8 ms·

> If you take one lesson from this, it’s that you can always say no. I fully understand why this is true, but it seems to ignore any retaliative measures that

by Rygian 1y ago

> If you take one lesson from this, it’s that you can always say no. I fully understand why this is true, but it seems to ignore any retaliative measures that the management could take against the person who says no. With the benefit of hindsight, any such retaliation would be weaker than ending up in an orange suit. But the person has to find the guts to say "no" without that hindsight.

OskarS 1y ago
I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. Your manager is certainly culpable, but if you act against the law, you are culpable as well. The exception is if you fear literal physical violence against you or others, or are being blackmailed or something, then of course you are being coerced and have no choice. But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion. Not saying it's easy, it's a horrible situation to be put in and I have huge amounts of sympathy for a person who has to experience this. No one is perfect and act with faultless ethics at all times. But hard or not, it is your duty as a citizen not to violate the law.
- overscore 1y ago
  > I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally. > The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only excusable, it's the only moral action.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    > When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions This is the time when your ethics are tested. Anyone can do the right thing when they're getting paid for it.
    - tpoacher 1y ago
      There's a nice Jordan Peterson quote: > There was a lesson to learn from the holocaust. We're always reminded that: "Never forget, we've learned our lesson." "What was the lesson?" That's the question. The lesson is, "You're the Nazi". No-one wants to learn that; If you were there, that would have been you. You might think "Well, I'd be Oskar Schindler and I'd be rescuing the Jews." It's like, no, afraid not. You'd at least not be saying anything. And you might also be actively participating. You might also enjoy it. Hindsight theoretical morality is very different from experience on the ground, where peer pressure, stress, uncertainty, exploding situations and fog of war come into the mix.
      - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - DennisP 1y ago
        Seems like a better lesson would be "don't be the Nazi." It's not like it's impossible. The Nazis arrested 800,000 Germans for active resistance activities, and several hundred thousand Germans deserted the military, many of those defecting to the Allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism It wasn't a huge percentage, but we don't know how many actively resisted without getting caught, or resisted in more passive ways. And that was resistance against the Nazis, who had no qualms about killing resistors. Risking or quitting your job to not only do what's right, but avoid getting in trouble with your government, isn't in the same ballpark.
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  "losing your job", for a lot of people, is extremely effective coercion. We are not talking about luxury here. A lot of people depend on their salary to pay rent and put food on the table. This is even more pressing if you have a family that depends on you, if you are in need of healthcare, etc. What your post fails to recognize is that in the current system, labor is already a form of coercion. You need to work because the option is homelessness and starvation. If you can avoid those even when unemployed, you are extremely privileged.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    If you can avoid those even when unemployed that would be all developed countries except the united states
    - rfrey 1y ago
      So yes, the extremely privileged
      - em-bee 1y ago
        privileged? sure, but extremely? nowadays even in china everyone gets healthcare, working or not, so we are talking about almost a quarter of the worlds population.
    - snypher 1y ago
      380k homeless in UK. 262k in Germany. 122k Australia. 650k in USA. The per capita math is left for the reader but I don't believe there is much distinction here .
      - throwaway-0001 1y ago
        You're right, the numbers are very close to recent official figures. I looked them up to calculate the per capita rates. So USA is actually better than other countries? Kind of defeats these arguments here - interesting. (By the way I’m not from us) Based on the latest available data (mostly 2023) and current population estimates: * *UK:* ~56.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 178) * *Australia:* ~45.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 220) [using 2021 census data] * *Germany:* ~31.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 323) * *USA:* ~19.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 515) The per capita distinction is more significant than the raw numbers suggest. (Note: Methodologies for counting vary by country, which can affect direct comparisons.)
- array_key_first 1y ago
  I think, for most people, getting the shit beaten out of them is a preferable outcome to losing their job. For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc. This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enough.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - DennisP 1y ago
