10 ms·

Holy shit. Except for a few details, I could have written that. I recently had a job I was "promoted" into a pseudo-managerial role and immediately asked to di

Holy shit. Except for a few details, I could have written that. I recently had a job I was "promoted" into a pseudo-managerial role and immediately asked to disparage people I actually really liked, in order to put a "unified front" about our history and our people before new management. Told it would be "insubordination" not to sign this "official version of events", even though it was full of factual inaccuracies. I was shocked and disgusted. (The company's engineers are great; this is a managerial ethics problem.) Resigned on the spot. No two weeks' notice, just walked the fuck out. Half my friends think I'm a hero for not selling my soul. Half think I'm an idiot for firing myself to avoid harming others who were in someone's crosshairs already. I don't think I'm either. Hero and idiot both imply a choice. I had none. I am not going to do the wrong thing. Ever. Not for more equity in a company whose executives are okay with this kind of shit, not to keep a job. Just not fucking happening.

temphn 15y ago
Just from the interwebs looks like you've had problems at two employers now including Google: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783114 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783114 Maybe the problem is you, not the employer?
- ryguytilidie 15y ago
  Yeah because if you have beef with more than one company doing sketchy shit its probably your fault...?
- csallen 15y ago
  Unless you're going to present some solid evidence, it's out of place to make that suggestion based on only two data points.
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    In August, I suggested that the only way we'd see lasting success/popularity for G+ was to build a really great game brand, and that we couldn't do this if we were publishing a mix of (a) Zynga games and (b) decent but not brand-defining games like Angry Birds (non-defining because it was already popular by then). I got a few people together and we came up with a plan for saving the Games brand by courting indie developers. A plan that would have worked, and that likely would have made G+ into something. I had massive support (including about 2/3 of the G+ Games team, because who wants to support Farmville instead of doing something cool?) among the engineers and a lot of people said they'd contribute on a 20% basis (even though 20%T was clearly dying). This drew a lot of attention to me. Positive attention from everyone who cared about games or the actual success of G+. Negative attention from the higher-ups because they were afraid of another RNCH. Googlers don't talk about it for fear of losing their jobs, but the engineers hate the Real Names policy. It's probably 80 to 90 percent opposition. Here was another mini-RN (even titled "Real Games") that I inadvertently started in my first 3 months by pointing out that the direction we were taking with games was going to set a historical record for missed opportunities. A weird and harrowing experience. I really did not anticipate that positing a good idea and getting a lot of popular support would lead to adversity. I underestimated the degree (and I still do) to which people would entrench themselves with bad ideas. I still stand by the fact that I was completely and utterly right. The only way I can see a general-purpose social network beating Facebook is by having great games, and by having a very high average quality (a "we won't waste your time" ideology). This requires being extremely editorial about what you accept. This is hard for Google because it made its name by being non-editorial, which is admirable and stately for web search but inappropriate for games, especially because those shitty Zynga games were (in 2011) the #1 cited cause of social network fatigue. I didn't get fired, because I don't think Google knows how to fire people. (If it did, there'd be boxes at the desks of most of their executives.) I left in good standing when I realized that (a) I had years of C++ legacy maintenance ahead of me, because that's what most of the work at Google is, and (b) it would take several years before I'd actually be able to really contribute. Not being able to save the Games product was pretty discouraging. This is what people keep talking about here on HN with regard to me and Google. That, and the fact that I got mixed up with one of the most ineffective means of communication (an internal mailing list that rhymes with henge-risk) I've ever encountered.
    - EwanG 15y ago
      If you ever decide to put together a social network dedicated to games by gamers (or people who want to play them), please let me know. I have a half dozen half-developed HTML5 games because I can't figure out how I would make enough money to pay the hosting bills. Would love to team up with someone who can build a platform that I could put these on. I could do these as Flash of course (did do so with one game a couple years ago), but I can't say I'm interested in putting in library after library of ads and optimizing Actionscript to support a shrinking audience.
      - OneWhoFrogs 15y ago
        http://www.kongregate.com/html5-games http://www.kongregate.com/html5-games It seems Kongregate supports HTML5 games. Perhaps you could try hosting them there?
        EwanG 15y ago
        Amusingly enough, while they do have a small list of HTML5 games, there is nothing in their documentation that talks about how to get one to them. The single reference is to using an iFrame to put their API onto your game that is hosted at another URL. I am hopeful they, or Mochi, or someone like them will come along and provide a true HTML5 solution like the Flash folks already have. But I suspect we are getting rather off-topic here :-)
      - Empedocles99 15y ago
        Maybe not exactly what you meant, but Raptr employs video game players (including a few pro/ex-pro players), and is a social network for video game players.
