Moral injury can occur in many contexts and populations, including the workplace
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Since I hated working there anyway, and had the financial freedom and job prospects to find other work I didn't hesitate to say "no, I will not do that", and he looked at me like I was a total asshole. But if I had been in a worse economy for programmers at the time, or hard up for money, I wouldn't have been able to make that choice so easily.
It is something that makes me very sad, especially since 99% of websites now have dark patterns similar to this. Most notable the modal popups that come up moments after a page loads and you have started to read it. I back out immediately whenever I can but obviously I am in the minority, this bullshit must "work" on some level to have become so ubiquitous.
Anyway if you should ever be asked to do a modal popup, and get fired for saying no, apply at Olo, we so far have never asked developers to do a dark pattern.
Intrusive, maybe, but a dark pattern is 'deceit by design' whereas what you're describing seems to me 'being slightly annoying by design', which is a totally different thing.
Thinking about Exit Intent and how to optimize for it is a fairly well established part of online eCommerce. I think you made the wrong choice and your boss was probably right to be annoyed with you. It's within their prerogative to decide what user experience they offer to their users. And obviously, it's also yours to quit, but if you do so based on a poor understanding of what a dark pattern is, you're just hindering yourself.
Just because something is institutionalized doesn't mean it's right. Especially when that institution is eCommerce, one of the most manipulative industries in software.
I would ammend your description of dark patterns to "Deciept and manipulation by design" to see this through the lens most people do.
Just because something is "a fairly well established part of online eCommerce" doesn't mean it is not a shitty thing to do.
Second - I didn't say it's not shitty.
I wouldn't normally nit pick on terms but this is a conversation about words and their definitions.
Dark Patterns are a deliberate attempt to defraud or deceive through the use of UI.
There are many things that are shitty - country music for one - that are not dark patterns.
Just because you and I both don't like exit intent popups, doesn't make them something that should be criminalised.
Dark Patterns describe activity that either is or should be criminal. The difference is enormous.
This should not be possible, it's a horrible jarring experience every time it happens to me when I click a questionable link and try to go back to the previous page.
Sadly it works too often in relationships as well as ecommerce.
Spoiler: no change is forthcoming.
This is not a totally different thing. Both are examples of coercive/deceptive behavior. That makes them the same sort of thing, but differing by degree.
We'll call it shitty pattern if you dislike dark pattern.
I expect that they refused to implement it because it was a practice they felt was bad ethically rather than because it matched some industry definition.
That's insane behavior, I don't owe your business or site anything, least of all my time. Those are the kindest words I can find for that behavior.
That'd depend on the implementation behavior. If it's using window.onbeforeunload, yeah I guess it's kind of like someone blocking you when you try to leave, although you can easily walk around them (on most browsers if you try to close the tab and the modal shows up, and you try to close the tab again it will override the modal). However, there's also another type where it tracks the location of your cursor, and shows a popup when it leaves the content area (indicating that your mouse is going to close the tab or go back). In that case it's not really blocking anything, and much more analogous to a salesperson saying "before you go" as you're walking out the door.
Which is a solid ‘no thanks, not coming here again’ from me.
I would try to avoid going back to that store.
It’s annoying and tacky but it’s not analogous to being held hostage.
Many stores do indeed make it hard to leave without buying, for example by having no direct route to the exit: you have to squeeze through the tills awkwardly. It's probably in the name of loss prevention, but it's also a disincentive to leave without a purchase.
Actually, nearly everything about a supermarket is carefully designed for extracting money from you, from product placement, to layout, need to have a loyalty card to access discounts, even perhaps having discounts in the first place (as opposed to selling at a lower regular price), multipacks driving food and packaging waste, etc etc etc.
well the difference is that you've used more fancy words in the second description. Reminds me of the joke
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
If a customer is attempting to leave and you bar their exit, you've demonstrated a willful contempt of their wishes. It causes the customer stress and serves no purpose other than to show them that you can make them do as you please. It's a micro aggression, a type of violence.
Imagine a woman trying to leave a man's apartment as he holds the door closed. He reminds her she was the one who came inside and asks again, is she sure there's nothing she wants from him? He keeps his hand there until she says she's sure so she understands, he [i]let[/i] her leave.
I'm against either scenario for effectively the same reasons.
You mean don't ultimately prevent you. But they absolutely do temporarily stop you.
For each one of those "No"s there are probably so many half-hearted and exasperated "Ok"'s. In aggregate we get to the point we're at, one little water droplet at a time. I'm optimistic though, because the same force works the other way too.
