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Comment by peterpeppers | Hacker News Reader

In the 2010s, we had a similar situation but it wasn’t illegal.

I used to work for a large drug distributor both pre and during the opioid epidemic.

At the time (pre-SUPPORT Act), distributors weren’t required to notify the DEA about anomalous ordering so we didn’t provide data to law enforcement unless they sent a subpoena.

To increase profits, we identified our best customers of opioids and updated our inventory tracking system to send rebates and early warning notifications to providers so they’d buy more earlier.

Each provider has a sales rep (territory) mapped so we could figure out bonuses easily.

We the software engineering team were paid well for it, but not as much as the sales reps who got a percentage of the buy.

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It really seems like you have effectively caused the deaths of many people through your actions. Does that have a lingering impact on you?

Judging actions taken at the time with the benefit of what we know now, is not a fair way to assess.

Sure we could say it was obvious they were pushing lots of pills. But this was a legal product.

Someone working for an NFL team trying to sell tickets , or for Starbucks trying to promote frappucinos, … these actions seem fine. We know the risks, but we acknowledge and move on.

But if it turns out that new data, 3 years from now, shows some huge uptick in head injuries among college players. Or high school. And we can attribute this to the influence of pro leagues, well…. The actions of the people participating in the enterprise now get considered in a different light.

Or if we gain new (as if we need it) data on the impact of sugar and caffeine on young people, then people who work for Starbucks or McDonald’s or basically any prepared food business, … we will judge them differently ?

People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.

What do we do then? Refuse to take any action for fear of some possible future negative impact ?

It’s not appropriate to judge this way. We learn as we go, and we can say “if we knew then, what we know now…” but it’s not clear in the moment. A difficult line to draw.

> People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.

In that case, they totally did. The people who pushed leaded gasoline knew it was dangerous, but they did it anyway! By the 1920s–30s, it was already well known in medicine that lead caused neurological damage, especially in children. Workers at DuPont and Standard Oil plants developed hallucinations, seizures, and many died. What's abhorrent was where industry executives and some government allies downplayed or suppressed evidence of the harms.

Considering he just admitted it on public forum, Ima guess no.

I was hoping to get some insight/context into how they actually feel about it, rather than guessing. You can certainly come to peace with a past decision, change your opinion later etc etc.

I think it's still controversial whether manufacturers of substances are morally culpable for the result of people wrongly using them. And while you could hold the marketing or executive team accountable for trying to get people addicted to heroin, I'm not sure the same applies to programmers of an inventory tracking system?

Controversial in general, maybe. In the case of opioids and the pharm industry, absolutely not. It's been well documented at this point that pharm companies were well aware of the abuse, and not only did nothing to stop it, but went out of their way to encourage it because sales were going through the roof.

In the case of Purdue and oxycontin, the culpability has in fact been established in court as well.

As for the coders, I find it hard to believe that they were so ignorant, naïve, or unintelligent that they had absolutely no idea what was going on. I just don't buy it.

Regardless whether the rest of society finds the programmers responsible, the integrity of that society depends upon programmers in such situations holding themselves accountable. Apparatchik or moral agent? That choice remains ours.

No.

Patient took medication and were responsible for their health.

Doctors wrote the scripts and have the ultimate responsibility to the patients.

Pharmacies dispensed the medications as instructed by the scripts.

Big Pharma (Sackler) makes and markets the drugs.

Distribution is only responsible for making sure drugs arrive efficiently to their location. I would work for a drug distributor again if the pay were better.

Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.

Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.

A bit of an ironic statement, given that this post is you blaming everyone except yourself for the role you played in deepening the opioid crisis to increase profits.

I'm not American; I also wasn't blaming you for anything - I took care to avoid that!

I appreciate the reply none the less.

You mentioned targeted rebates, which feel a lot more "active". My personal ethical barrier seems to be where its a direct interaction with the problem domain. e.g. I'll work on a tool for email marketing, which incidentally gets used by gambling orgs, but I wouldn't work directly on say, Roulette software.

"We the software engineering team were paid well for it"

I worked at a health care tech company in Silicon Valley that actively defrauded medicare. When the medicare inspectors came the owner's daughters had a bunch of their friends from college (who didn't work there) sit at computers and pretend to be working, then they told the inspectors all these random people were registered nurses and full-time employees who were helping patients (and thus being billed for). It was a total sham.

