Hacker News Reader

Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

So, one of Ozy's top two executives impersonated a senior YouTube executive, apparently using voice-modification technology, to answer questions in a due diligence phone call initiated by Goldman Sachs, who was considering investing $40M in the company.

First of all, wow. That takes a lot -- a lot -- of chutzpah. And a lot of arrogance too.

Second, Ozy's board of directors described this reckless con as a "mistake." Apparently the impersonator is still at Ozy. (Wait... What?)

Third, I'm reminded of the later stages of the residential mortgage market bubble, in which the zeitgeist was captured by the phrase "extend and pretend." The zeitgeist now may be best described as "fake it and pretend."

Again, wow.

View on HN

Shades of Theranos with this one. It's so sad that hard working, smart technologists struggle through and at best maybe make a decent living at a good tech company, yet smooth-talking phonies like these guys and Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann just get money thrown at them and can never fail. Why? Because they wear turtlenecks and have the right prestigious college names on their resume?

A bit off topic, but why do people conflate Elizabeth Holmes with Adam Neumann (and Travis Kalanick), completely different issues, one is fraud and the other is just a failed IPO that included some hyperbole, nothing more. No comparison.

Adam Neumann is not Elizabeth Holmes, but there is more to his story than "a failed IPO that included some hyperbole".

I lump them together because their primary skills are charm and persuasion rather than hands-on subject matter expertise. To me, it doesn't matter whether the end result turns out to be fraud or incompetence, they get ahead of honesty and competence by being phony smooth-talking salesmen. Like a role playing character that puts all their skill points into "Charisma" and nothing else.

And it's not just high profile entrepreneurs. Everyone knows people like this, they're all around us, climbing the corporate ladder. Mediocre performers, but boy can they "look the part", flash a big gorgeous smile, and talk in ways that sound pleasing to leadership but are ultimately empty words.

> Mediocre performers, but boy can they "look the part", flash a big gorgeous smile, and talk in ways that sound pleasing to leadership but are ultimately empty words.

Coincidentally, this also characterizes Ozy's content, which is unbelievably vapid and safe, but delivered with an unearned tone of gravitas. At least TED(x) talks were sometimes good because of the sheer number of them. Ozy content is never good.

Right! And go ahead and try to unsubscribe! Impossible.

Obligatory question: why don’t you do that if it’s so easy? My suspicion is you judge a book by its cover, how do you know it’s not just how they treat others ie. with a big smile that makes them succeed, but also the effort they put in behind the scenes when you’re not looking?

Does putting up a great face necessarily mean the content must be garbage and the whole package cannot be just as great?

I don't think anyone is saying it's easy - the complaint seems to more be that it creates no value (unlike those hard working technologists).

It's not easy, though it's mostly learnable. But the important part is that it's also a moral failure. You have to sacrifice your soul to do this well.

There were a few things in the WeWork story that were way closer to the fraud line than you're implying here including circular revenue and self-dealing.

Arguably Neumann was a fraud, he just got away with it. WeWork’s books were thoroughly cooked, and he managed to extract an inappropriate amount of wealth from it via his role, up to and including making the company lease land from him, and (attempting) to force the company to license its own brand from him personally.

Neumann was a complete conman, and he's the smarter one because he got away with a lot of money , while Holmes is a psychopath who hopefully will end up with a long prison sentence.

I'm so jaded that I think she will get off scott free

Of course! She will serve no prison time, and for the rest of her life remain richer than any of us are here on HN. Furthermore, she will go on to found other companies and have no trouble funding them. I could even see a successful political future with her prestigious contacts in government. Easiest predictions I’ve ever made.

Nah, she made a lot of proud people look stupid. I predict she'll get the Shkreli treatment.

Not now, she's already blaming that little guy who followed her around like a puppy dog. That whole "woke" thing will work to her advantage.

I predict a no federal jail, or a few months, like a Martha Stewart. She will write her bio.

She will be on the talk circuit the minute the trial is over, and talk about being a victim.

I don't think she will wear the black turtleneck ever.

My wish is they start to fining white collar criminals much more, especially the wealthy ones. Federal prison time for wealthy criminals seems like a vacation. Get them where they worship---their money. Every time I hear the fine, I cringe. Is that all? I would like to see all societal fees/fines tied to assets. She shouldn't feel able to capitalize on the crime either.

Then again I have never understood the logic of making a poor man pay the same fine, as the poor man.

>That whole "woke" thing will work to her advantage.

