I think a lot of us faced these kinds of situations. When I was just starting out I was writing drivers, and asked to write code to detect that a driver benchmark program was running (as opposed to an end-user's application), and if so, route the benchmark to a special code path who's sole purpose was to perform well in the benchmark. I didn't think that was right and expressed my concerns to management. The result was I could just move on to fixing other bugs and they got one of the contractors to do the benchmark detection instead. This echoes what others have said in this thread: for any ethical issue you feel uncomfortable with, there are plenty of other programmers lined up to do it if you won't.