Okay, let’s talk about this “inexcusable evil sample” thing. It sounds heavy, right? But sometimes you stumble across stuff in your day-to-day work that just leaves a really bad taste in your mouth. It’s not always some grand conspiracy, just… small, nasty decisions baked into things.
Finding the Nasty Bit
So, I was working on this project a while back. Pretty standard stuff, or so I thought. My job was mostly maintenance and adding small features to an older system nobody really wanted to touch anymore. You know the type.
I started digging through the code, trying to understand how a particular part worked. It involved user data, nothing too sensitive on the surface, mostly usage patterns. Standard procedure:
- Checked out the codebase.
- Set up my local environment, which took forever as usual.
- Started tracing the logic for this feature request I had.
- Ran the code, watched the logs, tried to make sense of it.
That’s when I found it. Tucked away, poorly commented, was this function. It wasn’t part of the main feature I was looking at. It seemed to be scraping extra bits of user information, stuff that wasn’t declared anywhere in the privacy policy or the system documentation. It wasn’t like, credit card numbers, but it was definitely stuff that felt… sneaky. Like, location hints derived from other data, more detailed usage timings than necessary. Stuff that painted a much clearer picture of individual users than they probably realized.
It felt wrong. It wasn’t a bug; it was deliberately built that way. A small, hidden “sample” of data collection that went beyond what was stated. Inexcusable, really, because it served no real purpose for the user experience, just gathered extra data on the sly.
What Happened Next (Why I Remember This)
So, what did I do? I flagged it. I brought it up to my manager. I showed him the code, explained why it looked sketchy. You know what happened?
Nothing. Well, not nothing. I got told, “Don’t worry about that part,” and “Just focus on your assigned task.” It was brushed off. The message was clear: Don’t rock the boat. That little piece of code, that “sample,” was just left there.
Why do I call it an “inexcusable evil sample”? Because it showed me the real priorities. It wasn’t about serving the user; it was about quietly taking more than was agreed upon. And the casual way it was dismissed? That was the really chilling part. It made me realize the culture there wasn’t about doing the right thing, it was about not getting caught.
I didn’t stay there much longer after that. The whole experience was part of why I left. You see something like that, something small but deliberately deceptive, and you see how management reacts… it tells you everything you need to know about a place. It wasn’t some big dramatic event, just a quiet little function doing its dirty work, and a management team that preferred plausible deniability. That kind of thing sticks with you.
