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Comment by jmbwell | Hacker News Reader

Years ago, I worked at a place that attempted this. They were so giddy about it. There wasn’t even a known leak, or, arguably, anything particularly worth leaking. They were just tickled by the idea that they could gotcha anyone who tried to leak something.

Then, as now, it strikes me as little more than sad and paranoid Tom Clancy cosplay.

I’d like to say I’ve moved on to a place with a culture of trust and faithfulness, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore, and recent general infatuation with petty lords of chaos doesn’t seem to be helping.

So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage.

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Stick the email into Google Translate, translate to Spanish and back, correcting any major mis-translations and Juan is your uncle .

Or put your own space noise in the message to frame a coworker.

Chaotic Evil at its finest.

Wouldn't you have to have access to your coworker's email in-box to do that?

Just an email they sent.

No, you might get lucky and your space noise "maps" to some other coworker without having seen their copy.

_WHICH_ coworker is unknown.

Don't have to...thier lame circumstantial evidence will do it for me. Boil your emails before leaking...got it.

>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore

No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends.

My company is hardly some "golden child", but it generally does right by its staff, and the staff, more or less, does right by the company. Things aren't perfect, but I would say the amount of inter-office trust is about as close as anyone would reasonably expect. Problems pop up, but with a healthy amount of addressing things head on, those problems don't rot and fester.

Need someone to be honest with you about the deadline of an upcoming project? Done.

Need to get a hold of someone off-hours on a three day weekend? Alright, as long as it's something important and time sensitive.

Need realistic feedback about a presentation you're working on. Sure.

It all revolves around mutual respect, camaraderie, and clearly defined roles. When I see an upcoming issue with an area I have nothing to do with, I don't feel the need to fix it "because no one else will", but, I also don't leave it to blow up in someone else's face either. I let the right people know, or tell my boss if I'm not sure who should be involved.

If I had to take a guess, maybe you work for one of those larger corporate type companies with lots of middle managers, office politics, etc.? I'd encourage you to look at getting away from that if it's weighing heavily on your ability to trust others. It's something that I dealt with for a length of time, and once I moved onto a smaller shop, the ability to trust and genuinely rely on others improved quite a bit.

Fair comments. I’m not at a huge org, but I am in an industry not known for its optimism. I myself am not particularly optimistic lately. Maybe I should be!

Dang, sorry to hear that. I do hope things improve for you! :)

I started out work in a shop with a terrible, toxic work environment. Micromanaging, power-hungry, abusive management begat gossiping, uncaring, deceptive, and selfish labor... you learned to just keep your head down and let the shit slide off your shoulders like water off a duck's back. Keep your wits about you when something went behind schedule, though, because the blame game was about to get serious. I took to taking long walks on my lunch break - 28 minutes out, plan for 28 minutes back for some breathing room, because you were entitled to a 1-hour lunch break and would get shouted at for punching in and out with a 61-minute lunch hour - just to clear my head.

Now I'm at a shop that's miles better than the first. Management probably cares too much, treating labor better than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn't result in blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers' favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore them when the machine is out of warranty.

The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly built up over decades could be quite effectively and profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the board or management. They could probably turn the screws and push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover and customers realized that our culture had changed.

Yep, unfortunately it’s incredibly hard to put value on those intangibles.

And what’s worse, being a hard nosed asshole is expected behaviour from executives, even if it’s uncalled for or actively harmful to the company.

I knew a guy fresh out of MBA school who proudly told everyone I worked with that if they didn’t like what he asked them to do, he’d sack them. Despite the fact that these people had specific training, were good at what they did, and understood how best to do their jobs.

His attitude really made me think about the value of individuals in a company - and showed me exactly how not to do things in the future.

I worked for most of my career, at an "old-fashioned" Japanese corporation, and the level of Personal Integrity in the company was phenomenal. It was not "touchy-feely" nice, but people were honest (when they were yelling at you), and weren't playing games. Everyone was focused on creating great stuff.

I just took it for granted, but that environment was a bit of a "silo." When I left that company, and started to interact with today's tech culture, it was ... quite a letdown.

It seems that most executives are fairly sketchy people, these days, and they set a culture that is mimicked by the folks that work for them.

I guess that it's always been like that, but it seems a lot worse, these days.

Oh, sure. Me too. And then someone I trusted utterly fucked me over. Like six figure fucked me over.

So consider that your trust, your opinion, is based on the past, and you have no actual idea what will happen in the future, or tomorrow even.

Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not actually merged with robots yet, and we still have human needs.

If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand, you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking and just give people what they need to produce great work.

