Yeah, I worked for a place that made POS equipment (no, actually POS, as in point-of-sale), and to the outside observer, the place was the definition of hypocrisy.
The owners loved to flaunt their “status” and “wealth”, but treated all their underlings as coolie labor. Might be shocking to us who call the boss “Bob” or “Pete” or “Jane”, but there, that behavior/attitude is the norm. “Know your place.”
What got me, though, is that I was tasked with repurposing one of their controller boards to do something specific as a one-off project, on a rather strict deadline as the owner was going back overseas for a while and wanted to take the prototype with him.
Okay, no prob. It’s a highly integrated 8x51 variant, lots of peripherals on-board, let me have a look at some existing code so I wouldn’t have to “reinvent the wheel” (setting up all memory-maps, port addresses, interrupts, etc.). Ohhhh, no. Ohhhhh, Hell no. Those are secret, and you don’t have “clearance” to look at that! All this from a piss-ant company of a coupla dozen people total.
Umm, okay, so how do you expect me to write firmware to do what you want, in such a short timeframe? Well, you have books and manuals, you can look it up, no? Again, back to the reinventing-the-wheel part. Hell, I wasn’t even given a schematic to see what lines from the µC were connected to the outside world; I was expected to visually trace the board to find out what went where. They wanted me to (selectively) reverse-engineer one of their boards, so they wouldn’t have to show me so much as a line of source-code or even top-level schematic of the donk.
I said screw that, I’ll write it in C and send signals to the printer-port. Pick ’em off the ribbon-cable…
The fun part, though? They did their own bit of REing competitors’ boards, trashed hard-disks deliberately (destructive testing by giving ’em heat-stroke) then returned them under warranty, pir8ed M$ licenses to install Windows on embedded systems (buy 100, install 1000), etc.
Oh, and then after I “unthinkingly” trashed dead HDs instead of returning them to stock (to be returned to the mfr under warranty), they tried to stick me personally for the cost of the drives! I had enough at that point, and even tried ratting ’em out to M$, but they’d have none of it, and expected me to pretty much prepare their case for them, else they weren’t interested. :person_facepalming:
Anyway, in earlier conversations with the chief engineer or lead engineer or whatever he was, he unabashedly said it’s SOP. Pir8 stuff from all over, keep your stuff secret (or try to), no such thing as “ethics”. Just the way of doing business. In fact, it’s not even seen as doing anything wrong, but is expected. As in, he wasn’t trying to defend their actions in any way (as he saw nothing wrong with them, thus nothing to defend), and was surprised that I had an issue with it.
It’s a cultural thing, I guess. Again, just the standard way of doing business. Takes a while to wrap your head around it. Kinda like watching the dog licking himself right in front of you when you’re watching teevee. You call out “Hey, stop that!”, and the dog gives you this “What’s your problem?” look.