What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons? | Hacker News Reader

What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons?

34 pointsprofunctor53 comments

I cases like [0] where software developers vowed not to create a muslim registry there has been recognition of the responsibility we have as software developers/engineers. What personal lines do you draw? Do you think drawing these "I will not create or use this software" lines help? I personally will not work at a gambling firm due to the damage I see the industry cause in my town.

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Although this is difficult to avoid because of its pervasiveness, I'm trying to avoid working in projects whose value proposition imply consistently distracting people from doing focused work.

Also, I'd not like to work in companies that use information that I consider BS in their publicity. I can cite RedBull in this case, with their publicity about turning you into the greatest multitasker of the office, when it's pretty obvious to me that multitasking has never worked and that it's totally delusional. See http://mywings.redbull.com/in-en/need-to-focus .

I think a good BS threshold is a good thing to have. If they are bullshitting you in trivial obvious ways just imagine all the less obvious dishonesty they are perpetrating and you haven't noticed yet.

I won't do any more political propaganda work; Bill Hicks/George Carlin (and my own nagging conscience) got to me on that front. And I won't do webdev for the big tv networks because all I did was build advert and spy apparatus.

I'm currently on an active mission to see if it's still possible for me to 1) work in webdev, 2) not hurt people, and 3) make a living.

Seems to be easy to get two out of the three, but not all three. Seems my network of contacts is wholly in politics and broadcasting. :(

I don't know what specifically in webdev you're looking for but my company is hiring frontend engineers (we're in Campbell, CA but OK with part-time remote). We work in enterprise cloud security and don't hurt people AFAIK :-). My email is my username @gmail.com. Please do reach out if it sounds like something you're interested in.

I really appreciate that! Frontend is up my alley. Saved your info and may contact you in the near future and I'll intro myself. Thanks again. :)

TripAdvisor is webdev, pays well, and has a business model that doesn't hurt anyone. When I was working there I frequently told people that I enjoyed working there "because we don't abuse people". I only left to go chase the start up life style, but 10/10 it was a great place to work.

disclaimer: I don't work at TripAdvisor anymore and I am in no way currently affiliated with them, but I am a previous employee.

Roger that; I appreciate the intel!

I have been approached to develop mass surveillance software and turned it down. I have been approached multiple times to work for casinos (online and offline) and have always turned them down. I will not work for technology primarily contributing to military systems.

I totally get that. I personally would do casinos; but could totally understand why one wouldn't

I refuse to work with companies who store sensitive data (financial, medical, etc.) and fail to take it deadly seriously. If the company won't hire a third-party security firm to audit and provide guidance, I won't work for that company.

Do you have a recommendation for a 3rd party audit or certification company that is inexpensive?

None of them are truly inexpensive. It's difficult, complicated work, and it's often time-intensive, too. There's a reason many companies, including large ones, aren't as careful/ethical about this as they should be.

Hiring a security expert as a consultant is a good start. There are many larger security firms that can provide audits, but an initial consultant will help you pick the low-hanging fruit and may even be able to contribute to your code.

Who will audit the auditor?

They could be useless. They could BE the criminals.

So you need an auditor for your auditor, and for that too you'll need an auditor. It's auditors all the way down.

It's not true that "X could be useless" implies "X is useless". If your expectation (in a probability sense) is that X is useful, a policy of requiring X is, broadly speaking, a better idea than a policy of not bothering at all.

In the specific case of auditors, they tend to be large, well-known companies with a reputation, a common system in our society for figuring out if people are useful or criminals. Arthur Andersen, for instance, made a series of bad ethical decisions in its accounting audit practice. They no longer practice auditing for accounting, and their consulting business has been rebranded (to Accenture) because they lost the reputation of their original name. So they did, in effect, get audited eventually. Which again is better than not bothering.

I moved out of ad tech, around the time my boss asked me to do something I thought was unethical.

I don't know that I'm out of it forever -- I find few industries a hard "no". Rather, it has to do with the people I'm working with and the exact project. I try not to make things that are addictive or harm the psyche, or that perpetuate social ills. I try not to do things that can be repurposed for those things.

Some industries seem to attract consistently immoral people, though.

I've had the exact same experience with adtech. People in this thread may, like we did, underestimate how immoral many of the people in this space are.

* End-user monitoring / surveillance (I started my career with a paper motivated by how skeeved out I was by IPWatcher: http://cs.unc.edu/~fabian/course_papers/PtacekNewsham98.pdf)

* Anything for DoD (or any country's Dept. of Defense)

* Casinos

* Weapons

That might be about it. I could, situationally, be comfortable working on:

* DRM/content protection

* HFT

* Some aspects of adtech

I'm curious why casinos are on the list?

I'm generally not a good barometer apparently given my work in HFT & adtech, but I'd think building a sports book would be fairly interesting & not evil.

Things I think are a shade past where I want to be: high risk consumer credit, for profit prisons, private military contractors & pyramid marketing schemes.

I wouldn't work on high-risk consumer credit either (I assume there aren't many coding jobs in the prison industry).

My problem with casinos is the same as your issue with high risk consumer credit. You're right: there may be exceptions.

