OpenTable Fires Employee for Making Fake Reserve Bookings
chicago.eater.com
chicago.eater.com
lesson to the youngsters - never do anything smelly/unethical (dont even mention criminal) without manager approval in writing. Otherwise at the first sign of trouble you'll be made to take one for the team as it seems to have happened in this and countless other cases.
I mean even in normal situation, whenever some details of feature, project, etc. are discussed and decided/assigned in some informal way, i find it is very useful to send a summary note so the manager/PM/etc wouldn't come later with the very different version of what happened.
Source: Worked in finance. Most inappropriate requests was verbalised. They not only came from management but from other members of team (ie, bullying). I had a coworker get really angry at me when I 'confirmed the task' to her and cc'd my manager for a task she was offloading to me that wasn't related to my department.
The point is that if you don't create a paper trail, you risk being set up as a fall guy for much worse than being fired. They know it, and you know it, and your safest way out is to make sure that they know that you know that they're asking you to do something inappropriate and that you're smart enough to ensure there's evidence implicating them if they force the issue.
If they get angry or keep making those kind of requests it's a good reason to look for another job anyway, before they find a way of pinning something else on you.
I'll never know what the full story was but the one time I had a request I wasn't comfortable with and communicated like crazy.... sales manager dude who was brought in with lots of fanfare moved on to other opportunities within two weeks.
Or the old, "I'll go ahead and open a ticket."
It was "regular job" in IT but if you left home before 9pm people were looking wierd at you. Plenty of good folks work there but you know how it is when environment rots you either lower your standard or you out (thats why Im personally out)
My favorite comments by my bullying boss:
If you have family, dont work here.
Everyone here knows they dont see their family till late night, except of you.
You are not C-level managment, you are on a McDonald salary here (altho wasn't tru)
Fine leave at 8 (job description said 8-5), i will write it in your report. Will see how its stacks up against others.
Im a CTO I have a right to be rude.
Im a CTO I can be wrong all the time.
The problem though is that people tend to start the paper trail when something fishy happens. That's too late. You have to "train" management to accept email confirmation on good days. The resistance will be lower, so that on a bad day, when things are fish, they are less inclined to pester you about it. Paper trails in general also help you in legal settlements when you do end up getting fired.
This is a crucial thing for recent college grads to understand. Learn it the easy way before you learn it the hard way.
That's exactly the way to handle gratuitous or fishy tasks - creates a paper trail and discourages any further attempts of the same kind. It may get you fired though :)
It boils down to risk management =P
I think that in such toxic work-conditions you can only benefit from getting fired. Do not accept bullying. And on many companies and state the paper trail is mandatory and if it doesn't exist, you get frowned upon.
Daniel Pink has a good talk about what motives people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
This is how smart modern businesses break the law. They don’t tell you to do it. They’ll probably be quite explicit that you are never supposed to break the law and that the company is serious about this. At the same time, they’ll give you incentives and requirements that you cannot meet legally. Then they’ll let you figure it out on your own. If SHTF, they’ll be able to tell investigators, with all honesty and sincerity, that you did this on your own and there was never any approval from management.
A really common example is working off the clock. This is super illegal and they’ll tell you never ever under any circumstances to do it. Then they’ll give you X hours and 2X work for the week and let you figure it out for yourself.
But sometimes it can be more subtle. For example, a delivery driver may be targetted to make 10 deliveries an hour. However what happens when they are short of their target. They cheat. Suddenly people aren't home. They hit their target, but now the company has to reattempt delivery which increases their overall costs. But many companies, instead of looking at what they are really trying to achieve, will just add more rules (only successful deliveries count) which will just lead to more sophisticated cheating.
Not sure the reason exactly, but incredibly aggravating to get an email saying they attempted and business was closed when you’ve been sitting there with the door open all day.
For now I’m running support for that myself. My most common email is explaining early delivery notifications to confused customers. I’ve taken to just emailing this link w a quick one-line explanation: https://lifehacker.com/why-you-have-a-delivery-confirmation-...
The amount of time wasted by this one specific ‘cheat’ is astronomical.
How about just not doing unethical shit?
http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article1253...
