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.
Oldest comments (43)
I saw @calebthompson give a talk about working on cellular triangulation technology that can help the military track and kill people.
It was never pitched as such, the developers were just given exciting math problems to solve, but that was its ultimate purpose.
I don’t have much in my own past to offer. But we will need to avoid dark temptations in the future of dev.to. Many platforms turn awful over time and prey on the users. Trying to ensure that doesn’t happen here.
This reminded me of an article (unfortunately in Italian) that I read yesterday about the new chief of Mossad that created an operation in which the various actors involved (killers included) didn't know they were part of a Mossad operation.
Sell out early and sell out often. Urgency kills ethics every time.
Watched a video yesterday on new research that creates photo realistic videos. It's really scary how if this is perfected, it could end the usage of videos as evidence.
Developed a management system for a client way back. Was recently asked to maintain/add features. I didn't write tests back then, so yeah, every code change is a bomb waiting to explode.
Been there!
The silly thing is that even knowing how things can get horribly wrong, I just can't find the discipline to write tests for legacy code. I strictly subscribe to TDD for new projects though.
I wrote content generation software that could be used by unscrupulous internet marketing types to spam blogs and forums for SEO purposes. I pulled the plug on it because I didn't like how it was being used.
In my opinion, the software behind any social media (if not handled carefully) would be an atomic bomb!
It starts off as something very useful that connects people globally but then explodes & spreads like a wildfire, i.e: The recent case of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica
Based on Facebook’s entire history, which showed pretty consistent contempt for the users, Cambridge Analytica hardly seems like a coincidence or accident. It’s exactly what they built towards.
I always felt that it was just me who thought Mark Zuckerberg must be as haughty as depicted in The Social Network but from your statement, I believe I'm not the only one :D
I remember first using Facebook's Graph API a couple years back. I only wanted to get engagement data (shares, likes, comments) for posts on a given page. I checked the documentation to see how often I could hit it within the rate limit.
The docs said we were allotted 2,000 calls per user per day.
One page like = one user.
Any medium-sized page or app which was so inclined could have (and probably did) stockpile loads of data.
The shocking thing about Facebook isn't they doled out everyone's data, it's that they did it for free.
I currently write UI for a TV provider. It sometimes feels like our ultimate goal is to waste the more time and money as possible for the end-user.
Can confirm it feels that way from the user side of things.
How is this? This can’t possibly make anyone happy about their work. Does anyone come into the office excited about today’s work?
Well, I'll speak for my colleague, but overall:
Here's the thing, we like UI/UX development and we're good at it. Compare to web, TV has interesting challenges and unique features. In the end, we ship very nice UI, that users should like to use.
But, that's still true that TV stay a time waster.
ps: but adding the nth feature to try to catch-up with Netflix hegemony, is sad at best.
Ah okay, I was thinking about bleaker elements of TV technical development. Your part of things seems like decent or neutral overall work and it’s probably best that it’s done by people with care for the experience.
Overall, I've been lucky enough to dictate terms on who I'll work for and what I'll work on. Notionally, I've had less in the way of flexibility in decision-making since getting married (since consequences of decisions-of-principle effect more than just me). However, that was offset by having built a work-reputation that meant that people haven't typically wanted to ask me to violate my principles and/or I've had "outs" if I needed to demure.
All I can say is, my ability to look myself in the mirror has been greatly aided by not having gotten married early.
My last bombs were decomisioned a few years ago, taken out of production. Nothing fancy just bad code as a junior 😀.
Spent two years working on a web platform for multi-level marketing companies. MLMs are, by and large, get-rich-quick schemes that sell McGuffins--the product doesn't matter as long as the sales rep can claim it will cure you of psoriasis, loneliness, poverty, ennui, or unattractiveness. They're very popular around here.
Ultimately I rationalized that not all of our clients were that bad. And the company was chock-full of really brilliant, wonderful people. And hey, it wasn't a cigarette factory. But I was always uncomfortable with what our clients were doing.
Now I work on products that help hospitals save money, hopefully by providing more effective care to patients. I'm sure the company has opportunities to compromise ethically, but for the most part we try to leave those decisions to our clients. It's not a perfect job but I feel better about myself now that I work in a field with clear ethical standards, like the Hippocratic oath.
This reminds me of some of my earlier work that I forgot about when first trying to answer the question.
I ultimately didn’t take the work, but I remember being asked to help with MLM-type stuff when I was doing web dev consulting in college.
The whole thing was just so weird. I’ve never felt comfortable blindly implementing some scheme.
I used to use over-the-counter maximum strength placebo.
But I found that wasn't helping my psoriasis, loneliness, poverty, ennui, and unattractiveness.
Now I'm using prescription placebo. Sure, it costs more, but its worth it!
(I kid! I kid!)
I once worked on a "modernization" program that turned out to be anything but modern. Was it more modern than what the customer had? Sure, but we were using an 8 year old release of Qt, a C++ language standard from when I was in college, and a version of CentOS that reached end of life support 5 months after the project was completed. It's on my resume, but I'm not proud of it.
My first professional tech job was writing ad hoc queries, uploading data, and maintaining software for a company that handled foreclosure claims on behalf of national bank chains.
Basically, banks cashing out on insurance from FNMA, FHLMC, and FHA on loans signed before the crash that, to an unknown extent, may have been predatory.
At one of my jobs my main project was doing web-scraping on a bunch of US states' websites, gathering business record data. Which one could argue should have been public domain anyways. The only qualm I had was we were shuttling all our traffic through TOR so the websites wouldn't block our IP address. Surprisingly only a few states at the time actually had APIs for collecting this data.
I've had several ideas over the years which I felt pretty certain would get me rich if pursued, but would ultimately be a blight upon the world. These were from the darker parts of my mind. Out of principle, I never implemented any of those ideas. I didn't even let them leave the confines of my brainpan for fear that someone else might. Fortunately I have forgotten most of them by now.
For work that I've actually done over the years, I can't point to anything that makes me feel like a destroyer of worlds. (I certainly can point to some horrendously bad code, but that is different.) I make apps/systems for businesses. So far they have been made in good faith, to make everyone's lives easier. Sometimes they are used in ways which I dislike. Mostly that is organizational unhealthiness rather than maliciousness.
I would like my work to have a positive impact, of course. But at the end of the day, I am a tool-maker. Tools are not inherently positive or negative, until they make it into someone's hands. So for me, the far more important consideration is the whether the organization itself is making a positive impact.
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.
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.
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