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• How much ethical is to accept second offer while serving notice period for first company? [closed]

  - by iammilind

  I had got an offer from a company X 2 months back. Though the compensation was pretty good, I asked for more. They declined and I continued my search for the best. I was expecting good companies (Y, Z) will contact me, but that din't happen. Then 2 months later, now I re-approached company X again and they issued me the same offer. I accepted it, resigned from my current company and serving the notice period (2 months). Now the twist: I got calls from Y and Z (good companies). They definitely give better compensation. If they select me then my plan is to accept the better offer from Y/Z and inform the X immediately that I have got better opportunity, so I will not be able to join the company... Is this ethical ? [Edit Note: I have to just send an acceptance email (i.e. no contract signing) which doesn't legally bind me to join that company. So, legally I am not doing anything wrong. However, I am worried that if I am doing right/wrong ethically.]

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• I just received a complaint from a user of the website I maintain. Should I do anything?

  - by Chris

  I was sent sent a large wall of text from a user of the website I maintain at my job. They are clearly upset for having to deal with a horribly outdated web application that has not seen any serious updates in over 6+ years. No refactoring has been done, the code quality is terrible, the security unchecked, policy compliances ignored, in addition to being ugly and frankly embarrassing. Keep in mind this is a small business but the website is used by hundreds daily. I'm one of two programmers there, and I've been working there for two years. This person says they are about my age (22) and understand technology (but can't use proper grammar). The complaint mentioned awkward pages and actions on the website, but they don't even have a clue as to the depth of the flaws in this website. Now, I would love to honestly tell them that there's a lot wrong with this company and that this application was built when we were in high school. And that while it's not my fault that the website is terrible, I'm the one in position to fix it. But on the other hand, I could just say nothing and ignore it. Would doing this publicly have any advantage to future employees (showing integrity) or would it just be a completely pointless mistake? Odds are, even if I respond only that one person will ever read it. Regardless, I'm probably just going to ignore it and continue starting my project to refactor the website.

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• Do we ethically have the right to use the MAC Address for verification purposes?

  - by Matt Ridge

  I am writing a program, or starting at the very beginning of it, and I am thinking of purchase verification systems as a final step. I will be catering to Macs, PCs, and possibly Linux if all is said and done. I will also be programming this for smartphones as well using C++ and Objective-C. (I am writing a blueprint before going head first into it) That being said, I am not asking for help on doing it yet, but what I’m looking for is a realistic measurement for what could be expected as a viable and ethical option for purchase verification systems. Apple through the Apple Store, and some other stores out there have their own "You bought it" check. I am looking to use a three prong verification system. Email/password 16 to 32 character serial number using alpha/numeric and symbols with Upper and lowercase variants. MAC Address. The first two are in my mind ok, but I have to ask on an ethical standpoint, is a MAC Address to lock the software to said hardware unethical, or is it smart? I understand if an Ethernet card changes if not part of the logic board, or if the logic board changes so does the MAC address, so if that changes it will have to be re-verified, but I have to ask with how everything is today... Is it ethical to actually use the MAC address as a validation key or no? Should I be forward with this kind of verification system or should I keep it hidden as a secret? Yes I know hackers and others will find ways of knowing what I am doing, but in reality this is why I am asking. I know no verification is foolproof, but making it so that its harder to break is something I've always been interested in, and learning how to program is bringing up these questions, because I don't want to assume one thing and find out it's not really accepted in the programming world as a "you shouldn't do that" maneuver... Thanks in advance... I know this is my first programming question, but I am just learning how to program, and I am just making sure I'm not breaking some ethical programmer credo I shouldn't...

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• What to do if you find a vulnerability in a competitor's site?

  - by user17610

  While working on a project for my company, I needed to build functionality that allows users to import/export data to/from our competitor's site. While doing this, I discovered a very serious security exploit that could, in short, perform any script on the competitor's website. My natural feeling is to report the issue to them in the spirit of good-will. Exploiting the issue to gain advantage crossed my mind, but I don't want to go down that path. So my question is, would you report a serious vulnerability to your direct competition, in order to help them? Or would you keep your mouth shut? Is there a better way of going about this, perhaps to gain at least some advantage from the fact that I'm helping them by reporting the issue? Update (Clarification): Thanks for all your feedback so far, I appreciate it. Would your answers change if I were to add that the competition in question is a behemoth in the market (hundreds of employees in several continents), and my company only started a few weeks ago (three employees)? It goes without saying, they most definitely will not remember us, and if anything, only realize that their site needs work (which is why we entered this market in the first place). I confess this is one of those moral vs. business toss-ups, but I appreciate all the advice.

