Legal, but possibly *unethical* engineering and/or computer related jobs?

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pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,572
8,471
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Born2bwire said:
Easiest one that I can come up with is defense contractor. Some people consider it unethical to be designing weapons.
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Once got offered a job in the defense sector. Justified it to myself on the basis that a nation needs to defend itself and I'm not a pacifist. Then it turned out the job was developing arms not for my own country but for a corrupt, human-rights abusing state that my country is in an alliance-of-convenience with.

Fact is, much of the defence sector is no longer about 'defense' its about earning foreign exchange by selling stuff to despots that (at best) will rust in a desert somewhere and, at worst, will end up being used against innocent civilians or one's own country. The ethics of that seem very dodgy to me.
 
Born2bwire

Born2bwire

Diamond Member
Oct 28, 2005
9,840
6
71
pmv said:
Once got offered a job in the defense sector. Justified it to myself on the basis that a nation needs to defend itself and I'm not a pacifist. Then it turned out the job was developing arms not for my own country but for a corrupt, human-rights abusing state that my country is in an alliance-of-convenience with.

Fact is, much of the defence sector is no longer about 'defense' its about earning foreign exchange by selling stuff to despots that (at best) will rust in a desert somewhere and, at worst, will end up being used against innocent civilians or one's own country. The ethics of that seem very dodgy to me.
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Precisely one of the points I was making.
 
I

ichy

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2006
6,940
8
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Selling electrical equipment to despotic countries that will use it to torture people?
 
disappoint

disappoint

Lifer
Dec 7, 2009
10,132
382
126
Jeff7 said:
- Spammer
- Anything affiliated with homeopathy - sales, production, design stages.
--- Any other manner of thing that's designed to look like it does something, but actually does nothing, like those wrist bands with hologram stickers that claim to "improve balance."
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Your post reminded me of the tornado fuel saver. lulz. There are so many scams like that.
 
waggy

waggy

No Lifer
Dec 14, 2000
68,143
10
81
abortion doctor. meh not technical but to be honest only thing i can think of even then its stretching it.


Born2bwire said:
Easiest one that I can come up with is defense contractor. Some people consider it unethical to be designing weapons.
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I have a close friend who was offered a job with one of the defense contractor's making a lot of money. he was troubled on it though since he is a Quaker. We talked about and he couldn't bring himself to work for them no matter what the pay. while i thought it was silly i advised him to do what he felt was right.

sad part is he passed up a $120k job and took a $80k one. but he is happy at least.
 
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I

ichy

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2006
6,940
8
81
Lol, silly hippies. I'd work for a company that made chemical weapons as long as the pay was good.
 
vbuggy

vbuggy

Golden Member
Nov 13, 2005
1,610
0
71
Dang. Can't believe no-one has touched on biotech, since it's very heavily IT-codependent.

There are plenty of examples already where e.g. genetically engineered organisms (sometimes fresh out of the lab, with little to no additional testing) were test-released into an ecosystem by companies who cherry-picked countries with the most lax laws in this aspect, often with little to no notification to the local residents, and no site analysis' apart from determining whether it was a good place to release in terms of being able to gather the most relevant data.

Think of any computer-related adjunct to this sort of project - data analysis, heck, even the development of the organism itself these days - and you might have fertile ground for such conundrums.

And it can often be conducted by individuals who have it in their heads that they are doing the world a service, because they have a single, beneficial-as-far-as-they-can-see goal in mind. As such, they regard legal "obstacles" (i.e. safeguards) and just general common sense as impediments to their greater cause. So what they will be doing in a particular selected country would undoubtedly be legal. But ethical - frequently not.

Is that the sort of thing you were after?
 
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Gibson486

Gibson486

Lifer
Aug 9, 2000
18,378
1
0
Anything that involves public money. You'd think that because it was public money that you would not be able to get away with anything. Well, you just can't get away with spending the money wrong. As long as you can justify it, it's alright. However, the justification is not always in public interest. You know, like spending a million dollars to achieve a 1% process improvement.
 
Modelworks

Modelworks

Lifer
Feb 22, 2007
16,240
7
76
Go to ebay and search for android tablet.
You will find many designs that look almost the same with just a different case. It is fairly common now for electronics product companies to take a competitors product, have the engineers reverse engineer it then change it just enough to not infringe on the other product. It is unethical because you are knowingly benefiting off someone else work without giving them credit, but legal because you used loopholes in the laws to produce the product.
 
sunzt

sunzt

Diamond Member
Nov 27, 2003
3,076
3
81
Financial Engineer... come up with bs financial products that barely make sense/legal and sell em to people who barely understand them and are designed to fk over.

Goldman Sachs trader who trades black market, unregulated derivatives and other shady financial instruments.

Goldman sachs salesman..... sell product x to company while at the same time shorting product x knowing product x is about get fked over.
 
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Perryg114

Senior member
Jan 22, 2001
768
4
81
Lets say you have an engineering job designing weapons of mass destruction. In one context is it unethical to kill. In another it is unethical not to. For example, if 5-6 billion poeple were killed most of our enviromental problems would go away. Especially, if the side effects of that extinction was a massive EMP pulse that destroyed all our electronic gadgets and put us back in the stone age. So killing = Bad less poeple = good. You figure that one out.

Perry
 
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Zargon

Lifer
Nov 3, 2009
12,218
2
76
how about being asked to help a govt agency increase their ability to 'legally' conduct video surveillance on the public......
 
acheron

acheron

Diamond Member
May 27, 2008
3,171
2
81
DominionSeraph said:
You would have no problems aiding Fox News, whose only goal is to wield absolute power -- power beholden to no ethical structure but their own capricious internal whims? You do realize that the tyrannical structure Fox News strives for threatens your personal safety, right?
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Might want to ask the psychiatrist to up your meds.
 
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