Have you ever been asked to develop something unethical by your boss? Did you do it anyway? Tell us your story.

I didn't develop anything but when we're traveling the county doing construction and demolitions, the whole team would have me hack whatever wifi passwords I could.
Sometimes when we were staying in the same apartments that we were doing repairs on and such, boss man would distract residents while I snapped pics of routers and modems...I'm a terrible person...but he was even worse, I watched him steal furniture from storage units and one time had me and another worker load up two flatscreens into the company's trailer 🤐 contractors are evil and they will snoop through all of your shit if you give them the opportunity.

A former boss of mine made us use pirated specialized software from a huge international company. We installed that software on client machines too. I was stuck for months trying to customise something that could easily be fixed if we called customer support for the software. I wondered why he didn't just buy a license. Turns out my salary for those months cost a lot less than the license.I was so pissed off when I quit(that boss even owed me 2 salaries!I got them months later) that I was tempted to call the software company and snitch on him.

It happened with my friend here in India. He was working in a startup. They were using pirated Microsoft softwares Windows, VS, office.
Microsoft got to know they came with the Police and seized the laptops with pirated software. The startup company had to pay a hefty fine and then buy all licensed Softwares.

Happened to a friend of mine:

They were integrating a web app with a third party service the client was using, they needed an end point from the 3rd party but they rejected to provide them with an API key saying it should come directly from the client.

Apparently the client was an ass, and he didn't want to lift a finger ( I pay you money you do work mentality)

The client was using a shitty email service so my friend's boss told him to sniff his email address and send an email to the 3rd party, he did just that and asked the 3rd part to send the API key directly to his work email.

30 minutes later the API key arrives 😂😂

In 2008 I got a job offer at a company that develops IE toolbars. The salary was roughly three times what I was making at the time. I definitely could have used the money...

I'm proud to say I declined the offer.

Sales promised a big customer an awsome quiz thing with a few thousend participants. Guess what happend... There where about 300. because fuck marketing/sales. You can't just... Well never mind. Anyways. Panic.
They then came up with the awesome idea to create fake users.
There was a number of users who have participed on the start page.

They asked me to increase that number. (Note I was the only dev there). I refused but they went to the CEO and told him how much money the clmpany would loose, long story short, I wrote a function that would add fake users over time. Like not increase the number all of a sudent but over time. It was something like `$dbUser->getCount() + $fakeUsers->getCountAt(time())`
Customer was happy marketing was happy, sales was happy, ceo was happy, I didn't care as it didn't do any real damage (client was one of the top 500 companies so they can spare the change).

Btw. Did I mention, that that company went bancrupt like a year later..?

@sylflo every one does that. My favorite thing is to actually introduce fake entries (that are hidden by css, or in a api with some strange flag), with wrong/insulting content... Just to fuck with them. (That way at least they have to verify each crawled entry :P)

@Wack reminded me of another random approach (not my boss, a random person who wants to pay me money, which is not something I generally disapprove of).

A couple of weeks ago, a company asked me if I can create fake apps in their name. They have no apps in the App Store or Play Store, which makes their sales pitch - ads in their apps - very hard. So they want five or six apps, that simply do nothing or crash when you start them. Preferably in the App Store because it doesn't show download counts.

@configurator oh. Wow. Just wow.

The other company I mentioned earlier also always prommised way more ad delivering and stuff. They usually ended buying ad impressions from other sites for a lower price than they charged to customer.

@sylflo I don't know about different countries, but at least in switzerland you're allowed to use data that's on the internet, as long as you state somewhere what the source of it is, as that data is considered "public knowledge" if any one can access it. It's a different story if ithe stuff is password protected.