Ask HN: What’s your “Everyone has a price” experience?
"Everyone has a price", I've heard this multiple times from the management.
Please share your experience which validates this point.
Please share your experience which validates this point.
If only we could whistleblow ...
Not only are these workers hungry for a job (and can be hired for less money because of their relative inexperience), but they also have not worked in the industry long enough to cultivate an ethical barometer (or are hungry enough for work that they would be willing to compromise their own ethical standards, if any).
When I read about or see a developer/engineer/etc stand up in support of the ethical or moral factor of their work it always makes me proud.
These sort of things typically help next time your name is up for a promotion.
You either work either with everybody, or everybody works together against you.
I worked for a subcontractor. The prime contract holder's boss found out that I was a software engineer, which they needed very badly on another project: it's untoward to just steal your subcontractor's employees, but they didn't care. They offered me a 25% base salary raise, a fast-tracked TS/SCI clearance, and travel to Afghanistan with hazard pay.
I went and interviewed, and they wanted to hire me, but the nature of the job became clear during the interview itself. The job was writing biometrics tracking software for use in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.
I refused. They called me pretty consistently for the next three years. I just knew I wouldn't be able to sleep at night doing something that was so very contrary to my beliefs.
Now yeah, I stayed at the architecture contract for a long time, and that was contrary to my beliefs too. I had no business doing defense contracting in any form. But that was a boring, actuarial, technical evil; the biometrics stuff would've been a constant in-my-face reminder of the wrongness.
What finally ended my defense gig was that I was reviewing a powerpoint slide which included a little graphic labeled 'squirters.' 'Squirters' are the survivors of indirect fire who run away from the impact site. I couldn't abide the fact that we dehumanize our foes with that kind of vocabulary, and even though I was just building useless budget-justification documentation for existing systems, I didn't want to keep doing it.
Recently, I got recruiter spam with a big number attached. They wouldn't match my scrappy startup employer's upside potential, but the base salary was appealing compared to the lottery tickets. I met with the CTO, who desperately needed someone to run the engineers and serve as a backup repository of institutional knowledge in case he got hit by a bus, but I didn't like the way he talked about the women in the bar where he chose to conduct the interview.
Sound like your story actually invalidates this point. You didn't have a price - you refused and didn't cave.
He had a price to tolerate a lesser encroachment on his beliefs. Sounds like there's two dimensions to explore: what price, and what personal compromise you're willing to accept.
They offered a 25% increase, to "GO TO AFGHANISTAN". Moral questions aside, that is a normal job to job bonus. Not a sell your soul bonus.
You can make 100k a year in Food Service, working at Taco Bell on base in Afganistan. The risk isn't great, but it is a real and present danger when you work in a war zone on a base that might be attacked.
It seems like a 250% increase would be required to get anyone to move.
It's TS/SCI clearance, and travel to Afghanistan with hazard pay. So, while in Afghanistan they could be making 2x as much or more.
Unfortunately as the US charges tax on world wide income you cant avoid tax.
There was no EHP for head office in Beruit as the civil war was raging.
So trucks these days have whats called a urea tank. It gets injected into diesel streams to knock out harmful pollutants and its required by federal law. My truck had in its place an oily rag and a few twists of bailing wire. but...my computer tells me the urea tank is topped up and ready to go!
Turns out the last shop this truck had been to was investigated by the EPA, NHTSA, and FBI and convicted for hacking ECM's. They were even forging certifications and licenses. The driver of the T700 I was working on had a revoked class C license and had never received formal training. Long story short, the chop shop owner was cooling his heels on a 12 year federal sentence and my T700 driver was arrested when he showed up with the insurance adjuster.
He's asking for stories about people who believed they had staunch morals or principles but then someone came in with a wad of cash and then they betrayed those principles.
Shady people exist, we all know that.
"Everyone has a price" is typically used when someone rejects an offer due to some claimed reason.
Running a shop to repair something that weighs north of forty tons implies you're a fairly ethical person. Large tanker trucks for example hold a capacity of 11,000 gallons (14.6kl). This can be anything from milk to salsa, or more typically gasoline or Methylene Chloride. Hacking around in the internals of the computer that controls the engine is generally a dangerous idea as trucks use their engines to slow themselves on hills, or control themselves during ascents much more than their brakes.
