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Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#21
post #7

Used some of the more advanced features in git to delete commit history and cover up bunch of illegal activity shortly before an acquisition. I used to feel really bad about this, but apparently there are whole teams dedicated to this sort of "cleanup" in M&A nowadays. Now I just feel bad about everything!

Without going into specifics, can you outline the kind of illegal activities that might appear in a git commit history? I'm guessing copyright infringements mostly?

Basically lots of tracking of users and reselling that data in extremely detailed ways. Whatever the marketing team demands or you're fired, that kind of environment.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#24
In my first job out of college i worked at a big consulting company on a project at a company that used interwoven teamsite cms. Teamsite was a cms written in Perl, JavaScript, and Java with lots of xml sprinkled in. It was a horrible system.

I blogged about it on my personal blog. All the posts were about how to solve issues I had using it. This was before stack overflow.

After I had about 10 such posts I wrote a post titled "interwoven teamsite sucks" and linked all the other posts there.

I started noticing traffic to that post from specific ips accross the country.

A week later I was pulled into a meeting with the top see directors and told to remove my blog. Interwoven was an Accenture client.

I removed it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#25
I've done a lot of work involving scraping, data analysis and reversing private API access from mobile applications. A lot of this work is legally defensible (if you do it correctly) and not particularly unethical. After doing a bunch of this type of work I started to accrue subject matter expertise in the area that led other companies to come to me with more questionable projects in mind. I turned down many of these, but two projects stand out to me as unethical or borderline. In fact, this was the reason I eventually stopped working with these companies.

The first project was for a large, (now) well-known fintech company. They needed to develop login integrations with consumer banks to acquire customer account information for verification purposes. But many such banks didn't particularly want to grant them any special API access. More importantly, these banks typically forbid scraping and made it explicitly difficult by implementing JavaScript-based computational measures required on the client in order to successfully login. I helped this company develop methodologies for bypassing the anti-scraping measures on several banking websites. However, I stopped working on this because 1) I felt uncomfortable with the cavalier way they were ignoring banks' refusals, then using the reversed integrations and onboarded customers as a bargaining chip for more formal partnerships, and 2) performing huge amounts of analytics on customer data acquired as part of the account verification process.

The second project was for a tech startup working on insurance and credit analytics. This company is one of several that popped up in recent years to use machine learning and social data in order to develop a more "complete" credit score (in their eyes). They had an impressive team of machine learning researchers but their data acquisition team was comparatively mediocre. So I worked with them to improve their acquisition methodologies for a variety of social media websites. I stopped working with them for three reasons: 1) fundamentally, I lost faith that their product was actually generating a meaningful signal over traditional means, 2) I was worried that the data they were collecting might introduce spurious correlations or illegal biases, and 3) if any team was going to do this correctly, I didn't think this particular team was the qualified one to do it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#26
post #5

I did some contract work for an online “payday loan” company for a bit. It didn’t take me long to realize I was ashamed of working with such a terrible industry, but my professionalism kept me there until I finished the job. Definitely a low point.

Having spent most of my spare time for the past 8 months on a FinTech idea (which I now question the cost of launching) I spent the day yesterday looking into PayDay loans as one of the URL's I got for said biz is pretty damn catchy for a PDL endeavor. Case in point--GoDaddy has all kinds of loan ads on the parked page.

I agree with you though, that's a sleazy way to make money, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#27
post #5

I did some contract work for an online “payday loan” company for a bit. It didn’t take me long to realize I was ashamed of working with such a terrible industry, but my professionalism kept me there until I finished the job. Definitely a low point.

Payday loans are bad but they are not that unethical. The alternative option for people reliant on payday loans are actual loan sharks, which will turn out a lot worse for the debtor. So don’t be so hard on yourself.

I think it would be difficult, but possible to run an ethical payday loan company that focuses on building people up and out of long term debt.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?

#30
As a gentle satire of a much-hated London-based design company we were working with during a project for a major brand, I added something called 'disco mode' to the customer's site if you crafted the correct query string. It progressively added more and more random jQuery effects to the page on a timer, while the customer's logo jumped to a beat.
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