Without any doubts, I am very under level on this topic. Honesty goes first.
That said... how many times do we stop writting code to reflex on how much impact it will have on the comunity we live into? Let me guess: not many.
The World has moved faster than ever in 2020, and it still does in '21. That global ticket called COVID-19 put all of us hands on work for adapting, even for thoose who were the most anti virtual activists. And those tasks revealed a lot of who we are, how IT people think, work, imagine or even, move.
We are one of the first industries that adopt remote work as usual, many years ago. And we created our tools, our methods, our culture. And we were pointed as the freaks. But now, almost every single industry is working completly or in part as we are used to.
It is then in this cahotic context when we can really have a meassure about how much impact we made into people's life. And it is a bit scary to remember ourselves writting code without cocerns on if it could harm someone, or if we were dealing with some personal data. Or even beyond: how many times did we notice something smelt rare on the definitions we were given?
Tons of times we had to deal with customer's or bosse's intentions we can disagree, but we still have to code. Did we do the enoug to protect everybody's integrity? Or have we protect our own integrity, keeping us as good citizens?
There are two accepted and adopted ethics codes around:
ACM: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
IEEE: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
But still, it looks a really underated topic in our community. I have never had the chance to discuss it in a work environment, for example.
In other to improve our proffesion, my intention and commitment is to put this topic on the table every single time I can. This is my promisse to Touring and Ritchie.
Furthermore, I want to motivate you to be conscious on the impact you are causing with your code... and to raise an alert every time you see something strange behind the scenes.
Thans for the reading, and ethic hacking!
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