In my experience, it was usually higher-ups and not the UX people who wanted to implement dark patterns. The UX people and devs wanted to make the enduser experience better (believe it or not), but were frequently overridden by some higher business priority (we NEED this popup as soon as the page loads! opt them in to all the newsletters by default! highlight the highest-margin products).
Some companies just don't respect their users or customers, and/or try to optimize for short-term metrics that make some individual or agency or department look good at the expense of long-term loyalty. But I've never seen a UX person willingly suggest a dark pattern... all the ones I've worked with were forced to implement them, despite much protest, because some manager wanted it there.
It’s not so hopeless though. Not sure about UX, but for devs there are plenty of jobs, so you are free to switch whenever you see people doing or worse, demand you to do, dark patterns.
I’ve literally quit a job out of protest, where I started reading user emails complaining about the service we were building.
Stuff like “put the unsubscribe button at the far end, gray on a gray background, so it will be harder to find”. People were actually closing their bank accounts as they couldn’t find a way to unsubscribe from the service…
We had a few hard talks about it and when the company kept up with it I just up and quit.
And I got a job for a lot more money almost immediately. Turned out people who would do that to users, were underpaying their employees quite a bit too, who would have thought…
Props to you for having some professional integrity in an industry where it's practically frowned upon.
I couldn't take it anymore, half my interviews were companies I think shouldn't even exist at all. Decided screw the industry, I'm gonna scrape together a living any way I can and spend the rest of the time working on whatever I want to.
I might be poor now but at least I can sleep at night and I've never been happier.
Realistically, not being so young anymore, I think it's a matter of picking my battles. I'm plenty vocal at work, and have resigned jobs in the past for serious human rights transgressions (such as one startup trying to sell their filtering technology to China to censor dissidents).
An annoying popup message would warrant a direct complaint from me. A pattern of bad UX might cause me to jump the ladder and try to get somebody to pay attention and change things. But quitting in protest isn't something I can always afford to do, and it isn't always the best strategy for change anyway. If you come across as unreasonable or explosively reactive, they'll just replace you with someone they deem more level-headed or compliant and do the thing they were going to do anyway. But if you have an opportunity to use persuasion/diplomacy instead of force, sometimes that can work.
Anecdotally: I don't typically work in "pure" tech, instead getting jobs in nonprofits and/or the energy sector. In these industries, concepts like UX aren't always familiar to management or marketing (it's not even 100% prevalent in tech proper either). Bad UX is just as often a result of ignorance, not malice, and a chance to discuss things and educate other stakeholders without hostility.
An example of the newsletter popup situation... we held a short meeting to discuss the pros and cons. It was important to the business to get these leads, but they also listened to the UX side of it. We arrived at a compromise: Instead of showing the popup front and center at page load, we would wait for some time (30 sec?) plus some scroll percentage (at least half the page length), then slide it up in a corner, make the close button highly visible (big and black instead of tiny and light gray), and set a cookie to not re-show the popup if they dismissed it once. Is it as good as not having a popup altogether? No, but it started a discussion and (hopefully) met both user and business needs halfway.
FWIW I was also the one who pushed for clearer organization-wide unsubscriptions (so you don't have to manually unsubscribe from every single dept's newsletter using a separate link), did a privacy audit (unfortunately to little effect), etc.
There is definitely a time to quit in protest, but there are still small changes one can effect from within an organization -- if they're open to listening and acting in good faith, which is thankfully the usual case in my fields. If you have an evil cult-of-personality CEO, on the other hand...
lol, it was the product department, they like to think of themselves as higher ups, they see the VPs and execs galavanting around with business dinners and cocktail lunches and they want in, so they tell everyone light grey "unsubscribe" in 3em smaller font on a white background is a great idea, besides...the un-skipable FAQ splash screen will redirect them to solving their problem on their own which makes them feel accomplished and keeps them on the system while reducing support costs, see how awesome they are?
i've heard this circular corporate self righteousness too many times
Don't forget about "modernizing" the design. It needs to be modern. AKA it needs weeks of design people to copy what some popular website or app did that they personally think looks rad.
Both front end and backend devs are the eqivalent of workhorses who implement whatever the business wants. Few can afford to keep their record spotless and while I struggle to point out my own blemishes I sure as hell worked on things I didn’t believe in or things I wouldn’t do if I didn’t have to earn a wage.
This isn't strictly true, it really depends on the company. I've worked at places where I absolutely had the autonomy to implement features in a certain way so as to not degrade user experience. Nobody has ever asked me to create a button that jumps around, and if your workplace is so inflexible that you can't effect any change so such a basic UI thing doesn't happen, I'd suggest looking for a new one.
Some companies just don't respect their users or customers, and/or try to optimize for short-term metrics that make some individual or agency or department look good at the expense of long-term loyalty. But I've never seen a UX person willingly suggest a dark pattern... all the ones I've worked with were forced to implement them, despite much protest, because some manager wanted it there.