[Intermernet]

I was talking about this with friends the other night. If you've been in the industry long enough, you've probably been party to creating something horrible. It takes a while for the reality of horribleness to crack the glamour of creation and monetary reward, but once it does, everyone I personally know has quit and lived with the regret.

I know people who have worked for adtech, gambling and HFT industries who now try to convince younger devs to avoid them. I personally worked briefly for a private prison corp, and I feel dirty and remorseful that I had anything to do with that industry.

[throwaway55717]

Due to an incarcerated family member, I had to deal with privately run prison telecom software, which was as awful and exploitative as you would expect, I could see where someone might feel guilty for working in this area. Evil business model.

But one of the worst things about the software was all the bugs. Silent failures so we couldn't tell what was happening, if it was a software problem or if our loved one was being prevented from communicating with us. The messaging and video call system failed us at some crucial moments and created a lot of emotional stress.

In fact I think this is part of the awful business model -- cut costs even if it hurts people.

Bad software can really make the lives of incarcerated people much worse. So if you were able to do a decent job on that software, whether it was prison telecom or internal tools for a prison contractor, you may have still had a more positive impact than you think, despite the broader business model being totally evil.

[Intermernet]

I was involved in the internal reporting. The clincher was when I saw the P&L for the internal sales of "luxury" items. Literally selling to a captive customer base.

It's weird that such a data point was the final straw, but eventually these small details build up and the whole edifice comes crashing down.

It's especially tragic as the company seemed to be full of talented, intelligent and nice people. Such seems to be the typical makeup of faceless evil.

[qingcharles]

The software on those "Temu" quality Android tablets they sell in prison is the worst I've ever encountered. And I've never seen an update of any note in the years they have been running them. If there is even a dev anywhere that could fix a bug and deploy it...

Anyone know the best way to pull an image off a locked-down Android tablet? I have a prison tablet here and I want to see what is inside the APKs.

[fragmede]

adb pull com.whatever will get you the apks which I think you don't need root for, but there isn't a way to just dd the whole image off, afaik.

[qingcharles]

Sadly I can't get into the settings. It boots into a custom menu, which might just be an app running over the default shell. I also can't get it into recovery mode. I need to do more digging.

[maeil]

> I know people who have worked for adtech, gambling and HFT industries who now try to convince younger devs to avoid them. I personally worked briefly for a private prison corp, and I feel dirty and remorseful that I had anything to do with that industry.

Sounds like getting to feel good after grabbing the bag. Particularly the first three considering how much they pay (even moreso if the gambling was crypto related).

> everyone I personally know has quit and lived with the regret.

Quit for a significantly lower wage job? Or quit in 2021 when they could trivially get another job likely with a raise?

I sound aggressive but these are serious, not rhetorical, questions. I don't know your friends, maybe they're the real deal, in which case massive kudos to them, I'm very happy to see others doing the same and I wish more were like us. But "living with the regret" is empty words if meaningful sacrifices haven't been made to atone for those sins.

FWIF, I left a job that paid more than twice what I'm able to get anywhere else without moving across the globe, for ethics reasons. And the industry wasn't as bad as the ones you've named besides HFT, which is imo pretty average when it comes to societal negative externalities for a tech company.