[HN Gopher] Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what t...
___________________________________________________________________
Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software
engineers did
Author : bschne
Score : 488 points
Date : 2025-10-02 08:51 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
| Rygian wrote:
| > If you take one lesson from this, it's that you can always say
| no.
|
| I fully understand why this is true, but it seems to ignore any
| retaliative measures that the management could take against the
| person who says no.
|
| With the benefit of hindsight, any such retaliation would be
| weaker than ending up in an orange suit. But the person has to
| find the guts to say "no" without that hindsight.
| OskarS wrote:
| 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 something, then of
| course you are being coerced and have no choice. But "losing
| your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my
| opinion.
|
| Not saying it's easy, it's a horrible situation to be put in
| and I have huge amounts of sympathy for a person who has to
| experience this. No one is perfect and act with faultless
| ethics at all times. But hard or not, it is your duty as a
| citizen not to violate the law.
| overscore wrote:
| > 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.
|
| When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for
| your family are dependent on your income, you may find
| yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will
| risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and
| that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream
| outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic
| system rather than the individual who is acting immorally.
|
| > The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it.
|
| This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there
| are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only
| excusable, it's the only moral action.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare
| for your family are dependent on your income, you may find
| yourself facing very difficult decisions
|
| This is the time when your ethics are tested. Anyone can do
| the right thing when they're getting paid for it.
| tpoacher wrote:
| There's a nice Jordan Peterson quote:
|
| > There was a lesson to learn from the holocaust. We're
| always reminded that: "Never forget, we've learned our
| lesson." "What was the lesson?" That's the question. The
| lesson is, "You're the Nazi". No-one wants to learn that;
| If you were there, that would have been you. You might
| think "Well, I'd be Oskar Schindler and I'd be rescuing
| the Jews." It's like, no, afraid not. You'd at least not
| be saying anything. And you might also be actively
| participating. You might also enjoy it.
|
| Hindsight theoretical morality is very different from
| experience on the ground, where peer pressure, stress,
| uncertainty, exploding situations and fog of war come
| into the mix.
| DennisP wrote:
| Seems like a better lesson would be "don't be the Nazi."
|
| It's not like it's impossible. The Nazis arrested 800,000
| Germans for active resistance activities, and several
| hundred thousand Germans deserted the military, many of
| those defecting to the Allies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism
|
| It wasn't a huge percentage, but we don't know how many
| actively resisted without getting caught, or resisted in
| more passive ways. And that was resistance against the
| Nazis, who had no qualms about killing resistors. Risking
| or quitting your job to not only do what's right, but
| _avoid_ getting in trouble with your government, isn 't
| in the same ballpark.
| rurban wrote:
| The figure of German soldiers deaths has an estimation of
| 50% suicides.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to
| think you're the Nazi. What change is he trying to effect
| in our culture, and how does that belief support his
| desire? Rhetoric always aims to effect some change in the
| attitude of the listener, and never without some benefit
| of the speaker.
| bjt wrote:
| > You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to
| think you're the Nazi. What change is he trying to effect
| in our culture, and how does that belief support his
| desire? Rhetoric always aims to effect some change in the
| attitude of the listener, and never without some benefit
| of the speaker.
|
| What benefit do you think he's trying to get from it? I'm
| honestly trying to figure out the nefarious angle and
| coming up blank.
|
| It seems to me like a very similar sentiment to that
| great "are we the baddies?" sketch from Mitchell and
| Webb. [1] I see both as an exercise in moral humility.
|
| See the Milgram experiment, or the Asch experiment. Most
| people _do_ cave to pressure from authorities and the
| group. Everybody believes they 're they exception.
| Statistically, most of them are wrong.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
| justinclift wrote:
| > You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to
| think ...
|
| What's your take on that?
| sethammons wrote:
| Not that person but the my take on their take is that
| Peterson is greasing you up to accept more authoritarian
| control since he puts you in the in-group of the
| oppressors to ease the societal drift.
|
| I don't necessarily agree. I think he is pointing out
| that people morally grandstand and the majority will not
| act out how they say they would.
| immibis wrote:
| Note that in the quote, he is, himself, moral
| grandstanding.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I thought the lesson was to not base your morality and
| what you are willing to do on the laws, because they can
| change at a whim. And for the democratic politicians,
| don't play with fire and take problems seriously.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Nah. I've been in the exact situation you describe and
| it's pretty obvious tbh. Loss of a job is a temporary
| setback. Being locked up in a jail is a permanent one.
| cess11 wrote:
| Right, saying outright that Thoreau was wrong and also that
| pretty much every famous person who took him to heart was
| wrong too is a rather strong position to take and likely
| very, very hard to defend.
|
| Or, for a more obscure example, that Antigone should just
| have said 'yes daddy' and left it at that with the play
| ending somewhere in the initial conversation with Ismene.
| barney54 wrote:
| It is not moral to break the law in the furtherance of
| fraud. That's the point.
| thyristan wrote:
| But if the fraud secures the livelyhood of $bignum
| children and they would starve without their parents
| committing that fraud?
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I think my son would rather have me in his life than have
| me in jail.
| OskarS wrote:
| We're not talking about living in a totalitarian state and
| breaking the law by aiding the resistance here. The cases
| in the article is like committing financial fraud or faking
| customer data. And then, yeah, I do think there is no
| excuse for going along with it, you have a duty as a member
| of society not to do such things, even if it costs your
| your job. It's not easy, and as I said I have enormous
| sympathy for a person in this position, but there is a
| clear right thing to do, and you have an obligation to act
| accordingly.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| To get rich at your software startup is not one of the
| situations where you have a moral obligation to break the
| law. None of these people were stealing bread from the rich
| to feed their children.
| nkrisc wrote:
| As a parent, I would risk destitution over going to prison
| every single time. I don't even have to think about it.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| At least in the case of engineers, we're talking about
| highly compensated people. You should have a solid
| emergency fund put together within a few months of starting
| your career. From there, it's on you to not put yourself
| into an economically precarious position. People who are
| making multiples of the median household don't have
| food/shelter as an excuse.
|
| Not that it's much of an excuse for everyone else either,
| but with people in the professional-managerial class it's
| absurd.
| closewith wrote:
| Globally, most software developers are not highly paid
| and certainly not enough to be above financial pressure.
|
| Becoming a whistleblower or refusing unethical demands
| can also lead to being blacklisted, as in most
| industries, loyalty is valued more highly than ethics.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| And the more people that buy into that, the worse it
| gets. That's why this has to be fought tooth and nail
| from day one.
| closewith wrote:
| If you want to fight corruption and unethical behaviour,
| start with a just society that doesn't tie a person's
| value and well-being directly to their income. Otherwise
| you're fighting incentives and will never win.
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| You don't get to a just society by not fighting
| corruption. Ask yourself not what "engineers globally"
| can do, but what you can do. Historically, pressure from
| the educated middle class has made huge impacts on
| culture and society.
| closewith wrote:
| Corruption is both a systemic and moral problem. You
| can't build a just society without confronting corruption
| and you can't sustain anti-corruption without reducing
| inequality.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah, but you have to factor in the probability of the
| orange jumpsuit.
|
| You're not going to be of much use to your family in jail.
|
| It's still a difficult decision, but it's not _just_ your
| job vs your morality. It 's your job vs morality+potential
| jail.
|
| We dish out criminal sentences precisely in order to affect
| the equation like this, because we know people don't always
| act on morality alone.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| "losing your job", for a lot of people, is extremely
| effective coercion.
|
| We are not talking about luxury here. A lot of people depend
| on their salary to pay rent and put food on the table. This
| is even more pressing if you have a family that depends on
| you, if you are in need of healthcare, etc.
|
| What your post fails to recognize is that in the current
| system, labor is already a form of coercion. You need to work
| because the option is homelessness and starvation.
|
| If you can avoid those even when unemployed, you are
| extremely privileged.
| em-bee wrote:
| _If you can avoid those even when unemployed_
|
| that would be all developed countries except the united
| states
| rfrey wrote:
| So yes, the extremely privileged
| em-bee wrote:
| privileged? sure, but extremely?
|
| nowadays even in china everyone gets healthcare, working
| or not, so we are talking about almost a quarter of the
| worlds population.
| snypher wrote:
| 380k homeless in UK. 262k in Germany. 122k Australia.
| 650k in USA. The per capita math is left for the reader
| but I don't believe there is much distinction here .
| throwaway-0001 wrote:
| You're right, the numbers are very close to recent
| official figures. I looked them up to calculate the per
| capita rates. So USA is actually better than other
| countries? Kind of defeats these arguments here -
| interesting. (By the way I'm not from us)
|
| Based on the latest available data (mostly 2023) and
| current population estimates:
|
| * *UK:* ~56.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 178) * *Australia:*
| ~45.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 220) [using 2021 census
| data] * *Germany:* ~31.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 323) *
| *USA:* ~19.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 515)
|
| The per capita distinction is more significant than the
| raw numbers suggest.
|
| (Note: Methodologies for counting vary by country, which
| can affect direct comparisons.)
| albumen wrote:
| Your last paragraph is doing a LOT of heavy lifting.
| TLDR: the US figures should be WAY higher if you expand
| the definition of homelessness like those other countries
| do.
|
| More research shows the U.S. rate looks lower largely
| because it uses a narrow, one-night "Point In Time"
| measure that excludes many precarious living situations
| other countries intentionally count. If you harmonise
| definitions, the U.S. does not outperform high-safety-net
| countries; on unsheltered homelessness in particular, it
| fares worse.
|
| In UK official usage, being legally homeless often
| includes people the state is actively accommodating; it
| is not limited to street homelessness like the US PIT
| figure. In Australia, their figures include couch surfing
| (staying temporarily with other households and those in
| "severely crowded" dwellings). In Germany, apart from
| again having a more expansive definition of homelessness,
| their figures also include ~130k Ukrainian refugees.
|
| Just one example: the US figures should at least include
| >1.2 million students experiencing homelessness.
| em-bee wrote:
| also, despite being homeless people in germany can get
| financial support and healthcare, which was the original
| point about the fear of losing your job. and losing your
| job in germany does not make you homeless. you'd have to
| get evicted from your home (but not for failing to pay
| rent, as you would cover that with the financial support)
| so the group that is being talked about in the original
| paragraph that fears losing their job, and the group that
| is homeless in germany have nothing to do with each
| other, because the first group does not exist. most of
| tho homeless in germany never had a job to begin with.
| array_key_first wrote:
| 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 enough.
| DennisP wrote:
| 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.
| tverbeure wrote:
| I know plenty of people who saved for years to get a
| downpayment for a house and then used all of that for
| just that. After that, it will take a while to replenish
| their emergency fund with very little margin of error. A
| job loss would be devastating.
| DennisP wrote:
| My claim is that that's a bad decision, for exactly that
| reason. Job loss can happen for any number of reasons,
| often without warning. Getting a mortgage without any
| cushion for job loss is a huge risk.
|
| Note also that I'm talking about highly-paid software
| engineers, not about people in general. Lots of people in
| the US make way less money than senior software
| engineers, and they manage to get by. Live at that level
| and secure your emergency funds first, and you'll be a
| lot more comfortable dealing with any ethical quandaries
| at work.
| tverbeure wrote:
| No, you're claiming they have a spending issue, with the
| typical judgemental holier-than-thou undertone. My
| example is not that.
|
| And I'm talking about my SWE neighbors in SV who have a
| desire to buy their own house just like almost everybody
| else. It's just wrong to claim they have a spending
| issue.
|
| They may be highly paid, but the house prices are
| commensurately higher too.
|
| It is nearly impossible in the US in general to buy a
| house without taking on some amount of financial risk. It
| has nothing to do with being wasteful with money.
| dmoy wrote:
| If you make say $400k a year and you buy a $2.5M house,
| at some level you do have a spending issue.
| DennisP wrote:
| I mean, it's been the standard personal finance advice
| for _decades._ Step one is to set aside six months of
| emergency expenses. If you have an above-average income,
| you 're capable of doing that. It's not "judgmental" to
| point out that this is indeed an intelligent strategy,
| just as advisors have been suggesting for years and
| years.
|
| You yourself said that for the people you know who bought
| a house without that, "a job loss would be devastating."
| So you seem to agree with me and the personal finance
| advisors.
|
| I did not say they had "a spending issue" or that they
| were "wasteful with money." Those were your terms just
| now. I simply said they should have rethought. You're
| turning that into some moral judgement, when all I'm
| saying is that it's bad strategy.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| > Lots of people in the US make way less money than
| senior software engineers, and they manage to get by.
|
| No, I'm pretty sure this is getting less and less true
| actually. Credit card debt is at an all time high.
| Homelessness is rising. Medical debt is crushing.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Indeed, any sufficiently wise man would prefer to place
| himself in a position of precariousness so that all his
| acts of crime can be attributed to the man who employs
| him. Only the financially careful face dilemmas. The
| spendthrift fears no judgment from society having forced
| his choice function into an identity of his employer's.
| testing22321 wrote:
| That may be true in the US, but very far from reality in
| countries that have universal healthcare and a strong
| social safety net.
