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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Nishad Singh wasn't some low-level coder. He was FTX's Director of Engineering.

> "Hey, due to the way our accounting works I need you to subtract X from our dashboard."

That is not what happened here. The fact alone that very few people knew about Alameda's special treatment, and, importantly, deliberately conspired to keep that treatment secret is a pretty strong indicator that he knew it was wrong.

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Director of engineering != product manager in charge of deciding what features to include. If somebody tells engineering, “we will not use this feature illegally,” then it’s the fault of the higher ups who are possibly (?) trying to scapegoat somebody to protect themselves

"I was just following orders" went out of style in 1946. Software engineers are not mindless drones.

Directors have specific, well defined legal duties to their company which includes a duty of fiduciary responsibility. That is why they're directors rather than "head of product" or "VP of marketing" or whatever other meaningless title people bestow on themselves. Saying "my boss told me to do it so it is not my fault" is nonsense because you have no boss beyond your shareholders.

Isn't VP usually a higher title than director?

(Well, it's not in finance, but it could be in tech-like crypto finance.)

That's Director as in Board of Directors. In this case, "Director of Engineering" probably just means "Manager of managers of engineers".

Holding the title "director of X" doesn't mean you're necessarily on the board of directors.

in fact, the two are probably anti-correlated

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