Civilisation depends on programmers
Software developers are being asked to do unethical and illegal things and they need to figure out how to self-regulate and do so quickly.
This is according to Robert Martin, a programmer and speaker, better known as “Uncle Bob”.
“Civilisation depends upon us. In ways it doesn’t understand. In ways we don’t understand,” said Martin.
Everything we do today involves software. He said people have already been killed due to faulty software in cars, while hundreds have died from faulty software during air travel.
“Other people believe they rule the world, but they write down the rules and they hand them to us. And then we write the rules that go into the machines that execute everything that happens.”
Martin said that when a fault in software causes tens of thousands of deaths, the opportunity to self-regulate will be over. Legislators will take control.
They will dictate everything about programmers’ jobs, down to the languages they are allowed to use, he said.
Sharing war stories
Martin’s talk inspired programmer Bill Sourour to write a post titled Code I’m Still Ashamed Of.
Sourour details how he was asked to build a website for a pharmaceutical company, where he was tricked into helping it dodge drug advertising laws to convince young women to take a particular drug.
He discovered the drug was known to worsen depression and that at least one woman committed suicide while taking it.
He told Business Insider that decades later he still feels guilty about it.
The post went viral on Hacker News and Reddit, where other programmers shared the unethical and illegal things they have been asked to do.
Now read: Most popular programming languages in the world
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