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

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 he worked at they used DNS tricks to exfiltrate data out of their enterprise clients. Nothing crazy, mostly just analytics to aid in things like product design. They got caught though. First Intel went out, then a couple hours later 4 other big tech companies (including Apple and Microsoft). Then a huge swath of devices stopped reporting. They got acquired shortly afterwards for a large, but sub-billion dollar amount.

3. I know a couple people that crack into devices and sell the 0days to the highest bidder. I consider this practice for anything cyber-physical (self-driving cars, etc) to be so unreasonably unethical that it should be against international law. It's one thing to sell these things to an allied government, it's quite another to have them on the open market.

The problem with trying to charge for programming work is that so much non-trivial work can be summed up as a few keystrokes, or an addition of a single line, or even producing less code (by deletion/refactoring). That said, I don't understand why your boss thought this subterfuge was necessary. If the client is non-technical enough to approve 8 hours of billing for something that takes 5 minutes to fix, how is that client competent enough to look through the git history to know that it was only 5 minutes of work?

Online lending, for example, is a pretty tricky area. You have to subscribe to a pretty hardcore version of a capitalist moral philosophy to justify the %xxx percent interest those places charge. Especially as the 'ideal' customer isn't the one who pays you back, it's the desperate population who continually re-up their ridiculously expensive loans.