        EwanG 15y ago
        Well, I was looking more for a site dedicated to developers that might also host games. But Raptr seems interesting enough. Thanks for the suggestion!
    - 15y ago
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I left Google voluntarily but, since you asked, I did blow the whistle on unethical management practices, and I was chagrined when absolutely nothing changed. That wasn't why I left. I left because I wanted to do functional programming and that wasn't going to happen where I was. I don't mind using C++ but I'd rather it not be my full-time job. For my part, I don't like the creeping laxity of ethics that I've seen in technology startups (including Google) for the past few years. I really think that some of the slimiest actors are coming into our industry because they think engineers are easier to take advantage of (since we just want to code and a lot of us put our heads in the sand about office nastiness). I'm glad that programmer salaries are finally starting to converge to what we're worth, but a lot of the worst elements are coming into VC-istan because of the money that's in it.
  - jberryman 15y ago
    Can you share if/where you do FP, or was that at the recent ex-employer?
    - michaelochurch 15y ago
      I did a year of Ocaml at Jane Street and Clojure for over 2 years at a startup that failed for non-technical reasons.
      - whalliburton 15y ago
        You know, I sit around here and occasionally run into classic Michael Church writing, which I feel like I dig pretty well. But the clearly provable missteps into blatant lies, such as this failed startup comment, just need to stop. Your honesty and your truth, Michael, are more important than your thoughts. Please stick with that.
        michaelochurch 15y ago
        When I left, an excellent programmer and a personal friend of mine had to crack his 401(k) because the company didn't have the money to cover what taxes he owed on the small amount it had paid him in 2010. Perhaps it's still on life support and E is still funding H's lifestyle, but I'll stand by "failed for nontechnical reasons".
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  It's called moral courage because it requires hard decisions and sacrifice, and leaves you open to suffer barbs from fools who seek to make themselves look and feel better. It's not called "moral no-shit-sherlock-easy-choice." It's called moral courage because of people like you. (full disclosure: I don't know the grandparent poster, I don't know his situation. But I do know how bad you can be made to look when making the right choice, usually by callow jackanapes.)
  - jaylevitt 15y ago
    Reminds me of Jon Stewart's great quote: "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values. They're... hobbies."
    - bloggergirl 15y ago
      That is excellent. Like everything Jon Stewart says.
  - temphn 15y ago
    Heh. You don't know the grandparent poster, but I'm the callow jacknape. He's slagging off everyone in the world, I'm only pointing out that it might not be the world that's the problem. And he's the upvoted one, on this thread at least. What's moral courage again? It's saying what's unpopular, because it's right. And it's right to note that the holier-than-thou who seek to lecture the world on all their sins (real and imagined) are generally self-important jackasses rather than people to be respected, let alone imitated.
- fudged 15y ago
  Do you think the idea of searching for this information perhaps a bit ironic in this context?
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    Not only ironic, but Orin Kerr has argued (http://www.c-span.org/Events/Washington-Journal-for-Monday-April-2/10737429561-0/ http://www.c-span.org/Events/Washington-Journal-for-Monday-A...) that in the case of police departments using this practice (they appear to be big users of the practice) it might actually be barred by the 4th Amendment. And private employers might or might not be violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as far as civil damages.
    - fudged 15y ago
      I was referencing the fact that the user was actively looking up the details of the other user.
suprgeek 15y ago
Indeed. Not only when the higher-ups ask you to pull unethical stuff, even when your close friends do. Last week a close friend of mine who is out of a job right now, told me he was interviewing at a consulting firm and they had given him an Architectural Case study. He called me up and explained the problem statement - having worked together he knew that it was complex system with multiple scalability & performance traps- and that I had spent a long time building exactly such systems. He nicely asked me to design a pseudo system for him.... I had to refuse as it was clearly an interview question he was meant to work on alone (the wording implied this). Felt bad as I know he really wanted the job...and it is going to put a big strain on our friendship. I am still wondering if throwing him a few pointers might have been the better move...
- johnbender 15y ago
  I don't know you or your friend, but business dealings with friends often end poorly, even with small transactions like the one you've described here. More importantly, good friends _generally_ will avoid putting you on the spot like that, though I can understand if he's been out of work for a while.
- chao- 15y ago
  I am still wondering if throwing him a few pointers might have been the better move... I will agree up front that if the wording explicitly said it was a solo deal, then at minimum you made a safe choice/morally defensible choice, and you can at sleep well at night. But I think you should have been allowed to give him pointers. And by "allowed" I mean to say that the general standards and expectations of our society should be that people's capabilities include their ability to locate, comprehend and apply new information. An important sub-case of "locate" should (and in practice often does) include maintaining a social graph of people with varied skill sets, and from whom you can get initial pointers in the right direction. As of late people are more accepting of the general premise of "find and use new information" as a skill unto itself, especially with regards to the internet. Much of you find via Google is written by a human, but when you describe where you got initial direction from, and replace "Google" with "a friend", suddenly it's a different package entirely. My suspicion is that it is because it does not conform to the "school exam" model that is ingrained into us all. What we are capable of is too often reduced to what we have memorized at any particular moment, and that can be a little misguided. I obviously don't have full understanding of the prompt your friend was given, nor do I discount the utility of having a huge mental repository of information in many spheres of life (e.g. time sensitive or emergency scenarios). I just think that the "only what you know this very second" examination model is often extended in situations where it isn't a good measure of or doesn't reflect the actual circumstances you can expect to face.
Simucal 15y ago
First off, I commend you for sticking to your ethical principles. I know a lot of people in your situation who would have folded and done what the company asked them to do. I'm curious, how will you present this situation to prospective employers in the future? Will you mention that you left because you refused to do something unethical or will you skirt the subject? I'm trying to think what the best course of action would be.
- christkv 15y ago
  Be honest about it is my advice. If the person does not want to hire you because you are not willing to compromise your personal integrity you will probably not want to work there anyway.
guelo 15y ago
Way to hog attention with your drama away from the topic at hand about the legal liability of employers invading privacy via Facebook. The OP wasn't a generic "some companies suck" rant, it was a parable about a specific problem.
- jsprinkles 15y ago
  It's fairly typical that the entire top half of this comments section is about michaelochurch and his honesty (which I'm not especially interested in) on a Hacker News item about a specific ethics debate regarding Facebook and hiring (that I'm especially interested in). This is the second day in a row that michaelochurch has specifically centered a popular item's discussion on him in a completely irrelevant manner: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784685 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784685 He knew, writing it, that people would call him out on the relevance of the comment so he threw in that little flourish at the end of the comment to establish some kind of a weak link between the content of the submission and his comment. None of the same wording here, just a completely irrelevant comment that's not even loosely related to the submission. Just look how far you have to scroll in this comments section to get to the discussion about the SUBMISSION ITSELF. Seriously. In all seriousness, I have no idea who michaelochurch is, nor do I really care about his escapades against Google or his honesty or quality as a person. I just want to read discussion about the topic at hand on Hacker News. (edit: strongly edited)
  - Confusion 15y ago
    I've taken to downvoting such comments. Not because I disagree with them or think they are wrong, but simply because they are offtopic and taking the place of a better ontopic comment. We really need an 'offtopic' flagging mechanism.
    - saraid216 15y ago
      1) I'd argue that downvoting is an appropriate course of action for this. As I understand it, the purpose of downvoting is to discourage the type of comment or submission being downvoted. 2) A little Javascriptiness to collapse trees of comments would do wonders to make it ignorable, too.
kevinalexbrown 15y ago
I am not going to do the wrong thing. Ever. That's a really strong statement. If you stood up and did the right thing, that's awesome. But if your opinion on every situation 'ever' is that you're not going to do the wrong thing, step back and ask whether things are so simple. I'm not saying moral absolutes don't exist, but striving toward 'the right thing' is seldom so clear. For instance, you quit on the spot. What about the wonderful engineers who now have to pick up the slack? I'm not saying you made the wrong choice, but there are consequences to be weighed in every situation. If your method of decision-making rests on the idea that you don't have a choice, I think you're limiting yourself. And finally - I thought a lot about writing this, because I generally hate comments about commenting - you responded to a really interesting post regarding privacy and hiring in an era of easily accessible sensitive personal information to point out how ethical you are - in your words 'not going to do the wrong thing. Ever.' It's not immediately clear why this applies to raganwald's post, except that both involve company bureaucracy and a protagonist resigning.
- lloeki 15y ago
  I won't go as far as to pretend to know what the parent means, but I'm quite sure he didn't mean to say he will know what's Wrong every single time, but that he just can't willfully commit himself to doing something that goes wildly against his morality.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I meant that I won't willfully do the wrong thing. Doing unskillful things is part of being human.
its_so_on 15y ago
a thousand years of Western Civilization thinks you're a hero. "Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor". I would have told them that you're out on that one.
beza1e1 15y ago
kudos
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
squozzer 15y ago
Hooray. Seriously. Your situation was not just a moral trap but a legal one. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole exercise was an attempt to make you "dirty" for some future use.

temphn 15y ago

Just from the interwebs looks like you've had problems at two employers now including Google: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783114 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3783114 Maybe the problem is you, not the employer?

ryguytilidie 15y ago
Yeah because if you have beef with more than one company doing sketchy shit its probably your fault...?
csallen 15y ago
Unless you're going to present some solid evidence, it's out of place to make that suggestion based on only two data points.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  In August, I suggested that the only way we'd see lasting success/popularity for G+ was to build a really great game brand, and that we couldn't do this if we were publishing a mix of (a) Zynga games and (b) decent but not brand-defining games like Angry Birds (non-defining because it was already popular by then). I got a few people together and we came up with a plan for saving the Games brand by courting indie developers. A plan that would have worked, and that likely would have made G+ into something. I had massive support (including about 2/3 of the G+ Games team, because who wants to support Farmville instead of doing something cool?) among the engineers and a lot of people said they'd contribute on a 20% basis (even though 20%T was clearly dying). This drew a lot of attention to me. Positive attention from everyone who cared about games or the actual success of G+. Negative attention from the higher-ups because they were afraid of another RNCH. Googlers don't talk about it for fear of losing their jobs, but the engineers hate the Real Names policy. It's probably 80 to 90 percent opposition. Here was another mini-RN (even titled "Real Games") that I inadvertently started in my first 3 months by pointing out that the direction we were taking with games was going to set a historical record for missed opportunities. A weird and harrowing experience. I really did not anticipate that positing a good idea and getting a lot of popular support would lead to adversity. I underestimated the degree (and I still do) to which people would entrench themselves with bad ideas. I still stand by the fact that I was completely and utterly right. The only way I can see a general-purpose social network beating Facebook is by having great games, and by having a very high average quality (a "we won't waste your time" ideology). This requires being extremely editorial about what you accept. This is hard for Google because it made its name by being non-editorial, which is admirable and stately for web search but inappropriate for games, especially because those shitty Zynga games were (in 2011) the #1 cited cause of social network fatigue. I didn't get fired, because I don't think Google knows how to fire people. (If it did, there'd be boxes at the desks of most of their executives.) I left in good standing when I realized that (a) I had years of C++ legacy maintenance ahead of me, because that's what most of the work at Google is, and (b) it would take several years before I'd actually be able to really contribute. Not being able to save the Games product was pretty discouraging. This is what people keep talking about here on HN with regard to me and Google. That, and the fact that I got mixed up with one of the most ineffective means of communication (an internal mailing list that rhymes with henge-risk) I've ever encountered.
  - EwanG 15y ago
    If you ever decide to put together a social network dedicated to games by gamers (or people who want to play them), please let me know. I have a half dozen half-developed HTML5 games because I can't figure out how I would make enough money to pay the hosting bills. Would love to team up with someone who can build a platform that I could put these on. I could do these as Flash of course (did do so with one game a couple years ago), but I can't say I'm interested in putting in library after library of ads and optimizing Actionscript to support a shrinking audience.
    - OneWhoFrogs 15y ago
      http://www.kongregate.com/html5-games http://www.kongregate.com/html5-games It seems Kongregate supports HTML5 games. Perhaps you could try hosting them there?
      - EwanG 15y ago
        Amusingly enough, while they do have a small list of HTML5 games, there is nothing in their documentation that talks about how to get one to them. The single reference is to using an iFrame to put their API onto your game that is hosted at another URL. I am hopeful they, or Mochi, or someone like them will come along and provide a true HTML5 solution like the Flash folks already have. But I suspect we are getting rather off-topic here :-)
