cheers! I've been saying this for a decade. What's really really hard is getting people to put ethics ahead of self, ahead of their paycheck and livelihood. Like the OP mentions, they likely just give it to a contractor (or outsource the entire project). We should be making technology for the betterment of man. Even reinventing the wheel to tackle shortcomings in markets and fixing fraud, not creating it. If there's an unfair advantage, we, engineers, need to make it fair.
I learned to code because the grandfathers of the web decided to share their knowledge for free.
I landed my first job because someone decided to take me under their wing and teach me more.
I too, was asked to design and build a high frequency trading system that was designed to be fraudulent by default. I decided to walk away. I focus my career on solving mankind problems. Whether it's travel waste, roofing waste, energy waste or optimizations, solutions for reducing energy consumption via optimal cloud architectures, and designing scale system on as little footprint (carbon included) as possible. I'm against cryptocurrencies requiring so much energy to mine. It's killing our planet. We need to find a better way. Time based auto-token so long as you are able to capture the packet? I don't know... But we, humans, need to find sustainable ways to keep our machines and our society moving forward.
I will never write code that gives an organization an unfair advantage over others or is fraud or "shady". I have no problem walking away, conscience clean. I can always get another job. Yes, some may end up implementing it anyway. Some would say "What about patents?" etc etc. A free market should be a fair market, otherwise it isn't free.
I learned to code because the grandfathers of the web decided to share their knowledge for free.
I landed my first job because someone decided to take me under their wing and teach me more.
I too, was asked to design and build a high frequency trading system that was designed to be fraudulent by default. I decided to walk away. I focus my career on solving mankind problems. Whether it's travel waste, roofing waste, energy waste or optimizations, solutions for reducing energy consumption via optimal cloud architectures, and designing scale system on as little footprint (carbon included) as possible. I'm against cryptocurrencies requiring so much energy to mine. It's killing our planet. We need to find a better way. Time based auto-token so long as you are able to capture the packet? I don't know... But we, humans, need to find sustainable ways to keep our machines and our society moving forward.
I will never write code that gives an organization an unfair advantage over others or is fraud or "shady". I have no problem walking away, conscience clean. I can always get another job. Yes, some may end up implementing it anyway. Some would say "What about patents?" etc etc. A free market should be a fair market, otherwise it isn't free.