Anonymous Programmers Talk About The Most Unethical Things They've Done, And Hoo Boy There Are Some Doozies

​Last week, a HackerNews user posed the following question to the forum: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer? As it turns out, the programmers that frequent HackerNews (and the companies they've worked for) have done some pretty messed up stuff! We've rounded up some of the lowlights below. 

Stealing A User's Clients Because The User Is Annoying

One the one hand, a jerk client is a jerk client. On the other hand, don't do this:

This one time a client joins the network, buys a server from us, and migrates from Rackspace. We wondered why he'd move from Rackspace given they were better than us, and it turns he was kicked off of their network because he basically submitted tens of support tickets daily asking for all kinds of optimisations, improvements, and silly stuff not covered by the support contract. Rackspace had decided he wasn't worth it and booted him.

We ended up with him and boy was he a pain in the backside. Anyway…

Long story short, he cost us more in engineering time than he paid us and this irritated the owner of our business. The owner had my team leader find someone on his team willing to do the following: dump the guy's Plesk database containing all of his customers and make a copy of it on our network. I took on the task and was told it was simply a backup. I was young and didn't really think things through. I feel bad about it now because…

The customer was booted from the network a month later and all of his customers were offered free email and or web hosting for the year, including migrating them over to our network… the owner absolutely annihilated the guy. He contacted all his customers and simply wiped him out.

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M&A Cleanup Duty

This probably goes on a lot, but still…

Used some of the more advanced features in git to delete commit history and cover up bunch of illegal activity shortly before an acquisition.

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Bathroom Watcher

The lives of low-wage workers are already hell and this programmer helped make that hell more efficiently hellish:

I created software that was used by call center agents to bid on "bathroom" break time slots and kept track of who was on break and actively punished those who didn't follow the rules. It rewarded those that had higher performance and who took less breaks with higher priority. If an agent didn't come back from their break a security guard would automatically be dispatched to find them. For the same company I also made software that reduced the same call agents to numbers and effectively automated the layoff/termination process. It would contact security with orders to have people escorted out, and had a sinister double verification process that would check to verify the agent was actually fired, or else the responsible security guard would be punished via the same point system. Everything was done via e-mail and would come from "System" and at the time used fancy HTML e-mail templates that looked official. I would frequently hear people talk about how they received a "System e-mail" with a chill in their voice, not knowing I was the one responsible. People who I ate lunch with sometimes didn't even really know. Embedded in each e-mail was a count-down timer to create a sense of urgency to do whatever was being asked before a "punishment" was applied.

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Those Penny Auction Sites Are Even More Of A Scam Than You Thought

Penny-bid auction sites have developed a bad reputation, but they're even worse than you think:

I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of no further bids. Each bid would increase the final price by 1 pence/cent, but each bid would cost 50 pence/cents. You could "win" a $20,000 car for $500.37 and the house would have taken 50,037*50 cents. It might be okay if that was it — but I was asked to code some "house bidders" who would outbid players until a certain threshold was met. I left that job shortly afterwards.

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Taking The Tips

"Not technically against the law": 

Worked on an automated system to skim tips from crowdsourced 'contractors' without them realizing it was being done. Don't worry, legal says it wasn't technically against the law and the fine print of the contracts said we could do it.

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Jared Kushner's Fixer

Kushner's mismanagement of the Observer and his use of the paper to go after a rival have previously been reported, but he allegedly also had critical articles about himself deleted: 

After Jared Kushner originally bought the New York Observer, I was hired to lead the tech team, which I did for a year and a half in house then for three more as a vendor. He asked me, out of band, to blackhole articles critical of his commercial real estate colleagues and I complied.

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Bypassing Bank Security

The first project was for a large, (now) well-known fintech company. They needed to develop login integrations with consumer banks to acquire customer account information for verification purposes. But many such banks didn't particularly want to grant them any special API access. More importantly, these banks typically forbid scraping and made it explicitly difficult by implementing JavaScript-based computational measures required on the client in order to successfully login. I helped this company develop methodologies for bypassing the anti-scraping measures on several banking websites. However, I stopped working on this because 1) I felt uncomfortable with the cavalier way they were ignoring banks' refusals, then using the reversed integrations and onboarded customers as a bargaining chip for more formal partnerships, and 2) performing huge amounts of analytics on customer data acquired as part of the account verification process.

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Not Even Working

We're not even mad about this one: 

One of my employees was contracting out his entire job. His performance was great and then fell off a cliff. Turns out he stopped paying the contractor and the contractor stopped doing his work for him. When he had to do it himself it was horrible.

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