I worked as a software development director for 10 years. I am guilty of scoffing at my customers. Users made mistakes, and – since I understood the way computer systems really work – the users’ mistakes seemed silly. But when I reflected on how those mistakes were made – by ignoring warning messages, for example, that were so numerous and obscure and often irrelevant that clicking “OK…OK…OK” became a habit – it became clear that the problem was not the user, but the godawful software we had saddled them with.

I always viewed the end user as a collaborator and customer, not an obstacle or an idiot. Working with our users helped my team define goals, share in success, and learn from failures – ours, and theirs. They were the reason we built software; it was our job to make software that made their jobs better. If our work made the user feel like a luser then we were to blame. We hadn’t done our jobs.

There is, believe it or not, a code of ethics for software developers, developed by the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM). The code spells out the obligations software engineers owe the public. “These obligations are founded in the software engineer’s humanity,” reads the preamble, “in special care owed to people affected by the work of software engineers, and in the unique elements of the practice of software engineering.”

I doubt most IT professionals have ever heard of the code of ethics. In my ten years of experience, it was never once mentioned, nor did I ever come across it in a trade journal or programming magazine. And I certainly never knew of a decision that was influenced by it. IT decisions are instead made based on the urgency of the problem being solved (Is a system down? Is this a pet project of the CEO? Has the deadline already slipped by three months?) or the allure of the technology (Sure, we can do it in a shell script in about an hour, but isn’t .NET cooler?).

But making a decision governed by a code of ethics? That would be a challenge. IT is objective – either a program works, or it doesn’t; either you can ping the network, or you can’t. Ambiguity is antithetical. You can’t assign a value to “special care.” There’s no network protocol that supports it, and no function call that returns it.

So start with the basics: Don’t call users idiots. I don’t know if that qualifies as “special care,” but it is common courtesy. That’s a good start.