> i told him no, i wouldn't knowingly participate in that (and i knew that my boss would back me up, so wasn't concerned about my job), so he went to some other guy who wasn't as stubborn and talked him into it.
This is the big problem with standing your ethical ground in software: They'll just find someone else who has no ethical standard to do it. One of my first programming jobs was writing graphics card drivers, and I was asked to write code to cheat a benchmark (basically detect the benchmark was running and send the code into an alternate faster path). I was a junior developer at the time, but I worked up the courage to refuse to do it, thinking I'll probably be fired. Boss said "Hey, no problem, we'll give you other tickets to work on. Bob, over there said he has no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code!" So a lone voice of ethics is never going to change things when the company itself is unethical.
This is the big problem with standing your ethical ground in software: They'll just find someone else who has no ethical standard to do it. One of my first programming jobs was writing graphics card drivers, and I was asked to write code to cheat a benchmark (basically detect the benchmark was running and send the code into an alternate faster path). I was a junior developer at the time, but I worked up the courage to refuse to do it, thinking I'll probably be fired. Boss said "Hey, no problem, we'll give you other tickets to work on. Bob, over there said he has no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code!" So a lone voice of ethics is never going to change things when the company itself is unethical.