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Postedabout 2 months ago
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I fully understand why this is true, but it seems to ignore any retaliative measures that the management could take against the person who says no.
With the benefit of hindsight, any such retaliation would be weaker than ending up in an orange suit. But the person has to find the guts to say "no" without that hindsight.
The exception is if you fear literal physical violence against you or others, or are being blackmailed or something, then of course you are being coerced and have no choice. But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion.
Not saying it's easy, it's a horrible situation to be put in and I have huge amounts of sympathy for a person who has to experience this. No one is perfect and act with faultless ethics at all times. But hard or not, it is your duty as a citizen not to violate the law.
When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally.
> The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it.
This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only excusable, it's the only moral action.
This is the time when your ethics are tested. Anyone can do the right thing when they're getting paid for it.
> There was a lesson to learn from the holocaust. We're always reminded that: "Never forget, we've learned our lesson." "What was the lesson?" That's the question. The lesson is, "You're the Nazi". No-one wants to learn that; If you were there, that would have been you. You might think "Well, I'd be Oskar Schindler and I'd be rescuing the Jews." It's like, no, afraid not. You'd at least not be saying anything. And you might also be actively participating. You might also enjoy it.
Hindsight theoretical morality is very different from experience on the ground, where peer pressure, stress, uncertainty, exploding situations and fog of war come into the mix.
It's not like it's impossible. The Nazis arrested 800,000 Germans for active resistance activities, and several hundred thousand Germans deserted the military, many of those defecting to the Allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism
It wasn't a huge percentage, but we don't know how many actively resisted without getting caught, or resisted in more passive ways. And that was resistance against the Nazis, who had no qualms about killing resistors. Risking or quitting your job to not only do what's right, but avoid getting in trouble with your government, isn't in the same ballpark.
What's your take on that?
I don't necessarily agree. I think he is pointing out that people morally grandstand and the majority will not act out how they say they would.
What benefit do you think he's trying to get from it? I'm honestly trying to figure out the nefarious angle and coming up blank.
It seems to me like a very similar sentiment to that great "are we the baddies?" sketch from Mitchell and Webb. [1] I see both as an exercise in moral humility.
See the Milgram experiment, or the Asch experiment. Most people do cave to pressure from authorities and the group. Everybody believes they're they exception. Statistically, most of them are wrong.
Not that it's much of an excuse for everyone else either, but with people in the professional-managerial class it's absurd.
Becoming a whistleblower or refusing unethical demands can also lead to being blacklisted, as in most industries, loyalty is valued more highly than ethics.
Or, for a more obscure example, that Antigone should just have said 'yes daddy' and left it at that with the play ending somewhere in the initial conversation with Ismene.
Wow. This is incredibly dangerous way of thinking. Are any “downstream outcomes” justified as moral in such a case? How about outcomes involving people dying eg due to safety or quality rules broken? People may do things like that “to feed their kids” but that does not make it ethical, especially when we actually talk about preservation of certain social status rather than real survival.
You're not going to be of much use to your family in jail.
It's still a difficult decision, but it's not just your job vs your morality. It's your job vs morality+potential jail.
We dish out criminal sentences precisely in order to affect the equation like this, because we know people don't always act on morality alone.
We are not talking about luxury here. A lot of people depend on their salary to pay rent and put food on the table. This is even more pressing if you have a family that depends on you, if you are in need of healthcare, etc.
What your post fails to recognize is that in the current system, labor is already a form of coercion. You need to work because the option is homelessness and starvation.
If you can avoid those even when unemployed, you are extremely privileged.
that would be all developed countries except the united states
Based on the latest available data (mostly 2023) and current population estimates:
* *UK:* ~56.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 178) * *Australia:* ~45.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 220) [using 2021 census data] * *Germany:* ~31.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 323) * *USA:* ~19.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 515)
The per capita distinction is more significant than the raw numbers suggest.
(Note: Methodologies for counting vary by country, which can affect direct comparisons.)
More research shows the U.S. rate looks lower largely because it uses a narrow, one-night "Point In Time" measure that excludes many precarious living situations other countries intentionally count. If you harmonise definitions, the U.S. does not outperform high-safety-net countries; on unsheltered homelessness in particular, it fares worse.
In UK official usage, being legally homeless often includes people the state is actively accommodating; it is not limited to street homelessness like the US PIT figure. In Australia, their figures include couch surfing (staying temporarily with other households and those in “severely crowded” dwellings). In Germany, apart from again having a more expansive definition of homelessness, their figures also include ~130k Ukrainian refugees.
