A Decade Ago, Suicides Rocked a French Telecom Firm – Now Its Execs Stand Trial
npr.org
npr.org
For this reason, I follow this trial with a particular interest and would like to clear a few things :
- Upper management is not directly accused of provoking the suicides. They are accused of a company-wide harassement policy aimed at pushing 22000 persons out without firing them (because they couldn’t - them being public servants), by making them decide to leave on their own. The suicides are the most spectacular side-effect of this harassement policy but they are not the center of the trial.
- France Telecom / Orange was a strange place at the time. It was divided between two generations : the older one signed up as public servants in a public service, and were deeply attached to France Telecom as a public service. A lot of them considered the recent privatization as a betrayal of their values. On top of that they had to go through a lot of technical evolutions, from phones lines to broadband to fiber. The younger generation were not public servants, were mostly fully on board with Orange being a private company and had skills more suited to current times. It was the older generation that was being pushed out.
- Even given the explosive context, everybody in the trial tries to make it as dispassionate as possible. Accusation is pointing out that the plan was illegal, not immoral. Defense is arguing how Orange was facing an existential crisis at the time.
It will be interesting to know how it all plays out.
One thing that has stuck with me is that the officials of the company have always insisted that the suicide rate at Orange/TF was not higher than the general population one. A grim statistic, but one that they were the only one exploring.
All the articles I have read so far failed to establish whether this is factual or not (and that would need a rigorous statistical analysis.. not just comparing the %).
And just to be clear, even if these rates where indeed "normal" or even lower, it would not lower the responsibilities of these execs in these deaths and the harassment policies.
The burden of proof required here is extreme.
Also, it's questionable if there was in fact a 'rash of suicides':
France has a rate of suicide of 12.9 / 100K / year. [1]
France Telecom has 95 000 employees In France alone. [2]
Here's the title of the Telegraph article: "Why have 24 France Telecom workers killed themselves in the past 19 months?" [3]
Well, it would be expected that about 20.5 FT employees will commit suicide every 19 months or so, sadly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_S.A.
[3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechno...
But that isn't what jumps out at me - to me the real issue is that if management pressure is so bad it is provoking suicides then there will be lots of evidence for it. Presumably the reason people are talking about it in newspaper articles is because they have seen evidence and are asking questions.
The stats you have quoted suggest the number of suicides is already above average. That, combined with evidence of a problem, is very likely what has triggered the conversation at all.
I've seen some angry workers, but generally all they want is more pay or to work with better conditions going forward. I'm not sure how many of them would bother trying to get managers imprisoned without good cause. I'd guess it would be about as rare as management policies being bad enough to cause suicides. The media might have wiped out a whole heap of nuance - so it isn't worth getting worked up over the case - but if lawsuits are flying then it is more likely than not that something went very visibly wrong.
Actually, the data frames the argument quite well, moreover, there's nary any way one is going to get better sampling.
" if management pressure is so bad it is provoking suicides then there will be lots of evidence for it"
It's incredulous to suggest that 'management is provoking suicides'. It is completely absurd.
When, in modern history do you suggest that this has ever happened? Ever?
Wouldn't people quit their jobs? Or get different jobs before resorting to 'death'?
We could all easily demonstrated working conditions elsewhere in the Western world where conditions are 'just as bad' - ergo, the logic of 'they were provoked into suicide' makes no sense whatsoever.
And FYI my data demonstrated that the number of suicides is well within normalized range. An variation of 20% in one year is going to be normal.
I meant it as "alleged side-effect".
Where are you going to get the comparable data?
How on earth does one show 'causation' for any of this?
There are tons of Chinese factories, and others all over the world with considerably worse conditions wherein nobody is committing suicide. People living in ghettos don't even commit suicide at alarming rates.
'Suicide' is actually a contagious behaviour, when a child in a school commits suicide, often there are others. This we have some data for.
Layoffs and crappy work conditions are basically normative in a lot of the world, and not uncommon in the Western world, but I don't recall any cases of this kind of thing happening.
While I think there's no doubt difficult work conditions are surely going to help to create 'conditions' for negative outcomes, I think 'causation' is going to be impossible to prove directly.
The other thing here is that people make choices in life, it's another stretch of responsibility for someone to assert that the company made or induced them into making these choices.
