[partdavid]

This might be the first time you've considered the question, but it's not novel. The ACM has a code of ethics required for membership. A compatriot of mine has focused on encouraging employers to pay for their engineers' ACM memberships, and require membership, as a way of advancing ethical standards in the profession.

Of course it's not perfect, but it's not like it's the first time it's occurred to someone to address.

[terminous]

> The ACM has a code of ethics required for membership.

The ACM has never taken action against an ACM member for an ethics violation that was not directly related to research misconduct in an ACM publication (edit: or inappropriate behavior at an ACM conference). Unlike a medical board or bar association, the ACM has no capacity, resources, or staff tasked to enforce even research ethics violations outside of ACM publications, much less ACM members day-to-day work they don't submit to a publication. And even then, it is up to the peer reviewers and editors of that publication. Otherwise, it remains just a list of suggestions.

At one time the ethics code said ACM members should respect terms of service, which means no bots or web scraping, but that was never enforced. You can find tons of research in ACM publications that uses web scraping of big sites that prohibit it in the ToS. The ACM certainly doesn't have capacity to police ethics violations by ACM members in industry. And if it started to do so, I suspect you'd see ACM membership plummet by those who fear they could be next.

[partdavid]

These are all very valid points, and I appreciate you making them!

But what I was trying to point out to GP is that the conversation here is not starting from 0. Certainly I'm not suggesting that ACM membership or their code is a sufficient answer, or the only possible answer.

As a tangent, I'll point out that often, codes of conduct or ethical guidelines aren't "policed" in the way you seem to imply--by some kind of active enforcement function. They generally come up after the fact, in some venue like a deposition or court case where questions like "did X act in accordance with the generally accepted standards and practices of Y". And I wouldn't expect the ACM to publicize most of what they do, anyway.

The reason I bring up ACM and their code of conduct is because a compatriot of mine has been advocating for companies to encourage or require their employees to become members of the ACM, and to pay for it. The idea being that progress can be made on becoming the kind of big-P professional GP is describing. I don't really know if that can work, but I do think it sounds like it's better than nothing. And that it could be a basis for improvement in time.

[dtaht]

I try to adhere to association of civil engineer's code of ethics:

https://www.asce.org/career-growth/ethics/code-of-ethics

I wish more software folk did.