    - Empedocles99 15y ago
      Maybe not exactly what you meant, but Raptr employs video game players (including a few pro/ex-pro players), and is a social network for video game players.
      - EwanG 15y ago
        Well, I was looking more for a site dedicated to developers that might also host games. But Raptr seems interesting enough. Thanks for the suggestion!
  - 15y ago
michaelochurch 15y ago
I left Google voluntarily but, since you asked, I did blow the whistle on unethical management practices, and I was chagrined when absolutely nothing changed. That wasn't why I left. I left because I wanted to do functional programming and that wasn't going to happen where I was. I don't mind using C++ but I'd rather it not be my full-time job. For my part, I don't like the creeping laxity of ethics that I've seen in technology startups (including Google) for the past few years. I really think that some of the slimiest actors are coming into our industry because they think engineers are easier to take advantage of (since we just want to code and a lot of us put our heads in the sand about office nastiness). I'm glad that programmer salaries are finally starting to converge to what we're worth, but a lot of the worst elements are coming into VC-istan because of the money that's in it.
- jberryman 15y ago
  Can you share if/where you do FP, or was that at the recent ex-employer?
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    I did a year of Ocaml at Jane Street and Clojure for over 2 years at a startup that failed for non-technical reasons.
    - whalliburton 15y ago
      You know, I sit around here and occasionally run into classic Michael Church writing, which I feel like I dig pretty well. But the clearly provable missteps into blatant lies, such as this failed startup comment, just need to stop. Your honesty and your truth, Michael, are more important than your thoughts. Please stick with that.
      - michaelochurch 15y ago
        When I left, an excellent programmer and a personal friend of mine had to crack his 401(k) because the company didn't have the money to cover what taxes he owed on the small amount it had paid him in 2010. Perhaps it's still on life support and E is still funding H's lifestyle, but I'll stand by "failed for nontechnical reasons".
mattdeboard 15y ago
It's called moral courage because it requires hard decisions and sacrifice, and leaves you open to suffer barbs from fools who seek to make themselves look and feel better. It's not called "moral no-shit-sherlock-easy-choice." It's called moral courage because of people like you. (full disclosure: I don't know the grandparent poster, I don't know his situation. But I do know how bad you can be made to look when making the right choice, usually by callow jackanapes.)
- jaylevitt 15y ago
  Reminds me of Jon Stewart's great quote: "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values. They're... hobbies."
  - bloggergirl 15y ago
    That is excellent. Like everything Jon Stewart says.
- temphn 15y ago
  Heh. You don't know the grandparent poster, but I'm the callow jacknape. He's slagging off everyone in the world, I'm only pointing out that it might not be the world that's the problem. And he's the upvoted one, on this thread at least. What's moral courage again? It's saying what's unpopular, because it's right. And it's right to note that the holier-than-thou who seek to lecture the world on all their sins (real and imagined) are generally self-important jackasses rather than people to be respected, let alone imitated.
fudged 15y ago
Do you think the idea of searching for this information perhaps a bit ironic in this context?
- einhverfr 15y ago
  Not only ironic, but Orin Kerr has argued (http://www.c-span.org/Events/Washington-Journal-for-Monday-April-2/10737429561-0/ http://www.c-span.org/Events/Washington-Journal-for-Monday-A...) that in the case of police departments using this practice (they appear to be big users of the practice) it might actually be barred by the 4th Amendment. And private employers might or might not be violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as far as civil damages.
  - fudged 15y ago
    I was referencing the fact that the user was actively looking up the details of the other user.