Just one example: the US figures should at least include >1.2 million students experiencing homelessness.
For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc.
This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enough.
Note also that I'm talking about highly-paid software engineers, not about people in general. Lots of people in the US make way less money than senior software engineers, and they manage to get by. Live at that level and secure your emergency funds first, and you'll be a lot more comfortable dealing with any ethical quandaries at work.
And I’m talking about my SWE neighbors in SV who have a desire to buy their own house just like almost everybody else. It’s just wrong to claim they have a spending issue.
They may be highly paid, but the house prices are commensurately higher too.
It is nearly impossible in the US in general to buy a house without taking on some amount of financial risk. It has nothing to do with being wasteful with money.
You yourself said that for the people you know who bought a house without that, "a job loss would be devastating." So you seem to agree with me and the personal finance advisors.
I did not say they had "a spending issue" or that they were "wasteful with money." Those were your terms just now. I simply said they should have rethought. You're turning that into some moral judgement, when all I'm saying is that it's bad strategy.
No, I'm pretty sure this is getting less and less true actually. Credit card debt is at an all time high. Homelessness is rising. Medical debt is crushing.
Seriously, we hear the "but the job, but the potential pay raise" exactly as often in a good economy from people having large salaries.
They have choice. They are choosing the fraud over ... still high salary but just not that high.
For a junior engineer it may not be that hard to fly under the radar, but senior/staff level folks tend to be well known by the execs. And execs talk, they call their friends to vet future hires... burn your execs, and maybe you don't work in that town again
Like, anyone who would work with some of my previous employers, are places I wouldn't want to work anyway. It's a big wide world out there.
Quite. One of my first gigs was at a large real-estate aggregator. The people were great but the highest levels of the company did
- A pet “adoption” site, in quotes because to my knowledge the pets weren’t real and it was a subscription service with no means of cancellation outside of a voicemail box - A kind of Craigslist-esque site for selling home improvement services that was wildly vulnerable to XSS - I discovered that during an unannounced client demo when my own manager had said “you guys try to break it” - We were a PHP shop from the beginning. One day, engineering gets pulled into a meeting room and told that they’ve been developing 2.0 in an office downtown, with a separate team, in ColdFusion. They fired the lead engineer on the spot and most of us left or got fired shortly thereafter. They did offer to train us in CF, but the bad blood was too thick for my taste.
All that is to say, if I ever get wind of the owner or CEO being involved anywhere that I’m working, I’ll probably be walking.
it depends how many friends and family you have in the area that can host your whole family that is now homeless. it depends how much disruption you are willing to inflict on your kids definitely right now as opposed to maybe in the future.
Not that I would recommend a night's stay at a local lockup (2/5 stars, the beds are awful, the toilet facilities are worse, and the roommates leave much to be desired), but doing so certainly puts things in perspective going forward.
- Firing someone has large costs to the employer. You have the job because you are needed. Same for side-lining someone or not promoting them.
- Firing someone removes the final incentives against that person reporting the deed to the govt. It pushes that person toward reporting instead of softer "negotiated" steps such as continuing to argue for legal alternatives or discussing it with an intermediate rather than outright reporting. And many corporate legal or accounting people are amazing at finding alternative ways to achieve the same result in a not-illegal manner.
- A lawyer can help you much more once there is retaliation. The company might end up fighting both the fraud reporting AND the retaliation.
Just firing someone is not a great "solution" for the company.
Letting you believe that they will ... that's very powerful.
(and probably all this is caveat: in countries where retaliation is illegal enough and commonly taken to court or settled. which is not worldwide.)
The code of ethics for Professional Engineers works even though it isn’t any of the things you say are necessary.
Licensed professions only serve to increase the scarcity of licensed professionals, drive up the price and thereby form an economic cartel. Neither does it prevent any of the aforementioned disasters, nor are the responsible professionals held liable.
"Licensed professionals" is one of those myths in software engineering cycles that won't die. A license won't make anyone competent. It will, however, provide them with an excuse to charge more, do less and ascribe any fuckups to "must be something else wrong, I did everything to board standards"...
In the Bhopal disaster, seven engineers and executives were convicted of causing death by negligence and give the maximum penalty (which was pretty weak).
The Chernobyl incident led to Anatoly Dyatlov to be jailed and getting a 10-year sentence.
