Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
Sometimes it's hard to see in the moment that a product will be used for evil or will have a negative effect on people. Can you look back on any of your work now and wish you didn't do it?
When I was working as a permanent employee for an agency, I created two games for the UK's lottery operator. They both had quite intricate rules to snare and addict the people playing them (let's just say that these games are anything but a game of chance). I felt a constant sense of disgust as I was doing it, though it was a moderately interesting technical challenge.
However, I have had the opportunity as a consultant several times to do work for gambling companies (and also for Camelot again!), and I have turned all of these down and made it extremely clear I was doing so for ethical reasons.
I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in a sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later. I am still quite proud of my response, which was, "Yes, we absolutely can! No, we absolutely won't help you do that!"
1) letting Javascript initiate network connections without explicit user interaction with a narrow set of elements (say, a submit button) was a mistake.
2) not having a browser-provided summary of the data a form is about to submit before it's transmitted was a mistake.
Basically letting Javascript escape from a little box of tightly-scoped input validation handling and maybe defining sort functions for tables was a mistake.
And something would replace them, and the same problems would happen because the fundamental problem is not caused by some technological decisions, but stems from human nature.
That a cross-platform application distribution platform might have arisen anyway is beside the point. It'd have been nice to keep that separate from the locked-down hypertext platform that keeps the user in control. We've lost the latter in gaining the former, rather than having both.
[EDIT] I'm with you on humans being the problem over technology in general, but in this particular case I think there were technical reasons that Web 1.0 was destroyed in the creation of Web 2.0 and we were left with one crappy platform that constantly betrays and tricks its users rather than two, at least one of which isn't capable of betraying its users the way this one does. We're where we are because no-one treated Javascript (or anything else with its capabilities and liberties in the browser) as the fundamentally terrible idea and permanent trust-ruiner that it was. It's inherently and unavoidably a security disaster for the Web, not in terms of secure communication between client and server or whatever, but in terms of practical personal security for the users and their data.
Heck, even if browsers always showed you the data they were about to send, split out by field, just base64 encode what you don't want them to know you know and give it an innocuous field name like, "session_id". Even better, piggyback off of legitimate fields with zero-width-character encoded data. Where there is any signal at all, there is a way to hide extra information.
They had a really great public mission about “responsible gaming” but during one meeting with some execs they let slip that it was all just a joke for them and they didn’t care as long as they got the ticket sales.
It made me feel sick, and I started being a bit uncoorporative on the project until my manager switched me into another project.
So I regret the time I worked in that, and also for being a bit of an asshole on the project instead of just telling my manager I had a problem with that client.
An actual example is of Oskar Schindler (if I recall correctly) whose munition factories in Germany produced faulty munitions during World War II.
It's amazing to see the length these companies will go through to present their product as just an innocent entertainment community where responsibility and morals are held in high esteem, and at the same time using every possible psychological trick in the book to hook their users.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/21/bet365-deni...
People entering the industry need to be thinking about the consequences of the products we make, and I feel like that's something that can be led in part by the visible example of experienced engineers like yourself - ones who have experienced being used for a harmful end and now are willing to both speak up and stand against it happening to them again. I know I needed this very same wake up call when I was a much younger engineer. I feel shame every time I speak about my involvement in harmful products and my cowardice in the moment, but that shame also reminds me of how important it is to talk about it, to try and make sure other engineers think about these duties that are so easily overlooked. And to remind myself that I don't ever want to be in that situation again.
I'm from Quebec and here it's Loto-Québec that operate the lottery. They have games on their online platform too, I had some fun on there a few time, but once I read the actual rule and learned that the dice doesn't follow the real probability... that's just freaking wrong. It's a thing to hide probabilities, it's a whole other ballgame to fake them.
I ended up leaving mainly because it was an unhealthy, high-pressure environment where a lot of the most celebrated people were giant dicks. But I stayed away because I realized that we weren't making anything better. We just situated ourselves near a river of (other people's) money and tried to siphon off a bit of the flow. It was depressing.
I'm glad I never went back. I honestly think the finance industry could be half the size it is with no real harm to the rest of the economy. And given what a mess the 2008 crisis was, trimming the industry way back might be overall beneficial.
It is strange that an industry whose only purpose is to service the productive economy should be 20% of GDP.
Here's an interesting take of the downsides to having such a large financial sector within an economy: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/05/the-finance-cur...
Is the job fulfilling? Depends on your goals - for me I've gained a huge knowledge of low level programming, and front line experience on how far one can go with both software and hardware to 'win' against other competitors in the space. That's invaluable stuff for me.
Is the job moral? Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor. People who invest must understand risk, and risk is really the only way things move forward in the first place. But it also implies there can and will be people who lose out.
It depends on how you look at things I guess.
For instance, when trading in commodities like grain, and deploying a strategy to push the price up over a long time period (whether or not it's a single entity doing so or all traders in unison), people somewhere in the world aren't able to buy that grain and go hungry.
Same with all the foodstuffs. But what about other stuff, metals? What happens if you drive those prices up? Well, again, somewhere in the world some poor chap now cannot afford the metal roof sheet that goes on top of his shed, and he'll sleep under the stars.
I think most if not all finance trading negatively impacts the people that are too poor to even dream about finance trading. When there's a buck to be made in finance, there's always a sucker paying for it. Somewhere along the line that sucker becomes someone who isn't even in the whole financial trading circus, and he'll in the end foot the bill. It must be this way, because the financial industry itself doesn't produce or increase the value of things, it just manipulates the price tags.
My experience disagrees with every statement you made, except the job fulfilling part.
Making markets does not add any value to anyone other than the marketmakers and the stock exchanges.
The only decent thing about those places is that they usually do not beat around the bush. "Does your idea help us be faster? Got proof? Go implement. Money is no objection."
Morals did not exist in that world when I was there.
What I was doing, was helping the 0.01% consolidate their power and wealth at the cost of all other living beings on this one habitable planet.
Then I stopped kidding myself and got out of my golden cage.
The problem here is that, for example, at least in the US, not everyone with a pension or who "contibutes" to a retirement plan is comfortable or even aware of the risks. That ignorance is not a defense, per-se, but if you've got blinders on that you're fleecing pennies off the already rich you are sorely mistaken.
I'd go so far as to argue that turning money into more money without providing a good or service in exchange is squarely immoral.
People with less knowledge. Less technology.
There should not be an additional layer of risk involved only because people bet on other people.
If I buy a share from company x, the success of that company should represent the share price. But that is partially true.