You get slightly slower growth, but more area under the curve in the long run.

Maybe he realizes that, and is just a jackass.

Where are the nice bosses of top tech companies? Maybe that's how you build a big tech company.

I think there is a middle area between being a "nice boss" and being a boss who calls out internal engineering implementation concerns (rightly or not) on Twitter. And then fire people who disagree in a response.

Well, Gates is an asshole, Jobs was an asshole - where's the middleground? Maybe niceness leads to [business] mediocrity.

Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery doesn't mean that slavery is okay, or that there is not a better way to build a pyramid.

The pyramids were not built with slavery

how were they built?

By teams of people stacking enormous stones on top of one another. Fun fact, there's inscriptions by the teams.

"... labourers were recruited from farms, perhaps from a region much further down the Nile, near Luxor.

The labourers would have been enticed by the mix of high-quality food and the opportunity to work on such a prestigious project."

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/were-the-egyptian-pyram...

Aliens.

Don't be absurd, we are not talking about anything comparable to slavery.

I am asking - show me the person who found the better way.

> Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery

They weren't build by aliens with alien technology? ;-)

SCNR because we are talking about Elon Musk with his space obsession.

Hewlett and Packard were relatively low on the asshole scale, at least for their employees. [1]

Early support for company health insurance, flextime, work-from-home, free coffee breaks, decentralized decision making, etc.

See the HP Memory Project at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org for some of the stories. ("Jim Catlin's Packard Story" and Packard's 11 rules, "Bill Hewlett and the HP Medical Plan" for their anonymous payment for medical bills for an employee's premature baby, etc.)

The padlock story at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/john_minck/inside_h... is also pretty well-known, and used as an example of promoting institutional trust.

Packard's support for apartheid profits keeps him definitely on the scale.

[1] Probably better if you were a white male not as subject to the "mixture of machismo and misogyny" of early HP - https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/barbara_waugh/barba... .

I don’t think it’s nice or not thing but more a management strategy thing. Hard-driving can be great at extracting value from an organization but it isn’t as effective at exploring potential as other management styles.

Were Larry and Sergey not considered nice?

To produce great work you also need some pressure. Otherwise people will get real lazy very quickly.

Counterpoint: open source software, of which there are many great works without anyone being forced or pressured into making it. There are many more ways of getting motivation than applying "some pressure". Indeed, people are inherently curious and motivated, but it can easily be suppressed by environmental factors. In particular "stick and carrot"-type reward systems.

For a (much more) elaborate expansion on this, see the book Drive by Daniel H. Pink.

The vast majority of open source done in peoples free time is unfinished and at best of limited use. The serious projects very often have payed developers. The good ones done by unpaid developers have some pressure in terms of expectations by their community or the developers put pressure on themselves to achieve some self goal.

OSS projects are also prone to leadership issues and tend to have "good ol boys" clubs. It's utlimately human nature, OSS or not. See Linus Torvals or some of the things that went on in Rust community. Also, StackOverflow mods that volunteer their free time have so many issues. Wikipedia editors and Reddit moderators. Same.

Putting a OSS lipstick isn't doing any favors to understanding the human nature and how to create a good governance model to keep people happy. I suspect this is never going to be "solved", only solved in one person's views or ideological bias.

You are quite right that open source done purely in free time usually takes much longer to be "finished" but that is more a question of the time available to spend on it than absence of pressure.

OSS projects that have paid developers often manage to avoid much of the pressure that occurs in closed source.

Some OSS projects like the kernel manage to harness companies as way of funding full time developers without giving them too much say in details or deadlines. A feature ships in Linux when it is ready and accepted by the maintainers and Linus not when some manager says it has to ship.

Of course this works far better for large projects that are essentially a "commons" like the kernel, less so for open source projects where most of the developers work for a single company.

We barely recently got decent open source computers (but not smartphones), now try to imagine a GPL car...

That said it wouldn't it be cool have some sort of open source VW Bug. Stainless steel cyberbug, EV for the people. Low tech, curb lasts whole century, ubiquitous parts.

> That said it wouldn't it be cool have some sort of open source VW Bug. Stainless steel cyberbug, EV for the people. Low tech, curb lasts whole century, ubiquitous parts.

AWS would just fork it, package it as a SaaS, give nothing back to the project and it would then slowly atrophy and cease to exist.

All this musk-style motivation 101 BS is direct from the CIA's manual on domestic espionage - frustration from within.

The means define the ends. If you treat people like shit, or as morons who need BS pressure techniques, you'll get a demoralised company.

