
Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product? - mavsman
Sometimes it&#x27;s hard to see in the moment that a product will be used for evil or will have a negative effect on people. Can you look back on any of your work now and wish you didn&#x27;t do it?
======
bshimmin
I had a freelance gig, a very long time ago, to create a full-screen ad
takeover for one of the UK's better known "lads' mags" (now defunct, I think).
I hate ads and I hate those sorts of magazines, and I hate ruining people's
browsing experiences. Yuck.

When I was working as a permanent employee for an agency, I created two games
for the UK's lottery operator. They both had quite intricate rules to snare
and addict the people playing them (let's just say that these games are
anything but a game of chance). I felt a constant sense of disgust as I was
doing it, though it was a moderately interesting technical challenge.

However, I have had the opportunity as a consultant several times to do work
for gambling companies (and also for Camelot again!), and I have turned all of
these down and made it extremely clear I was doing so for ethical reasons.

I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in a
sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later. I
am still quite proud of my response, which was, "Yes, we absolutely can! No,
we absolutely won't help you do that!"

~~~
ashrk
> I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in
> a sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later.
> I am still quite proud of my response, which was, "Yes, we absolutely can!
> No, we absolutely won't help you do that!"

1) letting Javascript initiate network connections without explicit user
interaction with a narrow set of elements (say, a submit button) was a
mistake.

2) not having a browser-provided summary of the data a form is about to submit
before it's transmitted was a mistake.

Basically letting Javascript escape from a little box of tightly-scoped input
validation handling and maybe defining sort functions for tables was a
mistake.

~~~
monsieurbanana
It's hard to even wrap my mind about the consequences of those limitations
though. The web as we know today would not exist, hell the world would be a
different place without facebook and all the other social networks.

And something would replace them, and the same problems would happen because
the fundamental problem is not caused by some technological decisions, but
stems from human nature.

~~~
cityzen
Not sure I get your point about Facebook. I quite liked the internet before
Facebook (been working on web since 95). What exactly did Facebook contribute
that was positive that helped the world as a whole?

~~~
blarn
Facebook imo has contributed more positive than negative. It's easy to quickly
judge FB as an evil company because of the media recently, but, just for
starters, here are a few things FB has done well:

    
    
      - Connected people from all around the world
      - Empowered small businesses
      - Is very pro-charity (e.g. "birthday" charity donations)
      - Allowed people to organize themselves online (groups)

------
wpietri
I worked for financial traders for a few years before I wised up. It was at
least refreshingly honest; during the hiring process, my boss explained that
the company had a pile of money and our goal was to turn it into a bigger
pile. But what I didn't understand was that mostly we made money when other
people lost it. We turned a profit by being smarter or faster or luckier than
the people we traded with.

I ended up leaving mainly because it was an unhealthy, high-pressure
environment where a lot of the most celebrated people were giant dicks. But I
stayed away because I realized that we weren't making anything better. We just
situated ourselves near a river of (other people's) money and tried to siphon
off a bit of the flow. It was depressing.

I'm glad I never went back. I honestly think the finance industry could be
half the size it is with no real harm to the rest of the economy. And given
what a mess the 2008 crisis was, trimming the industry way back might be
overall beneficial.

~~~
hacker_9
As a counterpoint I work in finance and work with a group of smart people that
all check their egos in at the door. It's a great place to work. We also try
to turn money into more money, it's pretty much the game of life whether you
play it or not. It pays really well so I can't complain.

Is the job fulfilling? Depends on your goals - for me I've gained a huge
knowledge of low level programming, and front line experience on how far one
can go with both software and hardware to 'win' against other competitors in
the space. That's invaluable stuff for me.

Is the job moral? Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks,
this isn't stealing from the poor. People who invest must understand risk, and
risk is really the only way things move forward in the first place. But it
also implies there can and will be people who lose out.

~~~
BurnGpuBurn
> this isn't stealing from the poor.

It depends on how you look at things I guess.

For instance, when trading in commodities like grain, and deploying a strategy
to push the price up over a long time period (whether or not it's a single
entity doing so or all traders in unison), people somewhere in the world
aren't able to buy that grain and go hungry.

Same with all the foodstuffs. But what about other stuff, metals? What happens
if you drive those prices up? Well, again, somewhere in the world some poor
chap now cannot afford the metal roof sheet that goes on top of his shed, and
he'll sleep under the stars.

I think most if not all finance trading negatively impacts the people that are
too poor to even dream about finance trading. When there's a buck to be made
in finance, there's always a sucker paying for it. Somewhere along the line
that sucker becomes someone who isn't even in the whole financial trading
circus, and he'll in the end foot the bill. It must be this way, because the
financial industry itself doesn't produce or increase the value of things, it
just manipulates the price tags.

~~~
dm3
The big players used to corner small markets which then led to extreme
blowouts. It doesn't happen as much now as there are tighter regulations on
max position sizes and the volumes are higher.

Significantly influencing the price of a commodity with liquid markets, such
as corn or soybeans is pretty much impossible unless you're acting on behalf
of a country or are able to control weather. The existence of liquid markets
is beneficial for the producers and consumers as the price volatility is
reduced and hedging becomes easier. I like to showcase the effect of
information on price with the example of fish price in Kerala before and after
the introduction of mobile phones to fishermen[1].

The financial world is evolving very quickly with various participants driven
by different goals pulling the rug in opposite directions which theoretically
should reduce volatility and spreads. However, when people get greedy - and
there's a lot of that in finance - bad things happen, e.g. see the natural gas
last week[2].

[1]: [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Changes-in-fish-price-
vo...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Changes-in-fish-price-volatility-
with-the-use-of-mobile-phones-in-Kerala_fig4_285771360)

[2]:
[https://www.ft.com/content/b7c525f6-ec44-11e8-89c8-d36339d83...](https://www.ft.com/content/b7c525f6-ec44-11e8-89c8-d36339d835c0)

~~~
BurnGpuBurn
> The existence of liquid markets is beneficial for the producers and
> consumers as the price volatility is reduced and hedging becomes easier.

Yeah, that's a nice fairy tale. It isn't true though. It's criminally untrue.

I can't eat volatile grain, nor hedged grain. I just eat grain. At a price I
can afford, today and tomorrow, not bankrupting me in the process. When you're
hungry you really don't care about all the financial jargon. You care about
price.

Traders cannot make a profit if they don't manipulate the price. Simple, if a
trader always sold for the same price he bought for he wouldn't make any
money. So price goes up, trader has profited from the grain I eat, and has
taken a few cents out of my pocket. And I don't even trade. I just live on a
dollar day in a shithole somewhere.

If everybody bought just the grain they needed to eat, and every grain
producer simply put their product on the market for people to buy, without a
"liquid global market" and price index, without traders in the middle wanting
to profit from it, my food would be affordable. But because the market bets on
a price rise in the future, even though the bad weather hasn't materialized
yet, my food is unaffordable.

In financial, when someone profits, someone hurts. And the one that hurts is
almost always not even in the game.

> Significantly influencing the price of a commodity [...] is pretty much
> impossible unless you're acting on behalf of a country or are able to
> control weather.

No. A market can do that by itself. It's what all those terms bullish and
bearish and stuff are for. Markets can drive up commodity prices like a
rocket. Bad weather coming? "Let's buy all the grain everybody! Guaranteed
profit! Just ignore the starving people over there, they'll go away fast
enough." And buy the way, all those think tanks and the pentagon predicting a
shortage of _every natural resource_ in the near future, that's not going to
influence the price at all, right? Great example of how a country manipulates
commodity prices btw.

Financial trade is just people profiting from people who are worse off to
begin with. And don't start about how nowadays regulations are much tighter
and all that, it's just not true. Everybody always says that in times when
stuff is stable, but as soon as something big happens everybody starts the
"nobody could have forseen this" dance followed by the too-big-to-fail
entities being saved by the govt and the bill footed to the people.

~~~
Applejinx
This position is further supported by the reality of real estate speculation:
in London, in Silicon Valley, you can count the housing units that are owned
by extremely wealthy capital holders, and kept empty because the increase in
value will exceed any profits taken from filling them (minus the costs of
maintaining them).

That's the market actively destroying the fundamental purpose of a good
because the dynamics of its value are able to bring more profit than using the
good for its existential purpose. If that can happen to housing, it can happen
to anything. BurnGpuBurn is absolutely correct here.