And NO enough people have no idea what they are doing. In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products.
Is the job moral? No.
Except when the finance industry creates (directly or indirectly) a financial crisis like in 2008. Its the poor, that never stood to gain from the financial system in the first place, that end up hit the worst.
However, nowadays the banking tech sector here in the UK seems to be more mature. Our traders are quite often from a STEM background which gives them an understanding of technology, and they don't adhere to the dicky stereotype you often hear about. But most of all, I've always found my tech colleagues to be extremely smart but also down to earth, pragmatic and meritocratic which is the reason why I've ended up remaining in banking.
This is really interesting. I'm at least passingly aware about high speed/frequency trading, but don't know much about the topic in depth.
How low is low in this field? I'm picturing RTOSes running AVX512-heavy hand-optimized code, FPGA farms, custom network ASICs... how overly optimistic am I being here? Heh
Of course, such a vision is very lop-sided, since HFT depends heavily on high-level intelligence. So perhaps it's realtime(ish) Linux and lots of GPUs.
That is definitely not the "game of life". Most business works by creating value for others. It's generally positive sum. Indeed, the only way people in zero-sum industries (e.g., betting, a lot of advertising, many kinds of finance) or negative-sum ones (e.g., scams) have anything to siphon off is because of people doing productive work.
One of reasons I'm most glad to get out of finance is that I could stop trying to justify it to myself. As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
> Is the job moral? ...
But in what way do you consider your job meaningful?
I'm not arguing investment banks and hedge funds are an unmitigated good! But at minimum, finance (much like tech) is far too complex and mixed to be able to correctly say you're not making anything better if you work in it.
That being said, I can absolutely understand why you'd regret working at a specific firm in the industry.
I agree that the industry does produce some value. But ask yourself honestly: what percentage of any given person's time and energy is devoted to value creation? To what extent are they sure their day's work is value-creating rather than value-subtracting for the economy as a whole? Maybe things have changed, but at the time very few people even cared about those answers. Those that did thought about the question very little, and with none of their customary rigor.
The reason I said the industry could be half its size (rather than eliminating it entirely) is that I know it produces some value to the rest of the economy. But if it could be half its size (or smaller) then it's perfectly plausible the average person in finance is a net drain on society.
This is because while things like market making are obviously necessary, you've got to ask yourself: does making trades on a timescale of microseconds or even less as opposed to making trades on a timescale of minutes lead to better outcomes in the real economy?
The answer is almost certainly "no", but at the same time, trading firms that are engaged in zero-sum games are still able to siphon a lot of money from the rest of the economy that goes into just that. So the net outcome for society of that is clearly negative.
We shouldn't be kidding ourselves, though. A lot of the incremental improvements in tech these days are also net negatives to society. Mostly this is because so much of tech is driven by advertisement.
However, there are large parts of tech, including some very traditional parts, in which improvements are clearly beneficial to society, e.g. when it comes to building more powerful and efficient hardware.
[1] An exception might be entirely new sub-sectors of finance that explicitly target beneficial outcomes. Climate finance comes to mind.
That said, I believe the industry's total value to others could be produced at far, far less total cost than now. And a lot of those very smart, very motivated people could be out there actually creating value for others.
Also, I am curious as to what you mean when you refer to retail trading as printing money. Don't know anything about it (why I'm curious), but from what I have heard about trading in general, it seems to have some reasonable level of risk.
Are you quoting God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater there?
It doesn't matter that you made money because someone lost SOME. Both market participants receive what they wanted to out of it.
For example, you take linear bets - going short a stock - and you bought to cover at a profit to someone that was maybe long and selling at a loss. You say wow so zero sum.
But little did you know, the person that was long was actually collecting premium from their covered call options trade, and is still getting what they wanted out of it. They may not have begun losing more money for their tolerance for another 2% or 10% drop in the stock. They would come out net positive until then, even though their MAXIMUM potential profit was still more.
Both participants still got what they want, and you wouldn't be the wiser - unless of course you were trading products that had no derivatives market. But even then you wouldn't know, because they could be written OTC.
Where did / do you think money comes from?
Most businesses are positive sum. E.g., the sandwich shop down the street buys ingredients at X, puts in labor valued at Y, and sells me a sandwich for Z > X+Y. They have created value. (As have the the people doing the labor, because they took time valued at zero and turned it into marketable labor.)
Money is a representation of the value created by humans. That's why the government must continually increase the money supply [1]: if money's value is to stay stable relative to goods, the supply has to increase as society creates more value.
Finance is sometimes value creating. E.g., the sandwich shop owner is willing to pay the bank for transferring money from my account to theirs. But it can also extract rents (e.g., arbitrary or hidden fees) and be parasitic (as when banks speculate with money insured by society, like during the S&L crisis).
[1] E.g., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2
Other kinds of “finance” are more like playing poker where everyone is betting the public’s money.
I can believe someone new to finance didn’t think very hard about which kind of firm they were at.
Me too; but then I think of all those unsavoury traders who would have to get other jobs, eventually inflicting hell on the innocent, and the prospect of keeping them where they are, flies to flypaper, becomes more appealing. (disclaimer: I work in the sector at large)
I know some of them have gone on to do good things elsewhere. What if more of them did?
One, if you're selling coffee every day to people, then you are creating value for all the people who say, "Hey, this was a good purchase. I'll come back tomorrow." So it's definitely not zero sum in the main economic sense. Value is created with every cup.
Two, if you open up next near another coffee shop, that's still not zero sum. More people will get coffee. Your better coffee means that people will get more for their money. Maybe your competition will force neighboring businesses to up their game. And even if another business ends up closing and exactly no new customers get served, that's still not zero sum, in that you're providing a better product.
I agree big financial firms are a mix of productive and rent-seeking behavior, although a lot of their nominally productive behavior is just helping other rent-seekers, so I think the truly positive-sum service is pretty small. I also disagree that rent-seeking is ethical. That some in the industry consider it "mandatory" is pure self-justification, a way of passing the moral buck.
With technology it should have shrunk by a couple of orders of magnitude. You don't need a room full of old men in green visors cranking away at adding machines to get anything done anymore. Instead technology has only made it bigger.
Then one Tuesday 9/11 happened. That morning all my colleagues turned into homocidal maniacs (they were already that way, the event merely triggered the expression of that personality trait— only much later did I realize that this meant they were and are good decent people) bent on revenge and eager to kill. The stock of the company skyrocketed and we got huge raises. I finally had an opportunity to see some of my work in action and strangely became sick to my stomach when the products functioned well and was oddly relieved when the products functioned less well.
