4 ms·

Now I'm curious... How did they sell the change in focus to your team/company? What aspects about MLM did you find most surprising?

• donretag 10y ago
  There was no change in focus per se. The company was an e-commerce site, and the parent company was going to simply be another vendor. They were using our in-house technology to power their external (to us) e-commerce presence, besides the placement of their products on our site. However, their products started to receive more and more focus on our site. If their highly profitable products had competitors in certain categories, we would eliminate those other products. SEO was optimized for those products. The underlying tech focus did not change. The UI team continued working on UIs, mobile teams on the app, etc. MLM was/is designed to fail. The barriers of entry for any form of compensation were incredibly high. If you satisfied some requirement of the program, there would be another one that was not achieved, invalidating any profits. I had zero insights on the parent company's network, but I simply do not see how a new person could make any money at all. Although our location, at least those in tech, had nothing to do with the MLM program, except for putting the products on the site (through the standard vendor process), it was still uneasy to be part of. I was not starving. I had a choice to not be part of it, so I exercised that choice. I should add the MLMs are completely legal under strict federal guidelines. Nothing illegal was happening, it was a bit too immoral for my personal standards.