Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product? - <AUTHOR> Sometimes it's hard to see in the moment that a product will be used for evil or will have a negative effect on people. Can you look back on any of your work now and wish you didn't do it? <comment><USER4> I had a freelance gig, a very long time ago, to create a full-screen ad takeover for one of the UK's better known "lads' mags" (now defunct, I think). I hate ads and I hate those sorts of magazines, and I hate ruining people's browsing experiences. Yuck.

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

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

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

<comment><USER5> > I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in > a sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later. > I am still quite proud of my response, which was, "Yes, we absolutely can! > No, we absolutely won't help you do that!"

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

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

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

<comment><USER6> It's hard to even wrap my mind about the consequences of those limitations though. The web as we know today would not exist, hell the world would be a different place without facebook and all the other social networks.

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

<comment><USER7> Not sure I get your point about Facebook. I quite liked the internet before Facebook (been working on web since 95). What exactly did Facebook contribute that was positive that helped the world as a whole?

<comment><USER8> Facebook imo has contributed more positive than negative. It's easy to quickly judge FB as an evil company because of the media recently, but, just for starters, here are a few things FB has done well:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked for financial traders for a few years before I wised up. It was at least refreshingly honest; during the hiring process, my boss explained that the company had a pile of money and our goal was to turn it into a bigger pile. But what I didn't understand was that mostly we made money when other people lost it. We turned a profit by being smarter or faster or luckier than the people we traded with.

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

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

<comment><USER10> As a counterpoint I work in finance and work with a group of smart people that all check their egos in at the door. It's a great place to work. We also try to turn money into more money, it's pretty much the game of life whether you play it or not. It pays really well so I can't complain.

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

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

<comment><USER11> > this isn't stealing from the poor.

It depends on how you look at things I guess.

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

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

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

<comment><USER12> The big players used to corner small markets which then led to extreme blowouts. It doesn't happen as much now as there are tighter regulations on max position sizes and the volumes are higher.

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

The financial world is evolving very quickly with various participants driven by different goals pulling the rug in opposite directions which theoretically should reduce volatility and spreads. However, when people get greedy - <USER2> there's a lot of that in finance - bad things happen, e.g. see the natural gas last week[2].

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

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

<comment><USER11> > The existence of liquid markets is beneficial for the producers and > consumers as the price volatility is reduced and hedging becomes easier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER13> This position is further supported by the reality of real estate speculation: in London, in Silicon Valley, you can count the housing units that are owned by extremely wealthy capital holders, and kept empty because the increase in value will exceed any profits taken from filling them (minus the costs of maintaining them).

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

<comment><USER14> Real estate is rather different from the commodities markets, though: It's most definitely _not_ a commodity (if you don't count things like mortgage- backed securities, anyway), and the markets are frighteningly illiquid. There are things like futures and options on real estate, but they operate very differently from your average put on hard white winter wheat.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I worked full time for a military contractor. When I arrived some of the products didn't work very well. After I worked on some of these products, some of them became more efficient and effective. It was an opportunity for me to apply math and physics and engineering to solve very interesting problems (variously related to shortening human lifespan or rendering remaining lifespan more expensive).

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

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

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

<comment><USER16> Wait ... what? You now believe that (more efficient) self destruction is a good thing?

<comment><USER17> If people are going to go to fight until one side is wiped out, minimizing attrition and ending the war more quickly and convincingly may be seen as a measure to minimize casualty.

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

<comment><USER18> The problem is that if both sides are really good at wiping out the other quickly, they might wipe each other out before they realize the other side has the same capability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I work as a game programmer. I'm one of those kids who grew up playing now "classic" games wanting to become a game developer themselves.

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

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

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

<comment><USER20> Do ever do any game jams? Those might be exactly what you are looking for.

<comment><USER19> Haven't gotten around to that yet, but the idea has been brooding for a while...

<comment><USER20> Go and do some! I find it scratches exactly that itch. Best part is: When the game jam is over, the project is finished!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Disclaimer: Throw-away account.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER22> Sounds a lot like what the UK government try to do these days.

<comment><USER23> No just "these days", the ATOS contract was awarded in 2008. The need for UBI is greater than ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have one regret. I was a java back-end developer on a major EU gambling site for a year. I was distracted by quite extreme (and cool) scalability and up- time requirements. This was years before cloud existed.

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

<comment><USER25> Good for you. I've had a 'no online gambling / no defence work' clause in my resume / Linked-In profile for a while now, cuts down on a lot of crappy or dodgy offers, that's for sure!

<comment><USER24> You're not worried your profile could come across as pretentious?

<comment><USER26> I'd call this specific, or focused, not pretentious.

<comment><USER24> I wasn't making the accusation, rather asking if you may have missed some opportunities by coming across as it to strangers.

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

<comment><USER27> I review a fair amount of resumes and I wouldn't give it a second thought if I saw that. I'd probably assume it was a religious requirement of some sort before I even considered other possibilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> One time I took on a contract project that was really soul crushing. They were just re-inventing a worse version of something that already exists, so I didn't see the point. The code was a mess, and the team wasn't very good to be honest. It paid really well, but I hated every second of working on it, and I really struggled with motivation. They were happy with the results, but it wasn't my best work and I wasn't proud of it.

