“Boiler room” workers at investment firms quickly realize that their position as “financial consultants” actually can mean that they’re “thieves.” Now, a software programmer has found himself in the same situation.

A story published last week shows how one programmer ended up working for pretty much the antithesis of his own ethics. Canadian programmer Bill Sourour had been working in interactive marketing, with many of his customers coming from the pharmaceutical industry.

Sourour was asked to create an informational site for a type of illness whose treatment was targeted at teenage girls. His creation: a quiz in which the only outcome was that the girl should take the client’s drug.

“I wish I could tell you that it felt wrong to code something that was basically designed to trick young girls,” he writes. “But the truth is, I didn’t think much of it at the time. I had a job to do, and I did it.”

His conviction, however, didn’t last long once he found out the drug led to severe depression and at least one girl had killed herself after taking it. He found out that even his own 19-year-old sister had been taking the drug. He never tells us the name of the drug.

The upshot is that many years later Sourour is still racked with guilt. And he’s not alone in his plight among programmers.

A long list of Reddit users, having read Sourour’s story, revealed that they also had created something they were ashamed of. They included programmers asked to violate laws and endanger people, among other things.

Suorour also believes we are at a turning point in which the ethics of programming have to be taken very seriously. One day soon, he reckons, artificial intelligence-driven machines might be giving us our prescriptions. Although Sourour walked out of his job after hearing about the suicide, a machine surely won’t be programmed with the same scruples.

Sourour thinks education is key. Many programmers these days are self-taught, but he believes that online training sites or coding boot camps should “start talking about the ethical responsibilities that come along with writing code.”

Photo credit: Michael Himbeault via Flickr