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Comment by frio | Hacker News Reader

It's more an industry error, I suspect. The University I went to forced all the Software Engineers to do some of the traditional Engineering papers, including courses on ethics. The professional institute that accredits the University's ability to call their course an Engineering course required those courses.

Courses like that don't fix unethical people, but they make the rest of us aware that ethical concerns exist. Software/Computer Science is such a young discipline that, industry-wide, I don't think we've learnt that one from the other industries yet.

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I question the amount that such ethics courses actually help. Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine, and yet you don't have to go far on HN (even in this very thread) before you see people saying business majors are unethical.

The bigger problem, IMO, is that many tech companies have started handing out kool-aid that data collection and analytics is ethical. They justify it by saying that it helps people avoid spam, or get better advertisements, or whatever, and then the engineers think they are being ethical and beneficial to society by building these systems.

> Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine

I took a business ethics course in undergrad, and it was surprising how many students advocated all sorts of (to me) aberrant ethical views. (Note I’m pretty traditional, morally speaking. The environment was strongly postmodern, and this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)

Not that I minded personally, but it was a strong lesson to me that teaching people categories and how to think won’t give them a desire to respect any particular brand of morality.

> this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)

To be totally fair, the idea "free speech is bad because some people say bad things" is older than the mind of man can remember.

> To be totally fair, the idea "free speech is bad because some people say bad things" is older than the mind of man can remember.

Yes, it's just that we've only recently been allowed to talk about it openly.

Saying that business majors are full of unethical people is like saying that politics is full of unethical people, it is the job that attract those characteristics.

The objective of those ethical classes is to move the neutral/good majority in hope in hope to counterbalance the unethical minority.

And computer science is just as full of unethical people. The highest paying jobs available to those in their 20s and 30s, by far, are computer science jobs. That alone attracts an incredible amount of people only in it for the money.

On top of that, companies which are usually regarded as some of the most unethical companies on the planet (especially in regards to privacy) are companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which are worshipped by and have computer science people scrambling to get hired by them. Going back a little further in history, before FAANG, the companies that were revered by the tech world were the very same ISPs that this post is railing against.

Programmers as a whole seem to have no problem at all being unethical as long as it gets them either money or the chance to work on the latest tech fad.

I do not disagree with this, but it stands that the presence/prevalence of unethical people is not really an argument against ethic courses, as they are meant to do little more that containing the problem

Unless you imagine some sort of industry-wide reckoning from a political/legal perspective, the industry will probably never "grow up". This isn't the sort of industry where a couple bridges might fall down and everyone suddenly gains self-awareness that it's time to be a little more adult.

Just look at the resistance on this forum to the idea of GDPR or data privacy bills. This is one of the most self-aware forums on the internet and still probably a majority of users are not only aware of who (and what) is signing their paychecks, but they actively endorse it in their personal discourse during their time off too.

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