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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing about this is that someone was asked to implement this, and instead of saying ‘fuck no’. They went ahead and did it anyway.

There’s a few hills worth dying on and I feel this is one of them. It is just unambiguously evil.

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If you're an h1b worker you literally don't have a choice.

You obey or get yourself and your family kicked out of the country.

Land of the free, they say!

So you literally do have a choice. There’s just a consequence (There are worse things than not living in America, hard as that might be for you to imagine.)

You're going to say no to writing a timeout code and risk your entire family going back to your country?

What if you have kids who were born here? You're now going to take them back to a place they don't know? Or are you going to let them go to foster care here?

How about if you've bought a house here? You're going to have just a few months to settle everything before you can go.

Why would anyone contemplate leaving their children behind in foster care? That seems an absurdly hyperbolic suggestion. People move countries for work and take their children with them all the time. I mean, if the country was Syria and you literally risk death, then I could understand, but people in that situation are refugees, not on work visas.

Perhaps I’m finding this hard to understand since I have no desire to live in the US whatsoever and have turned down several offers from companies that wanted me to move there. Nice place to visit, but I can think of dozens of places I would rather live.

What country are you based in? Have you ever lived in a country with extreme poverty or an oppressive government?

The kid is a US citizen and doesn't know any language other than English. Depending on the home country that might be a huge huge obstacle for the kid.

I was once that kid who had to go back to Iran without knowing Persian. It was fucking terrible.

Yes, moving to a country is hard when you don’t speak the language. Can I ask, why did your Iranian parents not ensure you learned Persian if moving back was a possibility?

Because it was something I resisted and made me miserable trying to learn in another country.

They did the right thing because I was able to still have a childhood that wasn't bogged down with learning Persian.

Why would you risk all of those things on the whim of an employer.

I swear the US must be the worst possible country in the world to emigrate to.

(Right, like returning to a country you were trying to escape.)

If you're here from a country that you had to escape, then you're a refugee, and unlike H-1B immigrants, refugees don't have to leave just because they lost their job.

There's a ton of people who had to (or really wanted to, makes no difference in this case) escape a country that did it using their skills as a programmer.

But the vast majority moved because they could make more money in the US. They behave unethically because they don’t want to give up that income. It’s a purely mercenary calculation. And it does make a difference whether it’s a want rather than a need. I want lots of things, but if I behave in a shitty way to get them I should be condemned.

I’m sure there are some people in the unfortunate position you describe, and in their case it’s understandable. But it’s not the general case.

People who moved for the money likely went to FAANG instead.

Actually, I got interested in this and checked trustarc's careers page and it seems most technical positions are in Philippines/Canada with a mention of "global team" so I'm convinced now all this thread is arguing about strawmen and in reality the product is being written by some remote contractors from third world country who will be easily replaced by a million others if they refuse.

The corporate leaders that make the decisions are the ones that should resign on principle. Not the theoretical H1B employee who would uproot their family, derail their career, distress-sell their house, leave the country, etc., over the setTimeout line.

Or if your employer is paying for your family's healthcare, or your school tuition.

> if your employer is paying for your family's healthcare

Isn't this true of every full-time job? But people quit and get new full-time jobs all the time.

Maybe in the US, but not in Europe. Health care and the education of your children is largely not dependent on your job. Shades of grey of course, I don't think university education is free in the UK anymore (it was when I was at university) and private health care does exist

Medical Feudalism is just how things work in the United States.

You absolutely do have a choice. You just have to decide where your line is.

If you are asked to commit a crime by your employer, do you go ahead and do it for the sake of keeping your job? What about something legal yet highly questionable on moral grounds? Going ahead with an annoying UI feature you don't agree with is probably justified if the alternative is getting deported, but there's a threshold somewhere and it's different for everyone.

I've already explained this in the thread.

Not going to argue about how each person defines literally.

Yes because America, not China has exacerbated the conditions in India to make it so you have no choice to come to America. There won't be a timeline where the US relaxes their immigration laws to make something like this possible.

What in your opinion has America done to India?