For Fukushima, some people were charged with professional negligence causing death but they beat the charges in court.
Licensing will not make anybody competent. But it can help keep incompetent people out of our field. When Engineers screw up, their malpractice insurance may get too expensive for them to continue to work in the field. When management asks for something unethical, it gives a pretty good reason for pushing back.
The Chernobyl disaster is an operation mistake, which a Professional Engineer may have signed the process for operation, but an operational failure to follow process is not the Professional Engineer's fault. Sure, a professional will try to narrow processes to be as fool-proof as possible, but you can't entirely blame a professional that the planet is capable of generating far more fools than you can plan for.
The Fukushima disaster actually shows Professional Engineering consequences with multiple engineering groups doing analysis and investigations of what went wrong and whether or not to indict Professional Engineers involved in the construction. None of those moved to such indictments, but it was investigated at length. Three of the executives of the company were indicted as a part of those investigations (and then were judged "not guilty" in a Japanese court of law).
"Licensed professionals" is not a myth. A license isn't about making anyone competent, it is about applying consequence when they aren't. It's also about having your back when you are worried about possible consequences. "I can't do that because I would lose my license" is a threat companies have to take seriously. If your company wants to force you to pursue it anyway, you can take the issue to the Ethics Committee at your licensing board/professional organization and they can help you examine the legal, ethical, and moral implications in a way that could result in consequences to your company. If all of that is documented and the company still does it anyway it is easier to get legal consequences applied to company executives, such as real, deserved jail time.
More to the point is trying to be an ethical island in an unethical society, You'd have to deal with constant attacks from the "anti-woke" crowd.
You may also find your support tickets everywhere languishing and x months of CAPTCHA-hell on every website.
But right now we have nothing. Surely, something is better than nothing. We can't have nothing and already be out of ideas.
The scope would necessarily be narrower and "permit" more unethical behavior but for violations to be enforced by peers it has to survive the eventual "oh you're making a big fuss over nothing, you won't lose your license" problem.
Unless you want this kind of arrangement for developers, the oath isn't any good.
Also, the Hippocratic Oath has tons of variants, nobody uses the original one anymore because there are things in there that went out of fashion over the last 2000 years. E.g. operating on people suffering from kidney stones used to be prohibited: "I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone[...]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath ). Similar prohibitions exist nowadays for abortions or euthanasia, but only in some places. In others, doctors are free to or even required to perform those. In software development, I would imagine even more variety in the allowed/prohibited-list.
If software had such a thing, it would be possible to achieve something similar. It is not the oath per se that keeps doctors on the righteous path, it is just as much the treath of not loosing your job - but having your professional status revoked (i.e. permamently loosing the ability to work).
On the other hand, reviewing code every now and then, it would be good if you could revoke programming privileges for ever for certain individuals.
At the end of the day you confront a jury and not a board of similarly positioned individuals.
I would like more 'philosophy' in CS education. Just that people are aware of the methods used against them helps alot. It is hard and takes time to discover stuff on your own. It took me like 5-10 years of working before I realized how the sausage is made.
This isn't the 90s anymore. Today there's practically nothing you can do in the modern world without interacting with software. Buying food, going to the hospital, travelling, communicating, voting, going to school, using anything electrical, anywhere. Our society is completely dependent on software at this point. The fact that there's no professional ethics code with the appropriate oversight for the development and maintenance of software is utterly insane.
The points you bring up about the Hippocratic Oath are important problems to solve, rather than reasons not to try.
Misconduct among doctors is rampant, special highlight on dentists:
Surgeons, in fact, often begin with harm. To replace a hip joint, they necessarily must begin by causing great trauma to the body by cutting it open and removing bone.
I had a burst appendix as a teenager, leading to peritonitis. To treat this, surgeons were going to operate laparoscopically to remove the appendix and fix remove any contamination in the peritoneum. Obviously this required damaging my skin, removing an organ etc. which in the strictest sense is harm. But doing nothing at all would obviously lead to sepsis and death, so this was still the least harmful intervention. During the surgery, it turned out that the laparoscopic method was hard to carry out due to obesity and other factors. The attending made the decision to convert to a laporotomy, doing even more harm to my skin and leaving me with a 30 cm scar on my stomach. But it was the right call because it maximised the chances of accomplishing the goal of the procedure(preventing imminent death), minimising the risk of serious complications.
