Back in ~2012 or so I worked for framesdirect, at the time owned by Luxottica, and was asked by one of their executives from France to work on a feature that would, when someone tried to leave the site, bring up a popup to offer them a deal or otherwise encourage them not to leave.
Since I hated working there anyway, and had the financial freedom and job prospects to find other work I didn't hesitate to say "no, I will not do that", and he looked at me like I was a total asshole. But if I had been in a worse economy for programmers at the time, or hard up for money, I wouldn't have been able to make that choice so easily.
It is something that makes me very sad, especially since 99% of websites now have dark patterns similar to this. Most notable the modal popups that come up moments after a page loads and you have started to read it. I back out immediately whenever I can but obviously I am in the minority, this bullshit must "work" on some level to have become so ubiquitous.
Anyway if you should ever be asked to do a modal popup, and get fired for saying no, apply at Olo, we so far have never asked developers to do a dark pattern.
Others can correct me, but I don't think that's an example of a dark pattern.
Intrusive, maybe, but a dark pattern is 'deceit by design' whereas what you're describing seems to me 'being slightly annoying by design', which is a totally different thing.
Thinking about Exit Intent and how to optimize for it is a fairly well established part of online eCommerce. I think you made the wrong choice and your boss was probably right to be annoyed with you. It's within their prerogative to decide what user experience they offer to their users. And obviously, it's also yours to quit, but if you do so based on a poor understanding of what a dark pattern is, you're just hindering yourself.
> Thinking about Exit Intent and how to optimize for it is a fairly well established part of online eCommerce.
Just because something is institutionalized doesn't mean it's right. Especially when that institution is eCommerce, one of the most manipulative industries in software.
I would ammend your description of dark patterns to "Deciept and manipulation by design" to see this through the lens most people do.
Some websites optimize exit intent by breaking the back button. Some malls optimize for it by making themselves difficult to navigate. It may not be a dark pattern to you, because you know how it works, but it might influence another person. I hope there will always be engineers and designers who refuse to implement them.
why does google allow them to abuse 'breaking the back button' by hijacking your history and overwriting it with the their website?
This should not be possible, it's a horrible jarring experience every time it happens to me when I click a questionable link and try to go back to the previous page.
When everything is annoying by design it becomes a mental tax on everyone using the web. It might not be a dark pattern, but it is asshole design. Neither of which anyone should tolerate or defend.
> Intrusive, maybe, but a dark pattern is 'deceit by design' whereas what you're describing seems to me 'being slightly annoying by design', which is a totally different thing.
This is not a totally different thing. Both are examples of coercive/deceptive behavior. That makes them the same sort of thing, but differing by degree.
>Intrusive, maybe, but a dark pattern is 'deceit by design' whereas what you're describing seems to me 'being slightly annoying by design', which is a totally different thing.
We'll call it shitty pattern if you dislike dark pattern.
> if you do so based on a poor understanding of what a dark pattern is, you're just hindering yourself.
I expect that they refused to implement it because it was a practice they felt was bad ethically rather than because it matched some industry definition.
>"My sense is you have not only willingly swallowed, but have effectively transfused the industry's Kool-Aid directly into your bloodstream to the point where you are beyond any hope or prayer help."
There's no need for this kind of preface to your comment; you seem to have substantive points to discuss. Please refer to the HN guidelines:
>" When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "
Just curious which of these you'd consider annoying vs. something more than annoying. This isn't just a lazy slippery slope line of argument, but rather an inquiry to see what the absolute limit might be for the most tolerant 1% of the HN population. I'm genuinely curious what is the most extreme situation for which someone would still say "Oh that's quite annoying, but still acceptable."
a) What if it was two confirmation popups before you had to leave the page?
b) Three confirmation popups?
c) What if it let you navigate away for about 10 seconds, but then immediately reloaded the last Luxottica page you were on. It only does this once.
d) What if it let you navigate away for about 10 seconds, but then immediately reloaded the last Luxottica page you were on. It does this 2-3 times before it stops redirecting you back and lets you browse freely again.
e) What if it required you to complete a short 5-30 second interactive engagement advertisement-game activity popup before you could leave instead of just clicking "OK I really want to leave".
f) What if it never let you leave unless you quit the browser but you could open other tabs.
g) What if it controlled your browser in such a way that you couldn't quit the browser, and it maximized the window. You can still put other windows on top of it but when you close them, the luxottica store is behind everything until you shut down the whole computer.
h) What if it loaded that page which you can't close every time you started the browser. Only reinstalling the browser makes this stop, until you visit the Luxottica website again and it reloads this functionality again.
i) What if it automatically loaded this page as your desktop background and required downloading a special tool from GitHub to get rid of it.
j) What if it automatically rebranded your entire computer to display Gucci logos throughout the UI. Reinstalling the operating system is the only way to fix it.
I said the popup was annoying but not deceitful. Those are two orthogonal axes.