I wouldn't be so sure. That whole "woke" thing is turning on white women and gay men rather quickly. Granted it's mostly middle-aged white women up to now, but Elizabeth Holmes has become a symbol of some excesses that are unpopular all over.

> Holmes is a psychopath who hopefully will end up with a long prison sentence.

This is an incredibly vile thing to wish upon anyone.

I hope you take some time to reflect what a long prison sentence actually implies in the US and consider whether or not that’s actually an appropriate punishment for what only amounts to a financial crime.

Theranos was rife with bullying and threats, and it affected lives of patients because of the false tests. Messing around with tests is not a joke, lives are at sake.

Did you miss the part where he trademarked company property and tried to sell it back to the company? Or the part that he acquired buildings and leased them to WeWork at inflated prices? There's an argument her for Adam Neumann to be actually WORSE than Elizabeth Holmes.

It takes a while for fraud to come to light. I'm not for a second suggesting Neumann is a fraud, but I would guess that the people who conflate him with Holmes think (rightly or wrongly) that the WeWork saga had at least some high-level hallmarks of fraud.

> hard working, smart technologists struggle through and at best maybe make a decent living at a good tech company

Woah woah woah.

If we want to claim that any tech salary is hard working and struggling, then I suggest you spend a summer digging ditches for the DOT, coal mining, or working in a factory.

In the US, programmers make about 2.5x the median salary (2019) [0]. The entire US median in 2019 was $35,000.

So remember to look down for perspective too, not just up.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.html https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programm...

Implying that people can't be hard working because "look, there's this other job that seems like it's harder" is just... I don't even know what.

As for the struggling part, if you control for cost of living the picture is going to look a lot different.

Incidence rates (per 100 full-time worker equivalents) of nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses by industry and case types, cases with days away from work, 2019 [0]

Fishing? 3.0 Bituminous coal underground mining? 3.0

Framing contractors? 4.5 Soft drink manufacturing? 4.8

Leather and hide tanning and finishing? 7.1

Computer systems design and related services? 0.1

Fatal injury rates fall along the same lines [1], and programmers commit suicide at less than 1/2 the rate of high risk occupations [2].

There's a difference between going home mentally exhausted, and being unable to go into work because your body is that injured.

Or to put it another way: if you were offered your equivalent salary, would you go fish Alaskan king crab or join a logging crew tomorrow?

[0] https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/summ1_00.htm (Table 1) https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/case/cd_r4_2019.htm (Table R4)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cftb0332.htm (Table A-5, Fatal incident counts by occupation) https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju... (Occupations with the highest rates)

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6903a1-H.pdf (Suicide Rates by Industry and Occupation, 2016)

I don't know that "hard-working" has generally been used to mean "working at hard physical labor". I have not been hard-working in that sense since the age of about twenty, the occasional home or volunteer project excepted.

Having said that, would you settle for "diligent"?

I struggle to find a term that allows for an equality between what I do on a daily basis, and what a fisherman does. Somehow, 'different but equal in effort' just doesn't seem accurate.

Which isn't to say that we aren't putting in work, or doing our best, or burning the candle, or creating amazing things.

You can do all of those things, and still not have as difficult a job as someone else. Because all work isn't the same.

And so I take a chunk of umbrage at whinging about the unfairness that we make so little while doing so much. "... struggle through and at best maybe make a decent living..." is a pretty damned entitled way to see the world.

Difficulty of a job is probably viewed differently from person to person also. I've done both programming and commercial fishing and I'd say they take different types of effort. Depending on the fishery, you could have a few months with lots of intense physical work and not much sleep, but the plus side is you get to work out on the ocean in a beautiful environment and you can travel around and not work for the rest of the year. One tech job I had, I was on call 24/7 with hours of commuting each day and it was very stressful and mentally tiring in my experience.

Hard-working (i.e. working hard) does not exclusively mean "working at hard physical labor". You are not insane.

It is a logical fallacy known as Relative Privation: https://academy4sc.org/video/fallacy-of-relative-privation-a...

By this token most of the tertiary sector can't be hard working and struggling, which would be more than 2/3 of the workers.

We'd also have to exclude all the workers that aren't in abusive conditions, like self owned artisan shops, plumbers etc. And exclude gig economy workers who don't literally work themselves to death and only work "a lot" for little pay.

You might be right, but the slice left is so small I am not sure it's a useful distinction in most conversations. Perhaps qualifying ditch digging and coal mining as "extreme working" and "hardcore struggling" would be a better fit.