I eventually left the company and felt happy for the first time in years while I was unemployed.
The irony is now that I have more perspective in life, I realize that society truly values killing and maiming (and threatening to kill and maim) other people. People feel safer when they can credibly threaten others with physical harm. I realize I squandered a wonderful opportunity to serve society more by helping kill and maim even more efficiently. Perhaps in a sense I have gone full circle.
Not to go too much into politics, but perhaps time is better spent by helping humanity heal and become more mutually caring rather than more authoritarian and flex on each other. It doesn't sound like you missed an opportunity at all, but rather dodged a bullet.
As part of this work, detailed manuals were provided with maintenance routines, service intervals and all kinds of top secret detailed information, and they were maintained (by me) with updates regularly. These were absolutely fascinating reading, and on a slow week I found myself reading several of the "Theory of Operation" sections for various weapons.
A great deal of thought goes into killing people. Far more than your imagination would lead you to believe. Now you're imagining a lot more. It's WAY more than that.
I couldn't really stomach the work after that and I started getting heavily depressed.
Could you clarify? Upon whom? My understanding is that neither the Afghans nor the Iraqi civillians that ended up being the majority of the victims of our subsequent actions were the perpetrators of the acts on 9/11 or even from the societies that nurtured them. If I recall correctly, 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia and the remaining 4 were from the UAE, Egypt and Lebanon. Even Osama bin Laden was Saudi, and nurtured in Switzerland, funded by the US Army and subsequently protected by the Pakistani Army which was itself directly funded by the US taxpayer.
They asked for evidence and when the US said no they said they wouldn't hand him over.
Unlike his previous attacks, Bin Laden initially denied being behind 9/11.
Describing the faction of the Taliban that for a brief period gave Bin Laden sanctuary as a "government" seems like an unusual way to interpret the term government. It is the equivalent for us of having some bandit hiding within some cult in Maine or Kentucky and us describing that cult as the government of Maine. Also, as others in this thread have pointed out, those Taliban offered to handover Bin Laden if evidence was provided convicting him of the crime. It is interesting to compare our level of "conviction" of blame for some sets of people and willingness to accept collateral damage to civilians who happen to be around them, but when it comes to our own, even despite blowback and high levels of culpability, we deny the equivalence and block judgements even from UN courts.
This is not necessarily my personal view, but one way logic could be applied to this statement.
Yes, I want a more efficient way to kill these people, and I want the US to have that. Not because the US is perfect, not because I am a fan of the Iraq war, but despite all the real difference, the US tries pretty hard not to hit civilians, and the others deliberately targets them.
Maybe some day we won't have to kill each other anymore. That would be awesome, but tit-for-tat is the best strategy.
They’re pretty much 100% effective at killing themselves.
It would be much more relevant if we could find a way to keep them alive.
I think this is the kind of question where it is good to ask what the alternative to the terrible reality we're creating would realistically be.
"Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field"
Page 15 of https://www.monticellocollege.org/sites/default/files/blog/G...
Their intentions are to help end the conflict but they fail to remove the weapons from the society afterwards. I realize this is implying the next batch carry the same views as the previous but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say your parents influence your outcome.
Or is the stat consider mere display a use case ? In that cas it should include display for intimidation. The stat feels off.
This is absurd and deeply disturbing. The only ones that such bloodthirsty individuals are serving are the ruling classes. I definitely do not feel well served by any of you and would much prefer it if you did not sell yourselves for such a cause.
I think you ought to question how you were led to this worldview by your greater "perspective in life" or how that perspective really reflects what society as a whole values. There are a lot more people in places like say Yemen right now that I think would be more inclined to disagree with you and would wish that the US war machine were not so effective.
Every time I'm in a corporate game development gig I have regrets, because instead of working on a game I could personally appreciate I end up working on copycat mobile games; poorly designed games; games with no creativity behind them. Working on a game I would never consider playing myself, a game I would never recommend to a friend.
The best gamedev experience I had was working on an indie title with a very small and tight team. But that enterprise went bankrupt and the team disbanded.
Hope to bring that back someday, but lack the discipline at the moment.
Is the resources required to make a hit PC game too high today for an upstart to succeed, or is it just big gaming houses controlling the distribution channels?
It pays much worse than game programming though, unless you make a major hit, so you'll need to keep a day job, especially now that there's way too many games released every year that it has the same visibility problem as like, Steam does.
But you get to work with all sorts of people, and do so in person (like I'm going to an event in a couple weeks where I will be playtesting other designers' board games, and even a couple games by publishers themselves, and get to talk to and be friendly with the people who work for the publisher), and I've found it generally more fulfilling than my time in video games, personally.
Although that being said, I do miss video games and I've started working on one in my spare time again recently.
They are almost on par with giving you the same satisfaction that your best gamed experience gave you with better pay and should I say most likely better working conditions as well!
This is why I got into development. I am so far away from that in the dev world nowadays. It is sad because it sounds like the video game industry does not promote healthy work environments.
Professionally, I have never worked in game development and doubt I ever will, but I have a couple of web versions of Star Castle (https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/) and Asteroids (https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/) that I've built that I feel 10-year-old me would probably have enjoyed.
[1] Actually it still is, but now using WebGL. Watch this space.
I respect Blizzard's history and games, however I feel it is going downhill, especially after their Diablo Immortal fiasco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmkHAlhCvWg To those who are unaware: Blizzard has historically been a company making awesome games mainly for PC. Blizzcon is an annual conference where hardcore Blizzard fans (mostly PC gamers) come to learn what's next for them. Diablo 3 was released 6 years ago, so naturally people have been expecting the next installment. And then Blizzard says to those people that the next Diablo is a mobile-only game (co-)developed by a Chinese company. Naturally, this isn't what most of the series' fans were expecting and are excited about.
That's the hallmark of having gamers as your audience. They reward the copycat garbage and publishers that mistreat them and exploit them, but they would never think of buying an indie game. They get what they pay for, and unfortunately so do the rest of us.
I worked for a company that mediates between Employers and Insurance companies.
In my country we have a system where disabled employees are partially paid for by either the insurance (from employer) or the goverment. 0-35% disabled -> No money is paid by insurance or government 36-80% disabled -> The insurance company pays part of the wage of the employee 81-100% disabled -> The government pays part of the wage, or completely pays the person not having to work
With "part of the wage" I mean that the employee would work part-time but would receive extra money to fill in the gap, so they could use the remaining time to recover, or just try and live life.
