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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?

#391

Post by chrismcb »

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…

Isn't some of this illegal? Wishing OT for free sounds illegal. Some of the other items may also be illegal... Perhaps that is why it was shut down

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

#392

Post by chrismcb »

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #248
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…

> But see, I can understand weapons building. This is my point. Eventually someone will come in and say the system in the OP was necessary for the company to stay afloat, pay its employees or retain value for its retired shareholders.

There is a difference between defending your nation and defending your country. But in this particular case, some of the things described are actually illegal. While building a weapon is not necessarily illegal. Ignoring the ethical implications.

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

#393

Post by cimmanom »

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…

This is much scarier for a construction project than the game programming anecdotes that follow.

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

#394

Post by chrismcb »

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.

Automating a job is one thing. Some people may consider it unethical. But it is going to happen. But writing coffee to terrorize people is something else.

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

#396

Post by cimmanom »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #276
insickness wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing unethical about this. In fact I applaud your boss. If you can automate something instead of pay people to do it, you should do it.

Agreed, it's pretty much what we (programmers) do. A cleverer boss will use his people to make more profit, instead of fire a bunch to reduce costs, but cest la vie.

Sometimes, sometimes not. Not all automation puts people out of work. I work for a company whose service facilitates a marketplace and allows a real life industry to grow.

Without our service nobody was doing the job of connecting the people who find each other on our platform. The industry was simply smaller and people could find others to work with only through their personal networks. There are no jobs being lost to our automation, only jobs being created.

And yeah, that’s a good feeling.

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

#397

Post by RugnirViking »

chrismcb wrote: post #391
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…

Isn't some of this illegal? Wishing OT for free sounds illegal. Some of the other items may also be illegal... Perhaps that is why it was shut down

Unpaid overtime is standard in nearly all salaried industries, unless you are getting paid by the the hour in the first place

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

#398

Post by cimmanom »

mkoryak wrote: post #24

In 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…

Ever so slightly surprised you didn’t get fired immediately.

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

#399

Post by z0mb3e »

I used to help out at a bed company selling matresses in their WooCommerce store. The owner was obsessed with „metadata“ and SEO.

He regularely told me I should copy and paste the meta title and descriptions into a Word document (ugh) so he could edit on them. When he was done I was supposed to put them back in, manually of course.

Now, normally I‘d tell a client that such a task could be easily automated. However he was a very shitty boss and I was getting paid hourly.

So I simply built a crawler that analyzed every site and pulled its metadata, put it in an Excel table (I convinced him it was easier for me to copy/paste) and sent it to him via email. He then gave me the updated table, for which I simply wrote a script to execute some SQL queries to put them in.

This turned what what’s effectively 2 hours of work each time into 20-30 because of the number of pages.

One time I remember I forgot to update the metadata one of the pages. When he complained and I realized, I quickly ran the script and told him he‘d have to „refresh his cache“ or something. He never noticed any of this.

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

#400

Post by throwaway_0hjpo »

I wrote (copy pasted / edited) a cheat for an online game that was in beta, when I was around 13. I released it (with no anti cheat protection), probably got a few thousand cheaters banned...

I then sold the cheat source code to a forum of cheaters, who integrated it into their own offering and paid me a small royalty. The source code was pretty much copy pasted from a guide with minimal changes to work on the correct memory addresses.

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