Ethical issues emerge everyday in the computer software industry. Often the employees receive immense pressure from their manager and other project team members to get a product finished to meet a deadline. Receiving pressure from these parties are normal, the problem comes in when the parties are pressuring to complete the project by unethical means.
During my work experience the previous summer, I have experienced such a situation where I received pressure from both, parties; the manager and a project team member. I was hired in the company Wow Wee as an intern to work on a new project they have recently started. I was responsible for programming software to animate robot motions and scenarios through a com port.
The project went smoothly at the beginning, but towards the middle, of my time there problems came up. The project leader Mike started receiving pressure from the manager Phil to have a demonstration ready because it has been over a month, and the team has yet to show a working prototype.
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What's in the bag? Business of Software 2010
English: software logoMike was in charge of the project, but he only worked on the robotics of the product, he did not know much about software so when I told him I had finished programming an initial demonstration version but needed to do some testing and possibly have one other person test it since my testing would be biased due to my intimacy with the code and the fact that I was the only programmer. He ignored my request. He told me he didn't have the resources and he had to meet a deadline.
At this point I was afraid of two things: one was the failure of the product, and the other was safety of the product. Even though the robot was only about two feet tall, some of the motors...