Health-records software pushed opioids to doctors in secret deal with drugmaker
They put pop-up stealth advertisements, targeted at your doctor, into your electronic medical record, so that he or she would get you addicted to painkillers.<p>Software developers did this. For drug money. That&#x27;s just terrible, isn&#x27;t it? They shouldn&#x27;t have done that.<p>But even if the developers had ethical concerns, they had no recourse but to quit, and be replaced by someone else--who might get six months of work in before realizing that they are working for the baddies, and also deciding to either quit or die a little inside.<p>I would do that job. I would take that money. I don&#x27;t get a stupidly-inflated Valley salary with bonus RSUs, and I have bills to pay. I don&#x27;t have a union that can protect me from nonsense. I know it&#x27;s wrong. I would do it anyway, because I have been screwed by every company I have ever worked for, such that I learned that my ethics don&#x27;t matter. Money matters.<p>I want my kids to get an education without student loans, if they want it. I want to drive a car that isn&#x27;t older than they are. And I want to retire before I die. My ethics would only keep me from that. Apparently, the companies that aren&#x27;t managed by money-grubbing sociopaths just don&#x27;t hire where I live. So if you don&#x27;t want stuff like this to happen, make it actually mean something to have ethical objections, even for people working outside of California.<p>I build software that has probably contributed in a material way to human suffering. For far less money than a Silicon Valley developer might get paid to make a mobile app for on-demand dog-walking. Everyone in my building does it. Everyone in the building across the street does it. Companies that don&#x27;t hurt people as part of their business model aren&#x27;t hiring here. People that have a problem with it--or at least those who can&#x27;t hide that they do--don&#x27;t get the jobs.<p>So if you are currently on a high horse, I hope you enjoy the view from up there. You haven&#x27;t yet used your influence to help other workers--those with nigh-nonexistent power as an individual to influence the corporate employers that reluctantly hire them, and then reserve the right to fire at any time for any reason, or no reason.