The way it worked is that the company would receive bonuses from both the insurance companies and employers if we could get people in either the 0-35 or 81-100 range.
This means we (they) would use any trick in the book to get people, clearly disabled, to no longer be marked as "Disabled enough".
This resulted in sending people that were disabled or recovering from disabilities to insurance-company-hired examiners, and sometimes even use court to enforce new medical checks over and over until they were marked as sub-35%. They would hire investigators to try get "proof" these people are not "that disabled at all"
In short, these were people, 36-50% disabled such as people in wheelchairs, hurt spines, burn-outs, and whatever else you can think of, to be forced into working full-time because they wouldn't be able to make enough money to support their own lives.
The moment where it really hit me, is when in a presentation, the CEO proudly stated "This year, we were able to get X (thousands) of people into the 0-35% range, this means we made our goals, so as a suprise we're all (200+ employees) going skiing together for a week!" (fully paid international vacation)
I did join the vacation at first, but on those mountains I realized that the people that would never be able to ski, paid for this. I swore I would never work for a company like this again, and I made a huge turn-around and went into the Healthcare sector.
In a small tribe, hurting your fellow man affects you. If you screw over your only hunter and he becomes homeless, it's both a problem for you and him. He's spending time repairing his place instead of getting food for everyone.
At scale, you'll never even know he exists and are free to leech everything you can out of him.
I was ignoring that this was funded by a dodgy billionaire seeking to maximize profits by hosting the site on the least gambling restrictive countries in EU; and ultimately exploiting people who are vulnerable to gambling habits. I consider contributing to gambling (and a very short list of other businesses) as a negative contribution to the world; and I won't do it again.
Software development is such a rush when you're young, and it's easy to be blinded to other concerns by the thrill of it. Those of us who have had this desire manipulated for malicious ends need to keep speaking up, to remind people that there can be real harm done by our actions and that we have to be thinking not just about the interesting problem spaces we're exploring but also what the product we're making is doing, what it's intent is, what effect it might have on people.
Please keep sharing this story to young engineers as you come across the opportunity to do so. It's a sobering truth about our duties that often goes unspoken.
I really regret taking on that project, and I should have quit much sooner. It wasn't evil and it didn't have a negative effect on people. It was just boring and felt like a huge waste of time.
After that experience, I only accept jobs where I know I can do really good work, and where I'm at least a little bit interested in the idea. Even if I have to cut my rate, it's always better to feel useful and productive.
I worked on a banking product that indirectly got a couple of kids tortured and killed.
It’s only recently that I’ve started accepting responsibility for that. It was just so out of the realm of possibilities when it bappened, that most people I knew, most people I worked with, couldn’t fathom that we had something to do with it.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/apr/27/french-studen...
The product was a standalone card reader, that allows the generation of OTPs by the crypto chip inside the CC, or challenge/responses by the same chip.
This allowed the attackers to verify the PIN without going to an ATM.
I can understand someone not wanting to work for, say, a firearm company if they didn't like what guns did. But what you're describing is more akin to someone in a steel mill feeling bad because some particular alloy they worked on was used in a pipe bomb. The connection is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.
I do hope you are speaking to a therapist about this.
(Completely serious, I see one regularly for my own reasons, and it's been a great help over the years. Yes, it frequently does take many tries before you find someone you click with. It's worth it.)
Of course, with the power of hindsight, you wish you hadn't worked on it. But you didn't have that power when you were working on it.
Anyway, not sure if this helps - I know it's easy to feel guilty for things like this. I'm not a psychologist, and everybody confirming you weren't responsible probably isn't enough to convince you of that. If you do feel guilt, however, seeing a psychologist might be a good idea.
If you'd rather not discuss it, that's cool too.
Whoever signed off on the badly designed process is to blame. It should not have been possible for the card reader to verify a PIN. It could easily generate a code with a fake PIN, and leave the banking website to verify that.
It was already known that criminals would escort someone to an ATM when streaking their card, and demand the real PIN was given. This made it a lot easier.
> Both students must have provided their assailants with their pin numbers. However, one nearby cash machine retained Ferez's card. "So to take revenge for the fact that they had been unable to steal money from Mr Ferez," the court heard, "both men were murdered in a way that one can only describe as inhuman."
I don't regret working there per see, I didn't make the rules, but it opened my eyes that the dream of everyone being treated equally on the internet is dying. Before, you could assume the internet wouldn't discriminate because it's digital and detached from your physical self, but more and more companies have profiles about you and your experience will vary depending on who you are.
In the context of my comment (internet dating company), it means even when you try to meet new people, we will make broad assumptions and present you people we think will match well with your assumed race, income, education. All for upping that retention a few .1%
In earlier internet, the experience on a single website, for example, was the same for everybody, no matter your demographic. I understand why it evolved, but I regret it a bit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
The most you could discriminate them by was their number of posts on that forum, moderator privileges etc.
Classic cartoon from 1993 celebrating the equality of the anonymous internet
It's like how the public wouldn't really accept that if statistics show that all planes are blown up by people from country X, everyone from country X is thoroughly searched and no one else.
Also note that in case of the dating app, if you assume people like X want to date with people like Y and you don't allow them to match anyone else you, you can never validate/improve your assumptions.
Another thing is that they used to bought ads targeting female users in developing countries to "feed them" to users of richer countries hoping to bait them to pay money (to send digital gifts for example).
Were the OP working on an algorithm that would go 'next level' and extract those qualities from the base data given, then I am sure that would have been a far more rewarding endeavour than just matching skin colour or income level.
(Note: I am of sub-continental heritage and married to an Australian girl whom I met while going to ballroom dancing lessons).
The algorithm will put you in the bottom pile, because your race is different than the women in your local area
Black people are more likely to date black people, white people are more likely to date white people, and rich people are more likely to date rich people. By tailoring the matching algorithm to take this into account, you increase the chance your users will find a good match. This seems user friendly to me. Were you also offended that the algorithm matched people differently based on age?
A database of fax numbers + a farm of boxes with multi-line fax cards + ads that people wanted to be faxed. Not my company, nor was I even the main developer. The owner was a non-technical dude that decided to re-invest money he got from reselling imported veggies on farmer's market, with a bit of help from the local mafia. They ended up having some issues, so the mafia murdered his grown-up son, but let him keep the money. So there he was, trying to cope with life by diversifying into fax spamming... I wish I was making this up.
If it really did catch millions of emails successfully then such a system would be highly appreciated by the majority of the market.
