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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?

#401

Post by capevace »

z0mb3e wrote: post #399

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…

I had one of those SEO obsessed bosses. They’re the worst since they never understand how SEO actually works and throw around buzzwords.

If he really was shitty otherwise too, good on you.

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

#403

Post by bklaasen »

Graham24 wrote: post #390
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've done this, leave an obvious trivial bug for the QA to find otherwise they'll keep digging until they find something pointless and hard to fix, which is not a problem in the first place. they have to find something to justify their jobs. I wonder if there's a name for doing this?

That's a team-wide failure to understand business value.

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

#404

Post by Zelmor »

akudha wrote: post #77

Not me personally, but the company I started my career with (was an intern there for a few months). ERM software. When a new client comes onboard, install the product and database, but make sure not to make any optimizations, not even the basic indexes in the DB. Depending on the usage, the DB will get slower and slower in a few months. Then send a "consultant" who will simply run a script and add indexes etc and tes…

Are they by any chance working with AX Dynamics?

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

#405

Post by scarface74 »

Rjevski wrote: post #367
scarface74 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it an innocent victim? Every company that I’ve worked for that sold B2B software had salespeople that had “regions” they sold into to get contracts. How are they anything but glorified telemarketers? I doubt any of our customers were “scammed” into buying services that cost tens of thousands a year. While I’ve never bought anything from a telemarketer, it doesn’t mean that thier product is not legit.

If the customer comes first to you and gives you their contact then it’s no longer telemarketing IMO - at the very least not the usual definition of telemarketing which is “asshole spamming your phone to sell their snake oil”. But if you just call out of the blue, I don’t care whether what you sell is legit, it’s just not okay to waste my time - frankly the fact that your company uses these practices damages my opini…

You should be more worried about the state of the economy if companies that can afford to buy services that cost six to seven figures annually that have to be approved by C-level people are so easily scammed.

Every B2B company that does large contracts that I’m aware of has sales people.

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

#406

Post by shoo »

scott-smith_us wrote: post #188
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 used to do this defensively when submitting 8-bit games for publication back in the 80s. The non-gamers at the publishing company seemed to feel they had to get back to you with a handful of changes. If your game was really polished, the changes would be pointless or even harmful things. I quickly learned to leave in a few obvious things that were trivial fixes, e.g. blocky bitmaps, misspellings, jarring colors. In…

similarly, in the context of nightmarish optimisation death marches to fit inside a memory budget -- see "the programming anti-hero"

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tri...

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

#407

Post by Timpy »

scott-smith_us wrote: post #178

There was an ongoing prank in my high school (late 70's) to insert John Holmes' name whenever/wherever possible. For example, one trick was to ask someone in the front office to add to the end-of-day announcements "{popular girl}, John Holmes won't be able to give you a ride today". Eventually the front office caught on, and it got riskier and more difficult to do. I was asked to write an Applesoft BASIC program to h…

I didn't know who John Holmes was. Don't google it at work guys.

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

#408

Post by dsego »

stealthmodeclan wrote: post #362
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…

First i thought that this is scary but I've had many friends who told me that they they play games all day at their office and once boss called them in their cabin and they expected to be laid off but were given a small raise instead. "I take lots of cigarette and bathroom breaks to fix my makeup/hair and Snapchat my friends. I can't see myself working hard. I am not a sheep". Those are the exact words. This is a sce…

This is a I believe a common sentiment in post-communist countries, esp. for anyone working for the state/city/municipality. It's normal for people to take a one or two hour break to go shop for groceries, or even leave at noon if they don't feel like working longer. There is even a common saying in ex-yu countries: “They can never pay me so little that I can't do even less work.” (sorry for the bad translation).

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

#409

Post by crookintheyard »

Worked in a company making internet scams.

My first project was an 'X-Ray': for a fee user could upload a photo of person and see them naked. The website just applied a picture of naked body to the uploaded face. We collected all of the resulting pictures and displayed them in a slideshow on a TV in the office for laughs.

The big project was 'download anything'. We had an affiliate program where partners were driving traffic to us and received 70% of profit. All the traffic was coming with ?search=keyword URL parameter and our landing page looked like a file sharing website with search results for 'keyword'. It was 2012, downloading shit from file shares was a big thing these days. Depending on the USER_AGENT, the visitor downloaded keyword.exe or keywork.apk. On Windows, it was an 'installer' that asked user to send an SMS to premium number in order to 'activate the download'. On Android, it was an app that just sent the premium SMS by itself — easy money!

We had a lot of fun and profit doing that, and I left that job not because of guilt, but because I burned out. Only after I left I was able to look at it from a different perspective.

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

#410

Post by golergka »

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…

Why would you consider such a system unethical? As a customer constantly annoyed by laziness and incompetence of the low-level support employees, I can only thank you for working on such system.
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