Ethical Programming — Is It Worth It?
The software has poured into almost all areas of our lives throughout the years. It remembers phone numbers of our loved ones, it finds the best route to a well-reviewed restaurant we want to eat in, and many many more things. This ever-presence of software engineering in our day-to-day things brings all kinds of questions on what is ethical and what is not.
The topic of ethics is significant for us programmers (developers) who produce living and breathing pieces of code every day. Those pieces of code can change and affect other people’s lives. So, is being ethical in your work worth it? And what to do when presented with questionable requirements from your superiors?
These are all hard questions and topics, but let’s try to break them together.
To Bully, or To Be Bullied
I recently came about a tweet where a company was being called out for planning to build features that would do surveillance on their users. Here’s the tweet:
