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That title is funny. I work at big nameless european telco and for the last 10 years that's exactly how I perceive the whole culture here. Some higher up, eith
by INTPenis 6y ago
That title is funny. I work at big nameless european telco and for the last 10 years that's exactly how I perceive the whole culture here.
Some higher up, either the CTO, CIO, or close to those roles, gets a pamphlet about some shitty product. And without listening to anyone buys it and forces all us techs to use it for a year or two before they move on to the next shitty product.
In one case we even had a CTO force a shitty product on us, speak very highly about it, only to quit and take a position at the vendor of the shitty product.
- canadianfella 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
- knuthsat 6y agoYeah, the same thing in European banks. It gets quite obvious when executives in local branches start pushing for shitty products. When I started working professionally, I always thought that eventually the best product wins. Then I was struck with this kind of reality, where the product with the biggest people network wins. Similar thing ended up being true for me. Without a good support network, I won't end up anywhere even if I have above average abilities.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoI find this to be an interesting thing about reading the Torvads–Tanenbaum debate, that both sides seemed to assume without much consideration that the best instruction set, and product in general, would always win. With instruction sets in particular, there is a very large amount of inertia.
- kjs3 6y agoTo be fair, Tanenbaum is an academic and Torvalds was not that far out of college. It's easy to be idealistic like that when you haven't been jaded by experience in the real world.
- toyg 6y agoThis also works in reverse. If you build an extensive ecosystem of "partners", then decide to cut them off, chances are these people will move on to something else and take customers with them, cutting you back to size. (Oh hai Oracle, I definitely wasn't talking about you, nope, nossir...)
- ahartmetz 6y agoHaha. In contrast to that, SAP is known for being very cooperative with SAP consulting firms - I guess that is part of their success.
- amelius 6y agoIt also sounds similar to how physicians prescribe medicines.
- pessimizer 6y agohttps://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/ https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/ https://www.frierlevitt.com/articles/service/pharmacylaw/pharma-company-pays-39-million-to-settle-kickback-allegations-for-physician-speaking-fees/ https://www.frierlevitt.com/articles/service/pharmacylaw/pha... > Last month, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a $39 million settlement agreement with pharmaceutical company, Daiichi Sankyo, Inc., resolving allegations that the company submitted false claims to federal healthcare programs by paying kickbacks to physicians to induce them to prescribe drugs. The DOJ alleged that Daiichi violated the Anti-Kickback Statute by disguising kickbacks as legitimate business engagements. Specifically, Daiichi engaged physicians as participants in various speaker programs, offering honoraria, payments, meals and other remuneration in return for the physicians’ services. The settlement agreement highlights the following activities which the DOJ found particularly offensive: > 1. Honoraria was paid where recipient spoke only to members of his or her own staff in his or her own office. > 2. [...]
- DesiLurker 6y agothat doc dollars is interesting, propublica does good work.
- varispeed 6y agoNot sure why people downvote it? Just because you don't like to hear it, it does not mean this is not happening. Doctors get paid cash and hospitality benefits (and in my country they don't even have to declare it). Pharma companies get sales reports from regions and reward doctors based how given region performs. Nothing is done about it, because pharma pays well to maintain the status quo.
- fidesomnes 6y agoThe entire medical profession as it exists runs on grift and payback schemes. The reason why the medical industry is pushing out vaccines to the elderly is that their pharma cash cow would disappear if the number of 85+ year olds dwindled a few percentage points.
- f00zz 6y agoHad similar experiences working at LatAm banks. I thought it was a third world thing.
- agumonkey 6y agoGlad to know every place is equally subject to shitty practice.
- varispeed 6y agoHave you tried to report it to anti-corruption unit at your org? I understand sometimes they are on it as well and that can put your position at risk.
- everdrive 6y ago>to anti-corruption unit at your org Do most companies have this?
- stuff4ben 6y agoA lot of the larger ones have a Code of Business Ethics and is a required training you take yearly. Either Netflix didn't have this, or this guy just didn't care.
- wayoutthere 6y agoIn my experience, Business Ethics exists to silence whistleblowers. In either case they have about as much influence over executive prerogative as diversity offices have — the people who make the decisions will never give them enough power to question decisions at or above the VP level because they don’t want their own decisions investigated.
- Macha 6y agoIt depends. If it puts the company at legal risk, they're pretty quick to act in all companies I've been at. If it puts the company at just PR risk, varies by company whether they will do anything or participate in the cover up.
- tyingq 6y ago"Internal Audit" is pretty common. Though I wouldn't just assume they would take your side. Whistleblowing is tricky business. Someone may decide that the public tarnish of "it happened" is worse than letting it slide.