Best management advice I ever received. They mean, always partner with people above you when a decision with consequences has to be made. And as others have said, confirm in email. Make sure you have a public trail that can be followed.
This advice is valid even if you're at a great company with great people because one bad decision and people will try and save their own jobs before they worry about you.
I started documenting all of these things in emails right from the start.
When I informed my manager the first thing out of his mouth was "Can we sue the former lead/contractors?" I had no idea, I'm an engineer. Whenever some contract with a third party service didn't seem to be what he expected: "Can we sue them?" This went on for about 6 months before I quit. It was a toxic workplace that left me mentally and physically drained each day.
After I left I'm sure they asked the next guy if I could be sued. I'm sure the paper trail I left saved me, because they would go down too.
The best part was when one of their favorite employees embezzled over 100k and disappeared. They sued him, or at least tried.
Is there any evidence that this employee took one for the team? Who is to say that it wasn't simply a lone sales employee looking to win a few new accounts to meet bonus quota.
1. The employee was a smart criminal. They knew how risky (but profitable to the company) this was and got hugely compensated for it.
2. The employee was dumb or gave into bullying by management and took this risk for free.
The scenario doesn't have to include management approval. I doubt there was.
There are also things that are ethically fine, but maybe your boss' boss, or some other department, or the customer, might not like. In those cases, it can be a good idea to document that you didn't come up with this on your own.
And I've definitely used "please put that in a ticket" as a stalling mechanism so I can go away and check that what's being asked for is legit.
I have a hard time believing he/she just thought of such scheme without silent knowledge, approval, and/or encouragement of others.
Went something like this:
- Prince acquired new territory by force and subjects in the principality started to rebel in disgust and distrust.
- Prince assigns cruel leader that preps the order and induces fear and order but subjects hate him even more.
- Prince then executes the assigned leader in the middle of town. Subjects now love him and order stays.
And just to be clear this doesn't absolve the company in any way, they're the ones who set incentives up, commonly expecting & hoping for misbehaviour.
I love how many of the Gervais Principle examples are actually something you can see in real life. Also hating it though. I wish we would live in a better world.
To the ethical people out there, I'd like to say that there is a battle and we haven't lost yet. It sure looks that way, given the behavior of the government, large corporations, even NGOs. But its a battle. And the first front in the battle is mindshare. If ethical people believe that everything is corrupt and hopeless, then the unethical people have won.
Consider this: the rogue employee at OpenTable could genuinely be a rogue employee. They might even be a nominal ethical employee who perceived behavior around them as unethical, or who believed that the only way to success given their performance targets was to behave unethically. They may have believed that the only explanation for the performance targets were that OpenTable wanted them to act unethically, when in fact they were just impossible targets set by an aggressive, but ethical manager.
I'm sorry to say that ethical behavior is something we have to fight for continuously. We don't get to create a constitution a few hundred years ago and call it done. But it doesn't help if we declare, as I used to, that the government has been "rooted", and the US is just an unethical cesspit now. Get involved. Demand ethical behavior. Call out moral hazards. Talk about ethics.
Isn't this a reasonably straightforward CFAA violation?
(I'd agree with "we don't believe it ought to be criminal.")
It was created during the enduing moral panic after the movie Wargames was released (1983 release, 1984 law). The House Committee Report about the bill literally references the movie.
Here's the Wikipedia page on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#C...
It does sound like tortious interference (civil law that would allow recovering damages).
I'm rather of the opinion that it should be criminal, this sort of action does real harm to society and is the exact sort of thing criminal laws should target.
[0] I'm not aware of any cases that found that they were. Here is a case that found that they weren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Drew
(not a lawyer)
The SCOTUS refused to hear the appeal, but since the Ninth has jurisdiction over California, it seems fairly secure. But IANAL either.
What about apologizing to Reserve?
On a positive note, at least you got a little peace for dinner
They didn't show up because they couldn't get a reservation (because it was already booked out fraudulently).
I guess I probably didn't get your point...
Reservations is what EVERYBODY calls it. I've made thousands of reservations in my life. I had no clue what a "reserve bookings" is. You can figure it out from context... but why go out of our way to make things so difficult to understand.
