Feel free also to share something unethical that you considered doing but decided not to.
I would consider this a good, ethical thing to do, and not at all unethical. The company's needs don't always come before your needs to protect your specialization and your work experience, not even in early-stage start-ups. It's on the management to get the right people, not to trumpet around some disingenuous "everyone wears many hats" philosophy to squeeze inappropriate work out of you.
It can really be damaging to your career if you get hired into a start-up to do X, but then because "wear many hats" or "we're a lean shop" or whatever nonsense, you only spend your time doing Y.
After that, if your real passion was to work on X, it can be really hard to get employers to look at you seriously for hiring for X. You'll be pigeonholed into Y.
Since employers ought to care about career goals and growth of their staff, it definitely makes this sort of thing more the employer's fault than the employee's.
So, I would say item 2) is not unethical at all -- and in fact it's deeply important for people around the industry to take a hard line with this sort of thing when they need to protect a career-goal specialty.
You monster!
I quit a good job once to join a start-up and also foolishly didn't take time off in between the two jobs.
So Monday morning, bright-eyed, I flew to the company's main office for some meet & greets, getting my company laptop, etc.
Literally the first thing that happened to me upon arriving at the office was that I was marshaled into a conference room where the CEO, director of HR and director of Sales were all sitting. Lunch was on the table.
They proceeded to ask me what my religious views were, and mentioned how the three of them, along with various other staff all went to the same local house of worship, and that they all had kids of the same age who participating in a particular religious activity together.
I tried to rationalize it as just chatter, like someone talking about where their kids go to college or something. Not my cup of tea, but hey, maybe it's just 'getting to know you' sort of chatter.
Then the director of HR started listing off people I would meet later that day, what their religions were, times he had "had a good debate" with them about their chosen religion, while the other two just remained silent.
I quit that job about 3 months later. If I hadn't been a remote employee and would have been forced to work in close proximity to those people, I probably would have quit on the spot, regardless of not having a job lined up.
I remember in the meeting when it was happening, I was panicking inside and my mind was racing. I had done many interviews with them, asked every question under the sun, and had no idea this was going on. And I had just given up a reasonably good job because I was an expert on some of the software tools this particular start-up made and felt I could do a lot of good work there.
Really made my approach to job hunting change after that.
> Really made my approach to job hunting change after that
How so? That is, how does a candidate screen for this possibility in advance?
It absolutely was illegal, and it was the first time in my life I ever hired an employment attorney (because of the way the company acted when I quit).
> "How so? That is, how does a candidate screen for this possibility in advance?"
Ask more probing questions about company culture, workflow processes, and whether any particular things are mandated or enforced.
Ask how the company handles diversity and what their goals on with staff of different backgrounds. Everyone will answer this with the same legalese insincere crap, but how they answer you can be very telling (e.g. are they very impatient with this line of questioning?)
Biggest of all: never ever accept a position that doesn't offer a very large severance package, usually in the range of 1 month of salary plus benefits for every 1 month of time listed in any non-compete, non-disclosure, or non-disparagement agreements, or anything like that implied in a company handbook.
If they aren't willing to offer competitive severance benefits, I take it as a sign that at best they want to costless restructure people at their whim without giving them fair compensation for the harm it would cause them, but at worst when they run away from severance, it means they take a top-down, dictatorship attitude to employees, and do not want anyone having any degree of bargaining power to disagree with how they are behaving (e.g. like outright religious discrimination).
Sure, some companies are earnest and just don't want to budget for the severance. But the cost of incorrectly rejecting them is OK, compared with accidentally ending up in some place where you have to keep your head down when there is rampant religious abuse going on.
What level can you expect this? I haven’t personally come across this. Am I missing out on something?
If a company says they either don’t offer severance as a policy, or that severance is calculated like, e.g. 1 week for each year of tenure, just push back or walk away.
When I’ve negotiated this before, it hasn’t been an issue, in mid-level individual contributor engineering roles, one senior engineer role, and currently in a managerial role.
Most companies will start out saying they won’t do it. But if you say that’s too bad, they’ll either pass on you (doing you a favor) or they’ll negotiate like grown ups.
Is IBM going to do this for you? Of course not. So don’t work there. But a lot of places will, or at least will negotiate a large portion of the type of severance I discussed above.
It’s not about levels. It’s about sensing that severance-minimization at the cost of missing out on a good candidate is a telling characteristic of dysfunction to be avoided. So just don’t work at those places.
How did you change your approach to job hunting?
For instance, I was once asked by an employer to do something unethical, and refused. I ended up talking them into something ethical instead.
But I'm still not going to say what it was, even though we never did it. That'd just be dumb.
Plus, HN is somewhat anonymous (if you're careful). It's not like you're incriminating yourself.
1: unethical things they've done that they're not proud of (and whether or not it worked)
2: unethical things they considered doing but didn't (and whether they later regretted it — perhaps as a result of hearing about other successful folks doing things that are at least as unethical)
3: unethical things that they considered doing but didn't, in favor of a more ethical strategy to accomplish the same goal.
The reason I'm interested in this is that I'm super risk-averse about stuff like this, and hearing stories about what other people have done has made me wonder whether I've been too conservative, to the detriment of my startup's growth.
This is far from unique, too. My understanding is that dating websites tend to get bootstrapped using purchased profiles from other dating websites.
I don't intend to mean that what Reddit did is very unethical - or indeed unusual. And if anything it was a good idea and it worked. But what we did strikes me as different from using multiple accounts to impersonate different users and chat with yourself's and your colleagues' multiple personae.
But that money doesn't only exist in your home!, you might cry out. To which I say: you think all those profiles were just sitting and talking to each other? Were they paying the dating site proprietor?
Some specific action that a "fake" account might take could be unethical, though it's hard to imagine what that could be such that it wouldn't be unethical coming from a "real" account.
Well, that depends: if someone believes that user IDs X and Y are different people, when in fact they are one, has there been a breach of ethics from that situation alone.
http://www.businessinsider.com/fedex-saved-from-bankruptcy-w...
One of their competitors was trying to lawyer them into dissolution.
1. Sell it. 2. Undisclosed Personnel issues I deeply regret. 3. Listen to customers too much without thinking critically about it.
Got any good examples of this?