I think college students should have to take an ethics course on spotting vaporware. The scenario usually it goes like this: An employer hires you to do a job, and then eventually they want you to work on only the front-end portion of a solution to use for presentation purposes only. They say "we'll make it work later. right now just make it look like its work because we're using it for a presentation to sell this company to a new owner". Then of course later on they say "ok make it work now" and demand unreasonable completion deadlines and want emails by end of day confirming a list of functional features that have been completed and confirmed to work (nevermind relational database design and the testing phase). When the developer says they can't get all that done in that short of an amount of time, next they get a speech that goes something along the lines of: "right now we have chickenshit, and we need to turn this into chicken salad so we can sell it". And somehow the owner has convinced themselves that the developer is totally oblivious to whats going on. They're obviously going to rip off some poor soul who thinks they're buying a near-completed product, and when the buyer realizes they've been duped and take it to court, the previous owner will have a stack of emails from the developer saying "your honor, my programmer lied to me. i was unaware we were this far from completion". Its vaporware, its a scam, its unethical to participate, plus you're willingly setting yourself up as a patsy.