Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you get that past code review?
It's cute that you think every company, even the kind that did brochureware sites for brands more than 10 years ago, does code review.
It’s cute that you think it’s cute.
Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
181–190 of 520 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the second part, I dont think about it as you sold a month of work. You just agreed with a customer that this task is worth X amount of money. If you managed to do it in one hour, that's just good business.
In this case you got lucky; other times you'll underestimate the amount of effort required. In the end it'll even out.
I still think they could have charged for less than the full month. The goodwill and trust that would have engendered would probably have been more than worth it in the long run.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#183I wrote code to automate my 15 hour per week grad assistant job.
One or two clicks and some php magic.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#184I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of no further bids. Each bid would increase the final price by 1 pence/cent, but each bid would cost 50 pence/cents. You could "win" a $20,000 car for $500.37 and the house would have taken 50,037*50 cents. It might be okay if that was it -- but I was asked to cod…
Sounds like Beezid. Worse than payday lenders IMO.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#185Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#186When I was in highschool there was an online competition every week.
So one week there was this very hard problem. I didn't knew how to solve this but I figured out that there is one answer per 10 tests.
I bruteforced easy tests and send program with different answers std::coutI passed every test. Week later my solution was removed and I got very nice e-mail about what I did and how wrong It was to exploit platform.
I still managed to be in top 10 at then end of competition but It was mistake huge mistake
Ps. Competition was with very good prizes but still I am ashamed of myself for that.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#187I wrote the initial SEO optimizations for reddit.
How is this unethical?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#188So my dad told me this story once, He was working on a large, industrial construction project and they were nearing the end of it, so a QA engineer was scheduled to do a walk-through, and before that happened a higher-up purposefully damaged finished work, dented a pipe with wrench, unscrewed a bolt, etc... That way when the QA engineer did his checks, he'd find these obvious, easily fixable defects and mark them, wh…
I used to do this defensively when submitting 8-bit games for publication back in the 80s.
The non-gamers at the publishing company seemed to feel they had to get back to you with a handful of changes. If your game was really polished, the changes would be pointless or even harmful things. I quickly learned to leave in a few obvious things that were trivial fixes, e.g. blocky bitmaps, misspellings, jarring colors.
Instead of coming back with:
> we really like the game, but couldn't the snake be an F-15 fighter, and couldn't the scrolling be vertical instead of horizontal?
...it would be more like:
> Change that color, fix that icon, correct that spelling
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#189Worked for a company that was contracted by DOW to make an app promoting some extremely toxic agrochemicals, such as Forefront. They talked about this being so poisonious that if animals eat grass sprayed with it, then crops grown with their manure will be unsuitable for human consumption. Was also asked to fake ("round up") the calculations of how much money you'd save if by those chemicals.
Read up a bit about DOW and the Bopal disaster and started to feel horrible about my work.
Tried to gently bring concerns up with the management, and was laid off immediately.
I feel really bad about doing that work, but trying to make up for it by not eating animal products anymore.