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

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

<comment><USER29> Very much echo this, specifically that I've found it's always better to take a worse paying project I'm stoked about making happen than a higher date rate on a project I have no interest in. Having intrinsic motivation to work rather than having to _force_ myself to work on something is easily worth a drop of £100-200 p.d. imo. (That amount presumes the lower day rate is still something I can live off.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Disclaimer: Throwaway account.

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER31> You cant blame yourself for that. Would you blame a front camera inventor for the deaths of people taking selfies on the edge of a cliff and falling down?

<comment><USER32> I'd met one of those students, they went to my university.

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

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

<comment><USER33> How would this work for offline transactions? Cards need to be able to verify PINs offline and provide feedback to users & merchants, otherwise someone can type a wrong PIN at an offline terminal (on an airplane, etc) and get away with free stuff because the transaction isn't valid.

<comment><USER32> Good point, but allowing a device given away for free to anyone with a bank account to test a PIN opens up a much bigger risk than limiting it to merchant terminals.

<comment><USER34> I think you're really overstating the difficulty of acquiring a merchant terminal, which are available at literally any shop or restaurant that accepts cards.

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

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

<comment><USER35> "everyone being treated equally on the internet" never heard of this phenomenon before. Stray thought: if you are not anonymous - you will be subject to discrimination. if you are anonymous and others not - you will be subject to discrimination. if everyone is anonymous you can't discriminate - but its not very useful.

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

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

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

<comment><USER35> Thank you for the elaboration. Good point.

<comment><USER36> I wonder if Tinder does matching based on my device type as a proxy for income....

<comment><USER35> Who knows. I don't think it would be the best proxy - these days everyone and their dog has an iphone.

<comment><USER36> I'd say there is at least some correlation. Not a great indicator, but better than nothing and helpful since it is in the user agent. They aren't curing cancer, so accuracy is less important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fax spamming service, back in the 90s.

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

<comment><USER38> so the mafia murdered his grown-up son, but let him keep the money ? makes.. no sense :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I worked as an analyst for an email security company. Stopping scams, malware, phishing, etc that comes through email. I liked security and had a machine learning/stat background, so I was eager to apply. What I learned was that basically, ML and stats are not applicable to this particular problem domain because there is no level of acceptable error. No matter how well my systems performed, whenever a vice president, C level exec, or any pinhead got a single FP or FN, I have to grovel at their feet and spend weeks explaining to people what happened. I once had 10 months of work go down the drain because the system let through a single phishing email to some secretary (it detected blocked millions of malicious messages prior)

<comment><USER40> I wonder how easily you could reproduce the system you created (how much do you remember? what sorts of resources did it require?) - and how where you worked would react/respond if you did so.

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

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

<comment><USER39> I think there aren't many startups/smaller companies trying to tackle the problem because: 1) there's not much money in it. Email is supposed to be "free", so is security. 2) mail systems, esp at larger/older orgs, tend be extremely baroque and you'd need full time integration engineers before making a penny. 3) Privacy laws make things difficult. 4) You need data and a wide view of the email landscape, and you only get that at large enterprises, and 5) at those orgs, the mail server operators are just waiting for the day they can retire and leave behind the mess they made.

<comment><USER41> We are working on this problem and hiring. Send an email to email@example.com :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've worked in the adult industry (you can say porn) for 10 years for some of the biggest brands. I have some regrets, especially contributing in a major way to the proliferation of free porn, pushing our product to millions of users per day and negotiating advertising campaigns in the millions$ to feed the system. Many in our audience were in developing countries and no doubt a lot of them under 18. The latest studies confirm that heavy porn consumption affect adolescent's view of others and their self-perception in a negative way - reading these made me evaluate my role in that ecosystem.

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

<comment><USER43> Just wait until you realize what VPNs are mostly used for...

<comment><USER44> I'll bite. I use a VPN every day, and while I will admit freely that it helps for less copyright friendly ventures, it has probably saved my privacy quite a few times, as I am almost always on public networks. In addition, I imagine many users in countries with more stringent censorship than the UK likely need a VPN to carry out their daily lives. True, a VPN can help people hide their identity to do criminal things, but there's a reason they call ski masks that way: because they have a specific but sometimes vital use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I worked on the back end system that allowed record labels block their content on YouTube. I thought I was going to be working on a system to help indie record labels distribute their content. I lasted 9 months.

<comment><USER46> When you say "you thought" do you mean you were somehow tricked by higher ups?

<comment><USER47> It is very difficult to realize what you objectively work on sometimes. Every organization internally tries to justify the product they build as "good". People don't want to openly admit they work on a product that is bad for society but generates money, so they lie to themselves.

<comment><USER48> Yes. This is so true. This is something we need to teach young software engineers - to try and identify the true business model from the model that the company is claiming to incoming employees. To question what you've been told at face value, and to be brave enough to walk away or put your foot down when you find out you've been had.