    The cases in the article were software engineers in the US, and at FTX. Two were engineering directors and the third was a senior engineer. If any of them didn't have plenty of emergency funds set aside, they should have seriously rethought their spending.
    - tverbeure 1y ago
      I know plenty of people who saved for years to get a downpayment for a house and then used all of that for just that. After that, it will take a while to replenish their emergency fund with very little margin of error. A job loss would be devastating.
      - DennisP 1y ago
        My claim is that that's a bad decision, for exactly that reason. Job loss can happen for any number of reasons, often without warning. Getting a mortgage without any cushion for job loss is a huge risk. Note also that I'm talking about highly-paid software engineers, not about people in general. Lots of people in the US make way less money than senior software engineers, and they manage to get by. Live at that level and secure your emergency funds first, and you'll be a lot more comfortable dealing with any ethical quandaries at work.
        tverbeure 1y ago
- exe34 1y ago
  > But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion. it depends how many friends and family you have in the area that can host your whole family that is now homeless. it depends how much disruption you are willing to inflict on your kids definitely right now as opposed to maybe in the future.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  I think the risk is somewhat higher than just losing your job - you are potentially burning your whole referral network in the process (especially if you end up with your name in the press during any resulting prosecution). For a junior engineer it may not be that hard to fly under the radar, but senior/staff level folks tend to be well known by the execs. And execs talk, they call their friends to vet future hires... burn your execs, and maybe you don't work in that town again
  - scaramanga 1y ago
    Probably for the best... Like, anyone who would work with some of my previous employers, are places I wouldn't want to work anyway. It's a big wide world out there.
    - phatskat 1y ago
      > Probably for the best... Quite. One of my first gigs was at a large real-estate aggregator. The people were great but the highest levels of the company did - A pet “adoption” site, in quotes because to my knowledge the pets weren’t real and it was a subscription service with no means of cancellation outside of a voicemail box - A kind of Craigslist-esque site for selling home improvement services that was wildly vulnerable to XSS - I discovered that during an unannounced client demo when my own manager had said “you guys try to break it” - We were a PHP shop from the beginning. One day, engineering gets pulled into a meeting room and told that they’ve been developing 2.0 in an office downtown, with a separate team, in ColdFusion. They fired the lead engineer on the spot and most of us left or got fired shortly thereafter. They did offer to train us in CF, but the bad blood was too thick for my taste. All that is to say, if I ever get wind of the owner or CEO being involved anywhere that I’m working, I’ll probably be walking.
pydry 1y ago
This is why whistleblower laws need to be stronger (e.g. retaliation means automatic jailtime even if the whistle was wrongly blown) and rewards need to be larger.
creer 1y ago
The threat of retaliation - in the form of being fired, harassed or moved to a dead end position - is very scary to a younger engineer. But from a rational point of view it's not very strong (HOWEVER many managers or CEOs are far from rational.) - Firing someone has large costs to the employer. You have the job because you are needed. Same for side-lining someone or not promoting them. - Firing someone removes the final incentives against that person reporting the deed to the govt. It pushes that person toward reporting instead of softer "negotiated" steps such as continuing to argue for legal alternatives or discussing it with an intermediate rather than outright reporting. And many corporate legal or accounting people are amazing at finding alternative ways to achieve the same result in a not-illegal manner. - A lawyer can help you much more once there is retaliation. The company might end up fighting both the fraud reporting AND the retaliation. Just firing someone is not a great "solution" for the company. Letting you believe that they will ... that's very powerful. (and probably all this is caveat: in countries where retaliation is illegal enough and commonly taken to court or settled. which is not worldwide.)
themafia 1y ago
That retaliation is in and of itself a new illegal act.
eur0pa 1y ago
You can absolutely, most definitely always say "no". Their carrot (money) comes and goes, and their stick (also money) is not enough to be concerning.
pavel_lishin 1y ago
> But the person has to find the guts to say "no" without that hindsight. Not that I would recommend a night's stay at a local lockup (2/5 stars, the beds are awful, the toilet facilities are worse, and the roommates leave much to be desired), but doing so certainly puts things in perspective going forward.