It's not your fault if where you worked didn't see the value in what you'd created.
> I think there aren't many startups/smaller companies trying to tackle the problem
I'd agree there too - in those two specific cases.
> because: 1) there's not much money in it. Email is supposed to be "free", so is security.
Right.
> 2) mail systems, esp at larger/older orgs, tend be extremely baroque and you'd need full time integration engineers before making a penny.
No... that sounds intimidating, daunting and disillusioning.
> 3) Privacy laws make things difficult.
One word: Gmail.
See next point.
> 4) You need data and a wide view of the email landscape, and you only get that at large enterprises, and
Also one word: Gmail.
They've set what amounts to revolutionary precedence on perception of privacy and necessary ubiquitous data access.
> 5) at those orgs, the mail server operators are just waiting for the day they can retire and leave behind the mess they made.
See answer for (2).
Two alternative providers immediately come to mind: fastmail and protonmail. (Literally, these are what I remember right now.) The first has a large enough userbase they have interesting problems. The other is security-focused, and probably has adequate raw data to usefully tune an NN.
While poking around for fastmail stories I was sure I'd seen on here (it might've been another provider, but I think it was fastmail), dropbox caught my eye - they would of course need (and have) similar systems to this sort of thing too. This reminded me of sendgrid, and every other email mass-delivery provider that doesn't want to turn into a spam-farm.
Some extra consideration made me think of another idea, though.
I have a small trickle of false positives that land in my gmail spam folder (and get deleted) on a regular basis. This self-perpetuating cycle exists because I simply don't keep on top of what's in there and "not spam" everything that is technically not spam. So, my lack of interception is treated (passive-aggressively?) as agreement, and it happily chews away deleting all my old (almost-literally-spam-but-still) newsletter subscriptions and whatnot. The occasional activation email gets buried in there as well.
The key part here is that I don't feel like keeping on top of the spam thing, which is because I don't really _value_ what's in there. I trust my $mail_provider's spam system way too much to "do the right thing" (the provider is agnostic here) - and I don't mean doing the right thing morally, I mean it in the sense of "do what I mean". Which it doesn't, even though I wish it did.
I wonder how many other people feel the same [ambivalent] way about spam... and wouldn't mind simply just shoveling _everything_ in their spam folder to a "verification" service? The idea would be, you have a custom client that connects to and only reads from the spam folder, and then it un-trashes things it decides are not spam.
Gmail seems to provide API integrations to fetch only spam (pre-filled fields: https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference/users/m... - I tried selecting for the "SPAM" and "TRASH" tags, but it seems to want a query of "in:spam" instead) and then trash/untrash messages (see bottom of opened node in list at left of that page). Naturally you can do this via POP/IMAP too but then it really is your word against your code as to what you're accessing (the query above currently only returns 15 results for me, which I just checked and is as correct).
As per https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference/quota you can perform a cumulative total of 200,000,000 list+trash+untrash operations a say; all of them use 5 of the 1 billion quota units available daily. The main concern if you scaled sufficiently that you approached this limit is that asking for higher quota might provoke a "yes" in the form of a purchase offer :P which would have both pros and cons (stares really hard at the second word).
But besides Gmail, verification is kind of cross-platform and cross-vendor - and anything with scoped-list and untrash APIs could be integrated into this... in theory. I trust your mentioning of in-house mail being baroque, and I'm curious to hear how terrible this is in practice.
Perhaps you could have a cool UI that lets power users describe why the email is not spam - break the ranking metrics out into the UI in some way and let people provide feedback in useful (machine-readable!) terms that can (properly aggregated) be directly folded back into the network to train it.
I know Gmail has a plugin/extension API now, although I don't know how useful it would be to implement a UI for this sort of thing.
The hacky high-maintenance route would be Chrome/FF extensions.
Of course neither would work on mobile; to create a smooth experience there you'd basically have to implement a from-scratch email client with the custom spam views baked in.
For mail classification you could use ML on non-spam messages and flag them as suspicious. Then that signal could be corroborated by volume, being sent by multiple senders in volume, or a user manually classifying content matching that as spam. While ML can't give perfect true positive and false positive rates, it can be combined with other signals.
The flip side of this is when I realized this is not something I want to carry on doing I just quit the industry. Now I'm working for a VPN company with a stand-out product and service, built by an honest team driven by the mission of helping people protect their privacy. I feel very content with that decision.
That sounds fascinating. Do you have a link to a source?
I recently had a family member trip over one of those markov-chain strung-together-keyword redirect farms. It decided to stop the redirect-train at something fairly crass (a topless ad). This was straight from Google search results. First time ever; mildly unpleasant 5 minutes.
I'm seeing this as the next level after that, and yeah, VPNs are comparatively a much more straightforward field.
Helped MannaTech swindle people out of money, by helping work on the donation site that enabled people to buy their useless sugar pills that promised to cure anything from cancer to Down syndrome. (The claims weren't so bold and outright - except by some of the in-person salesmen who eventually got into trouble with the Texas attorney general - but they heavily hinted, and the reviews from the poor parents desperate to latch onto any lifeline that claimed "marked improvements" in their children's various conditions.
Ended up donating the money I made while working on that project to St. Jude's hospital.
Fuck Manna Relief, fuck Manna Tech, and fuck everyone who's ever worked for them, myself included.
That triggered my move to education and medical software.
The company started exactly the way I hoped but management decided that there isn't enough money left to finish it (ROI fear).
Now a half baked functioning version of my idea is rotting and I wish I'd finished it myself and sold it. Think it may have hit off quite good. I'll never do this mistake again. Screw your companies :D
But it’s apparently the future of a lot of IT, because people aren’t going to stop buying really shitty software or start making architectural demands.
It’s going to be an amazing amount of technical debt in a lot of sectors though.
I mean, some of the integrations I build before my venture into management, decades ago are still running without the need for maintenance. Yet the most recent RPA project my team build has already used 6 hours of maintenance this week.
So stupid.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation
A month ago it was a change to the invoices from a specific company.
Every week it’s the business noticing an edge case, or something that could be better. We pile these up, but you’ll rarely have a RPA process that handles 100% so there is an never ending race to get closer and closer. ;)
In one of our processes that handles a major process related to payment, we were able to automate the work of two financial workers, but the cost was that it required a new RPA worker to handle the errors, and a RPA worker is more expensive than two financial workers. It was still a gain, because the RPA worker also does other RPA things, but it’s a good illustration of how terrible RPA is at automation compared to the other tools in the toolbox.