I reported it and quit but they managed to stay in business and keep getting government contracts.

One of the disgruntled doctors from that company made a whole website about some of their fraud: https://hiller.whitecollarcrooks.com/

They also bragged to us about how one of their daughters was dating a Glassdoor exec and had him take down all their bad reviews.

It's so funny af that when people from the hood are doing it they get locked up or worse, and when business people do it they might as well be the president.

I guess there are some differences though. When a new pusher shows up in your territory you sue him, not going for a drive by.

This is extremely common throughout the world for businesses that sell alcohol or variations on gambling - and while I don't necessarily think the advertising should be _illegal_ (in those cases with non-controlled substances at least), I've always been shaken that the many people involved in it don't seem to see how it could be immoral.

How do you live with yourself?

If you think about it enough, most industries are doing terrible things. Work for an auto company? Thanks for the CO2 emissions accelerating climate change. Work for a consumer manufacturer? Thanks for the plastic waste choking oceans and landfills. Defense contractors? Thanks for enabling wars and killing innocents. Banks? Thanks for enslaving folks to debt and perpetuating economic inequality. Tech giants? Thanks for surveilling billions and eroding privacy on a massive scale. Social media platforms? Thanks for amplifying misinformation and fueling mental health crises. Fast fashion? Thanks for exploiting sweatshop labor and polluting waterways with toxic dyes. Pharma companies? Thanks for price-gouging drugs and prioritizing profits over access. Oil and gas? Thanks for fracking communities into environmental ruin and lobbying against renewables.

Almost everyone is contributing to terrible activities. Just different degrees of bad.

What is your point, besides potentially making yourself feel better about your industry? Those "different degrees" are what it's all about. They're the whole point.

Yes, voluntarily working in an industry where that "degree" is undeniably magnitudes higher than average just for personal gain, does make you quite the awful human. And "helping maximize the number of pills pushed to confirmed opioid addicts" is indeed a large number of standard deviations of "terrible" removed from the work the average person does.

Yup, working on recommender sysrems at places like Meta is also quite high up there. Luckily the number of people who do this kind of work is minuscule when taken as part of the global population. Even more luckily, thousands of people on HN alone will forego such jobs even if it means earning less. I've done so myself.

How is it any different from working at a gambling company writing addictive software?

There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.

The question was how GP felt about their particular unethical act, and it's consequences which likely includes multiple deaths. Since you are not GP, it seems unlikely that you can answer this question.

I fail to see the relevance of bringing up a different, and also unethical example, but I'll answer anyway. If GP said that they used to spend their time optimising software to be as addictive as possible in order to drive people into gambling addiction, destroying their lives and taking all their money while doing it, I would ask the same question.

It's a very smooth gradient from optimizing a sales funnel to writing gambling software. I don't know where the line is, but in both cases you're exploiting human psychology to make more money.

Absolutely is.

And its also why some of the anarchist folks I hang out with say there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And definitely in areas, they're completely correct.

> there's no ethical consumption under capitalism

I tend to agree too. It’s incredibly hard to do much in the US without bumping into some ugly part of capitalism because the ugly parts constitute the majority.

It is not much different. I would not worked for gambling company either. In fact, gambling companies have to pay more (and do, there are open positions) because their pool of potential employees is smaller.

The exact same question can be asked to developers who help target gamblers with attempts to push them deeper into addiction.

It's probably slightly worse because opioids actually kill people whereas gambling just financially ruins them (which can lead to suicide, but still I know which I would pick).

But it's only a slight difference. I don't think people who work at predatory apps/gambling systems should be able to sleep at night either. Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.

But if you work for one of those pay-to-win apps and find some customers are spending thousands of dollars on it (whales), you know you're being immoral.

> Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.

The “occasional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I associate sports betting with the much more dangerous side of gambling than any kind of P2W system.

How is it different from smuggling fentanyl or taking hostages for ransom?

There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.

The former almost certainly causes much less societal damage than working for a pharma company that strives to get the whole population addicted to opioids, due to the scale constraints that come with running an underground business vs. an "above board" one.

Why do you think that gambling companies pay above the industry average for the required skillset?

Because luckily there are many other people with me who won't work for them, so they have a smaller pool of candidates and need to pay more.

I guess in the same way as people working for MS, Google, FB, Palantir and other genocide enjoyers.

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