Notably, it is impossible to behave legally without acting ethically as an IT professional. According to Nazerian (2018), ethics classes are essential in computer science education. For instance, numerous colleges, including Princeton and Harvard, have lately sparked campaigns to consider incorporating ethics into computer science courses. Nazerian (2018) suggests that thirty-five tech leaders, including executives from Instagram, Microsoft, and Lyft, announced their support for the “Responsible Computer Science Challenge,” a $3.5 million challenge to incorporate ethics into undergraduate computer science curricula. Universities integrate ethics into computer science education to create a community of individuals who value impact and are learning about the ethical issues in the field of data science (Stolzoff, 2018). Additionally, IT engineers have access to confidential information, and ethical conduct plays a fundamental role in computer science.
To perform ethically, IT employees must comprehend the moral foundation of individual obligations. Following a slew of controversies in technology development and business management in recent years, the visibility and public demand for courses in tech ethics on university campuses have increased dramatically (Ferreira & Vardi, 2021). Winiecki and Salzman (2019) depict Susan Fowler’s experiences as a ‘Site Reliability Engineer’ at Uber and emphasize how one may attribute responsibility for harassing conduct to individuals while also pointing to systemic shortcomings in responsibility and accountability at Uber. Acting to remove the specific harasser would not address the fundamental issues in the workplace, and it may even allow new varieties of the problem to emerge in the future. Although this is not an engineering challenge, IT engineers should work as responsible players in the social system and create ethical solutions to the problem. Therefore, the goal of computer science ethics is to develop a new generation of computer scientists who recognize the benefit of partnering with social science specialists and become informed about the societal implications of computing.
References
Ferreira, & Vardi, M. Y. (2021). Deep tech ethics: An approach to teaching social justice in computer science. Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Web.
Nazerian, T. (2018). New competition wants to bring ethics to undergraduate computer science classrooms. EdSurge. Web.
Stolzoff, S. (2018). Are universities training socially minded programmers? The Atlantic. Web.
Winiecki, D., & Salzman, N. (2019). Teaching professional morality & ethics to undergraduate computer science students through cognitive apprenticeships & case studies: Experiences in CS-HU 130 “Foundational Values.” 2019 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT). Web.