Has anyone experienced this obnoxious browser history hijacking in Chrome? How do they pull this off and how can we report it so it stops being exploited?
I fully agree with you here and if i could leave every site that did this I would be happier, but there are a couple that do this that I have little choice but to interact with:
- a hardware components website, pretty much the only good one in the UK that will ship individual parts, if you even move your mouse point towards the top right corner (this is also where the basket and login buttons live) up comes the model "Please don't leave" in big bold letters.
- a digital whiteboard used for work purposes, this one is a little more bad design than anything. if you login with an @example.com email address every so often instead of dropping you to the workspace you were hoping to get, it drops you to a page showing teams of other people from example.com, and a modal asking you if you are interested in getting more from the tool. This is most annoying when it's a customer meeting and one or two of your team get lost in this way (the links to get from the team page to the board is non-obvious, and if it's your turn to get the redirect, logging out and back in does not work)
During one customer call it happened to the security SME got caught by the value redirect (it was a security discussion I was facilitating, the security SME was the star of the show), not realising my mic was on I loudly shouted CRAP!. That's when I realised this is CRAP, the modal begging me not to leave, the redirects to show extra value, its all CRAP - Customer Retention by Annoying Popup and I hate it.
You can use ublock origin to block the modals / pop-ups. I did it for a lot of websites.
It’s your responsibility to raise points, it’s your choice to accept that premise, swallow your spine and do it anyway.
Injury by spine swallowing is cumulative each one relatively harmless until it isn’t
The profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht.
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/see-worthy-first-look-jeff-bez...
Source? That claim isn't supported anywhere in the geekwire article. It doesn't even talk about "labor", let alone "slave labor" or "Uyghur slave labor".
There’s plenty of sources documenting Amazon’s profits from Uyghur slave labor. Here’s one:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/apple-amazon-sony-samsung...
I suppose your claim that "profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht" is technically true, but that's more due to weasel wording than anything else. The sentence gives an impression that one of the reasons why bezos could buy the yacht was because of Uighur labor, but strictly speaking the "profit" could be anywhere between one cent to half a billion dollars.
Factories in Guangzhou (where a lot of electronics have been made) have been using Uighur labor for a few decades now, though supposedly they are migrant workers and it’s all non-forced (which I would tend to believe, in the way that government arranged labor migrations are sort of dubious). If your trade school sets up an internship at a factory in another province, is it forced labor or not? This applies to Hans as much as it does to Uighurs, so the claims in the article come off as a bit strange.
If I can't understand why something is a good idea I don't do it.
This isn't some selfish thing, if I think something will on balance help more people than it hurts, I'll probably want to do it and probably will do it.
It's that simple to be honest. I find it weird that other people don't seem to work this way. Maybe I'm autistic, innit.
It's worked for me so far.
If you take the extreme position that literally everything I ever do fits in this framework given information I don't even have, sure, maybe not. If I buy a tin of beans at the supermarket I don't know if like, bean #2129's harvesting resulted in a homicide because the farmer got mad or whatever.
And in interpersonal relationships, tempers flare, people get mad, perhaps we take actions that aren't ideal.
But I mean, generally, if we're not being silly, you know when things are on the boundaries, and you can spend time then to figure them out. For example if you want to work for a bank, you can work out if you feel like loans are morally justifiable, and if so you do it, if not you can try and do something else.
I get the sense a _lot_ of the time that people I'm interacting with just enter "bureaucrat mode" and it's like they have this whole other personality that doesn't do that thinking bit. The best explanation I have is that a lot of people are just under stress most of the time and so their brain doesn't really have the "ON" switch flicked. They just robot through work.
I heard in general, it's fantastic to be aware of your feelings, but they need to be managed, rather than given the reigns for decision-making. Like, you need an executive functioning overseer that fields, filters, guides, challenges, and at times even overrides your feelings, without denying or snuffing them out.
- money (rent etc)
- peer pressure (difficulty to not obey)
- social status / environment (a need to belong to a group)
-You may amass some wealth and have an affordable mortgage or paid-off house.
-The need to obey/conform may diminish with age, and you may find peers with values more compatible with your own.
-You may be able to cultivate relationships with peers whose morals are reasonably compatible with your own.
When you are challenged on these fronts - you cannot amass them unless you compromise your ethics/whatever.
Also every now and again you’ll have to realize that your ability to predict the outcome of your actions is imperfect.
