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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?

#321

Post by himlion »

ibudiallo wrote: post #234
iamleppert wrote: post #209

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…

hmmmm, you and I need to have a little talk... Edit: Since I am getting downvoted, I will just add context -> https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me I was on the other end of a similar system.

I thought parent post was a clever reference to your post. On the other hand, somebody has to make these systems of course.

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

#322

Post by CPUstring »

spo81rty wrote: post #194

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.

That's just arbitrage, right? If you're able to sell them at higher prices, the venue should've done it themselves.

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

#323

Post by xauronx »

throwaway14b141 wrote: post #18

Took liberties with our interpretation of a third party TOS so that we could utilize a product. I surfaced this to leadership when I realized we were not in compliance, but we kept the outcome of what we needed from it, although we did cease to use the tool. I chose less career friction over fighting further.

Saving data from something like google places API?

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

#324

Post by driverdan »

throwawaymath wrote: post #25

I've done a lot of work involving scraping, data analysis and reversing private API access from mobile applications. A lot of this work is legally defensible (if you do it correctly) and not particularly unethical. After doing a bunch of this type of work I started to accrue subject matter expertise in the area that led other companies to come to me with more questionable projects in mind. I turned down many of these…

What's wrong with allowing customers to fetch their own data from their bank? I hold the opposite point of view, that banks withholding information from their customers is unethical.

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

#325

Post by xauronx »

throwaway0255 wrote: post #8

I 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…

That’s how consulting usually works. You scope out stories and commit to the number of stories in a sprint. Even if you wanted to add more to the sprint you’d just mess up the allocated time of QA and add more stuff for the dev ops team. That’s why more than one person (and people who know the system) should be giving estimates.

Otherwise, if it takes half the time use the other half to test, or train yourself to be better at your job. IMO

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

#326

Post by calabin »

During the Ashley Madison incident, a partner and I put up what was either the first or one of the first online tools for checking to see if a particular email address or phone number had been exposed.

I'm still not sure whether or not that was net good/bad. I'm sure that the tool has caused some real familial stress. We could fall back on the "well if not us someone else would have" but that's a cop-out.

Our site was checkashleymadison.com. Later on we got rid of the domain. We had a ton of interest from advertisers, but we thought it best not to try and make money off of the exposition of others. Overall we took in something like 1.2mm uniques over 24 hours. It was a pretty crazy day, and my first time speaking with the media. Looking back, I'm glad that I didn't say anything too dumb.

Originally we intended to stay anonymous, but I forgot to tell a The Hill reporter of that wish and my name was published. After that I spoke on the record to whatever journalists were still interested.

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

#327

Post by scarface74 »

Rjevski wrote: post #243
austhrow743 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about conning or no value in the definition of telemarketing. It's just outbound sales. Some of it is scams, plenty isn't.

I disagree. You wouldn’t need “outbound sales” if you had a product that people wanted. They would be calling you with their wallets open if it was the case. You only need outbound sales/scammers if you have a product that you think that people need even though they’ve been living without just fine for ages. > Some of it is scams, plenty isn't. Please give me some examples of how some are scams but plenty are not. Fr…

How is it an innocent victim? Every company that I’ve worked for that sold B2B software had salespeople that had “regions” they sold into to get contracts. How are they anything but glorified telemarketers? I doubt any of our customers were “scammed” into buying services that cost tens of thousands a year.

While I’ve never bought anything from a telemarketer, it doesn’t mean that thier product is not legit.

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

#328

Post by austhrow743 »

Rjevski wrote: post #296
austhrow743 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't omniscient. People at best look for known unknowns, but not unknown unknowns. Particularly when it comes to tech, that covers a very broad area of things that they don't know are possible. The idea that if you need to tell people about it for them to know about it and potentially buy it, then the offer is a scam, is baffling to me. As for inbound leads, their existence doesn't stop outbound sales being…

People are not yet omniscient, I agree. But lately there's this wonderful new tool called the Internet which allows people to become omniscient as far as product discovery is concerned. If you have a product that solves problem X, make a website, blog posts, send samples to journalists for reviews, etc about how your product solves problem X, and let search engines & organic growth do the rest. > You're just arguing…

I'm definitely getting the impression that you're just asserting that outbound sales is "bad" in some general sense rather than specifically that its use means the business is a scam.

Microsoft has one of the highest quality sales teams there is. Many of which are outbound focused. Do you consider Microsoft products to be scams?

Most (all?) silicon Valley b2b startups utilise outbound sales heavily. /r/sales is full of people either in or looking to get in to saas. It's basically only behind medical devices in preferred products to sell as a salesperson right now. Do you believe the majority of b2b software companies are scams?

If so, what is a scam to you?

Sorry for the clarification request, and I will assume good faith if you get back with a reasonable answer, but I just can't see how the lines of argument you're putting forward pertain to your original assertion.

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

#329

Post by puzzle »

powvans wrote: post #201

I helped build Grindr, which of course I don't think was unethical. But I've been surprised by some people's reaction to it. It generally comes up in some conversation where someone asks "what have you worked on that I might have heard of?" Occasionally they follow up with (paraphrasing) "how do you sleep at night?"

You're not a current or former Google employee, are you? There's the legend of the engineer who was a Grindr user and helped them to scale their code (it ran on App Engine, at least at the time).

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

#330

Post by movedx »

typpo wrote: post #310
movedx wrote: 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…

UKFast is a UK-based web host whose CEO has received an MBE. Probably not that many other web host CEOs with an award from the Queen.

;-)
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