~~~
bunderbunder
Real estate is rather different from the commodities markets, though: It's
most definitely _not_ a commodity (if you don't count things like mortgage-
backed securities, anyway), and the markets are frighteningly illiquid. There
are things like futures and options on real estate, but they operate very
differently from your average put on hard white winter wheat.

There's an argument, not entirely (as far as I can tell) unreasonable, that at
least some trading firms - the market makers - are benefitting the small folks
in these markets. The argument goes that they do siphon profits out of the
market, but it's mostly the profits of other financial firms. What they're
ultimately nabbing is profits that come from information asymmetry, and that
asymmetry usually benefits hedge funds more than farmers. So hedge funds make
less money, yeah, but the impact on farmers is greater price stability, which
is a benefit to them.

By extension, the implication is that, when hedge fund managers complain
loudly about high frequency trading, it's crocodile tears.

------
basementcat
I worked full time for a military contractor. When I arrived some of the
products didn’t work very well. After I worked on some of these products, some
of them became more efficient and effective. It was an opportunity for me to
apply math and physics and engineering to solve very interesting problems
(variously related to shortening human lifespan or rendering remaining
lifespan more expensive).

Then one Tuesday 9/11 happened. That morning all my colleagues turned into
homocidal maniacs (they were already that way, the event merely triggered the
expression of that personality trait— only much later did I realize that this
meant they were and are good decent people) bent on revenge and eager to kill.
The stock of the company skyrocketed and we got huge raises. I finally had an
opportunity to see some of my work in action and strangely became sick to my
stomach when the products functioned well and was oddly relieved when the
products functioned less well.

I eventually left the company and felt happy for the first time in years while
I was unemployed.

The irony is now that I have more perspective in life, I realize that society
truly values killing and maiming (and threatening to kill and maim) other
people. People feel safer when they can credibly threaten others with physical
harm. I realize I squandered a wonderful opportunity to serve society more by
helping kill and maim even more efficiently. Perhaps in a sense I have gone
full circle.

~~~
nickbauman
Wait ... what? You now believe that (more efficient) self destruction is a
good thing?

~~~
bihnkim
If people are going to go to fight until one side is wiped out, minimizing
attrition and ending the war more quickly and convincingly may be seen as a
measure to minimize casualty.

This is not necessarily my personal view, but one way logic could be applied
to this statement.

~~~
Aeolun
The problem is that if both sides are really good at wiping out the other
quickly, they might wipe each other out before they realize the other side has
the same capability.

------
rizzin
I work as a game programmer. I'm one of those kids who grew up playing now
"classic" games wanting to become a game developer themselves.

Every time I'm in a corporate game development gig I have regrets, because
instead of working on a game I could personally appreciate I end up working on
copycat mobile games; poorly designed games; games with no creativity behind
them. Working on a game I would never consider playing myself, a game I would
never recommend to a friend.

The best gamedev experience I had was working on an indie title with a very
small and tight team. But that enterprise went bankrupt and the team
disbanded.

Hope to bring that back someday, but lack the discipline at the moment.

~~~
Svenstaro
Do ever do any game jams? Those might be exactly what you are looking for.

~~~
rizzin
Haven't gotten around to that yet, but the idea has been brooding for a
while...

~~~
Svenstaro
Go and do some! I find it scratches exactly that itch. Best part is: When the
game jam is over, the project is finished!

------
throwaway539
Disclaimer: Throw-away account.

I worked for a company that mediates between Employers and Insurance
companies.

In my country we have a system where disabled employees are partially paid for
by either the insurance (from employer) or the goverment. 0-35% disabled -> No
money is paid by insurance or government 36-80% disabled -> The insurance
company pays part of the wage of the employee 81-100% disabled -> The
government pays part of the wage, or completely pays the person not having to
work

With "part of the wage" I mean that the employee would work part-time but
would receive extra money to fill in the gap, so they could use the remaining
time to recover, or just try and live life.

The way it worked is that the company would receive bonuses from both the
insurance companies and employers if we could get people in either the 0-35 or
81-100 range.

This means we (they) would use any trick in the book to get people, clearly
disabled, to no longer be marked as "Disabled enough".

This resulted in sending people that were disabled or recovering from
disabilities to insurance-company-hired examiners, and sometimes even use
court to enforce new medical checks over and over until they were marked as
sub-35%. They would hire investigators to try get "proof" these people are not
"that disabled at all"

In short, these were people, 36-50% disabled such as people in wheelchairs,
hurt spines, burn-outs, and whatever else you can think of, to be forced into
working full-time because they wouldn't be able to make enough money to
support their own lives.

The moment where it really hit me, is when in a presentation, the CEO proudly
stated "This year, we were able to get X (thousands) of people into the 0-35%
range, this means we made our goals, so as a suprise we're all (200+
employees) going skiing together for a week!" (fully paid international
vacation)

I did join the vacation at first, but on those mountains I realized that the
people that would never be able to ski, paid for this. I swore I would never
work for a company like this again, and I made a huge turn-around and went
into the Healthcare sector.

~~~
bpye
Sounds a lot like what the UK government try to do these days.

~~~
gaius
No just “these days”, the ATOS contract was awarded in 2008. The need for UBI
is greater than ever.

------
finnjohnsen2
I have one regret. I was a java back-end developer on a major EU gambling site
for a year. I was distracted by quite extreme (and cool) scalability and up-
time requirements. This was years before cloud existed.

I was ignoring that this was funded by a dodgy billionaire seeking to maximize
profits by hosting the site on the least gambling restrictive countries in EU;
and ultimately exploiting people who are vulnerable to gambling habits. I
consider contributing to gambling (and a very short list of other businesses)
as a negative contribution to the world; and I won't do it again.

~~~
mb_72
Good for you. I've had a 'no online gambling / no defence work' clause in my
resume / Linked-In profile for a while now, cuts down on a lot of crappy or
dodgy offers, that's for sure!

~~~
finnjohnsen2
You're not worried your profile could come across as pretentious?

~~~
Juliate
I'd call this specific, or focused, not pretentious.

~~~
finnjohnsen2
I wasn't making the accusation, rather asking if you may have missed some
opportunities by coming across as it to strangers.

Being a contractor, its a perceived strength to be as flexible as possible.

~~~
brazzledazzle
I review a fair amount of resumes and I wouldn’t give it a second thought if I
saw that. I’d probably assume it was a religious requirement of some sort
before I even considered other possibilities.

------
nathan_f77
One time I took on a contract project that was really soul crushing. They were
just re-inventing a worse version of something that already exists, so I
didn't see the point. The code was a mess, and the team wasn't very good to be
honest. It paid really well, but I hated every second of working on it, and I
really struggled with motivation. They were happy with the results, but it
wasn't my best work and I wasn't proud of it.

I really regret taking on that project, and I should have quit much sooner. It
wasn't evil and it didn't have a negative effect on people. It was just boring
and felt like a huge waste of time.

After that experience, I only accept jobs where I know I can do really good
work, and where I'm at least a little bit interested in the idea. Even if I
have to cut my rate, it's always better to feel useful and productive.

~~~
DBCerigo
Very much echo this, specifically that I’ve found it’s always better to take a
worse paying project I’m stoked about making happen than a higher date rate on
a project I have no interest in. Having intrinsic motivation to work rather
than having to _force_ myself to work on something is easily worth a drop of
£100-200 p.d. imo. (That amount presumes the lower day rate is still something
I can live off.)

------
regrets
Disclaimer: Throwaway account.

I worked on a banking product that indirectly got a couple of kids tortured
and killed.

It’s only recently that I’ve started accepting responsibility for that. It was
just so out of the realm of possibilities when it bappened, that most people I
knew, most people I worked with, couldn’t fathom that we had something to do
with it.

[https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/apr/27/french-
studen...](https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/apr/27/french-students-
murder-torture)

The product was a standalone card reader, that allows the generation of OTPs
by the crypto chip inside the CC, or challenge/responses by the same chip.

This allowed the attackers to verify the PIN without going to an ATM.

~~~
ssijak
You cant blame yourself for that. Would you blame a front camera inventor for
the deaths of people taking selfies on the edge of a cliff and falling down?

~~~
Symbiote
I'd met one of those students, they went to my university.

Whoever signed off on the badly designed process _is_ to blame. It should not
have been possible for the card reader to verify a PIN. It could easily
generate a code with a fake PIN, and leave the banking website to verify that.

