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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

>Reserve’s security team conducted an investigation and brought that evidence to OpenTable and started a dialogue between the two rivals. OpenTable confirmed that it fired the employee in question

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.

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They will be verbal about it. If you request it in writing or email their own request to them, you will be fired or 'burned'.

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.

> I 'confirmed the task' to her and cc'd my manager

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 :)

Being fired at will is still better than being fired for a documented reason.

It boils down to risk management =P

But this seems like a really toxic place to work. I routinely send a short summary of key points whenever we have a talk with someone that impacts our work/course of action. If not needed, I try to stay polite and relatively informal "Hi Steve, here's a short summary of what we talked about in the morning as my memory tends to fail me these days. If I got something wrong, please correct me." If someone gets back angry at me after receiving such an e-mail, I don't want to work in such a place.

Hence why most meetings have "minutes" sent after them. I don't see what you're doing as any different, so good on you. Also, if someone gets angry about you "confirming" your discussion with them, well then, maybe you want to make sure everything you talk about with them is confirmed.

From what I've read, large parts of finance are toxic workplaces. Source: Swimming with Sharks by Joris Luyendijk.

There's a few issues with what you said. People will bully you when you start the paper trail, that's a fact. That shouldn't stop you.

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.

> You have to "train" management to accept email confirmation on good days.

This is a crucial thing for recent college grads to understand. Learn it the easy way before you learn it the hard way.

I wish I had this advice sooner. The new part for me here, beyond merely keeping a paper trail, is to make sure that everyone knows about your consistently kept paper trail, so that it wards off bad behavior before it starts.

It's never a bad idea to follow up after all meetings -- both team and 1-1 -- with an email that goes, "As per our discussion, I do X,Y; someone else does Z, 3rd person does W, and project A is blocked on B." Then everyone is definitely on the same page as to DRIs and commitments. Or you can hash out disagreements then and there.

If you're concerned about that, pull it back one step, and go "sure, I'll confirm in an e-email". And watch lots of excuses for why the request suddenly isn't essential anyway.

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.

> If you're concerned about that, pull it back one step, and go "sure, I'll confirm in an e-email".

Or the old, "I'll go ahead and open a ticket."

Yes, pretty much anything that innocently announces your intent to put it in writing somewhere, and gives them an opportunity to back off and pretend the conversation never happened will do.

I've done the "confirm in e-mail" thing. I highly recommend it. I also brought in other folks on the request via email mentioning the name of the person and their request etc. Over communication is key, before you act. NEVER leave it up to just you even if it is typically a one man action

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.

Hilarious! Can you say more about that situation. I love these kinds of stories and been bullied myself especially by last boss.

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.

If I heard any of the last five replies, i'd tell the CTO to go fuck himself and quit.

Fired or "burned" is the easy things. If they manage to get something illegal pinned on you, you are sitting in jail instead.

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.

If it gets to that point, you need to quit, because the alternatives are quite clearly headed in a get-fired or do-something-unethical or get-burned direction anyway. Just accepting it remaining verbal is only a temporary option while you're on your way to other options.

While it is possible that this was 'sanctioned' activity by OpenTable, I think it is more likely the result of sales/bonus targets. There is plenty of documentation on why targets/bonuses can lead to unintended consequences and more often than not lead to cheating/gaming the system to achieve the targets rather than actually delivering the outcome intended.

Daniel Pink has a good talk about what motives people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

I would argue that this sort of thing is the intended outcome.

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.

Yes, this argument certainly doesn't absolve OpenTable of any wrongdoing. Especially in sales it should be fairly obvious what the outcome of these ridiculous targets will be.

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.

In Mountain View, I’ve seen the USPS fake attempted delivery on packages at least 50% of the time, to a business that’s open from 7am to 7pm. I’ve heard this isn’t the driver so much as the postmaster gaming their stats from the office, so they don’t fall below SLAs with Amazon packages for instance.

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.

I run a fulfillment center and we recently acquired a client’s business: DonaldTrumpDogPoopBags.com

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.

>lesson to the youngsters - never do anything smelly/unethical (dont even mention criminal) without manager approval in writing.

How about just not doing unethical shit?

It can be smelly/unlawful without being unethical. Even quite the opposite.

Examples, for clarity?

Bypassing DRM so I can play a game without being online.

Feeding the homeless.

http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article1253...

Snowden.

Say you give an estimate on a project that includes work to address side-effects and other problems, and they ask you to provide a revised estimate assuming you didn't address those problems, you know, just so they understand the costs and can perhaps invest in other solutions to those problems. Not illegal, not even really unethical, but it's fishy because they're probably setting you up to be the engineer who didn't address those problems.

Stealing 99% of "everyone's" money.

"If you're going to go down, take people with you."

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 worked at a company about 5 years ago where the word "sue" was frequently used. Their previous lead engineer left and they had had a chain of contractors since his departure. When I came in I found several security holes and also discovered their payment system has been hacked, exposing thousands of customers to fraud and identity theft.

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.

> you'll be made to take one for the team as it seems to have happened in this and countless other cases.

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.

I see two possibilities in this scenario:

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.

3. They were a commissioned sales associate and thought by doing this they could make some sales and additional commissions.

The scenario doesn't have to include management approval. I doubt there was.

That falls under his 1.

Lesson to human beings - never do anything smelly/unethical. Period. Full stop.

life is never that simple

Reasonable people may disagree about what counts as unethical, but I don't see any gray in this scenario: if you're convinced that something is bad enough that you need written cover from a superior before you'll do it then you just shouldn't do it. Likewise if an employee comes to you and says "I want to do this thing but it seems smelly so I want written approval from you" you shouldn't approve it.

There are things you shouldn't do because they're plainly unethical.

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.

Stuff that requires a SOx audit trail (or equivalent local, or even internal, equivalent) is definitely not OK to do if asked verbally but (probably) fine to do with the correct paper-trail in place.

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.

But whether or not you should create fake reservations to harm your potential clients so they give you money is pretty damn simple. Sure you can find complex ethical dilemmas, but most issues at work are either right, wrong, or unclear. Getting stuff in writing helps keep honest people honest, and can help make things clearer. I think GP's point is that getting it in writing doesn't move it from wrong to right.

It's the best thing you can do at the time, but some managers take this badly. It makes it more difficult for them to throw you to the wolves.

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