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

Did a project using Cold Fusion.

I work for Diane Greene.

I once got pulled into an arbitration hearing to explain how certain code functions operated. While not necessarily unethical it was a moral moment because I knew the inquiry came with the loaded intent to twist whatever explanation I gave into the worst possible extreme.

Sure enough that's exactly what happened and a really hard working and honest developer lost their job so an executive could save face.

Left that company a month later but I still feel horrible

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 anything. This was just a few weeks into my career.

I’m surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often, to be honest. The people handling the business and writing the checks never seem to know anything about software. You could probably get away with telling them just about anything.

I’ve only ever seen it happen once, though. Software industry has been pretty honest in my experience (at least as far as billing goes...)

While working at a services / consulting company, I've been privy to cases where we put our own interests over the client's, essentially getting them to pay us to screw them over.