- INTPenis 6y ago
- Dansvidania 6y agoI feel exactly the same way. Worked for a big american Telco company that is universally hated everywhere (but unknown enough here in Europe so that they manage to hire) and I feel this is exactly how contracts of this kind worked. We would hear that this or that product was forced on us because this or that senior executive's friend/relative owned the company producing that product. Fighting against having to use crappy tooling because of this was one of the nuisances that we'd have to deal with a few times a year.
- killingtime74 6y agoVerizon right
- Dansvidania 6y agoI would rather not confirm or deny, but I find it funny that apparently telco companies in the US share a considerable amount of hate; enough for you to have to wonder :D maybe it is a location-based hatred distribution?
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y agoI've hated every Telco I've ever used, except the first. The first was a small local cell provider that kept my prepaid cell phone in service for months after my funds expired. Since then I've been plagued with terrible service (customer and signal), random outages, near fraudulent billing practices, sketchy offers, high pressure sales in stores, overage fees, arbitrary fees, continuously increasing bills, etc.
- javajosh 6y agoCould easily be Telekom, which is T-Mobile in Europe. But yeah, it's one of those.
- burntoutfire 6y agoIt's not American though.
- dr-detroit 6y agoThese elite glass-office dwelling executives all know each other from their elite college experience.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoI had a grand-boss who proposed buying an add-on to our PDM system. I explained how we already threw away $15 MILLION on buying ALL the licenses for a previous PDM system up front, only to scrap it when our company got taken over (and pillaged and destroyed, but that's a story for another day). I BEGGED him not to spend the money until we proved that we could actually, you know, integrate the add-on, and USE it successfully. No, of course, we spent all the money up front. And THEN found out that we couldn't use it. And then I heard he got a big kickback from the company, and I because a little less naive, and a lot more jaded.
- Chris2048 6y ago> then I heard he got a big kickback from the company sounds like a good case for whistleblowing
- krageon 6y agoDon't whistleblow unless you can work in an entirely different industry where nobody knows you (and nobody reads the news). Or of course you can do so entirely anonymously.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoI had already learned my lesson. My company had instituted an ethics hotline a few years before. Someone I knew actually had the guts to point out a large-scale graft, and... nothing was done about it. So I didn't bother.
- Chris2048 6y agoI didn't mean some internal thing, doesn't the SEC give % rewards to whistleblowers?
- lastofthemojito 6y agoYep. Alternate headline: "Netflix IT exec chose products using standard industry practices".
- Taylor_OD 6y agoYeah this is pretty much how these decisions are made at many companies. If it's not a direct kickback its a friends of the decision maker and they go golfing together four times a year. At the vendors expense of course.
- sdgasg 6y agoThis is so common, we even have ethics training at our mega tech corp and we are supposed to report any such activities. A lot of time kickbacks are subtle though like unpaid internship at vendor for CTO's niece. Or sometimes it is a bit more bold like a consulting contract that vendor need to sign up with CTO's brother's firm etc. The most obvious and legal form of kickbacks is just regular sales process that involve a lot of nice dinners or even trips to conferences on nice resorts. One of my old boss owned his company and it was so normal for him to go out for 4 hour lunches with clients.
- EveYoung 6y agoIn recent years, I've noticed that more and more vendors offer quite lavish "training" events for the tech teams evaluating their products. I'm sometimes still surprised by the type of questionable practices that are common in otherwise highly regulated industries.
- rednerrus 6y agoDid you an I work at the same place? We had the exact same thing happen. Incompetent CTO bought millions of dollars in unnecessary crap and consulting, quit and joined the unnecessary crap company.
- lordnacho 6y agoYeah but "Kail set up a corporation to receive bribes from Netflix contractors, the DOJ said." Super blatant. I don't get how he expected to get away with it? You'd think there's a fair chance his employment contract at Netflix would prohibit having an outside interest like this. Plus you know, maybe learn how brown paper bags work. Or find a relative who has a consulting business to bill. Maybe read what cryptocurrency is. Seems like there are a lot of things you could do that aren't making a separate company which has bank accounts and files returns. Oh yeah and don't buy a house with it, a house can be confiscated. Anyway he should have read the newspapers more. Clearly the thing to do is like your CTO or how politicians do it, just get them to pay you with a "job" after you leave. Perhaps he just hadn't reached scale yet like you can with political roles. Those £38B we spent on track & trace here in the UK will surely come back to the right pockets somehow.
- INTPenis 6y agoYeah reading the case this is nothing like anything I've experienced. But the title alone made me chuckle.
- rasputnik6502 6y agoIt director's wife runs a foundation that gets big donations from software vendor. Every time the vendor sells to the guy's company.