| renewiltord wrote:
| One can only conclude that the VW engineers were uniquely
| immoral, since they have a safety net and nonetheless
| committed massive scale fraud. At least in America it's
| coercion. In Europe, it's willful evil.
| Filligree wrote:
| That safety net does not extend to paying the interest on
| your house loan.
| testing22321 wrote:
| When unemployment benefits are a large percentage of your
| salary and last a year plus it does
| basisword wrote:
| It does in some places. Firstly banks will usually let
| you pause or significantly reduce mortgage payments while
| unemployed. You then make up for it with increased
| payments (for a period of time) when you regain
| employment. There is also government help in the form of
| a loan to pay the interest on your mortgage while
| unemployed if you've been unemployed for a certain period
| of time (longer than the bank grace period).
| watwut wrote:
| Countrapoint is that these dilemas are NOT dilemas of
| poor people struggling to feed their kids.They are
| dilemmas of well doing middle class who in fact, can find
| another job.
|
| Seriously, we hear the "but the job, but the potential
| pay raise" exactly as often in a good economy from people
| having large salaries.
|
| They have choice. They are choosing the fraud over ...
| still high salary but just not that high.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| I don't think that applies to the mid to high level
| software engineers here
| mettamage wrote:
| We're not all from the US.
| exe34 wrote:
| > But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of
| coercion, in my opinion.
|
| it depends how many friends and family you have in the area
| that can host your whole family that is now homeless. it
| depends how much disruption you are willing to inflict on
| your kids definitely right now as opposed to maybe in the
| future.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I think the risk is somewhat higher than just losing your job
| - you are potentially burning your whole referral network in
| the process (especially if you end up with your name in the
| press during any resulting prosecution).
|
| For a junior engineer it may not be that hard to fly under
| the radar, but senior/staff level folks tend to be well known
| by the execs. And execs talk, they call their friends to vet
| future hires... burn your execs, and maybe you don't work in
| that town again
| scaramanga wrote:
| Probably for the best...
|
| Like, anyone who would work with some of my previous
| employers, are places I wouldn't want to work anyway. It's
| a big wide world out there.
| pydry wrote:
| This is why whistleblower laws need to be stronger (e.g.
| retaliation means automatic jailtime even if the whistle was
| wrongly blown) and rewards need to be larger.
| creer wrote:
| The threat of retaliation - in the form of being fired,
| harassed or moved to a dead end position - is very scary to a
| younger engineer. But from a rational point of view it's not
| very strong (HOWEVER many managers or CEOs are far from
| rational.)
|
| - Firing someone has large costs to the employer. You have the
| job because you are needed. Same for side-lining someone or not
| promoting them.
|
| - Firing someone removes the final incentives against that
| person reporting the deed to the govt. It pushes that person
| toward reporting instead of softer "negotiated" steps such as
| continuing to argue for legal alternatives or discussing it
| with an intermediate rather than outright reporting. And many
| corporate legal or accounting people are amazing at finding
| alternative ways to achieve the same result in a not-illegal
| manner.
|
| - A lawyer can help you much more once there is retaliation.
| The company might end up fighting both the fraud reporting AND
| the retaliation.
|
| Just firing someone is not a great "solution" for the company.
|
| Letting you believe that they will ... that's very powerful.
|
| (and probably all this is caveat: in countries where
| retaliation is illegal enough and commonly taken to court or
| settled. which is not worldwide.)
| themafia wrote:
| That retaliation is in and of itself a new illegal act.
| eur0pa wrote:
| You can absolutely, most definitely always say "no". Their
| carrot (money) comes and goes, and their stick (also money) is
| not enough to be concerning.
| sltr wrote:
| 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.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| The code of ethics would need to be absolute, enforceable,
| unambiguous (without lawyers to interpret), and universal to
| really eliminate these activities.
| baobun wrote:
| If you are to be found in violation by DAO jury vote, you
| will be blocked from all private torrent trackers and usenet
| groups (we just have to make sure all of them mods are
| onboard mkay), with threat of ban for repeat offenders.
|
| You may also find your support tickets everywhere languishing
| and x months of CAPTCHA-hell on every website.
| pjc50 wrote:
| You can never make these kinds of things unambiguous. People
| are really creative about inventing interpretations to make
| things ambiguous in their favor, and rule systems are really
| complex.
|
| More to the point is trying to be an ethical island in an
| unethical society, You'd have to deal with constant attacks
| from the "anti-woke" crowd.
| criddell wrote:
| Software engineering could become a real profession with
| licensing like mechanical, electrical, chemical, civil, and
| other engineering professions. If you do something unethical,
| you could be sued for malpractice and lose your license to
| practice.
|
| The code of ethics for Professional Engineers works even
| though it isn't any of the things you say are necessary.
| thyristan wrote:
| Professional Engineers signed off on on broken dams
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster ),
| leaking chemical plants
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster ), exploding
| reactors and how (not) to operate them
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster ) and
| "high enough" sea walls
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
| ). There are a ton more examples. All highly unethical,
| most of the responsible engineers got away scot-free.
|
| Licensed professions only serve to increase the scarcity of
| licensed professionals, drive up the price and thereby form
| an economic cartel. Neither does it prevent any of the
| aforementioned disasters, nor are the responsible
| professionals held liable.
|
| "Licensed professionals" is one of those myths in software
| engineering cycles that won't die. A license won't make
| anyone competent. It will, however, provide them with an
| excuse to charge more, do less and ascribe any fuckups to
| "must be something else wrong, I did everything to board
| standards"...
| criddell wrote:
| In the Brumadinho case, five engineers were arrested and
| charged and jailed. They are out of jail and a criminal
| case is ongoing.
|
| In the Bhopal disaster, seven engineers and executives
| were convicted of causing death by negligence and give
| the maximum penalty (which was pretty weak).
|
| The Chernobyl incident led to Anatoly Dyatlov to be
| jailed and getting a 10-year sentence.
|
| For Fukushima, some people were charged with professional
| negligence causing death but they beat the charges in
| court.
|
| Licensing will not make anybody competent. But it can
| help keep incompetent people out of our field. When
| Engineers screw up, their malpractice insurance may get
| too expensive for them to continue to work in the field.
| When management asks for something unethical, it gives a
| pretty good reason for pushing back.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That's a weird set of anecdotes you've chosen. The first
| half of those incidents are in fact the opposite of what
| you seem to be complaining about: finding the
| Professional Engineers that signed off on the mistakes in
| the project is hard to do because they happened in
| countries that failed to regulate Professional
| Engineering licenses.
|
| The Chernobyl disaster is an operation mistake, which a
| Professional Engineer may have signed the process for
| operation, but an operational failure to follow process
| is not the Professional Engineer's fault. Sure, a
| professional will try to narrow processes to be as fool-
| proof as possible, but you can't entirely blame a
| professional that the planet is capable of generating far
| more fools than you can plan for.
|
| The Fukushima disaster actually shows Professional
| Engineering _consequences_ with multiple engineering
| groups doing analysis and investigations of what went
| wrong and whether or not to indict Professional Engineers
| involved in the construction. None of those moved to such
| indictments, but it was investigated at length. Three of
| the executives of the company _were_ indicted as a part
| of those investigations (and then were judged "not
| guilty" in a Japanese court of law).
|
| "Licensed professionals" is not a myth. A license isn't
| about making anyone competent, it is about applying
| _consequence_ when they _aren 't_. It's also about
| _having your back_ when you are worried about possible
| consequences. "I can't do that because I would lose my
| license" is a threat companies have to take seriously. If
| your company wants to force you to pursue it anyway, you
| can take the issue to the Ethics Committee at your
| licensing board/professional organization and they can
| help you examine the legal, ethical, and moral
| implications in a way that could result in _consequences_
| to your company. If all of that is documented and the
| company still does it anyway it is easier to get legal
| consequences applied to company executives, such as real,
| deserved jail time.
| fragmede wrote:
| Can you imagine how much worse it would be without that?
| Because how do you show the negative? There have
| definitely been cases where professionally licensed
| engineers have said no, or refused to sign off on
| something, or walked off the job, or otherwise have
| changed the course of human history for the better
| because of that code of ethics. That there have been
| failures in the system doesn't indight the concept as a
| whole. Software runs the world these days, it's time to
| grow up.
| array_key_first wrote:
| I don't think it needs to be (it isn't for anything else),
| and I also don't think it needs to eliminate all activies (it
| doesn't for anything else).
|
| But right now we have nothing. Surely, something is better
| than nothing. We can't have nothing and already be out of
| ideas.
| Spivak wrote:
| Which is why I think the ACM's code of ethics is good for
| someone looking to be introspective about right and wrong but
| would be _terrible_ as the basis for a legal code of ethics.
|
| The scope would necessarily be narrower and "permit" more
| unethical behavior but for violations to be enforced by peers
| it has to survive the eventual "oh you're making a big fuss
| over nothing, you won't lose your license" problem.
| mc3301 wrote:
| The author talks alot about this is this book:
| https://www.ruinedby.design/
| mrheosuper wrote:
| I wonder how would that work when you are working for companies
| like Lockheed Martin, knowing your code will be used in weapon
| that may kill innocent people.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Presumably similar to how it works for the professional
| Mechanical Engineers and Electrical Engineers they already
| employ. Ethics are subjective and nuanced. Ethics are also
| different from _morals_. Some people can live with the moral
| quandary that their work may do harm to innocent people and
| still have the ethical belief that they are doing the right
| thing generally and that their work does more good than harm.
| (I 'm not one of those people myself with regards to the
| military-industrial complex, but I respect my friends that
| are have sat with their morals and weighed them into the
| ethical frameworks of how they do their jobs and what they
| feel about doing their jobs ethically.)
| andrewflnr wrote:
| For a little bit I worried about that, wondered whether I
| would be morally comfortable working on that technology. Then
| Russia invaded Ukraine and I snapped back to reality. The
| consequences of even vaguely good actors _not_ having
| missiles are worse than the consequences of those actors
| having missiles. Because you better believe Putin and his ilk
| are going to have them.
| vkou wrote:
| It's easy, you just tell yourself that all of them are the
| enemy. As long as you outsource your morality and thinking to
| the Department of State, you can sleep easy.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| thyristan wrote:
| It only works because doctors have a self-governing body of
| other doctors as an oversight, usually called a chamber,
| board, Kammer, etc. This chamber is responsible for licensing
| doctors to perform medicine and has the power to withdraw
| that license upon violations of the Hippocratic Oath, other
| ethical violations and other professional misconduct or
| malpractice.
|
| Unless you want this kind of arrangement for developers, the
| oath isn't any good.
|
| Also, the Hippocratic Oath has tons of variants, nobody uses
| the original one anymore because there are things in there
| that went out of fashion over the last 2000 years. E.g.
| operating on people suffering from kidney stones used to be
| prohibited: "I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on
| sufferers from stone[...]"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath ). Similar
| prohibitions exist nowadays for abortions or euthanasia, but
| only in some places. In others, doctors are free to or even
| required to perform those. In software development, I would
| imagine even more variety in the allowed/prohibited-list.
| bmez wrote:
| not only, in most countries operating as a physician
| requires a license to operate. It can be revoked if the
| professional violates the terms of the license.
|
| If software had such a thing, it would be possible to
| achieve something similar. It is not the oath per se that
| keeps doctors on the righteous path, it is just as much the
| treath of not loosing your job - but having your
| professional status revoked (i.e. permamently loosing the
| ability to work).
|
| On the other hand, reviewing code every now and then, it
| would be good if you could revoke programming privileges
| for ever for certain individuals.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Our board would be packed with Scrum lords smacking down on
| missing field entries in Jira tickets.
|
| I would like more 'philosophy' in CS education. Just that
| people are aware of the methods used against them helps
| alot. It is hard and takes time to discover stuff on your
| own. It took me like 5-10 years of working before I
| realized how the sausage is made.
| themafia wrote:
| There is a ridiculously huge body of law covering medical
| practice. The AMA is just window dressing over an industry
| trade group.
|
| At the end of the day you confront a jury and not a board
| of similarly positioned individuals.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I absolutely want this arrangement for developers. We need
| to grow up as a profession, and take responsibility for the
| consequences of our actions.
|
| This isn't the 90s anymore. Today there's practically
| nothing you can do in the modern world without interacting
| with software. Buying food, going to the hospital,
| travelling, communicating, voting, going to school, using
| anything electrical, anywhere. Our society is completely
| dependent on software at this point. The fact that there's
| no professional ethics code with the appropriate oversight
| for the development and maintenance of software is _utterly
| insane_.
|
| The points you bring up about the Hippocratic Oath are
| important problems to solve, rather than reasons not to
| try.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Are you kidding?
|
| Misconduct among doctors is rampant, special highlight on
| dentists:
|
| https://archive.ph/70Zk5
| ekianjo wrote:
| Yeah some people choose to wear rosy glasses when it comes
| to the medical profession. They can see corruption around
| them but they can't imagine it exists in every walks of
| life. Kind of gell-man amnesia.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| The ACM has long had a code of ethics.