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

<comment><USER49> The truth of this matter is that most people really don't care. On top of this, schools _generally_ communicate with the business world to figure out what their curriculum is going to be (after all, that's where you're expected to go when you finish studying). To my mind, it is then not a huge leap to figure out that a strong foundation in ethics is not a desirable quality. After all, what big company these days doesn't want something that's at least a dark gray?

<comment><USER48> That's what I'm hoping we can change. When I think of Engineering, I think of trades that tend to have a firm grasp on ethics and take the consequences of what they build very seriously. I know that organizations like the ACM and IEEE espouse those same virtues, and I think they are not only worthy virtues but also important. Something worth being uncomfortable - or even discarded by less ethical companies - in order to defend.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Yes.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER51> Very much so. Worked on a system that coordinated vehicle registration for car fleets - it ended up being built into a system for repossession of cars from payday loan defaultors.

That triggered my move to education and medical software.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER52> Maybe this is my own hubris speaking, but over my career as a dev, I've worked on a few projects that lacked _vision._ I wouldn't say I regret the work because I learned quite a lot on these projects and none of them had a negative impact on society. But I do regret all the time spent in a sort of disengaged malaise rolling out features for projects I didn't believe in.

<comment><USER53> That. I realize more and more the value of working on something one can be proud of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I regret every RPA project we have to build. It's just so stupid and avoidable by only buying things with APIs.

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

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

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

So stupid.

<comment><USER55> Where does most of the maintenance of the RPA come from? Is it UI changes, edge cases in state (e.g. need to re-login), or other things?

<comment><USER54> Well it's a range of things, this week it was a SAP update that changed the necessary flow because the render speeds changed in the SAP ui.

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

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

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

<comment><USER55> Right on. In many ways, makes a lot of sense: UI automation is a quick-to- implement fix which addresses symptoms, with maintainability being the tradeoff. API integration (a la Mulesoft) can require an overhaul in a whole philosophy of organization and delivery, even though it's fundamentally more sustainable.

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

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

<comment><USER56> What's cool about UI integration is that the interface is uniform - it's text and clickS and keystrokes.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Yeah, a long time ago, I went to work in a little consulting company. It was perhaps 6 people.

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER58> Several years ago I worked for a company in the advertising industry, initially helping develop seedy browser extensions and "toolbars" that would essentially (among other things) inject referral cookies whenever the user's browser landed on a page that we had an affiliate link for.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER59> I worked on a concert/event ticket selling platform that sells tickets for far too much. It pretended it was selling tickets for sold-out events, but often it was nowhere near sold out.

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

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

<comment><USER60> even if you're not working for ticketmaster, i hope everyone who does work at ticketmaster has trouble sleeping at night. you provide nothing to no one.

<comment><USER61> I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression that ticketmaster's customers are the performers, who want to maximize their revenue without appearing greedy, so they give ticketmaster a cut for taking the blame.

<comment><USER62> Yes, but ticketmaster are also secretly co-operating with third-party resellers that want to tout their tickets, although they claim otherwise. So, even the listed price with fees is not the real price.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I worked on HR software that was mainly used to decide who to fire. And when I say "fire", I mean large scale restructuration, the kind of restructuration you read in newspaper because it's such a large scale. It wasn't always used to do evil, and in all fairness sometimes a company has to restructure or die, which I think would be worse.

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

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

<comment><USER64> What if any attributes or characteristics can employees exhibit to reduce the likelihood of being canned by the product?

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I left a boring job at a company that I respected for what I thought was a good, growing company.

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

(I wish I stayed at my old job.)

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

</comment><comment><USER66> I worked as a data scientist trying to figure out how to raise gas prices to the maximum price the market would bear (experimentation mainly). Began to feel really uncomfortable when I realized this wasn't improving society in any meaningful way so I noped out of there once I found a new job.

<comment><USER67> Higher gas prices == more efficient usage of gas. And more incentive to move away from gasoline. Isn't that good for the environment and for society in general?

<comment><USER68> High prices always disproportionally affect the lower classes which are also the most dependant on motor transport to get to their jobs (tend to live outside cities too). As such you're pricing a lot of people out of being afford to drive to work while giving them alternatives that are only affordable to the most wealthy (Teslas are still a luxury product only affordable to a low % of population).

<comment><USER67> In the short term expensive gas does hurt the lower classes. In the long term, the need for every household to own and maintain at least one automobile is a much bigger drag on the finances of the poor than the well-off.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I read somewhere that people who invented ships also invented shipwrecks. You work (design, sell, market, manage & ship) on something hoping that a lot of people use your baby and sometimes when it takes off you end up knowing that its used for terrible stuff as well. If i created Whatsapp, i would presumably be having a hard time digesting the fact that its now being used in countries like India to spread fake news. I am not someone who has been in this position yet(fortunately), i would presume there would be a sense of guilt and anger whenever this happens. But the question/ thing to ponder on is does the medium(products you created) have the problem or the messenger(folks who use them) ?

<comment><USER70> Well if we berate Whatsapp where do we stop? Whatsapp is just an enabler. If there was only IRC to communicate I am sure fake news could use that channel as well.