I guess 'everyone has a price' in my field is the greased palm you take when someone asks you to compromise your ethics. Sure, you made way more on a routine service overhaul than you normally would have, but gojo doesnt make a hand cleaner to wash off what happens when your work is directly attributable to a major accident or fatality.
Eh. I wouldn't put that into the necessary column.
Not to mention, there's also the chance that these people saw nothing morally wrong with what they did. They see all these safety features and regulations as nothing more that the government "playing nanny" or whatever.
Or maybe the truckers do and some guy decided he can make a good living off of catering to their particular whims. Also whoever did the modification believed that he knew what he was doing.
Ethics are also a very fluid thing. This guy may show up to work on time every day, great boss, great employee, faithful to his wife, great dad to his kids, pays his taxes, volunteers at the soup kitchen, etc., but thinks that as long as no one is directly hurt by his actions, taking money to perform these modifications is a-ok.
Wait, so the weight of the machines someone repairs is somehow directly related to how ethical one it? Would a heavy industrial crane mechanic be even more ethical then? What about someone who works on a boat? A large cargo ship, maybe? And does it work the other way - someone who repairs cars is less ethical? And a wrist-watch repair man would have no ethics at all, I assume?
How long have you been working on diesel engines? How much have diesel engines changed over your career? What's the worst part of your job? I think the thing that ultimately steered me away from a blue collar career is the perception that I'd be stuck in a system of pay grades and unions and zero ability to climb up the ladder faster through hard work and expertise, rather than just putting in time and waiting for dates on a calendar, was I right about that?
Thanks for sharing.
I stayed for the money and my loyalty to my team but I hated that place.
And admitted so to a room full of people?
Both very common. I used to work at a place that was a real meat grinder. Leadership were ethical enough on big stuff, but didn't really care about their people too much so they worked us to the bone. The team constantly felt like we were in a war together and the only thing keeping us going was us watching each other's back. In reality, our "war" was building some nonsense web sites or whatever for clients that had little practical value. Sometimes you have to step back and say you don't want to be part of it anymore and no one else should feel pressured to stay either.
Having worked for another Mark Pincus company, I feel you.
I worked for a web development firm as my first job out of college, and one of our clients was MannaRelief. We were tasked with building the part of their online presence than handled donations via check, credit card, etc.
I didn't look into their business model for a long time, but when I eventually got curious, I realized that they (well, their parent company, MannaTech) basically peddled sugar pills to the parents of children with severe disabilities, making all sorts of promises (some vague enough to pass FDA muster, and some not.)
I'm not sure what I should have done differently, but the ethical compromise I came to was donating all the money I made working for them to St. Jude's hospital - since we billed clients hourly, it was pretty easy to figure out exactly how much tainted money was in my paycheck every week.
Fuck MannaTech, and fuck MannaRelief. Feel free to read up on them and their various run-ins with the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannatech
Bonus fun fact: we inherited this project from someone else, and at the time, they were storing all billing data completely unencrypted, in clear text. Their production server was some windows box somewhere, running some older version of some SQL database. I kept pushing them to upgrade this, since a) not only was it a flagrant security risk, but also b) violated their agreement with their card processor and put them at risk of not being able to accept donations at all. Naturally, "it wasn't in the budget" until they discovered that the machine had been compromised for weeks, and the entire database had been exfiltrated repeatedly. Suddenly, we had the budget to start doing things the correct way.
I've quit multiple jobs over that type of repeated stupidity, and left pay and options on the table. Just intolerable.
It was a lot of stress for what ended up being about $200 per person in the end.
I believe you.
They told me they'd called several others but were turned down, and they offered to pay "whatever you want".
I turned them down but it was only a few years later I first heard the term "revenge porn site".
What really struck me about that conversation was that the guy seemed like a really nice guy. He was soft spoken and very respectful and understanding, but also very determined to build that site.
Back in the `70s I built custom cars with my father. Ideal Toy company called and asked us to build a car based on their "Evel Knievel Stunt and Crash Car" toy. They asked us if we could make the doors and hood "blow off the car like it exploded" with the push of a button.
We told them we could do that but in the contract they sent us they wanted us to assume liability for anyone getting injured when they exploded the car. We declined to sign that and in the end they modified their request to just have the hood blow off and took out the liability clause. But the audacity of that liability request and their initial insistence of it just astounded me.
Anyway, not everyone "has a price". I have turned down many requests to work on projects I considered unethical or dangerous over the years and don't regret it at all.
And true, the price to compromise your morals in that case might have been too great. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
But I think comfort plays a large part in this. You've turned down unethical and dangerous projects because you could. You had enough income to survive so there's no need to risk anything. You could be slightly better off, but you're probably still doing good.
I've grown old enough now to say with certainty that I will die without compromising my morals like that, even if I die hungry, homeless, and cold.
I've seen a handful of such clauses too. I don't know how lawyers' brains works, but I imagine it is something like "lets try to sneak in the nastiest clause we can in the contract. What is the worst that can happen? If we get caught, we can simply remove it"
The measure of "a nice guy" isn't how they speak.
But I think greasing the wheels is a surprisingly useful and underutilized tactic.
While many people "get it" when bargaining at the flea market or for some craigslist item, those same people bawk at the idea of paying more than the listed price for something they want.
Example: A month back I went to a nice and popular restaurant at prime time without a reservation.
As I'm slowly getting closer to the host, I see no less than 3 parties all turned away by the host's matter of fact "No tables available tonight".
I request the same table as others before me and am greeted by the same cold response.
But, I respond: "Fifty bucks?"
Host: "SIR! Please! No need for such things! Please wait right here and we'll find you a table right away!"
disclaimer: i'm super susceptible to this as well..
Jane Street also has one of the absolute worst reputations for brutal hazing-style trivia interviews. Round after round with no official timeline given. Nonsense word problems that have no bearing to “how someone thinks.” I think it’s short-sighted when people don’t stop to ask, if a company believes it is entitled to treat candidates that way when evaluating them, what else might it mean about internal culture?
While I think Jane Street is probably an above average employer, I also think people get carried away glorifying them. It’s great pay and benefits, occasionally interesting problems, and all the same headaches as working anywhere else.
I feel like I might know what you mean, but I'd be interested if you could elaborate. (Also, isn't OCaml multiparadigmatic?)
If I recall correctly, Palantir had low salaries relative to Google and FB, who they compete for talent with. Their work does seem fast-paced and interesting.
Additionally, while it's very much outside the HN bubble, I can imagine a lot of people would like Palantir's mission of helping law enforcement and the military, even when factoring in the loss to privacy that most HNers value more.
Nobody said that immoral things can't be interesting.
Graded pay scales meant people's price was very low.
I quit when I started putting 2+2 together.
We must have very, very different concepts of defense.
This crude propaganda cliche doesn't offer anything for the discussion. If you take an emotional snapshot of a complex situation and assume that's the whole truth of a situation you almost always are pretty far from the truth - even if in some subset of reality this snapshot is true.
My right wing uncle with his gun collection is a bigger threat to the American people. Why did those 400 innocent people die?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-...
This is a relevant question, but not precise enough. What I would be interested instead, is, what's the total mean and variance of american lifes saved in all those operations? And more importantly, what other hypothetical possible combinations of these variables (civilians killed, combatants killed, unuidentified casualties, mean and variance of americans saved) we could have if different decisions have been made - i.e. what's the whole problem space?
Of course, this data is impossible to get and hard to estimate, but this is much closer to the real dilemma at hand.
Nothing of that matters if layers above you casually bribe people left and right in order to more freely sell to even worse people than what your democratically elected leaders decided were OK - and that first set of prospective customers are probably not so pretty in the first place, because you know, realpolitik and trade-offs. :-/
This prepared me nicely for a career as a cog in the military industrial complex.
What I mean to say is, not something you have against what a specific group within a specific bank did like manipulating libor or something.
Do you have something against banks in general? Like the activity they perform in society?
I liked working at Palantir because the work was important and the company's actual ethics was very strong, contrary to the impression you might get in the press. I thought having a company with that kind of ethical beliefs doing the work that other people would be willing to do, but worse, was better for the outcome I wanted.
In college my roommate was a gambler and heavy alcoholic. I have no idea how he even graduated tbh. One day, after a three day gambling bender and a long afternoon at the bar, he hit a car in the middle of a busy intersection after running a red light. Completely his fault and when he got out, the person could smell the alcohol on him and said they were going to call the cops and told him not to go anywhere.
