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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Integrity matters. Even if he hadn't gotten a big offer later on, he could still walk away with that.

Yes, you can argue that he could have just kept his mouth shut and still honestly taken the Yahoo deal, but he said what he thought was right and gave Yahoo some good judgement about pg's team.

I recently interviewed with a number of firms, and the ones that give off the best impression are the ones who ask to integrity at some point in the process. Hopefully this won't turn into the next "what's your greatest weakness" of interview questions. But firms doing the same thing in the same industry can often have a very different feel to them, and this is one of those things that might change your impression.

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Sometimes this type of integrity is just being too honest as he said. Is like telling your customer there is a better restaurant down the road with cheaper prices, go there.

How do you have integrity when you throw your own engineers under the bus?

Integrity is about telling the truth (as you see it), not about doing stuff for the benefit of "your own".

In fact the latter can lead to exactly the opposite of integrity.

I wonder how many times there were pep-talks with the LinkExchange engineering team about how everyone was great.

Idk, maybe the twitter OP told their engineering team they were worse than Viaweb every day via automated, department-wide emails.

Integrity involves placing our duties to others in the proper order.

Sometimes that means doing stuff to benefit "your own." sometimes that means blowing the whistle on something. It really depends on the context.

Not exactly. Having integrity means being whole, united, and indivisible. That certainly can involve telling the truth, but it's much broader than that. Someone who leads a double life, even if they don't make any commitments about their private behavior and even if they don't lie about it, lacks integrity.

Integrity means the opposite of being two-faced.

In this case, OP's behavior lacked integrity, even though it was likely honest. Although he was at the Yang meeting as a representative of LinkExchange, he advocated in favor of Viaweb. The forcefulness with which he argued ("your guys are wrong") definitely crossed the line into advocacy, not just an off-hand honest opinion. This set up a conflict within himself (his feelings toward Viaweb vs. his own interests and duties to his partners) as well as a conflict within the LinkExchange team.

https://insighttimer.com/consciousleadershipgroup/guided-med...

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/character-strengths-and-lif...

"the standards of integrity involves regarding internal consistency as a virtue, and suggests that parties holding within themselves apparently conflicting values should account for the discrepancy or alter their beliefs."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity

>Not exactly. Having integrity means being whole, united, and indivisible.

Not just any kind of whole. Somebody "whole, united, and indivisible" devoted to his own interests for example, doesn't have integrity (even if he's open about it and e.g. is equally and wholy bad to everybody).

Let's stick to the dictionary: "1. the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles."

The "whole, united, etc" thing is "integrity" in objects (e.g. as in "structural integrity". Not integrity as the moral quality in people.

>Consciously or unconsciously, he was trying to serve three masters: his current company, Yahoo!, and PG's company. That kind of conflict of interest is inconsistent with integrity.

It's the opposite. That kind of conflict of interest is what you want to test someone's integrity.

Someone more strategic or someone which places tactic over integrity would have stayed silent (and neither lose nor verify their integrity). Someone without integrity would have lied against PG's company to promote their own.

Someone devoted to his own interests lacks charity, but not integrity. And yes, being whole and undivided is also in reference to the moral quality, not just structural integrity.

>Someone devoted to his own interests lacks charity, but not integrity.

Well, I wasn't talking about some hermit fully devoted to his own self without impact on others.

I was talking about someone pursing his own interests ahead of everything else - who would e.g. lie if it benefits him, steel, backstab, and so on.

This man might be an "whole and undivided" jerk, but he lacks integrity - that is, an actual good moral character.

So, "whole and undivided" is not what people mean when they say "this person has integrity". They mean that he is a "man of his word", has honor, is not two-faced, and so on.

I am not going to argue with you. There is a lengthy discussion of the breadth of the word in the Wikipedia article. It does not mean what you think it means. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity

There's a saying: you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. I can provide you the resources to show you the meaning of the word, but I'm not going to waste my time in any further back-and-forth. Have a good day.

That's honesty, not integrity.

You'd be surprised.

Dictionary to the rescue: "Integrity: 1. the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles."

Your response is (intentionally?) incomplete. Talking about integrity...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/integrity

Definition of integrity

1 : firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : INCORRUPTIBILITY

2 : an unimpaired condition : SOUNDNESS

3 : the quality or state of being complete or undivided : COMPLETENESS

My response is about integrity as it pertains to the discussion - as a property of a person.

Note that (2) and (3) are not about people.

We don't say that someone who is not impaired (in "an unimpaired condition") has "integrity". We call them able and other things.

We don't say that someone who is "complete or undivided" has integrity either (we use the term "complete" for humans, but there it means something like satisfied or fulfilled).

(2) and (3) are not about integrity as in "X has integrity". It's about integrity as a property of things, in usages like "structural integrity", "mechanical Integrity" (the same sense used when we talk about "integrals" and so on).

And you made it sound like I did something nefarious. Talking about integrity (1).

> Note that (2) and (3) are not about people.

False. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity

> (2) and (3) are not about integrity as in "X has integrity"

False. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity

> And you made it sound like I did something nefarious.

You did. In a discussion about whether a word's meaning was narrow or broad, you argued it was narrow by citing its definition -- but left out every part of its definition that didn't align with your argument.

Yeah, exactly, honestly is just a part of it. He failed hard on the other part by saying his own team was worse then some other team. Integrity is standing up for the people you lead, it falls under the moral principles part.

If you always standup for the team you lead, then where is the moral principles and honesty? My (fill in the blanks) is always right means you have no integrity.

Integrity is having a set of moral principles and evaluating against them honestly. You will see your beauty, warts and all.

I think you could consider looking out of the people under you as mouths to feed as moral.

It's impossible to calculate the moral implications of the entire world for every decision you make, but taking care of your own is a pretty easy start.

>I think you could consider looking out of the people under you as mouths to feed as moral.

That's a quality a mafia boss might also have (taking care of its own team/employees/famiglia). Doesn't mean they have integrity (heck, it's not even moral - not every quality that results to the good of some people is moral).

I guess that depends on what you consider morals? Local or Universal.

Telling the truth isn't throwing anyone under the bus. If "they" are better than "us", that's the truth. Personally, I'd have bought the guy's company just because that's the right sort of engineer I want. Having said that, he wasn't under any obligation to tell Jerry anything.

He compared engineers he's worked with to engineers he hasn't worked with (Viaweb) and said they were better. How did he know they were better? Is he just better at assessing engineering talent than the rest of us?

You're assuming he knew they were better. Based on all of us (esp. here) not trusting technical interviews to determine engineer quality, I suspect he did not know they were better and was simply trying an off-the-cuff comparison to get Yahoo to acquire both of the companies.

What he really gave was an opinion. It wasn't truth.

Dude he didn’t literally mean they were better. He gave a sincere compliment to Viaweb (an exaggerated one) as a compelling counterpoint to shift the other’s view.

I dunno, the Yahoo guy seemed a little sociopathic for doing this. Reminds me of when Paul McCartney told Michael Jackson he wanted to buy The Beetles catalog, only to have MJ go ahead and buy it instead. Douchey to say the least.

>I once killed a $125M deal by being “too honest”

>“They are hands down better than us."

Uh, I'm pretty sure he meant what he said, with the second being a solid assertion. He didn't dance around it, he literally meant they were better.

Makes you wonder if behind the scenes, someone at Microsoft checked with someone at Yahoo and heard the story, and then Microsoft did the deal.

If that were true, they wouldn't have paid more than Yahoo offered.

I read it as they sold later (amount of time unspecified), so presumably they continued to grow before the Microsoft offer.

> Integrity matters

Citation needed :-)

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