And here I am almost 20 years later. I have a scar, I have some adhesions that occasionally cause moderate abdominal pain if I don't eat enough fibre, and perhaps my lymphatic system and gut flora are very minorly compromised in some nebulous way due to the lack of an appendix. On the other hand, I'm alive. So yes, they "did harm", but they also minimised harm. And they didn't do any unnecessary harm, to the best of their ability. And that's the point of the ethical principle.
This reads like a bad joke. Ever heard of the opoid crisis?
A) Software developers should be free to sign a code of ethics, or
B) Software developers should be compelled to sign a code of ethics, and be prevented from working if they refuse to sign, or
C) Something else.
1. The way most people here on HN, and most people in the US, understand it.
2. The way the laws in most of Canada (but not Alberta) define the term.
AIUI someone can design and develop software for pay in Canada without declaring themselves to be a 'software engineer' and without signing a code of ethics.
Is that correct?
* The development of the software required the application of engineering principles (ie. "a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software")
* The software concerns the public interest (ie. there is a reasonable expectation that failure or inappropriate functioning of the system would result in harm to life, health, property, economic interests, the public welfare or the environment).
In practice, LinkedIn is full of "software engineers" and anyone with a P. Eng uses it as a suffix.
For example, try disagreeing with the statement “SWEs should take reasonable effort to protect user data”
In all honesty, I haven't checked if it's true, but you can use AI to find a foreign law that fits and cite it word for word.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/
Once you link the actual law, it becomes more of a checklist and less of a principle though.
If the customers/bosses do not even allow those to be followed, what chance do you think some pro-social rules with actual costs have?
That can be reasonable for something like medicine or structural engineering. But is it appropriate for a developer cranking out Javascript or Excel macros? This is pulling up the drawbridge behind you, excluding anyone who comes to the profession through informal means - and in my generation, that meant almost everyone. It also means that you will need to determine how much of your time you dedicate to politics.
Of course I found out that he was going into our billing software and adding hours to me. I had to talk to a lawyer and he recommended I report it to the gao. I compromised by quitting and reporting it to the liaison on the project (a professor). It was very stressful because if I hadn't reported it he could say that I reported those hours, not him, and I could have ended up in prison.
I think the liaison just buried it in the end.
This is the attitude that lands otherwise-normal-seeming people in jail. They dgaf about you until they do. Maybe the prosecutor needs an easy win. Maybe they have a wealthy patron you offended. You don't know. And casual cheating becomes criminal very quickly.
Charlie Javice, to get back to the core subject, seemed to genuinely think she was on the right side of the line. All she was doing was faking some numbers for investors, right? Nine times out of ten, investors have already bet on the company and want to see it do well, and even if they catch a founder fibbing are likely to see more value in suffering along with it than in blowing it up.
Except in this case the investor was JP Morgan, not an incubator, and they had the prosecutor in the rolodex.
Startup culture, our culture right here, absolutely encourages cheating. And it doesn't give you a clean instruction manual to figure out how to stay out of jail, because there isn't one. The point above, while technically about government contracting, is absolutely of a piece with the same dysfunction. I think a lot of people in our world need to spend a little more time in introspection.
Sadly, I suspect most or all of the investor class of people "in our world" have done this introspection. They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal things and potentially end up in jail, if it makes the odds of that company being a 100x exit - so long as the investors and their staff are all insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
The latter type of people don't become businessmen, of course, so the selection bias is for the businessmen to all be from the unworried people.
No legitimate business person I have ever met holds this position, if for no other reason than criminal acts pierce the corporate veil[0].
> ... so long as the investors and their staff are all insulated from the illegal behavior and jail time risks.
There is no such thing.
0 - https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/03/27/the-three-justifi...
> There is no such thing.
Sure there is. You can never request an illegal act, never commit an illegal act, but create a culture where others become incentivized to do illegal acts. This can be done in sufficiently subtle ways that it's impossible to prove it was intentional.
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest"
I disagree. So do many state and federal RICO[0] laws. They were enacted for precisely this situation.
But you do you.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
EDIT:
Just so I am properly understanding your position, are you advocating for engaging in activities which would qualify as RICO crimes due to "how notoriously difficult they are to prosecute"?
RICO is hard to prosecute on a good day. If an organization is usually law-abiding and occasionally structures things such that some lower manager has a near-impossible goal to hit that is made easier with crime, then one gets crime occasionally.