It was already known that criminals would escort someone to an ATM when
streaking their card, and demand the real PIN was given. This made it a lot
easier.

~~~
Rjevski
How would this work for offline transactions? Cards need to be able to verify
PINs offline and provide feedback to users & merchants, otherwise someone can
type a wrong PIN at an offline terminal (on an airplane, etc) and get away
with free stuff because the transaction isn’t valid.

~~~
Symbiote
Good point, but allowing a device given away for free to anyone with a bank
account to test a PIN opens up a much bigger risk than limiting it to merchant
terminals.

~~~
icebraining
I think you're really overstating the difficulty of acquiring a merchant
terminal, which are available at literally any shop or restaurant that accepts
cards.

------
EZ-E
I previously worked for a company in internet dating and I implemented a
matching algorithm that actively segregated people according to their
language, country, income, race and education. For example we would match
people differently if they were assumed poor, rich, black, white, etc

I don't regret working there per see, I didn't make the rules, but it opened
my eyes that the dream of everyone being treated equally on the internet is
dying. Before, you could assume the internet wouldn't discriminate because
it's digital and detached from your physical self, but more and more companies
have profiles about you and your experience will vary depending on who you
are.

~~~
gronne
“everyone being treated equally on the internet” never heard of this
phenomenon before. Stray thought: if you are not anonymous - you will be
subject to discrimination. if you are anonymous and others not - you will be
subject to discrimination. if everyone is anonymous you can’t discriminate -
but its not very useful.

~~~
EZ-E
I have a bit of an hard time articulating what I mean (ESL), but what I mean
is that these days depending on what profile companies have on you (your
assumed interests, income, education etc), your experience on the internet,
apps will differ more and more. In order to improve retention and engagement,
they will try to tailor the experience and give you what they _think_ you want
instead of letting you get it yourself, effectively creating a bubble around
you.

In the context of my comment (internet dating company), it means even when you
try to meet new people, we will make broad assumptions and present you people
we think will match well with your assumed race, income, education. All for
upping that retention a few .1%

In earlier internet, the experience on a single website, for example, was the
same for everybody, no matter your demographic. I understand why it evolved,
but I regret it a bit.

~~~
gronne
Thank you for the elaboration. Good point.

~~~
hndamien
I wonder if Tinder does matching based on my device type as a proxy for
income....

~~~
gronne
Who knows. I don’t think it would be the best proxy - these days everyone and
their dog has an iphone.

~~~
hndamien
I'd say there is at least some correlation. Not a great indicator, but better
than nothing and helpful since it is in the user agent. They aren't curing
cancer, so accuracy is less important.

------
ta_891304
Fax spamming service, back in the 90s.

A database of fax numbers + a farm of boxes with multi-line fax cards + ads
that people wanted to be faxed. Not my company, nor was I even the main
developer. The owner was a non-technical dude that decided to re-invest money
he got from reselling imported veggies on farmer's market, with a bit of help
from the local mafia. They ended up having some issues, so the mafia murdered
his grown-up son, but let him keep the money. So there he was, trying to cope
with life by diversifying into fax spamming... I wish I was making this up.

~~~
darioush
so the mafia murdered his grown-up son, but let him keep the money ? makes..
no sense :(

------
i_phish_cats
I worked as an analyst for an email security company. Stopping scams, malware,
phishing, etc that comes through email. I liked security and had a machine
learning/stat background, so I was eager to apply. What I learned was that
basically, ML and stats are not applicable to this particular problem domain
because there is no level of acceptable error. No matter how well my systems
performed, whenever a vice president, C level exec, or any pinhead got a
single FP or FN, I have to grovel at their feet and spend weeks explaining to
people what happened. I once had 10 months of work go down the drain because
the system let through a single phishing email to some secretary (it detected
blocked millions of malicious messages prior)

~~~
exikyut
I wonder how easily you could reproduce the system you created (how much do
you remember? what sorts of resources did it require?) - and how where you
worked would react/respond if you did so.

If it really did catch millions of emails successfully then such a system
would be highly appreciated by the majority of the market.

It's not your fault if where you worked didn't see the value in what you'd
created.

~~~
i_phish_cats
I think there aren't many startups/smaller companies trying to tackle the
problem because: 1) there's not much money in it. Email is supposed to be
"free", so is security. 2) mail systems, esp at larger/older orgs, tend be
extremely baroque and you'd need full time integration engineers before making
a penny. 3) Privacy laws make things difficult. 4) You need data and a wide
view of the email landscape, and you only get that at large enterprises, and
5) at those orgs, the mail server operators are just waiting for the day they
can retire and leave behind the mess they made.

~~~
protonmail
We are working on this problem and hiring. Send an email to
postmaster@protonmail.ch :)

------
burnaway
I've worked in the adult industry (you can say porn) for 10 years for some of
the biggest brands. I have some regrets, especially contributing in a major
way to the proliferation of free porn, pushing our product to millions of
users per day and negotiating advertising campaigns in the millions$ to feed
the system. Many in our audience were in developing countries and no doubt a
lot of them under 18. The latest studies confirm that heavy porn consumption
affect adolescent's view of others and their self-perception in a negative way
- reading these made me evaluate my role in that ecosystem.

The flip side of this is when I realized this is not something I want to carry
on doing I just quit the industry. Now I'm working for a VPN company with a
stand-out product and service, built by an honest team driven by the mission
of helping people protect their privacy. I feel very content with that
decision.

~~~
huhtenberg
Just wait until you realize what VPNs are mostly used for...

~~~
yunruse
I’ll bite. I use a VPN every day, and while I will admit freely that it helps
for less copyright friendly ventures, it has probably saved my privacy quite a
few times, as I am almost always on public networks. In addition, I imagine
many users in countries with more stringent censorship than the UK likely need
a VPN to carry out their daily lives. True, a VPN can help people hide their
identity to do criminal things, but there’s a reason they call ski masks that
way: because they have a specific but sometimes vital use.

------
FigBug
I worked on the back end system that allowed record labels block their content
on YouTube. I thought I was going to be working on a system to help indie
record labels distribute their content. I lasted 9 months.

~~~
stelonix
When you say "you thought" do you mean you were somehow tricked by higher ups?

~~~
warp_factor
It is very difficult to realize what you objectively work on sometimes. Every
organization internally tries to justify the product they build as "good".
People don't want to openly admit they work on a product that is bad for
society but generates money, so they lie to themselves.

~~~
EdgarVerona
Yes. This is so true. This is something we need to teach young software
engineers - to try and identify the true business model from the model that
the company is claiming to incoming employees. To question what you've been
told at face value, and to be brave enough to walk away or put your foot down
when you find out you've been had.

I've been there. I often wonder how many others in the industry have.

~~~
krageon
The truth of this matter is that most people really don't care. On top of
this, schools _generally_ communicate with the business world to figure out
what their curriculum is going to be (after all, that's where you're expected
to go when you finish studying). To my mind, it is then not a huge leap to
figure out that a strong foundation in ethics is not a desirable quality.
After all, what big company these days doesn't want something that's at least
a dark gray?

~~~
EdgarVerona
That's what I'm hoping we can change. When I think of Engineering, I think of
trades that tend to have a firm grasp on ethics and take the consequences of
what they build very seriously. I know that organizations like the ACM and
IEEE espouse those same virtues, and I think they are not only worthy virtues
but also important. Something worth being uncomfortable - or even discarded by
less ethical companies - in order to defend.

Ethics not being a desirable quality to some (many? That seems too bold to
assert) businesses is ironically part of the reason why ethics is so important
to hold onto as an engineer. Some businesses would be elated to find software
engineers that have discarded their sense of ethics entirely, to the profit of
themselves and the harm of our society.

------
pavel_lishin
Yes.

Helped MannaTech swindle people out of money, by helping work on the donation
site that enabled people to buy their useless sugar pills that promised to
cure anything from cancer to Down syndrome. (The claims weren't so bold and
outright - except by some of the in-person salesmen who eventually got into
trouble with the Texas attorney general - but they heavily hinted, and the
reviews from the poor parents desperate to latch onto any lifeline that
claimed "marked improvements" in their children's various conditions.

Ended up donating the money I made while working on that project to St. Jude's
hospital.

Fuck Manna Relief, fuck Manna Tech, and fuck everyone who's ever worked for
them, myself included.

