Through the multiple readings on Ethics in the Software Engineering field i’ve come to the conclusion that ethics represents the actions engineers take in order to solve issues without compromising public and professional ideas. Ethics for Software Engineers is a little special because it resembles the ethics of many different fields, having to take into account the actions a group takes and how it will affect not just the immediate public but the eventual global one as well. Software Engineers must also understand and contribute both personal and professional ethics, without either we engineers would be blindly producing malicious software. Balancing both would result in a conscious responsible engineer who produces software that benefits the community without exploiting them.
Near the end of my first Software Engineering course at the Univeristy of Hawaii at Manoa(UH) I was assigned a group project that would take an idea involoving UH and produce the idea as a functioning website. The name of our groups idea was myuhclub, which will take UH clubs and organize them for students to explore their possible interests. Two main issues called upon our ethics involving how we proceeded with the project, the first involoved the control club administers should have, and the second involved the power and potential weakness of the reporting system. Our group quickly decided that the club administers should each be unique in the sense that they can only edit their club, an idea we entertained was that all club admins would be one and the same and have access to all clubs, but we quickly dismissed it since it could be easily abused. As for the report system, we wanted to allow all user to report any issues they had but we didn’t want this system to be abused to annoy anyone into resolving the issue without real thought, so we agreed on ading the name of the users who report the issues with our website or the use of it. Because the report system would include the names of the user who submitted them, we agreed the only people who should be responsible to resolve these issues should be the website admins since club admins might also attempt to abuse the system used to resolve said issues.
To be honest I dislike the idea of teaching ethics, I find the thought that it’s necessary to be quite distressful. In my eyes ethics are the actions people take to support the well being of the community as a whole, and holding the well being of the group is more important than any one individual. That being said, this was common sense when I grew up and in regardes to Software Engineering I think it should hold true that engineers should not only hold the well being of society over share holders but should also be blatantly obvious about their intentions. This idea is also a goal that I aim to continue to follow and achieve in the future of my career.