Your question is about what's acceptable. My answer is:
1. If the site tricks me (makes me take an action that I would not have taken if the site had not misled me), that's unacceptable. So, roughly any degree of deceit is unacceptable to me.
2. If the site stops me from switching/closing tabs, or changes system settings (like the ones you describe) without me being cognizant of agreeing, that's unacceptable.
Showing 3 popups within a tab when I'm about to close it: that's annoying and douchy, and probably won't work on me, but I won't hate you for it.
From your list, c-j would definitely make me hate you. a and b might be OK if you're presenting me better offers (e.g. 10% off the first time, then 15%, finally 20% off the third time).
If it appears to user as an "alert" to something they should "fix" or take special note of -- and it is specifically raised when your algorithm detects they are attempting to leave your website -- it is plainly deceitful.
If a site shows me a special offer (e.g. an extra 10% off) when I'm about to abandon my cart, that's OK with me. Just like if I'm walking out of a store because I didn't get an acceptable price, and the owner calls to me as I'm passing through the doorway.
If the alert says something untrue or misleading (last day of sale, virus on computer, 1000th visitor) that's deceitful.
I would have preferred getting a good offer to begin with. That just reveals to me they were not offering their best before, which is kind of deceitful in itself. Why would I trust them to give me a good deal afterwards?
Plus, it incentivizes having to threaten to cancel a deal to get anywhere near acceptable terms. Fuck that.
Right - which is an extremely narrow subset of "changing your offer during the course of a negotiation". Meanwhile it has other intent-blocking attributes for which the "deceitful" label quite justly applies.
In other words: in the Venn diagram of the two buckets - the measure of overlap is quite small.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there a pretty big difference between a "moral compromise" and a modal to entice a potential customer to buy? I'm not clear on how enticement even comes close to being a "dark pattern" as I understand the term.
When someone tries to navigate away they wanted to stop them. A real world analogue would be if I tried to leave a store and someone blocked my way to try and make me buy something.
That's insane behavior, I don't owe your business or site anything, least of all my time. Those are the kindest words I can find for that behavior.
>A real world analogue would be if I tried to leave a store and someone blocked my way to try and make me buy something.
That'd depend on the implementation behavior. If it's using window.onbeforeunload, yeah I guess it's kind of like someone blocking you when you try to leave, although you can easily walk around them (on most browsers if you try to close the tab and the modal shows up, and you try to close the tab again it will override the modal). However, there's also another type where it tracks the location of your cursor, and shows a popup when it leaves the content area (indicating that your mouse is going to close the tab or go back). In that case it's not really blocking anything, and much more analogous to a salesperson saying "before you go" as you're walking out the door.
But assuming it’s just a div that appears when you mouse off at the top, it doesn’t actually do anything to stop them. It’s not outrageous for a shopkeeper to say “don’t go!” or something like that as you’re leaving.
It’s annoying and tacky but it’s not analogous to being held hostage.
In the olden days, a website could pop up a dialog box that would lock browser interaction til it was dealt with. It was abused. A lot. This was way prior to 2012 tho.
You've never seen this? When someone clicks to close a browser tab you can stop the tab from closing by adding a handler to the onbeforeunload() event.
2012. A modal dialog was probably a javascript alert(), which at the time was model for the whole browser and would prevent navigation until dismissed.
While I agree, do remember that some patterns can and do extend to the physical.
Many stores do indeed make it hard to leave without buying, for example by having no direct route to the exit: you have to squeeze through the tills awkwardly. It's probably in the name of loss prevention, but it's also a disincentive to leave without a purchase.
Actually, nearly everything about a supermarket is carefully designed for extracting money from you, from product placement, to layout, need to have a loyalty card to access discounts, even perhaps having discounts in the first place (as opposed to selling at a lower regular price), multipacks driving food and packaging waste, etc etc etc.
Best Buy used to do something similar in their retail stores to paying customers. A bouncer at the exit would usually stop people and check receipts against the merchandise they were leaving with. It's a great way for a company to show that it has no trust for its customers and that it hopes they don't come back.
>isn't there a pretty big difference between a "moral compromise" and a modal to entice a potential customer to buy?
well the difference is that you've used more fancy words in the second description. Reminds me of the joke
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
If a customer is attempting to leave and you bar their exit, you've demonstrated a willful contempt of their wishes. It causes the customer stress and serves no purpose other than to show them that you can make them do as you please. It's a micro aggression, a type of violence.
Imagine a woman trying to leave a man's apartment as he holds the door closed. He reminds her she was the one who came inside and asks again, is she sure there's nothing she wants from him? He keeps his hand there until she says she's sure so she understands, he [i]let[/i] her leave.
I'm against either scenario for effectively the same reasons.
Thanks for taking a stand and sharing your experience. That takes bravery. And thanks for acknowledging that that is not always an option for all of us.
