You're agreeing with him. He is making the judgement that actions such as his is a problem, and then he makes the point that there is no feedback to prevent such actions.
Aren't you only admitting it to people who can't DO anything about you, except express outrage? Why don't you tell your boss your scheme, and see if they only thing they do is "express outrage"? Your behavior is very anti-social, and your rationalizations for why it's OK are very weak.
By not having terminated me (and I survived two layoffs across the three companies, so they had a chance to do just that very easily), they do not have an issue with my current output.
Your problem is your lack of experience is also giving you a lack of empathy.
Also, what university was this? It doesn't sound like mine.
I am getting friends into tech firms with six figure salaries with nearly entirely manufactured resumes.
I admit that there is risk, but the payoff is also tremendous and there seem to be next to no barriers to well constructed fakery.
Please don't take that offensively. I'm not throwing the word around. I don't mean "evil". I don't think it's "evil", I'm even jealous. Not just of money. Of the rationality.
The rest of us don't do this stuff because we'd feel horribly bad for doing it, to the point benefits would outweigh the costs.
I'd hazard a guess that most people would also say it was fine given a sufficient trolley problem set up "is it okay to take 3 jobs and not do the work I can't be held accountable towards given...I have a trust fund...versus...my kids wont have food"
You don't even need a good reason--just go out and do what you want, and nobody is going to stop you. It's like society hardly even functions anymore.
I don't think it did. We forget that a few as 60 years ago, a person could rape a woman and she might be pressured to marry him to save face. Unless the accused rapist were black and then you would go find a tree to hang him and a couple friends from, whether or not he was guilty.
Scams are not new. Get rich schemes like crypto have been around forever. Same with scam medical treatments, fraudulent investments, abuses of power, skimming inventory, etc. Yes, we are worse on shoplifting now than we previously were, but the rest all happened before, at scale.
People have very rosy views of the past and their fellow humans. It is all a lie. It has long been the human way to ignore wrongdoing as it is too much work to fight over or pretend it does not exist.
Because it doesn't. We aren't meant to live like we live. We're hyper-individualized, alienated, and atomized by our relations to the means of production. We're all mercenary wage slaves just trying to get enough scratch to escape the rat race for a few years before we kick the bucket. Nearly all of those that don't really have this concern (aka the already-set-for-life crowd) seem to be preternaturally greedy and devoid of empathy.
The deterioration of society under these conditions isn't exactly surprising.
Hoping to retire to either Europe or the middle of fucking nowhere within a decade.
You get to see your dying father for just one week as that is all the vacation time you have left and you cannot just walk away from your job due to house/kids/etc. Happened to a friend. Father had 6 months to live. He got 1 week with him in that time. Pile of cash lets you walk away. How horrible will that make you feel to not get to spend that time with him?
My employer, who I will end up leaving in a year anyway (if they do not lay me off as every company I have been with has had layoffs) as the best way to get a raise is to leave, is way, way, way, way down on the list of people it hurts to disappoint.
I would do the same as you if oprimozimg for income. But I tend to optimize for free time rather than income. So I take 4-5 months of PTO a year at one "full time" job which takes ~15 hours/week. (TC > $400k)
I have generous vacation at all jobs and at a prior job, I just quit to go on vacation after lining up another job to start in a few weeks, so booking the same time off everywhere is easy.
I am an unimportant rank and file developer.
To my point, people don't do this even though everyone knows it, and its obvious, because....:(
But you were the one who introduced the word "rationality". It implies ethical behavior is somehow irrational. I don't believe it is.
To ease your mind, let's keep the quotes and say I'm from Mars and don't share your definition of rationality, I'm using it wrong, but you want to avoid coming to a shared definition in order to have conversation without derailing:
it would be highly "irrational" to adopt this viewpoint given no code would ever be delivered if everyone adopted it. "Unstable equilibrium", in "game theory" sense. Everyone "can't" do it, but everyone "should" do it
(note airquotes again, don't want to come across as being a jerk and writing a book in response in order to be technically correct, could look patronizing since I think you understand the point)
~80% of people will push the limits until they see people are punished for breaking the rules.
~10% of people (often a little on the ASD spectrum) will follow the rules even if they don't really matter.
If your wallet is stolen from your locked home, it's the thief's fault. But if you leave your wallet in a crowded nightclub for an hour and it goes missing, maybe it's also your fault.
In most big companies, unless you actually do something wrong or there is a hardcore metric they are monitoring you by, then it's very easy to do a fairly poor job and slip underneath the radar, because there are only a few things people see you doing, everyone else is too busy trying to deal with there own life and not get fired themselves.
The complete lack of consequence at the top of society can only lead to us at the bottom ignoring the rules too and frankly? There’s waaaaay more serfs with pitchforks than castles to storm.
However, you care as a manager. What I am doing works best with managers who do not care.
As my grandmother used to say, "If you have to hide it, it's probably wrong."
"Anne Frank? Why yes, she's right upstairs..."
So I think it’s pretty common.
I assume you're not religious, then? The prevailing view seems to be that the punishment for an amoral life will come when it's too late for apologies or take-backs.
If you really work in adtech, then keep up the good work (that’s a sentence I never thought I would type) :)
EDIT:(Yeah, I know it would be an obvious thing to throw out to try to turn the tide of the comments on HN :P)
Namely individuals have to call out bad behavior to the point it’s regulated. Not so much in this case by the market but by government regulation to hold two sided marketplaces accountable for almost literal fraud by one party.
In this case it’s easier as more a legal question as opposed to a skill question.
I would penalize Upwork for the wage differential times three. Notice Upwork would be responsible, not the other side.
It should also be easy for the ”wronged” side of this transaction to pursue such a claim.
The non-irony here is the tremendous amount of effort, ie periodic screenshots, logs etc. that make sure Upwork gets paid.
This is me. Can you please help? srpen6@gmail.com
Um ... surely when he showed up to work and he wasn't YOU ... there were some questions?