What are your thoughts on ethical considerations in software development? Are there specific ethical dilemmas you've encountered and navigated?
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Top comments (4)
Choosing to (refuse to) work on a product that is technically challenging but that you know to be unethical is a difficult issue.
That can be anything from working on a astrology product to working at Facebook.
At some point you have to decide what your values are and speak openly about it.
I will always remember my first interview. It was related to nuclear stuff. Not the civil ones, if you see what I mean. At some point, the interviewer told me:
I end up working for various domains: Military, Medical, Oil & gaz, life science. I noticed that the less "ethical" the field, the more "ethical" the people are, to compensate in a sense...
One of the challenge is when using open-source libraries to build prototyping software, how to protect intellectual property for the use case we are building. The challenge is developers (including me) without understanding licensing terms or without proper attribution just use the open source and then assume it would be fine to use.
Another classic one specially with story point estimation and under-estimating the work and putting the work -life balance out of equation....
For me, the "categorical imperative" applies.
The worst moral thing I've ever built was a billing program for insurance agents.