If Orange was skimping on safety gear, and we saw a spike in related accidents - then I think this is the 'statistical case' and we can show causation and direct responsibility. But suicide, although tragic, is a different scenario altogether.
>Where are you going to get the comparable data?
>How on earth does one show 'causation' for any of this?
Is called epidemiology
>Layoffs and crappy work conditions are basically normative in a lot of the world, and not uncommon in the Western world, but I don't recall any cases of this kind of thing happening.
Do you know many farmers?
edit - Apologies, the raised suicide rate reported for farmers in North America looks as though it may not be true in Canada - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10557200
Even this fairly level headed conversation, and the legal case, are likely to somewhat contribute to suicidal ideation through mere awareness.
Having spent some time in rural Ontario, I can say it imbues one with a sense that life is worth living. ;- )
If that wasn't possible, makes me only wonder what the buyers were thinking during privatization.
You can't just transfer the assets of one company into a new one and let the old one go into administration with it's liabilities. The administrator will undo any such transfers and you will go to prison.
She ended up quitting and getting into the sciences instead, because she couldn't stand the class warfare techniques that the school taught. I think this is telling of a part of French society that isn't well-known outside of France.
This is an elite school, which teaches the brightest French youths (in terms of grades and competitive intellectual ability), and also the children of politicians, business leaders and powerful families.
The curriculum has your usual suspects of business administration topics, but also focuses on forming contacts in the elites and politics, plus explicit instruction in techniques for manipulating and dominating others. Examples being rhetoric, lying with a straight face, defending and justifying an indefensible or immoral case, or spreading rumors and damaging others' reputation.
France, in spite of all the beheadings, never really lost its aristocracy. There is a level of first-world corruption that's insane by central European standards. The politicial class consists exclusively of people who have gone to elite schools like the one I described, and never held a job, catering mostly to the requirements of big businesses.
As an external observer, it seems insane to me that the French are unable to vote in politicians that are not cronies to this system. But the news story is really no surprise, based on my third-hand knowledge of how French executives are trained.
Would love to hear some viewpoints from French or French-affiliated hackers on this.
> The curriculum has your usual suspects of business administration topics, but also focuses on forming contacts in the elites and politics, plus explicit instruction in techniques for manipulating and dominating others. Examples being rhetoric, lying with a straight face, defending and justifying an indefensible or immoral case, or spreading rumors and damaging others' reputation.
Interesting, but why are you calling these "class warfare techniques"? Most of them seem equally applicable regardless of your social class or the social class of anyone you're notionally targeting. The first, developing elite contacts, is only applicable to non-elites. If you came in as a member of the elite, you'd already have those.
I would guess because if these sorts of people end up leading the country they're not going to target fellow elite classmates. It's a big club and you ain't in it.
The people, left free, naturally turned to charismatic leaders (Louis-Philippe, Napoleon) so that this supposedly temporary step could lead to better systems for all. The only time the people have practically achieved a literally democratic feat is the episode of the "Paris Commune" in 1871.
Unfortunately, the educational gaps in French society led to the violent repression of these political projects (the "Commune of Paris" was violently repressed by the army, which was mainly monarchist at the time).
Our current system expresses this duality: we are a republic, certainly, but whose system produces an elite capable of manipulating the people "in its interest". Unfortunately, man being what he is, the elite is not benevolent and will protect his interests more than attempt to raise the whole society. Moreover, the people themselves do not share the same conceptions: thus, in the 1980s, the left-wing government tried to put an end to "private" schools to limit these inequalities. The people, still predominantly Catholic at the time, strongly disagreed that private Catholic schools (although more expensive and producing elite) should not be abolished, and the project was abandoned.
As long as the country's growth was correct, this situation was not problematic because, despite this creation of elites, the whole society continued its "social ascent" until the early 2000s.
Today, the situation is no longer the same because elitism is continuing (or even increasing) while society as a whole remains stable or even regresses. Elitism is therefore losing its legitimacy, which is why the "yellow vest" movement continues and mistrust of institutions is increasing. The elites are therefore trying to destroy this protest in order to maintain their privileges by fragmenting society, whether media or political: in particular by seeking to present to French citizens the success of so-called more virtuous models such as the American model or the German model (much more unequal). It is not a conscious phenomenon, it is unfortunately the logical consequence of the evolution of an unequal society that justifies this inequality by the social and economic stability it induces.