And that's also not counting all the crimes like environmental dumping, which consistently yield zero prosecution and slap the company with a fine that's 4% of what the company saved by dumping their waste in a river.
Here's a recent example https://www.wjhl.com/news/national/campbell-soup-admits-to-d...
That is not subtle enough(anymore), if you want to disguise ordering murder.
Well, sure, that's true. But only because that's a no-true-scotsman fallacy in incubation. All these perps are "legitimate business people" until they aren't. And they cross that rubicon, almost to a person, still believing that they're legitimate business people and that this is all a clever hack.
It looks obvious only in hindsight when you're looking at the indictment.
What gets them in trouble is the clever hacking, not a fundamental moral flaw. Or conversely, we need to start treating clevery hackery with a lot more suspicion. It's fine to "cheat cleverly" in software design. Outside that world it's got some pretty ugly externalities.
I think you've got that backwards. Crims gonna crim. A clever hacker will evaluate ALL the risks, whereas a moral flaw blinds people to risks. Doesn't mean somebody can't have both attributes.
I quite literally stole an education, and there's a college transcript to prove it. I was a clever hacker, and I worked hard; I was aided and abetted by the college administration, inducted into the Masters candidate ghetto as an honorary member. When they made it a felony I quit that path, and following Hunter S. Thompson's advice [0] I went into business so that I could continue learning "on the job". (Nowadays they call it "OPT". Served today with a very thin glaze of sarcasm.)
During that tenure I met people who wrote theses for a living, who appreciated my industriousness and offered to admit me to their fold. I drank with foreigners ("muslims") who wanted information I might have or be able to obtain; I suggested that they get their home countries to forge documents and and then get admitted as students.
I've quit jobs after an appropriate "honeymoon period" when I still hadn't been furnished documentation demonstrating that we had customers' permission to be doing what we were doing. I've quit jobs when government compliance was considered a game rather than a minimum standard of performance. [1]
I pass government background checks just fine; no reason I shouldn't. I get the "dgaf" attitude, but I strongly suggest getting it in writing. Doing things off the books is a cancer; and it's contagious, like that 10,000 year old dog cancer which now moves from host to host.
[0] "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
[1] If you need somebody who takes risk assessment seriously, we should talk.
Once more, this is a no-true-scotsman argument hanging on your added adjective "clever". All the frausters and criminals in the linked articles were "clever hackers" until they weren't. You probably are too.
Introspection and humility are among the hardest skills for hackers to develop (probably harder for us than for the general population, honestly, as our cheating gets rewarded!), and they're exactly what are being demanded here to keep us out of jail. And I'm pointing out the fallacies inherent in all the "it would never happen to me" argumentation.
> Well, sure, that's true. But only because that's a no-true-scotsman fallacy in incubation.
Which, by your own admission, makes it not a no-true-scotsman fallacy since it does not exist.
> All these perps are "legitimate business people" until they aren't.
This is a strawman fallacy[0] when considering the assertion to which I replied, which reads thusly:
They've checked with their peers and lawyers, and decided
it's a perfectly acceptable risk to have the founders and
staff of a company they're already invested in do illegal
things and potentially end up in jail ...
Post that gain and you will have a 100x flood of civil lawsuits to deal with. You may escape jail but I doubt you escape with the gains.
> All you had to do was report it to the liaison and keep punching the clock. Unless you were getting paid more because of the overages the enforcers dgaf about you.
That is not how fraudulent billing in a federal contract ends.
The DOJ prosecutors hammer the person documented as having submitted fraudulent billing and then go after everyone else involved. There is an outside chance in this case the innocent person originally identified does not get indicted and/or convicted of defrauding the government. But there is no doubt this process will cost the innocent person many thousands of dollars in legal fees just to stay out of prison.
The advice of "report it to the GAO" and then GTFO[0] is the way to go.
EDIT:
If a person continues to "keep punching the clock" knowing someone else is actively defrauding the government by "going into our billing software and adding hours to me", there is a nontrivial risk of being charged for conspiracy to defraud the US[1].
0 - https://www.dictionary.com/e/acronyms/gtfo/
1 - https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
'In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
Apropos to the article, as a programmer for this feature, what you are actually asked to do is write a greybanning engine. It can take various features (geofence, denylist of phone numbers/emails/device identifiers/payment, etc.) and use it to calculate a score that applies a greybanning policy. The policy may be that the cars in the app are now fake, the ride will never come, your CC is "denied", etc.