For each one of those "No"s there are probably so many half-hearted and exasperated "Ok"'s. In aggregate we get to the point we're at, one little water droplet at a time. I'm optimistic though, because the same force works the other way too.
There are some scummy sites that literally hijack your browser history and overwrite it with links to the current page you are on, so clicking the back arrow does nothing. This always gets under my skin as an extremely hostile dark pattern to keep me locked on their page against my will.
Has anyone experienced this obnoxious browser history hijacking in Chrome? How do they pull this off and how can we report it so it stops being exploited?
> Most notable the modal popups that come up moments after a page loads and you have started to read it. I back out immediately whenever I can but obviously I am in the minority, this bullshit must "work" on some level to have become so ubiquitous.
I fully agree with you here and if i could leave every site that did this I would be happier, but there are a couple that do this that I have little choice but to interact with:
- a hardware components website, pretty much the only good one in the UK that will ship individual parts, if you even move your mouse point towards the top right corner (this is also where the basket and login buttons live) up comes the model "Please don't leave" in big bold letters.
- a digital whiteboard used for work purposes, this one is a little more bad design than anything. if you login with an @example.com email address every so often instead of dropping you to the workspace you were hoping to get, it drops you to a page showing teams of other people from example.com, and a modal asking you if you are interested in getting more from the tool. This is most annoying when it's a customer meeting and one or two of your team get lost in this way (the links to get from the team page to the board is non-obvious, and if it's your turn to get the redirect, logging out and back in does not work)
During one customer call it happened to the security SME got caught by the value redirect (it was a security discussion I was facilitating, the security SME was the star of the show), not realising my mic was on I loudly shouted CRAP!. That's when I realised this is CRAP, the modal begging me not to leave, the redirects to show extra value, its all CRAP - Customer Retention by Annoying Popup and I hate it.
>I fully agree with you here and if i could leave every site that did this I would be happier, but there are a couple that do this that I have little choice but to interact with:
You can use ublock origin to block the modals / pop-ups. I did it for a lot of websites.
I found a new job after having to remove unsubscribe features and replace them with phone numbers to call at my first job out of college (among other questionable practices).
Even if we assume it's a dark pattern, don't you agree it's not your decision to reject it or not. The moral decision is the company/product team's. You can raise the points on why it shouldn't be done but straight away rejecting it is childish. End of the day they must have gotten it done with someone else and you would have done it anyway (as per your words) if financial situation isn't good.
At the risk of the perception that I'm making a false equivalence or reducing the importance of being mindful of the types of suffering you point out (I don't intend that, and I'm as outraged by the problem you mentioned), but it's ok to tend to your own garden. In fact, that's where we can sometimes make the impacts that occasionally tip the system over. The more we try, the luckier we get.
>The profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht.
Source? That claim isn't supported anywhere in the geekwire article. It doesn't even talk about "labor", let alone "slave labor" or "Uyghur slave labor".
> Source? That claim isn't supported anywhere in the geekwire article. It doesn't even talk about "labor", let alone "slave labor" or "Uyghur slave labor".
There’s plenty of sources documenting Amazon’s profits from Uyghur slave labor. Here’s one:
The article claims "Amazon [...] benefiting from the forced labor of Uighur Muslims in China", but that really just translates into "amazon buys goods made from factories in reeducation camps in Xinjiang". That doesn't really contradict or refute what the parent poster said, which is that consumers are the ultimate benefactors (presumably from lower prices).
I suppose your claim that "profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht" is technically true, but that's more due to weasel wording than anything else. The sentence gives an impression that one of the reasons why bezos could buy the yacht was because of Uighur labor, but strictly speaking the "profit" could be anywhere between one cent to half a billion dollars.
It’s not even “amazon buys goods from labor camps in Xinjiang” rather it is “amazon allows sellers on their platform from China who could be reselling goods from labor camps in Xinjiang.” Or it could just be a normal furniture factory in Changji (a city near Urumqi).
Factories in Guangzhou (where a lot of electronics have been made) have been using Uighur labor for a few decades now, though supposedly they are migrant workers and it’s all non-forced (which I would tend to believe, in the way that government arranged labor migrations are sort of dubious). If your trade school sets up an internship at a factory in another province, is it forced labor or not? This applies to Hans as much as it does to Uighurs, so the claims in the article come off as a bit strange.
I just don't do things that I don't want to do. Like, in general.
If I can't understand why something is a good idea I don't do it.
This isn't some selfish thing, if I think something will on balance help more people than it hurts, I'll probably want to do it and probably will do it.
It's that simple to be honest. I find it weird that other people don't seem to work this way. Maybe I'm autistic, innit.
If you take the extreme position that literally everything I ever do fits in this framework given information I don't even have, sure, maybe not. If I buy a tin of beans at the supermarket I don't know if like, bean #2129's harvesting resulted in a homicide because the farmer got mad or whatever.