This is fascinating - any other folks know of similar formal training. I work in a well known tech company and at the higher levels, this seems to be the distinction between folks who go up and those who don't.
As I think about it, it feels like courses that train one to spot and defend against such behavior should be part of all undergraduate curriculum.
Clearly some people master these exploits (and the defenses) without formal training but most people don't and pay for it over the course of their careers.
Also the 'aristocracy' is definitely gone. Entrance to the 'Grande Ecoles' is competitive, not based on nobility.
But yes, once you're in, you're 'set' and they do protect each other, it's similar to Oxbridge and Ivy League to some degree.
There were also assignments given to each student in turn, of the type "this is the position you are going to defend -- you have two hours to prepare, then you must front a debate in front of the class where you defend this viewpoint, regardless of whether you agree with it or not".
It doesn't require abnormally critical skills to imagine what sort of societal power structures such an education is meant to support.
Unless the positions were somehow inherently dangerous (i.e. advocating violence or similar) that's how you learn to debate. It forces you to consider viewpoints that don't align with your gut instinct.
In the US, high school debate competitions all revolve around a single topic, and you alternate rounds between defending and opposing it. One such topic I recall a lot of people struggling with (compared to other topics) was "An oppressive government is better than no government" or something along those lines.
Now, if the debate were something like "Women deserve to be paid less than men" I can understand being exceptionally uncomfortable being forced to defend that position.
Second is probably the best way to learn about a topic and how to debate. Take something you abhore and defend it. It is an incredibly useful skill.
People from US and Canada in general are absolutely terrible at it, this is why in debates vs British or French they usually loose.
I remember going to Monk debate where head of Green Party of Canada got absolutely annihilated, they got under her skin, made her completely loose it to the point moderator had to cut her microphone. It was sad.
Be a Nazi for a day, then if you ever debate one you will have a huge advantage.
0. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm...
If this was an exercise in 'how to start false rumours to ruin someone' - then it's not just 'questionable', it's shocking.
I can see this as part of an exercise to demonstrate how these things are 'powerful' - but as a training exercise .... it's so abrupt I just don't believe it.
If this is part of the curriculum it should be posted somewhere, no?
Edit:
Here is a paper from Paris School of Economics [1] a 'Grande Ecole' where profs have basically studied how information flows through social networks.
I can easily see a professor teaching this course asking students to 'start some kind of rumouor' to see how the information propagates through social networks.
I don't for a second believe that this would be taught in a manner such that students are being 'instructed on how to use rumours to advance their careers' or some kind of nefarious thing.
I believe it's totally misrepresentative to indicate that schools would be doing such nefarious things, and I think that for whatever reason the OP has possibly misunderstood the nature of this kind of activity.
A quick glance at the paper reveals that this is just regular, kind of interesting social science.
[1] https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00966234/document
For instance, some explosives that were developed for the mining industry are now used in military applications- similarly, there's nothing really stopping someone from weaponizing almost any scientific discovery.
But the issue is not that they exist, it's that people are somehow thinking these Machiavellian tools are literally being taught as part of a curriculum as craft at France's highest institutions - this I find very hard to believe. I think that the kids are learning this in high school outside of class if anything.
I know third hand of someone who paid attention to his watch and smartphone to get a job (or a promotion, I don't recall). It was in finance. The idea is, if you belong to the right social class, you are allowed to go up. If they spot you for a commoner, you're not. Simple as that.
Think this is a stretch? I'v read an article (American article) about how someone was denied a job because of how she dressed. Oh she was dressed all right, neat and all, but she also had a dark skin (okay, she was black), and here is what the boss said once the interview was over: "my, you don't wear a tank top under your shirt, you wear a silk shell!".
Such a little detail, but that was nevertheless a sign that this applicant was perhaps not as rich as she should have been.
The second one, though - like the other posters have noted - is just a basic debate assignment you'd find in lots of schools.
Just two weeks ago the headmaster of a prestigious private school in the UK claimed that the rise in Oxbridge admissions from students educated at state schools was a form of "social engineering" and likened it to anti-Semitism.