<comment><USER71> Yeah, but if without the enabler the world would be better off on net, there still is a case against WhatsApp.

<comment><USER72> Congratulations, you just argued against TV, the internet, cars, and everything else that enables stuff :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Just remember: you can't fix society with technology. Everything you do is a weapon. In the wrong hands it will harm other people.

<comment><USER74> A weapon or a tool, it is the intention and the skillful hand that selects.

<comment><USER75> Some things can only be a weapon, other things may be used as a weapon.

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

<comment><USER48> Definitely - and the intent of the business model and the business itself. I've worked on products before that on the surface (and even what I was told by the folks running it) could have done good. But the company had no intention of using it for good. They had every intention of lying about where they were really making their money though.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I worked as a sysadmin in a startup which developed ContentID contender (video recognition). Fun fact: half of the IT department was using torrents with no regrets.

edit: wording.

<comment><USER40> I once saw a documentary about a tobacco magnate. He didn't smoke, because, of course, it was bad for one's health.

<comment><USER77> I heard TV network execs saying they don't let their children watch TV because it's bad

<comment><USER78> Similarly a bunch of tech bigwigs have admitted to having strict limits for their children being on the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I already commented here but I have an even worse confession - I've operated an affiliate payday loan website. For me it was a good paying gig at $100 per application. I have no doubt I ruined lives as I was well aware of the types of people who operate those types of businesses. At the time I didn't really have an alternative and I was much younger. The old me looks back at that time with great shame, something I'd never mention to anyone and I wish I could take it back.

<comment><USER48> Thank you for sharing that. I hope that you continue to share this story.

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Well. In a way.

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

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

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

<comment><USER81> I don't think anyone holds the developers responsible. At the end of the day most people are upset about the business model, not the content.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER80> Catch 22: people will not buy your game if your development and marketing budget aren't high (taking a long time to make a game is a huge increase in development budget). Yet sales of a game at the industry standard price-point barely cover the costs already. It would only take 2 failed AAA titles for my company to be on the verge of bankruptcy.

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

<comment><USER82> It _should_ get harder every year to make money on games since there's so much already out there. There is less room for novelty and less reason to explore an ever-widening selection of games to kill time with. The big game publishers that are pumping out new editions of the same old game all the time are not providing that much value for all the work they're doing. Content isn't what makes games great, IMO, it's the novelty of the experience of interacting with it that draws me. Who says there should be continued growth all the time in that sector? Why wouldn't we get so efficient at entertaining ourselves that the revenues top out or dry up? What if the next big thing is discovering there doesn't always need to be a next big thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I worked for one of the largest auction companies in the world, which specializes in agriculture and construction equipment (should not be too hard to find). It was initially just fine, but like many others in the thread it was soul crushing and led to burnout and depression, subsequently forcing me to re-evaluate many aspects of my life. It was a complicated choice. It paid double what I made previously and I was out of work for many months at the time. It brought me to a better city for a while. But I didn't really accomplish anything there. I was ostracized from the culture of the place—which I suspected I would be before taking the job—because at heart I'm very far from the drab "yes" people that work there, play the politics, and wear slacks. It was novel that I wanted to work elsewhere than my group cube thing. I tried and failed to use the shitty HP ThickBook workstation that was assigned to me, ultimately bringing my own mac and being the only dev to have one, because they're for designers. I stayed too long and should have left before they fired me, but it's tough to quit. I just kept thinking "Ya things are going very badly, but maybe if I persevere we can get this done".

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

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

</comment><comment><USER84> When I was a kid I joined a crackers' group. With them I learned very strong programming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER85> > _I feel immoral for being so successful on the stock market!!!! I just > couldn 't help it, my program was TOO successful_

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

<comment><USER82> I don't understand why this is not believable. If someone has a conscious and believes in fairness, why shouldn't they feel bad about exploiting a market to profit without creating value? That's being a bit of a leech, which some people are fine with, and others are not.

<comment><USER85> The OP said he would have felt fine had his returns been limited to 10%. I hope you realize your characterization of returns ("profit without creating value") can be applied whether his program yielded 10% returns or 400%. The moral dilemma for someone who has a conscious that you describe would be choosing to invest in the first place (is investing on the stock market creating value?) or choosing an investment strategy (is this certain strategy creating value?).

<comment><USER82> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> At my first full time software development job, the company I worked for had a telemarketing B2B call center. It was run by a web application that controlled the agent's phone via some ActiveX TAPI components. I modified the software so it could work with Skype, so the company could open new offices without having to set up some crazy expensive phone system. The company was happy but I'm sure I helped inconvenience and annoy countless people. I'm sure there's a similar story behind plenty of the more modern forms of this like robocalls and phone number spoofing.

</comment><comment><USER87> I worked for a small business to track surgical trays by bar code and rfid chips. I was fired after I found out they wanted to use the code to track people and invade their privacy. I raised ethical issues only to be told ethics does not matter only the bottom line.

<comment><USER33> I wonder if you can blow the whistle and raise it with your country's privacy regulator?