And in interpersonal relationships, tempers flare, people get mad, perhaps we take actions that aren't ideal.
But I mean, generally, if we're not being silly, you know when things are on the boundaries, and you can spend time then to figure them out. For example if you want to work for a bank, you can work out if you feel like loans are morally justifiable, and if so you do it, if not you can try and do something else.
I get the sense a _lot_ of the time that people I'm interacting with just enter "bureaucrat mode" and it's like they have this whole other personality that doesn't do that thinking bit. The best explanation I have is that a lot of people are just under stress most of the time and so their brain doesn't really have the "ON" switch flicked. They just robot through work.
I gotta concur. It's also really easy to rationalize/ justify in either direction, of not doing something because you don't feel like it (and thereby attach reason to your desire), or on the flipside, doing something you actually don't believe in, but excusing yourself for why it's good for you to do so and rationalizing some guilt so you don't have to deal with the inner tension.
I heard in general, it's fantastic to be aware of your feelings, but they need to be managed, rather than given the reigns for decision-making. Like, you need an executive functioning overseer that fields, filters, guides, challenges, and at times even overrides your feelings, without denying or snuffing them out.
With some combination of good luck and planning, these factors can all get easier with age.
-You may amass some wealth and have an affordable mortgage or paid-off house.
-The need to obey/conform may diminish with age, and you may find peers with values more compatible with your own.
-You may be able to cultivate relationships with peers whose morals are reasonably compatible with your own.
I'm around middle-age, and so far these things have been getting easier and easier.
Unless your core emotional desires just happen to flawlessly, without a single exception, line up with a comprehensive and consistent ethical worldview, then at least every once and awhile you’ll not want to do something when you ethically should do it, and want to do something that will cause more than nominal harm to someone else.
Also every now and again you’ll have to realize that your ability to predict the outcome of your actions is imperfect.
If you happen to be like every other person that has ever existed on this planet, possibly excepting Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus H. Christ, you’ll have to sort out the places where your instincts and desires depart from what’s ethical and make value judgments.
Well sure, sometimes I'll do things that, without me realising, are net negative.
I'm human, so sometimes I'll even do things that _I_ know are net negative just because that day I've kind of been like, fuck it, eat three bowls of cornflakes and fuck the indigestion.
I was very fortunate to work for a corporation with a heavy-duty moral backbone. That was one of the reasons that I stayed, as long as I did.
There were plenty of weasels* there, and it got worse —much worse— towards the end, but the corporation, itself, was one of the oldest Japanese tech companies, with a 100-year history of insane levels of Quality. It was truly a signal Honor to work there.
It was not an environment a lot of folks here would like, but that moral infrastructure was crucial to me. For reasons that aren’t really ones that I’ll go into, I have lived a highly moral life, and I was grateful to have the support.
I’m not competitive, for moral reasons, and I really enjoyed the way that the Japanese valued teamwork.
Sadly, it seems to elicit scorn, from folks in tech. Either folks think I’m being “snobby,” or they think I’m stupid and weak-willed.
*One of my favorite books is Scott Adams’ The Way of the Weasel.
I have a thing for these structures too. And a lot of people frown upon my ways of operating, it's super weird.
That said, there were a few instances of Japanese management techniques that would make amazon warehouse managers feel at home :) (someone recently told he was asked why he went to the toilet 3 times that day)
Oh yeah. I was glad I wasn’t in Japan. I once watched a manager drive one of his employees to tears. I don’t know what he said, but it obviously had an emotional impact.
unless you're in a position to direct decision making without making self-sacrificing choices, you are not complicit to anything. The person above you that made the decision (and either profited, or somehow benefited from it) is.
But if the cultural standard is that no one personally sacrifices anything in order to try to render better moral/ethical outcomes, how will people that become business owners and CEOs learn that they're supposed to be better?
And from their perspectives, why should they have to sacrifice additional wealth in order to make some more ethical decision? If they don't make some morally questionable decision, they may worry that a competitor will. No business leader wants to crash their own company; they like the feeling of importance they get. And sometimes they feel like their position makes them feel more important in society at large, too, not just at their own company.
Why should they have to make self-sacrificing choices and give all that up, when doing so would make them... like everyone else.
This applies to ordinary employees, but not to the executives that the article describes; those executives can, without much risk of harm to themselves, choose to resign and change jobs rather than agree to do something wrong.
When executives agree to do immoral things, they aren't suffering a "moral injury," they're complicit in inflicting one.
This is one of the reasons the trucking industry is having problems. Drivers are tired of being asked to break the law. The consequences land on the driver and not the company.
It isn't fair to the driver and especially not the people injured when an accident happens.
The way motor carriers work is weird. Enforcement folks at the state and federal level sample for inspections based on company size, violation history, and areas of operating authority.
