Other questions, particularly those concerning the human aspects of software engineering, have been hopelessly difficult to understand and improve. One of the seminal books on these issues was Fred P. Brooks, Jr.'s The Mythical Man Month. In it, he presented hundreds of claims about software engineering. For example, he hypothesized that adding more programmers to a project would actually make productivity worse at some level, not better, because knowledge sharing would be an immense but necessary burden. He also claimed that the first implementation of a solution is usually terrible and should be treated like a prototype: used for learning and then discarded. These and other claims have been the foundation of decades of years of research, all in search of some deeper answer to the questions above.
-If we step beyond software engineering and think more broadly about the role that software is playing in society today, there are also other, newer questions that we've only begun to answer. If every part of society now runs on code, what responsibility do software engineers have to ensure that code is right? What responsibility do software engineers have to avoid algorithmic bias? If our cars are to soon drive us around, who's responsible for the first death: the car, the driver, or the software engineers who built it, or the company that sold it? These ethical questions are in some ways the future of software engineering, likely to shape its regulatory context, its processes, and its responsibilities.
+Other social aspects of software engineering have received considerably less treatment. For example, despite the central role of women in programming the first digital computers, and the central role of women like Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper leading the formation of software engineering as a field in research and government, these histories are often forgotten, erased, and overshadowed by the gradual shift from software development being a field dominated by women to a field dominated by men. Many texts are beginning to document the central role of sexism that was at the heart of causing this culture shift (e.g., Abbate 2012). These histories show that, just like any other human activity, there are strong forces that shape how engages in software engineering and how it proceeds.
+ +If we step even further beyond software engineering as an activity and think more broadly about the role that software is playing in society today, there are also other, newer questions that we've only begun to answer. If every part of society now runs on code, what responsibility do software engineers have to ensure that code is right? What responsibility do software engineers have to avoid algorithmic bias? If our cars are to soon drive us around, who's responsible for the first death: the car, the driver, or the software engineers who built it, or the company that sold it? These ethical questions are in some ways the future of software engineering, likely to shape its regulatory context, its processes, and its responsibilities.
There are also economic roles that software plays in society that it didn't before. Around the world, software is a major source of job growth, but also a major source of automation, eliminating jobs that people used to do. These larger forces that software is playing on the world demand that software engineers have a stronger understanding of the roles that software plays in society, as the decisions that engineers make can have profoundly impactful unintended consequences.
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Abbate, Janet (2012). Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing. The MIT Press.
Brooks Jr, F. P. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month (anniversary ed.). Chicago
Gleick, James (2011). The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. Pantheon Books.
Grudin, Jonathan (2017). From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction.