[shipscode]

This is bad - but I doubt there's an engineer in here that hasn't written throwaway code to make a deadline, joked about some code they wrote being "job security" because it's so confusing, or picked a soon to be deprecated package to use because it was quicker to get up and running.

Ethics is lacking in our industry, and as more and more people are laid off, you're going to have the equivalent of tens of thousands of "dead mans switches" going off at every company just out of sheer disincentivization of quality that's become so common in today's engineering culture.

[63]

I'm aware of at least one project at $work that will definitely break at some point that no one but me knows how to fix. Despite my best efforts to leave breadcrumbs to good resources and an extensive ReadMe, I suspect if I'm gone they just won't care enough to fix it and let employees go back to doing things manually (based on what happens right now when I'm not available to jump on a fix immediately). I wonder how many inadvertant "dead-man switches" like this there are out there where the loss of specific employees can cause a disproportionate amount of damage entirely by accident.

[jjmarr]

If the project has so little impact that they won't bother maintaining it, that's not really job security.

[bee_rider]

I dunno, the ethics depends on the situation, right?

If the customer asks for shoddy workmanship in a system that will have some safety critical application that will hurt the general public, you have a the engineer’s ethical obligation to blow the whistle.

If the customer asks for shoddy workmanship because they don’t care to prioritize documentation and robustness in their ad system, that’s management’s prerogative. The customer can be trusted to represent themselves.

[morcus]

> written throwaway code to make a deadline

A deadline is a business decision. An engineer makes a tradeoff (incurring tech debt) in order to meet the business goal. How is this remotely an ethics issue?

[ttyprintk]

Good point. If you hadn’t met the deadline, there would be no opportunity to encounter the software functioning in any state.

[tbrownaw]

Really? Downplaying intentional sabotage on account of cutting corners to make deadlines being industry standard?

[chneu]

I think it's important to say that ethics are lacking from top to bottom. It isn't just devs who lack ethics. Companies do incredibly unethical things all the time and many folks act like not going along with it is somehow bad.

When the lil person gets a lil revenge we blow it way out of proportion because we're so incredibly desensitized to the constant barrage of unethical acts by executives and corporations.