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August Talknight: Ethical Software by Jeri Sommers
August 7, 2019 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Join us for August Talknight at Hulu!
Main Talk: Ethical Software by Jeri Sommers
Talk Description:
“I made one great mistake in my life – when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made” –Albert Einstein, 6 Nov. 1954
Ethics. It’s a complex discipline, and it’s rarely as clean cut in the moment as it seems when looking back through the lens of history. So what can you do to ensure your company isn’t building bombs? How can you ensure your organization is trying to make ethical choices? Is it ethical to ask engineers to work 80 hours a week during their on call rotations? Is it sustainable? What about the contract the sales team just signed which promises a fully functioning product, from scratch, in less than six months? What do you do when you realize your app is leaking unencrypted data?
In this talk, I’ll walk you through some of processes that my company has around ethical sales, sustainable workflows, and preventing burnout. I’ll talk about what’s worked for us & what hasn’t– from surfacing and discussing ethical concerns to ensuring our development process is sustainable — both for our employees during a contract’s term and for our clients after we hand off the finished product.
Speaker Bio:
Jeri is a software engineer who graduated from Ada Developers Academy back in 2015. Since then, they have spent a few years working at Microsoft before leaving to join Truss, a software consultancy that has put a *lot* of thought into ethical processes. Jeri is passionate about ethical software. Case in point: she left Microsoft over their relationship with ICE and joined Truss after asking a lot of questions about how they evaluated incoming contracts.
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Thank you to our host and sponsor this month, Hulu!
