Musing about ethics and software develpment
There's something that I haven't seen in the education plan of IT degrees ever - professional ethics, and I think it is a huge miss. Ethics is being taught for lawyers, MD, teachers and lots of other degrees. Ethics tells us that there's something beyond our job responsibilities. Ethics reminds us that the one who is footing the bill may not be the final decision maker of everything. That if something is legal, it yet does not mean it is a right thing to do. Let me share a story about one of my previous project. I was working for an IT services company and we were helping our client to deliver a new version of the software. A peculiar thing was that if there were a bug in the Product, then something horrible could happen (in the worst case - somebody could die). And I was the quality guy on a project. Our sponsor (the one, who was footing the bill, and ultimate decision maker) had his deadlines. He already made a demo for marketing people and wanted to ship the softwar