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• Fixing a bug that has never caused a problem until now.

  - by codeelegance

  I recently made a change that caused some code to be run far more often than it used to. This lead to the discovery of a bug. This bug had the potential to happen any time that code was run but because it was run so seldom it never surfaced. When I brought this to the lead developer's attention he wanted me to undo the change that exposed the bug rather than fix the bug quoting the adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Its clear to me that we were just lucky up until now but he won't listen to reason. Should I fix it anyway? Update The lead technically doesn't have any authority over me. Just tenure. He's been the sole developer on the project for a number of years until a year ago and I think he doesn't take constructive criticism very well. For what's worth, I didn't criticize him I just pointed out that just because the bug never showed up didn't mean it wasn't there.

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• What is ethical/unethical while seeking help on the web with programming assignments?

  - by HelpNeeder

  I have used the web and Stack Overflow extensively during the past month or so in creating my final project for my C# class. I have used so much code that I didn't write myself that I feel I am being unethical by not giving proper credit to the people who helped me; or the websites that have provided excellent examples. Is it unethical to publish work which was created by me, even though its hardest problems were solved by other people? Should I credit these people for helping me with my assignment? Or the web sites which provided examples?

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• Are there Any Concerns with Importing Document Files From a Competing Product?

  - by Thunderforge

  I have a new product that serves the same purpose as my competitor's long-standing product. One thing I have considered doing is allowing my program to import document files created by their product in order to provide an easy way for users to migrate towards mine. Naturally, this would be done without the competitor's permission, as it goes against their interests. I've seen this done before with office suite software (e.g. Open Office and Apple Pages can import MS Word documents), but I'm wondering if there are any concerns, legal or ethical, with me doing this. I fully expect any answers will most likely fall under the "I am not a lawyer" clause, but it would be helpful to have a starting point for anything I would need to be aware of, or if I shouldn't need to worry.

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• What is the/Is there a right way to tell management that our code sucks?

  - by Azkar

  Our code is bad. It might not have always been considered bad, but it is bad and is only going downhill. I started fresh out of college less than a year ago, and many of the things in our code puzzle me beyond belief. At first I figured that as the new guy I should keep my mouth shut until I learned a little more about our code base, but I've seen plenty to know that it's bad. Some of the highlights: We still use frames (try getting something out of a querystring, almost impossible) VBScript Source Safe We 'use' .NET - by that I mean we have .net wrappers that call COM DLLs making it almost impossible to debug easily Everything is basically one giant function Code is not maintainable. Each page has multiple files that are created every time a new page is made. The main page basically does Response.Write() a bunch of times to render the HTML (runat="server"? no way). After that there can be a lot of logic on the client side (VBScript), and finally the page submits to itself (often time storing many things in hidden fields) where it then posts to a processing page which can do things such as save the data to the database. The specifications we get are laughable. Often times they call for things like "auto-populate field X with either field Y or field Z" with no indication of when to choose field Y or field Z. I'm sure some of this is a result of not being employed at a software company, but I feel as if people writing software should at least care about the quality of their code. I can't even imagine that if I were to bring something up that anything would be done soon, as there is a large deadline looming, but we are continuing to write bad code and use bad practices. What can I do? How do I even bring these issues up? 75% of my team agree with me and have brought up these issues in the past, yet nothing gets changed.

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• How to handle situation of programmer stealing credit for your project [on hold]

  - by shorecc

  There is a coworker who has stolen credit for my work. I created a system that will show live statuses of printing machines throughout the plant. There was one glitch in it so the coworker made an improvement and then re-wrote the entire system (copying 90% of my code, yet he added a new piece of hardware then took over the project). Now he asks me programming questions from time to time. I don't mind teaching coworkers how to program, but since he has stolen my ideas and credit in the past I am reluctant to teach him all I know. Today he asks me for a particularly challenging algorithm for this system. His code now looks exactly like the way I would program! How would you handle the situation? How can I decline helping him without appearing to not being a team player?

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• Is it okay to rollback code if your client refuses to pay you?

  - by JustinY

  A friend of mine did some contracting work to add localization support to an existing mobile app. He was not contracted to add any other features or fix any already existing bugs. He has finished his work, but the client refuses to pay him because of an already existing bug that he hasn't fixed. The only card my friend has left is to rollback the server code to the state it was before he began working, which will probably break the mobile app and hopefully force the client's hand. Is this legal? Is there a better way to handle the situation?

