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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?

#211

Post by aidos »

eof wrote: post #65

Very short backstory: I was very severely punished for breaking security on our pcs at school (utilizing interactive startup on windows 95 to not start the "fortress" process.) For a final project presented which was ostensibly a limited auto-translation application, I made an application which just popped up an alert, "program unable to run due to security" Got an A!

Upvoted you because me and a friend did exactly the same thing. The IT guy was really pissed about it, but we didn’t think it was such a big deal. Nothing came of it in the end but I think we were banned from the computer lab. Pretty backwards priorities on behalf of the teacher in retrospect.

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

#212

Post by amingilani »

thom wrote: post #86
hjorthjort wrote: post #33

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.

I downvoted you because you were condescending while providing an otherwise relevant piece of information.

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

#213

Post by Rjevski »

tedeh wrote: post #129
hirundo wrote: post #70

I wrote telemarketing software. Not sure if I'll go into the same circle of hell as telemarketers, or something worse. But it is an incentive to live as long as possible before going to my reward.

Ha, I write telemarketing support systems for a living and feel your pain. It might not be sexy work but sure helps to grease the wheels of commerce and put food on the table.

Telemarketing does not help grease the wheels of commerce. It helps grease the wheels of scamming.

Commerce is when people buy stuff they do need and that provides value to them. Telemarketing is conning people by pushing them to buy shit they never needed and that won’t provide any value to them. It is not commerce, it is scamming.

I’m not criticizing you for doing the necessary things to put food on the table, but please don’t justify it by saying it helps commerce.

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

#214

Post by aidos »

spo81rty wrote: post #194

I made software 15 years ago to automatically buy concert and sports tickets from Ticketmaster and other websites. At the moment tickets went on sale we used hundreds of computers to buy up the good tickets. I'm sorry your daughter didn't get Nsync tickets.

Wasn’t there a big case about that?

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

#215

Post by GhostVII »

hirundo wrote: post #126
everdev wrote: post #120

One of my employees was contracting out his entire job. His performance was great and then fell off a cliff. Turns out he stopped paying the contractor and the contractor stopped doing his work for him. When he had to do it himself it was horrible.

I don't fault the guy for the arbitrage, just for not fulfilling the contract. It would be about equally unethical if he were doing the great work himself and got bored and wandered away.

I think it is pretty unethical to give someone access to company data without the companies permission, and especially to allow that person to actually work on company products.

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

#216

Post by Rjevski »

ada1981 wrote: post #183

I wrote code to automate my 15 hour per week grad assistant job. One or two clicks and some php magic.

Not unethical at all. They were paying X amount of money to get Y work done. You were providing that just fine (I’d say you were providing them even better value because you eliminated human error).

It’s not your fault if they would rather hire a human to do some automatable task.

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

#217

Post by Rjevski »

lunulata wrote: post #81

Implemented APIs for clients that were based on scraping data from other competitor sites that did not give permission, it's some kind of service hi-jacking. Similarly, implemented some clone sites that just rip off other people's work #zuckerberging Some bug bounties ask pentesters not to hit their production servers hard with automated tools... I've ignored this to find some bugs in production servers on occasion.

Scraping is not unethical IMO. If you make the data public then everyone has the right to use it for whatever reason.

Arbitrarily restricting what the data can be used for is what I would call unethical.

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

#218

Post by secfirstmd »

hjek wrote: post #189

Worked 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…

Why not channel your feelings and talk to a journalist, NGO or regulator willing to act in the public interest?

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

#219

Post by fao_ »

iamleppert wrote: post #209

I 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 mad…

I have to ask, why did you choose to take the contract? Financial pressures? Or did you not feel that such a system is morally reprehensible?

Personally while I'm opposed to programmer certification, systems like these certainly make me wish such a thing existed.

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

#220

Post by craftyguy »

northwest65 wrote: post #137

I was subcontracted as development resource to a short terms loan company. They had me implement a piece of software that lets people enter their online banking details (yes their name and password, that thing that the bank says if you reveal to anybody you have no protections on your account), store them in a database, and then use those credentials to scrape their bank records so that their loans could be approved…

What you described sounds a lot like mint.com.
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