It is not “fake reserve bookings” but “fake Reserve bookings” (that is, in longer form, “fake bookings on Reserve”.) As GP pointed out reserve is a proper, not common, noun in this use.
With all the silly things people want to regulate, I'm always baffled how intentionally deceiving people with the intent to cause harm isn't just plain illegal, and your only recourse is civil court. It seems to me it would cover a lot of situations that people try to fix with very specific (and thus loophole-y and high-overhead) regulations.
Of course, just because a prosecutor _could_ prosecute someone for a crime doesn't mean they will or should. And I think Reserve's lawyers have probably come to the conclusion that the State's Attorney probably has better things to do with her staff's time than prosecute this case.
Interesting that they would be monitoring for fraudulent reservations. Are fraudulent reservation 'wars' between these companies pretty common that they would be tracking such behavior?
Also, if this isn't criminal, is DDoSing a SaaS competitor not criminal then, since they are pretty similar?
So much money to be made so fast. It tends to attract . . . operators.
My source is a medium prominent tech executive who tried to disrupt the Valentine's Day flower business (with its high mark-ups). His plan was to set up his own, lower-priced regional alternative -- which would bring in planeloads of flowers from Central America, right on time.
Things did not work out the way he had hoped. Everything went sideways the first year. He tried again, and the second year was catastrophically worse. There was no third year.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/13/386005044/epis...
Detecting someone using multiple fake accounts (maybe from the same IP) is one thing, but how to track its origin? Did they use approximate location of the IP and saw it's close to OpenTable offices?
"The no-shows were accompanied by an OpenTable inquiry about Tavern’s 'sagging sales,' with a renewed attempt to convince them to switch."
On the other hand, there's an Opentable lawyer who is getting an extra martini at lunch today for saving the company by including that text.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/uber-fake-ride-re...
FTA: > it's not just a rogue employee or two
In my experience watching company cultures, companies that fire employees for bad behavior (as opposed to reassigning or sending them for additional training) are less likely to be complicit in that behavior. And when this sort of behavior is uncovered at a higher level, more likely to fire the senior leader as well.
I find I too have a knee jerk reaction to narrative arguments which seek to assert a generalization (as most of them do) against their enemy target. We are flooded with them these days pretty much everywhere we look.
I observe that a simple statement, "I give credit to companies that fire employees they discover have engaged in actions which violate their stated values.", is pretty standalone without narrative. And yet, it is contextualized by the reader into the narratives they either endorse or oppose.
And since narratives are crafted from a curated set of truths, things that would either disprove or dismiss the conclusions of a narrative are most vigorously opposed or pushed back upon.
It almost seems to me that the reality of a more nuanced and textured reality where many things are true, corporations can be both good and evil, and everything is evolving through experience and time, is the most frightening place of all.
Jesus! C-can they do that?
I recognize your comment is in jest, but I appreciate you making it. This challenge is rarely understood.
If you're making a reservation last minute, its a god-send to not have to call 10 places just to ask if they have tables available. You can just look for yourself online in the time it takes you to dial a phone number and have someone answer. Think about the difference between calling up and asking a business a question vs just reading the answer on their website.
Since almost zero restaurants pay a staff member to sit by the phone doing nothing but taking reservations (it wouldn't be practical), by definition, your phone call is interrupting the restaurant staff - which leads to a poor experience on both ends. I imagine the staff certainly appreciate reservations being made without phonecalls.
Plus it is a huge benefit to the deaf and hard of hearing.
Kokonas believes the other sites are taking millions of dollars of revenue away from restaurants when other options work better.
https://alinearestaurant.com/site/2014/06/tickets-for-restau...
- Repeat my incredibly common, single syllable, three letter name for the umpteenth time just for them to still get it wrong.
- Ask for a high-chair and ask them to please write that down somewhere, only to arrive and find they didn't do so and there's no longer any available.
- Have staff mess up the time and/or number of people I've booked for, all because they can't hear over the kitchen noise?
Yeah, I'll just fill out a few fields and hit submit, thanks.
For myself, one of the features I like is being able to search by area or type of food; you can check availability at a bunch of places at once.