I found out why they hired me, and it wasn't for my technical skill. They wanted me to break customers' things and then lie to customers. The reasoning was, that contracts were reviewed and renewed yearly.
The worst came down was for a japanese factory (back with Windows NT4.6 and Win98 clients). Half the engineering staff was Japanese and half were American... I think you see where this is going. Files were being sent to the server, but being WinNT 4, couldn't read japanese files. So half of their enterprise was not being backed up.
I mentioned this to my manager, and they threatened me with a lawsuit if I said anything. I quit right there, and then went to the client and told them what I was aware of. Soon after, they lost the contract (shocked, I say!). Not too long afterward, their building caught on fire, and their VP ran. Last I heard was that he was wanted by the FBI for suspected arson..
Thankfully, I've not worked in small shops like that since.
That was bad enough, but eventually I was internally recruited to help launch a new mobile division at the company. The worst thing I built while there was a desktop application that we distributed through third party installer applications that bundled adware along with whatever application the user actually wanted to install. The thing I wrote was a background Windows service that would directly read the user's browser cookie databases and find any cookies they had for the Google Play store, then use those to push various apps to the user's Android phone (basically emulating all of the HTTP calls that happen when you click the install button from your desktop browser to have the app installed on your phone directly). We'd get paid per install of those Android apps.
I stayed at the company way longer than my conscience preferred, mainly because I really liked the team I was working with and the complete freedom the developers were given to tackle problems however they want (as long as you were putting money in the pockets of the higher ups). I wrote about this in more detail a few years back on my blog https://codeword.xyz/2015/08/09/exploiting-android-users-for...
It took me a while to realize the entire thing was just a scam and that the only reason we were getting traffic was due to advertising shenanigans.
At the time, it was one of the best sites out there on account of having the most correct (or rather, least incorrect) events. Lots of websites contained many errors, such as listing "London, UK" instead of "London, Canada". Mixing up "Ryan Adams" and "Bryan Adams" was also a common one. We corrected a lot of that. I did "big data" kind of stuff before it was cool (no machine learning though, just old-fashioned rule-based logic).
Some were even scummier than TicketMaster. For example there was one that would simply try to guess ticket/tour dates and venues and then sell massively overpriced "early bird" tickets for them. Sometimes their guesses were more-or-less reliable, other times it was wildly off.
And yeah, I agree. The entire endeavour is useless. It was my first real programming job, and since then I've been a lot more careful what kind of companies I work for.
https://www.iq-mag.net/2018/09/cbc-news-details-ticketmaster...
I left after two years for many reasons, one of them being that I knew my work was used to dramatically affect people's lives.
I still hold my stock, and I do intend to sell as soon as it goes public, then I'll wash my hands and never look back.
The problem was, I worked with idiots and the project that I joined failed. No one had any idea why the project failed.
(I wish I stayed at my old job.)
Even though the project I joined was honest and ethical, the sheer amount of idiocy of the people I worked with had a negative effect on me. Ultimately, the money and time wasted because a bunch of "senior" engineers couldn't figure out how to work with a simple embedded database was shocking.
I think we as an industry need to stop stretching for excuses for why greedy behavior might unintentionally do something good. It's not a worthwhile cause and it doesn't justify the behavior if the "good" is a theoretical and unintended side effect. The "good" being theorycrafted on the nature of this product is indeed both highly speculative, oversimplifying of the human cost of changes to this economic model, and is obviously not the purpose of the product. That "good" is contingent on and integrated with a number of factors too complicated to boil down to a single sentence: it's something that looks good when oversimplified and makes ourselves feel better if we try not to think too hard about it.
When we ask ourselves whether a product we work on is ethical or not, we have to account for the intent of the product, and not merely stretch to find theoretical ways to justify it to ourselves. We do need to think about unintended side effects - particularly when they could harm others - but we shouldn't be using our theoretical and simplified best-case scenario of unintended side effects as a way to justify the intention and practical use cases of the products we make.
We should ask ourselves: if the "good" of an unintended side effect could be cut out of a product and we'd still make it, is it actually the good of a product? Or is it an excuse we're making to ourselves to make us feel better?
* Would this product exist without the malicious use cases?
* Can the company sustain itself without the malicious use case?
* Are there ways to mitigate the malicious use cases, and could they be reasonably implemented?
* Is the true intent of the business - when you assess it honestly - for it to be used in the "good" scenario, or in the malicious scenario?
* Are the malicious scenarios being reinforced/rewarded?
* What portion of revenue is directly caused by the malicious use cases?
* Is the company marketing or appealing to the malicious use cases? Are they trying to actively warn against/discourage them?
* What are the worst case scenarios of the malicious use case? Are they theoretical or real?
* What are the best case scenarios of the "golden path" use case? Are they theoretical or real?
And we also need to pay attention as we answer the questions above, looking out for if/when we make shallow justifications rather than honestly assessing the answers to the questions above. Look out for situations where our response is hedged by an excuse that's irrelevant to your ethical duties as a software engineer, such as:
* "but we can't leave money on the table"
* "but people would lose their jobs if we didn't do this"
* "but this is what our competitors do"
* "but if we didn't do this, someone else would"
* "but it also causes [theoretical/unintended side effect that sounds good on paper]" (particularly important to watch out for when that unintended side effect is an oversimplified version of reality)
* "but it's not our choice how it is used" (particularly relevant in situations where the business model relies on the malicious use case, and/or there are opportunities to mitigate the harmful use case that are intentionally going unexplored... or situations where your product itself is using techniques such as behavioral conditioning to train a user's choices)
I would be worried that the platform is now used to silently steal the contacts list of millions of users without their informed consent.
Huge difference, what the intent is of what you are building.
I feel like all the justification we see in our industry of "it's just a tool, it's not our fault if it's used poorly" can often end up being a variant of the banality of evil. What if its most obvious use case is the malicious one? What if the company paying you to make it has the malicious use case of the tool in mind? Would the company and the product exist/be sustainable without the malicious use case? Are there ways to curb the malicious use case that are being ignored - intentionally or not? We've got to start asking ourselves these questions. The ACM and IEEE would insist that it is part of our core duty to be asking these questions.
edit: wording.
"We want x But have to do y because then we can retire."
Problem is life doesn't work the way we plan it. Every moment is what you create. It doesn't take much for your entire world to be thrown into chaos.
Quit making excuses about not living your life the way you want to.