Because US employment laws are terrible. For everyone, not just h1b workers.

How many companies seriously start revoking visa sponsorship the moment an employee pushes back on a Jira ticket?

Really the issue is being fired over it isn't it? The visa just makes being fired worse for employees requiring one.

I would hate to work at a company where a bit of debate on 'is this really a good idea' were a firable offence; sounds like the 'believe it or not - jail' scene from Parks & Recreation! That's satirising a visiting delegation from a developing country under military rule.

>I would hate to work at a company where a bit of debate on 'is this really a good idea' were a firable offence

Right, and you don't have to because your continued existence in a country isn't dependent on it. Companies with attitudes like that don't reveal it until it's too late.

I just think the existence/prevalence of such places is being wildly overstated... Especially without any sort of 'hey, stop pushing back on every issue, shut up and do your job or you won't have one' type warning.

But then I've never lived or worked in the land of the free, so what do I know.

As someone on a Visa - even a 0.0001% chance of being fired for saying something like this would shut me up.

So you walk on your toes all the time? That seems like a really unhappy way to live.

What's the alternative?

It just seems even less likely to be such an issue to me than unavoidable things like personality clashes, or getting stuck on some work that someone you report to thinks should be quick and easy, etc.

Why do you assume it’s an H1B worker? I don’t see where you get this baseless accusation from.

What if 3 US citizens said "fuck no", and it was someone on much shakier ground who felt the pressure to say yes? Not a given at all, just makes it more likely.

It really seems horribly racist to just assume that it must be the “lesser moral” H1B employee who made this dark pattern happen. You have zero evidence, no indication that’s the case, and are speculating wildly.

It isn't even slightly racist. It isn't a comparison of morals between the H1B worker and U.S. citizen; the employer simply has more leverage over the H1B worker.

But where is this assumption of a H1B worker causing this coming from? Literally zero indication of this, just a racist strawman.

What a depressing thread this has been.

I am a brown immigrant. I am critiquing America's system.

Uh, immigrants from Europe are also on a H1B as far as I understand it. How do you associate it with racism?

Europeans on h1b have a very easy path to citizenship so it's not really the same.

I'm not seeing any claim that an H1B employee is less moral, only that a person (regardless of visa status) can be coerced into doing something they would rather not do.

Also, there is no inherent racial component to an H1B or other status.

The example of an H1B person seems to have been provided only as a sample to further illustrate the point that "Just quit on principle, rather than implement this thing!" is often not an acceptable action due to other effects.

This whole thread has nods to moral high ground US citizens, versus the immoral scared H1B workers, who are /obviously/ the only ones who would implement such a dark pattern. Mind you we’re discussing an American company, working with American clients.

You seem to be one of those “assume good faith” people, who knows exactly what the others actually mean.

>Mind you we’re discussing an American company, working with American clients.

And everyone in this thread is discussing how that company could be using American laws to pressure workers. This thread is an indictment of an American system, no one is blaming the H1B workers.

Is being an H1B worker now an accusation? This was me pointing out that our VISA system forces a huge chunk of our workforce to not have a strong ability to stand up to their employer.

I hear you.

Same for if you’re disabled, your partner has a medical condition… moving between jobs can be cost less for some, but changing jobs is not cost less universally.

Which means in a given developer pool, there’s usually at least one person who “won’t put up a fuss about implementing industry standard code”.

> instead of saying ‘fuck no’

This is only possible for people whose job stability or financial situation is above average.

I'm out of the job market myself (retired) but isn't every developer's job stability above average? Isn't everyone looking for developers now? If you're one to take a stand then now is the perfect time. Unless you're in a H1B situation as mentioned by the comment below.

Yeah, man, most people have very flexible morals

Just look at all the engineers at Facebook, or even worse: the defense industry

I have a very hard time deciding which one is worse. At least one of those has the potential of saving more lives than it ruins.

