Circumvented browser features to force autoplay on videos with high volume on our websites. While not a morally bankrupt thing to do especially compared to some of the other examples, we all felt dirty doing it.
Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
31–40 of 520 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#32not mine, but someone programmed The Drop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCOCKS5AJI8
Is this real? Can't find any sources on it.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#33As 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.
How did you get that past code review?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#34In 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 po…
I like how you dropped the name of the "big consulting company" in the end, there.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#35I'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…
> A lot of this work is legally defensible (if you do it correctly)
Could you expand on the correctness aspect? I'm currently working in this space for what I believe to be good reasons (to improve the accessibility of a particular service for visually impaired users). But I'm eager not to abuse my position and knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#36I'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 own data is, IMO, more of the moral violation than forcibly scraping that data out.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#37Amazing there’s nothing here about crypto.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#38Most unethical?
Probably pre checking one of those cookie policy checkboxes or what not. Wasn't too happy about that, especially when the software used removed the feature before for exactly the reason you may expect.
I also previously used a mod to read personal messages on a forum once, though that's one of those things which is heavily, heavily debated about on community management sites, with about half the audience saying its an unethical breach of privacy and the other half saying either that it's their site and property deal with it or that it's a good way to stop poaching and abusers.
But that one wasn't exactly coded by myself, so eh, it's an edge case for this question.
So probably a tie between those two, depending on what you count by 'as a programmer'. Fortunately, everything else I've been asked to do in my career has been pretty normal/ethical.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#39While I haven't done anything nefarious other than putting a few tracking/analytics frameworks into our product, I have heard a few stories from my colleagues...
E.g. at a contractor company, a client wanted to lease 5 developers for a project. We didn't have enough free developers, so they assigned a single guy to the project, who was making commits from 5 different accounts. The client was paying for 5 devs of course.
There was also a client who was building slot machines, and we wrote the software for it. We ran experiments to figure out the best way to rip off gambling addicts.
The first company I worked for took EU innovation grants and when the deadline came, they simply copied their existing product, replaced the logo and showcased it as something they used the grant for.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#40Circumvented browser features to force autoplay on videos with high volume on our websites. While not a morally bankrupt thing to do especially compared to some of the other examples, we all felt dirty doing it.
> While not a morally bankrupt thing to do
Could you explain this position? (Honestly asking.)