How Do Developers Handle Moral Dilemmas?

DwightFagen asks: "I'm curious to know how developers in the Slashdot community handle situations in which they are given a project that rubs against their moral borders. I was recently hired as a Flash developer for a design and development company and am just beginning my second project. This particular assignment is to build the video portion of an online magazine. This magazine deals with various topics and is by no means a pornographic site (although some content may border on that), but it seems one of its key tenets is to be untethered by social moral values. Though I do not believe such things should in any way be censored or banned from the internet, I do not wish to actively support something I believe to be an exploitation of human beings. What would you in the Slashdot community do in such a situation? Have any of you dealt with something like this before?" "For the sake of clarity, I'd like to mention that I'm all for the freedom of expression on the internet and that I do not in any way judge people based on the media they choose to consume.

If this were a clear cut case of pornography, my choice would be simple; but that is not the case. I do still hold myself to certain standards and believe in the value of integrity and I would also like to do work that my family and friends can be proud of (or at least work that I could show them). However, I would also like to keep my job and would not want to put my small company of very nice people in a difficult position (as the deadline is not so far off)."

Comments

Re:Simple

[__aaclcg7560]

There's a small caveat there - if your boss is a dick (on the off chance), if you state your moral objection, he might perceive you as a primma donna.

I was caught in that situation at a video game company. The company had a Team Day T-shirt design contest for the employees that my supervisor managed to win. Since my co-workers were upset that someone in management won the contest with a blatent rip off of the XBox logo and I was taking a business ethics class at the time, I notified HR that they mismanaged the contest. HR dropped the T-shirt design and asked marketing to come up with a design based on recent titles being released for that year. My supervisor was not a happy camper when the shirts were handed out and his team was overwhelmly defeated at the Team Day events (he blamed HR for stacking his team with all the women -- that's because the women didn't hate him as much as everyone else). The next day I got a verbal warning for not being devoted to the job (i.e., the business ethics class), a verbal warning for insubordination when I documented a disagreement with him concerning my project (which got the previous supervisor in trouble because I document everything), and a prep talk about doing the job his way or taking the highway. Since my mom died of breast cancer three months before and I was alreay making a career transition, I had no problem handing in my three-week notice to complete my project before leaving. My supervisor went on to sack the two lead testers that I trained since they documented everything as well. The company is now on the verge of bankruptcy and I'm a lot happier making more money working as a help desk specialist for only 40 hours a week. Who says ethics doesn't pay?

Re:Watch out for H-1Bs

[Garridan]

Depends. I was the lead of a small number of developers working full-time for a company, and my boss wanted me to some things that I disagreed with; primarily putting popup ads on the site, and spamming. I told him that I wouldn't do it. Once or twice, he said he'd pay some Russians to do it. I told him that if he did so, I'd never touch their code, so if he wanted it to continue working on the site, he'd have to regularly solicit their help. He asked me why I was being such a hardass, so I explained why I felt the way that I did about the spam/popups, and launched into a bit of a tirade about why outsourcing programming work was detrimental to the economy that his business depended on.

In the end, I convinced him that what he was asking me to do was dumb, and that outsourcing sucks in the long term. (I couldn't ply to morality, the man had none, but he'd listen to reason)