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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?

#71

Post by nharada »

3pt14159 wrote: post #41

I suspect you're not going to get many personal stories here because it would be self-incriminating. But I have a couple from some people I know in tech. 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 h…

> Yes it's wrong, but what do I know? I just design electronic circuits.

This outlook, along with "well if I don't do it someone else will anyway", is why tech workers are quickly becoming the new bankers in the view of the public.

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

#72

Post by diamondo25 »

Our crappy ActiveX object was made for the windows xp era. When it started to glitch, my boss told me to 'just disable UAC' on our customers pcs (instead of fixing the issues). Did not do it and instead told him what to fix and fix some things myself...

Another one is installing basically trackware on the website, from an external party, that recorded certain input fields so it could mail you later when you didnt buy the product...

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

#73

Post by amelius »

nharada wrote: post #71
3pt14159 wrote: post #41

I suspect you're not going to get many personal stories here because it would be self-incriminating. But I have a couple from some people I know in tech. 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 h…

> Yes it's wrong, but what do I know? I just design electronic circuits. This outlook, along with "well if I don't do it someone else will anyway", is why tech workers are quickly becoming the new bankers in the view of the public.

Yeah, some hackers wear white hats, others wear black hats, and then there are those who wear paper bags over their heads.

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

#74

Post by AndrewKemendo »

beaker52 wrote: post #66

I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of no further bids. Each bid would increase the final price by 1 pence/cent, but each bid would cost 50 pence/cents. You could "win" a $20,000 car for $500.37 and the house would have taken 50,037*50 cents. It might be okay if that was it -- but I was asked to cod…

Is that even legal?

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

#75

Post by VLM »

Interesting the comments are all "The companies business model sucked" and nothing from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_ethics

Also WRT ageism and changing ethics over time, "we don't have automated testing infrastructure" was BAU in the 80s/90s yet today would be an ethical WTF moment.

Something that probably still happens today is the old "address ... economic .. issues related to work projects" Pointing out this thing is never going to run a net profit just means I'll get downsized first; everyone who's numerate could run the numbers if they wanted to and they're all theoretically responsible adults at the meeting table, so ... If you mean address the fundamental economic issue, as in make sure my resume is updated while avoiding a meaningless fight with execs, sure...

Oh and edited to add, WRT taking responsibility, a couple of times I've optimized and improved processes to the point its a one line shell script wrapping a grep or echo and that's kinda queasy taking responsibility for "writing" that. Replace half the job responsibilities (and presumably employee slots) of a department with a one line sql query in a cronjob, that kind of thing.

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

#77

Post by akudha »

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 test a bit (no more than an afternoon worth of effort) and charge a high fee for it.

We had a project once for conversion (not getting into details). My team found a tool online. Boss bought it, finished the entire project in one day. Boss bills for month (which was the original estimate), puts the team to work on another project for the next 29 days, gets paid for that too. The only decent thing in this story is that we didn't know before the quote, that such a tool was available. Some would say this is smart way to do business, it felt shitty for me though.

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

#78

Post by vidanay »

Didn't do it, but I was asked to "pre-package" the results of a piece of test equipment. Basically, we didn't have a clue what we were doing, and we were in way over our heads on the project. The customer was coming in to do the final approval and we were nowhere near complete. The boss told me to make sure the test results matched the specification "no matter what".

I quit instead.

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

#79

Post by nyolfen »

INeedToGetOut wrote: post #60

I live in a dictatorial country with 90%+ of the tech, industrial, and service sector owned directly by the president's family. So I kinda feel like whatever work I take on in this country is evil in one way or another. I haven't had to hack independent media agencies and opposition parties yet and I plan to keep it that way.

can you give us the continent at least? ;)

i have a couple of guesses.

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

#80

Post by digianarchist »

beaker52 wrote: post #66

I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of no further bids. Each bid would increase the final price by 1 pence/cent, but each bid would cost 50 pence/cents. You could "win" a $20,000 car for $500.37 and the house would have taken 50,037*50 cents. It might be okay if that was it -- but I was asked to cod…

I worked on a system like that but it was run by a charity so whilst unethical at least somebody wasn't profiting from it.
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