
What type of software will you refuse to develop for ethical reasons? - profunctor
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&#x2F;engineers. What personal lines do you draw? Do you think drawing these &quot;I will not create or use this software&quot; 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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naitoon
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](http://mywings.redbull.com/in-en/need-to-focus) .

~~~
quantumhobbit
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.

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thesagan
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. :(

~~~
craftkiller
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.

~~~
thesagan
Roger that; I appreciate the intel!

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contingencies
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.

~~~
wand3r
I totally get that. I personally would do casinos; but could totally
understand why one wouldn't

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smt88
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.

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

~~~
smt88
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.

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SomeStupidPoint
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.

~~~
hawkice
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.

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tptacek
* 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](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

~~~
kasey_junk
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
kasey_junk
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.

~~~
ta123321
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.

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wglb
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]

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

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CCing
What is wrong with this ?

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isomorph
Just felt sorry for the cows

~~~
CCing
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)

~~~
whistlerbrk
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

~~~
contingencies
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](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

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quantumhobbit
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.

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legostormtroopr
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"

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miguelrochefort
Anything related to planned obsolescence.

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chrisbennet
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.

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

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whistlerbrk
Adtech.

~~~
angusmacphail
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.

~~~
ep103
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

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breeny592
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.

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

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

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

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

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dragonwriter
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.

~~~
flukus
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?

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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_.

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zem
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.

~~~
soulchild37
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

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

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wballard
Control software for the baby oil and baby powder plant.

~~~
legostormtroopr
This seems oddly specific. Why?

~~~
patio11
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.

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

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