If you happen to be like every other person that has ever existed on this planet, possibly excepting Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus H. Christ, you’ll have to sort out the places where your instincts and desires depart from what’s ethical and make value judgments.
I'm human, so sometimes I'll even do things that _I_ know are net negative just because that day I've kind of been like, fuck it, eat three bowls of cornflakes and fuck the indigestion.
i don't care about what anybody else thinks about me afterwards
i've got only one life to live and it better be fun
There were plenty of weasels* there, and it got worse —much worse— towards the end, but the corporation, itself, was one of the oldest Japanese tech companies, with a 100-year history of insane levels of Quality. It was truly a signal Honor to work there.
It was not an environment a lot of folks here would like, but that moral infrastructure was crucial to me. For reasons that aren’t really ones that I’ll go into, I have lived a highly moral life, and I was grateful to have the support.
I’m not competitive, for moral reasons, and I really enjoyed the way that the Japanese valued teamwork.
Sadly, it seems to elicit scorn, from folks in tech. Either folks think I’m being “snobby,” or they think I’m stupid and weak-willed.
*One of my favorite books is Scott Adams’ The Way of the Weasel.
That said, there were a few instances of Japanese management techniques that would make amazon warehouse managers feel at home :) (someone recently told he was asked why he went to the toilet 3 times that day)
https://drewdevault.com/2020/05/05/We-are-complicit-in-our-e...
And from their perspectives, why should they have to sacrifice additional wealth in order to make some more ethical decision? If they don't make some morally questionable decision, they may worry that a competitor will. No business leader wants to crash their own company; they like the feeling of importance they get. And sometimes they feel like their position makes them feel more important in society at large, too, not just at their own company.
Why should they have to make self-sacrificing choices and give all that up, when doing so would make them... like everyone else.
When executives agree to do immoral things, they aren't suffering a "moral injury," they're complicit in inflicting one.
It isn't fair to the driver and especially not the people injured when an accident happens.
Basically the best drivers will only work for the best carriers, but you need to work up. If you work for a shitty company and get inspected, you are sanctioned for mechanical problems, including things like ripped seats. (Funny, as police car seats are always torn up)
Once you have those violations, you’re stuck working for shitty carriers.
Long story short, stay away from old trucks at night, especially near state borders. Chances are they’re problematic.
This dude is devastated by lying to a bunch of developers. Has he ever worked a minimum wage job in a call center, being the human punching bag for the company's infuriated customers?
I would be more impressed if HBR talked to people like the redditor who I saw the other day talking about handling repo cases for Rent-A-Center and how much the job wrecked them. The final straw was having to repo a bed from a kid with cancer.
I have, at a credit card company. One day I spent 90 minutes arguing with the credit department for a limit increase on behalf of someone who was dying of cancer. I failed to convince them, and quit the job not long after. That wasn't the only reason, but it was one of them.
Granted this was many years ago, but I'm nonetheless not sure quite what point you're trying to make here. Managers shouldn't be expected to behave with moral probity because they and their reports are well compensated? It sounds like that's what you're saying, but I'm not sure how that makes sense.
It seems like what we're seeing now is something like a massive accumulation of moral and organizational "debt" to the point that organizations easily escape it.
You've had accumulation of companies that only know how to manage by abuse, that lie to everyone, including themselves, about what's reasonable to expect for people. They've dug themselves a hole and the only way they know to get out is to dig deeper.
https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Leadership_...
To that end, your CV is the best license you can carry. It's unique per person unlike generalized licenses that lump people together like a hash collision.
Requiring licenses will have two effects - making people pay money, and complicating job seeking. You can gauge a bridge for safety. You can test weld jobs. You cannot standardize code writing ability. My understanding is you want the profession to remain the same with the exception of bearing an extra piece of paper to my name. What does this improve?
What I'm saying is, you're not original or clever in wanting something the industry and academia does not, and has invested in figuring out.
I can count on less than one hand the times when I was asked to do anything I felt was immoral.
Maybe folks know better than to ask me ...
Variability between people in regards to where they draw the line between ethical and unethical probably plays a role too.
I suspect that a fair number of people on sites like this though probably work on fairly abstract things like device drivers or compilers, where ethical dilemmas are relatively infrequent. And even fields like autonomous driving where there are disagreements about the right technology, I don't think many people are morally conflicted about whether cars should crash more or less often -- I hope most everyone agrees that fewer and less damaging car crashes is the goal.
in e-commerce and shady web hosting companies, yes
I could tell the people requesting these things often felt trapped themselves, that they had to. In one occasion, I was told the company could shutter in months if "we" didn't throw up smokescreens and obfuscate the product.