>Privately educated pupils in the UK are also being accused of dominating the top jobs and stifling social mobility
Huh, it's almost as if... they actually do.
"Meritocracy" for these people really means "quis paget entrat".
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/11/head-liken...
Um, what? Only one out of three of those is actually a word.
the beheading were about getting rid of the nobility(and the clergy), not the bourgeoisie.
The French revolution wasn't a "grass root movement", "coming from the people", it was just a power grab from a specific clique. I'm not saying it didn't benefit the poor with the abolition of privileges, but it was really about trading an aristocracy for another. In fact, as soon as they were done with the nobles they started to behead one another during something that was called "the terror".
The popular imagery of the French Revolution, at least outside of France, was that the peasants rose up to destroy the aristocracy by chopping all their heads off. While some people certainly had this motivation, especially the sans-culottes and extremists like Marat, as a means of describing the entire revolution this framework falls far short of reality.
A large portion of the early revolution was actually supported by factions of the French nobility, including the liberal sons of old noble families. These nobles saw their current privileges as destabilizing, and wanted to move the country in a more meritocratic direction where they could dominate based on their education rather than their birth.
Furthermore, the near universal opinion of the political class early on was that they wanted a constitutional monarchy, even Robespierre opposed a republic early on during his revolutionary career.
It wasn’t until after the execution of the king did the purely anti-noble sentiment get going (and executing), but for a variety of reasons (read: civil war), they killed a lot more French peasants than they killed aristocrats. Later historians would typically call this period the “bad revolution”, while the partially aristocrat led early phases the “good revolution”. A later King of the French (yes, they came back) actually ponied up a huge amount of money to restore property to the nobility that had fled, effectively returning the nobility to their pre-revolution economic power.
tl;dr: the French Revolution was never a unified anti-aristocrat operation, which explains why semblances of the aristocracy remain to this day. It was effective at eliminating the king, but it was partially led by aristocrats, and ineffective at killing off or making the aristocracy permanently poor.
> Lombard wanted to cut 20% of staff — about 22,000 employees — to reduce debt and make the company more competitive. But many workers retained the protections they had enjoyed as civil servants.
What?
> Between 2008 and 2009, there were 19 suicides of employees, who left notes blaming the company or who killed themselves at work. Twelve others attempted suicide during that period.
How?
> Engineers were demoted to call center jobs. Employees say they were micromanaged, isolated and assigned jobs without training. Families were moved across the country multiple times in short periods of time.
What happens if they are found guilty?
> The defendants face up to a year in prison and fines of 15,000 euros (about $16,750).
Oh, and that was when the FT was still „the good guys”, i.e. a public service. I guess they just treated Polish branch as their for-profit colony, where rules of basic decency do not apply.
Therefore they need less protection/benefits for the case that they were fired, that being impossible.
Nowadays they can ask for a 3-year pause (e.g. to create a startup, etc.) but those plans come from the “flexible economy” and were introduced only recently.
It's like a startup who offers high stock options vested over a period for early employees. They grow too quickly and try to push the early employees out without triggering a clause that allows them to take back the options if they quit. They try to place them in jobs they are over qualified or not suited for.
Would you quit and leave money on the table.
As consequence very few people hire for these positions as well.
Employees in the private sector can receive significant severance pay, which provides a financial cushion while they look for a new job. Civil service contracts don't have that perk, so France Télécom employees were reluctant to quit.
A radical negative change in the working environment combined with no safety net seems like a recipe for depression. Maybe these people were ill prepared for the upheaval and had no idea how to cope with it.
From 1990 to 2017, U.S. GDP per capita is up from $36,500 to $54,200, about 50%. France is up from $29,500 to $38,600, about 30%. The forecast for 2021 has France at $41,100 and the U.S. at $60,100: https://tradingeconomics.com/forecast/gdp-per-capita-ppp?con.... That means in 30 years, Americans will have gone from being modestly richer than the French (24%) to being quite a bit richer than the French (50%). To put that into perspective, the 50% gap from France to the U.S. is the same as the gap from Turkey to France.
Worker protections make sense, but it seems that too many and you're locking people into an illusion.
Put simply, your boss is "expected" to know more than you, you're not really supposed to question that. Easy to see how that can degenerate when going through such a change.
