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Everyday UX Ethics

This landed in my email box the other day, from a company I am always rooting for. They put on  excellent conferences and help me to keep my ideals high.

Quoting from Mark Hurst's (1/15/13) blog post at Creative Good:


"For years I've been fascinated by the work of Natasha Dow Schüll, an MIT professor who has studied Las Vegas gambling for many years. She gave a great talk at Gel a few years back . . .
The question is unavoidable: if UX methods are effective in projects with a wide range of outcomes, which do you want to spend out your career on? Those that benefit the customer in the long term, or those that are in the long run harmful? And don't think the slot machine example is foreign to online business. Social-gaming company Zynga has been trying to enter the online gambling market. The company has always paid close attention to user behavior, and now they seek to maximize the profits from such a skill."
However, the job market does not seem to agree with him.  There are naturally many opportunities for UX people to do research (including eye-tracking and lots of quality user research) on any product which will bring in profit.  Not just gambling, but also banking or investment services, etc.  There are many studies, presentations and events  (The link is to a NYTech event which happened June of 2012) based on the idea of "trust" or lack thereof.  
And it is not even a matter of questionable products, there are much bigger everyday compromises that are made by a UX person in a day's work.
Within the most junior of tech companies, the idea of UX is still taking hold.  Roles call out for UX Experts who are developers/designers/researchers/content strategists and business analysts.  After you have delivered the basic expectations of your role ("Here's the project specs, give me a wireframe tomorrow"), there is very little to NO time to devote to the perspective of the User.
Having people in the business TELLING you what the User wants is NOT Usability.
How can a User Experience Professional begin to deal with larger career goals, if compromise is a given from the get go?


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