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Comment by kenneth | Hacker News Reader

Hiring a known whistleblower is a risk not worth taking, even if you are not doing anything wrong. The risk vs. reward ratio is just too high.

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I am sure that this is the logic executives like to go through, but whistleblowers aren't people who compulsively reveal company secrets. They reveal secrets which the public should know about, and usually have to be very large and important in order to justify the personal risk involved.

If your company is so ethically bankrupt that you can't afford the risk of someone who would only reveal things that are of critical importance to the public, then maybe you aren't the "good guys" anymore.

Is this a variation on "you don't need to be afraid if you have nothing to hide" thing?

It's more like "you don't need to be afraid of whistle-blowers unless you're killing people through your actions". VW didn't make a small mistake -- their evasion of emission standards has directly resulted in thousands of preventable deaths due to air pollution (they also decided to unethically poison monkeys in order to "prove" that the gasses weren't toxic). Again, whistle-blowers don't just reveal secrets willy-nilly -- there is significant personal risk to being a whistle-blower and very few people make such decisions lightly.

The thing is -- everyone has something to hide, which is why that adage is wrong. But not everyone is hiding a scheme they've cooked up to flaunt laws (and lied to regulators for years when they came knocking) which resulted in tangible deaths as a result. If you are worried that you have a scheme like that on your books, then yeah you should avoid hiring whistle-blowers.

You're right about the logic of corporations when it comes to hiring decisions. He probably doesn't have much of a future in automotive.

His career has taken an ironic downtown, ironic enough to land him as the centerpiece in a NY Times article. That will certainly help his profile.

> If your company is so ethically bankrupt that you can't afford the risk of someone who would only reveal things that are of critical importance to the public, then maybe you aren't the "good guys" anymore.

Exactly.

Fortunately, a great many companies are not hiring him, so it’s not like not hiring him will expose that we’re doing tons of illegal stuff.

They were studying vehicle emissions for a grad-degree. Why would he be a whistle-blower?He didn't work for VW when he was studying that ?

Who's a known whistleblower?

It is unclear whether you approve of this decisionmaking heuristic

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