|
| https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
| dooglius wrote:
| Why do you believe it works? I don't particularly get the
| sense it has any effect whatsoever, particularly in cases
| where doctors are pressured to do harm. (There's also a lot
| of ambiguity left in what constitutes "harm")
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Not taking away from your point, but just a PSA: For some
| reason "First, do no harm" is synonymous with "Hippocratic
| Oath" in pop-culture. Just a reminder that this is
| apocryphal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
|
| Surgeons, in fact, often begin with harm. To replace a hip
| joint, they necessarily must begin by causing great trauma to
| the body by cutting it open and removing bone.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| That's far too literal an interpretation of harm. The point
| isn't to never do any kind of "physical harm". It's about
| doing the least amount of harm possible/necessary in any
| situation, where doing nothing can also be seen as causing
| harm.
|
| I had a burst appendix as a teenager, leading to
| peritonitis. To treat this, surgeons were going to operate
| laparoscopically to remove the appendix and fix remove any
| contamination in the peritoneum. Obviously this required
| damaging my skin, removing an organ etc. which in the
| strictest sense is harm. But doing nothing at all would
| obviously lead to sepsis and death, so this was still the
| least harmful intervention. During the surgery, it turned
| out that the laparoscopic method was hard to carry out due
| to obesity and other factors. The attending made the
| decision to convert to a laporotomy, doing even more harm
| to my skin and leaving me with a 30 cm scar on my stomach.
| But it was the right call because it maximised the chances
| of accomplishing the goal of the procedure(preventing
| imminent death), minimising the risk of serious
| complications.
|
| And here I am almost 20 years later. I have a scar, I have
| some adhesions that occasionally cause moderate abdominal
| pain if I don't eat enough fibre, and perhaps my lymphatic
| system and gut flora are very minorly compromised in some
| nebulous way due to the lack of an appendix. On the other
| hand, I'm alive. So yes, they "did harm", but they also
| minimised harm. And they didn't do any unnecessary harm, to
| the best of their ability. And that's the point of the
| ethical principle.
| GrumpyYoungMan wrote:
| 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.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > the Hippocratic Oath works quite well
|
| This reads like a bad joke. Ever heard of the opoid crisis?
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| I remember reading that no med schools in the U.S. use the
| actual Hippocratic Oath anymore, although it seens that most
| schools have sone form of oath.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Do you mean:
|
| A) Software developers should be free to sign a code of ethics,
| or
|
| B) Software developers should be compelled to sign a code of
| ethics, and be prevented from working if they refuse to sign,
| or
|
| C) Something else.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| In Canada, (B) is how it works for engineers, including
| software engineers.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| We are using the term 'software engineer' in two different
| ways:
|
| 1. The way most people here on HN, and most people in the
| US, understand it.
|
| 2. The way the laws in most of Canada (but not Alberta)
| define the term.
|
| AIUI someone can design and develop software for pay in
| Canada without declaring themselves to be a 'software
| engineer' and without signing a code of ethics.
|
| Is that correct?
| jjmarr wrote:
| It's unclear and barely enforced in Canada. Ontario has a
| two-step test for defining "software engineering":
|
| * The development of the software required the
| application of engineering principles (ie. "a systematic,
| disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development,
| operation, and maintenance of software")
|
| * The software concerns the public interest (ie. there is
| a reasonable expectation that failure or inappropriate
| functioning of the system would result in harm to life,
| health, property, economic interests, the public welfare
| or the environment).
|
| In practice, LinkedIn is full of "software engineers" and
| anyone with a P. Eng uses it as a suffix.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| The calling of the engineer is not required but you are
| bound to ethical guidelines as a PEO.
| vkou wrote:
| Most software engineers in Canada don't call themselves
| 'Engineers' and don't have any ethics codes they need to
| follow.
| muzani wrote:
| We have plenty of difficulty just following the Agile
| Manifesto.
| callc wrote:
| 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"
| muzani wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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...
| muzani wrote:
| Of course it can. But it's more precise than Google and
| it's easy to fact check.
|
| https://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/
|
| Once you link the actual law, it becomes more of a
| checklist and less of a principle though.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| No, it's just a bunch of counter-intuitive rules that if
| followed make life better for both the developers and their
| customers/bosses. (On most circumstances, not all.)
|
| If the customers/bosses do not even allow those to be
| followed, what chance do you think some pro-social rules
| with actual costs have?
| musicale wrote:
| ACM has a code of ethics. However, it does not seem to be
| enforced against many companies that routinely violate it.
|
| https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
| goodpoint wrote:
| It's not enough. It needs enforcement and whistleblower
| protection.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| No. I oppose any formal requirement to practice software
| development. And this isn't because I disagree about the
| requirement to be ethical, but because it would draw a moat of
| "professionalisation" around software development, excluding
| new entrants. It's a fashionable trend across many disciplines:
| it starts innocuously with informal groups and seminars. Then
| someone starts one or more professional bodies which devise
| some sort of qualification. Then they start charging a yearly
| or triennial renewal fee for that qualification. Then they try
| to make it impossible to get work without their qualification.
| The profession comes under the thumb of people who spend their
| time getting on to the committees which control these
| professional bodies.
|
| That can be reasonable for something like medicine or
| structural engineering. But is it appropriate for a developer
| cranking out Javascript or Excel macros? This is pulling up the
| drawbridge behind you, excluding anyone who comes to the
| profession through informal means - and in my generation, that
| meant almost everyone. It also means that you will need to
| determine how much of your time you dedicate to politics.
| fragmede wrote:
| Those are all fair points, but the Internet and smartphones
| happened. Software is a necessity for existing in society
| these days. Yeah it sucks that we'd be pulling up the
| drawbridge. Donate some of your software developer salary to
| non-profits to make testing accessible to whichever groups
| you see as the younger version of you to assuage your guilt.
| Crowdstrike shouldn't have been possible. Mulitple airlines
| going down for days because they botched an upgrade because
| it wasn't properly resourced. Someone cranking out some silly
| shit on the weekend doesn't need licensing, but having
| unprotected S3 buckets full of drivers license photos of your
| users in this day and age should be criminally liable.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| 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 to me. I had to talk to a lawyer and he
| recommended I report it to the gao. I compromised by quitting and
| reporting it to the liaison on the project (a professor). It was
| very stressful because if I hadn't reported it he could say that
| I reported those hours, not him, and I could have ended up in
| prison.
|
| I think the liaison just buried it in the end.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| There were other issues... this was the final straw.
| krageon wrote:
| They do care - they care because they have an inflated
| impression of their own importance and you seem guilty, so
| you must be.
| ajross wrote:
| > 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.
| bigiain wrote:
| > I think a lot of people in our world need to spend a
| little more time in introspection.
|
| Sadly, I suspect most or all of the investor class of
| people "in our world" have done this introspection. They've
| checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided it's a
| perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and staff of
| a company they're already invested in do illegal things and
| potentially end up in jail, if it makes the odds of that
| company being a 100x exit - so long as the investors and
| their staff are all insulated from the illegal behavior and
| jail time risks.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| I'm not sure it's even at that level of rationality.
| People just don't think bad things will happen to them,
| either through naivety or a mistaken belief that they're
| so superior they'll never be caught. Jail is something
| that happens to other people, stupid people, not to me.
| immibis wrote:
| I think people are either too worried about things like
| this or not worried enough - no middle. For every time
| I've heard of rich people thinking they can get away with
| ridiculous scandals I've also heard someone being
| discouraged from legitimate economic activity because
| what if some really unlikely thing happens and lands them
| in jail for dumb reasons.
|
| The latter type of people don't become businessmen, of
| course, so the selection bias is for the businessmen to
| all be from the unworried people.
| bix6 wrote:
| So much
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Part of the value that VCs are supposed to provide
| society is being more skeptical than this.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and
| decided it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the
| founders and staff of a company they're already invested
| in do illegal things and potentially end up in jail ...
|
| No legitimate business person I have ever met holds this
| position, if for no other reason than criminal acts
| pierce the corporate veil[0].
|
| > ... so long as the investors and their staff are all
| insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
|
| There is no such thing.
|
| 0 - https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/03/27/the-three-
| justifi...
| margalabargala wrote:
| > > ... so long as the investors and their staff are all
| insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
|
| > There is no such thing.
|
| Sure there is. You can never request an illegal act,
| never commit an illegal act, but create a culture where
| others become incentivized to do illegal acts. This can
| be done in sufficiently subtle ways that it's impossible
| to prove it was intentional.
|
| "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest"
| lukan wrote:
| "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest"
|
| That is not subtle enough(anymore), if you want to
| disguise ordering murder.
| ajross wrote:
| > No legitimate business person I have ever met holds
| this position
|
| Well, sure, that's true. But only because that's a no-
| true-scotsman fallacy in incubation. All these perps are
| "legitimate business people" until they aren't. And they
| cross that rubicon, almost to a person, _still believing_
| that they 're legitimate business people and that this is
| all a clever hack.
|
| It looks obvious only in hindsight when you're looking at
| the indictment.
|
| What gets them in trouble is the clever hacking, not a
| fundamental moral flaw. Or conversely, we need to start
| treating clevery hackery with a lot more suspicion. It's
| fine to "cheat cleverly" in software design. Outside that
| world it's got some pretty ugly externalities.
| m3047 wrote:
| > What gets them in trouble is the clever hacking, not a
| fundamental moral flaw.
|
| I think you've got that backwards. Crims gonna crim. A
| clever hacker will evaluate ALL the risks, whereas a
| moral flaw blinds people to risks. Doesn't mean somebody
| can't have both attributes.
|
| I quite literally stole an education, and there's a
| college transcript to prove it. I was a clever hacker,
| and I worked hard; I was aided and abetted by the college
| administration, inducted into the Masters candidate
| ghetto as an honorary member. When they made it a felony
| I quit that path, and following Hunter S. Thompson's
| advice [0] I went into business so that I could continue
| learning "on the job". (Nowadays they call it "OPT".
| Served today with a very thin glaze of sarcasm.)
|
| During that tenure I met people who wrote theses for a
| living, who appreciated my industriousness and offered to
| admit me to their fold. I drank with foreigners
| ("muslims") who wanted information I might have or be
| able to obtain; I suggested that they get their home
| countries to forge documents and and then get admitted as
| students.
|
| I've quit jobs after an appropriate "honeymoon period"
| when I still hadn't been furnished documentation
| demonstrating that we had customers' permission to be
| doing what we were doing. I've quit jobs when government
| compliance was considered a game rather than a minimum
| standard of performance. [1]
|
| I pass government background checks just fine; no reason
| I shouldn't. I get the "dgaf" attitude, but I strongly
| suggest getting it in writing. Doing things off the books
| is a cancer; and it's contagious, like that 10,000 year
| old dog cancer which now moves from host to host.
|
| [0] "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
|
| [1] If you need somebody who takes risk assessment
| seriously, we should talk.
| ajross wrote:
| > A clever hacker will evaluate ALL the risks
|
| Once more, this is a no-true-scotsman argument hanging on
| your added adjective "clever". All the frausters and
| criminals in the linked articles were "clever hackers"
| until they weren't. You probably are too.
|
| Introspection and humility are among the _hardest_ skills
| for hackers to develop (probably harder for us than for
| the general population, honestly, as our cheating gets
| rewarded!), and they 're exactly what are being demanded
| here to keep us out of jail. And I'm pointing out the
| fallacies inherent in all the "it would never happen to
| me" argumentation.
| themafia wrote:
| > if it makes the odds of that company being a 100x exit
|
| Post that gain and you will have a 100x flood of civil
| lawsuits to deal with. You may escape jail but I doubt
| you escape with the gains.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| >> Of course I found out that he was going into our billing
| software and adding hours to me. I had to talk to a lawyer
| and he recommended I report it to the gao.
|
| > 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.
|
| That is not how fraudulent billing in a federal contract
| ends.
|
| The DOJ prosecutors hammer the person documented as having
| submitted fraudulent billing and _then_ go after everyone
| else involved. There is an outside chance in this case the
| innocent person originally identified does not get indicted
| and /or convicted of defrauding the government. But there is
| _no_ doubt this process will cost the innocent person many
| thousands of dollars in legal fees just to stay out of
| prison.
|
| The advice of "report it to the GAO" and then GTFO[0] is the
| way to go.
|
| EDIT:
|
| If a person continues to "keep punching the clock" knowing
| someone else is actively defrauding the government by "going
| into our billing software and adding hours to me", there is a
| nontrivial risk of being charged for conspiracy to defraud
| the US[1].
|
| 0 - https://www.dictionary.com/e/acronyms/gtfo/
|
| 1 - https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-
| manual...
| exasperaited wrote:
| I have promised to resign (and fully would have) when asked to
| implement something that would put customer security and privacy
| at risk, when such concerns were in their infancy; more than half
| a lifetime ago but in the dot com era when I had actual value.
| Our client, a very large organisation, became aware I had an
| ethical concern my own bosses didn't share, listened to me and
| changed their policies to eliminate my concern.
|
| People who work in the Valley for fifty, a hundred times more
| than the poorest in their own country often do not seem to feel
| the same way anymore.
|
| This is not a question of abstract ethics, but a question of
| simple professional integrity. If the thing is bad and risks
| harms, you don't do it.
|
| It's part of why I work for myself now; it's not difficult to
| spot people who do not have a strong sense of ethics and simply
| not work for them. I work in a couple of fields where there are
| many non-ethical players, and can do so with a clear conscience.
| cess11 wrote:
| This is good advice not only for people who encounter fraud, but
| also those whose employers are profiting from war crimes and the
| like.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| So Google, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft etc.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Kids these days always forget about IBM.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
| cess11 wrote:
| They're still at it:
|
| 'In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one
| of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance
| apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."'