I think ethbr0 was kind of dividing it into 3 categories:

People with it easy: 2.5x median and working in an office, which includes programmers

People with it hard: making little and doing backbreaking labor

People with it medium: everyone else

So we shouldn't say people in the easy category are struggling, and for perspective we should think about people in the hard category. But we can't say one way or the other about people in the medium category.

To quantify it, I guess it's the ratio of (physical or mental discomfort) to (compensation) that I'm talking about.

I wouldn't say programmers have exceptionally high mental discomfort; we certainly don't have high physical discomfort. And we're well compensated, relatively speaking.

In contrast, we have oil field workers(?): uncomfortable physical and mental work, but well compensated. Or meat processors: uncomfortable physical and mental work, poorly compensated.

By that metric, it seems like we're doing pretty well.

That may hold true for US (and even then there's a lot of variation in living expenses and affording things like education or healthcare), but it doesn't necessarily for many of the other countries out there. For example, i recently did a blog post on my earnings as a software dev in Latvia: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings

In short:

  - i earn 1.5x the average salary/wage in my country
  - that figure is approximately 1500 euros per month

To afford the cheapest VW Golf [0] (a popular car here), i'd need to save up 22'325 euros, which is the equivalent of 15 months' wages, or ~30 months with the ability to save 50% of what i make. It'd take me over 2 years to afford a new car, which is also why the used car market is so popular here.

To afford a house in my region of the country [1], i'd need to save up around 100'000 euros, which is the equivalent of 67 months' wages, or ~134 months with the ability to save 50% of what i make. It'd take me over 11 years to afford my own house, something for which i really don't have an answer - most people just rent apartments instead (also we're talking about countryside properties here, not the ones in cities).

Of course, it's not all bad, but how much money people in various careers make and how much PPP holds true in a globalized economy varies greatly, as expressed in that blog post of mine. Some countries are just poor and the people in them aren't well paid. Some companies are profitable but aren't incentivized to pay developers anything above what they can get away with - which is also why many of the WITCH companies have regional offices in my country, as we're one destination for outsourcing. As for how hard these careers are, it depends: some people are miserable working in software, but at the same time at least it isn't back breaking work.

Links:

[0] https://www.volkswagen.lv/lv/models/golf-8.html

[1] https://www.ss.lv/lv/real-estate/homes-summer-residences/lim...

If a teacher was telling you they’re exhausted from work would you smugly point out that ditch diggers have it harder? Physical labor and non-physical labor can both be demanding work, it’s not a competition and you’re not doing the physical laborer a favor by denigrating other people’s work.

Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to only have jobs with high pay, low stress, and good work life balance, but I’m sure you’ve seen enough tech burnout stories to know that tech jobs are not always easy. The factory worker and the engineer have vastly more in common with each other than they do with Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Neumann.

Note that according to the story, the fake email address was provided by the CEO, which was then used to arrange a call between Goldman and the COO/cofounder, pretending to be a YouTube exec.

At first glance, that seems to implicate both the CEO and the COO/cofounder in the fraud. Even if you buy the story that the COO was experiencing a mental break, I wonder what the CEO's excuse was? Must be pretty good, since his board apparently was fine with it...somehow.

(One rather suspects the FBI and the SEC will be less impressed.)

Of course the CEO is in on it. He probably set it up in the first place. How did he not recognize his own COO on the call?! Even with the voice "digitally altered" (?) it should be trivial to recognize someone you work with every single day. And if the CEO had been in contact with the YouTube person before he also, at least, should have understood that this was not him.

If you search for the CEO's name on Google Images, you get a wall of photos with the exact same broad, fake smile. What a character. It's amazing what some people can get away with.

Both the CEO and CFO had to have been involved. This is simply criminal fraud and hopefully both individuals are prosecuted for it.

My guess is the board is made up of investors who don't want to see their money disappear when the leadership gets criminal convictions. That is why they brushed it under the rug.

Ozy, their investors/backers and surprisingly Goldman themselves all seemed to have gotten over the incident a little too casually. Google was the one who raised up a storm and got the FBI involved, despite not even really being part of the whole situation.

Not part? Wasn't it one of their execs who was impersonated?

And the hypocrisy of companies to make employees read & sign "code-of-conduct and ethics" and shitty training sessions on integrity and values.

If execs and top leadership simply walked the talk it will do far greater good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com