suprgeek 15y ago

Indeed. Not only when the higher-ups ask you to pull unethical stuff, even when your close friends do. Last week a close friend of mine who is out of a job right now, told me he was interviewing at a consulting firm and they had given him an Architectural Case study. He called me up and explained the problem statement - having worked together he knew that it was complex system with multiple scalability & performance traps- and that I had spent a long time building exactly such systems. He nicely asked me to design a pseudo system for him.... I had to refuse as it was clearly an interview question he was meant to work on alone (the wording implied this). Felt bad as I know he really wanted the job...and it is going to put a big strain on our friendship. I am still wondering if throwing him a few pointers might have been the better move...

johnbender 15y ago
I don't know you or your friend, but business dealings with friends often end poorly, even with small transactions like the one you've described here. More importantly, good friends _generally_ will avoid putting you on the spot like that, though I can understand if he's been out of work for a while.
chao- 15y ago
I am still wondering if throwing him a few pointers might have been the better move... I will agree up front that if the wording explicitly said it was a solo deal, then at minimum you made a safe choice/morally defensible choice, and you can at sleep well at night. But I think you should have been allowed to give him pointers. And by "allowed" I mean to say that the general standards and expectations of our society should be that people's capabilities include their ability to locate, comprehend and apply new information. An important sub-case of "locate" should (and in practice often does) include maintaining a social graph of people with varied skill sets, and from whom you can get initial pointers in the right direction. As of late people are more accepting of the general premise of "find and use new information" as a skill unto itself, especially with regards to the internet. Much of you find via Google is written by a human, but when you describe where you got initial direction from, and replace "Google" with "a friend", suddenly it's a different package entirely. My suspicion is that it is because it does not conform to the "school exam" model that is ingrained into us all. What we are capable of is too often reduced to what we have memorized at any particular moment, and that can be a little misguided. I obviously don't have full understanding of the prompt your friend was given, nor do I discount the utility of having a huge mental repository of information in many spheres of life (e.g. time sensitive or emergency scenarios). I just think that the "only what you know this very second" examination model is often extended in situations where it isn't a good measure of or doesn't reflect the actual circumstances you can expect to face.

Simucal 15y ago

First off, I commend you for sticking to your ethical principles. I know a lot of people in your situation who would have folded and done what the company asked them to do. I'm curious, how will you present this situation to prospective employers in the future? Will you mention that you left because you refused to do something unethical or will you skirt the subject? I'm trying to think what the best course of action would be.

christkv 15y ago
Be honest about it is my advice. If the person does not want to hire you because you are not willing to compromise your personal integrity you will probably not want to work there anyway.

guelo 15y ago

Way to hog attention with your drama away from the topic at hand about the legal liability of employers invading privacy via Facebook. The OP wasn't a generic "some companies suck" rant, it was a parable about a specific problem.

jsprinkles 15y ago
It's fairly typical that the entire top half of this comments section is about michaelochurch and his honesty (which I'm not especially interested in) on a Hacker News item about a specific ethics debate regarding Facebook and hiring (that I'm especially interested in). This is the second day in a row that michaelochurch has specifically centered a popular item's discussion on him in a completely irrelevant manner: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784685 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784685 He knew, writing it, that people would call him out on the relevance of the comment so he threw in that little flourish at the end of the comment to establish some kind of a weak link between the content of the submission and his comment. None of the same wording here, just a completely irrelevant comment that's not even loosely related to the submission. Just look how far you have to scroll in this comments section to get to the discussion about the SUBMISSION ITSELF. Seriously. In all seriousness, I have no idea who michaelochurch is, nor do I really care about his escapades against Google or his honesty or quality as a person. I just want to read discussion about the topic at hand on Hacker News. (edit: strongly edited)
- Confusion 15y ago
  I've taken to downvoting such comments. Not because I disagree with them or think they are wrong, but simply because they are offtopic and taking the place of a better ontopic comment. We really need an 'offtopic' flagging mechanism.
  - saraid216 15y ago
    1) I'd argue that downvoting is an appropriate course of action for this. As I understand it, the purpose of downvoting is to discourage the type of comment or submission being downvoted. 2) A little Javascriptiness to collapse trees of comments would do wonders to make it ignorable, too.

kevinalexbrown 15y ago

I am not going to do the wrong thing. Ever. That's a really strong statement. If you stood up and did the right thing, that's awesome. But if your opinion on every situation 'ever' is that you're not going to do the wrong thing, step back and ask whether things are so simple. I'm not saying moral absolutes don't exist, but striving toward 'the right thing' is seldom so clear. For instance, you quit on the spot. What about the wonderful engineers who now have to pick up the slack? I'm not saying you made the wrong choice, but there are consequences to be weighed in every situation. If your method of decision-making rests on the idea that you don't have a choice, I think you're limiting yourself. And finally - I thought a lot about writing this, because I generally hate comments about commenting - you responded to a really interesting post regarding privacy and hiring in an era of easily accessible sensitive personal information to point out how ethical you are - in your words 'not going to do the wrong thing. Ever.' It's not immediately clear why this applies to raganwald's post, except that both involve company bureaucracy and a protagonist resigning.

lloeki 15y ago
I won't go as far as to pretend to know what the parent means, but I'm quite sure he didn't mean to say he will know what's Wrong every single time, but that he just can't willfully commit himself to doing something that goes wildly against his morality.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
michaelochurch 15y ago
I meant that I won't willfully do the wrong thing. Doing unskillful things is part of being human.

its_so_on 15y ago

a thousand years of Western Civilization thinks you're a hero. "Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor". I would have told them that you're out on that one.

beza1e1 15y ago

kudos

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

squozzer 15y ago

Hooray. Seriously. Your situation was not just a moral trap but a legal one. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole exercise was an attempt to make you "dirty" for some future use.