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It's not that I mind being bribed. It's that the offers are insultingly low. A coffee mug in exchange for an appointment. A lunch coupon in exchange for an ap
by dsr_ 6y ago
It's not that I mind being bribed. It's that the offers are insultingly low.
A coffee mug in exchange for an appointment.
A lunch coupon in exchange for an appointment.
A USB flash drive in exchange for intelligence about the company.
A "chance" at an iPad in exchange for filling out a 12 page survey.
These just don't cross any reasonable risk/reward threshold.
Did this person get offered multiple years of their salary, or did they not do any thinking at all?
- conanbatt 6y agoRead the article and find out!
- jjeaff 6y agoThe miniscule value of those items is exactly what makes them -not- bribes.
- ceejayoz 6y agoLegally, yes. Functionally, they still work. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/health/research/19beha.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/health/research/19beha.ht... > A study reports that students from a medical school where such gifts are allowed had a more favorable attitude toward a cholesterol drug than did students from a school where they are banned. > Although hospitals have long discussed what restrictions to place on the more valuable offerings lavished by drug companies, the researchers, whose study appears in The Archives of Internal Medicine, suggest that no gift is too small.
- retsibsi 6y agoI think there's a decent argument that 'bribe' still isn't the most applicable category. The gifts are certainly used as a manipulative tactic, but if their value is trivial and they are given unconditionally, maybe they have more in common with practices like hiring attractive representatives and instructing them to be friendly when pitching a product (and also with ordinary advertisements; part of the point of those free pens is simply to get a name or logo into the doctor's head). They're tactics to give the product a positive sheen and 'earn' some goodwill and familiarity, rather than items of (non-trivial) material value used to incentivise the desired behaviour. edit: I'm thinking of practices like the one referred to in the nyt article -- gift-giving to doctors by drug manufacturers. The top-level comment that started this chain did talk about items offered as part of a direct exchange, which is different.
- everdrive 6y agoThen why do the companies give them out?
- paulz_ 6y ago> ultimately received over $500,000 and stock options from these outside companies. $500,000 seems like probably a little less than one year salary for a Netflix VP. But then again people have been known to engage in fraud for much less.
- 0800LUCAS 6y ago500K is a year's salary for a senior SWE there. I imagine VPs are making well above that.
- cutemonster 6y agoIt was about 10 years ago though, maybe Netflix salaries were lower back then
- rednum 6y agoPerhaps he gambled on the options being worth more. I don't know about all the companies mentioned, but Sumo IPO'd last year.
- jeffbee 6y agoThe amount of RSUs that a VP at Netflix would have been awarded 2011-2015, the years this guy was there, would now be worth about 20 million dollars.
- mywittyname 6y agoWell, that's for the one company he got caught accepting bribes for. The article lists at six other companies he was receiving kickbacks from. And the fact that he set up an LLC in his own name demonstrates just how comfortable he was with all of this. All told, I wouldn't be surprised if he banked tens of millions over his career before getting caught.
- fnord77 6y agoyou can buy a US senator for a few thousand bucks.
- willcipriano 6y agoThis has been tested experimentally in a way and nearly everyone offered accepted a bribe, one that didn't said "not at this point" and only one reported it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam
- sumedh 6y agoWhy doesnt the FBI do such sting operations these days?
- nappy-doo 6y agoprobably because it worked so well last time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- willcipriano 6y ago"In the wake of Abscam, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued "The Attorney General Guidelines for FBI Undercover Operations" ("Civiletti Undercover Guidelines") on January 5, 1981." Short answer: The AG made it much harder to do that sort of thing.
- MarkSweep 6y agohttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/fbi-entrapment https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/fbi-entrap... They do something similar with “terrorists”. They find someone, tell them “push this button to blow up everyone”, and then charge them with terrorism.
- thrower123 6y agoAt least the Snap-On or Redlon Johnson salesmen would bring in donuts or sandwiches. Then again, a full kit of Snap-on tools probably costs more than some companies' AWS spend for a year...