------
thomasfedb
Very much so. Worked on a system that coordinated vehicle registration for car
fleets - it ended up being built into a system for repossession of cars from
payday loan defaultors.

That triggered my move to education and medical software.

------
VvR-Ox
Once I wrote an app and made the mistake to give it to the company I work at
in the hopes we could finish it sooner and make it better because more money
and people.

The company started exactly the way I hoped but management decided that there
isn't enough money left to finish it (ROI fear).

Now a half baked functioning version of my idea is rotting and I wish I'd
finished it myself and sold it. Think it may have hit off quite good. I'll
never do this mistake again. Screw your companies :D

------
kendallpark
Maybe this is my own hubris speaking, but over my career as a dev, I've worked
on a few projects that lacked _vision._ I wouldn't say I regret the work
because I learned quite a lot on these projects and none of them had a
negative impact on society. But I do regret all the time spent in a sort of
disengaged malaise rolling out features for projects I didn't believe in.

~~~
amoitnga
That. I realize more and more the value of working on something one can be
proud of.

------
eksemplar
I regret every RPA project we have to build. It’s just so stupid and avoidable
by only buying things with APIs.

But it’s apparently the future of a lot of IT, because people aren’t going to
stop buying really shitty software or start making architectural demands.

It’s going to be an amazing amount of technical debt in a lot of sectors
though.

I mean, some of the integrations I build before my venture into management,
decades ago are still running without the need for maintenance. Yet the most
recent RPA project my team build has already used 6 hours of maintenance this
week.

So stupid.

~~~
kornish
Where does most of the maintenance of the RPA come from? Is it UI changes,
edge cases in state (e.g. need to re-login), or other things?

~~~
eksemplar
Well it’s a range of things, this week it was a SAP update that changed the
necessary flow because the render speeds changed in the SAP ui.

A month ago it was a change to the invoices from a specific company.

Every week it’s the business noticing an edge case, or something that could be
better. We pile these up, but you’ll rarely have a RPA process that handles
100% so there is an never ending race to get closer and closer. ;)

In one of our processes that handles a major process related to payment, we
were able to automate the work of two financial workers, but the cost was that
it required a new RPA worker to handle the errors, and a RPA worker is more
expensive than two financial workers. It was still a gain, because the RPA
worker also does other RPA things, but it’s a good illustration of how
terrible RPA is at automation compared to the other tools in the toolbox.

~~~
kornish
Right on. In many ways, makes a lot of sense: UI automation is a quick-to-
implement fix which addresses symptoms, with maintainability being the
tradeoff. API integration (a la Mulesoft) can require an overhaul in a whole
philosophy of organization and delivery, even though it's fundamentally more
sustainable.

How do you test RPA bots - just wait for them to break?

If you're interested, it'd be great to hear more about what you think of other
tools in the toolbox. Email is on my profile.

~~~
macca321
What's cool about UI integration is that the interface is uniform - it's text
and clickS and keystrokes.

If you are integrating using something like Sikuli, which works by actually
looking at the screen pixels (rather than DOM elements, which are an
implementation detail), you can use 'smart' techniques like OCR and synonym
lists to make a change resistant client.

------
crankylinuxuser
Yeah, a long time ago, I went to work in a little consulting company. It was
perhaps 6 people.

I found out why they hired me, and it wasn't for my technical skill. They
wanted me to break customers' things and then lie to customers. The reasoning
was, that contracts were reviewed and renewed yearly.

The worst came down was for a japanese factory (back with Windows NT4.6 and
Win98 clients). Half the engineering staff was Japanese and half were
American... I think you see where this is going. Files were being sent to the
server, but being WinNT 4, couldn't read japanese files. So half of their
enterprise was not being backed up.

I mentioned this to my manager, and they threatened me with a lawsuit if I
said anything. I quit right there, and then went to the client and told them
what I was aware of. Soon after, they lost the contract (shocked, I say!). Not
too long afterward, their building caught on fire, and their VP ran. Last I
heard was that he was wanted by the FBI for suspected arson..

Thankfully, I've not worked in small shops like that since.

------
Rudism
Several years ago I worked for a company in the advertising industry,
initially helping develop seedy browser extensions and "toolbars" that would
essentially (among other things) inject referral cookies whenever the user's
browser landed on a page that we had an affiliate link for.

That was bad enough, but eventually I was internally recruited to help launch
a new mobile division at the company. The worst thing I built while there was
a desktop application that we distributed through third party installer
applications that bundled adware along with whatever application the user
actually wanted to install. The thing I wrote was a background Windows service
that would directly read the user's browser cookie databases and find any
cookies they had for the Google Play store, then use those to push various
apps to the user's Android phone (basically emulating all of the HTTP calls
that happen when you click the install button from your desktop browser to
have the app installed on your phone directly). We'd get paid per install of
those Android apps.

I stayed at the company way longer than my conscience preferred, mainly
because I really liked the team I was working with and the complete freedom
the developers were given to tackle problems however they want (as long as you
were putting money in the pockets of the higher ups). I wrote about this in
more detail a few years back on my blog
[https://codeword.xyz/2015/08/09/exploiting-android-users-
for...](https://codeword.xyz/2015/08/09/exploiting-android-users-for-fun-and-
profit/)

------
Carpetsmoker
I worked on a concert/event ticket selling platform that sells tickets for far
too much. It pretended it was selling tickets for sold-out events, but often
it was nowhere near sold out.

It took me a while to realize the entire thing was just a scam and that the
only reason we were getting traffic was due to advertising shenanigans.

At the time, it was one of the best sites out there on account of having the
most correct (or rather, least incorrect) events. Lots of websites contained
many errors, such as listing "London, UK" instead of "London, Canada". Mixing
up "Ryan Adams" and "Bryan Adams" was also a common one. We corrected a lot of
that. I did "big data" kind of stuff before it was cool (no machine learning
though, just old-fashioned rule-based logic).

~~~
mylons
even if you're not working for ticketmaster, i hope everyone who does work at
ticketmaster has trouble sleeping at night. you provide nothing to no one.

~~~
55555
I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression that ticketmaster's customers
are the performers, who want to maximize their revenue without appearing
greedy, so they give ticketmaster a cut for taking the blame.

~~~
lozenge
Yes, but ticketmaster are also secretly co-operating with third-party
resellers that want to tout their tickets, although they claim otherwise. So,
even the listed price with fees is not the real price.

[https://www.iq-mag.net/2018/09/cbc-news-details-
ticketmaster...](https://www.iq-mag.net/2018/09/cbc-news-details-ticketmaster-
investigation/#.W_UW5JP7TRY)

------
alex_duf
I worked on HR software that was mainly used to decide who to fire. And when I
say "fire", I mean large scale restructuration, the kind of restructuration
you read in newspaper because it's such a large scale. It wasn't always used
to do evil, and in all fairness sometimes a company has to restructure or die,
which I think would be worse.

I left after two years for many reasons, one of them being that I knew my work
was used to dramatically affect people's lives.

I still hold my stock, and I do intend to sell as soon as it goes public, then
I'll wash my hands and never look back.

~~~
howard941
What if any attributes or characteristics can employees exhibit to reduce the
likelihood of being canned by the product?

------
gwbas1c
I left a boring job at a company that I respected for what I thought was a
good, growing company.

The problem was, I worked with idiots and the project that I joined failed. No
one had any idea why the project failed.

(I wish I stayed at my old job.)

Even though the project I joined was honest and ethical, the sheer amount of
idiocy of the people I worked with had a negative effect on _me_. Ultimately,
the money and time wasted because a bunch of "senior" engineers couldn't
figure out how to work with a simple embedded database was shocking.

------
kcwlkjwelfjw
I worked as a data scientist trying to figure out how to raise gas prices to
the maximum price the market would bear (experimentation mainly). Began to
feel really uncomfortable when I realized this wasn't improving society in any
meaningful way so I noped out of there once I found a new job.

~~~
jogjayr
Higher gas prices == more efficient usage of gas. And more incentive to move
away from gasoline. Isn't that good for the environment and for society in
general?

~~~
izacus
High prices always disproportionally affect the lower classes which are also
the most dependant on motor transport to get to their jobs (tend to live
outside cities too). As such you're pricing a lot of people out of being
afford to drive to work while giving them alternatives that are only
affordable to the most wealthy (Teslas are still a luxury product only
affordable to a low % of population).

