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Software Engineering Needs A Hippocratic Oath

Here’s the draft. Do you think I missed anything?

Attila Vágó
Level Up Coding

Author wearing a Medium hoodie from Bonfire.com pledging to write software that makes the world a better place one line of code at a time. Photo by author.

Blue screens across the globe. Beeping cockpits, puzzled pilots, grieving relatives at destination airports. Passengers in Nissans across the world cluelessly driving unsafe cars, Volkswagen owners unwittingly becoming environmental offenders. I could go on. It’s a long list and these are just some of the particularly famous examples of poorly written software that resulted in the costs being paid in human lives. The more you look, the more you’ll find, and the more I think about it, the more apparent it becomes — we have never treated software development with enough care and consideration for human lives. In fact, quite the opposite. We went from “don’t be evil” to ”move fast and break things”, to dark UX patterns, untested code and deliberately malicious software practices. This needs to stop.

One of my engineering managers years ago had a famous motto: “it’s just code, not heart-surgery”. Years later, I’ve grown to learn how wrong he was. A botched cardiovascular surgery will likely directly affect the life of just one person. Bad code — be that by deliberate design or not — has the potential to devastate millions of lives.

We’re living in the Wild West of software development, where there seem…

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Responses (110)

Most people don't like what I have to say on this and similar contexts, but it goes something like this.
* software is getting worse, quality wise, the more time I spend in the biz
* rather than really getting the fundamentals and building on that…

Comgrats on the award, Attila! 🫡

Usually tech makes me a bit confused, but I could make sense of this article. 😁👌
I'll be waiting for something more hands on. 🤭

In Canada, software engineers must take ethics classes and swear an oath.
During a graduation ceremony, we are given a ring made from the iron of a bridge that collapsed due to (at the time) unknown forces due to harmonic resonance. We are meant to…