Edit: to be more clear, as in contrary to “private, corporate” mentioned above.
Hence why one refers to work in the private sector, which could mean a privately-owned or publicly-traded company, but not something government-owned/operated.
For example British Broadcasting Corporation.
The point was that I think there is value in distinguishing public companies and private companies because it's completely different from employee's and career viewpoint.
2. It's not an amorphous corporation that does wrong, it's particular people.
This should happen more often.
I’m on holiday in France. SIM card was mailed to me for free. Activated an unlimited call/SMS and 4gb data for 10 EUR, or about US$12, and that includes their sales taxes.
And this isn’t the oft-mentioned Free, just a random MVNO that mainly targets immigrants.
(Ok, it actually cost me 15 EUR because bloody iMessage sent a short code SMS to send tell Apple HQ what my new number is and ate some credit before I could sign up for the plan)
I would have signed up with that company, but I didn’t want to have to go to a boutique to signup ;)
It's much cheaper to buy a phone outright and get a giffgaff sim. I was buying Nexuses, but the pixel seemed a ripoff so I haven't upgraded yet. And to be honest I'm not really seeing poor performance yet on the Nexus 5x. I had been thinking about a oneplus, but I see they've released a cheaper pixel now.
But this is one of the first times where I see there's some potential consequence to negative or destruction actions conducted.
I think this is a sad state of affairs. It could work if the law perfectly reflected the ethics.
People get paid a lot because other people think they can trust them. Once it turns out you were wrong about trusting someone, you don't say "well, I will stop paying people I think I can trust so much!"
1) as mentioned in the article and comments elsewhere, the majority of employees in FT at that time were civil servants. This meant (as per the privatization deal that was defined by the French govt at the time) that they could not be fired. Ever.
2) the population was pretty old (the average employee age when I joined in 2004 was 48 years old). A lot of people were hired in 1976-1980 by the then-“ministry of posts and telegraphs” to bring copper to every home in France. Those linemen and women were around 50 in 2004. Needless to say, every home in France had long since been plugged to the telephone network so their original work no longer existed. It’s not fun being a 50 year-old civil servant whose skill set is obsolete and no-linger needed.
3) FT was in pretty bad financial shape after purchasing Orange at the height of the dot-com bubble. I remember endless cost-reduction plans at that time, initiated by Lombard’s predecessor (Thierry Breton, who is now C.E.O. of Atos). As an example, the 2003-2005 objective was 15B€ in savings, IIRC.
4) Competition in the French telco space was already fierce at that time. FT, as the incumbent, was under obligation to provide its infrastructures and bulk service at cost+ to all the newcomers. Suddenly it could no longer charge what it pleased, and had to learn about marketing and sales and customer service. At the same time it also had to become a competitive internet provider and mobile operator.
5) Of course the obvious answer was to transition the historic workforce to new jobs required by the change in context and technology: telemarketing, customer service, IT infrastructure (my first job was web developer, and the ops team for our production infrastructure was party made up of ex-linemen. Needless to say, not all of them were comfortable with system administration, and I spent a lot of hours on the phone with them spelling out bash commands). Besides the skills gap, it’s also a very large mindset shift to go from proudly contributing to the modernization and wellbeing of your country, to trying to upsell your customers on a faster Internet offer. (Think going from Bell in its glory days to current-day Comcast)
6) for a very long time, FT’s top leadership (and I mean like the top 4-5 management layers, including all the excom and the CEO - basically anyone at VP level or above) came almost exclusively from a small group of engineers, the “Corps des Télécoms”. These people are extremely bright but not always gifted on the emotional intelligence scale. And they’re very loyal to the company. Plus, there was a huge amount of groupthink — they basically all reason the same way. This only started to change with Lombard’s successor, Stéphane Richard. I mean, he’s also from the Grandes École elite circle, but he went to a business school rather than an engineering one, so, you know. (/s)
Now, I absolutely do NOT condone what happened in FT at that time. But its management had to deal with massive debt, eroding revenues and margins, intense competition, and a large, ageing workforce who needed to be reskilled and had trouble transitioning from public service to competitive market. And who could not be let go.