~~~
jogjayr
In the short term expensive gas does hurt the lower classes. In the long term,
the need for every household to own and maintain at least one automobile is a
much bigger drag on the finances of the poor than the well-off.

If higher gas prices lead to more efficient vehicles, and a shift to less
driving and personal car ownership, it's a bigger win financially for poorer
households than some cheap gas in the here and now. I also acknowledge that
it's easy for me to say this because higher gas prices don't affect me much
personally - I might feel differently if they did.

------
HHalvi
I read somewhere that people who invented ships also invented shipwrecks. You
work (design, sell, market, manage & ship) on something hoping that a lot of
people use your baby and sometimes when it takes off you end up knowing that
its used for terrible stuff as well. If i created Whatsapp, i would presumably
be having a hard time digesting the fact that its now being used in countries
like India to spread fake news. I am not someone who has been in this position
yet(fortunately), i would presume there would be a sense of guilt and anger
whenever this happens. But the question/ thing to ponder on is does the
medium(products you created) have the problem or the messenger(folks who use
them) ?

~~~
indogooner
Well if we berate Whatsapp where do we stop? Whatsapp is just an enabler. If
there was only IRC to communicate I am sure fake news could use that channel
as well.

~~~
xanipher
Yeah, but if without the enabler the world would be better off on net, there
still is a case against WhatsApp.

~~~
wink
Congratulations, you just argued against TV, the internet, cars, and
everything else that enables stuff :P

------
GoToRO
Just remember: you can't fix society with technology. Everything you do is a
weapon. In the wrong hands it will harm other people.

~~~
sova
A weapon or a tool, it is the intention and the skillful hand that selects.

~~~
antocv
Some things can only be a weapon, other things may be used as a weapon.

Huge difference, what the intent is of what you are building.

~~~
EdgarVerona
Definitely - and the intent of the business model and the business itself.
I've worked on products before that on the surface (and even what I was told
by the folks running it) could have done good. But the company had no
intention of using it for good. They had every intention of lying about where
they were really making their money though.

I feel like all the justification we see in our industry of "it's just a tool,
it's not our fault if it's used poorly" can often end up being a variant of
the banality of evil. What if its most obvious use case is the malicious one?
What if the company paying you to make it has the malicious use case of the
tool in mind? Would the company and the product exist/be sustainable _without_
the malicious use case? Are there ways to curb the malicious use case that are
being ignored - intentionally or not? We've got to start asking ourselves
these questions. The ACM and IEEE would insist that it is part of our core
_duty_ to be asking these questions.

------
chupasaurus
I worked as a sysadmin in a startup which developed ContentID contender (video
recognition). Fun fact: half of the IT department was using torrents with no
regrets.

edit: wording.

~~~
exikyut
I once saw a documentary about a tobacco magnate. He didn't smoke, because, of
course, it was bad for one's health.

~~~
baud147258
I heard TV network execs saying they don't let their children watch TV because
it's bad

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Similarly a bunch of tech bigwigs have admitted to having strict limits for
their children being on the Internet.

------
mrhappyunhappy
I already commented here but I have an even worse confession - I’ve operated
an affiliate payday loan website. For me it was a good paying gig at $100 per
application. I have no doubt I ruined lives as I was well aware of the types
of people who operate those types of businesses. At the time I didn’t really
have an alternative and I was much younger. The old me looks back at that time
with great shame, something I’d never mention to anyone and I wish I could
take it back.

~~~
EdgarVerona
Thank you for sharing that. I hope that you continue to share this story.

I think you can still do good with the situation by doing exactly what you're
doing now: talk to other software engineers about this often overlooked duty.
Talk to young engineers about the need to examine the ethical implications of
the products they are making. These stories of shame are something we need to
share with each other, to stress the importance of thinking about the
consequences and intent of what we make.

I remember first coming into software development, creating software was a
rush. I was a junkie, getting high on solving problems and working against
tight deadlines. This is a common experience I've seen in many new software
engineers: but when you're getting high off of those factors, it's easy to not
even realize that you have to be asking yourself questions about what you're
making. Stories like yours can be a bucket of cold water, something that helps
to wake people up to the other obligations that are part of our duties as
software engineers.

------
dijit
Well. In a way.

I work for one of the big video game publishers. If you believe the internet
we slaughter puppies and are the cause of all unhappiness in the world.

The actual work is gruelling, frought with long hours and very challenging. So
when you finally get your ducks in a row after countless hours of overtime and
stress to see the public’s reaction is heartbreaking.

I regret working on games, but the technical challenges are stimulating enough
that I continue to do it.

~~~
yurishimo
I don’t think anyone holds the developers responsible. At the end of the day
most people are upset about the business model, not the content.

Look at Fallout 76. Content wise, it’s a decent game. The graphics are better
than the previous game and they made attempts to rework some of the mechanics.

Where it failed was the utter lack of quality control due to timelines and the
inclusion of micro transactions. The game obviously wasn’t ready. Plus the
added shenanigans of the botched launcher rollout.

Add it all up and it’s easy to see why people are pissed, but they’re mad at
Bethesda for pushing such as obvious cash grab as something innovative and
new.

Obviously developers work hard and create awesome stuff. It’s just a shame
these companies pile on the crap to suck every spare dollar out their
customers instead of just releasing a great game that isn’t a bug filled mess
due to botched release timelines.

~~~
dijit
Catch 22: people will not buy your game if your development and marketing
budget aren't high (taking a long time to make a game is a huge increase in
development budget). Yet sales of a game at the industry standard price-point
barely cover the costs already. It would only take 2 failed AAA titles for my
company to be on the verge of bankruptcy.

I guess it's dishonest to push so hard to have "high quality" games with a lot
of content when you know that it's impossible to actually cover the cost with
the list price, but it's what people demand. And it gets harder every year.

~~~
smolder
It _should_ get harder every year to make money on games since there's so much
already out there. There is less room for novelty and less reason to explore
an ever-widening selection of games to kill time with. The big game publishers
that are pumping out new editions of the same old game all the time are not
providing that much value for all the work they're doing. Content isn't what
makes games great, IMO, it's the novelty of the experience of interacting with
it that draws me. Who says there should be continued growth all the time in
that sector? Why wouldn't we get so efficient at entertaining ourselves that
the revenues top out or dry up? What if the next big thing is discovering
there doesn't always need to be a next big thing?

------
craigzucchini
I worked for one of the largest auction companies in the world, which
specializes in agriculture and construction equipment (should not be too hard
to find). It was initially just fine, but like many others in the thread it
was soul crushing and led to burnout and depression, subsequently forcing me
to re-evaluate many aspects of my life. It was a complicated choice. It paid
double what I made previously and I was out of work for many months at the
time. It brought me to a better city for a while. But I didn't really
accomplish anything there. I was ostracized from the culture of the
place—which I suspected I would be before taking the job—because at heart I'm
very far from the drab "yes" people that work there, play the politics, and
wear slacks. It was novel that I wanted to work elsewhere than my group cube
thing. I tried and failed to use the shitty HP ThickBook workstation that was
assigned to me, ultimately bringing my own mac and being the only dev to have
one, because they're for designers. I stayed too long and should have left
before they fired me, but it's tough to quit. I just kept thinking "Ya things
are going very badly, but maybe if I persevere we can get this done".

Bad choice. Use your intuition and don't second guess yourself.

The tech stack and other aspects of the place were equally bad, but I probably
don't need to elaborate any more.

------
hevi_jos
When I was a kid I joined a crackers' group. With them I learned very strong
programming.

I decided it would be a good idea using the computer as a tool to understand
financial markets so I started creating programs to play with outcomes and
probabilities ... something like generic programming we will call today in
order to augment your human perception using lots of data.

It started as a game but soon I made over 400% benefit in the stock market
that year(with very little money). It seemed at the time few people were doing
that. That made me regretting it because from my point of view you can expect
a 10% increase reasonable from real creation of value. Values much bigger than
this means you have just taken money from those that do not have the
tooling(the normal people who "invest" in the stock market, and lose). The big
guys, called the "sharks", never loose.

That made me feel very bad inside, while I was making money in the outside.

On the other hand, it drove me absolutely crazy. Emotionally this tool
magnified any bump in the stock market making myself constantly alert, even
having problems sleeping as the thing will work even by night doing things
like analyzing the Asian or US markets while in Europe they were closed.

