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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

I've never had such a serious ethical issue in front of me, I have code I'm ashamed of in a "Oh god we could have done so much better, what a fool I was at 22" kind of way. But so far my ethical conscience is largely clean. I can think of really only one ethical close call in my career, but still not as serious as the linked article -

"Hey developers, customer account manager here, just sold an upgrade to the customer on product X, they need capability Y"

"It already has that in the version they have, it's probably just misconfigured"

"Oh... well I've sold it now, can we just increase the version number and pass it over to them anyway?"

We laughed that guy out of the room, thankfully.

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I wonder how big of a computer it would take to calculate all of the sweat and tears spent by software developers so that some salesperson or manager could save face.

I once designed and built an entirely new video integrated article format because a salesperson sold something based on a concept we had no intention of building.

My boss's response was basically, "Welp, we just got $200,000 to build this. We should probably figure out what the fuck it is."

I think I've got you beat.

My first job out of university, the sales guys would desperately throw every feature they could dream up into the contract to try to close a deal, then we'd have to build it before they committed to purchase. Then we'd be on the hook to make it based on their whiteboard fever dreams and find out after it shipped the customer just needed 2% of the whole thing

Hi there, do we work at the same place?

Sincerely,

help.

I used to work on a team that made flash ads at a giant company. The salespeople didn't say no to anything.

These companies were paying $500,000 for 12 hours of exclusive time on our home page, so they got whatever they asked for. If they wanted a car to drive out of the ad and smash into the text below, and have each character morph into 5,000 butterflies that then reformed into the car, they got a car driving out of the ad and smashing into the text below, and having each character morph into 5,000 butterflies that then reformed into the car. And they got it within a week.

I swear, the wizardry those flash devs pulled out of their asses was some of the best hacking I've seen in my life.

I miss actionscript, and Flash in general. A hackers delight, I’m still yet to see such a great mix of coding and visual editing/timeline systems.

I once worked on a system with small modular pieces of hardware. But the hardware was expensive, so there was a plan that you could buy less hardware but pay more for software that would cover for the hardware. So we literally wrote more software so that we could get paid less.

Sounds like somebody's manager will be calling that customer back, voiding an invoice, and putting them in touch with the correct staff to help them with the configuration.

And somebody is leaving the sales team for either a makework job till they leave, or just straight up fired if there's less politics involved.

IIRC he hit the road soon after, yep. Turned up later at another company I contracted for in a related industry, as one of the upper management. I didn't stick around there long!

Most of us are ethically in the right in that regard.

Like: change the API and forget to update the version number.

Never confuse Sales with Implementation. :P

> We laughed that guy out of the room, thankfully.

If the customer can be made happy and the company can make money by just making an increase to a version number with no additional changes, why not just do it?

Because the customer already paid for those features and you're accepting that you'll dick them over for a few pennies.

Becasue selling something that they already own to someone as a new feature is unethical at best and illegal at worst?

Don't you think the client would be happier with a refund and an explination?

Because it's morally wrong to charge someone for a product they already have, and then to cover up what you've done.

It's likely also criminal, as fraud is illegal, but even if not the deceit should be something that makes your conscience bristle.

Many products with embedded systems ship with the same firmware regardless if it’s the basic/mid/pro model where features are enabled/disabled with a flag set in the EEPROM. So to charge a customer $XX more the company just has to flip a bit at production time. Is that ethically ok do you think? Not sure I have an opinion either way so just curios, but it’s not a million miles from this scenario above .

It's certainly not the same. In one case, the client had already paid for the feature but weren't aware, and a salesperson told them they needed to upgrade to unlock it (a lie). In the latter case, they simply didn't pay for the feature.

Is it ethically wrong to ship chicken bits like that? You can make arguments either way (e.g. a device might not have been QA'd or tested for the disabled features, and the feature itself might be faulty, e.g. that's extra support labor they didn't pay for). But that's a different question to whether the salesperson should have sold them a feature they already had access to.

Those features cost money to develop, but if someone is paying you for a feature and isn't using it, it's probably unethical to charge them.

It’s totally fine. They’re not paying for the bits burned into the EEPROM, they’re paying for the effort it took to develop the capabilities.

Did you actually read what the person was asking them to do? It could be illegal in the worst case.

Yes, I did. In the best case it's a happy customer and more money for the company. I'm a glass-half-full guy.

Thanks for letting us know we should avoid becoming your customers.

I'm gonna rob a bank. In the best case, I'm an instant millionaire and I never get caught. I'm a glass-half-full guy.

You'll make way more money in the long run if you own up to mistakes like this.

It builds trust in your company, so that when they think about renewing their contract they remember you have integrity and aren't trying to rip them off. Instead, you believe in your product and are actually trying to sell it on its merits.

It also becomes a funny story they tell their friends / others in the industry, which could lead to further business.

There are no downsides to owning up (I'd even claim the upsides above), but there are some possibly gigantic downsides to not owning up.

This is a reasonable consequentialist argument, but I think you could also argue that it's unethical and wrong to lie/mislead someone this way even if the consequences weren't potentially worse for you in the long run - even if by lying you might come out ahead.

It's fraud. Accepting money for delivering nothing yet pretending that you give them something is fraud.

Even if it was perfectly (or at least technically) legal, I'd still argue that it would be wrong to do it.

As others have said, it's effectively fraud at that point.

The customer has already paid for that feature. Best case we rip them off and take their money for nothing, which is scummy. Worst case they figure it out later and sue.

Either way it's the wrong thing to do.

They should get a refund if they already paid for the feature. If you want to make money off of the situation then say you'll send a support technician or someone to look over their configuration and set it up to do what they want. That's the only legitimate and fair thing to do.

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