Implemented APIs for clients that were based on scraping data from other competitor sites that did not give permission, it's some kind of service hi-jacking. Similarly, implemented some clone sites that just rip off other people's work #zuckerberging Some bug bounties ask pentesters not to hit their production servers hard with automated tools... I've ignored this to find some bugs in production servers on occasion.
Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
81–90 of 520 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#82Not 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…
i wouldn't sweat it, a lot of economic activity is just information arbitrage.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#83I 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.
I wonder what the percent of that unethical charity's income was spent on its stated mission? Many charities are just fronts for marketing companies with super high salaries and almost none of the money goes to what the donors would expect.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#84I 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.
Ditto, in my case the site was like this, wasn't itself a non-profit organization, but said proceeds from it would go to the specified NPOs... but that never actually happened as far as I know.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#85I 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…
You missed out. You could’ve rigged it so you could easily win yourself.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#86As a gentle satire of a much-hated London-based design company we were working with during a project for a major brand, I added something called 'disco mode' to the customer's site if you crafted the correct query string. It progressively added more and more random jQuery effects to the page on a timer, while the customer's logo jumped to a beat.
How did you get that past code review?
It's cute that you think every company, even the kind that did brochureware sites for brands more than 10 years ago, does code review.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#87I was once assigned a task that had been estimated at 8 hours of development time, but only required the modification of a single line of code. I finished it in 5 minutes. My boss asked what happened, I told him, and he told me to revert the code, work on other tasks, and redo it at the end of the day so he could bill for 8 hours (in addition to billing for the other tasks I worked on). I did it and didn’t say anythi…
Your mistake was getting it done too quickly. I hope you learned to manage your time better for future endeavors.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#88I did some contract work for an online “payday loan” company for a bit. It didn’t take me long to realize I was ashamed of working with such a terrible industry, but my professionalism kept me there until I finished the job. Definitely a low point.
Payday loans are bad but they are not that unethical. The alternative option for people reliant on payday loans are actual loan sharks, which will turn out a lot worse for the debtor. So don’t be so hard on yourself. I think it would be difficult, but possible to run an ethical payday loan company that focuses on building people up and out of long term debt.
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Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#89In my first job out of college i worked at a big consulting company on a project at a company that used interwoven teamsite cms. Teamsite was a cms written in Perl, JavaScript, and Java with lots of xml sprinkled in. It was a horrible system. I blogged about it on my personal blog. All the posts were about how to solve issues I had using it. This was before stack overflow. After I had about 10 such posts I wrote a po…
I like how you dropped the name of the "big consulting company" in the end, there.
Yeah that was a mistake on my part, but you can easily find it on my resume anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
#90Not 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…
For the second part, I dont think about it as you sold a month of work. You just agreed with a customer that this task is worth X amount of money. If you managed to do it in one hour, that's just good business.