The right thing

I got into a discussion with a co-worker about pirated software, and the recent bust by the Custom on a well known company (which would remain unnamed) for their use of illegal software for day-to-day business activities.

The said company, heavily involved in schematic drawing and revision, needed copies of Autocad-equivalent software for most of its employee. The cost of which would probably amount to 6 digit figure. They very naturally turned to illegal copies for at least 40 of their company computers. All of these 40 computers were taken away as evidence by the Custom during the bust, bringing its operation to a complete halt.

What they did was obviously the smart thing to do, economically. It was far from the right thing to do, and it strikes me that we're constantly in battle between the two: the right thing to do, vs the profitable thing to do. There are those of us who sticks to legal software no matter what, while others use the latest and greatest software readily available for the cost of a pair of socks. It's just impossible to justify that other than to say you're doing the right thing.

The name of the game

In large-scale projects, it has to go through a few phases: Bid, design, implementation, test, revision, completion. When bidding, we find ourselves bringing our profit margin down just to win the bid. When implementation and testing are done, any revision would be variation order, which we can charge a more reasonable price, incuring profit for the whole operation. During design phase, there are times when we see flaws that would lead to problems later for the customer. Now the right thing to do? Verify with the customer, work with them to seal out these flaws. But why do that when we are directly profitting from these "opportunities"? The designs were approved by the customers for implementation, and any change after that would be variation order, high margin profit goodies.

It's fustrating to see this as the accepted way to "play the game" so to speak, especially so for real Engineer. But the "right thing to do" here really doesn't work for a system that so well accepted by everyone.