On the DevBots blog recently Darby Felton posted a few suggestions of things that could be done to help improve IT organizations from the inside and promote a more healthy environment for everyone involved.

Lately I have been thinking about a few aspects of the information technology industry. Particularly, regarding software development, I am concerned that the following characteristics remain pervasive and detrimental to our industry: far too many software development projects ultimately fail, we tend to lack clear, rigorous standards and credentials that other industries typically employ, and our [lack of] adherence to ethics and professional conduct leaves much to be desired.

He addresses each of these, pointing out that a good number of IT environments have fallen into these issues and steps need to be taken to: reduce the failure rate of projects, hone down the staff to those that will turn out the best possible product and will uphold a good set of standards/ethics while they do.

In a recent post from Brandon Savage he looks at something not commonly thought about with the act of developing applications - ethics and how they impact the end user.

Doctors, lawyers and engineers are required by their professions to receive certifications and follow certain ethical guidelines. These rules exist to protect those who rely on their services. [...] Software development is a skill, and an increasingly important one, but one that is not governed by any licensing or ethical rules. It’s a Wild West of ethical and legal conduct.

He suggests that, since the world of programming (and programmers) grows larger and larger every day, there should be some sort of standards put in place to ensure that the developer you just added to your team (or contractor!) will write code that handles user data correctly and provides the security guaranteed to the users of the system.