Nothing illegal or unethical about this feature, as written, but it is a "dual-use" technology.
The feature has been used to literally save lives. There were taxi-affiliated people in South America that would call an Uber and then, at best, trash the car and beat the driver. At worst, they'd kill the driver. Those people need to be greybanned, along with scammers, criminals, and abusive people of all sorts.
The local market administrators, however, definitely might ban users that the know to be police ticketing the drivers, might ban any account signup from the police station, might ban city credit cards, etc.
You, as the programmer on this feature, can't defend against that unethical use of it.
If you work at the insurance company and get asked to write a rules engine but not the rules, this same thing applies to you.
In this instance nothing intentionally illegal was being attempted. However, had the original claim been made it could have been considered fraud. In these sorts of situations I always ensure that the company put me in contact with the professionals that can indemnify both the company and me from any wrong doing. Provided we tell the truth.
There is lots of pressure not to take action, because of the feeling you're overreacting, because you've had things explained to you in a way that minimizes or removes the criminality, and because your job is at stake.
And crucially there is never some black and white issue. If your employer told you to murder someone, it would be easy to say no and know you did the right thing. If they tell you to incrementally go along with some grey area thing you're not sure the legal status of, it's way harder to know what to do.
People still have to be accountable for their actions of course, ignorance is no excuse. But we all should hope we're never in such a situation to begin with rather than thinking we'll know how and when to act.
The three example given are quite black and white ...
https://leanpub.com/unethical-software-engineering/
Covert Surveillance
EMAIL PIXEL INJECTOR
STEALTHY INPUT LOGGER
Monetization at all costs
AGGRESSIVE ADVERTISER
AD BLOCKER DETECTOR
PAY TO WIN
ADDICTION PEDDLER
ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY HOARDER
DRM RUG PULLER
OBSOLESCENCE PLANNER
Digital Fraud
CYBERSQUATTER
SNEAKY TERMS DEGRADER
INTEROPERABILITY BREAKER
Ranking Manipulation
FAKE REVIEW GENERATOR
SEARCH RANKING KICKBACKER
Unethical Artificial Intelligence Practices
TRAINING DATA HARVESTER
BOT PRETENDER
DECEPTIVE DEEPFAKERI would not have been surprised if the 5 million user thing was couched as some sort of "we need to generate some realistic test data to load test our systems <WINK WINK> - please create 5 million accounts very similar to these paying ones, remember this is testing so they need to be as realistic and believable as possible <WINK WINK>".
If I got that request (perhaps without the winking!) come down the line through the usual channels I'd probably have gone along with it without realising it was for anything nefarious. ...but then would that be a viable defense?!
Context is everything.
OTOH if somebody sent a message saying, 'Hey we need to increase our apparent paying users in order to defraud some potential investors.' then obviously you've become part of a criminal conspiracy, but I think nobody would ever* overtly say that.
I can see the situation you're describing, sorta. Though if it was me and someone asked me to generate a list of 5 million real-ish user accounts in a report, I'd immediately ask why. If it's to commit fraud or lie to investors, I would be like hell no! If we're doing load testing or something legit, for sure. But I feel like benign use-cases of generating 5 million accounts would not include the "make it look real" aspect.
I also don't think the Reddit comparison makes sense, since Reddit didn't seek to sell the company at the time based on the # of users. Growth hacking is one thing, lying to investors about users is another. Because this data point was a key decision factor for a financial transaction, this fake information/lie becomes fraud.
One of many reasons employers have a quiverful of ways to exploit and control workers.
If you're serious about anything, you do more than hope. You do diligence on your prospective employer before going to work for them. You think through a litany of contingencies and prepare a plan of action for each. Jobs in this industry are uniquely amenable to this by virtue of their relatively higher compensation and the autonomy often afforded to employees. If you spend an hour every day on HN, you can spend an hour meditating upon your conscience.
Predicting one's response to stressful and unexpected circumstances is hard. So try to anticipate circumstances and cultivate relevant virtues in advance.
People who work in the Valley for fifty, a hundred times more than the poorest in their own country often do not seem to feel the same way anymore.
This is not a question of abstract ethics, but a question of simple professional integrity. If the thing is bad and risks harms, you don’t do it.
It’s part of why I work for myself now; it’s not difficult to spot people who do not have a strong sense of ethics and simply not work for them. I work in a couple of fields where there are many non-ethical players, and can do so with a clear conscience.
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