My buddy, fresh from a good run of luck at the blackjack tables looked at the ladies car, pulled out $1,000 cash and told her it should cover any damage. The rear quarter panel was crushed in and the bumper was partially torn off, but the car was drivable. After a minute or so, she took the cash and he came home with the front end of his car totaled.
The other story is when I was working at a startup. There were stories one of the founders was skimming money out of their accounts. After the company went under, I found out several of the developers I worked with were helping the founder cover her tracks. There were stories of her exchanging sex or money for them to keep quiet.
Hedge Fund in Connecticut (aren't they all). Someone's first job after grad school. Someone and his boss are trading, and things go very well the first year. Its a small fund ($1-$10 million). The idea is to get a track record and then make the big bucks.
The second year things are way down. Almost half the fund has evaporated. Someone comes to work to find he can't place trades. Sees that the shares are there but the liquid money in the cash account seems to be gone. Panics. Calls the major investors to tell them.
Investor calls cops on him who arrest him. Turns out the boss had run off with the liquid cash in the account (worked out to about $60,000). The fund was down but it was a small fund.
Someone was released from jail and not charged, but the boss was.
It is just wild that someone would try to make a run for it and ruin their lives and go to jail for that sum.
Was there a reason for him to have been suspicious, or was it more of a "Something's wrong! Start shooting! Oh there's a messenger, shoot him!" sort of response?
The investor didn't direct the cop to anyone at particular, but to the "company." There was only one person at the office that they could get ahold of.
I am fuzzy on the details. I don't know if the arrest happens right then and he was let go the next morning, or in an hour.
He was very stressed at the cop's presence. He didn't know till later that everything was okay.
Must have been a uniquely unpleasant day for your acquaintance.
And yeah, absconding for a mere $60K is just stupid. It's not going to get you very far, except in jail. $6 or $60 million might make some sense, otoh ... (but that's for discussion under the other item on HN "everyone has his price" )
Edit: found this http://www.forensicaccountingservices.com/fraudvault/connect...
If my company decided to start paying me minimum wage, I'd leave.
If my salary stayed the same and another company would pay me slightly more I'd stay because I like the work, location, people, etc.
If another company (credibly) offered me a million dollars a month, I'd leave and go work for them.
Someone here was talking about working for banks or data analytics companies that work with law enforcement.
He accuses all of them of some sort of moral breach. But that's from his point of view. A lot of them may not see what they're doing as wrong. In that case, it's not a case of "having a price", it's just a job like any other to them.
Now. If he worked for them in spite of his clear objections, then he clearly has a price.
... I mean, that's just a matter of locality of ethics. IMO going against your own principles is unethical from your own perspective.
Killing a man is generally seen as unethical. Eating meat generally isn't.
So if a vegetarian was working as a taster for Al's Nothing But Beef restaurant, we wouldn't say they are unethical, but they are violating their principles.
Or if Stallman started working for Apple or Microsoft. He wouldn't be doing anything unethical, but he'd be violating every principle he stands for.
So I think the distinction is an important one. To separate one's personal principles from what is generally regarded as ethical.
It is also timely, in that Google and Microsoft are considering or have had to consider their ethics company-wide. Current political events also ask what the United States is willing to accept as a nation.
They ended up offering a very generous salary, compensated me for the income missed due to the bought out contracts, paid out my early termination fees and the company was acquired about 7 months later where I got a retention bonus and another bumped salary on a 3 year contract.
Not sure if I regret it or not - I was really enjoying the entrepreneur aspect - working towards passive income. Now I'm back in the grind, but my compensation is pretty silly for the effort required.
I have an example - I'm an average software engineer in the midwest making $170K/year in a great field, and I've been offered a position in Dubai, in an outdated industry, making somewhat less salary, but 0% taxes and a housing and travel allowance.
Here is the thing - I love my current job, love the field, love the local weather, culture, apartment. I really don't want to move, don't really like the new field, really don't like living in Dubai (lived there for six months) - but, Net of Travel/Allowance/Salary/Housing/Taxes, I'll be making $50K more in pocket
At a certain point, money can buy your unhappiness. I guess we'll see if $50K is enough to do that for me.