Basically the best drivers will only work for the best carriers, but you need to work up. If you work for a shitty company and get inspected, you are sanctioned for mechanical problems, including things like ripped seats. (Funny, as police car seats are always torn up)
Once you have those violations, you’re stuck working for shitty carriers.
Long story short, stay away from old trucks at night, especially near state borders. Chances are they’re problematic.
What about all the people who can't command "a high salary, perks, and multiple promotions" who have been forced to be the human front to shitty practices implemented by the people HBR is sympathizing with?
This dude is devastated by lying to a bunch of developers. Has he ever worked a minimum wage job in a call center, being the human punching bag for the company's infuriated customers?
I would be more impressed if HBR talked to people like the redditor who I saw the other day talking about handling repo cases for Rent-A-Center and how much the job wrecked them. The final straw was having to repo a bed from a kid with cancer.
> Has he ever worked a minimum wage job in a call center, being the human punching bag for the company's infuriated customers?
I have, at a credit card company. One day I spent 90 minutes arguing with the credit department for a limit increase on behalf of someone who was dying of cancer. I failed to convince them, and quit the job not long after. That wasn't the only reason, but it was one of them.
Granted this was many years ago, but I'm nonetheless not sure quite what point you're trying to make here. Managers shouldn't be expected to behave with moral probity because they and their reports are well compensated? It sounds like that's what you're saying, but I'm not sure how that makes sense.
As a programmer, you see a lot of "technical debt" and occasionally technical reaches the point it can no longer be paid and a company just abandons a product.
It seems like what we're seeing now is something like a massive accumulation of moral and organizational "debt" to the point that organizations easily escape it.
You've had accumulation of companies that only know how to manage by abuse, that lie to everyone, including themselves, about what's reasonable to expect for people. They've dug themselves a hole and the only way they know to get out is to dig deeper.
We already have licenses, they're called university degrees. You can get certifications, e.g. Cisco, but those are overpriced. We should be avoiding centralized authority, the profession allows it. We are knowledge workers and it so happens the only qualified people to certify and judge us are other knowledge workers, not bureaucrats.
To that end, your CV is the best license you can carry. It's unique per person unlike generalized licenses that lump people together like a hash collision.
Perhaps the most Dunning-Kruger response I can imagine. Education is never a license to practice in any industry, and rarely required for anything in software. Confusing this only devalues education for the developer too ignorant or entitled to understand the difference.
Have you tried getting a serious job without a degree? Education is used as a de facto license. One exception is education cannot be revoked, but then again people who write buggy, leaky code don't get fired let alone forbidden from practicing.
Requiring licenses will have two effects - making people pay money, and complicating job seeking. You can gauge a bridge for safety. You can test weld jobs. You cannot standardize code writing ability. My understanding is you want the profession to remain the same with the exception of bearing an extra piece of paper to my name. What does this improve?
What I'm saying is, you're not original or clever in wanting something the industry and academia does not, and has invested in figuring out.
I have known many people earn high paying jobs without college. Likewise education won’t make you a medical doctor, a lawyer, engineer, school teacher, or even a truck driver. They each have requirements in addition to education. In no case is education a license to practice in any industry.
Again you assume I'm talking about "any industry". I am talking about the software industry, which makes the world run without licenses. I'm glad you know outliers and I'm glad you know about normal distributions.
It hasn't happened often to me either, but I imagine it varies quite a bit depending on what industry you work in, what your main product is, who your employer is, and what the team you work on is like. Some kinds of products have fairly obvious inherent conflicts of interest (health insurance, advertising) whereas some don't. Some don't seem like conflicts of interest until something blows up (like mortgage lenders selling bad mortgages to be bundled with other bad mortgages into financial instruments given AAA ratings). Some conflicts of interest are mitigated somewhat by legislation, whereas other industries are mostly unregulated.
Variability between people in regards to where they draw the line between ethical and unethical probably plays a role too.
I suspect that a fair number of people on sites like this though probably work on fairly abstract things like device drivers or compilers, where ethical dilemmas are relatively infrequent. And even fields like autonomous driving where there are disagreements about the right technology, I don't think many people are morally conflicted about whether cars should crash more or less often -- I hope most everyone agrees that fewer and less damaging car crashes is the goal.
Across 3 companies in 10 years, yeah, each one requested me to pursue ethically questionable ends. Sometimes it was an abuse of our customers. Sometimes it was an abuse of other employees.
I could tell the people requesting these things often felt trapped themselves, that they had to. In one occasion, I was told the company could shutter in months if "we" didn't throw up smokescreens and obfuscate the product.
An important lesson is these types of people don't actually value you if you deliver their unethical requests. They've already demonstrated their lack of backbone. It's rarely a quality that cohabitates with empathy and respect.
I worked in ad tech for 6 years. Once we got involved in APAC territories an exec bragged how there's no net neutrality so we could combine our tech with the Telco they owned to completely identify a person clicking on an ad.
