331–340 of 520 posts
I suspect you're not going to get many personal stories here because it would be self-incriminating. But I have a couple from some people I know in tech. 1. I know the guy who, pre-Snowden, actually designed many of the pieces of network gear needed for the dragnet. His perspective was basically: Yes it's wrong, but what do I know? I just design electronic circuits. 2. Same guy also mentioned how at another company h…
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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.
First part of the sentence, sure. Last part is debatable, so many things are outsourced or contracted, any product is largely contributed to by non employees.
It's in most standard employee contracts that employees won't disclose confidential information for reasons like this.
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…
I hope karma does happen in the end but I fear it doesn't.
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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 created a cool little easer egg where if you clicked in the bottom left corner of the browser window and dragged in a circle, the site would flip upside down. A coworker and I also photoshopped some of the client's imagery that was used on the site and hosted it on another domain. If you typed a variation of the Konami code while on the site, the images would be replaced with our meme-ified versions of their imagery. Even if we had a code review process, none of my coworkers would have even noticed that little bit of extra code in the mess of jQuery spaghetti that was their codebase.
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It was a small 30 person company with an overbearing founder.
We ran a chat program called Pandion to allow non-IT staff to quickly ask each other work questions.
The boss had already asked us in IT to set up journaling in Outlook so he was getting a copy of every email sent and received by his staff.
Next he turned his attention to Pandion and I was tasked with setting up a regular report containing all chat messages that were logged on the server.
I knew everyone in the company personally and didn't care to read their private messages...but the boss wanted to get a copy right away before it was announced to staff.
So I send a copy to him, containing the last few days of messages that had been sent.
Of course a couple of staff were dating. Apparently Glen* and Amy* used Pandion for personal messages to each other.
I'm sitting with the boss explaining how the staff don't know their messages are being reported on and we can start publishing the report after the next team meeting, but the boss wanted none of that...
So we start going through it together. One of the first messages is from Glen telling Amy that she's as tight as the seal on his lunchbox. The boss had a good sense of humor and we both pissed ourselves laughing, but it still goes against my values.
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I doubt it leads to actual profits but the morons at the top think it will for some reason.
Most of the dark patterns lead to more profits, or sign ups, or something measurable. That's why they are everywhere, they really have a purpose.
Metricitisis is a major management disease of our times and neither corporate, nor government nor nonprofits are safe from missing the point completely in the quest for meeting irrelevant metrics so they can say they are a good manager.
When I was in college I finished a couple of programming projects late. My professor said if we could prove that it was done on time he wouldn’t penalize us so I found a program that would let me alter windows time stamps. I’m sure he knew and accepted it anyway because he was a great teacher that seemed to enjoy letting us creatively solve problems more than sticking to specific curriculum. Was my favorite class in…
Let me answer on behalf of programmers employed by Facebook. The most unethical thing I have done as a programmer is going to work everyday.
I once used curl to continuously upvote a family member's art submission to some national contest. The contest site did no validation so continuously sending POSTs with was almost too easy to game it. They won and got a free trip across the country (among other things).