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Comment by BlueTie | Hacker News Reader

> Well, in this case, people are mad at Azure/MS and Canonical for betraying developer trust, not the individual salesperson. He's just a pawn in the game. It's not like this guy went rogue; this is his job.

It's still his linkedin profile plastered all over twitter right now though more than Azure's EULA/T&C's.

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But no one is calling this guy a villain. For example, his name is not mentioned once in all these HN comments. It's not his fault.

And indeed the Azure T&C's are definitely referenced a in the Twitter discussion with the OP. Such as:

https://twitter.com/dezren39/status/1359726235929223168

"On February 10th, a new Canonical Sales Representative contacted one of these developers via LinkedIn, with a poor choice of word. In light of this incident, Canonical will be reviewing its sales training and policies.""

My reading of this statement is that they are scapegoating the guy.

They are trying to scapegoat the guy. Thankfully, people are not falling for it.

This. Typical Marketing and Sales tactics involve using the lowest level employee both because they're naive and because they have nothing to lose because they're already lowest on the pecking order.

I pulled up his LinkedIn. He started at Canoncial three weeks ago, fresh out of undergrad.

I really hope he comes out of this unscathed.

I think an attempt to scapegoat would look more like "in violation of our established policies and rigorous training, a Canonical Sales Representative contacted one of these developers via LinkedIn."

The actual quote acknowledges that the company's training and policies are at fault. I'd also expect a scapegoat to be publicly fired or disciplined, did they say that elsewhere?

> "On February 10th, a new Canonical Sales Representative contacted one of these developers via LinkedIn, with a poor choice of word. In light of this incident, Canonical will be reviewing its sales training and policies."

This was their official statement regarding this matter. They provided this to The Register to defend their actions when this story got written up: https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/11/microsoft_azure_ubunt...

Edit: Yes so just to be clear, according to their official statement they are scapegoating the salesman. They call him a "new Canonical Sales Rep" to imply he isn't experienced and made a mistake. The only responsibility that Canonical took is that they will "review its sales training".

The only blame they gave him was that he had a poor choice of words. They're not saying he went against training or policy. They're not saying that he's being disciplined or fired.

Canonical said that they need to review their policies. To me, this implies that what he did was not against policy.

Poor guy must be having a hard time.

It really depends on company culture. But there's probably a good chance this affects him at the company internally.

Perhaps. At the very least, it's gotta be uncomfortable for him.

No one is calling this guy the villain, but he is pictured as the villain.

> It's still his linkedin profile plastered all over twitter right now though more than Azure's EULA/T&C's.

This is pretty disgusting that someone didn't think to cover his name or image while complaining about what is essentially privacy and having a central beef with two companies. That said, while it's disgusting to me, it can easily be shrugged off as "thoughtless" by others because privacy is not a mainstream concept.

Frankly, using a personal profile for work activity in this vein is just not a good idea. Regardless of whether Linkedin ‘forbids’ creating secondary accounts.

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