<comment><USER87> When I became mentally ill from the stress nobody seems to take me seriously anymore.

Facebook tracks people too using their own smartphones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I think in tech it is hard to see how the product you build is going to be used sometimes. If I work on something in AWS say EMR which enables the "evil corp" to analyze data and influence election outcome. But the same platform can be used by CERN to further their research work.

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

</comment><comment><USER88> Worked on behavior manipulation via social networks back in the day. It was supposed to be used to introduce energy saving habits into people's minds. Got me very depressed a few years ago, but now I got over it, realized I was just a replaceable piece of a big puzzle and if not me, somebody else would have done it.

</comment><comment><USER89> Long ago I worked in Credit Default Swaps. I was naive and did not understand the concept then. I created many reporting and trading applications over 2 years before realizing. This was 2008. I was shocked later.

</comment><comment><USER90> I was a technical director for about 5 weeks. It was a huge opportunity. But quickly, I found out we had more customers sueing us than paying us, for promising stuff (before my time) the company couldn't possibly deliver (no one could) on time and budget.

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

</comment><comment><USER79> I've designed many e-commerce stores and helped improve conversions for a ton of companies most of which sell stuff. I regret being a cog in a system that propels consumerism but food has to be put on the table.

<comment><USER91> It wasn't really the consumerism of it that bugged me the most about working in e-commerce. We where pretty honest about what we sold, entertainment and general stuff you could live without. What I didn't like was implementing instant loans as a payment option.

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

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

<comment><USER79> That would bother me too. For me, just convincing people to buy stuff they don't really need makes me feel guilty. I often wish I could work in an industry that helps the planet or even stay in e-commerce as long as it sells products aimed at improving environment, I just don't know how to switch over or where.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I worked in government affairs division of a major pharmaceutical company. I usually create documentation and economic models that justify value of high price medicines. Anyways one day a jurisdiction came back to us saying they have noticed off label use and that they won't be funding them anymore. I worked tirelessly over two weeks to build out a medical review and economic model which showed it was better then the alternative. We came to an agreement on a discounted price and all parties were happy. However, I soon realized the company would provide compassionate use as they don't want to alter prescribing behaviour, I just took xx millions from a struggling public system... I did get a raise but quit shortly after.

</comment><comment><USER93> About a year ago I worked on a system that helped a political party in my country to keep track of their "associates" in order to get some advantage in the election. They lost, but after I finally saw what the whole deal was I quitted at that company.

</comment><comment><USER94> My first job out of school was for a U.S. defense contractor. I told myself for a while that we weren't directly doing any harm (our software was basically a terrible front end over a database, not eg. weapons research), but when it came down to it I don't know who all was using our software or for what purpose. Sadly, I didn't really realize that until years after I'd left.

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

</comment><comment><USER95> I've never worked on a product that I thought was evil. But I have worked on a product crufty enough that if I had had a chance to inspect the codebase before taking the job, I would have passed. One of my employers had a Java codebase that had been hacked on for fifteen years or so, and had all sorts of weird stuff in it. Working on it was a huge pain.

</comment><comment><USER96> One of my worst, and final freelance web development gigs was for a foot worship events website. Not porn - this was an event website featuring a calendar of upcoming foot worship parties/nights in London. I was a bit naive at the time and didn't really know what it was all about, or really anything about the BDSM scene for that matter. Definitely not kink-shaming here - everybody should be absolutely free to express their sexuality however they see fit as long as it is consensual and does not cause any actual harm - but I honestly felt really weirded out after doing it. It didn't pay well at all, and I needed the money.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER97> A bit too easy to book subscription model with clients that ask if they can pay next month because they are out of cash for this month... And a buggy old product that's no fun...

<comment><USER97> Oh and after school I did flash fly-over ads. (for BMW, Lego and Ariel though, so cool for me)

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Yes, advertising. I started working on "Kindle Special Offers", a product I actually liked as a customer before getting the job. I knew what the team worked on and actively chose that team out of a dozen options. It's advertising, but I think is at the very least not "bad" advertising. There was even some really interesting work with automatically generating ads for books based on recommendations.

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

</comment><comment><USER99> Pfff, I got plenty of choice

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

Facebook scapers used by companies similar to Cambrige Analitica

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

And much more...

<comment><USER100> This comment comes across as though you simply don't care

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> I worked on an online poker platform software as a developer and team leader, where client was professional poker player with zero vision about the product. It was a mess. Team was also terrible and irresponsible. 2 years and 150 KLOC later, we had a product without any vision.

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

</comment><comment><USER102> Yes, I worked in "anti-piracy" for some years and that whole industry is a mass of delusions of adequacy, coupled to a client base of some of the most morally torpid, personally horrible people I've ever encountered. The products we worked on we're basically to assist bastardry by Big Content, and most were poorly built (one team led by a dessicated chain smoking codger with a right hand manjaw of a coder, basically used Java with the same attention to detail one would expect from a lemur on meth) and another kept shoving out POCs into production with zero sense of a release process. It was a total mess, for products that should all have been stillborn.

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

Take that as you will.

