I did retail and finance, so, yeah. Me too. 
One place, as part of “Management Training” would require countless hours of unpaid overtime. I hated that place.
I suppose not reporting daily violations of company policy and state labor laws might be considered unethical. But I’d rather keep my job than test the company’s claim that they won’t retaliate against whistleblowers.
Yes.
That baffles me. Why would they make that request?
I had one job which I viewed as so unethical, I quit.
It was a home sharing nonprofit - people sign up to live with complete strangers because they are desperate. Several elements of this job struck me as highly unethical. Most of the unethical behavior stemmed from the President’s pathological fear of getting sued.
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No informed consent. People were not advised of the legal complications that could arise from having someone move in, rent-free, for an extended period of time. They only learned about the law when they tried to kick the person out.
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Gross violations of privacy (IMO.) Anyone who was home sharing was required to sign a release form allowing their psychologist/psychiatrist to answer extensive personal questions about the candidate, and a full list of medications that person was taking was made available to the homeowner. Some questions absolutely need to be asked i.e. ''Has this person ever demonstrated they are a harm to themselves or others?" but the extensive nature of the questions (family history, abuse history, etc) and the requirement for medication disclosure was wholly inappropriate. I was amazed how many therapists went along with it - including, I’m sorry to say, those that didn’t have a disclosure form officially on record.
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If for whatever (almost always arbitrary reason) someone was disqualified from the program, we weren’t allowed to tell them, because whatever reason we gave them could also be a lawsuit. So people would be on our waiting list for months, calling constantly asking when they can be a part of the program, and we had to blow them off knowing they would never be a part of the program. We were not allowed to ever tell them the reason for their rejection, or that they were even rejected at all.
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Number 3 was an issue because the President made decisions about who was suitable based entirely on her own shitty judgment, making such broad assumptions and leaps in logic based on such insignificant factors that it was impossible to replicate her way of doing things. For example, if someone phrases something in such a way, it means they have a drug problem. People with certain mental health diagnoses were viewed as a high risk of violence apropos of zero evidence. Total WTF logic. Which was problematic, because she was a micro-managing freak and was trying to teach me her fucked up decision-making methodology.
I still think about that place and wonder if I should have tried to take it down. AFAIK she was violating no laws, so the only option would have been reporting her to the ethics board that issued her social work license. Pulling her license wouldn’t have affected her ability to run the nonprofit. I almost never hate people, I haven’t spoken to that woman in years, yet I still think of her and her shitty business model with nothing but contempt.
Require, no. Allow, yes.
I was a PI (corporate only) for 10 years. While I (pretty much) never did anything that was actually illegal, I am positive that a lot of our targets would tell you that we had behaved unethically or immorally. It was our job. At one point, I spent three months undercover working in a manufacturing facility. I made “friends,” attended parties, told people elaborate lies about my background, etc. Probably the LEAST of what we did was simply misrepresent ourselves to the subjects of our investigations, as well as to innocent co-workers and staff who had nothing to do with the investigation. I’ve impersonated traffic surveyors, telephone technicians, accountants, janitorial staff, door-to-door salesmen, customers, dogsitters, and even a potential client for an engineering consulting firm.
Ironically, I quit working for that firm when they actually did start planning a business move that would, in my opinion, have been fraudulent. I went to talk to the owner, got no satisfaction, and gave my notice on the spot.
My job is to represent people who have acted unethically and immorally.
Ironically, it requires me to refrain from doing so.
During the 60s I worked in the testing laboratory of a major cement manufacturing company in the UK. The srrength of the cement varied from batch to batch. One day a visitor offered me £200 (a LOT of money back then!l) to falsify the result … I refused … a week later I was given my notice (because, so I was told, the other staff in the laboratory didn’t want to work with me).
Some uber-religious men will not interact with a woman, and cannot touch them at all. We always keep a man around who can handle the register. And this idea includes all religions (Jewish, Muslim & Christian). I find it it incredibly stupid in this day and age, but it is legal.
Good thing he didn’t ask you to bake him a wedding cake.
Regards,
Shodan
The products my company produces contribute to climate change, traffic fatalities, lack of urbanization, and the off-shoring of what were traditionally US jobs.
Thanks for the intro there Bathisar.
I’m probably the Doper with the highest CO2 footprint. I get through roughly 10,000 gallons of fossil fuel per workday. With almost all the consequences delivered directly to the stratosphere. Given what we now know of global climate change the ethics of that are kinda rocky. Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, the current job is very hyper-legal. And almost entirely moral.
There was/is always an interesting moral/ethical debate at the core of military service in peace and even more, in war.
My time in the software industry included a lot of writing RFP responses that were mostly fantasy. There was one proposal to a government agency where I told the CEO that he’d better pray we don’t win this thing because there’s no way we could do what he’d insisted we promise. I said we’d be bankrupted even *before *they sued us to the ends of the Earth.
He was an utter psychopath and just blinked uncomprehendingly at me. That was one of the biggest straws that broke my camel and got me out of there. I was a slow learner about that stuff.
I never was and never would have since I’m such a goody-goody. Before my dad retired, there were things going on at his company that were kinda hinky and he was ignored when he raised questions. So he just kept good records to cover his ass and did his job. Dunno if anything ever happened after he was gone, but the company is still in business 20+ years later so who knows.
Me too.
… remember that thing with the epipens…?
I’m not allowed to name the company I was working for. Confidentiality agreements, yadda yadda. But while I do consider that it is ethical to do my best to help their undertrained, kept-in-the-dark, trying to do their best lab techs and production people survive another working day, doing it for that particular company was not my favorite moment.
I’ve worked for several pharma companies and I’ve worked for one which, being aviation, is officially classified as “part of the military complex” ( :ghost noises: ). The planes people were just fine; I’ve worked for them twice and would be happy to do so again. Each pharma company leaves me more reluctant to accept another one.
No. I’m a software performance engineer. The closest to the edge I get is deliberate optimization for benchmarks. We have a policy of never optimizing in a way that could only affect the benchmark, but this is a fairly fuzzy concept. If I optimize a routine that is only a bottleneck for a particular benchmark, but in principle could be a bottleneck anywhere, then is that a problem? It’s a judgment call. Fortunately, 95% of my time is spent on truly general-purpose optimizations and there’s no real question about the value.
Did you follow the USFDA data integrity warning letters and consent decrees from a couple of year ago? Entertaining in a profoundly twisted way.
Nothing unethical or immoral, but I wish things were different and my job didn’t need done.
I write control software for autonomous aircraft. I’m in a research group learning to apply AI to this task, and the machines are getting very good. We’ve successfully flown a few full-sized versions in a test range and it’s uncanny to watch them fly themselves and make their own decisions. Eventually this research will replace a lot of pilot’s jobs, probably by shrinking crew size to one. I don’t know how it will play out, but automating these jobs isn’t likely to improve career prospects for pilots.
And my son is an airline pilot.
This might be a nitpick, but to my knowledge, everyone is a member of at least 6 protected classes (i.e. presumably you have a race, therefore you are in the class of people protected from race-based discrimination).