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Software Engineering Needs A Hippocratic Oath
Here’s the draft. Do you think I missed anything?
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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…