> I always wonder about the people that implement this.
In my experience behind that curtain, it's not the developers, it's the marketing and sales people. Yes, they have such meetings, then they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain to the developers why that particular approach is "necessary," while the developers try to explain that jumping through three hoops cannot possibly be simpler (to implement or use) than jumping through a single hoop.
i literally had one such person come to me one afternoon and say, "we need you to add such-and-such to the website, but do it in such a way that we can remove it quickly if needed because it's not entirely kosher and our competitors will report it as soon as one of them sees it." When i asked why they bother to do it the answer was (i kid you not), "because we expect to make more money through this than we will have to pay in the resulting fines."
No joke.
i told him no, i wouldn't knowingly participate in that (and i knew that my boss would back me up, so wasn't concerned about my job), so he went to some other guy who wasn't as stubborn and talked him into it.
> i told him no, i wouldn't knowingly participate in that (and i knew that my boss would back me up, so wasn't concerned about my job), so he went to some other guy who wasn't as stubborn and talked him into it.
This is the big problem with standing your ethical ground in software: They'll just find someone else who has no ethical standard to do it. One of my first programming jobs was writing graphics card drivers, and I was asked to write code to cheat a benchmark (basically detect the benchmark was running and send the code into an alternate faster path). I was a junior developer at the time, but I worked up the courage to refuse to do it, thinking I'll probably be fired. Boss said "Hey, no problem, we'll give you other tickets to work on. Bob, over there said he has no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code!" So a lone voice of ethics is never going to change things when the company itself is unethical.
In my experience behind that curtain, it's not the developers, it's the marketing and sales people. Yes, they have such meetings, then they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain to the developers why that particular approach is "necessary," while the developers try to explain that jumping through three hoops cannot possibly be simpler (to implement or use) than jumping through a single hoop.
i literally had one such person come to me one afternoon and say, "we need you to add such-and-such to the website, but do it in such a way that we can remove it quickly if needed because it's not entirely kosher and our competitors will report it as soon as one of them sees it." When i asked why they bother to do it the answer was (i kid you not), "because we expect to make more money through this than we will have to pay in the resulting fines."
No joke.
i told him no, i wouldn't knowingly participate in that (and i knew that my boss would back me up, so wasn't concerned about my job), so he went to some other guy who wasn't as stubborn and talked him into it.