Treat people well, set them clear targets and say it without fluff when they're slacking. If you can't tell somebody they're not good enough, you cannot help them to be good enough. None of this psychobabble BS where you're constantly second-guessing in a failed attempt to retain them on the rat-race for the rest of their life. Stop building ratrace companies.

> Stop building ratrace companies

They build rat-races because they are all still rats at heart. Endemic crisis of leadership and vision bred men who cannot think outside the maze. No amount of climbing extended their horizons or released them from slavery to money and the misery it brings.

> released them from slavery to money and the misery it brings

Good point. I often wonder what motivates a billionaire to keep making more money. For most it seems like ego, greed, and inability to rethink their life. I suppose they climbed so high by being relentless and not stopping. This is what makes the example of Yvon Chouinard so interesting.

You are putting words in my mouth. Pressure can be as simple as a deadline.

Exactly, which is why I am advocating precisely for giving people what they need. Some people need pressure to perform optimally, others don't. Some people need to put in 80 hours of work per week, others don't. It is simple and humane to approach it this way.

I think motivation is more important. Solving problems should be fun and engaging activity. There are always bad apples literally in every single company no matter how good or faithful their culture. So, there is no way around it.

To give Elon credit, he does try to motivate people. Sleeping on the factory floor, doing more work than his subordinates, inspiring people about grand goals and "anti-bureacratic" philosophy – all contribute to motivation. He sent out an email to Tesla employees that literally said "If a rule becomes a Dilbert joke, then change the rule".

I am trying to steelman Elon's way of governing and personally know several people at SpaceX that are not dying from overwork, but actually happy. I also have a few friends who couldn't stand SpaceX and quit within the first year.

I suspect the world's wealthiest man knows how to grow a business better than either of us.

And farm government subsidies better than the rest of us

At that scale, isn't that a required part of it?

(Thinking of how much the Artemis cost vs. total SpaceX subsidy here, but subsidies are everywhere and look suspiciously like legalised corruption and/or voter manipulation to me even when I like the thing being subsidised).

>For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work"

And Musk is the perfect example of "do as I say, not as I do", as he sends teams into a death march of insane hours, wherever he is, while he's shitposting on Twitter from his multi million dollar house paid for by company funds and pretending he's doing 120 hour work weeks

> So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage.

Espionage isn't a fantasy, it's very much real. People go to jail for it all the time. The only question is to what degree might a company be affected or targeted. Taking steps to add a reasonable layer of security to attempt to protect costly IP isn't being paranoid at all. Not to mention that in some environments there are legal requirements, a prime example being aerospace.

We have had the experience of having an employee provide confidential technical information to a multi-billion dollar international competitor. The same competitor that, for as long as a year, bribed top resellers not to feature our products at industry trade shows. Business can be absolutely brutal and, yes, it can be war.

Your particular example wouldn't be deterred from the tactics that Elon says that he used, though. If it's not leaked to the public it wouldn't be seen by those that encoded an identifier into it.

But it would be discoverable and traceable in the case of legal proceedings.

If they kept the original correspondence then it would anyway. Plus this wouldn't be legally binding in a court room when Elon runs in and is like "I think the spaces match the one that I sent to this employee." That is not enough evidence to say that the employee did it when it is trivial for the ploy to be subverted by another employee just inserting a space in a random place.

defense in layers. no single mechanism wins the trophy.

Shaming tactics are orthogonal to defense, especially when the only way this succeeds is when nobody thinks the CEO is paranoid enough to try it. If anyone is leaking private memos from an Elon company now, it is trivial to disrupt this by reformatting the document and rephrasing sentences.

Curious if anyone realized this early & either:

* tried to sabotage other employees at random by modifying their letter & leaking it

* tried to sabotage a specific employee by getting their unique copy & leaking it

The risk/reward for a company here seems very poor. I would imagine this blows up in the face of the company often.

If you can get a copy from another employee then they are in trouble for not securing private communications.

> They were so giddy about it.

This makes no sense. Why would they tell everyone what their measures were?

Well, they didn't tell everyone. I was simply, as they say, familiar with the plan.

Yet I can't really fault a company for trying to hold people accountable for breaking their terms of employment.

I can. It's a waste of time and easily defeated if anyone realizes. Once secret is known, its easy to frame innocent coworkers by twiddling spaces.

Employees should be responsible and have a duty to their employer. But it's important to decide if enforcement is appropriate and helpful. It hurts employee morale to be distrusted like this.

If the secrets being guarded are life or death for the company, then some extra measures may be appropriate. But if they're normal corporate "secrets" the harms of enforcement will be worse than a leak.

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