Why every profession needs a Hippocratic Oath

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Issue #267: the past is in front of you, spiteful biology, and 80 years of symbolism
By Harris Sockel

I featured this story briefly in Tuesday’s issue but it didn’t quite get the airtime it deserves, so I’m mentioning it up here: Attila Vágó’s Hippocratic Oath for software designers.

“One of my engineering managers years ago had a famous motto,” he remembers, “it’s just code, not heart surgery.” (I’ve heard this, too — sub in anything for “code” — as a way to put your work in perspective.) But as Vágó’s career progressed, he started to question the maxim. Sometimes code is life or death? “Let’s not even start with the obvious ones like writing software for medical robots,” he explains, “95.9% of all webpages out there fail to meet accessibility guidelines” — meaning people with disabilities can’t even use them. Software determines much of how we think and act. It’s reasonable to profess, at the very least, to “do no harm” when building a new app or feature.

So, Vágó created his own Oath for developers. He pledges to “remember that there is art to software engineering as well as science” and to “not write code just for fun, [or] for business success, but for humans…”

Turns out he’s not the only one who’s written an oath for their tech job. Nick Hodges wrote an Hippocratic Oath for developers in 2020 (“I’ll be teachable”) and Xian Gu proposed a designer’s Oath in 2023 (“focus on long-term wellness”). Here’s another designer’s creed, written by the founder of a branding studio in Chicago. I like this line: “I will apply, for the benefit of culture, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of awards and self-congratulation.”

Quick aside: Fifth-century Greek doctor Hippocrates is typically credited with writing the classic Oath (some med students recite a modernized version at graduation) but there’s little evidence he wrote it himself. Some scholars think a group of physicians came up with it collectively. I like that idea—it was a way for a group of people to keep themselves accountable to each other.

It’s not a bad idea to design an oath for whatever job you’re doing — a mantra that grounds you in why you’re doing it and helps steer you away from committing unintended harm.

⚡ 1 story, 1 sentence

• Historian George Dillard shares a brief history of people renaming geographical features for petty reasons, beginning with biologist Carl Linnaeus who in the early 1700s named a seed he’d discovered cuculus ingratus (“ungrateful cuckoo”) and mailed a packet to his rival biologist.
• Designer Kelly Smith on how language influences perception: In English, we imagine the past behind us and the future in front of us — but in other languages, the past is in front (where you can see it) and the future behind.
• Marlyn Pereira catalogues the 80-plus years’ worth of symbolism in Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, writing: “He not only understands but fully embraces the weight of responsibility that comes with furthering a cause generations in the making — one that intertwines art, activism, and the relentless pursuit of truth.”

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“You don’t need to be an expert. It’s better to be a student. Because being a student means you’re growing. And your audience will grow with you.” — Derek Hughes

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