All programmers make business decisions

Programmers don't just write code. We influence human behaviour and the policies and operations of human organizations.

Each tiny decision made by a programmer -- the design of each API interface, class, function, and statement -- has holistic effects on the software's clients, and their clients' clients. The engineers who built Stripe, Twilio and Algolia influence and decide the business processes of millions of client businesses. Those client businesses, in turn, have their own customers who are impacted by engineering choices made upstream.

Think about the impact of software engineers who create computer operating systems and programming languages. The engineers working on these pieces of software make choices that ripple through the economy. In turn, those ripples move through history.

You wield a lot of power. Use it responsibly.