Imagine something alerts you in the night with an alarm, so you can study it
for the next day,it can be any day, at any hour... when you are young you do
very stupid things. That kind of thing was a torture of totalitarian regimes
and I had chosen to do it to myself voluntarily.

One day I decided to sell anything and to extract the hard drive and break it
with a hammer so I could not recover the program if I changed my opinion
later.

It was a great idea. It gave me peace of mind.

~~~
hnphillipj
> _I feel immoral for being so successful on the stock market!!!! I just
> couldn 't help it, my program was TOO successful_

Next time you want to covertly brag in a thread about regret, at least make
the moral dilemma believable.

~~~
smolder
I don't understand why this is not believable. If someone has a conscious and
believes in fairness, why shouldn't they feel bad about exploiting a market to
profit without creating value? That's being a bit of a leech, which some
people are fine with, and others are not.

~~~
hnphillipj
The OP said he would have felt fine had his returns been limited to 10%. I
hope you realize your characterization of returns ("profit without creating
value") can be applied whether his program yielded 10% returns or 400%. The
moral dilemma for someone who has a conscious that you describe would be
choosing to invest in the first place (is investing on the stock market
creating value?) or choosing an investment strategy (is this certain strategy
creating value?).

~~~
smolder
Good point.

------
dbattaglia
At my first full time software development job, the company I worked for had a
telemarketing B2B call center. It was run by a web application that controlled
the agent's phone via some ActiveX TAPI components. I modified the software so
it could work with Skype, so the company could open new offices without having
to set up some crazy expensive phone system. The company was happy but I'm
sure I helped inconvenience and annoy countless people. I'm sure there's a
similar story behind plenty of the more modern forms of this like robocalls
and phone number spoofing.

------
orionblastar
I worked for a small business to track surgical trays by bar code and rfid
chips. I was fired after I found out they wanted to use the code to track
people and invade their privacy. I raised ethical issues only to be told
ethics does not matter only the bottom line.

~~~
Rjevski
I wonder if you can blow the whistle and raise it with your country’s privacy
regulator?

~~~
orionblastar
When I became mentally ill from the stress nobody seems to take me seriously
anymore.

Facebook tracks people too using their own smartphones.

------
indogooner
I think in tech it is hard to see how the product you build is going to be
used sometimes. If I work on something in AWS say EMR which enables the "evil
corp" to analyze data and influence election outcome. But the same platform
can be used by CERN to further their research work.

OTOH if I work for Shell or Dow I am pretty clear who I am working for.

------
punchingpeople
Worked on behavior manipulation via social networks back in the day. It was
supposed to be used to introduce energy saving habits into people's minds. Got
me very depressed a few years ago, but now I got over it, realized I was just
a replaceable piece of a big puzzle and if not me, somebody else would have
done it.

------
sidcool
Long ago I worked in Credit Default Swaps. I was naive and did not understand
the concept then. I created many reporting and trading applications over 2
years before realizing. This was 2008. I was shocked later.

------
keyle
I was a technical director for about 5 weeks. It was a huge opportunity. But
quickly, I found out we had more customers sueing us than paying us, for
promising stuff (before my time) the company couldn't possibly deliver (no one
could) on time and budget.

If it's too good to be true, it probably is.

------
mrhappyunhappy
I’ve designed many e-commerce stores and helped improve conversions for a ton
of companies most of which sell stuff. I regret being a cog in a system that
propels consumerism but food has to be put on the table.

~~~
mrweasel
It wasn't really the consumerism of it that bugged me the most about working
in e-commerce. We where pretty honest about what we sold, entertainment and
general stuff you could live without. What I didn't like was implementing
instant loans as a payment option.

If you admit that you're selling "luxury" goods, then you shouldn't be
providing people, who don't have the money, with loan options. Least of all
loans with 20%+ yearly interests.

As it happens very few customers actually choose the loan option. I think it
took a week or so before the first customer even tried using that payment
option.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
That would bother me too. For me, just convincing people to buy stuff they
don’t really need makes me feel guilty. I often wish I could work in an
industry that helps the planet or even stay in e-commerce as long as it sells
products aimed at improving environment, I just don’t know how to switch over
or where.

------
KP17
I worked in government affairs division of a major pharmaceutical company. I
usually create documentation and economic models that justify value of high
price medicines. Anyways one day a jurisdiction came back to us saying they
have noticed off label use and that they won't be funding them anymore. I
worked tirelessly over two weeks to build out a medical review and economic
model which showed it was better then the alternative. We came to an agreement
on a discounted price and all parties were happy. However, I soon realized the
company would provide compassionate use as they don't want to alter
prescribing behaviour, I just took xx millions from a struggling public
system... I did get a raise but quit shortly after.

------
capi_salazar
About a year ago I worked on a system that helped a political party in my
country to keep track of their "associates" in order to get some advantage in
the election. They lost, but after I finally saw what the whole deal was I
quitted at that company.

------
SamWhited
My first job out of school was for a U.S. defense contractor. I told myself
for a while that we weren't directly doing any harm (our software was
basically a terrible front end over a database, not eg. weapons research), but
when it came down to it I don't know who all was using our software or for
what purpose. Sadly, I didn't really realize that until years after I'd left.

I also worked recently for a large modern tech company. Almost from week 1 I
was disgusted by how things were run internally. I think the CEO honestly
believed that he was helping people, but really it was just a toxic
environment and the product made people more secure online by asking them to
give all control up to this company (which, as far as I know, didn't do
anything bad with the data, but the opportunity was there and the CEO didn't
seem to be in any hurry to put any safe guards in place to make sure it wasn't
abused in the future). I never want to work anywhere again that uses the
excuse "we can't help it if other companies are forming monopolies and
generally doing bad things, so we should get a piece of the pie".

------
johan_larson
I've never worked on a product that I thought was evil. But I have worked on a
product crufty enough that if I had had a chance to inspect the codebase
before taking the job, I would have passed. One of my employers had a Java
codebase that had been hacked on for fifteen years or so, and had all sorts of
weird stuff in it. Working on it was a huge pain.

------
thisismyusernam
One of my worst, and final freelance web development gigs was for a foot
worship events website. Not porn - this was an event website featuring a
calendar of upcoming foot worship parties/nights in London. I was a bit naive
at the time and didn't really know what it was all about, or really anything
about the BDSM scene for that matter. Definitely not kink-shaming here -
everybody should be absolutely free to express their sexuality however they
see fit as long as it is consensual and does not cause any actual harm - but I
honestly felt really weirded out after doing it. It didn't pay well at all,
and I needed the money.

The client was really flakey (bad choice of words perhaps) and late with
responses and payments. The website was nothing special but was a bit of a
bore to design and code.

I think it was the final nail (again, poor choice of words) for my freelancing
career, and I went to join a startup which ended up working really well for
me.

------
anotheryou
A bit too easy to book subscription model with clients that ask if they can
pay next month because they are out of cash for this month... And a buggy old
product that's no fun...

~~~
anotheryou
Oh and after school I did flash fly-over ads. (for BMW, Lego and Ariel though,
so cool for me)

------
delecti
Yes, advertising. I started working on "Kindle Special Offers", a product I
actually liked as a customer before getting the job. I knew what the team
worked on and actively chose that team out of a dozen options. It's
advertising, but I think is at the very least not "bad" advertising. There was
even some really interesting work with automatically generating ads for books
based on recommendations.

Eventually my team started to own web ads, and I was gone in 9 months (note
that I was happily at Amazon for almost 5 years before that point). I hate web
ads, and think it's a net negative to the browsing experience on a website
that's already making Scrooge McDuck pools of money.