AFAIK, for US citizens and green card holders, there aren't any income tax advantages to working in a place like Dubai.
If you're an LGBTQ person, you're gonna have a bad time.
If you're a woman, you might have a bad time.
If you are a smiling person who laughs at a good joke about the administration and likes jokes about administration, you're gonna have a bad time.
I have heard of passports taken away for silly reasons ("we just need it to do some photocopies...") And not given back until the company was "done with you", effectively holding a free person hostage in the state.
I wish you none of the above, but I would read more about UAE and think about it more than twice before boarding that plane.
Good luck, really.
As long as you are a straight, white, non-jewish, male that has no interest in being in the private company of women, and no interest in politics, freedom, or human rights issues, and are comfortable waking up, doing your work, and going home again - you'll probably be fine in the UAE.
The reality is that most people don't have a price, and that's why negotiating, leadership, and management are so challenging. This is well-understood in those areas of studies, but of course those areas of study often come in for mockery or disdain here on ol' HN.
What people usually mean when they say this is "some people have a price, and those are the types of people I want to find right now."
I and just about everyone who found out lost all respect for him.
To make matters worse I find out the idiot did it for $2k to prove to the owners that he was a badass dev.
Sold his soul for $2k.
I eventually managed to download the director's mail. It made it clear why (he'd "promised" one of the guy's children to someone in return for a construction-related favour, essentially for money but slightly more complicated). I handed those mails to him and looked up what happened, and helped the guy arrange a very rapid transfer outside of the country he was working in.
I have worked for political organisations before, so I knew the situation is far worse than "you can't trust the state/bureaucrats", but there is a huge difference between knowing and seeing one of them use the power of the state to essentially kidnap children, "legally". It's not just that these people have a price ... it's cheap. The police will enforce the kidnapping of a child, if it won't draw too much of a crowd, for a free veranda. Casually. Without feeling the need to hide such conversations from their official mail accounts, where their superiors might read it. It made me see the purpose of organisations like the police and child services and I'm sure mental services, the criminal justice system, and so on for what they actually are and do, how and what someone coming into contact will be treated. The upper echelons will defend the bad actors, they won't attack them, but this event, seeing those mails, the fact that they used mail to just banally discuss such a "trade", killed every last bit of belief I had in even the idea of justice through a state, and really drove the yearly "we cannot have judicial oversight for child services decisions" we-must-save-the-children article home. I still have to fight down feelings to the tune of just killing the director and his customer. Killing as in ending their life, cruelly, for trying this.
Every last doubt I had about articles like police officers using phone taps to stalk girlfriends, stealing everything from money to tvs, beating up people for not immediately submitting to them, attacking/arresting/convicting people for racist reasons, ... and of the fact that in all but the most extreme of circumstances the commissioner, mayor, governor, judges, ... will back up those people and enforce their actions, and protect them, essentially because the only power they have comes from those assholes. They can't attack the bad actors without turning 10% of the organisations they control against them, and so they don't, with most probably being bad actors themselves. The worst thing to do is to expect help from them.
And that the right action is not to expose them. You can try but odds are vastly against you. But you can get away from them if you read the rules, and that is the correct action to take. That when a police officer, or a judge, a mayor, a governor or some other bureaucrat asks or tells you something you should look at them in disgust, not say a word and walk away.
Really puts in perspective what the state is : power, to take children, to take anything, to incarcerate and destroy the lives of poor people you don't like for whatever reason, racist, ex-girlfriend, whatever, by giving violence as a tool for social status to exactly the people who would take such an offer and order is really just the result of attempting to play off these people against eachother, leaving very little room to actually protect anyone assuming that's what they want to do in the first place.
What country was this, out of curiosity?
There's a kind of reinforcing loop, where the more power the government gets, the more it attracts those who abuse that power, who are the most effective at coming up with reasons to make their organization more powerful and unaccountable.
However good the intentions sound at each step, it ends in tyranny all too often.
Also be wary of people claiming, "don't worry, no prosecutor would read the law that way."
If it's part of the law, it's a matter of time before a prosecutor will use it. And if it's so unreasonable that no prosecutor should read it that way, the law should say exactly that in black and white.
