When I first looked at the article, “The Code I’m Still Ashamed of”, I expected it to be about having previously written code that isn’t as good as you could have written or could write now. Just based on the title, I started thinking about all of the programming projects I’ve turned in for a passing grade but was disappointed in the quality for one reason or another. To my surprise, the article went in a completely different direction. In the article, “The Code I’m Still Ashamed of”, Bill Sourour creates a quiz for a website that has misleading results. The website’s main goal is to promote a specific drug aimed at teenage girls, though the website does not admit to being associated with that drug. Shortly after completing the quiz, Sourour finds out that a girl committed suicide while taking the drug his quiz was promoting because some of the main side effects of it were suicidal thoughts and depression.
While it’s obviously unethical to give rigged results on a quiz, I don’t think he should feel bad about what happened to the girl. I have to assume that the girl was given warning of the dangerous side effects since it was by prescription only. He is however still responsible for building the quiz itself. I can understand that people may not feel responsible for things like this because they were told to do this by their boss, but everyone working on this should have known it was wrong. If I were in his situation, I most likely would have made the same decision though. Being the newest member on a team of developers would make it difficult to speak up about something you knew to be wrong. Given the situation, I would say he still is at fault, but not nearly to the extent that his project manager is. The project manager should have looked over the requirements after seeing the issue with the quiz, and told the company sponsoring the website that they can’t give them a quiz like that. This isn’t a topic I’ve thought about before reading the article, but it has been very interesting. Sourour states that, “As developers, we are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices.” This quote by itself felt a little dramatic to me, but when he started talking self-driving cars and AI that diagnoses patients, I understood the repercussions of unethical code a little better. I started thinking about something as simple as a database with user information. If I had users that had willingly given me information on a website I built, I probably would not have thought twice about using the info for new features without their consent. I would not go so far as to give their information to a 3rd party, but even using the info for something they did not sign up for seems pretty unethical. I'll have to give these things more thought in the future.
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2017
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