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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?

#511

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…

You do realise that this actually makes you evil, don't you?

Think about the numbers of parents unable to support kids because of what you did, people made ill or even killed by your programming of their behaviour.

How does it feelto know that you certainly will have caused serious illness by what you did and very probably killed people?

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

#512
post #469

I wrote a ton of IRC war bots and scripts back when I was a teenager including something called the "Sumo nick collider" and the textbox.irc script. The latter was a general client enhancement script but had tons of extensions for "war." For you spring chickens "war" was exploiting the IRC protocol to take over channels, kill users, etc. The protocol was pretty vanilla back then and was vulnerable to a lot of those t…

On the IRC bot note, I have a petty-unethical story of how I made an IRC bot that would pick up movie titles, search for them on IMDB and respond with a randomly chosen spoiler marked trivia bullet.

My most benign bot simply played back the subtitles of Robocop in realtime on a loop.

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

#513

I made software 15 years ago to automatically buy concert and sports tickets from Ticketmaster and other websites. At the moment tickets went on sale we used hundreds of computers to buy up the good tickets. I'm sorry your daughter didn't get Nsync tickets.

There was a Freakanomics episode about this. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-scr...

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

#514
post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Those are incredibly arbitrary labels and you either know that or should know that 2) The US drone program regularly targets first aid personnel and rescuers.[0] [0] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2012-02-04/cia...

What does nr. 2 have to do with anything? The fact that the US kills civilians doesn't make this more ethical.

Because the original implication was that state actors don't target civilians.

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

#518
When I finished my studies I was sold as a trainer for Microsoft training When I was assigned a course, I had about 2 days to a week to discover the technology and prepare the course. Often I didn't even know the name of the technology I was supposed to be an expert on.

When you looked at the official conditions of the training, you had to have 10 years of experience just to have the right to follow it, I was supposed to have passed diplomas to have the right to line up. I finally realized that my company had to produce fake degrees with a fake resume or I must have been 10 years older developpers.

It is obvious afterwards that employees, or even managers of training centers were in the scheme, there is indeed in my country a law that obliges companies to spend money in training every year. The company was doing this scheme on a large scale, we were 40 The worst part was that most of my colleagues were younger trainees than me, only three or four of us were officially employed and had real diplomas, so we were sent to the most difficult cases.

The advice we received was to be aggressive with the students to prevent them from asking too many questions, to be impeccably dressed and to be "handsome". It was not easy to teach to 15 years older So that my classes were not too pathetic and to make a minimum illusion I often prepared my courses the day before until 5 o'clock in the morning.

The trainees who gave the training deemed easier were recruited on the line, preferably if they were foreign, they were sent to give a test training and if it went badly they were sent back on the spot without remuneration. I don't know how or why, but I did about nine months of this before I left.

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

#519
post #196

Not a programmer at the time, but a system administrator. I won't mention the company. This was 2011-2012 -ish. We hosted dedicated servers and most of the time, they were mostly Plesk or cPanel servers run by people selling email and or web hosting to hundreds of clients from a single server. This one time a client joins the network, buys a server from us, and migrates from Rackspace. We wondered why he'd move from…

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

#520
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s great. Just as long as you reward me for watching an ad as opposed to making them a forced part of the experience. E.g. watching an ad to double my score/gems, sure. Making me watch an ad after every level before I can continue, hell no, that’s an instant uninstall.

As a hypothetical since I'm working on a game that may use this, how would you feel about the following? For a multiplayer .io-style game, you get a score per level, and a cumulative score. The top few players by cumulative score are shown to everyone and celebrated, etc. If you ever get zero points in a level though, you'll lose your cumulative score - unless you watch a video ad. Is that acceptable, or does it feel…

In general, I think I'm happier with being rewarded for watching an ad, than being punished for not doing it.

I'm not a compulsive player either, so in the described situation I'd probably just end up with a permanent score of 0 while having some fun playing.

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