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in
| _...
| n4r9 wrote:
| Another recent classic case of this is the revelations that Uber
| were targeting law enforcement based on user behaviour, and
| refusing to offer them rides in areas where they were breaking
| regulations. I mentioned this at some point last year, and
| someone replied saying that they'd enthusiastically volunteer to
| take part in that project (assuming no personal risk). People's
| ethics are not always what you'd expect (or hope).
| avidiax wrote:
| I used to work for Uber, but not on this feature or anything
| related.
|
| Apropos to the article, as a programmer for this feature, what
| you are actually asked to do is write a greybanning engine. It
| can take various features (geofence, denylist of phone
| numbers/emails/device identifiers/payment, etc.) and use it to
| calculate a score that applies a greybanning policy. The policy
| may be that the cars in the app are now fake, the ride will
| never come, your CC is "denied", etc.
|
| Nothing illegal or unethical about this feature, as written,
| but it is a "dual-use" technology.
|
| The feature has been used to literally save lives. There were
| taxi-affiliated people in South America that would call an Uber
| and then, at best, trash the car and beat the driver. At worst,
| they'd kill the driver. Those people need to be greybanned,
| along with scammers, criminals, and abusive people of all
| sorts.
|
| The local market administrators, however, definitely might ban
| users that the know to be police ticketing the drivers, might
| ban any account signup from the police station, might ban city
| credit cards, etc.
|
| You, as the programmer on this feature, can't defend against
| that unethical use of it.
|
| If you work at the insurance company and get asked to write a
| rules engine but not the rules, this same thing applies to you.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Thanks for the info! I've always wondered about the inside
| dev perspective on it.
| mgilroy wrote:
| I was asked to sign off on an R&D tax claim for my team's work. I
| reviewed it and said no. Was then sent to a meeting with the
| accountants who explained the claim was based on what the CEO had
| told them. We went through the details and the agreed with me on
| most things. I also discovered that we were entitled to claim for
| things I wouldn't have known about and the CEO discovered that
| just because the credits were for R&D the legal definition didn't
| allow for normal development work.
|
| In this instance nothing intentionally illegal was being
| attempted. However, had the original claim been made it could
| have been considered fraud. In these sorts of situations I always
| ensure that the company put me in contact with the professionals
| that can indemnify both the company and me from any wrong doing.
| Provided we tell the truth.
| benoau wrote:
| This happened to me too, the claim was outsourced to a
| contractor who had never interacted with myself or anyone on my
| team - the only devs in the company - resulting in a purely
| fictitious depiction of what we did.
| andy99 wrote:
| It's easy to armchair quarterback these things, and in
| retrospect, the actions that innocent people should take are
| probably obvious. At the time I don't think it would be so easy.
|
| There is lots of pressure not to take action, because of the
| feeling you're overreacting, because you've had things explained
| to you in a way that minimizes or removes the criminality, and
| because your job is at stake.
|
| And crucially there is never some black and white issue. If your
| employer told you to murder someone, it would be easy to say no
| and know you did the right thing. If they tell you to
| incrementally go along with some grey area thing you're not sure
| the legal status of, it's way harder to know what to do.
|
| People still have to be accountable for their actions of course,
| ignorance is no excuse. But we all should hope we're never in
| such a situation to begin with rather than thinking we'll know
| how and when to act.
| Timshel wrote:
| > And crucially there is never some black and white issue.
|
| The three example given are quite black and white ...
| pautasso wrote:
| Here are a few more examples:
|
| https://leanpub.com/unethical-software-engineering/
| Covert Surveillance EMAIL PIXEL INJECTOR
| STEALTHY INPUT LOGGER Monetization at all costs
| AGGRESSIVE ADVERTISER AD BLOCKER DETECTOR
| PAY TO WIN ADDICTION PEDDLER
| ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY HOARDER DRM RUG PULLER
| OBSOLESCENCE PLANNER Digital Fraud
| CYBERSQUATTER SNEAKY TERMS DEGRADER
| INTEROPERABILITY BREAKER Ranking Manipulation
| FAKE REVIEW GENERATOR SEARCH RANKING
| KICKBACKER Unethical Artificial Intelligence
| Practices TRAINING DATA HARVESTER
| BOT PRETENDER DECEPTIVE DEEPFAKER
| DoctorOW wrote:
| You should probably disclose this is your own book you're
| advertising.
| pluies wrote:
| AGGRESSIVE ADVERTISER
| nritchie wrote:
| I was just double billed by the third-party that Enterprise
| Rentals uses to handle tolls. Fraud? Incompetence? Is there a
| difference?
| mattlondon wrote:
| The article makes it sound clear sure. But then the article
| has been edited.
|
| I would not have been surprised if the 5 million user thing
| was couched as some sort of "we need to generate some
| realistic test data to load test our systems <WINK WINK> -
| please create 5 million accounts very similar to these paying
| ones, remember this is testing so they need to be as
| realistic and believable as possible <WINK WINK>".
|
| If I got that request (perhaps without the winking!) come
| down the line through the usual channels I'd probably have
| gone along with it without realising it was for anything
| nefarious. ...but then would that be a viable defense?!
|
| Context is everything.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Even if somebody gave no pretext, I don't think that, in
| and of itself, is illegal. Though it could be used for
| illegal things. For instance early on Reddit actively
| created fake accounts, fake votes, fake comments, and all
| other sorts of stuff in the process of trying to reach
| critical mass. I _really_ doubt that was illegal.
|
| OTOH if somebody sent a message saying, 'Hey we need to
| increase our apparent paying users in order to defraud some
| potential investors.' then obviously you've become part of
| a criminal conspiracy, but I think nobody would ever*
| overtly say that.
| wink wrote:
| I think there is a big difference between faking 10k
| users and then going to investors at 1m users years later
| (it's a morally dubious kickstart) or in this case for
| the sake of the sale/investment going to 1400%.
| meesles wrote:
| I think this skips over an important fact from the article
| - the head of growth + CEO were in the room making this
| request, then the eng director raised concerns, then they
| assuaged his concerns by saying it's ok for 'investor
| purposes'.
|
| I can see the situation you're describing, sorta. Though if
| it was me and someone asked me to generate a list of 5
| million real-ish user accounts in a report, I'd immediately
| ask why. If it's to commit fraud or lie to investors, I
| would be like hell no! If we're doing load testing or
| something legit, for sure. But I feel like benign use-cases
| of generating 5 million accounts would not include the
| "make it look real" aspect.
|
| I also don't think the Reddit comparison makes sense, since
| Reddit didn't seek to sell the company at the time based on
| the # of users. Growth hacking is one thing, lying to
| investors about users is another. Because this data point
| was a key decision factor for a financial transaction, this
| fake information/lie becomes fraud.
| imglorp wrote:
| I can only imagine someone with a family to feed who is tied to
| corporate health insurance, or an H1 visa, being coerced into
| some gray activities being unwilling to lose their job to
| remain ethical or legal.
|
| One of many reasons employers have a quiverful of ways to
| exploit and control workers.
| franktankbank wrote:
| And why some people have a problem working with H1 coworkers
| at all. Its a separate class of workers, same as offshore,
| its somehow hostile.
| walleeee wrote:
| > we all should hope
|
| If you're serious about anything, you do more than hope. You do
| diligence on your prospective employer before going to work for
| them. You think through a litany of contingencies and prepare a
| plan of action for each. Jobs in this industry are uniquely
| amenable to this by virtue of their relatively higher
| compensation and the autonomy often afforded to employees. If
| you spend an hour every day on HN, you can spend an hour
| meditating upon your conscience.
|
| Predicting one's response to stressful and unexpected
| circumstances is hard. So try to anticipate circumstances and
| cultivate relevant virtues in advance.
| zero_k wrote:
| I wish I could tell a story. Alas, I can't. It turns out that
| large corporations are excellent at hiding evidence of
| wrongdoing, and will do everything to cover the backside of high-
| level execs, because stock price matters. When it's bad, the exec
| leaves for a "better opportunity", and none will be wiser. The
| stress of the honest, serious engineer(s) remain, and the exec
| gets a free ride to their next big beautiful step up the ladder.
| In retrospect, don't follow internal reporting guidelines, and
| don't talk to internal lawyers. They either are incompetent or
| competent, but paid to swipe stuff under the rug -- you'll never
| find out either way. Instead, go to the relevant regulatory
| agency, write a detailed report to them, and let it play out.
| ruszki wrote:
| It depends on the country. It's not possible to operate large
| companies in Hungary without paying to the prime minister's
| family. When I lived there, I signed a paper at a large
| multinational company as a simple developer. The paper's only
| purpose was to channel EU funds to the family. I was naive, and
| I thought that it's a real project, with real work. It wasn't.
| Later I realised why some of my coworkers were against it, but
| I didn't believe that that company would go down on that route.
| I was really naive.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Looks like Trump has taken a leaf out of Orban's notebook.
| What a depressing situation to be in.
| gadders wrote:
| That 100k/month for Hunter Biden from a Ukrainian energy
| company was totally legit though.
| ajoberstar wrote:
| It's not even the same ballpark.
| Tesl wrote:
| Just ... wow
| andrepd wrote:
| It's extremely fucked up that the EU has this kind of
| kleptocratic autocracy in its midst not only stealing
| billions but actively sabotaging its operations, when people
| have been warning about Hungary for 15 years (the Tavares
| report is from 2010 I believe).
| ruszki wrote:
| It's funny seeing America, and making the same mistakes.
| We're humans after all.
|
| The transition in Hungary was really seamless. Step-by-
| step. The Tavares report was still mainly about
| possibilities. The laws and the new constitution were
| already there to use them, but they still didn't use their
| full force. They could pretend that it's a democracy. They
| still pretend it, and most Hungarians still believe it,
| even when the government rules by decree for over a decade
| now, with elections with not equal playing field at all
| (opposition needs to win over 10% to be 50-50 with the
| ruling party).
|
| And they're on the next phase. There is a new opposition
| leader, and it's way more difficult to pretend democracy
| now. The most interesting is Orban's used to be supporters.
| They switched like nothing. One day, an opposition adjacent
| podcaster was satan itself, the next day, "she's all right
| after all". One of my friend and his siblings argued
| against Orban with their parents for more than a decade,
| then the switch was instant. The parents will still choose
| badly next time, for the bad reasons, and they will allow
| to happen this again. When MAGA collapses, you can expect
| the same thing. There won't be any self reflection.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Frank was a student loan startup founded by Charlie Javice in
| 2016. In 2019, Javice was featured on the Forbes "30 under 30"
|
| There was a joke going around Twitter about "30 under 30 doing 30
| to life", because the startups involved were getting more and
| more outlandish to the extent that bystanders suspected that
| fraud was going on. Became a Guardian article:
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-u...
|
| Of course, a fraud can stay afloat for a lot longer than you
| expect. The _really_ tricky case is when you 're ordered to do
| something illegal or unethical for which there is substantial
| political cover. An executive order, for example. You cannot rely
| on anyone to back you up simply because of the letter of the law.
|
| Also:
|
| > The reality was that this was a very deliberate double charge.
| I could not share this fact at the time - as the company
| threatened me with libel after I informed them of this detail
|
| UK libel law routinely covers up all sorts of things which the
| public would benefit from having revealed, simply by the threat
| of an expensive lawsuit. It makes investigative journalism really
| uneconomic.
| bloak wrote:
| > UK libel law routinely covers up all sorts of things which
| the public would benefit from having revealed, simply by the
| threat of an expensive lawsuit. It makes investigative
| journalism really uneconomic.
|
| But the worst horror stories date from before it was last
| reformed, in 2013, I think, and I feel the need to
| patriotically point out that Australian libel law is even
| worse!
| noir_lord wrote:
| Another country having worse legislation doesn't really
| impact on how bad ours is though.
|
| Bad is bad.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I've been doing this tech nonsense at moderately high levels
| for over 45 years now, and over the years I've had business
| dealings with members of these "30 under 30" lists, and every
| single fucking time it's a conman, a grifter. I don't even
| bother with heavily marketed individuals nor their flagships
| anymore. They are nonsense.
| graemep wrote:
| It reminds me of one of two people (at the same time and
| place in my life) I was introduced to because they shared
| national origin (i.e. nationality at birth, or parents
| nationality) with me.
|
| One later got into the Sunday Times rich list (the under 40
| section, IIRC) during the dot com bubble, by the simple
| expedient of lying. He claimed to be working on encryption
| software that was hugely valuable and said it was valued in
| billions. He actually owned a smallish local computer shop.
| He later fled the country claiming MI5 were persecuting him
| for developing such good encryption software.
