Month: January 2018

I don’t have a job offer yet, so I am applying mostly to positions in California. From the readings I will guess that they don’t enforce non-compete rules. To be honest, this is something I have never thought about before. I was not even remotely aware that this was a common practice in businesses these days. I feel much more secure knowing about it now. I will be sure to look for this in any business contract I sign from now on.

The issues itself can be highly controversial. There are two sides of the issue. On the one hand, it seems that the broad practice of non-compete contracts essentially blocks people from advancing in their career. As Cameron Keng explains in his article, employees that don’t move between companies end up earning much less than those who change careers more often. The problem for this seems to be that company politics prevent companies from increasing the wage of their employees to something that better matches their skills and expertise. People are clearly unhappy with this. Thousands of employees almost sued a group of big tech companies in Silicon Valley which had secretly agreed to not compete for their employees. This agreement created a restriction similar to that imposed by the non-compete contract agreements. The lack of competition allowed their employers to underpay their workers while giving them little negotiation leverage.

On the other side of the coin, the fact is that companies truly need to protect their company’s secrets. A high senior executive may indeed be high knowledgeable on the secrets of the company. However, how this applies to low employees on the company is questionable. For example, as mentioned in multiple of the articles, Jimmy John’s sandwich making skills are an unlikely company secret, but their non-compete agreements bind their workers as if they were.

Due to this large employee dissatisfaction and employer abuse, the Obama administration urged states to completely ban the non-compete agreements completely. This worried multiple employers that argued this would put their company’s secrets in danger. Then, what is the solution to this dilemma? I believe the practice itself is not the problem, but simply its rising usage. Certainly, there are employees that hold secrets of a company, but confidentiality agreement should be enough to protect the original employer. On top of that, there is a second layer protecting company’s secrets: patents. Patents protect innovation by providing ownership over the innovation or invention. Proper use of patents should be enough to protect companies from the danger of the spreading of their secrets. Even if the secrets are spread out, by law they are not allowed to use them. Patents themselves are a counter-argument to the non-compete practices. Patents are open and often reveal the details of their inventions.

Regarding the employee’s expertise, I argue that expertise belongs to the person more-so than the company. The company trained the individual, but assuming the expertise they gained belongs to the company implies that the individual suddenly is an asset of the company. When companies hire, they should be aware that the training they perform is an investment that implies no binding.

With all this in mind, there might still be cases where non-compete agreements may be necessary. However, as Beth Milito said, “There need to be individualized assessments of the agreements that consider the industry and the geographical location”. In other words, these few exceptions should be looked at in a case by case basis. All in all, companies should strive to keep their employees through competitive salaries and growth potential, not through threats and questionable contracts.

To me, a hacker is someone who finds a non-conventional way to approach or solve a problem. In this regard, I really like the example providing by Brett Scott in How Yuppies Hacked the Original Hacker Ethos: slaves practice capoeira under the guise of dancing, when they were in fact practicing martial arts. Such is the spirit of hacking.

With that regard, it is easy to see how hackers are usually seen as devious. They visit places they are not supposed to see, they break things they are not supposed to understand, they snoop things they are not supposed to know. Here there is a divide however, there are two kinds of hackers. The first one is the hacker that breaks things for the purpose of knowing. As the mentor describes in the conscience of a hacker: “My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.” This is a great vision of the hacker, and one proud computer scientists will deliver while boasting of being one.

However, on the other side of the spectrum, there are those who not only have curiosity to learn, but curiosity to harm. “The media stereotype that began to be constructed was of a precocious computer genius using his technological mastery to control events or battle others.” I believe there is some truth to that. Whereas I believe all hackers have great intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn, I don’t agree that they all share a benign goal. There are those who want to use their superpowers to become a supervillain. They want things to go their way. They may just want money or to control the way the world works. A great example of this is Andrés Sepúlveda, who rigged elections in Latin America for a decade. Some may argue that this doesn’t make him a true hacker, but I think it would be more suitable to simply call him an evil one. Regardless, he is still a hacker.

To me, being a hacker is simply an approach to life, but not necessarily one that is born from any moral standpoint. I like this definition by Scott, which comes from his same article: “The hacker ethic is therefore a composite. It is not merely exploratory curiosity or rebellious deviance or creative innovation within incumbent systems. It emerges from the intersection of all three.” It simply comes to that.

With that in mind, there is certainly some danger in the softening of the hacker term. Hackers are dangerous. They can have great power. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, gives a description of hackers as if they were the best Facebook worker: “Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once.” That has nothing to do with a hacker. Similarly, other voices in media have, over time, softened the term to mean this smart individual that can help the world. While that can be true at times, we should always acknowledge the danger of a super-villain.

Studying Ethics in the context of Computer Science and Engineering is important because of the growing significance people in those roles have. More and more, programmers have the power to greatly influence people’s lives. People spend multiple hours a day browsing in social media apps. This is where people get their news, love, and social connections. As Marc Andreessen puts it in his blog post: “In short, software is eating the world.”

Behind the power of software are the programmers who write it. It is, thus, in our hands to decide what and what not to program. In that respect it is easy for a programmers to wash their hands and say they were just doing what they were asked to. However, programmers should realize that they have a choice. By having a body of moral engineers and programmers, we can prevent corporations from using this power to harm people.

In modern medicine, Jonathan Harris describes how there’s two types of software companies: the dealers and the healers. The healers are those that satisfy an urge, but don’t lead to addiction. They usually provide a service for which there is a need. Take Uber for example. People have a need to get to places at an affordable price. Then there’s the dealers. The dealers are software companies that have taken people as assets. They offer people a free product, make them addicted to it, and then bombard them with advertisement to earn money from them. This is no different from a drug dealer.

Besides this, there are also companies that purposely damage people for money. In The code I’m still ashamed of, Bill Sourour describes how the pharmaceutical company he worked for performed underhanded business to get around regulations that prevented advertising drugs. To do this, they ordered Sourour to create an online quiz targeted at younger girls that suggested them to take their drug for virtually every case. Later Sourour found out that the drug was known to cause depression and that it led to the death of a teenage girl.

Besides the morality behind it, it is important to also be aware of that there are laws that have been laid down for years. Just like how industrial laws were laid down over the years after the industrial revolution, the software revolution led to new changes in legislation. Morality on software used to depend completely on the commitment of engineers to it. This has changed now, and programmers are liable by the law over any software they write. These laws range from respecting copyrights and patents to laws about privacy. Overall, they involve you being ethical and not performing underhanded business. Being ethical will protect you from being in trouble with the law and help you have a successful career.

Like Uncle Ben told Peter Parker “with great power comes great responsibility”. There may be lives at the tip of your hands. Be ethical programmers capable of tackling this world full of corporate giants who take advantage of people. Together we can make a difference.