An important lesson is these types of people don't actually value you if you deliver their unethical requests. They've already demonstrated their lack of backbone. It's rarely a quality that cohabitates with empathy and respect.
Humans were not meant to compete on the world stage. This level of competition is too intense. On the world stage, there will always be someone willing to compromise all principles and ethics to achieve their goals; such a person is much more likely to win.
If you break it up by industry, you will get the same result across all industries. All industries will end up being headed by people who aren't impeded by moral hurdles. It's terrible for society.
Most of the horribly unethical things I've witnessed happened in hyper-local markets.
Ugly corruption is rampant in small or medium businesses that dominate the economic output of isolated and localized geographic regions.
As a distinct but sometimes overlapping phenomenon, "warm fuzzies corruption" is also incredibly common in hyper-localized markets. "Family owned and operated for three generations" is literally a re-framing of "nepotism in the C-suite and boardroom" as a good thing!!! Find me a multi-national that brags about bloodline continuity, please.
Of course with government spying, China probably isn't the only one with a "good citizen index" calculated based on the monitoring. All it takes is for once three letter security agency to want to assign "danger" scores to citizens, as well as "importance".
Your are also correct that if capitalism and its inherent sociopathic reward system promulgating to some form of reproductive reinforcement or selection, then in the long term bad things will happen.
Even trade within a nation rarely met that bar in the past.
don't compete with morale-less losers!
you can be a ethical company and let others follow your example
I think people's frustrations with this is part of the reason we currently have a cancel culture.
Part of the risk of unethical behavior IS getting cancelled. Of course as soon as people bring up their pitchforks, a company always backtracks with a "we remain committed to bringing the best experience for our customers"
- Stop money printing globally. Switch to a deflationary monetary system like Bitcoin or other.
- Change the mechanism of money printing globally. Distribute all newly issued currency via UBI indiscriminately to citizens (instead of the current trickle-down approach of currency issuance which gives an advantage to corporations).
We need to get rid of the centralized streams of new currency because it artificially concentrates all of a nation's competition to small areas. Those who are closer to the money printers have a huge competitive advantage over those who are far. We need to get rid of Cantillion effects.
Maybe if globalization was done in a decentralized way, we would have smaller tribes wherein reputation would matter more and competition would be less intense.
Currency printing is essentially a form of government subsidy via dilution. It takes wealth from PersonA, PersonB and PersonC who are on the periphery and uses it to subsidize PersonD who is in the middle. It's not difficult to figure out why PersonA, PersonB and PersonC are not able to compete against PersonD - Their own money is weaponized against them. The subsidy allows PersonD to offer lower prices.
But I agree that it could go a long way if governments would make the distinction between value-creation and value-extraction. The way things are now, people simply do not acknowledge that there is a difference at all.
The reason why I think that monetary policy is the most important thing is that it naturally favors value-extraction (rent seeking). Why bother creating value for consumers when you can just tap into easy money from banks and government contracts?
It looks amazingly profitable from the bank's perspective. You just print money, loan it out to PersonA to buy a house, then collect interest payments on that for 20 years, then PersonB comes along, you print even more money, loan it out to PersonB to buy the same house from PersonA at a higher price, then collect interest payments on that for another 20 years... Repeat ad-infinitum.
at some level, you're not really compromising your ethics for a paycheck if you could just find alternative employment.
The real test is when you cannot find alternative employment, would you still not compromise your ethics?
“This is how the industry is, we don’t like it, and we don’t have expect you to like it. In fact, if you did like it, we wouldn’t consider you. Our company’s practices make things a little better, or at least not worst, and we have bright lines we don’t cross.”
I thought it was really great they were up front about things, and I wish I got that job.
I knew a founder who worked in the seedy end of an industry (non-profit industry, ironically) and walked out when it got bad.
I consider myself an ethical person. But when people say “yes it’s wrong, you don’t have to like like” that goes a long way with me.
Can you imagine working there and looking at yourself in the mirror? You are actively contributing to the hellscape life of people. Fuck no.
Yeah, actually.