|
| TO be fair, he seems to have fooled financial institutions
| too. He bought a Ferarri (presumably on credit) and Amex gave
| him a black card (which he tastefully put a picture of on the
| company website). It did not take a lot to see through the
| fraud, the actual business was decribed on the website.
|
| The other person I got introduced to around the same time for
| the same reason turned out to be a member of a terrorist
| organisation. Not banned here at the time, but still not
| someone I particularly wanted to meet.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Do any other countries have an equivalent to the UK's "super
| injunction"? This is where a court order says you're not
| allowed to talk about the court order itself nevermind the
| topic covered by the order.
| flir wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
|
| That's probably a good starting point for a dive into that
| question.
| scott_w wrote:
| I remember a lot of fuss being made about these but, as
| time goes on, I'm very sceptical they can work. Looking at
| the Afghan data leak reported earlier this year: courts can
| make it practically difficult for most of the organisation
| to even know they're subject to court orders!
|
| The person updating the website asks "have we received a
| court order?" and the person under injunction _must_ answer
| "not me." The website author isn't lying, but the website
| contains incorrect information (as the result of a legally-
| enforced lie).
|
| You could ask your lawyer but, once again, they'd also
| answer "no we haven't" because answering anything else is
| contempt of court at best.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I'd think the CEO would know, would they not? And the CEO
| could tell the person updating the website: "Let's go
| ahead and remove the canary, we don't need it anymore."
| --> "OMG, did we get secretly subpoena'd?" ---> "No, not
| yet, but I just don't want to run the warrant canary
| anymore."
| scott_w wrote:
| The only way the CEO finds out is if they're made privy
| to the injunction, at which point they become subject to
| it. Even an oblique hint could be a breach of the
| injunction.
|
| Be honest: do you think a judge is stupid enough to
| believe you had the injunction explained to you by your
| legal counsel then, in a totally unrelated incident,
| thought "oh, I don't think we need the warrant canary any
| more."
| malnourish wrote:
| That's a key component of some specific forms of US warrants.
| scott_w wrote:
| I imagine so. Bear in mind that the concept isn't
| particularly a bad idea, however they are _very_ easy to
| abuse and the laws need to restrict them to where they 're
| strictly necessary (and force the court to prove they're
| still needed).
|
| The Afghan data leak scandal is a great example of where it
| made sense to use a super-injunction at first but also where
| its application continued long past when it should have done
| for (frankly) political reasons. Lewis Goodall's reporting on
| this is pretty excellent and fairly balanced, in my opinion.
| abxyz wrote:
| > UK libel law routinely covers up all sorts of things which
| the public would benefit from having revealed, simply by the
| threat of an expensive lawsuit. It makes investigative
| journalism really uneconomic.
|
| No. The deference people have to _the law_ as some sort of all
| knowing all powerful magic spell that can be cast to force
| silence at any time is to blame. Libel is publishing something
| you know to be untrue. The truth cannot be libel.
|
| If you want to speak the truth, if you want to act in service
| of the greater good, you must take the risk that you will
| attract attention from people who do not want you to speak the
| truth. And those people may use whatever power they have to
| suppress you, whether that's judicial or extrajudicial. That's
| not caused by any specific legal system, it's how people
| behave.
|
| Investigative journalism is uneconomic the world over. The U.K.
| has some of the best investigative journalism in the world. The
| U.K. legal system is far from perfect, but it is wrong to say
| that in this case, the U.K.'s libel laws (for all their flaws)
| kept this information secret.
|
| The irony is that the greatest suppressor of the truth is
| comments like yours which scare people into silence about the
| truth.
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://www.msrs.co.uk/the-libel-labyrinth-navigating-the-
| tw...
|
| > The costs in this case were significant, with Vardy being
| ordered to pay a substantial proportion of Rooney's legal
| fees. Initially, the court ordered Vardy to pay PS1.5 million
| in costs, earlier this month, it was revealed that Vardy had
| been ordered to pay an additional PS100,000, bringing the
| total to PS1.6 million.
|
| https://www.matrixlaw.co.uk/news/noel-clarke-ordered-to-
| pay-...
|
| > In August, after a six week trial, the High Court upheld
| the Guardian's defences of truth and public interest speech.
|
| > The trial judge, Steyn J, has now ordered Mr Clarke to pay
| PS3m on account within 28 days, in respect of a likely
| eventual costs liability of over PS6m.
|
| Those are cases where the defence _won_. But in those cases,
| (a) they have to front the legal fees themselves for a period
| of several years during the action and (b) there is a real
| risk that the person who filed the libel action may not be
| able to pay it.
|
| It very risky for an individual to defend a libel action, so
| almost everyone folds instantly on receiving a letter, or
| settles.
|
| An exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_v_Hopkins
| - peak Twitter, sadly. Fortunately in this case justice
| prevailed and Katie Hopkins lost her house and life savings.
| closewith wrote:
| Yes, I once made a bug report based to a client's supplier
| (overly permissive API endpoint was leading user data) and
| became the subject of the a spurious defamation letter. It
| was obviously unwinnable on the supplier's part, never went
| past solicitor's letters, and still cost high four figures
| to defend.
|
| Nothing like some of the real horror stories, but still a
| significant chilling effect.
| abxyz wrote:
| > ...and still cost high four figures to defend
|
| You do not need to "defend" against a "spurious
| defamation letter". The (very profitable) business of
| sending legal letters is based on the misunderstanding of
| the law that is perpetuated online. Legal letters are to
| law firms what bandwidth is to cloud hosting providers:
| free money.
| krageon wrote:
| Bandwidth isn't free to a cloud hosting provider in any
| real sense of the word. It's not priced in relation to
| cost, but it definitely _does_ cost
| closewith wrote:
| In the UK, under the UK Civil Procedure Rules, you are
| expected to engage in the Pre-Action Protocol and provide
| a substantive response within 14 days, and failure to do
| so can effect you credibility and standing in court. So
| you do not have to respond, but not doing so risks
| sanction from the court for non-engagement.
| abxyz wrote:
| You're proving my point. You are catastrophising.
|
| A response to a "spurious defamation letter" does not
| cost "high four figures". Substantive does not refer to
| the cost of the response. Substantive means that it
| addresses the substance of the complaint.
|
| The "high four figures" you spent for a lawyer to respond
| (I disagree with the word "defend") to a legal threat was
| unnecessary. You paid a bunch of money for some low-paid
| legal assistants to fill out a template, and then a high-
| paid solicitor to sign off on it.
|
| As an individual, you can respond substantively to a
| legal threat for free. And even if you choose not to
| respond, courts are not punitive, the standard that
| courts hold individuals to are different to the standards
| they hold law firms to. A court will not rule in a
| claimant's favour in a libel case because an individual
| didn't follow procedure correctly.
|
| If you, as an individual, make a truthful statement about
| A Big Corporation and A Big Corporation spends PS100,000
| on a team of lawyers to write an angry letter to you
| demanding you retract, a simple single-sentence self-
| composed response of "The statement is true, I will not
| retract." is substantive.
|
| Despite what catastrophisers like yourself
| (catastrophisers who are encouraged by participants in
| the legal system who profit from this misapprehension)
| might suggest, civil courts are interested in
| adjudicating fairness, not trapping individuals in an
| endless legal quagmire.
|
| Can you share examples of individuals who have been
| sanctioned by the U.K. courts for anything that comes
| close to not engaging in the Pre-Action Protocol?
| closewith wrote:
| No, the Pre-Action Protocol is quite a bit more in depth
| than that and required a significant response including
| document review and research.
|
| "The statement is true, I will not retract" is not
| substantive and is effectively calling the bluff. If they
| take it beyond a letter, those costs will balloon
| further.
| abxyz wrote:
| https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-
| rules/civil/prot...
|
| The "Defendant's Response to Letter of Claim" section is
| very clear that it is actually that simple. The burden is
| almost entirely on the claimant, the defendant has very
| little to do. Can you provide any evidence that any
| individual has ever been sanctioned by a U.K. court for
| either not filing a response, or not filing a substantive
| response?
|
| You are saying that "costs will balloon further" but you
| haven't yet established there are any costs. How can
| costs that do not exist balloon? Any individual could
| satisfy the "Pre-action Protocol for Media and
| Communications Claims" with ease, no expense necessary.
| closewith wrote:
| Costs upon commencement of litigation. Are you being
| purposely obtuse or trolling?
| abxyz wrote:
| The point I am making in this thread is that there are no
| mandatory costs, that receiving an angry letter from the
| lawyers of a deep-pocketed litigant is financially
| inconsequential. The choice to hire legal representation
| and pay them "high four figures" to write a response is a
| choice. Hiring legal representation for court is a
| choice, too.
|
| The courts are very kind to people who choose to
| represent themselves, especially when the litigants are
| obviously abusing the system to try and silence
| individuals. The point you're making seems to be that you
| must spend money to defend against spurious defamation
| claims so I have asked you to provide any evidence of a
| case where an individual is accused of libel and has
| suffered because they chose not to spend money.
|
| I am not trolling. I disagree with the suggestion that
| the U.K. libel laws create an environment where people
| are scared to speak truth because there is a real threat
| of an expensive lawsuit. My position is that the fear
| people have of expensive lawsuits comes from other people
| fear mongering, in comments like yours, either based on a
| misunderstanding of a case they've seen publicised or
| because of information they've been given by legal
| professionals in a different context.
| closewith wrote:
| Okay, so you are trolling or you are at peak levels at HN
| arrogance.
|
| No, the chilling effect of UK defamation laws is not an
| artefact of scaremongering. No, you have not discovered
| the secret truth hidden by the legal profession. Yes,
| defamation cases are a real threat and expensive to
| defend as the burden of proof lies on the defendant, not
| the allegedly defamed.
| jddj wrote:
| > Lots of people are celebrating but I'm not. It's a sad,
| lonely sort of anticlimax. It's really crap and I feel
| really bad it's all ended up like this. I thought she'd
| just say sorry
|
| Wow.
|
| > In May 2018, Hopkins won an IPSO case against the Daily
| Mirror for claiming that she had been detained in South
| Africa in February 2018 for taking ketamine. The Mirror
| updated the headline to say that she had been detained for
| spreading racial hatred, and included a correction in the
| article.
|
| Pick your battles, eh
| abxyz wrote:
| You are (wilfully?) misrepresenting these cases. The
| defence in each of these cases chose to employ very
| expensive legal teams, the cost in these cases is a
| reflection of choices made by the defendant, not the cost
| of defending against a claim of libel. As an individual
| defendant in a libel case, there would be no obligation to
| incur such costs.
|
| Noel Clarke's legal team were working on a no-win no-fee
| basis (before they saw the writing on the wall and dropped
| him as a client, leading him to represent himself). The
| Guardian had no obligation to spend over PS6 million on
| their defence, it was a choice they made. Indeed, one could
| argue that The Guardian chose to spend so much to send a
| message to those that consider baseless libel legal action
| in future, that The Guardian is willing to spend any amount
| of money to defend itself.
|
| If you are an individual who posts the truth online, and
| you are sued for libel, you can spend very little on
| mounting a defence (you may even choose to represent
| yourself for free). Whether the litigant spends thousands,
| millions or billions on their action against you is
| immaterial as it is their cost, not yours.
|
| As for Jack Monroe vs. Hopkins, Jack Monroe is a fraud.
| Justice did not prevail, although Hopkins losing her house
| was a nice treat.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Very easy to pop shit when you aren't risking your life and
| your family's future to protect the honor of JP Morgan. If
| everything goes perfectly, you've just lost your job and
| can't get hired because people don't want to hire a snitch;
| and if everything goes badly, it could go really badly. You
| might end up killed in a _botched robbery_ , or thinking
| suicide will be the only way to save your family.
|
| I'm pretty sure the truth wasn't even a defense in UK libel
| law before 2013. It was entirely about whether you had the
| intent to harm someone. If you want to disrupt a thief's
| business, that's intent to harm someone, as a lot of people
| who wrote about quack doctors found out.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| The irony is that libel doesn't just suppress individuals,
| but corporations that might be bankrupted by libel suits,
| such as reporting agencies.
|
| Nice ideals. I mean that. But pure altruism at great cost is
| a lot harder than you imagine.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| Then go publish an article about how much time the Prince of
| Wales spends with women that aren't his wife
| abxyz wrote:
| Sure, send me the evidence and I'll publish it.
| bschne wrote:
| I'm quite firmly on the side of "don't do bad stuff", even way
| before crossing the line to wondering how you'd look in the
| proverbial orange jumpsuit. But two things about this are often
| under-discussed IMO.
|
| Firstly, personal costs can be high even before full-blown
| whistleblowing, the struggles of which are well reported. The
| best case is usually that you're looking for a new job. It is
| clear to me that that's better than committing a crime or gravely
| unethical action, but not everyone always has good alternatives,
| enough financial safety, and no major economic responsibilities
| to cover at home.