by Rygian 1y ago

OskarS 1y ago

I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. Your manager is certainly culpable, but if you act against the law, you are culpable as well. The exception is if you fear literal physical violence against you or others, or are being blackmailed or something, then of course you are being coerced and have no choice. But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion. Not saying it's easy, it's a horrible situation to be put in and I have huge amounts of sympathy for a person who has to experience this. No one is perfect and act with faultless ethics at all times. But hard or not, it is your duty as a citizen not to violate the law.

overscore 1y ago
> I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job. When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally. > The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it. This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only excusable, it's the only moral action.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- philipallstar 1y ago
  > When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions This is the time when your ethics are tested. Anyone can do the right thing when they're getting paid for it.
  - tpoacher 1y ago
    There's a nice Jordan Peterson quote: > There was a lesson to learn from the holocaust. We're always reminded that: "Never forget, we've learned our lesson." "What was the lesson?" That's the question. The lesson is, "You're the Nazi". No-one wants to learn that; If you were there, that would have been you. You might think "Well, I'd be Oskar Schindler and I'd be rescuing the Jews." It's like, no, afraid not. You'd at least not be saying anything. And you might also be actively participating. You might also enjoy it. Hindsight theoretical morality is very different from experience on the ground, where peer pressure, stress, uncertainty, exploding situations and fog of war come into the mix.
    - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - DennisP 1y ago
      Seems like a better lesson would be "don't be the Nazi." It's not like it's impossible. The Nazis arrested 800,000 Germans for active resistance activities, and several hundred thousand Germans deserted the military, many of those defecting to the Allies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism It wasn't a huge percentage, but we don't know how many actively resisted without getting caught, or resisted in more passive ways. And that was resistance against the Nazis, who had no qualms about killing resistors. Risking or quitting your job to not only do what's right, but avoid getting in trouble with your government, isn't in the same ballpark.
surgical_fire 1y ago
"losing your job", for a lot of people, is extremely effective coercion. We are not talking about luxury here. A lot of people depend on their salary to pay rent and put food on the table. This is even more pressing if you have a family that depends on you, if you are in need of healthcare, etc. What your post fails to recognize is that in the current system, labor is already a form of coercion. You need to work because the option is homelessness and starvation. If you can avoid those even when unemployed, you are extremely privileged.
- em-bee 1y ago
  If you can avoid those even when unemployed that would be all developed countries except the united states
  - rfrey 1y ago
    So yes, the extremely privileged
    - em-bee 1y ago
      privileged? sure, but extremely? nowadays even in china everyone gets healthcare, working or not, so we are talking about almost a quarter of the worlds population.
  - snypher 1y ago
    380k homeless in UK. 262k in Germany. 122k Australia. 650k in USA. The per capita math is left for the reader but I don't believe there is much distinction here .
    - throwaway-0001 1y ago
      You're right, the numbers are very close to recent official figures. I looked them up to calculate the per capita rates. So USA is actually better than other countries? Kind of defeats these arguments here - interesting. (By the way I’m not from us) Based on the latest available data (mostly 2023) and current population estimates: * *UK:* ~56.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 178) * *Australia:* ~45.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 220) [using 2021 census data] * *Germany:* ~31.0 per 10,000 people (1 in 323) * *USA:* ~19.4 per 10,000 people (1 in 515) The per capita distinction is more significant than the raw numbers suggest. (Note: Methodologies for counting vary by country, which can affect direct comparisons.)
array_key_first 1y ago
I think, for most people, getting the shit beaten out of them is a preferable outcome to losing their job. For most people, their job is the only thing standing between them and being homeless, losing their car, losing their kids, their partner, etc. This is why having a culture that treats firing people as no big deal leads to wack ass incentives. You can make people do almost anything if you threaten their job enough.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- DennisP 1y ago
  The cases in the article were software engineers in the US, and at FTX. Two were engineering directors and the third was a senior engineer. If any of them didn't have plenty of emergency funds set aside, they should have seriously rethought their spending.
  - tverbeure 1y ago
    I know plenty of people who saved for years to get a downpayment for a house and then used all of that for just that. After that, it will take a while to replenish their emergency fund with very little margin of error. A job loss would be devastating.
    - DennisP 1y ago
      My claim is that that's a bad decision, for exactly that reason. Job loss can happen for any number of reasons, often without warning. Getting a mortgage without any cushion for job loss is a huge risk. Note also that I'm talking about highly-paid software engineers, not about people in general. Lots of people in the US make way less money than senior software engineers, and they manage to get by. Live at that level and secure your emergency funds first, and you'll be a lot more comfortable dealing with any ethical quandaries at work.
      - tverbeure 1y ago
exe34 1y ago
> But "losing your job" does not rise to that kind of coercion, in my opinion. it depends how many friends and family you have in the area that can host your whole family that is now homeless. it depends how much disruption you are willing to inflict on your kids definitely right now as opposed to maybe in the future.
swiftcoder 1y ago
I think the risk is somewhat higher than just losing your job - you are potentially burning your whole referral network in the process (especially if you end up with your name in the press during any resulting prosecution). For a junior engineer it may not be that hard to fly under the radar, but senior/staff level folks tend to be well known by the execs. And execs talk, they call their friends to vet future hires... burn your execs, and maybe you don't work in that town again
- scaramanga 1y ago
  Probably for the best... Like, anyone who would work with some of my previous employers, are places I wouldn't want to work anyway. It's a big wide world out there.
  - phatskat 1y ago
    > Probably for the best... Quite. One of my first gigs was at a large real-estate aggregator. The people were great but the highest levels of the company did - A pet “adoption” site, in quotes because to my knowledge the pets weren’t real and it was a subscription service with no means of cancellation outside of a voicemail box - A kind of Craigslist-esque site for selling home improvement services that was wildly vulnerable to XSS - I discovered that during an unannounced client demo when my own manager had said “you guys try to break it” - We were a PHP shop from the beginning. One day, engineering gets pulled into a meeting room and told that they’ve been developing 2.0 in an office downtown, with a separate team, in ColdFusion. They fired the lead engineer on the spot and most of us left or got fired shortly thereafter. They did offer to train us in CF, but the bad blood was too thick for my taste. All that is to say, if I ever get wind of the owner or CEO being involved anywhere that I’m working, I’ll probably be walking.

