CSE 40175 Ethics Blog

I believe that it should matter where employees come from at least a little bit. I'm not saying to disallow H1-B visas at all, but I do believe that American companies and companies based in America should try to take care of American citizens over hiring out to cheaper work from different countries. I understand that America is a melting pot and that our goal as a nation is/should be to be all inclusive, though we've been failing recently, but I believe that we need to take care of American citizens and legal residents before companies look to outside sources for jobs. This is to prevent cases such as the story which we read about the Disney IT department that was asked to train their foreign replacements for a month if they wanted to receive a severance package. In the cases where it is a truly higher-experienced and/or higher-educated foreign job candidate being considered against an American candidate I believe that the alien should be chosen, but in the cases where an Ame...

From the reading, the Therac-25 is a radiation therapy device that treats patients with either a beam of electrons or x-rays. The previous versions of this device had many manual controls to allow for a technician to set everything up with their hands, but the Therac-25 switched to software control in favor of hardware. The software had been the same since the first version of the Therac, so it was considered "battle tested" and did not need to be revised, but it turned out the switch to software dependance created some problems that were initially unreproducible when operation of the machine is done by hand. The determined problems with the Therac software were a race condition in the code which would not catch a switch in modes from x-ray to electron and a variable which determines whether the hardware is configured correctly had a byte overflow which caused the variable to display that there was no error when there in fact was. The reason for these trivial errors in such...

I believe that the gender gap is overblown so it would make sense that I resonated with what  Why the STEM gender gap is overblown  had to say on the matter. If we focus on all fields of STEM then we can see that the number of degrees received per gender in many fields is fairly equal. The largest gap was in Computer Science, but it was argued that this division starts even before we get to high school and is just something that comes with being a male or a female. The article sites a study done on male and female monkeys which showed that even mammals that are not exposed to human gender-specific socialization effort have splits in what interests males more (mechanical) and what interests females more (social). It is due to that idea that I believe that the split that exists in computer science is natural based on what males and females are drawn too. Furthermore the reading states that part of the reason for the gap is due to the establishments that some women are getting C...

The controversy surrounding the H-1B Visa program is similar to what blue collar Americans in farming and low-skilled jobs have been complaining about and that is the immigrants are taking their jobs, the difference in the case of H-1B Visa's is that these people are coming to the US legally and are taking jobs in high-skill, high-education requiring jobs such as doctors and engineers. There are really two sides to the controversy, the first being that companies are hiring H-1B workers to replace American IT specialists, as in the case with Disney, because those coming on H-1B Visa's are more likely to accept a lower wage and may be more motivated to stay at the current company and work extra hard because they have the fear of being sent back to their home countries if they do not have the Visa which is sponsored by their employer. On the other hand, there has been a significant amount of contribution to the STEM industry by foreign born people. Some of the biggest companies i...

Over the past summer I interned at a big data company up as a data engineer. When I applied for the internship the skills which I listed most prominently on my resume were my ability to learn and efficiently use python packages as well as write complex SQL scripts. When I came in for the interview I was sat down in the office of the CEO with the CEO as well as the head data scientist. The interview started with general questions about the classes I had taken, how I perform when working with groups, what projects I had worked on and the problems and solutions I found and came up with for those projects. After 15-20min of that I was thrown for a loop when I was asked if I would be ok with doing some technical questions to which I agreed. Just like the stories in  Why is hiring broken? It starts at the whiteboard.  I was not given a computer to do these problems, but was given a whiteboard wall and a dry erase marker. Fortunately for me, the questions asked weren't about algori...