I suppose I could be persuaded to work in high risk consumer credit if the point was to eliminate the exploitation and I suppose doing that in casinos means getting rid of them.

I once built a prototype that was supposed to identify gamblers who were going off the deep end. It was billed to me as a way to help people before they ruined their lives. I found out it was marketed to casinos as a way to keep players in the system longer by enforcing cool down periods. Players who go too far sometimes don't come back, or not to the same casino or type of gambling.

Not to be too light about this serious topic but anything in COBOL. But that is what I said before I had to program in RPG III for about a year then discovered COBOL was not so bad. But then what are you going to do on an IBM system 34.

Also I will never again write a furniture store inventory and accounts receivable program in Altair Basic.

Incidentally not many of you know that Altair Basic was written using a BSO 8085 emulator running on a PDP 10 somewhere near Harvard. Possibly unlicensed.

Which is a cool idea--if you can't lay your hands on the target hardware, write an emulator for it while you wait. I actually did that for a totally obscure bit of hardware while writing a compiler back end for it. I think it was a flight simulator system.

Admittedly these are more personal than ethical. But isn't there sort of a connection between ethics and a sense of proper design?

[edit typo]

Turned down a job for a yc startup doing genetic tests on cows to maximise meat yield

What is wrong with this ?

Just felt sorry for the cows

In theory if cows produce more meat, less cows will be killed.

(we can talk how immoral is kill a cow for feed ourself, but this is off-topic and everyone has different opinions)

I think I find the fattening more disturbing. It was a precursor to me becoming vegetarian though so ymmv

Devils advocate play here - when NYC via Robert Moses built more highways and tunnels to ease congestion, more cars got on the road and soon the problem was recreated

Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. - Cyril Northcote Parkinson, British civil servant, first published in 'The Economist' (1955)

Parkinson's Law - Data Corollary: Data expands to fill the space available for storage.

Generalized form of Parkinson's Law: The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource. The reverse is not true.

Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

... from my fortune clone @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

Not just dishonest products, but I want to avoid companies that treat their employees like crap. None of the trend of making everyone a contractor or making people train their replacements.

My current company is generally pretty good but the app I'm building will reduce call center volume and therefore call center employees. I think they are treating the call center employees pretty well but a few of the higher ups are just a bit too eager to "staff down". I'm generally in favor of creative destruction but something about the eagerness of all the VPs I talk to is just rubbing me the wrong way.

To paraphrase famed philosopher Crombobulous Michael:

"I'm very discreet. I have no code of ethics. I will program for anyone, anywhere. Children, animals, old people, doesn't matter. I just love coding"

Anything related to planned obsolescence.

I avoid working on projects where my software will kill people on purpose or by accident i.e. missle guidance or medical devices. The former former for ethical reasons.

Medical devices: The risks are scary, but somebody has to do it!

Adtech.

I've turned down so many, and quit the only job in the space I ever had after 3 months. Bad products and bad people.

I'm pretty surprised to hear this on here. I work in advertising analytics, and its amazing. I always thought that going over a bit, into ad tech, would mean more access to cooler, more interesting real-time technology

Anything where the customer and their real needs is not the focus. If a product places sales or money above the people it's dealing with, I'm not interested. Ironically, I now work for a bank - just luckily a bank that has very good ethical practices and takes their responsibility to their customers very seriously.

Which bank does that? If that's true, then I want them taking care of my money instead of the other guys.

I do not undertake projects having an immediate or exclusive military application.

Beyond that, I pick and choose based on my gut.

Would you make an exception for something purely defensive, like an ICBM interceptor?

ICBM interceptors are (among other things) for neutralizing an enemy's retaliatory deterrence thus enabling the protected party to carry out nuclear first strikes. They are not purely defensive.

I'm not sure if it's helpful to think about things that way because it can be applied to just about everything. Does body armor make war more likely because we can kill more of theirs than they can kill ours? Does that mean personal body armor can not by considered purely defensive?

> I'm not sure if it's helpful to think about things that way because it can be applied to just about everything.

It can be applied to just about anything (well, anything combat-related) because, in fact, nothing combat-related is purely defensive; it's all, including things whose direct use is protective, developed and acquired in order to improve the ability to destroy the enemy.

It's not helpful to delude oneself into believing that the purely defensive exists.

apart from the obvious malware, i will not work on drm, surveillance, spam, and anything that depends on addicting people to in-app purchases. i would like not to work at all for companies employing dark patterns, even if i don't work on those parts of the code myself, but realistically i tend to settle for not doing anything sketchy myself, and working for companies that i see as delivering positive value overall.

I work as a full time mobile dev and my primary task is to implement dark design pattern to increase number of in-app purchase made by user, it's agonizing to go to work every day but the salary is quite decent

that's pretty sad :( have you looked out for other work, or just let it slide?

Control software for the baby oil and baby powder plant.

This seems oddly specific. Why?

There was a famous incident in the Gulf War where the US bombed a facility which was described by the US as a chemical weapons factory and by Iraq as a factory which produced powdered milk for infants. This is likely a callback (via snowclone) to that incident.

Just the thought of all those babies in the hopper

I wouldn't develop software for surveillance, advertisement, weapon systems, high-frequency trading.

Web-scraping if a reasonably priced and accessible API is available

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