Today’s Code Is a Script for the Future: Why We Need Developer Ethics

As a founding member of several successful companies in the software development space, you could say that Joel Spolsky knows a bit about developers. His company, Fog Creek, originally created software development tools for programmers but evolved into the incubator that spun off Trello, a project management platform that Atlassian acquired for $425 million earlier this year. His other venture, Stack Overflow, is a popular online forum, where developers ask more than 8,000 questions a day to a community of roughly 40 million developers who visit the site every month.

Joel talks about software developers with a reverence normally reserved for philosophers: “Every day, developers get a chance to make a decision that’s going to impact the world,” he says. “Developers write code that is like a script for a play, except it’s for the actual future that we’ll live in.”

Joel’s description of developers reminds me of a GE commercial series, where a young programmer named Owen explains how he’s going to change the world by creating turbines that power cities and helping hospitals run more efficiently. Contrast that with Owen’s friend, who works on an app that allows you to put fruit hats on pictures of animals. While code does enable us to apply silly filters to our photos or order dinner via an app (both of which I enjoy), it also shapes far more important things, like our infrastructure, healthcare and news consumption. There’s a weighty responsibility that comes with coding; it can have consequences we don’t anticipate.

Facebook’s recent struggle with fake news is a great example of well-intentioned code gone wrong. When Facebook tinkered with its news feed algorithm to make it more personalized, the intent was to “get you to engage more with Facebook,” Joel says, but the unintended consequence was the rise of non-credible stories, which further polarized views in the 2016 presidential election. The propagation of these stories led people to form opinions and make decisions based on inaccurate information.

Leaders and direct managers have an important role to play in helping developers consider unintended consequences and use their power for good. Through clear communication and a strong set of company values, leaders can shape programmer ethics in their organizations.

The first step is talking about the responsibility of coding with developers. “There’s an ethical dimension to what developers are doing…. They are causing a particular future to happen,” Joel explains. Leaders have the power to instill a sense of responsibility by discussing ethics openly.

Since there’s wide variation in how managers discuss ethics (if at all), a few organizations have tried to standardize a set of developer ethics to create consistency across companies; think a Hippocratic Oath for developers. For example, The Association for Computer Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers created a task force on engineering ethics. Still, there’s no one set of standards that applies to the entire industry today. That’s where company culture plays a crucial role.  

Companies that codify their values provide employees with an ethical framework (even if they don’t call it that). At Zillow Group, one of our core values is “Act with Integrity,” and we hire and evaluate employees with that value in mind. We also act with integrity when we balance what’s right for the consumer, the industry and our business in our product decisions. “Own It” is also an important core value; we want our employees to feel empowered to make good decisions. We know that employees who own their outcomes are more likely to think critically about the implications of their work.

Contrast that with compliance-driven or win-at-all-costs cultures. Employees may ignore their moral compass, even if it’s bad for the business or broader society. It’s also nearly impossible to create a set of rules that addresses all the potential implications of code. That’s why core values are so important; they provide a framework for acting ethically in an increasingly complex world.

I had a great time chatting with Joel. In addition to being passionate about programmer ethics, Joel’s a history buff and a management geek like me. His perspective on how technology has changed management over time is fascinating and worth a listen. Check out the full conversation below, or read the transcript here.

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