Decades ago, someone's reputation was in a large part based on their ethics. Nowadays, with globalization, money and rank act as substitutes for a reputation; ethics and morals are seen as hurdles to achieving a desirable reputation, not as its foundation. This is a radical shift.
Humans were not meant to compete on the world stage. This level of competition is too intense. On the world stage, there will always be someone willing to compromise all principles and ethics to achieve their goals; such a person is much more likely to win.
If you break it up by industry, you will get the same result across all industries. All industries will end up being headed by people who aren't impeded by moral hurdles. It's terrible for society.
Most of the horribly unethical things I've witnessed happened in hyper-local markets.
Ugly corruption is rampant in small or medium businesses that dominate the economic output of isolated and localized geographic regions.
As a distinct but sometimes overlapping phenomenon, "warm fuzzies corruption" is also incredibly common in hyper-localized markets. "Family owned and operated for three generations" is literally a re-framing of "nepotism in the C-suite and boardroom" as a good thing!!! Find me a multi-national that brags about bloodline continuity, please.
On the flip side, with the rise of persistent social networks and the long memory of the internet, people may be thinking about their overall ethical image "globally" in the same manner, and it being hard to wrap one's head around.
Of course with government spying, China probably isn't the only one with a "good citizen index" calculated based on the monitoring. All it takes is for once three letter security agency to want to assign "danger" scores to citizens, as well as "importance".
Your are also correct that if capitalism and its inherent sociopathic reward system promulgating to some form of reproductive reinforcement or selection, then in the long term bad things will happen.
I think people's frustrations with this is part of the reason we currently have a cancel culture.
Part of the risk of unethical behavior IS getting cancelled. Of course as soon as people bring up their pitchforks, a company always backtracks with a "we remain committed to bringing the best experience for our customers"
- Stop money printing globally. Switch to a deflationary monetary system like Bitcoin or other.
- Change the mechanism of money printing globally. Distribute all newly issued currency via UBI indiscriminately to citizens (instead of the current trickle-down approach of currency issuance which gives an advantage to corporations).
We need to get rid of the centralized streams of new currency because it artificially concentrates all of a nation's competition to small areas. Those who are closer to the money printers have a huge competitive advantage over those who are far. We need to get rid of Cantillion effects.
Maybe if globalization was done in a decentralized way, we would have smaller tribes wherein reputation would matter more and competition would be less intense.
Currency printing is essentially a form of government subsidy via dilution. It takes wealth from PersonA, PersonB and PersonC who are on the periphery and uses it to subsidize PersonD who is in the middle. It's not difficult to figure out why PersonA, PersonB and PersonC are not able to compete against PersonD - Their own money is weaponized against them. The subsidy allows PersonD to offer lower prices.
You forgot the single most important piece: outlaw usury. Lenders should earn from the value they create by underwriting, which is to say identifying parties that will increase general wealth and well-being if found creditworthy, not by collecting rents.
I don't know if it's the most important. I think monetary policy is the most important.
But I agree that it could go a long way if governments would make the distinction between value-creation and value-extraction. The way things are now, people simply do not acknowledge that there is a difference at all.
The reason why I think that monetary policy is the most important thing is that it naturally favors value-extraction (rent seeking). Why bother creating value for consumers when you can just tap into easy money from banks and government contracts?
I basically agree. Here’s why I think interest is so odious though: barring rounding errors like minted coins and federal reserve notes, our civilian money supply is bank created deposits. Anyone who borrows at interest from a bank will have to get more money than the bank initially created when it originated the loan. In aggregate it’s clear that it’s impossible for all borrowers to pay back usurious loans. It’s a fundamentally unjust system that guarantees that no matter how well they manage their finances, some borrowers must be forced to default.
Agreed. I guess it could be said that usury is an integral part of our current monetary system.
It looks amazingly profitable from the bank's perspective. You just print money, loan it out to PersonA to buy a house, then collect interest payments on that for 20 years, then PersonB comes along, you print even more money, loan it out to PersonB to buy the same house from PersonA at a higher price, then collect interest payments on that for another 20 years... Repeat ad-infinitum.
Without question, you should strongly refuse to do unethical work you disagree with. Never compromise your ethics for a paycheck. It's absurdly easy to find employment as a software engineer.
I once chased a job from a company whose business model I consider extremely unethical. The recruiter said straight up:
“This is how the industry is, we don’t like it, and we don’t have expect you to like it. In fact, if you did like it, we wouldn’t consider you. Our company’s practices make things a little better, or at least not worst, and we have bright lines we don’t cross.”
I thought it was really great they were up front about things, and I wish I got that job.
I knew a founder who worked in the seedy end of an industry (non-profit industry, ironically) and walked out when it got bad.
I consider myself an ethical person. But when people say “yes it’s wrong, you don’t have to like like” that goes a long way with me.
A recruiter reached out once for a company that offered "better financial lending to underserved customers". Basically people with shit credit getting more loans with shark predatory rates.