|
| This also goes for mental costs: I have previously come close to
| burnout spending months trying to rectify a clearly very bad and
| doomed situation. The only reward at the other end was the bitter
| vindication of seeing a project I deeply cared about crash and
| burn from afar after cutting my losses. And I personally know
| people who suffered far greater damage and took longer to recover
| from it, even in cases where they merely uncovered some big
| skeleton in the closet that was not even the fault of anyone
| currently in charge or clearly malicious. In many cases,
| management will be somewhere between actively complicit and
| themselves stuck in a bad situation with barely enough
| (perceived) agency to fix things the right way, which doesn't
| help.
|
| Secondly, short of "going to war" and dedicating your entire life
| to changing something, saving yourself is usually the best you
| can hope for. That's obviously better than being complicit and
| possibly liable. I also like being able to sleep at night knowing
| I have principles. But if you have the righteousness to refuse to
| become complicit, it's quite frustrating to come to terms with
| the fact that you mostly won't be able to set things straight
| properly unless you are in a very influential position. I know
| that's often not really my responsibility if I'm not higher up,
| but it still doesn't sit right with me that I can't do more.
| gampleman wrote:
| > not everyone always has good alternatives, enough financial
| safety, and no major economic responsibilities to cover at
| home.
|
| I recommend planning for this (if you can). Set money aside
| sufficient to cover your costs until you can get another job so
| that you can quit at any time. Negotiate your deals so that you
| don't end up with substantial golden handcuffs (i.e. cash >
| equity, especially with long vesting periods).
|
| This helps a lot with maintaining an ethical position, but is
| also helpful for other negotiations. Effectively you are
| maintaining a good BATNA[1].
|
| [1]:
| https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/valuation/wh...
| bschne wrote:
| whole-heartedly seconded, it helps with anything from "they
| want me to do something really bad" all the way to "I'm
| really not feeling it anymore here"
| moron4hire wrote:
| Many years ago, I was working for a consulting firm doing work
| for a, erhm, "large insurance provider headquartered in
| Illinois". I was building a tool their insurance adjusters could
| use to use GPS devices to check how far houses were from the
| coast line and deny flood coverage to anyone within a certain
| boundary. Note that this was during the time of Selective
| Availability, so GPS devices were only good to 100m precision.
|
| The client saw my first version where I marked an "indeterminate"
| buffer zone to account for the precision problem. They complained
| it was "confusing" and insisted I use the raw value without any
| buffer. Oh, and also, round the numbers in such a way to put all
| indeterminate points inside the denial zone. This would
| effectively add hundreds of square miles to the denial zone. A
| denial zone set by law, i.e. this was the some the government was
| allowing the insurance company to blanket deny flood coverage.
|
| Giving them the benefit of doubt, I explained that the proposed
| changes didn't make mathematical sense and would over count
| people near the edge of the denial zone. I had access to some
| market data at the time and was able to estimate it would be a
| few thousand extra homes. They did the standard "avoid
| acknowledging the issue" whenever someone is trying to pressure
| you into doing something unethical it illegal.
|
| I told my boss at the consulting company. He started putting the
| screws on me. Told me we needed to do this. Told me my job was on
| the line. Intimated it would be hard to find a new job
| considering the client was the largest employer in the area. Told
| me he could get anyone to do it.
|
| I had two weeks of PTO planned, during which I was supposed to
| come back to Pennsylvania and move my stuff out to Illinois.
| After my PTO, I was supposed to show back up in Illinois.
| Instead, I went to our HQ in PA (much to the surprise of
| everyone, "what are you doing _here_ "), told the CEO what
| happened, and when he doubled down on doing the wrong thing, I
| quit on the spot, no notice period.
|
| I learned later they did not "get anyone to do it". My actions
| put the contract in a lurch, the client dropped my former
| employer, and cancelled the project.
|
| I feel pretty good about that one.
|
| There have been other issues since then, but I've noticed a
| pattern. They always happen at places I had to talk myself into
| joining. There were red flags and I rationalized them away,
| "well, I'm just over reacting. I don't have any evidence anything
| is wrong here. It's just the way people talk that's bothering me.
| And I really need this job." Since I've gotten more stable and
| better about not taking jobs that show red flags, somehow the
| ethical issues seem to have magically gone away.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Does this pre-date flood zone maps or something? That's a way
| better indicator of risk than miles from the coast.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I don't know. This was 25 years ago and I was pretty young at
| the time. Clients being clients, they probably didn't know,
| either. Consulting being consulting, probably nobody would
| have sprung for it (the maps if they needed licensing, or
| even just the development to use them) if anyone did know.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| FEMA provides them for free, but 25 years ago there may
| have been a great cost to using them in printed form.
| spicyusername wrote:
| Quitting is usually a good first response.
| cakealert wrote:
| If you asked to do something fishy then document it and consult a
| lawyer. Don't do anything that is above the bare minimum required
| to cover your ass. You get nothing for doing the "right thing"
| and are likely to be penalized for it - word will get around and
| future employers have no interest in figuring out if you were
| right nor will they care, you will have proven to be disloyal or
| worse an idealist.
| swills wrote:
| I really do not know what to think of someone facing up to 75
| years in prison getting 3 years of probation.
| singron wrote:
| The media is terrible about reporting on "maximum sentences".
| The federal sentencing guidelines are super complicated and
| lazy journalists usually just add all the maximum numbers up
| and write these egregious numbers. In reality, a lot of the
| charges are deduplicated, can be served concurrently, or are
| automatically attenuated by factors like being a 1st time
| offender.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I believe it's mostly because of cooperating with the
| prosecution of the ringleader.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 'You can always say no...' That is like something from a bad
| movie about spouse abuse. 'Just leave' plays well on TV but the
| reality is often that a job is someone's life. Just saying no and
| leaving will have real, and likely massive, harm to the person.
| Where do they go? What do they do? Do they actually have 6 months
| of savings to look for a new position and explain why they left
| their last one? How about the money to spend on hiring lawyers to
| help them? We need functioning protections for whistleblowers
| that are well advertised, well funded, -not- subject to the whims
| of whoever is in office and that actually allow people to 'just
| say no' and not have their lives shattered.
| jcz_nz wrote:
| 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.
| jcz_nz wrote:
| 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.
| testing22321 wrote:
| 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.
| ghssds wrote:
| It's counter-productive to punish someone for something out
| of their control. One should not be punished for his
| parents', siblings' or childs' actions.
| jliptzin wrote:
| It's not even a punishment anyway, they can easily afford
| to pay for their care out of pocket.
| ashdksnndck wrote:
| Are you implying random programmers, administrators, and
| managers at insurance companies have generational wealth?
| Then why are they spending their time doing those jobs?
| adrianN wrote:
| It is my understanding that in the US many common health
| issues can cost you millions of dollars.
| thfuran wrote:
| A few million dollars would probably cover months in the
| ICU, so not exactly common. A few tens of thousands would
| be a more plausible ambulance ride to ER followed by
| emergency surgery and a few days in the hospital, which
| still isn't very common. Carrying a pregnancy to term and
| delivery can be similarly expensive though.
| adrianN wrote:
| My twins spent a month in the ICU but my insurance
| covered it.
| salawat wrote:
| Ah, but the family of the canceled policyholders should
| suffer for losing their mother/sister/daughters?
|
| Make decisions to harm others, don't be surprised if it
| blows back in kind. Golden Rule is there for a reason.
| Treat others as you would have them do unto you.
| gljiva wrote:
| Have the families of those "insurers" made a decision to
| harm others?
| thephyber wrote:
| A different lens to view this:
|
| If you benefit from receiving stolen property, does the
| law force you to return it? One way of interpreting your
| scare quotes is that the executives turned a health
| insurer into a law violating company.
|
| Obviously there are burdens of proof and this is most
| likely not possible to prosecute (it sounds like the
| health insurer has already shrunk and based on the date
| of the anecdote above, I'm guessing the relevant statutes
| of limitations have expired.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > If you benefit from receiving stolen property, does the
| law force you to return it?
|
| The general answer to that is: it depends on a lot of
| factors, but sometimes yes and sometimes no. The specific
| answer varies between jurisdictions, I think even between
| different US states and certainly between countries. It's
| often relevant whether you knew or should reasonably have
| known at the time of purchase that the property was
| stolen.
| em-bee wrote:
| well it depends, if you buy a car stolen from me, then i
| should get the car back, no matter what. if you didn't
| know that it was stolen, you have a claim against the
| person who sold you the car, but not me. but if that
| person can't return the money, then you are out of luck,
| just as when you are falling for a scam. not your fault,
| but your damage nontheless.
| salawat wrote:
| Those families are/were more than happy with the standard
| of life being raked in by their breadwinner's willingness
| to make the unilateral decision to indulge in
| institionally driven statistical murder. So yeah, as one
| who walked away from Omelas in that sense, I think I'm
| pretty qualified to say yes on this front. After a
| certain point, a wife or husband not asking "so what is
| it you do exactly?", does rather reflect poorly on them.
|
| Remember, every person working for an insurer has
| unparalleled access to data on what the effects of their
| decision is going to be. You can't claim ignorance once
| you've seen the glorified spreadsheets that run these
| companies.
| rswail wrote:
| In the US it's unconstitutional for the government to do
| that, it's what the ban of laws of attainder is partially
| about.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > it's what the ban of laws of attainder is partially
| about.
|
| Not really; attainder occurs when you're convicted by a
| legislator as opposed to a judge.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >It's counter-productive to punish someone for something
| out of their control.
|
| For people in specific classes that benefit from networks
| and status: it is not.
|
| It should be default. If you abuse your power and
| position, it should have cascading effects not just for
| you but people that benefited from it.
|
| This idea that only one person at fault when there are
| 10's of people that hide behind the crime is just non-
| sense and has done immeasurable damage to society.
|
| And I stress again: it should be income bracket/class
| based. The higher you are, the harder the fall.
| teiferer wrote:
| Collective punishment also has done immeasurable damage
| to society and I'm glad that most reasonable systems of
| law do not consider it legal.
|
| Go after the guilty party and revert whatever benefits
| they got. If money went to dependents, that money is to
| be seized. But those who received the money are not at
| fault per se. Unless they helped in the crime, then they
| are obviously guilty too, but not of receiving fund but
| for helping committing a crime.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Yep. We have laws against that sort of thing precisely
| because it's such a common human reaction to an
| injustice.
|
| You can even see the evidence in many of the sister
| comments here.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment
| bestouff wrote:
| Of course, but having their families profit from the
| money earnt via these evil actions doesn't seem fair
| either.
| kstenerud wrote:
| We already have long-established legal precedent for
| dealing with such issues and much more. It can actually
| get quite complicated - which is why we defer to the
| experts and move slowly on such subjects.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It really seems like it's only complicated because there
| are an awful lot of people who want to do as evil things
| as possible and not go to prison for it
|
| Loopholes and lawfare are the tools of the corrupt
| kstenerud wrote:
| You'd think so, but no. Most of the complications come
| from handling edge cases where the innocent would get
| swept up, while avoiding exploitability. Making laws that
| actually do what we want is HARD.
|
| Laws are like code: It only seems perfect until it meets
| the real world. And the complications only seem frivolous
| until it's your ass on the line.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >We already have long-established legal precedent for
| dealing with such issues and much more.
|
| We really don't in reality. The manner in which even the
| existing laws are enforced leaves a lot to be desired.
| bill_joy_fanboy wrote:
| Is it really counter-productive, though?
|
| Propensity to do harm through crime, violence, etc. is
| largely a genetic attribute.
|
| Take a violent drug lord for example. Do you really want
| a woman capable of loving him allowed to continue on as
| if nothing happened?
| teiferer wrote:
| "permanently"
|
| "ever again"
|
| For good reason, modern law systems rarely issue punishments
| that last a lifetime. People can and do change, and something
| stupid (and illegal) you did 30 years ago shouldn't be held
| over your head today. These are rare cases for the absolutely
| worst crimes. For anything else, you receive a punishment, be
| it money or months/years in jail, and after that, you deserve
| a chance to live a life without ongoing punishment. Beyond
| knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which
| for most people is already a burden heavy enough.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's a bit disingenuous to argue "they shouldn't get life
| without the possibility of parole" when in fact most of
| this economic white-collar crime goes completely
| unpunished, or at best gets a fine targeted at the company
| and never at the individual people who committed the
| crimes.
| catgary wrote:
| Most of these C-suite executives have more than enough
| money to retire comfortably.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yep! So they need to go to jail, or the "punishment" is
| moot.
|
| Obviously fining you 5$ for stealing 100 is not gonna
| work.
| hnfong wrote:
| This is more justification for banning people who got
| rich by doing illegal things from holding positions of
| power ever.
|
| Not to punish per se, but to prevent them from doing more
| harm to the public.
| teiferer wrote:
| To the contrary. I do find it a disingenuous argument to
| say "most of this kind of crime goes unpunished, so the
| cases we do punish, we have to punish for life".
|
| The solution is not harder punishments for those that are
| punished, but punishing more of them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You're protesting a lot here.
| teiferer wrote:
| I do hate economic criminals just as much as everybody
| else. But I also value honest arguments. The kind of
| thing this reply of yours didn't provide.
| hvb2 wrote:
| Isn't that exactly how the criminal justice system works?
| Because you know you're not going to catch all the
| criminals you want the punishment to serve as a
| deterrent?
