MGMT628 GDB No. 2 Spring 2012 Solution

MGMT628 GDB No. 2 Spring June 2012 Solution

Discussion Question:
There has been a serious critique on codes of ethics that they are only used for employees not for organizations. It is said that a code of ethics only transfers responsibility and accountability of ethical behavior from organization to individual employees. For instance, it is expected by an employee to perform efficiently and effectively along with loyalty and dedication. He is also ethically bound to disclose his all other activities, assets and sources of income to the organization. But at the same moment, if government announces some benefits for employees, e.g. to increase the pay of all government employees, the private organizations do not comply.

Question:
Do you think a code of ethics is also valuable for an organization; and if organization does not follow it, what are the repercussions for the employees to follow the code of ethics?

Solution:

A code of conduct is intended to be a central guide and reference for users in support of day-to-day decision making. It is meant to clarify an organization’s mission, values and principles, linking them with standards of professional conduct. As a reference, it can be used to locate relevant documents, services and other resources related to ethics within the organization.

A code is an open disclosure of the way an organization operates. It provides visible guidelines for behavior. A well-written and thoughtful code also serves as an important communication vehicle that “reflects the covenant that an organization has made to uphold its most important values, dealing with such matters as its commitment to employees, its standards for doing business and its relationship with the community.

A code is also a tool to encourage discussions of ethics and to improve how employees/members deal with the ethical dilemmas, prejudices and gray areas that are encountered in everyday work. (Snowz) A code is meant to complement relevant standards, policies and rules, not to substitute for them.

Codes of conduct offer an invaluable opportunity for responsible organizations to create a positive public identity for themselves which can lead to a more supportive political and regulatory environment and an increased level of public confidence and trust among important constituencies and stakeholders

CS201 GDB Idea Solution Spring June 2012

CS201 GDB Idea Solution Spring June 2012

For developing software for embedded systems, C/C++ is an optimal choice. Yes or NO? Support your answer with solid reasons:

Solution::

C++ is still useful in embedded systems. As everyone else has said, that it still depends on the system itself, like 8-bit uC would probably be a no-no in my book even though there is a compiler out there and some people do it(shudder). [ There's still an advantage to using C++ even when you scale it down to something like "C+" even in a 8-bit micro world. What I mean by "C+", I mean don't use new/delete, avoid exceptions, avoid virtual classes with inheritance, possibly avoid inheritance all together, be very careful with templates, use inline functions instead of macros, and use const variables instead of #defines. I've been working both in C and C++ in embedded systems for well over a decade now, and some of my youthful enthusiasm for C++ has definitely worn off due to some real world problems that shake one's naivete. I have seen the worst of C++ in an embedded systems which I would like to refer to as "CS programmers gone wild in an EE world." In fact, that is something I'm working on with my client to improve this one codebase they have among others. The danger of C++ is because it's a very very powerful tool much like a two-edged sword that can cut both your arm and leg off if not educated and disciplined properly in it's language and general programming itself. C is more like a single-edged sword, but still just as sharp. With C++ it's too easy to get very high-levels of abstraction and create obfuscated interfaces that become meaningless in the long-term, and that's partly due to C++ flexibility in solving the same problem with many different language features(templates, OOP, procedural, RTTI, OOP+templates, overloading, inlining). I finished a two 4-hour seminars on Embedded Software in C++ by the C++ guru, Scott Meyers. He pointed out some things about templates that I never considered before and how much more they can help creating safety-critical code. The jist of it is, you can't have dead code in software that has to meet stringent safety-critical code requirements. Templates can help you accomplish this, since the compiler only creates the code it needs when instantiating templates.