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

I was a graduate student living off a stipend and working for the university teaching math and CS courses. It wasn't enough money, especially with my wife's medical bills, so I got desperate and...taught for ITT Tech.

If you've never had the displeasure of being a student or teacher at ITT Tech, I'd describe it as a cross between community college and vocational school but where everyone is pretending it's a 4-year college. It felt like a place where dreams go to die, and no where did I see that more in the way they set me up to teach classes.

Now, first I should say I have a lot of sympathy for my students there. They were generally folks who honestly wanted to make better lives for themselves and got duped by ITT Tech into thinking it was a place where they could do that. Those students are now stuck with a lot of crappy debt they can't easily get out of and also didn't learn much, because as I learned from teaching there, the goal was not really to teach anyone anything.

I taught two classes: software engineering principles and Linux system administration. I had not special qualifications to teach either of those classes, but they needed someone to teach them, I had an MS in CS, and I had some idea of what to do. The SE class consisted of two students and we'd meet for 4 hours every Saturday for 3 months. We'd sit together and read the textbook, then do some problem sets out of the textbook ("how would you design this system or organize this work?"). Nothing truly objectionable, just the same shit the passes for "education" in most school. I think I gave both of the students As at the end of the semester.

The Linux system administration class was another story. I had three students, although one showed up maybe 3 times all semester, and they had all in theory already taken a class teaching them Linux/Unix basics, but as became immediately apparent none of them had actually used Linux before, just read about it in a book. So began our awful semester of them pretending to learn and me increasingly transitioning from teaching to pretending to teach.

They started out needing to install Linux on their laptops. This was around 2010, so not quite as easy as today but already very easy (the worst case scenario was you failed to get hardware acceleration for graphics or something like that, not non-functional input devices). Yet somehow every week for the first month we had to reinstall Linux. I don't know what was happening in the week between classes, but somehow Linux disappeared from their computers and we had to go through it all over again. This obviously put us way behind.

Once we got Linux running on their computers we started to try to do some basic system admin stuff (there was a syllabus telling me what stuff they should be able to do by the end). I don't think we ever really made it past creating users and installing packages (is installing packages even still sys admin work?). They constantly got stuck on basic things, forgetting how to `ls` and `cd`. By the end of the semester I think they still couldn't reliably `sudo` on the first try.

I knew this was bad and had been talking to my supervisor about it, but he kept telling me it was fine just do my best and work with them where they were. When the end of the semester came I didn't know what to do about grades because they had tried but were just unprepared for the class. At university I would have failed them, but ITT Tech insisted I give them Cs. I was pretty unhappy about that whole situation but what could we do.

When they offered me classes for the next semester I declined. I didn't want to be part of a system that was all about pretending to teach people things while also charging them a bunch of money. But for one terrible semester I was complicit to a system of exploiting desperate folks (some of my students had been in prison and were trying to get their lives back together and giving up a lot to pay for classes to be there).

Should've gone through with it but shared the result with the data-entry people instead of the boss!

Not questioning your story a bit, I'm sure it's true. But shouldn't we all be a little concerned that CNN is posting a story as fact without verification or even talking to the person making the claims? The article even implies heavily that they've talked to you.

That scares me.

It's really depressing how capitalism has taken automation and data and bastardized it into a toxic weapon.

I worked on dating websites. The codebase was awful but more importantly, 99.9% of female profiles were fake, poor guys were trying to get a date when in fact they were chatting with some other guy in Africa... It was really depressing doing a job that wasn't adding any value to the world and being part of a parasite economy. I had to this for financial reasons but left as soon as I could.