marked current.
Some components are designed to have a defined failure state. You can use capacitors that always break, never short circuits.
For transistors you have to document how the device will operate in the different possible ways the transistor can break.
For complex circuits like a CPU you are not allowed to assume that it will remain functional and because of this you need at least two CPUs and have software or hardware that detects if one of them doesn't act as it should.
Depending on what safety class you are aiming for you might have to use CPUs of different architectures and have different programmers writing the software to minimize the risk of them failing in the same way.
As you might have figured out you can't just throw in a Raspberry Pi or anything running Windows CE and hope to write life critical applications.
If you need an OS it will be something like SafeRTOS but most of the time you will skip it.
You typically have to use window watchdogs to make sure that the code executes within the right time and you need to add checkpoints to make sure that the code executes in the right order.
You should try to avoid using pointers and dynamic allocation. Yep, that rules out high level languages no matter how safe some people seem to believe they are.
Exceptions is a big no. You avoid code that doesn't have a determined path trough it.
If you actually use pointers you will have to document every usage to make sure that it can never be used uninitialized or trash other parts of the memory.
If you allocate things dynamically you will have to show that allocation failure doesn't lead to safety issues.
TL;DR;
We have the methods to write safe software. It's not easy and it is very time consuming.
If you are interested in doing it I recommend going for an EE degree rather than CS. Reading the standards will be hard otherwise and understanding the possible failure modes even more so.
As a practicing structural engineer for 30 years who also writes structural engineering design software, let me answer this for you. When an engineer signs/stamps a design, they are not certifying that it is perfect. In fact, it is generally recognized that no set of plans is ever error free. What you are asserting by your signature is that 1) You were in charge of and supervised all the work going into the design and 2) The design was performed in accordance with the standard of care for the work being performed. Standard of care is NOT a standard of perfection, by rather "that degree of care and skill ordinarily exercised under similar conditions by reputable members of our profession practicing in the same or similar locality." TL/DR; An engineer cannot sign/stamp shoddy work, but is not expected to perform perfection.
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
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
One difference between the civil and software engineering examples that strikes me is that the civil engineer only has to ensure that the building never falls down due to natural and expected forces. If someone sets off a large truck bomb in the basement, the building *will* fall down, and everyone understands that's not the civil engineer's fault because that attack was outside of the normal and accepted design parameters.
That's not to say that we don't defend buildings against truck bombs. We do, but we do it with other mechanisms. We have regulations that attempt to restrict the availability of explosives. We have law enforcement and court systems that attempt to deter people from blowing up buildings by threatening them with punishment if they do. In some cases, for buildings that seem to be at particularly high risk, we apply various other security measures to control what vehicles can be driven into the basement, and by whom. We also have infrastructure in place that attempts to monitor whether or not some individuals or groups might be interested in trying to blow up a specific building, and devise and implement countermeasures dynamically as needed.
In the case of software, the responsibility of software engineers is not nearly as clear as it is for civil engineers. Largely this is because software engineering is still a very young profession as compared to civil engineering, and it's still evolving rapidly. In some cases, the tools and techniques used by attackers didn't even exist when the software was written. In most cases, the tools and techniques did exist and were well-known to attackers and security engineers, but not to the people who wrote the software. This indicates a failure of the profession to educate its members... but given the pace at which attack techniques develop and the pace at which the software industry is and has been expanding, it's a failure without obvious solution. Simply applying the same sort of regulation and procedures applied to civil engineering would be massive overkill that would dramatically decrease the ability of the industry to produce software and probably wouldn't solve the problem.
Clearly, we need to create more secure software. The status quo is generally terrible. There are exceptions; there are organizations that do excellent security engineering and we have a good collection of tools and practices for making software that is much better than the norm. On the other hand, no matter what we do during development there will always exist the potential for a truck bomb, an attack which was simply outside the parameters that it made sense to defend against. That means we'll always need additional, "active" defenses.
In the case of the hospital equipment, that means that processes developed for medical equipment not based on software simply don't work. FDA approvals hinder security because they make patching far more expensive and difficult than it should be. We can attempt to build security perimeters around all of the equipment, but experience proves that that's a fool's errand. There's always some way in and once inside the perimeter attackers can run amok.
Our current (but rapidly evolving!) best understanding of how to make software reliable in the face of active attack is a multi-layered strategy. It starts with good software engineering practices that attempt to minimize well-understood risks (buffer overflows, SQL injection, XSS, etc.). Then we try to add firebreaks wherever possible and reasonable, so that compromise of one component doesn't compromise the system as a whole. Such firebreaks mostly consist in locking down any communication channels between components that aren't actually necessary, within processes, between processes, and between devices on networks. We also try to authenticate users and keep them restricted to the functions they can legitimately perform. Then at every level we do regular penetration testing and work to identify and patch vulnerabilities before they can be exploited -- because there will
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Google for machine safety standards. IEC 60601-1 seems to be a good starting point for medical devices.
We have the methods to write safe software. It's not easy and it is very time consuming.
There is still a fairly large difference between quality control in civil engineering and software development, even for safety critical devices. In college I worked with a professor whose area of research was requirements engineering, specifically requirements trace-ability. I did some work on a research project involving Siemens and the FDA where the goal was to improve specifications given to the FDA so they could monitor safety critical devices better. It was very eye opening just how difficult it is for the FDA to perform approval on devices which include a software component.
Right now their approach is basically to look for what they called "bad smells". It is impossible to thoroughly go over every software system with the same rigor they would over electronics or mechanic systems without an astronomically higher cost. So the best they can do is use their experience on where problems are most likely to be and to focus on areas where documentation is light. Just like an experienced software QA engineer would. My professor's research focused on AI and information retrieval to build tools which assist in investigation because a thorough review would be impossibly costly.
People often pontificate about whether civil engineering, electronics, or software engineering products are inherently more or less complex than each other. They look at number of bolts in a bridge and the lines of code in a software program and pretend they can compare the two. But coming from the actual mechatronics engineers and FDA officials whose job it is to oversee the safety of these products, software systems have simply too many external and internal inputs for software quality control to reach the rigor of other engineering disciplines. Human beings are simply not capable of handling the level of complexity it would take for software engineers to have the same confidence in their products as a civil engineer has in his.
Engineer experience and good QA practices really do make a big difference, but no software engineer will ever be capable of taking on the same level of responsibility for his products as a civil engineer does when he signs off on a bridge. This doesn't mean the industry cannot improve (it certainly can), it just means comparing the results of software QA with the results of civil engineering QA will always be faulty. Comparing each other's procedures to find ways to improve is still a good exercise though.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.