Can you imagine working there and looking at yourself in the mirror? You are actively contributing to the hellscape life of people. Fuck no.
>Can you imagine working there and looking at yourself in the mirror? You are actively contributing to the hellscape life of people. Fuck no.
Yeah, actually.
"I'm helping to provide financial products to underserved customers that traditionally couldn't get access. Access to financial products can improve the lives of customers when they're used responsibly. A 300% APR loan might seem like a rip-off, but if you can't afford a car repair and you need it to get keep your job, then having the option to take out the loan is strictly better than having a broken car and losing your job. The high interest rates/fees are justified by the high credit risk of our customers, and competition ensures the interest rates aren't unreasonably high".
From what I hear¹ the research on payday loans is that on average they provide a useful service to their customers. Banning them makes poor people worse off.
Of course, among policy makers, no one asks the poor people they claim to help.
¹ I've heard and read this several times, but I'm not going to dig out a reference.
Not to summon Godwin or anything, but my grandpa testified at Nuremberg. There are lines that shouldn't be crossed for a wage. There should be shame when these lines are crossed. They aren't all so bright and clearly defined, but they're there.
I don’t see how it’s bluffing to say “yes, there’s bad stuff, you don’t have to like it.”
“Bluffing” means faking something to get an advantage. So you think the company was filled with sadists who were trying to appear to be sympathetic to make hiring easier?
It’s pretty easy to say “full disclosure, some stuff sucks. It’s ok to hate it, we all hate it. Just hold your nose and do it anyway.”
Why fake that attitude? What advantage does the alternative present?
it is bluffing when you admit wrongdoing but then keep doing it
the advantage you get is a larger candidate pool who are more sympathetic with your company now after you portrayed yourself as a victim of circumstances outside your control, aka. "It's not us, anybody is doing it!"
in reality nobody forced that company to adopt the business model, which OP described as unethical
The language in this article is the kind of thing that makes me hate sociology and business literature. They invent jargon to pretend they have 'discovered' something to get published. Because they are not controlled, interventional, reputable scientific disciplines they have to generate their 'discoveries' out of thin air and nonsense.
It's called having a conscience. Why do we need your BS terminology for people acting ethically? Pride, self-respect, decency. The English language is resplendent with words to describe this phenomenon. Keep your moral injury and shove it in your lived experience.
I call these "Gilded Words." They're all new and shiny, superficially expensive, but with little to no substance under the surface.
This article actually has things to say. It would say them better if it referred to "integrity" and "breach of trust" and "principles," which, like "decency" have specific meanings, and do not leave me wondering what a moral center is, how it relates to a moral top, and what it even means to "harm" this novel abstraction.
That's an especially good one because an "emergent property" is a very specific thing, but people use it to replace "new" (for dramatic effect) and then I have no idea what they're talking about.
I also like "intentionality" which suddenly appears everywhere and means "put thought into." Authors who like that word never seem to specify the content of those thoughts, and therefore delegate all of the hard work of actually having thoughts worth expressing off to other people.
First up, that's a completely rational/understandable position to have on this topic. Business papers constantly involve jargon to get themselves published.
Given the context of this particular article I wanted to share somewhat of a counter point to this that I learnt a few years ago. From my readings and experience, what's happening here is that we are creating a shared vocabulary, or, pedagogy, to describe shared experiences. I used to think it was bunkum until I read some books including pedagogy of the oppressed. The truth is, when we have these terms that we can share and discuss, it gives a lot of power for affected people to express what they are feeling more clearly.
In the example of this article, one could read it as tackling the topic of individual ethical compasses. Ethics has fuzzy edges all over. Sometimes, business needs will cross those fuzzy edges but it's not necessarily unethical. An example will be asking people to temporarily set aside the discomfort they are feeling with a a local situation (eg: politics) that affects their personal life in a long term manner. It sucks. Work also needs to get done. There's a good chance you hurt an individual's ethics along the way. An individual can feel ashamed of themselves sometimes when they feel they are doing work that ignores the plight of people around them. If you go about this the wrong way (completely innocently) you end up causing... what?
Describing these moments is much easier when you have the right words to use it. And the thing is, it's really hard to understand how it's useful until you've experienced it yourself (i.e., suddenly having the right words to express yourself). Hence, lived experiences.
Finally it's worth noting that these terms don't get invented out of thin air. Moral injury has a history dating back to 1984 for example(wikipedia page on moral injury). These terms are born out of iteration as people strive together to find ways to describe how they are feel. And personally, I think that the language enables that is actually something to embrace and celebrate.
Wow this is one of the worst articles I've ever read that I almost 100% agree with in principle. "spalencing = spa + silencing" was the shark jump for me. Maybe the linked study is better?
