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

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

#291

Post by Rjevski » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

sgentle wrote: post #273

Rjevski wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. You wouldn’t need “outbound sales” if you had a product that people wanted. They would be calling you with their wallets open if it was the case. You only need outbound sales/scammers if you have a product that you think that people need even though they’ve been living without just fine for ages. > Some of it is scams, plenty isn't. Please give me some examples of how some are scams but plenty are not. Fr…

I've got no great love for telemarketing or the advertising industry, but as a point of fact it's not true that if you make something people want they will seek you out to find it. If you make something that people want but do not make any effort to put it in front of them or argue for its merits, it will likely end up ignored and forgotten. "They're just fine without it" is a pretty good counterargument, not just ag…

> it's not true that if you make something people want they will seek you out to find it

If you solve my problems I will find it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. You can't imagine the number of times I've searched Google or asked friends about solutions to problem X.

> do not make any effort to put it in front of them or argue for its merits

If your product solves problem X, make a website or blog posts explaining that and let Google do the rest. Post it to Product Hunt or Hacker News. Reach out to journalists/bloggers and offer them a sample for review. Even buy some ads - sure, ads are cancer and will be blocked on my side, but I still prefer them compared to telemarketing.

> it will likely end up ignored and forgotten

If your product is so revolutionary that you feel it's OK to interrupt people by calling them and trying to sell it to them, then this is not something you should worry about. Such a revolutionary product will become mainstream in a matter of days. ;)

If your product isn't that revolutionary, then maybe you should instead work on making it revolutionary instead of paying monkeys to spam people. And finally, if that still doesn't work, then remember that nobody is entitled to any business and that interrupting everyone else just so you can have it your way is still not right.

> is a pretty good counterargument, not just against marketing, but against speaking your mind, applying for a job, asserting yourself in any way, and the pursuit of science, knowledge, or advancement of any kind

Seems like this is a pretty good counter-argument to a bullshit marketing model as well. Why improve my marketing model if the status-quo is good (as long as it's not me getting spammed)?

Speaking your mind, applying for jobs and asserting yourself is something you can do by yourself without bothering anyone. This kind of bullshit marketing does bother everyone - I haven't met a single person yet who was happy to receive telemarketing calls - I think this says a lot about what you're preaching. ;)

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

#292

Post by hello_newman » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

movedx wrote: post #196

Not a programmer at the time, but a system administrator. I won't mention the company. This was 2011-2012 -ish. We hosted dedicated servers and most of the time, they were mostly Plesk or cPanel servers run by people selling email and or web hosting to hundreds of clients from a single server. This one time a client joins the network, buys a server from us, and migrates from Rackspace. We wondered why he'd move from…

what is an MBE?

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

#293

Post by overkalix » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:16 AM UTC

curare wrote: post #281

At a previous employer we used the data referenced in the question. We bought the "anonymised" telecom data from one of the big providers in the USA. We would then analyse that data to figure out where the phone spent 6-8 hours during the night to determine where the phone owner lived. Then we'd pull the USA consensus data(free!) so the system would know what demographic the user probably belongs to. We got a surpris…

Census

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

#294

Post by hndamien » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #257

fao_ wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But see, I can understand weapons building. The motivation is protective towards one's society, and that is the intended result, even if that might not be the actual case. Whereas the intention of building an oppressive system such as the one described above is, what, selfishness? Laziness? Programmers, because of the high-demand nature of our role, do not tend to be subject to the usual financial pressures that othe…

Not saying this was likely, but one potential reason could be a kind of selfless penny-pinching. Say you have a call center run as a co-op. You’ve got workers and HR people. Both the workers and HR people are shareholders. If you can eliminate the HR people, then the workers can each have a larger proportionate share for the same work. Automating HR eliminates the HR people.

Is Uber so different?

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

#295

Post by andy_ppp » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #250

fao_ wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, as both a writer and a programmer, I often consider implementing the systems that I’ve written dystopian fiction about. Not to create a dystopia, but for the same reason I write: to point one out, such that people can get incensed, laws can be made, etc. To put this another way: the most efficient way we could have possibly found to get the use of nuclear arms in war globally banned, was to have someone u…

You’re actually suggesting being a sociopath is a good thing because it’ll make all the bad ideas eventually die by us trying them. This is simply not true, we have to make bad ideas die by reason and logic, before we do too much harm.

