[justasitsounds]

This story hits very close to home for me.

Back in 2001 I worked for a 'Medical Communications' company, building marketing websites for various drugs companies. I was young, it was my first coding job and I desperately needed the money

I even ended up building an internal marketing website for use by sales reps pushing an antidepressant. It was an awful PoS, technically, but it had a basic CMS system and I was flown to the US (from the UK) to show the very friendly team at the drug company how to use it. I was fairly blasé about the ethics of it - they paid a lot of money after all. The drug in question was later removed from the market after it was found to increase suicide risk.

14 years later, my mother had maxxed out on the same kind of anti-depressant. She kept relapsing and the doctors kept upping the dose until they couldn't prescribe her any more. She took her own life shortly after.

Not so long ago, I interviewed a candidate for a data engineer position at the 'FinTech' I was lead engineer at. He turned us down because he didn't like the CTOs attitude towards the credit data we were collecting about our customers. Until that point I hadn't really considered the ethics of what we were doing, again. I started looking for another job the same day.