Yep, but that is a dangerous path/metric, besides this specific "artificial" delay, think of the millions, billions, trillions seconds humanity has lost - particularly the poorest - waiting for stupidly bloated sites to load on a slowish connection (or even worse a metered one) when the same content and message could have been delivered with 1/10th or 1/100th of bandwidth usage ...

If you adopt this kind of metric/moral stance any web programmer workng in the last 20 years is guilty ...

There are things you can refuse to work on and there are things that you have to put in effort to make better. Improving a bloated site to load faster is not as trivial as refusing to put a dumb timeout to slow things down. I still think the OP is totally overreacting and even calling something as stupid as this a "dark pattern" belittles truly horrific things that are happening in the world including the cyber world.

We’re talking about “dark patterns” here, not crimes against humanity. I think this is unambiguiously evil, but that doesn’t automatically make it as bad as murder.

Tons of HN readers work at Google, which is much worse than whatever this dumb thing on the Starbucks website is. Ethics is in short supply.

Those Googlers just follow orders, so you can't blame them. /s

Die, eh? Na, this isn’t the one.

I don’t understand why you are shocked.

Ethics should follow the same standard normal distribution model as everything else. Which means that 50% of the population has less than average ethics.

Not everything follows a standard distribution model. In fact, since some psychological tests are designed to return a standard distribution result, if the traits do not occur in the population along a standard distribution, the psychological tests are designed in a way which will give inaccurate results.

Despite being called normal, not as much as you would think follows a normal distributon. But if your main point is that there is some mean value of ethicalness and 50% fall above and below that value then I suppose there's not much to argue about there.

*median. It is commonplace for more or less than 50% to fall below the mean.

It's also common for more or less than 50% to fall below the median. The average M&M fun size package has 15 M&Ms (mode, median=15; mean=15.02). Only 25.6% have fewer than that. As fumeux_fume stated earlier, not everything follows a normal distribution.

Since morality is socially mediated, I think it's reasonable to hypothesize it would tend to be N-modal.

We need an 11th commandment: Thou shalt not apply dark patterns!

If you tell them you aren't doing it, they'll fire you and find someone who will. It'll end up existing either way.

This argument can justify anything on that basis, from fraud to murder or slavery. By withdrawing your services to do it, you reduce supply, increasing prices and providing a financial penalty for trying to enact it.

Am I the only one seeing the irony of it? You are asking the guy who already added a ton of JavaScript junk to the website to have concerns about one delay function?

There's plenty of people who would do whatever they're told, regardless of their own principles, as long as they're paid for it. I'm not one of them, sure, but as long as there's just ONE person like this, we can't have nice things in the long run.

> This argument can justify anything on that basis, from fraud to murder or slavery.

Interestingly there are laws and whistleblower protections against murder and slavery.

Another poster mentioned H1B visa holders, and I'm sure that is a valid concern there, given how poorly H1B holders are treated. But as a citizen, I've heard this many times, been told it to my face during sit downs with my boss while refusing to do something shady, and it has never happened. On two occasions, the threat was idle. On two more, I quit and they never did find anyone to replace me.

But regardless, even if it were true, you still need to protect your own soul. Better to let someone else corrupt themselves.

Exactly! But what if everyone had a concience and said no? Would they fire all their developers?

Anyway, they wouldn’t fire you since just finding someone else to do it is easier than starting any HR process.

That’s pretty sad by itself.

It's one reason that software engineering should become a real Engineering profession and not just a title. If your employer asks you do something unethical, it would give you grounds for pushing back. Who would risk losing their license to practice because of a deceptive cookie notice?

Yeah, I would refuse to implement this and immediately start searching for a new job, whatever the fallout.

This is not why I got into software.

That's what you get for tearing down any worker protection or ability to organize.

So a dumb one-minute timeout is the thing that pushed you over the edge? How would you feel if you had to work on drones that kill people or as a nuclear scientist on the Manhattan project?

When I work on drones that kill people I choose to work on it from the start. There’s no doubt that they’ll be used to kill people since it’s an explicit design goal.

The same is not true for a ‘cookie selection dialog’, where the stated goal would be to allow people to easily select what cookies they want to allow.

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