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• HTML/CSS plagiarism

  - by luqita

  Hi!! I'm facing an issue here. A customer asked me to copy an exact site, and even though I'm trying to convince him of going for a new design he does not accept it. He loves this design so much (on a side note it's horrible and outdated, but I wouldn't say that to him!) It's been a couple of weeks since we are discussing this and I don't know what to do. Do you have similar experiences? I don't want to lose the customer, he pays well and his jobs are really easy. At the same time, I don't want to put my signature on someone else's work. Any suggestions? Similar experiences? Thank you!

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• How to give life to my idea which belong to my company?

  - by pmod

  I wonder, what options do I have in the following situation. In the course of the several projects I realised the need in some auxilary software product (related to testing of the main products). I applied a creative approach to the matter and implemented a system which I think has a potential and looking promising (maybe not on the market but at least among some interested supporters). I have even more ideas related to this system and continue developing at my free and work time. It has become a work and hobby at the same time. Unfortunately, this work basically has nothing in common with the company's business and there is no way this will be organized in a form of standard development process and be presented to costumers as a product. What can you suggest in this situation? How to avoid breaching of contract? Have you had something similar in your career? What if my intention is to develop it as an open source project?

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• Host's sys admins - can they view files?

  - by FullTrust

  Hi, Just a quick question. When using shared hosting, can system admins (employed by the host) access your files and read your database connectionstring details? Can they also access your database, and view the files, without a connectionstring? I'm assuming there's a certain level of trust, but is this possible/common? Thanks

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• Should I keep my ex-employer's data?

  - by Jurily

  Following my brief reign as System Monkey, I am now faced with a dilemma: I did successfully create a backup and a test VM, both on my laptop, as no computer at work had enough free disk space. I didn't delete the backup yet, as it's still the only one of its kind in the company's history. The original is running on a hard drive in continuous use since 2006. There is now only one person left at the company, who knows what a backup is, and they're unlikely to hire someone else, for reasons very closely related to my departure. Last time I tried to talk to them about the importance of backups, they thought I was threatening them. Should I keep it? Pros: I get to save people from their own stupidity (the unofficial sysadmin motto, as far as I know) I get to say "I told you so" when they come begging for help, and feel good about it I get to say nice things about myself on my next job interview Nice clean conscience Bonus rep with the appropriate deities Cons: Legal problems: even if I do help them out with it, they might just sue me for keeping it anyway, although given the circumstances I think I have a good case Legal problems: given the nature of the job and their security, if something leaks, I'm a likely target for retaliation Legal problems: whatever else I didn't think about I need more space for porn. Legal problems. What would you do?

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• What is an acceptable on-call agreement between employee and employer?

  - by jldugger

  IT is full of heroics; many of us carry a paging device, like Batman waiting in his cave for the Bat Signal. What's a fair compensation for on-call schedules? Is it acceptable to handle emergency requests on weekends or vacations?

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• How to protect folder privacy against unethical network administrators? [closed]

  - by Trevor Trovalds

  I just need a technical solution for the sake of my group's shared passwords, projects, works, etc. safety. Our network has Active Directory with public/groups/users and NTFS permissions, under a Windows Server 2003 which will soon migrate to Windows Server 2008 R2. Our IT crowd is small, consisting of 2 DBAs, 4 designers, 6 developers (including me), 2 netadmins and (a lot of) tech supporters, everyone has local admin rights. Those 2 network admins weren't the ones who set the network up, they just took the lift recently when the previous ones quit. We usually find them laughing at private contents from users stored in the groups AD, sabotaging documents that don't match their personal tastes and, finally, this week we found out they stole a project we (developers and DBAs) were finishing and, long before, they presented it to the CEO as theirs without us knowing. I'm a systems analyst, and initially my group decided to store critical content, like shared passwords, inside encrypted .zip files. Unfortunately we couldn't do the same to the other hundreds of folders and files, which included the stolen project, because the zipping process would take too long for every update. We also tried an encrypted Subversion repository under SSL, but there are many dummies (~38 atm) involved in the projects that have trouble using TortoiseSVN when contributing, and very oftenly we had to fix messed up updates. Well, I think these two give the idea of what we've been trying to reach. So, is there a practical "individual" protection for our extensive data or my hope can already be euthanized? P.S.: Seriously, at the place where I live/work, political corruption gone the wildest, so denounce related options are likely impracticable. Yet both netadmins have strong "political bond" with the CEO and the President, hence their lousy behavior and our failed delation attempts.