During the phone interview, I asked some questions about work involved, work-life balance, PTO/holidays - the work sounded a lot and the engineer claimed good work-life balance. It didn’t add up. The kicker though was only 6 days of PTO.
Needless to say, I passed on the role.
A lot of them have student debt, multiple mortgages, multiple kids, a stay at home wife, and so on.
I don't pride myself of being a highly moral person, but even to me this seems pretty weak. I think I'm less shocked by "I don't care if I get people dead as long as I'm getting paid", than by "ordinarily I'm really concerned about the consequences of my actions, but since I got that extra mortgage I will get people killed if I have to". Somehow it seems the former is just imoral, whereas the latter is imoral and stupid.
But either way, these machines are being made and sold because the government demands it, and the workers provide it. Whether the workers are enthusiastic or not about doing it, well, they still show up to work, and the work still gets done.
If student loans, mortgages, health insurance, college tuition and so on weren't so expensive, then I think you'd have way less people queuing up to work for Raytheon.
PS: Go check out Raytheon's instagram. They seem to be prioritizing hiring kids straight out of college, who have an incentive to work for nearly any price. https://www.instagram.com/p/BiplewylpMp/?hl=en&taken-by=rayt...
Because he is just as immoral as the other guy, but he's dishonest about it.
The guy who just doesn't care as long as he gets his paycheck, I get him. His motives are clear. I can count on him to act in that manner.
The guy who rationalizes his decisions so he can sleep at night. He can do anything. He will come up with some story to make himself feel not so bad about what he does.
Thats a really long term for "government"
I personally don't see anything wrong with designing weapons that are later sold and used to kill innocent people. Or with manufacturing firearms that can be used to shoot innocent people. Or with designing cars that can be used to run over innocent people.
It's like wanting to ban guns because they can be used to murder innocent people
If my company is making a lot of its money selling weapons to people or groups that I have issue with, and Saudi Arabia is likely on that list (though I’d do some reading), then that’d be a problem for me.
And there’s only so much I’d excuse in others. If someone knowingly works for a company that makes “flesh-eating nano-machines” for third world dictators... I’m probably not going to want that person in my home.
My issue is that Saudi Arabia has a known habit of hurting innocent people and hence it is immoral to sell them weapons.
That said, there are products that I might have issue with across the board. Chemical or biological weapons might be examples, especially nasty ones.
Some companies lie to or otherwise deceive their customers. The new word on Theranos is that they might have been falsifying test results. If I’m a lab tech and I know that they are doing that, that’s a problem, as there’s the potential for real harm there.
I have been asked to breach my contract (sharing ip) with my current employer when interviewing.
I told them no a canceled the second interview.
Or is this just about how you compromised your preferred career path?
I don't regret the decision, and I ended up really enjoying the five years I spent working in the energy industry. However, at the time, I definitely believed I was "selling out".
But the literal interpretation is somewhat tautological; we all work for money, and we all would like more money. Most of us would do boring things we wouldn't normally do if offered more money -- because most of us are already doing some boring things we wouldn't normally do, for money. Think about it this way; if you won the lottery, would you stay at your current job? Why or why not?
During my 20s and 30s, I worked in film and games and pulled a lot of overtime. At some point, I suddenly realized that I was trading all of my waking hours and all of my available energy for the salary and bonuses I was getting. I was paid reasonably well, and I enjoyed the work and don't have many regrets, but I realized that I had had a price. I was giving up the opportunity to do anything else with my life other than work. After that, my price has gone up, I will no longer do 80 hour weeks for extended periods without the payoff being much higher. I probably still have a price, but thinking more carefully about what I'm trading for that price has led me to make different decisions, and to value my time more.
This is, of course not "Truth", nor is it true for many people who have evolved out of these earlier levels. Those stuck in early stages of psychological evolution often trot it around to influence others by asking them to subvert their true path for money.
This tends to resonate with people that are also stuck on earlier levels of psychological evolution. Those that have evolved past that and have a clear understanding that true happiness comes from serving their values and not their egotistical or fearful desire for Federal Reserve Notes will reject this out of hand.
In any case, OP wasn't claiming that "everyone has a price", he was asking for examples where someone did have a price, so your comment doesn't even apply.
Basically the question is "What could cause you to betray your claimed principles"
Found the guy who made Gurren Lagann his religion.