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Not sure why you are being downvoted. You've (correctly) pointed out that the parent comment has constructed a strawman to punch at, rather than the actual even

Not sure why you are being downvoted. You've (correctly) pointed out that the parent comment has constructed a strawman to punch at, rather than the actual events. Arguments of the form, "Person did X. Imagine if they had done Y! (Where Y is some obviously unethical thing.)" are fallacious and they lead the discussion to useless dead ends. The point is that the person did do X, and NOT Y.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
vorpalhex is stating action X was wrong in the first place, and describing a situation Y as an example to show why action X is wrong. I have policies at my workplace that disallow something because it's impractical to judge every single situation and then have to deal with the gray area.
- JeremyBanks 6y ago
  That's a fair perspective, but that's not applicable here. The punishment isn't because of how much she violated the policies, it's to send a message. At Google, someone once disruptively modified the root permissions for the entire company-wide monorepo to show off that the permissions scheme was fallible. They were left off with a verbal warning, even though on paper they massively abused their position, and could have made the point without actually doing it. The engineer in the OP took a much smaller action, that was closer to the scope of her actual duties, but was punished more severely.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    > That's a fair perspective, but that's not applicable here. It's exactly applicable. If you violate say, finance reporting laws (KYC) then you've violated finance reporting laws. If you've added unauthorized code to an internal tool, well, you've added unauthorized code to an internal tool. And had it been part of a security disclosure, well, that might be different (did they try other disclosure avenues?), but pushing a political viewpoint isn't. Imagine instead if the employee had added the message "Trump 2020" - how would you feel about that?
    - Jotra7 6y ago
      Saying people have a right to organize is not political speech if you aren't a reactionary.
buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
But X is also unethical. Not sure why you're seemingly ignoring that.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  I'm not. I'm explicitly saying you should discuss X. Adding Y just muddies the discussion.

lotsofpulp 6y ago

vorpalhex is stating action X was wrong in the first place, and describing a situation Y as an example to show why action X is wrong. I have policies at my workplace that disallow something because it's impractical to judge every single situation and then have to deal with the gray area.

JeremyBanks 6y ago
That's a fair perspective, but that's not applicable here. The punishment isn't because of how much she violated the policies, it's to send a message. At Google, someone once disruptively modified the root permissions for the entire company-wide monorepo to show off that the permissions scheme was fallible. They were left off with a verbal warning, even though on paper they massively abused their position, and could have made the point without actually doing it. The engineer in the OP took a much smaller action, that was closer to the scope of her actual duties, but was punished more severely.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  > That's a fair perspective, but that's not applicable here. It's exactly applicable. If you violate say, finance reporting laws (KYC) then you've violated finance reporting laws. If you've added unauthorized code to an internal tool, well, you've added unauthorized code to an internal tool. And had it been part of a security disclosure, well, that might be different (did they try other disclosure avenues?), but pushing a political viewpoint isn't. Imagine instead if the employee had added the message "Trump 2020" - how would you feel about that?
  - Jotra7 6y ago
    Saying people have a right to organize is not political speech if you aren't a reactionary.

buzzerbetrayed 6y ago

But X is also unethical. Not sure why you're seemingly ignoring that.

Pfhreak 6y ago
I'm not. I'm explicitly saying you should discuss X. Adding Y just muddies the discussion.