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• Can my employer force me to backup my personal machine? [closed]

  - by Eric B

  Here's the background: Approximately 1.25 years ago, the company I work for was acquired by a larger 400 person company. Before acquisition (and today still) we are all remote employees using our own personal hardware for work-related duties (coding, email, etc). We are approximately 15 employees within the larger organization. Some time after acquisition, the now owning company was slapped with a civil lawsuit. Part of this lawsuit (discovery) is requiring them to retrieve & store from us any related information. Because we were a separate company up until acquisition, there is a high probability that our personal machines might contain information about what the lawsuit alleges (email, documents, chat logs?, etc). Obviously, this depends largely on the person's job function (engineer vs. customer support vs. CEO). All employees are being required to comply. Since acquisition (1.25 yrs), the new company has not provided us with company laptops/desktops. We continue to use personal hardware, licenses, etc for work. Email is via POP3s and not hanging around on the mail server - it's on everyone's client. Documents are spread across personal machines. So, now they want us each to backup our complete personal machines. They are allowing us to create a "personal" folder where we can place personal documents. That single folder will be excluded from backup. Of course, that means total re-arrangement of documents, etc. For most of us, 99% of the data on the machine is NOT related to work. So, what's the consensus? Should we comply? What is their recourse if we do not?

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• What is the most ethically or morally questionable sysadmin task you have been given?

  - by Alex Angas

  In the recent past I was asked to set up a reporting facility for upper management so they can spy on what web sites users are visiting. This was done without any notice given to users. Unfortunately, I have a good friend with some rather unusual tastes who I knew would be caught! He also knew I set up the reporting... To me, the lack of user notification was unethical. What similar experiences have you had that haven't "felt right" and left you questioning what to do? How did you deal with it?

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• Is it ethical to let users see the request headers from visitors to a url shortening service?

  - by soniiic

  I'm currently in the progress of making a url shortening service that will let the creator see the http request headers that the browser has made when visitors visit the url. The visitors won't be made aware that they are being tracked, but obviously nothing is personally identifiable. Is there anything I should be made aware of ethically or legally that makes this a bad idea?

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• Legality, terms of service for performing a web crawl

  - by Berlin Brown

  I was going to crawl a site for some research I was collecting. But, apparently the terms of service is quite clear on the topic. Is it illegal to now "follow" the terms of service. And what can the site normally do? Here is an example clause in the TOS. Also, what about sites that don't provide this particular clause. Restrictions: "use any robot, spider, site search application, or other automated device, process or means to access, retrieve, scrape, or index the site" It is just research? Edit: "OK, from the standpoint of designing an efficient crawler. Should I provide some form of natural language engine to read terms of service and then abide by them."

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• Practical ways around the GPL?

  - by Daniel

  My company makes an extremely specialized piece of software which costs a lot of money for those few who need it. On our current release we have no choice but to use a few libraries which are released only under the GPL. Releasing the code is not an option and it would take months, if not years to implement the functionality the libraries provide. What do companies do in this situation? Are there practical and legal ways around the GPL?

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• Is reverse engineering evil?

  - by Amir Arad

  Lately I've been pondering on how a specific beloved old game actually works. I had some mild progress, but then a friend pointed out that if I really loved the game and appreciate it, I wouldn't try to reverse-engineer it. Note that the game is long considered an abandonware and is offerd for download publicly in lawful game sites, and I have no commercial / other large scale intentions - just to learn and "mess around" with it. Did I miss something? Is there an ethical taboo regarding reverse-engeneering? Alternatively, is there a legal issue?

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• Best ways to utilize computer resources

  - by Algorist

  Hi, Do you ever feel bad keeping office or lab computers "on" after day work? Is there anything useful you guys utilize those computers till you come back the next day morning. Thank you.

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• Have you ever turned-down morally questionable or unethical web work?

  - by louism

  i'm just wondering if you guys have ever had a situation where you were offered a web development project which you turned down because you felt it was unethical or morally questionable. i've only had this once. i was offered a contract to develop a website for a meat abattoir (i.e. slaughterhouse). what's the problem you may ask? i'm vegetarian. i know, it's not an egregious dilemma, but it just didn't seem right to me. i have a female graphic designer friend who declined to work on a sex toys website where she was working at the time. funny thing is, it wouldn't bother me to work on a porn site (as long as it wasn't anything shifty - e.g. dwarfs + donkeys, that sort of thing). anyone else ever had a similar experience?

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• Is it ethical to post my own Topcoder solutions to my blog

  - by Chintan

  I recently joined Topcoder and have been solving a few problems on the site. Now, I want to publicly post my solutions onto my blog and have others go over it, suggest improvements, better design etc wherever applicable. My question is, would this be ethical?

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