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Back in 2006 I worked for a bank services company, that sold software to banks to use on their website. I was looked at favorably by the company until I tried to fix a problem. It was a problem they didn't want me to fix, and it got me in hot water. Basically, to keep it non-technical, there was a process that ran over night (batch job) and it would often get stuck. The issue is that it was a critical process for one of our clients, and needed to be complete everyday before 7AM. We eventually found a way "speed up" the process by finding a way to restart it. However one day we restarted it but we missed the deadline by 3 minutes.
When this happened I got in hot hot water. See the larger story is that the sales team wanted the job to be late. This client was on an old version of our software, but refuse to move because they felt little reason to use the newer version. They felt the older version worked well enough. The proess failing was a bug, but the company refused to fix it. We still had to support the customer because they were a tier 1 customer. Anyway, the sales team strategy was to just keep the bug there, not to have anyone fix it, and then that would pressure this customer to migrate to a our new software. They felt it would probably eventually lead to migration cost, and to renegotiate a brand new contract (probably for even more money).
Me "fixing" the job actually made the company look bad, as it exposed that we could have fixed the process anytime we wanted, but choose to keep it unfixed. I was scorned by the organization for fixing it, and my management my my next 6 months there a living hell. I felt this sales strategy was very unethical, since my job was to fix these issues.
Have you ever been asked by your organization or your superior to do something unethical?
Not exactly, but I witnessed unethical behavior and spoke up which made everyone uncomfortable and me the "outsider." This was in the nonprofit world too where we had to service homeless people yet staff would steal the donations and I was the only one that spoke out against it. Needless to say I didn't have many work "friends" at this job nor did I care.
Often times, companies test employees by asking them to do unethical things just to see if they'll do it, and most employees bite the bait every time. I haven't been asked to do anything unethical, and hope I never have to. To be honest, I'd tell my superior(s) straight up, I'm not jeopardizing my good standing with this company because you guys want me to do something unethical. For all we know, you guys could be setting me up to take the fall, and I'm too smart for that.
I was being push to give customer partial truth about credit cards and new accounts to sign them up. I refused and quit.
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