Yeah, all these cool names like toxic workplaces, burnout didn't bring us much further. (Maybe I'm biased subjectively and through my choice of workplaces but from what I see it just gets more.) OTOH I think language and the chance of looking stupid/lazy are limiting factors of efficiently raising these topics. In fact I strongly believe in practice bringing up any of these topics directly just makes them worse but silently acting against that actually has an effect on the long-term
Honestly, do you expect any more from Harvard Business Review?
Book recommendation: “The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite” by Duff McDonald. (I liked his previous book on McKinsey better but there’s good stuff here too.)
> failing to provide proof of vaccination, despite being a 100% remote worker
That seems weird. Are you only incidentally remote, or is your position officially a remote one? As in, if the company reverted "back to normal", would you still be remote without any close interactions with people on behalf of the company? If so, this demanding proof of vaccination doesn't make sense, but if not, then presumably it's hindering their ability to have you come back to the office like they would've wanted outside of the pandemic.
When I said "weird" I meant the logic was weird (read: illogical, unreasonable, etc.). I wasn't trying to claim anything about whether it was common or unusual.
One justification I’ve heard used in the past for similar types of things (requirements for smoking or not smoking or whatever) was health insurance premiums, which in the US are often paid partially or fully by the employer.
I certainly wouldn't buy that pretext for COVID-19 vaccination. Would the company let you cover health insurance yourself and stay unvaccinated?
And required what exactly? Healthy diet or vaccination for remote-only workers, because of higher health insurance premiums? IIUC, it's outright illegal for that to affect health insurance. Smoking seems to be literally the only exception for health insurance [1]:
> the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2014, prevents insurers from pricing plans according to health – with one exception: smoking status.
My employer requires flu shots for certain roles, and has for many years. Never a problem till a political party made dewormers an alternative to a vaccine.
They fired a few dozen people. Good news imo, they lost their ability to think.
It’s a mix. In this case there are no roles where a person is fully remote and would never interact with other humans in person in a business context. It’a never been a problem until recently.
I have colleagues in hospitals struggling with with similar problems. In one case, a group of medical professionals in a neonatal ICU refused covid and flu vaccines. Given the nature of the people whose care they are entrusted with, that’s unconscionable.
Mine makes me wear clothes on the video conferences, despite nobody being able to see below my chest.
I mean if they asked me to go into the office, I've not told them I wouldn't consider trousers.
sounds like no one has forced you to do anything, sounds like you made a choice. Whether it is ok for them to have criteria around employment based on vaccines is a valid concern, especially for a remote worker, but this isn't about being forced, this is about whether it is ok for them to choose whether to employ/do business with you based on your choices around vaccines. I think if there is any reasonable expectation you'd interact with other people, their clients or other employees, even if irregular, then yeah, it would be reasonable. But if you are 100% remote, with no expectation of interaction with anyone, then it doesn't sound reasonable.
Your arguments are literally the same as those anti-work people, just replace “getting a vaccine” with “getting a job”
Whether or not I agree with either of those positions is neither here nor there, but both of them tend to elicit a considerable degree of eye roiling from the general population.
Zoom meetings! Friend got put on leave for repeatedly wearing tank tops and raggedy shirts. They are not interacting physically with any one. This is a personal issue as you stated. It isn’t being left at the door. Same with when they accidentally were shown to be in boxers when they got up a bit too high to grab something in a zoom meeting. Nothing was revealed. Still. Not left at the door”.
Interestingly, I’ve been told this sort of behavior never would have flown in corporate America ever. In fact it was stricter.
Being asked to motivate a team to meet a deadline is to sustain a "moral injury".
Give me a break. I wouldn't have been surprised if this was from a lifestyle magazine like The Atlantic; but, this is from Harvard Business Review!? They're just not serious people anymore.
That's not what this article says. Here's the relevant text:
“Just say whatever you need to say to get them to stay. We can’t lose any more techs or we’ll have to announce huge delays on the launch. I’m holding you accountable for making sure that doesn’t happen.”
Brian,* an executive Ron coached, told him about this ultimatum he’d received from his boss. He explained that the project had been under-resourced, people were exhausted from working under impossible deadlines, and he felt ashamed of the corners he feared had been cut to meet them. Now, being asked to manipulate and lie to his people crossed the line for Brian. Despite feeling guilty for abandoning his team, he resigned.
Since I hated working there anyway, and had the financial freedom and job prospects to find other work I didn't hesitate to say "no, I will not do that", and he looked at me like I was a total asshole. But if I had been in a worse economy for programmers at the time, or hard up for money, I wouldn't have been able to make that choice so easily.
It is something that makes me very sad, especially since 99% of websites now have dark patterns similar to this. Most notable the modal popups that come up moments after a page loads and you have started to read it. I back out immediately whenever I can but obviously I am in the minority, this bullshit must "work" on some level to have become so ubiquitous.
Anyway if you should ever be asked to do a modal popup, and get fired for saying no, apply at Olo, we so far have never asked developers to do a dark pattern.