</comment><comment><USER103> Working for a betting exchange is something I'm not proud of. At times it was liberating because I didn't care about the company and would just leave early and not put my soul into it. At times it was soul crushing because I felt it's a meaningless endeavour and didn't want to connect with my coworkers as I didn't think much of them although some of them were skilled. Still I wanted to do a good job and learn new stuff. I stayed with the company 9 months and only accepted it because I perceived it as my ticket out of my native country to a big european city as this betting company had a good reputation in the software industry.

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER104> When I was finishing up University I had been interning at a company (for around 2 years) that had some roots in IDW ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_Data_Warehouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_Data_Warehouse) \- interesting if you haven't ever heard of it); really just made me think of certain 'other' gov agencies and their trove of data, but I never considered how it was searched. We were all about the crawling/searching (indexing) of data from all kinds of sources (websites/emails/various dbs). One product ran a search against this dataset (using name, email, address, phone #, ssn, and other pii) and would spider out a graph with all possible connections and other associated data. Not sure regret is the right word, as it was cool, but I can only imagine how it's being used. The company has gone under more than once actually, since it was being funded by only 1-2 clients whose funding wasn't very stable.

<comment><USER105> Sounds a lot like what Palantir does. Also, fuck Palantir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> I was a nuclear weapons tech in the USAF. I'm proud of that. But I've regretted working for plenty of _people_.

</comment><comment><USER107> Kind of. On the one hand, I've never regretted working on a project because it's unethical, and the only one that could even remotely count as that was something related to gaming those cookie law pop ups.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER108> I only regret experiencing poor leadership styles (but am also thankful to see them.) The product is a result of the team led by leadership so any and all of the factors in there ultimately lead to what is built.

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

</comment><comment><USER109> I did my masters on compiling Matlab, which involved coding parts of the compiler. Compilers are cool, Matlab isn't. My decision was based at least partly on easy availability of funding, and I was a poor grad student at the time.

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

<comment><USER110> Honoustly curious: What's wrong with Matlab? Never need it nowadays, but I always enjoyed working on Matlab projects in University.

<comment><USER109> It has a very strange type system. Funny syntax. Lots of unexpected behavior. Also could be compiled relatively easily if it behaved better, there are a lot of funky edge cases. It's also bad as a general computing language - <USER3> where you aren't just computing on a bunch of matrices.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> I'll just say I'll never get close to adtech ever again

</comment><comment><USER112> I once worked on an analytics product for a company. The product would get the details of your machine's hardware details, commonly used softwares, most visited websites and so on. This product was installed on selected list of people who where made aware of the data being collected.

<comment><USER113> And many times more people who were not aware at all...

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> I worked for one of those companies that created user-generated content (UGC) marketing platform. The basic idea was picking images from Instagram (IG) and feeding it to the client's site so that they could have the lookbook page. I am not an IG user but was surprised IG exposed these images for anyone to use. The original poster on IG has no idea something of this sort happens. If I recall correctly the client can also use the images in FB ads and stuff.

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

</comment><comment><USER115> I ended up being the sole developer for a system that managed vehicle trackers installed in fleet vehicles.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER116> i worked on an ad campaign for an international company and was instructed by my client to mislead customers and hide important information. i quit the job at TBWA advertising and switched to the startup world.

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

</comment><comment><USER117> Com'on people! where are the folks who are working on Facebook and Instagram? No regrets?

</comment><comment><USER118> I made something that is good (the Python module for the current Microsoft Office file format) and years later, despite handing over the project, I'm still harassed for free help in my personal mailbox by staff at Indian outsourcing firms.

</comment><comment><USER119> I remember a previous HN discussion where someone mentioned working on improving design for a conveyor belt, but only on the drawing board so to speak, and only when they went to see it in action did they find out to their dismay that it was being used to transport chicken to get sorted and have their beaks singed and all that.

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

</comment><comment><USER120> Yes, a few of my gigs were, probably not evil but certainly low in value for actual humans. But we all have to eat, and circumstances sometimes send you off looking for whatever job or client you can get right now.

</comment><comment><USER121> Iep, a platform for mobile ads management.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER122> When we initially put our our web app [https://www.whataportrait.com](https://www.whataportrait.com) all our initial attempts to get traction failed. It's only when you sit down, get a global view, assess your actions and reactions ti them that you get to the core of whats goig on with your product. You slice big issues in smaller steps - assess each and if you get the needle moving then you do more of what gets the needle moving and the cycle continues..

</comment><comment><USER123> Few years ago, while a CS undergrad, I created a WeChat mini-prog to optimize and streamline the hiring and management of foreign actors and background actors(movie biz) in Beijing and surrounding areas.

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER124> I worked at a company where we built surveillance video recorders. We used GNU/Linux as the OS in the video recorder and we didn't have anywhere in the docs saying so. I got lured in by the fact that it was a Linux company (so yes it wasn't a secret) but then it turned out that we did a botched job respecting the GPL. What bothered me was that nobody really cared about it.

<comment><USER125> How exactly did you violate the GPL? It is not forbidden to use GNU/Linux or free software in commercial projects.

