Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

There’s a good quote that goes something like “the law treats all men equally: the rich man and the poor man are punished the same for stealing bread to feed their family.”

i have never worked in an office environment where people didn’t routinely unwind for a couple minutes. the way we’re treated in an office setting vs those outside an office is in a lot of ways disturbing. a couple years ago my friends dad lost his job of 25 years because he was caught sneaking around a corner, out of eyesight of his foreman, to eat a candy bar. he had been warned about these “unauthorized” snack breaks in the past.

this idea is entirely foreign to any of us who sit at a computer coding or doing whatever desk job that sometimes we don’t stop to think of how ludicrous some workers are treated—my entire post college career, if i wanted to eat a candy bar, i just ate it.

were a decision to come down in just about any office full of engineers which said “unless authorized, you cannot drink or eat anything. if any unauthorized stoppage of typing occurs, there will be consequences.” people would be justifiably outraged.

but they’d be “catching” “unauthorized” non-typers.

the idea that someone somewhere decided to put trackers on human beings is wild.

But the agency I was working for was so busy, and we were cranking out code at such a rate, that after a while I stopped thinking about exactly who the clients were. We did a lot of work for religious and political organisations, gambling industry lobbying groups etc. "Charities" in the loosest sense.

Before long it became clear that I'd used my talents to help organisations whose values were directly against mine (I'm a strong supporter of LGBT rights for example, on which the Catholic church has a poor record.)

The main things I learned as a junior dev were:

* Non-profit clients aren't necessarily more ethical than business clients, it's naive to assume this is the case

* Be careful when taking on a high volume of client projects. It's hard to track exactly what their values are, and you might accidentally end up enriching an organisation which hates your guts

* Track your personal values carefully and regularly check if you're living up to them at work

Next up was a table to help workers move large objects with hydraulic movement and pins to hold the material in place via compressed air activation, and all the associated limit switches electronic eyes etc. cool enough.

Then the big leagues, a 300k (17 years ago) A-B (Allen-Bradley) robotic arm in an auto parts plant. Day 3 inside / outside / on top of the cage, I become aware of a number of people standing behind the yellow line staring at me, later cursing me, one threw some crumpled paper at me… I’m asking the plant foreman wtf is with those guys. He says well as soon as your robot works they’re all laid off. I left that day and never went back. Someone finished programming and set up I’m sure, I could care less, I didn’t. I thought one day I’ll get stabbed in the parking lot.

I realize that my automation didn’t take jobs away from society, I didn’t do anything evil. Those jobs would just move and hopefully spawn better jobs in the community (medium to long term). But in that small short term microeconomic moment, there were real consequences, and I was the face of them. I was not happy, I changed careers that exact day.