Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
I created software that was used by call center agents to bid on “bathroom” break time slots and kept track of who was on break and actively punished those who didn’t follow the rules. It rewarded those that had higher performance and who took less breaks with higher priority. If an agent didn’t come back from their break a security guard would automatically be dispatched to find them. For the same company I also made software that reduced the same call agents to numbers and effectively automated the layoff&#x2F;termination process. It would contact security with orders to have people escorted out, and had a sinister double verification process that would check to verify the agent was actually fired, or else the responsible security guard would be punished via the same point system. Everything was done via e-mail and would come from “System” and at the time used fancy HTML e-mail templates that looked official. I would frequently hear people talk about how they received a “System e-mail” with a chill in their voice, not knowing I was the one responsible. People who I ate lunch with sometimes didn’t even really know. Embedded in each e-mail was a count-down timer to create a sense of urgency to do whatever was being asked before a “punishment” was applied.<p>After an agent had been terminated, their punishment points would decay over time until such a time they reached zero (or another configurable threshold depending on how desperate the company was for warm bodies), at which time they would be sent an e-mail to their personal e-mail (which was collected during the application process), inviting them to “re-apply”. Being an early telephony company we also would send them a robo-call with the “good news”. This process was known as a “life-cycle” and it was common in certain labor markets for employees to have many such lifecycles. Another way employees could stave off automated termination was to work for unpaid overtime, which offered to reduce their point values per unit of overtime worked. Everything was tracked to second granularity thanks to deep integration with phone switches and the adoption of the open source Asterisk CTI.<p>This orwellian automation terrorized the poor employees who worked there for years, long after I left, before it was finally shut down by court order. I had designed it as a plug-in architecture and when it was shut down there were many additional features, orders, and punishment_types.