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Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#111

Post by ajross »

potato3732842 wrote: post #13
comrade1234 wrote: post #6

I was working with someone on a large government project. At the beginning I told him that we cannot pad our hours at the end of the year to run the contract out and then make up for it with extra hours in the next year like we do with business clients because it is illegal and further because it's a $1M+ contract could lead to prison. Of course I found out that he was going into our billing software and adding hours…

You had record of your correspondance with the lawyer. All you had to do was report it to the liaison and keep punching the clock. Unless you were getting paid more because of the overages the enforcers dgaf about you.

> the enforcers dgaf about you.

This is the attitude that lands otherwise-normal-seeming people in jail. They dgaf about you until they do. Maybe the prosecutor needs an easy win. Maybe they have a wealthy patron you offended. You don't know. And casual cheating becomes criminal very quickly.

Charlie Javice, to get back to the core subject, seemed to genuinely think she was on the right side of the line. All she was doing was faking some numbers for investors, right? Nine times out of ten, investors have already bet on the company and want to see it do well, and even if they catch a founder fibbing are likely to see more value in suffering along with it than in blowing it up.

Except in this case the investor was JP Morgan, not an incubator, and they had the prosecutor in the rolodex.

Startup culture, our culture right here, absolutely encourages cheating. And it doesn't give you a clean instruction manual to figure out how to stay out of jail, because there isn't one. The point above, while technically about government contracting, is absolutely of a piece with the same dysfunction. I think a lot of people in our world need to spend a little more time in introspection.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#112

Post by [deleted] »

array_key_first wrote: post #98
OskarS wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. Your manager is certainly culpable, but if you act against the law, you are culpable as well. The exception is if you fear literal physical violence against you or others, or are being blackmailed or…

I think, for most people, getting the shit beaten out of them is a preferable outcome to losing their job. For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc. This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enou…

[deleted]

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#113

Post by muzani »

callc wrote: post #109
muzani wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have plenty of difficulty just following the Agile Manifesto.

The agile manifesto is far from a set of ethics that if you disagree with you can’t help but sound like the bad guy. For example, try disagreeing with the statement “SWEs should take reasonable effort to protect user data”

That's article 32 of the GDPR. It also includes protection from social engineering.

In all honesty, I haven't checked if it's true, but you can use AI to find a foreign law that fits and cite it word for word.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#114

Post by jcz_nz »

In 2010 WellPoint was found to be automatically targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext. Angela Braly was the CEO at the time, now at ExxonMobile. WellPoint was the second largest health insurer in the US at the time. This required a lot of business analysis and software development - and people had to realize what this code was doing. I’m guessing bonuses were paid on the back of the “savings” this generated.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#115

Post by jcz_nz »

jcz_nz wrote: post #114

In 2010 WellPoint was found to be automatically targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext. Angela Braly was the CEO at the time, now at ExxonMobile. WellPoint was the second largest health insurer in the US at the time. This required a lot of business analysis and software development - and people had to realize what this code was doing. I’m guessing bonuses were pai…

At the very least, these folks need to have their names permanently attached to this atrocity. These weren’t decisions made by “a corporation” - these people sat across a meeting room table and actually concluded that targeting breast cancer patients was an acceptable means to an end.

Lori A. Beer was the CIO at the time. Now at JP Morgan.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#116

Post by DennisP »

array_key_first wrote: post #98
OskarS wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. Your manager is certainly culpable, but if you act against the law, you are culpable as well. The exception is if you fear literal physical violence against you or others, or are being blackmailed or…

I think, for most people, getting the shit beaten out of them is a preferable outcome to losing their job. For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc. This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enou…

The cases in the article were software engineers in the US, and at FTX. Two were engineering directors and the third was a senior engineer. If any of them didn't have plenty of emergency funds set aside, they should have seriously rethought their spending.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#117

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

amelius wrote: post #27
sltr wrote: post #3

Software developers should sign a code of ethics, like other professions do and then cite it when asked to do unscrupulous things. This would work for activities that aren't illegal but still unethical, like defaulting user privacy choices to open/public. Citing professional organizations like ACM or IEEE would deter retaliation.

Yes, the Hippocratic Oath works quite well even if it has no legal underpinnings, so why not use the same idea for developers? Indeed ACM and IEEE could draft one.

Casual of research shows that the ACM's Code of Ethics can be traced back to its Guidelines for Professional Conduct in Information Processing dating back to 1966 (https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics/1966-acm-code) and the IEEE's Code of Ethics can be traced back to a precursor organization's Code of Professional Conduct dating to 1912.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#118

Post by testing22321 »

jcz_nz wrote: post #115
jcz_nz wrote: post #114

In 2010 WellPoint was found to be automatically targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext. Angela Braly was the CEO at the time, now at ExxonMobile. WellPoint was the second largest health insurer in the US at the time. This required a lot of business analysis and software development - and people had to realize what this code was doing. I’m guessing bonuses were pai…

At the very least, these folks need to have their names permanently attached to this atrocity. These weren’t decisions made by “a corporation” - these people sat across a meeting room table and actually concluded that targeting breast cancer patients was an acceptable means to an end. Lori A. Beer was the CIO at the time. Now at JP Morgan.

Na, just ban all of them and all their families from ever having health insurance again so they can suffer the same fate they doomed others too intentionally . Make an example and all that.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#119

Post by testing22321 »

array_key_first wrote: post #98
OskarS wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. Your manager is certainly culpable, but if you act against the law, you are culpable as well. The exception is if you fear literal physical violence against you or others, or are being blackmailed or…

I think, for most people, getting the shit beaten out of them is a preferable outcome to losing their job. For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc. This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enou…

That may be true in the US, but very far from reality in countries that have universal healthcare and a strong social safety net.

Re: Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

#120

Post by bobthepanda »

muzani wrote: post #113
callc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The agile manifesto is far from a set of ethics that if you disagree with you can’t help but sound like the bad guy. For example, try disagreeing with the statement “SWEs should take reasonable effort to protect user data”

That's article 32 of the GDPR. It also includes protection from social engineering. In all honesty, I haven't checked if it's true, but you can use AI to find a foreign law that fits and cite it word for word.

AI can, and will, hallucinate legal cases and laws to make you happy. This happened pretty quickly after ChatGPT was introduced into the world: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-f...
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