pydry 1y ago

This is why whistleblower laws need to be stronger (e.g. retaliation means automatic jailtime even if the whistle was wrongly blown) and rewards need to be larger.

creer 1y ago

The threat of retaliation - in the form of being fired, harassed or moved to a dead end position - is very scary to a younger engineer. But from a rational point of view it's not very strong (HOWEVER many managers or CEOs are far from rational.) - Firing someone has large costs to the employer. You have the job because you are needed. Same for side-lining someone or not promoting them. - Firing someone removes the final incentives against that person reporting the deed to the govt. It pushes that person toward reporting instead of softer "negotiated" steps such as continuing to argue for legal alternatives or discussing it with an intermediate rather than outright reporting. And many corporate legal or accounting people are amazing at finding alternative ways to achieve the same result in a not-illegal manner. - A lawyer can help you much more once there is retaliation. The company might end up fighting both the fraud reporting AND the retaliation. Just firing someone is not a great "solution" for the company. Letting you believe that they will ... that's very powerful. (and probably all this is caveat: in countries where retaliation is illegal enough and commonly taken to court or settled. which is not worldwide.)

themafia 1y ago

That retaliation is in and of itself a new illegal act.

eur0pa 1y ago

You can absolutely, most definitely always say "no". Their carrot (money) comes and goes, and their stick (also money) is not enough to be concerning.

pavel_lishin 1y ago

> But the person has to find the guts to say "no" without that hindsight. Not that I would recommend a night's stay at a local lockup (2/5 stars, the beds are awful, the toilet facilities are worse, and the roommates leave much to be desired), but doing so certainly puts things in perspective going forward.