Inspired by Software that helps, except I disagree with Bertil's implicit assertion that all software is helpful in the long run :) The development of the atomic bomb is the classic example of how diffusion of responsibility through a team and/or management structure helps people rationalize working on all kinds of stuff. Likely none of us have reached the ethical depths plumbed by Oppenheimer and his team, but what aren't you proud of?
I worked in advertising for a few years, making it easier to waste paper and annoy people worldwide with those mailers from car dealerships you throw away without looking at. I'm never working in advertising again.
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Built up an administration framework for a customer route back. Was as of late requested to keep up/include highlights. I didn't compose tests in those days, no
Best Custom Logo Design Company doubt about it each code change is a bomb holding on to detonate
While I understand what you are asking, I take issue with the creation of the atomic bomb as "plumbing the ethical depths". More like an ethical gray area, IMHO. Developing the atomic bomb is only unethical if you are sure that you are the only team capable of completing the task. German and Soviet scientists/politicians of the time were fully willing and capable of developing similar weapons.
At the time of the Manhattan Project, the scientists involved must have assumed that the Nazis were working along similar lines, and allowing Hitler to have sole possession of nuclear weapon would hardly be the ethical choice. Stalin obtained nuclear weapons shortly after the US, and most historians would agree that it was fortunate that a democratic country obtained nuclear weapons before a murderous dictator did so.
The decision to drop nuclear weapons on Japan is more problematic, but there is a good argument to be made that this decision saved 100,000 US troops and millions of Japanese civilians. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed fewer people than the firebombing of Tokyo, and you have to remember that the US had seen the Japanese fight to the last man (civilians included), on several islands leading up to the decision to use nukes.
I am currently working on deploying cameras in my office to analyze "work office behavior" and my company plans to selll this project if it is sucessfull. I feel like big brother.
That would be because you essentially are, in this scenario; one panopticon is much like another. What are the positive reasons you're going along with it in spite of your misgivings?
All in all it's in fact, the most interesting project in my company but currently I am second guessing if it's a good choice. I'd like to work on something similar but with a more positive impact.
My first dev job, nearly two years ago, was for a little french online payment provider. Basically, and even if that was not the part that was proudly displayed on the "customer" part of the website, the company was making money on payment transaction thanks to internet gambling, fortune telling sms and money laundering... great !
Hopefully I was a total beginner (still am, a little) with no guidance so my work there was never used, I left this job after only 7 month.
In my case, working in a project payed with public money and knowing that It would be thown away in a year. It wasn't my fault but we all knew that we were running a project with no future due to political corruption
As a new developer I added third-party DRM to a B2B client program, despite personal reservations about DRM I had at the time. It ended up causing some issues, either due to its requirement to phone home, or due to the way the DRM program modified the distributed binaries. Management eventually decided that it was better to distribute this program sans-DRM for free as a way to generate demand for a paid data service we provided.
I worked on a book about Brexit, written by one of the UK's most prominent critics of the EU. Ergo, Brexit is partly my fault.
A lot of programmers like to pretend that there are no politics or power hierarchies involved in the products we build, and once they are built that we are no longer responsible for how they get used or by whom.
I used to write software that enabled telecommunications companies to be CALEA compliant, i.e. allowed them to gather call records, voicemails, IP addresses, cell tower records, and text message records from mobile subscribers. While there were many cases where the usage of this software was valid, I believe it was possible for authorized parties and law enforcement to misuse the software for personal uses.
Additionally, I have installed deep packet inspection devices to ISP edge routers for subscriber traffic analysis, though those devices were really just used to see how much of a provider's traffic was being used to watch porn (it's a lot) and were not geared towards analyzing any particular user's activities.
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