|
| Punishing more of them is easily said, when the crime is
| much harder to prove than shoplifting for example. And
| I'm skipping the fact that the shoplifter will be
| represented by an overworked public defender while the
| exec has a team of lawyers lined up that probably are
| payed by the company that got richer off illegal behavior
| teiferer wrote:
| > Isn't that exactly how the criminal justice system
| works?
|
| No, it's not. We don't catch everybody guilty of petty
| theft, but those we do catch still don't end up in prison
| for life.
|
| There was a time when we chopped their right hand off,
| but I'm glad those days are behind us.
|
| (Reading many of the reactions here though, we are just a
| thin layer of judges away from mob rule.)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What is disingenuous is claiming that putting a crazy
| punishment on the paper will change anything when
| absolutely nobody gets caught.
|
| If you tear apart whatever guarantees human rights exist
| on your places just so your can impose unreasonable
| punishment to nobody, then don't act surprised when
| somebody else uses it against real people you sympathize
| with. (And yeah, if you are from the US or some other
| place where lifelong punishment is common, you should be
| fighting to fix this, not to add support to it.)
|
| On the other hand, you could be pushing for those people
| being punished at all, by reasonable crimes that your law
| probably already recognizes or that could be added
| without rotting your society. But yeah, maybe that's too
| much.
| flir wrote:
| Being struck off by professional organisations is a thing,
| though.
|
| On the one hand I don't want the bar to this discipline
| raised. On the other hand, I don't want people like us
| (metaphorically) building bridges that tip every two
| hundredth car into the river.
| teiferer wrote:
| Of course not. But 10 years later, rehabilitation could
| be in the cards?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Depends on what you did. In this case: no way. You can
| fuck right off and you should never be in charge of a
| company again.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Punishment should match the crime, to both rehabilitate and
| be preventative.
|
| White collar crime gets basically no punishment, and
| looking at career of those people they usually end up
| falling upwards.
|
| For such cases banning them from being in a management
| position for X years would be a nice discouragement.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I wouldn't ban them from management, just garnish their
| wages so they can only earn minimum wage (or minimum
| living wage). Also, no property ownership beyond a single
| home.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Without punishment, there's not much incentive for
| rehabilitation. Why stop/change/repent instead of just
| continuing?
| watwut wrote:
| Being forced to change the profession is not the same as
| being in jail forever or being unable employable forever.
|
| > Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the
| punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy
| enough.
|
| Like, seriously? These people do not feel bad, there is no
| heavy burden. They are proud of how they earned money, feel
| like any prosecution is grave injustice and would do it
| again.
|
| Widely immoral people, whether in politics or business,
| dont feel sorry for who they are. They made those decisions
| because there was no moral dilema for them.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| They are proud _that_ they earned money, the how
| (positive or negative) is completely immaterial.
|
| Others who want to earn money and are likewise ambivalent
| about the means will see a felony conviction for causing
| grievous public harm in the pursuit of giant piles of
| money as an endorsement and hire the "reformed" exec at
| the first opportunity.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sorry, but in this case I think 'lifetime' is very much
| appropriate. It's not like they're being sent to the
| electric chair. They were systematically ripping people off
| on what matters most to a person: their health. There is a
| good chance people died as a result of this. And since
| hardly any of these crooks _ever_ goes to jail (but instead
| they get to do it again somewhere else) having their name
| out in the open _for ever_ is very much appropriate.
| Loughla wrote:
| That's just false though. For poor people, if you have a
| conviction, it follows you forever and impacts your life
| negatively in a multitude of ways.
| askonomm wrote:
| Depends where you are, I guess. In a prison-first
| rehabilitation-last country like USA, yes. In EU, many
| countries will close your criminal record after some
| years (7 in Estonia) at which point nobody other than law
| enforcement itself can see that you have a record. Not to
| mention that even if the crime you did was fairly recent,
| no company has the ability to check your background
| without your permission, and even then it is not
| something that is being done in the vast majority of
| places.
|
| In other words, once you've carried out your sentence, in
| 99% of the cases it's done and behind you, and you can go
| on living a normal life without anyone else needing to
| know.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| But if you're restarting your life after serving a
| sentence, if you're poor it will be very hard. If you
| have wealth you probably can easily put your crime behind
| you.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| This is what people always say, but it sure seems like
| that guy was able to get a job as School Superintendent
| in Iowa. His past didn't get in the way of actually
| getting the job. It was only when ICE showed up that
| people noticed.
| asacrowflies wrote:
| What horrible crime did that guy commit "firearm charge"
| you mean being told to put a hunting gun in the car then
| instantly ticketed for "improper storage" by a racist
| ranger? The horror.... So glad we got that one /s
| Loughla wrote:
| Yes if you lie about your past, you can do those things.
| Correct.
|
| Not sure how that's relevant.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| That's true. We judge people to be guilty and then they get
| a punishment. But after the punishment they have payed back
| their guilt and are now not guilty anymore, that's kind of
| the deal.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| If you commit any number of stupid or criminal acts, you
| are legally blacklisted from the financial industry for
| life.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Should be unable to be a politician, or take part in the
| political process beyond voting (eg party donations),
| too.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| which would incentivise politically motivated charges for
| opponents.
| f1shy wrote:
| I think this have to ve public Information, giving the
| right to decide to the next employer. You may employ them,
| other people may not. I would at least ask some questions.
| mystraline wrote:
| An 18 year old (HS senior) and a 15 year old (HS sophomore)
| can have sex together and thats a statutory rape charge
| that will follow you the rest of your life.
|
| And say its 2 17 year olds, and you take nude pictures to
| send to your partner. Now, having sex is legal here, but a
| picture? Thats possessing 'child sexual assault imagery'.
| Nobody would think 17 year olds are 'children'. Even the
| law routinely charges them as adults.
|
| And getting a felony at all follows you around, unless you
| can pay the danegeld to have it removed. Of course, staying
| clean isn't sufficient. Paying $10k or more is.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You can't count the years you evaded law enforcement as
| time served during the sentencing process.
| bill_joy_fanboy wrote:
| Well, that's nice that you feel that way. But, you don't
| get to decide what people "deserve" or what "should"
| happen.
|
| I happen to disagree. I think these crimes (and many
| others) should follow you more or less permanently.
|
| My opinions on what "should" be the case have just as much
| validity as yours.
|
| Please be self aware when you are making baseless moral
| claims.
| teiferer wrote:
| I don't think I wrote anything about the validity of
| other opinions. I have mine, you have yours, that's fine.
|
| A bit of self-awareness would suit yourself well. I
| didn't make any moral clas, baseless or not.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Yeah no, sociopathy isn't something that ever goes away
| after someone becomes her age.
| teiferer wrote:
| It's not? Are you a neuroscientist and/or have evidence
| for that claim? Then we can talk, I'm interested.
|
| Or do you just claim this because that's your gut
| feeling?
| iwontberude wrote:
| History is the best teacher
| furyofantares wrote:
| > These are rare cases for the absolutely worst crimes.
|
| If "targeting insurance policies of women with breast
| cancer for cancellation, using any pretext" is accurate -
| I'm curious how that compares to the absolutely worst
| crimes to you.
| xbar wrote:
| Personal accountability with consequences that make fraud
| unpalatable means setting a high bar on white collar crime.
|
| If you are saying that twentysomething founders should not
| be held accountable for the mistakes of their "youth," then
| you might be inclined hold the investors personally
| accountable for funding them--similar to parents being
| liable for their teenagers' driving mishaps.
|
| I am disinclined to believe that Javice and his ilk are
| very much corrected by the Department of Corrections or
| later life experiences.
| nurettin wrote:
| CIOs simply manage the IT budget and technology to be used.
| They don't necessarily have to be present for company policy
| planning.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Same thing happened to patients with AIDS, in the 1990s. It
| was disgusting. May still be going on.
|
| People don't really care about drug addicts and gay folks,
| though (there's a fairly significant number of folks that
| think they "deserve" it), so it didn't get as much attention.
| peterpeppers wrote:
| In the 2010s, we had a similar situation but it wasn't illegal.
|
| I used to work for a large drug distributor both pre and during
| the opioid epidemic.
|
| At the time (pre-SUPPORT Act), distributors weren't required to
| notify the DEA about anomalous ordering so we didn't provide
| data to law enforcement unless they sent a subpoena.
|
| To increase profits, we identified our best customers of
| opioids and updated our inventory tracking system to send
| rebates and early warning notifications to providers so they'd
| buy more earlier.
|
| Each provider has a sales rep (territory) mapped so we could
| figure out bonuses easily.
|
| We the software engineering team were paid well for it, but not
| as much as the sales reps who got a percentage of the buy.
| gregoryl wrote:
| It really seems like you have effectively caused the deaths
| of many people through your actions. Does that have a
| lingering impact on you?
| globalise83 wrote:
| "We the software engineering team were paid well for it"
| aydyn wrote:
| Considering he just admitted it on public forum, Ima guess
| no.
| gregoryl wrote:
| I was hoping to get some insight/context into how they
| actually feel about it, rather than guessing. You can
| certainly come to peace with a past decision, change your
| opinion later etc etc.
| immibis wrote:
| I think it's still controversial whether manufacturers of
| substances are morally culpable for the result of people
| wrongly using them. And while you could hold the marketing
| or executive team accountable for trying to get people
| addicted to heroin, I'm not sure the same applies to
| programmers of an inventory tracking system?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Controversial in general, maybe. In the case of opioids
| and the pharm industry, absolutely not. It's been well
| documented at this point that pharm companies were well
| aware of the abuse, and not only did nothing to stop it,
| but went out of their way to encourage it because sales
| were going through the roof.
|
| In the case of Purdue and oxycontin, the culpability has
| in fact been established in court as well.
|
| As for the coders, I find it hard to believe that they
| were so ignorant, naive, or unintelligent that they had
| absolutely no idea what was going on. I just don't buy
| it.
| walleeee wrote:
| Regardless whether the rest of society finds the
| programmers responsible, the integrity of that society
| depends upon programmers in such situations holding
| themselves accountable. Apparatchik or moral agent? That
| choice remains ours.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| Judging actions taken at the time with the benefit of what
| we know now, is not a fair way to assess.
|
| Sure we could say it was obvious they were pushing lots of
| pills. But this was a legal product.
|
| Someone working for an NFL team trying to sell tickets , or
| for Starbucks trying to promote frappucinos, ... these
| actions seem fine. We know the risks, but we acknowledge
| and move on.
|
| But if it turns out that new data, 3 years from now, shows
| some huge uptick in head injuries among college players. Or
| high school. And we can attribute this to the influence of
| pro leagues, well.... The actions of the people
| participating in the enterprise now get considered in a
| different light.
|
| Or if we gain new (as if we need it) data on the impact of
| sugar and caffeine on young people, then people who work
| for Starbucks or McDonald's or basically any prepared food
| business, ... we will judge them differently ?
|
| People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had
| no idea that they would be causing brain disorders ,
| generations down the road.
|
| What do we do then? Refuse to take any action for fear of
| some possible future negative impact ?
|
| It's not appropriate to judge this way. We learn as we go,
| and we can say "if we knew then, what we know now..." but
| it's not clear in the moment. A difficult line to draw.
| fragmede wrote:
| > People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel
| had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders ,
| generations down the road.
|
| In that case, they totally did. The people who pushed
| leaded gasoline knew it was dangerous, but they did it
| anyway! By the 1920s-30s, it was already well known in
| medicine that lead caused neurological damage, especially
| in children. Workers at DuPont and Standard Oil plants
| developed hallucinations, seizures, and many died. What's
| abhorrent was where industry executives and some
| government allies downplayed or suppressed evidence of
| the harms.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| How do you live with yourself?
| comprev wrote:
| How is it any different from working at a gambling company
| writing addictive software?
|
| There will always be someone willing to do the work if the
| pay is good enough.
| stavros wrote:
| It's a very smooth gradient from optimizing a sales
| funnel to writing gambling software. I don't know where
| the line is, but in both cases you're exploiting human
| psychology to make more money.
| nekusar wrote:
| Absolutely is.
|
| And its also why some of the anarchist folks I hang out
| with say there's no ethical consumption under capitalism.
| And definitely in areas, they're completely correct.
| watwut wrote:
| It is not much different. I would not worked for gambling
| company either. In fact, gambling companies have to pay
| more (and do, there are open positions) because their
| pool of potential employees is smaller.
|
| The exact same question can be asked to developers who
| help target gamblers with attempts to push them deeper
| into addiction.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| The question was how GP felt about their particular
| unethical act, and it's consequences which likely
| includes multiple deaths. Since you are not GP, it seems
| unlikely that you can answer this question.
|
| I fail to see the relevance of bringing up a different,
| and also unethical example, but I'll answer anyway. If GP
| said that they used to spend their time optimising
| software to be as addictive as possible in order to drive
| people into gambling addiction, destroying their lives
| and taking all their money while doing it, I would ask
| the same question.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's probably slightly worse because opioids actually
| kill people whereas gambling just financially ruins them
| (which can lead to suicide, but still I know which I
| would pick).
|
| But it's only a slight difference. I don't think people
| who work at predatory apps/gambling systems should be
| able to sleep at night either. Not _all_ gambling though;
| I don 't have any objection to occasional sports betting
| for example.