I suppose doubling down of fossil fuels and burning of rainforest is great, we’ll just have to adapt quicker to the super extreme weather. But we can adapt with more aircon! Yay!

Maybe we are just monkeys who can’t actually learn from things that we haven’t experienced but then we’ll be replaced by nature any day now. I’d rather learn things the easy way, if at all possible.

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

#296

Post by Rjevski » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

austhrow743 wrote: post #263

Rjevski wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. You wouldn’t need “outbound sales” if you had a product that people wanted. They would be calling you with their wallets open if it was the case. You only need outbound sales/scammers if you have a product that you think that people need even though they’ve been living without just fine for ages. > Some of it is scams, plenty isn't. Please give me some examples of how some are scams but plenty are not. Fr…

People aren't omniscient. People at best look for known unknowns, but not unknown unknowns. Particularly when it comes to tech, that covers a very broad area of things that they don't know are possible. The idea that if you need to tell people about it for them to know about it and potentially buy it, then the offer is a scam, is baffling to me. As for inbound leads, their existence doesn't stop outbound sales being…

People are not yet omniscient, I agree. But lately there's this wonderful new tool called the Internet which allows people to become omniscient as far as product discovery is concerned.

If you have a product that solves problem X, make a website, blog posts, send samples to journalists for reviews, etc about how your product solves problem X, and let search engines & organic growth do the rest.

> You're just arguing against progress there

I'm not arguing against progress. I'm arguing against the (potential) progress of your wallet, which is not at all correlated with progress of humanity as a whole. Again, if a product was truly progress then organic growth would be more than enough. As far as your wallet is concerned, you can make it progress through other, less annoying means, and actually create value in the process.

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

#297

Post by hkai » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

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…

That looks pale in comparison to the Chinese employee tracking app Dingding. And it's becoming crazy popular.

Your employer's mistake was working in the call center business, they should've sold your system instead.

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

#298

Post by mindslight » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #36

throwawaymath wrote: post #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…

I don't necessarily agree that the first project was unethical, the banks were saying no because they wanted to develop a product of their own to compete with the company that hired you, not because they had any moral standing to prevent the customer from running analytics on their own data. The company you did the work for is immensely helpful to the consumer, and banks refusing to let consumers interact with their…

Even worse, the banks preventing users from straightforwardly accessing their own data is exactly what is pushing users right into the arms of these "fintech" surveillance companies.

The technology (OFX direct connect) and software (Quicken, now Moneydance) for users to privately track their finances has been around for quite some time. But the protocol appears to be getting deprecated in favor of this "web download" rigmarole as banks attempt to decommodify.

I had thought about futzing with Plaid for my own monitoring purposes, figuring since they were B2B they wouldn't be directly surveilling (leaving that up to customers instead). Apparently I was wrong. Surveillance capitalism, indeed!

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

#299

Post by user5994461 » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

jrs95 wrote: post #231

Rjevski wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They weren’t branded as such but the store(s) only existing on the deep web plus the incredibly low pricing made it obvious that these couldn’t have been obtained legitimately, if they were really selling anything at all and not just scamming people out of BTC. I highly doubt anyone capable of finding and using these sites could actually be dumb enough to believe it was anything other than stolen electronics (or a sc…

The stolen or the oppressing government are not good arguments. It doesn't allow either party to buy or sell.

We had the case of an ex student who opened a company selling electronics and mechanical parts. Some shipments were stopped at the border by the local equivalent of the NSA and the company received a visit shortly afterwards. Turns out that some stuff can be used to manufacture military equipment.

That day, we learned that they take it pretty seriously and the onus is on you to prove that it's legit and going to a legitimate party.

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

#300

Post by neumann » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

cdoxsey wrote: post #159

So 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 did this in our University laboratory for OHS, we called it window shopping. By giving the inspector a few easily visible, but not dangerous issues out in the open, he was satisfied we were up to scratch safety wise but could also tick all his little boxes. An out of date MSDS for chemicals we no longer had, a not tested and tagged electrical cable used prominently, a drink bottle left next to the lab computer by a student.