>As a physician and, prior to that, military officer, I have been struck by the fierce non-ethics of many software folks.
Yes! Compared to the noble physician, programmers like like Linus Torvalds (Linux, Git) and Richard Stallman (Emacs, GCC) who freely give away the fruits of their labor, even when it generates billions of dollars in value of which they reap only a tiny fraction, are nowhere near as ethical.
Physicians are so ethical, in fact, that medical bills are number one cause of bankruptcy in the US!
As a regular donor to FSF, I don't disagree with you. But very fundamental ethics are shoved in front of us constantly by the nature of the work.
You can definitely make solid arguments for or against the ethics of medicine, particularly as a business, and you can definitely make solid arguments for or against the ethics of the military.
My point is more that it's quite difficult to make a lot of arguments at all about software engineering ethics. Find me a book on ethical network administration at Barnes and Noble.
Does it make sense that doctors have to charge 10x just to even-out the insurance companies only paying 1/10 the price? Nope. You should direct your anger at for-profit medical insurance companies, which make billions of dollars in profit every month.
To your ethical claim: can engineers go to prison for being unethical? No. Can physicians? Yes.
"But that’s not remotely true. The last time the OECD looked at this (PDF), they found that, adjusted for local purchasing power, America has the highest-paid general practitioners in the world. And our specialists make more than specialists in every other country except the Netherlands. What’s even more striking, as the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff observed last week, these highly paid doctors don’t buy us more doctors’ visits. Canada has about 25 percent more doctors’ consultations per capita than we do, and the average rich country has 50 percent more. This doctor compensation gap is hardly the only issue in overpriced American health care—overpriced medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, prescription drugs, and administrative overhead are all problems—but it’s a huge deal.
Doctors aren’t as politically attractive a target as insurance companies, hospital administrators, or big pharma, but there’s no rational basis for leaving their interests unscathed when tackling unduly expensive medicine."
I am pretty sure an engineer can face some kind of serious charges if they were negligent in part of a system that ended up killing people, like a faulty airplane
Yes! Compared to the noble physician, programmers like like Linus Torvalds (Linux, Git) and Richard Stallman (Emacs, GCC) who freely give away the fruits of their labor, even when it generates billions of dollars in value of which they reap only a tiny fraction, are nowhere near as ethical.
Physicians are so ethical, in fact, that medical bills are number one cause of bankruptcy in the US!