I helped build Grindr, which of course I don't think was unethical. But I've been surprised by some people's reaction to it. It generally comes up in some conversation where someone asks "what have you worked on that I might have heard of?" Occasionally they follow up with (paraphrasing) "how do you sleep at night?"
Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
201–210 of 520 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#202I helped build Grindr, which of course I don't think was unethical. But I've been surprised by some people's reaction to it. It generally comes up in some conversation where someone asks "what have you worked on that I might have heard of?" Occasionally they follow up with (paraphrasing) "how do you sleep at night?"
Out of curiosity - was this because of their homophobia or something else? I’ve read they’ve been terrible about data security.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#203A few years back at my last job, I was approached by a senior guy on a product team asking me to game some tests so we could get our Windows certification.
I just kind of brushed him off at the time. I'm still sorry I didn't collect evidence and then report him. He was a real dirt bag.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#204So 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. In…
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Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#205Not me personally, but the company I started my career with (was an intern there for a few months). ERM software. When a new client comes onboard, install the product and database, but make sure not to make any optimizations, not even the basic indexes in the DB. Depending on the usage, the DB will get slower and slower in a few months. Then send a "consultant" who will simply run a script and add indexes etc and tes…
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.
That would require that you eat up the cost if something takes more time. Most of the time the customer will pay for the additional time or at least part of it.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#206Me and a friend setup a fake electronics store on the dark web and ended up making a lot of money when bitcoin spiked in value.
Brutal.
Personally I don’t think scamming people who intend to buy stolen electronics is particularly unethical anyways. It’s sort of like...profitable vigilante justice.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#207Its an entirely standard thing, but I feel it is unhappy knowing that my paycheque depends upon thousands of mobile game players watching advertising, and feel that it is ethically dubious that my job is to try to cram more ads down their throats.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#208I was once assigned a task that had been estimated at 8 hours of development time, but only required the modification of a single line of code. I finished it in 5 minutes. My boss asked what happened, I told him, and he told me to revert the code, work on other tasks, and redo it at the end of the day so he could bill for 8 hours (in addition to billing for the other tasks I worked on). I did it and didn’t say anythi…
Guess I haven't had enough coffee -- I'm struggling to remember the joke in which the punchline is the professional telling the client something like "You're not paying me to do [one simple/small thing], but for the years of experience it takes to know that [it's that one simple thing]". The problem with trying to charge for programming work is that so much non-trivial work can be summed up as a few keystrokes, or an…
My art history textbook has a similar story about James McNeill Whisler, who when challenged on charging 200 guineas for a painting, responded, "I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime."
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#209I created software that was used by call center agents to bid on “bathroom” break time slots and kept track of who was on break and actively punished those who didn’t follow the rules. It rewarded those that had higher performance and who took less breaks with higher priority. If an agent didn’t come back from their break a security guard would automatically be dispatched to find them. For the same company I also made software that reduced the same call agents to numbers and effectively automated the layoff/termination process. It would contact security with orders to have people escorted out, and had a sinister double verification process that would check to verify the agent was actually fired, or else the responsible security guard would be punished via the same point system. Everything was done via e-mail and would come from “System” and at the time used fancy HTML e-mail templates that looked official. I would frequently hear people talk about how they received a “System e-mail” with a chill in their voice, not knowing I was the one responsible. People who I ate lunch with sometimes didn’t even really know. Embedded in each e-mail was a count-down timer to create a sense of urgency to do whatever was being asked before a “punishment” was applied.
After an agent had been terminated, their punishment points would decay over time until such a time they reached zero (or another configurable threshold depending on how desperate the company was for warm bodies), at which time they would be sent an e-mail to their personal e-mail (which was collected during the application process), inviting them to “re-apply”. Being an early telephony company we also would send them a robo-call with the “good news”. This process was known as a “life-cycle” and it was common in certain labor markets for employees to have many such lifecycles. Another way employees could stave off automated termination was to work for unpaid overtime, which offered to reduce their point values per unit of overtime worked. Everything was tracked to second granularity thanks to deep integration with phone switches and the adoption of the open source Asterisk CTI.
This orwellian automation terrorized the poor employees who worked there for years, long after I left, before it was finally shut down by court order. I had designed it as a plug-in architecture and when it was shut down there were many additional features, orders, and punishment_types.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brutal.
Personally I don’t think scamming people who intend to buy stolen electronics is particularly unethical anyways. It’s sort of like...profitable vigilante justice.
Unless the electronics were branded as stolen I wouldn’t immediately assume malicious intent from the buyers.
People might have all kinds of reasons buying those electronics anonymously - maybe there are no other channels to get them from (oppressive government restricting features like VoIP in iPhones, etc) in which case the “dark” web is the most logical place to go to get a clean device.