------
theqult
Pfff, I got plenty of choice

I made management system for family doctors that was selling private patient
data to pharmaceutical industries

Facebook scapers used by companies similar to Cambrige Analitica

Create systems that cut money from the payroll of fast food workers if they
spend to much time at the toilet

And much more...

~~~
buttscicles
This comment comes across as though you simply don't care

------
rsrx
I worked on an online poker platform software as a developer and team leader,
where client was professional poker player with zero vision about the product.
It was a mess. Team was also terrible and irresponsible. 2 years and 150 KLOC
later, we had a product without any vision.

It was good money and just what I needed right then. I used that money and
time to travel and live digital nomad lifestyle, which directly impacted and
transformed my professional career in a great way. So, that part, I don't
regret. But I regret wasting 2 years of my professional development time down
the drain on a product without vision. I learned a lot about handling people
and about the lifecycle of a bad product tho.

------
zeruch
Yes, I worked in "anti-piracy" for some years and that whole industry is a
mass of delusions of adequacy, coupled to a client base of some of the most
morally torpid, personally horrible people I've ever encountered. The products
we worked on we're basically to assist bastardry by Big Content, and most were
poorly built (one team led by a dessicated chain smoking codger with a right
hand manjaw of a coder, basically used Java with the same attention to detail
one would expect from a lemur on meth) and another kept shoving out POCs into
production with zero sense of a release process. It was a total mess, for
products that should all have been stillborn.

------
King-Aaron
I build automated consumer lending software. Certain clients of ours use it
specifically for sub prime lending.

Take that as you will.

------
shaman1
Working for a betting exchange is something I'm not proud of. At times it was
liberating because I didn't care about the company and would just leave early
and not put my soul into it. At times it was soul crushing because I felt it's
a meaningless endeavour and didn't want to connect with my coworkers as I
didn't think much of them although some of them were skilled. Still I wanted
to do a good job and learn new stuff. I stayed with the company 9 months and
only accepted it because I perceived it as my ticket out of my native country
to a big european city as this betting company had a good reputation in the
software industry.

After 6 months I started looking for a new position and I finally moved to the
city I wanted to. Later on, lots of recruiters offered me positions in betting
but it was a straight no, that including spread betting or CFDs companies.

Most of my former colleagues are still there, how can they justify it to
themselves I don't completely understand. The company payed top salaries for
the local market and offered great benefits but I felt like in Pleasure
island.

I now work for an investment bank but my goal is to resign in the next 6
months after I sort out my health problems and complete my investments.

Although working for a big investment bank is not bringing me satisfaction I
find it less evil then betting.

The choice between money and meaning is a tough one especially in big cities
where living costs are very high. The highest paying jobs where I live are in
banking, gambling or big software companies. But in the latter the competition
to get in is intense and you might end up doing something evil anyhow. See
Facebook, Google, etc.

------
fonix
When I was finishing up University I had been interning at a company (for
around 2 years) that had some roots in IDW
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_Data_Warehouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_Data_Warehouse)
\- interesting if you haven't ever heard of it); really just made me think of
certain 'other' gov agencies and their trove of data, but I never considered
how it was searched. We were all about the crawling/searching (indexing) of
data from all kinds of sources (websites/emails/various dbs). One product ran
a search against this dataset (using name, email, address, phone #, ssn, and
other pii) and would spider out a graph with all possible connections and
other associated data. Not sure regret is the right word, as it was cool, but
I can only imagine how it's being used. The company has gone under more than
once actually, since it was being funded by only 1-2 clients whose funding
wasn't very stable.

~~~
pmiller2
Sounds a lot like what Palantir does. Also, fuck Palantir.

------
CapitalistCartr
I was a nuclear weapons tech in the USAF. I'm proud of that. But I've
regretted working for plenty of _people_.

------
CM30
Kind of. On the one hand, I've never regretted working on a project because
it's unethical, and the only one that could even remotely count as that was
something related to gaming those cookie law pop ups.

But I've definitely regretted working on stuff for other reasons. A couple of
sites were simply poorly managed, designed and coded, which meant hours wasted
on implementing things that should have been in the brief weeks ago due to a
manager not really knowing what the customer wanted and requiring the whole
thing to be rebuilt at short notice.

Quite a few instances of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole there.
Like using a shop for an events system... for some reason I can't quite grasp.

There are also a few game design (well, mod design) disasters, and I regret
the poor difficulty/design decisions involved there. Hopefully one of my
current projects will consign those terrible old ones into the history books.

------
ninjakeyboard
I only regret experiencing poor leadership styles (but am also thankful to see
them.) The product is a result of the team led by leadership so any and all of
the factors in there ultimately lead to what is built.

Reading the other posters though I can see that there are some unethical
products being built where you can impact someone else negatively.

------
ant6n
I did my masters on compiling Matlab, which involved coding parts of the
compiler. Compilers are cool, Matlab isn't. My decision was based at least
partly on easy availability of funding, and I was a poor grad student at the
time.

I wish I'd done a master that was more in tune with my interests; the regret
is largely about wasting time.

~~~
kabes
Honoustly curious: What's wrong with Matlab? Never need it nowadays, but I
always enjoyed working on Matlab projects in University.

~~~
ant6n
It has a very strange type system. Funny syntax. Lots of unexpected behavior.
Also could be compiled relatively easily if it behaved better, there are a lot
of funky edge cases. It's also bad as a general computing language - anything
where you aren't just computing on a bunch of matrices.

Nowadays I'd say just use python -- it's not _quite_ as nice when it comes to
computing on matrices, but it's _much_ nicer when it comes to everything else.

------
eafkuor
I'll just say I'll never get close to adtech ever again

------
kentms
I once worked on an analytics product for a company. The product would get the
details of your machine's hardware details, commonly used softwares, most
visited websites and so on. This product was installed on selected list of
people who where made aware of the data being collected.

~~~
stirlo
And many times more people who were not aware at all...

------
getRandom
I worked for one of those companies that created user-generated content (UGC)
marketing platform. The basic idea was picking images from Instagram (IG) and
feeding it to the client's site so that they could have the lookbook page. I
am not an IG user but was surprised IG exposed these images for anyone to use.
The original poster on IG has no idea something of this sort happens. If I
recall correctly the client can also use the images in FB ads and stuff.

I understand some people using IG want fame and stuff but I just felt we were
stealing people's pics and making some profit out of it without even telling
them and it just saddened me. Every time I was asked to work on a feature I
would just start questioning myself WTF am I doing? Is this what I want to do?

------
markh1967
I ended up being the sole developer for a system that managed vehicle trackers
installed in fleet vehicles.

A few months after I took over they picked up a new client that was a finance
company for people with bad credit ratings who wanted to purchase vehicles at
exhorbitant interest rates. The trackers allowed them to remotely disable
vehicles if the finance payments weren't met.

After a while they became the systems's largest customer and finally the only
customer. They then asked for some changes so that all their vehicles would be
remotely disabled at the start of each month and would be re-enabled when that
month's payment was received.

Fortunately, they then purchased the system outright from its current owners
and that allowed us to stop developing for them.

------
maram
i worked on an ad campaign for an international company and was instructed by
my client to mislead customers and hide important information. i quit the job
at TBWA advertising and switched to the startup world.

i’m not getting paid the same, but my conscience sleeps well enough.

------
perseusprime11
Com'on people! where are the folks who are working on Facebook and Instagram?
No regrets?

------
nailer
I made something that is good (the Python module for the current Microsoft
Office file format) and years later, despite handing over the project, I'm
still harassed for free help in my personal mailbox by staff at Indian
outsourcing firms.

------
PavlovsCat
I remember a previous HN discussion where someone mentioned working on
improving design for a conveyor belt, but only on the drawing board so to
speak, and only when they went to see it in action did they find out to their
dismay that it was being used to transport chicken to get sorted and have
their beaks singed and all that.

Or something very close to that; if anyone remembers that comment, and the
discussion in general, not only would it be relevant here, I would be very
grateful. I was never able to find that discussion again, I have no idea what
the actual subject was... but the comment stuck with me.

------
fusiongyro
Yes, a few of my gigs were, probably not evil but certainly low in value for
actual humans. But we all have to eat, and circumstances sometimes send you
off looking for whatever job or client you can get right now.

------
HugoDaniel
Iep, a platform for mobile ads management.

ad-tech is pure ev1l. now they are probably making a ton of money though.

I wish I could go back in time :( it was one of those moments that i won't be
able to erase from my life

------
peter1689
When we initially put our our web app
[https://www.whataportrait.com](https://www.whataportrait.com) all our initial
attempts to get traction failed. It's only when you sit down, get a global
view, assess your actions and reactions ti them that you get to the core of
whats goig on with your product. You slice big issues in smaller steps -
assess each and if you get the needle moving then you do more of what gets the
needle moving and the cycle continues..

------
dqhAR
Few years ago, while a CS undergrad, I created a WeChat mini-prog to optimize
and streamline the hiring and management of foreign actors and background
actors(movie biz) in Beijing and surrounding areas.

Back then, I had a gig as a 'foreign talent' recruiter for a contractor of a
mega chinese movie studio, Hollywood-big studios-size. I proved my worth by
using my entire network of foreign students, public/night time events group
chats... In fact, I was a part-time agent for like 2 years and that mini-
program was my edge on the market. I figured out that I needed a consistent
database that's easily managable from a smartphone and a real-time payment
system(Wechat Pay) right after movie scene shoots. Scaled real fast and
provided extra income to my friends who also enjoyed the fame aspect of the
gigs even though it's very time consuming(~8hr/day).

As I'm from a war-torn african country, I was at ease on movie sets(action,
guns and destruction) and didn't mind moving around a lot. I would do
translation if needed and give some occasional inputs on cultural references
given that few chinese guys in the industry had ever stepped foot on Africa's
soil or interacted directly with more than a dozen black 'background actors'
at one time for weeks(cant tell who's who face:).

Wechat was the hub for all my work-study-social life in China. We had near a
800 ppl in the portfolio when I left in '16(for unrelated personal political
reasons) and dropped out.

Later, I heard that the promising projects became great box office successes
on the local chinese market and still are. My regret is that I kind of oiled
up the machine by implementing a quick techie idea. Social impact might be
that it pumps up the chinese world conqueror ego spirit and shrinks the
imagery of africans/blacks in the eye of millions of chinese. Plus, they are
expanding distribution to african markets a.k.a broadcast directly to national
tv channels. The rapid growth after the 1st record breaker in '17 is
continously huge in terms of audience and investments.

I cringe when I explain this stuff to my european friends who are always
mindful about international geopolitics and to other black 'woke' westerners.
Now, I live&work in Benelux where they are mostly clueless about China movies
or WeChat, so my mind is quieter but regrets won't wash away.

------
anonymou2
I worked at a company where we built surveillance video recorders. We used
GNU/Linux as the OS in the video recorder and we didn't have anywhere in the
docs saying so. I got lured in by the fact that it was a Linux company (so yes
it wasn't a secret) but then it turned out that we did a botched job
respecting the GPL. What bothered me was that nobody really cared about it.