<comment><USER124> You have at the very least to say that what you are distributing is GPL software and offer the posibility to give the source code if requested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER126> Whoever wins this "blockchain all the refugees!1!" RFP from UNHCR is going to regret it: [https://www.unhcr.org/admin/sts/5be980924/request- proposals-...](https://www.unhcr.org/admin/sts/5be980924/request-proposals- rfp20181178-addendum-15112018-establishment-frame-agreements.html)

</comment><comment><USER127> I once worked on a monitoring system (internal and for clients) that was build in house. Everything was configured in an Oracle database.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER128> I already worked in Marketing in the banking industry and a lot of times I felt that we were trying to sell products that weren't always of the best interest or useful for clients at that moment of their lifecycle.

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

</comment><comment><USER129> Yep. A few.

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

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

</comment><comment> village-idiot I don't think I did any harm, but I came close to regretting my work.

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

</comment><comment><USER130> I once worked for a Slot machine game company. The CEO said the main reason they developed a Slots game versus any other type of game, was that they knew people were addicted to Slots. I left shortly after and regretted working there ever since.

</comment><comment><USER131> Yes. Some of the DoD work I did was probably a net-negative for the world.

</comment><comment><USER132> A couple of times, yes.

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

Now for the product themselves, nothing was lost.

</comment><comment><USER133> I worked for Pearson digital publishing. Their digital products are crap and they charge way too much for them. Big Pharma of education business.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've talked about this in a few places before... when this subject comes up, I try to talk about it because I think the ethics aspect of software engineering often goes overlooked in our industry. I'll copypasta from the last time I spoke about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER134> Better question would be: have you ever not?

</comment><comment><USER135> I regretted wasting so much of my life on a product (opportunity cost), if that counts.

</comment><comment><USER136> I worked on a nuclear plant subsystem despite being anti-nuclear.

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER137> Yes, anything that eventually got patented.

</comment><comment><USER138> I was asked to create a system to track ass in seat time.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER139> Are you serious?

<comment><USER138> Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER140> yes

<comment><USER141> Thanks for sharing this amazing experience with us ^_^

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> Back in early 2000's I was working at the hottest luxury real-estate digital agency in NYC as an Art Director, and got to redesign Trump.com. I met Drumph briefly..( if you told me then he would end up being the POTUS.. i would have pulled a Cristopher Walken Epileptic fit )

FFWD..

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

</comment><comment><USER143> Yep, and I quit.

<comment><USER144> Riveting.

<comment><USER145> Aircraft wings?</comment></comment></comment>


Concurrent Programming Constructs and First-Class Logic Engines - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/ALP/2011/03/concurrent-programming-constructs-and-first-class-logic-engines/

<comment><USER2> I hadn't been aware of Tarau's work:

<http://www.cse.unt.edu/~tarau/>

The real treasure looks like being his theory of isomorphisms:

<http://logic.csci.unt.edu/tarau/research/2010/ISO.pdf>

I haven't read it all yet, but it reminds me a bit of the isomorphic kernel described here:

[http://www.informatik.uni- marburg.de/~rendel/unparse/rendel1...](http://www.informatik.uni- marburg.de/~rendel/unparse/rendel10invertible.pdf)

Discusion on LtU here:

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4191>

Sometimes wading through the noise on HN is worth it when gems like this turn up.

Mik

<comment><USER2> P.S. on seeing them implement their 'interactors' in Java, one could also quote Virding's Rule:

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule#Erlang...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule#Erlang_follow- up)

Mik

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My kind of HN article! Food for thought for my own concurrent logic engine. Thanks for posting this.</comment>


A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines - <AUTHOR> http://zooie.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/a-comparison-of-open-source-search-engines-and-indexing-twitter/

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the comments asked about how each engine handles updates, which is an interesting topic to me.

Unfortunately reproducing the results would be somewhat difficult: while zooie open-sourced the code ([http://github.com/zooie/opensearch/tree/b03e41ab04a480edd66c...](http://github.com/zooie/opensearch/tree/b03e41ab04a480edd66c4726bcb558afdeb04a94/exp/software/ohsumed)), the test twitters and trec content aren't as freely available.

<comment><USER2> the trec data is (linked in the README) <http://trec.nist.gov/data/t9_filtering.html></comment></comment>


HBO Max cranks up the Widevine DRM, leaves Linux users in the cold - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/hbo-max-cranks-up-the-widevine-drm-leaves-linux-users-in-the-cold/ <comment><USER2> > Widevine is a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology > provider used by Google Chrome and Firefox web browsers (and some of its > derivates), Android MediaDRM, Android TV, and other consumer electronics > devices. Widevine Technologies was purchased by Google in 2010

Yet again, Google as the root issue:

from [https://www.widevine.com/news](https://www.widevine.com/news) (April 01 '20)

> All Widevine browser-based integrations (platforms and applications) must > support VMP. VMP support is NOT available for Linux platforms.

Previously did some work with DRM streaming video hitting (MS) Playready, (Google) Widevine, (Apple) Fairplay. Google's Widevine was the out standing issue for server side ARM support. Google's products are the software equivalent of throwing half a bucket of paint at a large wall, not fully covering it, then saying the wall is painted; followed by ignoring any issues.