I think you can still do good with the situation by doing exactly what you're doing now: talk to other software engineers about this often overlooked duty. Talk to young engineers about the need to examine the ethical implications of the products they are making. These stories of shame are something we need to share with each other, to stress the importance of thinking about the consequences and intent of what we make.
I remember first coming into software development, creating software was a rush. I was a junkie, getting high on solving problems and working against tight deadlines. This is a common experience I've seen in many new software engineers: but when you're getting high off of those factors, it's easy to not even realize that you have to be asking yourself questions about what you're making. Stories like yours can be a bucket of cold water, something that helps to wake people up to the other obligations that are part of our duties as software engineers.
I work for one of the big video game publishers. If you believe the internet we slaughter puppies and are the cause of all unhappiness in the world.
The actual work is gruelling, frought with long hours and very challenging. So when you finally get your ducks in a row after countless hours of overtime and stress to see the public’s reaction is heartbreaking.
I regret working on games, but the technical challenges are stimulating enough that I continue to do it.
Look at Fallout 76. Content wise, it’s a decent game. The graphics are better than the previous game and they made attempts to rework some of the mechanics.
Where it failed was the utter lack of quality control due to timelines and the inclusion of micro transactions. The game obviously wasn’t ready. Plus the added shenanigans of the botched launcher rollout.
Add it all up and it’s easy to see why people are pissed, but they’re mad at Bethesda for pushing such as obvious cash grab as something innovative and new.
Obviously developers work hard and create awesome stuff. It’s just a shame these companies pile on the crap to suck every spare dollar out their customers instead of just releasing a great game that isn’t a bug filled mess due to botched release timelines.
I guess it's dishonest to push so hard to have "high quality" games with a lot of content when you know that it's impossible to actually cover the cost with the list price, but it's what people demand. And it gets harder every year.
Buy a bubbletea, get the ingame content: Straw and bubbles.
That's not a knock on the developers or content quality though. It's a knock on the business model. You guys make beautiful things.
Bad choice. Use your intuition and don't second guess yourself.
The tech stack and other aspects of the place were equally bad, but I probably don't need to elaborate any more.
I decided it would be a good idea using the computer as a tool to understand financial markets so I started creating programs to play with outcomes and probabilities ... something like generic programming we will call today in order to augment your human perception using lots of data.
It started as a game but soon I made over 400% benefit in the stock market that year(with very little money). It seemed at the time few people were doing that. That made me regretting it because from my point of view you can expect a 10% increase reasonable from real creation of value. Values much bigger than this means you have just taken money from those that do not have the tooling(the normal people who "invest" in the stock market, and lose). The big guys, called the "sharks", never loose.
That made me feel very bad inside, while I was making money in the outside.
On the other hand, it drove me absolutely crazy. Emotionally this tool magnified any bump in the stock market making myself constantly alert, even having problems sleeping as the thing will work even by night doing things like analyzing the Asian or US markets while in Europe they were closed.
Imagine something alerts you in the night with an alarm, so you can study it for the next day,it can be any day, at any hour... when you are young you do very stupid things. That kind of thing was a torture of totalitarian regimes and I had chosen to do it to myself voluntarily.
One day I decided to sell anything and to extract the hard drive and break it with a hammer so I could not recover the program if I changed my opinion later.
It was a great idea. It gave me peace of mind.
Next time you want to covertly brag in a thread about regret, at least make the moral dilemma believable.
Facebook tracks people too using their own smartphones.
OTOH if I work for Shell or Dow I am pretty clear who I am working for.
If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
If you admit that you're selling "luxury" goods, then you shouldn't be providing people, who don't have the money, with loan options. Least of all loans with 20%+ yearly interests.
As it happens very few customers actually choose the loan option. I think it took a week or so before the first customer even tried using that payment option.
I also worked recently for a large modern tech company. Almost from week 1 I was disgusted by how things were run internally. I think the CEO honestly believed that he was helping people, but really it was just a toxic environment and the product made people more secure online by asking them to give all control up to this company (which, as far as I know, didn't do anything bad with the data, but the opportunity was there and the CEO didn't seem to be in any hurry to put any safe guards in place to make sure it wasn't abused in the future). I never want to work anywhere again that uses the excuse "we can't help it if other companies are forming monopolies and generally doing bad things, so we should get a piece of the pie".
The client was really flakey (bad choice of words perhaps) and late with responses and payments. The website was nothing special but was a bit of a bore to design and code.
I think it was the final nail (again, poor choice of words) for my freelancing career, and I went to join a startup which ended up working really well for me.
Eventually my team started to own web ads, and I was gone in 9 months (note that I was happily at Amazon for almost 5 years before that point). I hate web ads, and think it's a net negative to the browsing experience on a website that's already making Scrooge McDuck pools of money.
I made management system for family doctors that was selling private patient data to pharmaceutical industries
Facebook scapers used by companies similar to Cambrige Analitica
Create systems that cut money from the payroll of fast food workers if they spend to much time at the toilet
And much more...
It was good money and just what I needed right then. I used that money and time to travel and live digital nomad lifestyle, which directly impacted and transformed my professional career in a great way. So, that part, I don't regret. But I regret wasting 2 years of my professional development time down the drain on a product without vision. I learned a lot about handling people and about the lifecycle of a bad product tho.
Take that as you will.
After 6 months I started looking for a new position and I finally moved to the city I wanted to. Later on, lots of recruiters offered me positions in betting but it was a straight no, that including spread betting or CFDs companies.
Most of my former colleagues are still there, how can they justify it to themselves I don't completely understand. The company payed top salaries for the local market and offered great benefits but I felt like in Pleasure island.
I now work for an investment bank but my goal is to resign in the next 6 months after I sort out my health problems and complete my investments.
Although working for a big investment bank is not bringing me satisfaction I find it less evil then betting.
The choice between money and meaning is a tough one especially in big cities where living costs are very high. The highest paying jobs where I live are in banking, gambling or big software companies. But in the latter the competition to get in is intense and you might end up doing something evil anyhow. See Facebook, Google, etc.
But I've definitely regretted working on stuff for other reasons. A couple of sites were simply poorly managed, designed and coded, which meant hours wasted on implementing things that should have been in the brief weeks ago due to a manager not really knowing what the customer wanted and requiring the whole thing to be rebuilt at short notice.
Quite a few instances of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole there. Like using a shop for an events system... for some reason I can't quite grasp.
There are also a few game design (well, mod design) disasters, and I regret the poor difficulty/design decisions involved there. Hopefully one of my current projects will consign those terrible old ones into the history books.