|
| But if you work for one of those pay-to-win apps and find
| some customers are spending thousands of dollars on it
| (whales), you know you're being immoral.
| deaux wrote:
| How is it different from smuggling fentanyl or taking
| hostages for ransom?
|
| There will always be someone willing to do the work if
| the pay is good enough.
|
| The former almost certainly causes much less societal
| damage than working for a pharma company that strives to
| get the whole population addicted to opioids, due to the
| scale constraints that come with running an underground
| business vs. an "above board" one.
|
| Why do you think that gambling companies pay above the
| industry average for the required skillset?
|
| Because luckily there are many other people with me who
| won't work for them, so they have a smaller pool of
| candidates and need to pay more.
| cebert wrote:
| If you think about it enough, most industries are doing
| terrible things. Work for an auto company? Thanks for the
| CO2 emissions accelerating climate change. Work for a
| consumer manufacturer? Thanks for the plastic waste choking
| oceans and landfills. Defense contractors? Thanks for
| enabling wars and killing innocents. Banks? Thanks for
| enslaving folks to debt and perpetuating economic
| inequality. Tech giants? Thanks for surveilling billions
| and eroding privacy on a massive scale. Social media
| platforms? Thanks for amplifying misinformation and fueling
| mental health crises. Fast fashion? Thanks for exploiting
| sweatshop labor and polluting waterways with toxic dyes.
| Pharma companies? Thanks for price-gouging drugs and
| prioritizing profits over access. Oil and gas? Thanks for
| fracking communities into environmental ruin and lobbying
| against renewables.
|
| Almost everyone is contributing to terrible activities.
| Just different degrees of bad.
| deaux wrote:
| What is your point, besides potentially making yourself
| feel better about your industry? Those "different
| degrees" are what it's all about. They're the whole
| point.
|
| Yes, voluntarily working in an industry where that
| "degree" is undeniably magnitudes higher than average
| just for personal gain, does make you quite the awful
| human. And "helping maximize the number of pills pushed
| to confirmed opioid addicts" is indeed a large number of
| standard deviations of "terrible" removed from the work
| the average person does.
|
| Yup, working on recommender sysrems at places like Meta
| is also quite high up there. Luckily the number of people
| who do this kind of work is minuscule when taken as part
| of the global population. Even more luckily, thousands of
| people on HN alone will forego such jobs even if it means
| earning less. I've done so myself.
| cheraderama wrote:
| I guess in the same way as people working for MS, Google,
| FB, Palantir and other genocide enjoyers.
| randycupertino wrote:
| I worked at a health care tech company in Silicon Valley that
| actively defrauded medicare. When the medicare inspectors
| came the owner's daughters had a bunch of their friends from
| college (who didn't work there) sit at computers and pretend
| to be working, then they told the inspectors all these random
| people were registered nurses and full-time employees who
| were helping patients (and thus being billed for). It was a
| total sham.
|
| I reported it and quit but they managed to stay in business
| and keep getting government contracts.
|
| One of the disgruntled doctors from that company made a whole
| website about some of their fraud:
| https://hiller.whitecollarcrooks.com/
|
| They also bragged to us about how one of their daughters was
| dating a Glassdoor exec and had him take down all their bad
| reviews.
| yard2010 wrote:
| It's so funny af that when people from the hood are doing it
| they get locked up or worse, and when business people do it
| they might as well be the president.
|
| I guess there are some differences though. When a new pusher
| shows up in your territory you sue him, not going for a drive
| by.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > This required a lot of business analysis and software
| development - and people had to realize what this code was
| doing
|
| Too many people are trained to not rock the boat and not ask
| questions. I'm always "that guy" in pretty much every meeting
| I'm in. Some people like me, but many don't. It's tough. On the
| occasions that all my questions are already answered or I have
| nothing more to say it's obvious how relieved people are. It
| would be so easy to just be a yes man and please people all the
| time, but I just can't. It's easy to see how selecting for
| people who aren't like me would lead to an organisation that is
| essentially psychopathic.
| andrepd wrote:
| Whistleblower protections need to be steel-solid. Then maybe
| just 1 person with a spine might be enough to get the story to
| the press and/or prosecutors.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Seems to be a trend of Women (especially the 30 under 30) in
| tech being especially fraudy.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Having worked as a programmer for twenty years, most of that as a
| contractor (hence a different employer about once a year), I have
| never been asked to do anything illegal. This isn't said to mean
| no one is, but rather that, if you are asked to do something
| illegal, it is weird. It isn't the normal, messed up capitalist
| system, it isn't typical bureaucratic nonsense, it isn't the
| imperfect state of the world we live in. Most companies don't ask
| their programmers to do something illegal.
|
| Therefore, if you are, you should leave that company, pronto.
| They're weird and probably desperate, and it is likely to get
| even worse. It's not normal. Get out, quickly.
| Spivak wrote:
| Unethical, morally questionable, in poor taste, impolite,
| unprofessional, or underhanded is pretty normal and you can
| find it in every job in every industry and you might not even
| realize without the benefit of hindsight that what you did was
| any of those things. But illegal _feels_ different when it
| happens, even if you don 't know exactly the law something will
| be off. You'll be apprehensive in a way you weren't before,
| people around you will act different, this little pit of
| anxiety will form in your stomach even if you haven't done it
| yet.
| heisenbit wrote:
| Companies usually do not ask but powerful charismatic
| individuals close to the top do.
| stack_framer wrote:
| I worked at NS8 in 2020 for just four months before it collapsed
| and the CEO was arrested for defrauding investors of
| $123,000,000. Just a few months ago, I got a modest payout due to
| a lawsuit over NS8 laying off almost everyone with just three
| days notice. It was very stressful to be without a job in the
| middle of Covid!
| neilv wrote:
| > _The smart thing would have been to do #1. [Talk to a lawyer on
| how to avoid assisting a crime] [...] Here 's what Singh did
| instead: he asked for a personal meeting with Bankman-Fried and
| confronted him about the missing funds._
|
| If you're not sure something illegal is happening, you could do
| both. The lawyer might tell you what questions to get answered,
| to inform what you do next.
|
| (But don't do talk to anyone at the company if you think there is
| any risk that they will try to neutralize you as a weak link.
| "The coverup is worse than the crime" happens in organizations
| with shitty people, and you might have just discovered an
| especially shitty person.)
|
| As an engineer, I once told a company that it was about to
| accidentally do something that I suspected was seriously illegal.
| They were able to prevent it from happening, in time. Problem
| solved, no wrongdoing occurred, and no one had to quit, nor go to
| federal prison.
|
| Longer ago, I once told an organization about some bad things,
| using the appropriate internal channels. And then I had to keep
| going up the chain of command, when each level would suppress it,
| and sometimes even retaliate. Which was a rare opportunity to
| realize that an organization had infected its org chart with a
| high degree of shittiness. I'm now a big fan of people consulting
| a lawyer.
|
| On another occasion, not necessarily "illegal" was averted, but
| at least "big liability" was. I had reverse-engineered a
| customer's security-related protocol, for an integration, and
| found a grave vulnerability. (Critical info that must be inside
| the cryptographic signature envelope, was outside of it, meaning
| that an attacker could replay a captured message later, with
| changed data.) To interoperate with the customer's system, I'd
| need to implement the security thing in an unambiguously wrong
| and insecure way. So I told the appropriate person on my end, and
| thankfully they handled it well, and figured out how to break the
| news to the customer.
|
| That time, to be sure the appropriate person understood the
| severity, I mentioned that, in a different engineering field
| (including one in the application domain), I would "lose my
| license or go to jail" for implementing that.
|
| Occasionally, I briefly muse that our field could use the
| obligations and authority of Professional Engineers. But moments
| later, I realize that our field went too long without that, and I
| can't imagine that being implemented with integrity at this
| point.
| thrown-0825-2 wrote:
| Unionize?
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| Could help for some cases, but at least two of the three
| examples in the article were engineering directors, who are
| generally excluded from unionization rights in the US at least.
| (Other countries vary in how low-level line managers are
| treated by their employment laws, but the closer a manager gets
| to the senior executive ranks, the less those employment laws
| allow them to do anything akin to unionizing.)
| gtsop wrote:
| When ordered to do something that is clearly an illegal action,
| you can just say no. However, in most situations your actions
| won't be directly illegal, but aid someone else to illegal
| actions.
|
| Simply, deny to carry out the work UNLESS you are directly and
| clearly instructed to by EMAIL. Oh, and be sure to make this
| request by email as well, as a record. So send an email saying
| "hey i was told to do that and i am concerned about the legality,
| please give me clear instructions over email"
|
| This will calm them down.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Slow news day? Did this really need a second chance pullback to
| the front page?
| notthatAIguy wrote:
| wow, this was weird
| jamesnorden wrote:
| >To be fair, Singh didn't seen totally clueless, and it seems he
| decided to profit on the developments. Days after he found about
| this fraud, he took a $3.7M loan from FTX (!!) to buy a house
|
| huh...
| sgarland wrote:
| The sub-linked legal document about Frank's synthetic data
| generation was quite interesting, specifically how much
| difficulty their hired consultant (a Data Science Professor) had
| in creating it.
|
| It can indeed be a tricky problem to do in a manner that's both
| fast and accurate, but it's absolutely possible once you have the
| right datasets, which aren't even that large. U.S. ZIP codes,
| telephone area codes (with enough out-of-place ones to mimic
| people who've moved and kept their cell phone number), common
| names, and a word list will get you rows that look plausible.
| Matching street addresses requires a much larger dataset, but
| again, it's not impossible.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Here's another thing to think about: if you are in IT ops, you
| might have access to private data that could be requested,
| without proper judicial review, by a three letter agency. When
| you receive a National Security Letter with a gag rule attached,
| how will you react? What action can you take that is both legal
| and also ethical?
|
| Because it is not just bosses that might try to pressure you into
| taking unethical actions, it is also the state itself.
|
| For my part, I have a plan, and I've told my boss enough to trust
| him to read between the lines and revoke my access to make it
| impossible for me to turn over customer data without a warrant.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Warrant Canary-like system?
|
| Like "I hate the color purple, so if you ever see me in a
| purple baseball cap..." or something similar?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| The problem with a NSL is that the gag rule is pretty
| watertight. For example, "oops, I accidentally wrote my
| password on a bathroom wall" is gonna land you in a world of
| hurt.
|
| You need to find a way to bring some of your other rights
| into balance (and conflict with) those of the state, to bring
| professionals who have a duty to protect your confidence to
| your defense.
|
| The power of the state is asymmetric warfare against an
| individual, which is what they count on. You need leverage
| from other competing lawful protections working on your side.
| noir_lord wrote:
| We have pretty much identical laws here (where here is UK)
| - you can be forced to backdoor things, you can't tell the
| customer and you can't tell anyone else in the company (not
| sure if you are allowed to tell your manager).
|
| There was a whole thing about it a while ago, gov said "we
| are listening to your feedback" and then did it anyway.
|
| Of course our system is actually worse in some ways -
| forgotten a password, they don't believe you (parks and rec
| style) "Believe it or not, straight to jail" (iirc it's a
| max of two years).
| deaux wrote:
| You use parallel construction of course, that's how the
| state itself does it after all.
| dwedge wrote:
| I honestly can't tell if the pragmatic engineer is a well
| regarded site or they are just very good at promotion on LinkedIn
| and hacker news. I suspect the latter but I'm getting more
| curious
| ngriffiths wrote:
| It's funny how people's mindset shifts when they work for a
| company versus independent contracting, but this is another case
| (like salary negotiation) where it should be the same. If your
| client asked you to do something illegal you'd be thinking about
| liability and drop the client. If your employer does, you should
| realize not only do they not have to protect you, it's probably
| in their interest to turn around and blame it all on you!
| bitbasher wrote:
| Thousands of engineers aid companies in user surveillance and
| tracking every day. Cyberstalking at scale.
| monster_truck wrote:
| While not explicitly illegal, I was building out part of a
| product for an international company with a massive userbase
| (hundreds of millions) and discovered a slight issue: their api
| required no authentication, had no rate limiting, and an easily
| discoverable request format. Anyone could make a simple request
| with a handful of digits and get a complete history of that
| product, revealing very intimate details about the users in every
| aspect of their lives.
|
| I don't get nervous easily but it made my stomach turn, my palms
| started sweating. I told my boss, we told our boss, who went and
| pulled the CEO out of a meeting. I was given signed documentation
| on company letterhead that stated I raised the issue and also
| detailed how our company had informed the customer, along with a
| modest cash bonus and they bought me most of the furniture in my
| house (no taxes!)
|
| The company came back to us and said "we know, we built it like
| that on purpose". Incredulous but reassured that both myself and
| my employer were not facing any liability, I finished the product
| and it shipped. Predictably this was exploited within a few years
| and made national news when it was used against prominent
| political figures.
|
| There are still no legal mechanisms in place to enforce any kind
| of security for this class of product.
| aorloff wrote:
| Sounds like from a legal perspective, everyone covered their
| bases.
|
| I take it you are an Oak man, then ? [Harvey Keitel voice]
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