<comment><USER3> Huh? The vast, vast majority of Widevine streaming is done to ARM devices - Qualcomm and Exynos chips for Android, which have a verified media path in hardware.

<comment><USER4> Is "verified" code for user hostile?

(I would say owner, but clearly purchasing a phone does not grant full ownership.)

<comment><USER5> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ars is a few weeks late to the game here. Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24094386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24094386)

<comment><USER7> I don't really get the melodrama of most of the top comments in that the old thread nor the current headline. Everyone is bemoaning how this is what drives people to piracy... but does Chrome not work anymore? Is the bar for resorting to piracy that low? It's hard to feel sympathetic when the starting position is presented as "It's broken, we've been forsaken!" but then on inspection it turns out to really be a case of "It doesn't work in a way that fits our politics, we've been forsaken!" I get that there's a lot of idealism in play but the histrionics just make the author and the community look dishonest.

<comment><USER6> Desktop Linux and the anti-DRM movement have always been that way and the intersection of both is even worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Piracy to the rescue I guess?

<comment><USER9> I haven't kept up with the scene but as long as set top boxes & sticks exist, can't you just buy a $10 HDCP decoder on eBay and re-compress with minimal loss?

<comment><USER6> I guess the Hollywood-industrial complex has to pretend that doesn't exist because it would mean the emperor has had no clothes for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Linux desktop*. We often don't think of them as linux, but Apple tvOS is BSD and virtually every other TV and smart box is Android (linux).

<comment><USER11> BSD is unrelated to Linux.

<comment><USER10> BSD is a unix-like operating system the same as Linux. They're unrelated in the same way two brands of skateboards are unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Usually the solution is to use Windows, Mac or one of their supported devices[1]. I doubt Linux was ever on their radar.

For most people this is a non-issue and can be easily solved.

[1] [https://help.hbomax.com/Answer/Detail/20](https://help.hbomax.com/Answer/Detail/20)

<comment><USER13> Linux is explicitly on their radar. What do you think Android or Chromebooks are?

<comment><USER3> > Linux is explicitly on their radar. What do you think Android or Chromebooks > are?

Android and Chromebooks don't intrinsically get you the content either. They just tend to run on hardware that's supported or include closed source components for big chunks of their graphics systems and management engines including chains of trust that are signed as being the code the other sections expect.

The average desktop Linux system has no interest in that, so it doesn't happen.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Browse public profiles on LinkedIn without signing in - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linkedin-for-unregistered/fbgocpeinpehngepmppookhlhogaihij <comment><USER2> Fyi this probably violates LinkedIn ToS

</comment><comment><USER3> How it works?</comment>


Tumblr's Porn Ban Could Kill It - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/futuresin/tumblrs-porn-ban-could-kill-it-85b31c76a470 <comment><USER2> Verizon Oath is terrible at content and this is just the latest failure. A few years ago, they imagined they'd be a content producer like Netflix. Have you heard of any great TV shows or music or movies produced by Verizon? Of course not. A huge amount of Tumblr's traffic had to be NSFW and now it, and the viewers who wanted that, will go away.</comment>


FCC AWS-3 Spectrum Auction Closes at $45.9B - <AUTHOR> https://auctionbidding.fcc.gov/auction/index.htm?CFID=5570645&CFTOKEN=11542522&jsessionid=2NntJKkcBM1WnhhvGnQprN4Zv49pj2VGN3KV01wS9BCqpVkWhQJ3!819142837!-1117002762!1422550236764

<comment><AUTHOR> The auction had a reserve price of $10.25 billion, with optimistic expectations at less that half of the ultimate closing bid total. The spectrum available for bidding was in the 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1780 MHz, and 2155-2180 MHz bands.</comment>


3D Without Glasses, With Nightmarish Disfigurement - <AUTHOR> http://lonelysandwich.com/post/2756106707/3d-without-appetite

<comment><USER2> is this for real?? i feel like it's a really nice special effect.

and i can't stop cracking up.

<comment><USER3> Great thing! I can already see the infomercials for this:

 _"I wear prescription glasses. Now I can watch 3D movies without piling on glasses and looking like a freak!"_

 _"Now I can watch 3D while diving!"_

 _"My kids just love it, and I love it too! No handles to break off, no glass to scratch... We used to go through at least four pairs of glasses a year in my family; Winkeroo is going to last a lifetime!"_

<comment><USER4> ".....looking like a freak!"

wow! as if you don't look like a freak when your eyes blink like a dragonfly wings!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He doesn't really seem to act like he notices the constant blinking (winking?). I wonder if it is actually an issue.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would prefer to wear glasses rather than blink at that rate.

</comment><comment><USER6> I once had this thing called Bells Palsy for 3 weeks where a nerve in your face gets blocked and the whole side of your face sags. Felt like I had it again in both sides of my face after watching this guy. I think he's serious.</comment>


Arduino The Documentary - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/18539129

<comment><USER2> This is a great intro to Open Source Hardware.</comment>