A "Hippocratic Oath for developers" sounds like a great idea, but we vastly underestimate the number of jerkbags in the world.
People want validation. Line-level employees want praise from coworkers and bosses. Executives want praise from their peers, investors, industry, and press. Concepts like ethics, "right," or even this-is-good-for-thie-world isn't a concern when faced with "X will increase my social status and happiness with my peer brogrammers." What's X? It's anything possible, regardless of legal, right, wrong, or ethical.
A nontrivial number of companies use unethical methods (spam, false invites, false installs, phone and email address book capture, fake attractive profiles) to increase their vanity metrics. Employees see those methods as either: "this is bad, but it's sooooo good for us — look at all the lame n00bs who fall for our tricks" or "this is bad, and I'm ashamed to work here."
The ones who feel shame would take the Hippogrammer Oath. Those who revel in manipulating others and standing on their broken bodies will rake in all the profits while the good guys just sit around and "play nice."
Even the tech darlings of today used spammy methods to grow their initial user base. How do you grow your userbase to ten million when you're growing at a constant 5,000 per day? Obviously you want to "go viral." How does one just on a whim "go viral?" You can either become a meme, a social phenomenon, or spam and manipulate unsuspecting people. Spam is less work than creativity.
A lot of the things mentioned there are good reasons for a curated App Store approach. It's almost impossible to stop arbitrary programs from abusing features of the OS on which they run, unless you have control over which ban poorly behaving programs from ever reaching end users.
Alternatively, you can think of it as a good argument for open source. Take abuse of the notification area, for example: in Ubuntu this was eliminated by modifying every package in the archive. That's something a system like Windows with closed components belonging to dozens of different manufactures can't really do.
wow, I (like many others, obviously) have experienced many of the things described in the msdn blog article you linked to, yet never really thought critically that those things don't have to be there!
Things are going to look different to me now when I'm on a windows machine.
Nice post, but putting shortcuts in Quick Launch bar seems pretty standard these days and I like it as long as the installer asks. Also, he mentions the fact a programmer would have to hard code the file path ... I don't see why they couldn't write an algorithm to discover it instead.
I remember having to put my job on the line a few times for refusing to program / setup something awful.
One of the worst was when I was asked to combine all divisions email lists and send out a marketing email selling some overpriced book, this was against the Privacy Act (AU), against our privacy policy and highly unethical to boot, refused and was given a written warning.
It was a contract web development company I was working for, about ten years ago. One of our clients wanted some SEO work done, and my supervisor had recently been reading a lot about SEO. He started out reading white-hat stuff, but by this point he was delving into some black-hat research, and he essentially asked me to program a message-board spam-bot. I just told him straight up that I believed that would be unethical and I refused to do it, knowing full well that simply refusing to do assigned work could cost me job.
Thankfully, not only did this not cost me my job, it caused my supervisor to re-evaluate his own position and he decided to go back into completely white-hat SEO. And in the end, he actually thanked me for refusing to do that work.
> The ones who feel shame would take the Hippogrammer Oath. Those who revel in manipulating others and standing on their broken bodies will rake in all the profits while the good guys just sit around and "play nice."
I think it is important that we should realize this kind of mentality won't work. You might see bad people making money, but eventually it will be no good for them. Either they don't sustain, or the money is no good for them, or they can't sleep with all that money under their pillow. You will see lot of examples of this from history.
I have seen people who are ethical and right also make a lot of profits. May be not in the short term, but in the long term. The idea is, you don't go behind money, instead you do what you do best, and money will come behind you.
I am not a jerkbag yet multiple times I have put my beliefs to one side to implement something I really didn't want to do. It made me sad and demoralized for weeks. Yet the choice between sticking to values and feeding family is not a difficult one to make in the end.
This is why we got mad at the top of the Nazi regime, not the bottom. The workers just needed to feed their families, the ones at the top orchestrated the evils.
There were plenty people at the lower levels of the Nazi regime who were put in trial if they were considered to have committed crimes (e.g. concentration camp guards).
People want validation. Line-level employees want praise from coworkers and bosses. Executives want praise from their peers, investors, industry, and press. Concepts like ethics, "right," or even this-is-good-for-thie-world isn't a concern when faced with "X will increase my social status and happiness with my peer brogrammers." What's X? It's anything possible, regardless of legal, right, wrong, or ethical.
A nontrivial number of companies use unethical methods (spam, false invites, false installs, phone and email address book capture, fake attractive profiles) to increase their vanity metrics. Employees see those methods as either: "this is bad, but it's sooooo good for us — look at all the lame n00bs who fall for our tricks" or "this is bad, and I'm ashamed to work here."
The ones who feel shame would take the Hippogrammer Oath. Those who revel in manipulating others and standing on their broken bodies will rake in all the profits while the good guys just sit around and "play nice."
Even the tech darlings of today used spammy methods to grow their initial user base. How do you grow your userbase to ten million when you're growing at a constant 5,000 per day? Obviously you want to "go viral." How does one just on a whim "go viral?" You can either become a meme, a social phenomenon, or spam and manipulate unsuspecting people. Spam is less work than creativity.