It was a pretty shitty context, and arguably a textbook example that too much worker protection can actually be a bad thing for the workers themselves. I mean, if a mass layoff (with healthy compensation packages and re-training and so forth) had been possible, FT’s management would most definitely have gone for it, rather than bullying people until they left of their own accord (or took their own life).
There will be plenty to write about the incredible damage done to France by polytechnicians in the last fifty years.
I used to work for another state owned company and they were still catapulting freshly graduated polytechnician to important management position when I left a couple years ago. It was beyond funny because all the good elements who had already proved they were good at the actual job were getting deprived of promotion and just weren't listened to when it came time to take decision. They then either became jaded and stopped contributing or just left.
Top management (themselves former polytechnicians) would keep communicating about how the rank and file was so ineffective and expensive while all their improvement plans kept failing.
Meanwhile, Polytechnique keeps using its clout to sabotage any effort to reform the French higher education system.
We managed to live through it. 8-)
So obviously, these kinds of deals are actually one of the 'root causes' of economic malaise in France.
These 'tipping points of destruction' are realized largely due to the inability of companies to actually navigate rough waters in the first place.
It is like buying a used car with 3rd party stanced suspension and tires and then lamenting later on how you need to buy custom parts and tires when they wear out. There were other choices, but it just had to be that one, and those extra 'features' were very clearly presented as part of the original deal.
France Telecom's bit :
Please note that the numbers of suicides at France Telecom was not even statistically so high :
https://www.atlantico.fr/decryptage/85841/suicides-a-france-... (yeah google translate)
> Analysons en effet avec objectivité les chiffres concernant ce sujet grave. Le nombre annuel de suicides parmi les employés du groupe France Telecom sur le territoire français a été de 28 en 2000, 23 en 2001, 23 en 2002, 22 en 2003, 13 en 2008, 19 en 2009, 25 en 2010.
> le « taux de suicide théorique » atteint alors près de 16,9 pour 100 000. Ainsi, le taux de suicide constaté chez France Télécom à 19 pour 100 000
Taking into account the age, male/female repartition and the industry average, these are the 2 numbers : 17/100000 vs 19/100000. You can check other countries suicides rates for these population to notice it's not abnormal - people got sick.
So what has happened : some people squarely laid the blame on the employer for their suicide in notes or letters (one such letter being written 2 years before the act - 2 years to react). The cases were hugely publicized.
I am pretty sure work(place) issues are a major cause of suicide, being the bread winning activity & so consuming so many hours and human interaction. Lack of work is a bigger factor too when you look at suicide frequency between active / inactive adults.
Hope this give a more open view than "bad management - no donut".
France bit :
It was really hard to fire people in France. The employee needs to messed up pretty big. It's next to impossible to fire public servants. The absolute opposite is the USA, where managers can fire their subordinates almost instantly (which brings in a bigger lot of issues and abuse).
So how do a team get rid of someone screwing up, not working, not team-playing, even actively hindering the team ? You don't. At best, you can put this employee to a new team or assign it a useless project (or more exactly, a project that the company accepts will never get finished). If the under performing employee does not want to be trained for new jobs, no consequences for him/her. Public service in France is ridden with such people, and government is paying twice for their work : once in their salary, once in the salary of someone actually doing it or a private contractor. I have work with&for such people and it's horrible.
So French management have these horrible & convoluted ways to make people leave the company. Giving them useless assignments, always poor performances reviews, etc.
French employees are very very well protected (thanks to decades of unions fighting) and it's much much better to be employed by French corporations than USA or British ones.
Nowadays, we might have reached a point where the downsides of this protection on economic performance are doubled by necessary hypocrisy in management. The social contract "work for the company, get paid for your work" is not holding. You can get paid without working. And you can work without getting paid enough (but I dare say it's the rarer of both in France).
It's changing under Macron's reforms which disgruntled privileged workers and which worried unprivileged ones. Now, there is a upper bound cost for firing someone & companies can plan on it. Remember, when fired, we got unemployment benefits + company's compensation. You also got the state's benefits when both you and the company agrees on you leaving the company.
Americans have no idea how amazing our social welfare is. And Frenches have no idea either.
Imagine that. Laws that help people.
Who would have thought that for profit companies would want to profit ?
This sounds like something out of a bad movie. Corporations are people, too!
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. There are legit uses for throwaways, just not routinely.
Lots more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...