"I'm helping to provide financial products to underserved customers that traditionally couldn't get access. Access to financial products can improve the lives of customers when they're used responsibly. A 300% APR loan might seem like a rip-off, but if you can't afford a car repair and you need it to get keep your job, then having the option to take out the loan is strictly better than having a broken car and losing your job. The high interest rates/fees are justified by the high credit risk of our customers, and competition ensures the interest rates aren't unreasonably high".
Of course, among policy makers, no one asks the poor people they claim to help.
¹ I've heard and read this several times, but I'm not going to dig out a reference.
Overall I hate the fact that companies portray themselves as changing the world for the better. They’re making money. No shame in that.
they were bluffing to get your sympathy so you don't pull your application, because they are aware candidates question their ethics
> I wish I got that job
see, worked
“Bluffing” means faking something to get an advantage. So you think the company was filled with sadists who were trying to appear to be sympathetic to make hiring easier?
It’s pretty easy to say “full disclosure, some stuff sucks. It’s ok to hate it, we all hate it. Just hold your nose and do it anyway.”
Why fake that attitude? What advantage does the alternative present?
the advantage you get is a larger candidate pool who are more sympathetic with your company now after you portrayed yourself as a victim of circumstances outside your control, aka. "It's not us, anybody is doing it!"
in reality nobody forced that company to adopt the business model, which OP described as unethical
ever heard of Stockholm Syndrom?
The language in this article is the kind of thing that makes me hate sociology and business literature. They invent jargon to pretend they have 'discovered' something to get published. Because they are not controlled, interventional, reputable scientific disciplines they have to generate their 'discoveries' out of thin air and nonsense.
It's called having a conscience. Why do we need your BS terminology for people acting ethically? Pride, self-respect, decency. The English language is resplendent with words to describe this phenomenon. Keep your moral injury and shove it in your lived experience.
End Rant
This article actually has things to say. It would say them better if it referred to "integrity" and "breach of trust" and "principles," which, like "decency" have specific meanings, and do not leave me wondering what a moral center is, how it relates to a moral top, and what it even means to "harm" this novel abstraction.
I also like "intentionality" which suddenly appears everywhere and means "put thought into." Authors who like that word never seem to specify the content of those thoughts, and therefore delegate all of the hard work of actually having thoughts worth expressing off to other people.
Given the context of this particular article I wanted to share somewhat of a counter point to this that I learnt a few years ago. From my readings and experience, what's happening here is that we are creating a shared vocabulary, or, pedagogy, to describe shared experiences. I used to think it was bunkum until I read some books including pedagogy of the oppressed. The truth is, when we have these terms that we can share and discuss, it gives a lot of power for affected people to express what they are feeling more clearly.
In the example of this article, one could read it as tackling the topic of individual ethical compasses. Ethics has fuzzy edges all over. Sometimes, business needs will cross those fuzzy edges but it's not necessarily unethical. An example will be asking people to temporarily set aside the discomfort they are feeling with a a local situation (eg: politics) that affects their personal life in a long term manner. It sucks. Work also needs to get done. There's a good chance you hurt an individual's ethics along the way. An individual can feel ashamed of themselves sometimes when they feel they are doing work that ignores the plight of people around them. If you go about this the wrong way (completely innocently) you end up causing... what?
Describing these moments is much easier when you have the right words to use it. And the thing is, it's really hard to understand how it's useful until you've experienced it yourself (i.e., suddenly having the right words to express yourself). Hence, lived experiences.
Finally it's worth noting that these terms don't get invented out of thin air. Moral injury has a history dating back to 1984 for example(wikipedia page on moral injury). These terms are born out of iteration as people strive together to find ways to describe how they are feel. And personally, I think that the language enables that is actually something to embrace and celebrate.
Book recommendation: “The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite” by Duff McDonald. (I liked his previous book on McKinsey better but there’s good stuff here too.)
If your boss asks you do something you don't agree with, then don't do it. Not sure why I need an article from HBR.
Give me a break. I wouldn't have been surprised if this was from a lifestyle magazine like The Atlantic; but, this is from Harvard Business Review!? They're just not serious people anymore.
“Just say whatever you need to say to get them to stay. We can’t lose any more techs or we’ll have to announce huge delays on the launch. I’m holding you accountable for making sure that doesn’t happen.”
Brian,* an executive Ron coached, told him about this ultimatum he’d received from his boss. He explained that the project had been under-resourced, people were exhausted from working under impossible deadlines, and he felt ashamed of the corners he feared had been cut to meet them. Now, being asked to manipulate and lie to his people crossed the line for Brian. Despite feeling guilty for abandoning his team, he resigned.