Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

47 points·kiyanwang··8 comments

Prison Time vs Potential Short Term Unemployment. If people really thought about it is not a difficult choice. You won't get a paycheck while in prison either.

Also, industry reputation. You have to check that box about criminal convictions in most states, not to mention the media and background check associations.

It's never worth it.

FAANG seems to get well selling PII customer data which is illegal.

> If you take one lesson from this, it’s that you can always say no

that's a bit of survivor bias. what about the engineers who did something blatantly illegal, but got so much money that they were too big to fail, and got a large bailout?

What about them? They're criminals.

They too could --and should-- have said no.

One of my managers asked me to write a keylogger when I first started programming. I'm glad I had the common sense to say heck no. This was 2015 and I was still a novice developer at an e-commerce company (Flipkart). This was for an internal application and not for our users but it was still wildly unethical.

I've never been asked to do anything illegal. But I've absolutely been asked to do things I considered unethical, and have always said "no".

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