Tag Archives: ethics

Honesty, loyalty, and service

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I just found out that the ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, is an alumnus of my school, Whitman College.

It’s an interesting coincidence because I’ve been thinking alot about Renee Montagne’s February 7th NPR story:

Like his military counterpart, Lt. Gen. David Petreaus, the new top general in Iraq, Crocker raised questions about the conduct of the war. Now, Crocker and Petreaus are being asked — perhaps too late — to correct it.
…
Crocker and Petreaus will be sent to fix the troubled post-war situation that they warned of four years ago. [Barbara] Bodine [, former ambassador to Yemen,] wonders where the United States might be today, had Crocker and Petreaus been appointed earlier in the war.
“It will be one of the inevitable speculations of history,” she says.

As Demarco and Lister say in Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects, it can be futile to be the only one in the room acknowledging risk.

It really is so late.

Is it too late for professionals with relevant experience, appropriate authority and a willingness to entertain complexity?

The buck stops… where?

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A fundamental value of computer ethics, agile and Scrum is truth telling.

As developers we have an obligation to provide honest feedback around decisions that affect either the quality or value of software our employer asks us to create.

I am now the senior person dedicated to software in my company. If that means anything it is that my responsibility has expanded to protect the best interests of my employer on any project we undertake that has software development dependencies.

The profound challenge in this is that while the company has expanded my scope of Responsibility it has not necessarily expanded my scope of Authority. As a mid-size, growing company we give department heads great discretion. My company is also one of many with a structural distinction between online and IT related software development. Therefore my team has no direct role in some of the most visible outputs of our company.

As a result, I cannot have true accountability for some outcomes since I cannot change them. That does not absolve me of my ethical responsibility nor allow me to narrowly define success in my current role. That is why to take my job seriously is to take on a certain amount of anguish.

The obvious answer is that I never should have taken on the role unless I was given commensurate authority. Perhaps this is correct.

I accepted the promotion because I believe it raises the profile of my team and makes more visible the quality and value return they are producing. I also believe that while responsibility without authority is flawed, it is a common state of play for those of us who introduce agile practices into a company. Let’s be honest, introducing agile is an attempt to lead change. Since I am not an entrepreneur it is a given that I will have to earn trust at each step of the way in making that change.

So given these circumstances, what is my responsibility to my employer around truth telling? Who am I obligated to tell truth to? Let’s focus on questions of value and quality and leave aside safety or legal concerns because as dramatic as whistle blowing is, that is not my reality.

Basic risk management tells me that the person who’s interests are most damaged should a problem arise owns the risk. In a functioning Scrum organization this is the product owner — or as Yahoo calls them, the single wringable neck. This one person is held accountable to the performance of a product in the market place. It is to them that any concerns over the value or quality of a software product need to be raised.

As I’ve said, I have a Scrum team but I do not work in a Scrum organization. There are times when projects originating outside my team do not have a clear “single wringable neck”. This presents a huge challenge. Who will be most affected by a problem if no single person is assigned real accountability for the outcome of a software project?

I have decided after hard experience that in circumstances where there is no responsible and empowered product owner the person most affected by problems is the person most identified with our brand and our products, my CEO. Therefore my responsibility for truth telling is to her.

This is, to me, a freeing realization for in it lies great opportunity for my company. My CEO who has proven herself to be an exceptional product owner. If anyone on the business side understands agile principles and my ethical responsibility as a software developer it is her. If anyone is capable of creating positive change in my company it is her.

Therefore, in the spirit of my CEO’s own vision, I will expect the best of people while maintaining my integrity and independent judgment to serve the best interests of my company, our customers, my peers, and our society.

Big things in small boxes

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Two justifications I’ve seen for dismissing the relevance of computer ethics in decision making:

  • this decision is harmless,
  • this is a business decision not a technology one

Computer Ethics and Professional Responsibility
I’m reading a great collection called Computer Ethics and Professional Responsibility. In the essay Unique Ethical Problems in Information Technology Walter Maner writes:

In the discreet world of computing, there is no meaningful metric in which small change and small effects go hand in hand.” – (Dijkstra 1989. p. 1400) … the normally predictable linkage between acts and their effects is severely skewed by the infusion of computing technology.

This disconnect around human perception, size and complexity reminded me of John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity:

Thus while [integrated circuits] are a primary driver of complexity in modern day objects, they also enable the ability to shrink a frighteningly complex machine to the size of a cute little gum-drop… There is no turning back to the age when large objects were complex and small objects were simple.

So in hard and soft technology, size is no longer a predictable measure of consequence. Small contains great expressive power.

From Bill Joy’s 2000 wired article on the threat of miniaturization, ubiquity and self-learning systems, Why the future doesn’t need us:

The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved.

Not only small tools but mundane and seemingly insignificant decisions about their use can have tremendous consequences.

Should we limit our concern for consequence to harm: injury, economic loss and the like?

To think so would be to absolve most technologists of ethical considerations most of the time. But an ethical view point doesn’t limit itself to harm but considers net benefit. So this isn’t just a discussion of quality control, it’s one of maximizing value and not just to our employers, clients and ourselves but with consideration for all those who are affected by the use of our products.

But is good ethics good business?

If “good business” is maximizing return over a fixed period then that clearly is not the same as maximizing benefit to the larger society. Most would argue that there are meaningful considerations besides acquiring wealth for both an individual and an organization but I’ll leave that for now. Let me concede that in business there are winners and losers and that winners often gain at the expense of those around them.

Nonetheless, what Walter Maner, John Maeda and Bill Joy are telling us is that in a way unique to this time in history we cannot deem a thing or a thought innocuous because it is small.

To borrow from an ex-Secretary of Defense, our work is fraught with far more “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” and far less “known knowns” than our ape-evolved brains would have us believe.

Even out of narrow self interest we must approach decision making around technology with humility and not skip the hard work of thinking through the consequences of our actions.

  • this decision is harmless
  • this is a business decision not a technology one

Embrace such thoughts at your peril for you deny complexity that both envelops you and fits on the tip of your finger.