The ethics of Software Engineering

I believe software developers have just as high ethical responsibilities as engineers within other disciplines. Many engineers (and other professionals) do for example not want to work with weapons, animal experiments and so on. My opinion is that you should consider the ethical implications of your work even if you are within a more “mundane” field such as e-commerce or game development.

This is especially important considering the fact that we are just a limited number of people with the knowledge how to develop the applications that are used by the majority of the world’s population. Case in point: there were just 22.3 million developers in the world 2018 according to IDC Insights Industry Research. Constrast this number with the more than 4.4 billion internet users worldwide. Many software companies show even more extreme numbers, such as Facebook which alone boasts 2.41 monthly active users while having just 35000 employees in total. That means that a lot of power is concentrated into the hands of a relatively low number of developers. Your choices and what you choose to spend your time on has real impact in the world.

To me, there are no right or wrong answers to the difficult questions of whether a certain product is worthy of your time or not. But these questions still need to be answered. Myself, I would never want to work for Twitter or some other company whose entire business model is built upon learning as much as possible about each individual user and then selling the information to the highest bidder. The same goes for any other kind of surveillance or advertisement. If you have another opinion, you are of course very welcome to it. The only thing I’m asking is that you consider the consequences of any work assignment you undertake and is prepared to stand up to them.