~~~
jaifraic
How exactly did you violate the GPL? It is not forbidden to use GNU/Linux or
free software in commercial projects.

~~~
anonymou2
You have at the very least to say that what you are distributing is GPL
software and offer the posibility to give the source code if requested.

------
jeffrallen
Whoever wins this "blockchain all the refugees!1!" RFP from UNHCR is going to
regret it: [https://www.unhcr.org/admin/sts/5be980924/request-
proposals-...](https://www.unhcr.org/admin/sts/5be980924/request-proposals-
rfp20181178-addendum-15112018-establishment-frame-agreements.html)

------
NedIsakoff
I once worked on a monitoring system (internal and for clients) that was build
in house. Everything was configured in an Oracle database.

To adjust the parameter of a check? Edit rows in Oracle using SQL. Add a new
check? Edit rows in Oracle using SQL. Edit the script for a check? Edit rows
in Oracle using SQL.

My job was to make improvements to the scripts/checks/agents, but not the
process.

------
pmcpinto
I already worked in Marketing in the banking industry and a lot of times I
felt that we were trying to sell products that weren't always of the best
interest or useful for clients at that moment of their lifecycle.

But I imagine that the feeling was even worse for the sales team, that it
needed to deal directly with clients and hit monthly and quarterly targets

------
codewritinfool
Yep. A few.

One was a series of electronic game callers used by hunters to kill coyotes.
I'm not opposed to hunting, and I realize coyotes are predators, but with the
caller, the coyotes don't stand a chance.

The second was a commercial PC product that didn't end well. For me. It ended
pretty well for others.

------
village-idiot
I don’t think I did any harm, but I came close to regretting my work.

Shit job at a startup, no money and burnout central, then I heard that the CIA
was investing (well, their front company, which was an open secret). I decided
that that was plenty enough for me and got a different job.

------
fuddle
I once worked for a Slot machine game company. The CEO said the main reason
they developed a Slots game versus any other type of game, was that they knew
people were addicted to Slots. I left shortly after and regretted working
there ever since.

------
doktrin
Yes. Some of the DoD work I did was probably a net-negative for the world.

------
pjmlp
A couple of times, yes.

However at least there was a positive outcome, my CV came out looking better
in terms of experience in specific technology stacks.

Now for the product themselves, nothing was lost.

------
pesty_wanderer
I worked for Pearson digital publishing. Their digital products are crap and
they charge way too much for them. Big Pharma of education business.

------
EdgarVerona
I've talked about this in a few places before... when this subject comes up, I
try to talk about it because I think the ethics aspect of software engineering
often goes overlooked in our industry. I'll copypasta from the last time I
spoke about it.

It's coming up on ten years now since this happened. I was a young, naive
software engineer, addicted to the adrenaline rush of solving problems on
tight deadlines and not giving much thought to what those solutions were being
used for.

The company I was working at suddenly folded, leaving me looking for work. The
father of an old friend of mine hit me up, telling me about this new idea he
had for a service that doctors' offices would use to contact patients, or for
universities to contact their students, all over SMS. For some reason, he was
very insistent that it be done over long codes. I didn't understand why at the
time and was too naive to press him on this odd requirement. Fuck does it
matter if a university texts you from a long code or a short code?

I decided to go for it, and made a prototype of a system that would allow
folks to automate sending SMS messages to all their clients (what I was told
was the "v1" on which the more interesting features would be layered). He told
me he already had some clients, but said they were from "the other side of the
tracks."

I will be honest, I was too scared to call him out. I was prepared to take the
cowards' path of not asking so I didn't have to know: a fact that still fills
me with shame today. It was another guy working there on a separate project
who heard him and and pushed for what he meant.

Finally he admitted what the whole thing really was. There were no doctors'
offices, no universities lined up. Just porn sites looking to spam people over
SMS, with long code numbers so it looked like it was coming from a person and
not a business.

I flipped the fuck out, partly at him for decieving me and partly at myself
for the fact that I was so willing to not even fucking ask when he said that
shady shit.

I told him to fuck this and everything, and walked out the door.

About a week later my friend tried to resurrect the originally proposed
business without his dad, and I reluctantly said I would if his dad wasn't
involved. But he wasn't in a position to actually keep him out of it, and I
walked away for good.

If you are reading this and you are a young software engineer, please do not
follow my path. Ask the hard questions. Read the ACM code of ethics and the
duties to society that it demands of you. Your job is not just to solve
problems: you may be called on to be the one to put your foot down for the
sake of ethics, and it is so easy to turn away from that duty when money and
comfort are on the side of shutting up and doing as you are told.

------
leowoo91
Better question would be: have you ever not?

------
tw1010
I regretted wasting so much of my life on a product (opportunity cost), if
that counts.

------
kakwa_
I worked on a nuclear plant subsystem despite being anti-nuclear.

I worked on an SSO solution for the Police despite being more of a
libertarian.

I worked on an ATC system for the military despite being a pacifist.

Right now I'm working on a marketing solution which is basically a email/spam
gun and a click tracking servive.

I guess one day I will find something my morally good or at least neutral from
my point of view...

------
glonq
Yes, anything that eventually got patented.

------
choot
I was asked to create a system to track ass in seat time.

Basically, we put a sensor which measure body heat and pressure on the seat to
determine if the person is sitting or not.

Then crunched all this data every quarter and would fire the people who were
most absent from the chair regardless of any other metric. We all felt cheated
but were given a big raise, some still left tho.

We shipped this system to many startups and service companies and consultancy
firms.

While developing the system we were told that this system is to track health
concerns with sitting too much at the desk.

~~~
hathym
Are you serious?

~~~
choot
Yes

------
forsythe
yes

~~~
jesuisuncaillou
Thanks for sharing this amazing experience with us ^_^

------
artur_makly
Back in early 2000’s I was working at the hottest luxury real-estate digital
agency in NYC as an Art Director, and got to redesign Trump.com. I met Drumph
briefly..( if you told me then he would end up being the POTUS.. i would have
pulled a Cristopher Walken Epileptic fit )

FFWD..

when he won i decided to build a weapon of Mass Instruction to counter his
Twitter hose: [http://TrumpTweets.io](http://TrumpTweets.io)

------
sjg007
Yep, and I quit.

~~~
acct1771
Riveting.

~~~
quickthrower2
Aircraft wings?