Reading the other posters though I can see that there are some unethical products being built where you can impact someone else negatively.
I wish I'd done a master that was more in tune with my interests; the regret is largely about wasting time.
I understand some people using IG want fame and stuff but I just felt we were stealing people's pics and making some profit out of it without even telling them and it just saddened me. Every time I was asked to work on a feature I would just start questioning myself WTF am I doing? Is this what I want to do?
A few months after I took over they picked up a new client that was a finance company for people with bad credit ratings who wanted to purchase vehicles at exhorbitant interest rates. The trackers allowed them to remotely disable vehicles if the finance payments weren't met.
After a while they became the systems's largest customer and finally the only customer. They then asked for some changes so that all their vehicles would be remotely disabled at the start of each month and would be re-enabled when that month's payment was received.
Fortunately, they then purchased the system outright from its current owners and that allowed us to stop developing for them.
i’m not getting paid the same, but my conscience sleeps well enough.
Or something very close to that; if anyone remembers that comment, and the discussion in general, not only would it be relevant here, I would be very grateful. I was never able to find that discussion again, I have no idea what the actual subject was... but the comment stuck with me.
ad-tech is pure ev1l. now they are probably making a ton of money though.
I wish I could go back in time :( it was one of those moments that i won't be able to erase from my life
Back then, I had a gig as a 'foreign talent' recruiter for a contractor of a mega chinese movie studio, Hollywood-big studios-size. I proved my worth by using my entire network of foreign students, public/night time events group chats... In fact, I was a part-time agent for like 2 years and that mini-program was my edge on the market. I figured out that I needed a consistent database that's easily managable from a smartphone and a real-time payment system(Wechat Pay) right after movie scene shoots. Scaled real fast and provided extra income to my friends who also enjoyed the fame aspect of the gigs even though it's very time consuming(~8hr/day).
As I'm from a war-torn african country, I was at ease on movie sets(action, guns and destruction) and didn't mind moving around a lot. I would do translation if needed and give some occasional inputs on cultural references given that few chinese guys in the industry had ever stepped foot on Africa's soil or interacted directly with more than a dozen black 'background actors' at one time for weeks(cant tell who's who face:).
Wechat was the hub for all my work-study-social life in China. We had near a 800 ppl in the portfolio when I left in '16(for unrelated personal political reasons) and dropped out.
Later, I heard that the promising projects became great box office successes on the local chinese market and still are. My regret is that I kind of oiled up the machine by implementing a quick techie idea. Social impact might be that it pumps up the chinese world conqueror ego spirit and shrinks the imagery of africans/blacks in the eye of millions of chinese. Plus, they are expanding distribution to african markets a.k.a broadcast directly to national tv channels. The rapid growth after the 1st record breaker in '17 is continously huge in terms of audience and investments.
I cringe when I explain this stuff to my european friends who are always mindful about international geopolitics and to other black 'woke' westerners. Now, I live&work in Benelux where they are mostly clueless about China movies or WeChat, so my mind is quieter but regrets won't wash away.
To adjust the parameter of a check? Edit rows in Oracle using SQL. Add a new check? Edit rows in Oracle using SQL. Edit the script for a check? Edit rows in Oracle using SQL.
My job was to make improvements to the scripts/checks/agents, but not the process.
But I imagine that the feeling was even worse for the sales team, that it needed to deal directly with clients and hit monthly and quarterly targets
One was a series of electronic game callers used by hunters to kill coyotes. I'm not opposed to hunting, and I realize coyotes are predators, but with the caller, the coyotes don't stand a chance.
The second was a commercial PC product that didn't end well. For me. It ended pretty well for others.
Shit job at a startup, no money and burnout central, then I heard that the CIA was investing (well, their front company, which was an open secret). I decided that that was plenty enough for me and got a different job.
However at least there was a positive outcome, my CV came out looking better in terms of experience in specific technology stacks.
Now for the product themselves, nothing was lost.
It's coming up on ten years now since this happened. I was a young, naive software engineer, addicted to the adrenaline rush of solving problems on tight deadlines and not giving much thought to what those solutions were being used for.
The company I was working at suddenly folded, leaving me looking for work. The father of an old friend of mine hit me up, telling me about this new idea he had for a service that doctors' offices would use to contact patients, or for universities to contact their students, all over SMS. For some reason, he was very insistent that it be done over long codes. I didn't understand why at the time and was too naive to press him on this odd requirement. Fuck does it matter if a university texts you from a long code or a short code?
I decided to go for it, and made a prototype of a system that would allow folks to automate sending SMS messages to all their clients (what I was told was the "v1" on which the more interesting features would be layered). He told me he already had some clients, but said they were from "the other side of the tracks."
I will be honest, I was too scared to call him out. I was prepared to take the cowards' path of not asking so I didn't have to know: a fact that still fills me with shame today. It was another guy working there on a separate project who heard him and and pushed for what he meant.
Finally he admitted what the whole thing really was. There were no doctors' offices, no universities lined up. Just porn sites looking to spam people over SMS, with long code numbers so it looked like it was coming from a person and not a business.
I flipped the fuck out, partly at him for decieving me and partly at myself for the fact that I was so willing to not even fucking ask when he said that shady shit.
I told him to fuck this and everything, and walked out the door.
About a week later my friend tried to resurrect the originally proposed business without his dad, and I reluctantly said I would if his dad wasn't involved. But he wasn't in a position to actually keep him out of it, and I walked away for good.
If you are reading this and you are a young software engineer, please do not follow my path. Ask the hard questions. Read the ACM code of ethics and the duties to society that it demands of you. Your job is not just to solve problems: you may be called on to be the one to put your foot down for the sake of ethics, and it is so easy to turn away from that duty when money and comfort are on the side of shutting up and doing as you are told.
I worked on an SSO solution for the Police despite being more of a libertarian.
I worked on an ATC system for the military despite being a pacifist.
Right now I'm working on a marketing solution which is basically a email/spam gun and a click tracking servive.
I guess one day I will find something my morally good or at least neutral from my point of view...
Basically, we put a sensor which measure body heat and pressure on the seat to determine if the person is sitting or not.
Then crunched all this data every quarter and would fire the people who were most absent from the chair regardless of any other metric. We all felt cheated but were given a big raise, some still left tho.
We shipped this system to many startups and service companies and consultancy firms.
While developing the system we were told that this system is to track health concerns with sitting too much at the desk.
FFWD..
when he won i decided to build a weapon of Mass Instruction to counter his Twitter hose: http://TrumpTweets.io