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It's sad to see a group of engineering professors having political squabbles involving unethical behavior in response to an ethics complaint.

Ethics are supposed to be a core part of engineering, not too dissimilar from medicine. Good thing those folks are in academia where they can't hurt the rest of us.

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Engineering ethics is completely different from classroom ethics. Engineering ethics is all about compliance. If you build a missile to kill people, you better make sure it works as described. Who it kills is none of your business but if it doesn't work as described then it's a breach of "engineering ethics". It's funny when people on HN call for the "professionalisation" of software engineering. The only person who benefits is management who will happily throw the poor engineers under the bus the moment a self driving car hits somebody. Hold the entire organization responsible, starting from the top, not the lowly engineer.

On the contrary, in academia they can do lots of damage by encouraging the same behavior in new engineers.

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