Responsible Software Engineering

Preface

This book was created in 14 seconds. That’s the time I spent watching one compelling scene in The Social Dilemma, a documentary film from 2020.¹ The film describes how social media companies engage in practices that may be harmful to our health, our ties to other human beings, and democracy itself. I found some scenes convincing and others overly dramatic, but those particular 14 seconds altered my whole outlook on software development.

The scene in question is an interview with a former Facebook engineer named Justin Rosenstein, who was a developer of the Like button. His team’s “entire motivation” for inventing likes, he said in the film, was to “spread positivity and love in the world.” As their invention reached billions of users, however, he and his team found that they hadn’t anticipated some serious negative effects on society. “The idea that...teens would be getting depressed when they don’t have enough likes, or it could be leading to political polarization, was nowhere on our radar.”²

This scene nagged at me. I mean, I was coding web applications back in 2007, when the Like button was conceived. What if fate had placed me at Facebook on Rosenstein’s team? Would I have thought ahead about potential risks of the Like button? Or would I just have been swept up in the coolness of the invention? I couldn’t know. But I was fascinated to learn that such experienced software engineers, acting with the best of intentions, could deliver a product with these unforeseen ...