8 ms·

"It's wrong to do others work for them and let them represent it as their own" which is what I do in my everyday job. And I am not shadow-writing, I am a consu

• sk5t 12y ago
  Your ideas and work product are the ideas and work product of the organization, which your superiors represent... different kettle of fish.
  • cgio 12y ago
    People belong in organisations, have roles in organisations, but also act within organisations and with reference to their organisations. The assertion of representation is not always valid, and I am sure many people get the context of what I am suggesting here. Now, in the admissions process of the example, an organisation (ad-hoc but valid) is also present and the paying applicant represents the financial relationship they built with their shadow writer. Why is the ethical context different when we consider mystic, gargantuan organisations than when we consider rich, clueless teenagers?
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • ghshephard 12y ago
    I had a friend who got her degree from UC Berkeley, and maybe wrote 5-10% of her work, she had other people (Friends, Lovers, colleagues) write all the others - she was a master of manipulation. Who is to say that the valuable skill she developed wasn't her delegation and management skills, and that those were far more important in the long term than her ability to wax poetically about Plato's Republic? The fact that she had to write that 5-10%, and do the occasional in class essay, that she did okay in, suggests that not writing the other 90-95% didn't seem to negatively impact her, "Learning Experience." What I find particularly humorous, of course, is that all these random people, none of whom had taken any of the course work, or background that she presumably had, and many of them without college degrees, were capable of whipping out a paper with a day or two of research (under her guidance, and with a bit of her editing and supplying of facts) that passed muster at Berkeley.
    • 1337biz 12y ago
      How did it turn our for her? Is that strategy working for her after college as well?
      • Chronic29 12y ago
        Manipulation is a very good skill to have. I'm trying to improve on that area myself. I would not be surprised if she is at a high end, prestigious job, in any industry.
      • rjsw 12y ago
        Sounds like she will do well in Management to me.
      • rwmj 12y ago
        It's a classic sign of sociopathy, so at a guess she's either a CEO or in prison.
      • ghshephard 12y ago
        Good question. She has a degree from Cal., so that opens doors for her. Last I checked she was VP of marketing for a chain of Valero gas stations in California. Much of her work seems to consist of negotiating large sums of money from various vendors for placing their products/refrigerators at key locations in their stores. It's astonishing what a generic-brand ice-cream vendor will pay a gas station to replace Hagen Daz with their brand of ice-cream. I've watched her at work, and really, it seems like she's mostly an excel jockey who dresses well, drives a nice vehicle and takes a lot of meetings with vendors. Honestly - It's not clear to me that she couldn't have done exactly the same thing without her degree - she got a B.S. in Conservation and Resource studies. What she's doing now seems entirely unrelated.
        • lancewiggs 12y ago
          You've pretty much identified her with this description. Did you mean to?
    • praneshp 12y ago
• morgante 12y ago
  > Writing ideas that superiors represent as their own, or clients do. If they actually do that, it'd be considered unethical. While specific credit isn't always given to the originator of an idea, superiors shouldn't pretend they actually had the idea. In many organizations, explicitly passing off an idea as your own would be a pretty serious offense.
  • hnnewguy 12y ago
    >It'd be considered unethical There's a big difference between passing someone's idea off as your own, and allowing someone to pass an idea off as their own. I guess I'm considered "unethical" around these parts, but I stand firmly in the court that the buyer may have ethical issues, but certainly not the seller.
  • maaku 12y ago
    No, it'd be business as usual. It is exactly how things are expected to work in industry. Industry is not academia, and crediting the originator of the idea is not a concern. Especially when it makes you look bad (why couldn't you come up with this? etc.)
    • skybrian 12y ago
      I don't know what you mean by "industry." I don't think there are many generalizations that hold true between, say, government contractors and internet startups. Also, many companies have their own cultures - deliberately so.