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Comment by qikInNdOutReply | Hacker News Reader

The problem with such betrayal is, that companies names are all but smoke and mirrors by now. The reputational damage should be tracking with the leading employees. One customer betrayal travels along with the manager who caused it, to whatever company s/he touches. No matter how the company is named, no matter how much branding, one linked in api roll call later you know what you got.

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This is a great idea! A while back I had an idea to maybe scrape Linkedin(or download one of their numerous dumps) to help "track" executive movement from company to company and set alerts if I use products from the new company so I can have a heads up before they inevitably turn to shit. Alternatively, I was also looking to expand this to when companies get bought out by those vulture capital "management" firms as they will start to squeeze costs. The Hackers of the 90s dreamed about software being an equalizing force between the powerful and the powerless...well this is one area that can definitely help(at least in the short term).

Your idea sounds like something that independent journalism can pick up or some non profit organization that exposes these kinds of things. Of course I'm sure someone will go after them sooner or later.

Can’t wait for the social credit score determining people’s career prospects!

People must be held accountable for their actions; if it cannot be through self-governance, their reputation must meet needs.

Take them to court. File a grievance. But opening individuals to ruin by internet trolls for lulz, or worse making everyone’s life dictated by collaborative filtering - there’s no good to come of it. Human lives aren’t like product reviews. Scarlet lettering people isn’t a good idea - maybe it works for some, but there will be a lot of innocent people destroyed along the way. Or, people who made unethical decisions at some point in their life and realized their mistake and have reformed. A society of perpetual punishment isn’t a humane society, especially without any review or recourse just anonymous voting.

There's often a big gap between things that constitute a crime, tort, or breach of contract and things that would make me disinclined to do business with a person. I'd like to know if the founder of a startup has a bait-and-switch habit before I decide to rely on their product, for example.

The court system has decided that individuals aren’t liable for their actions taken on behalf of a company, but the company is. But a company is merely a temporary arrangement of people! It can be dissolved and reformed any number of times with any number of names with only marginal annoyance. The corporation is the end of responsibility.

Who arbitrates the fairness of such a system? Does anyone get a chance at redemption? One of the reasons for the corporate veil is to lives aren’t destroyed except for the most egregious behavior. For sensitive professions they’re licensed with review processes that aren’t as steep to get at the principals. But I would rather the world allow assholes to be sure we don’t plow under the innocent or close the door to reform in a human life.

What exactly does "being held accountable" mean? I hear this a lot and this statement seems empty

In this instance, it appears to mean making it possible to purchasers to be aware of past business decisions made by people in positions of authority at companies that they are considering doing business with so that they can make an informed decision.

Making unethical business decisions that negatively impact customers is a bit different from jaywalking.

We have courts of law that determine fact, and if the behavior isn’t criminal, we have civil courts as well. For professionals we have ethics boards and censuring processes. But do we really want to set up a system where people vote people out of their careers with no review or process? How do you prevent this from being abused? Or worse expanding beyond the original remit to more facets of life? There’s a reason we have reasoned institutions handle these sorts of things rather than the lynch mob. How long until internet trolls use these tools to take down people that go against their politics, or ruin random people for lulz?

Well, the system could be entirely individualized. Not like an ad blocker where you download a list of neer-do-well urls curated by unknown people.

I didn't have such a draconian interpretation of the idea. I don't know where you got "lynch mob", "ruin[ing] random people" and "social credit score" from it to be honest. Quite a dramatic take.

Individuals and companies knowing more information about the professional history of the people they're doing business with is always better.

I know you didn’t. But any such idea should be constructed game theoretically with 4chan on the other side. “Blind for humans” would destroy lives. And it doesn’t give people a chance at redemption in their career. I’ve had low points in my career I wouldn’t want to follow me any more than they do already. When you’ve done something for 40+ years you’ll have run the entire gamut of human experience, good, bad, and ugly. In these sorts of things only the ugly gets memorialized.

I assumed we were talking exclusively about executives, not rank-and-file. I also assumed we were talking about poor business decisions rather than personal ones.

I get your point though - I'm just more inclined to believe this would be used for good, rather than evil. I also agree that people should have a chance at redemption.

I think you might be over-stating the effect this would have. Most people won't care. And if Elon Musk is any indication, having a bad reputation only hurts so much if the offering is compelling (eg. Space-X, Tesla). Both of those are huge successes despite Elon having a questionable reputation personally and professionally.

Note - I'm making no judgement here - I'm just talking about the consensus opinion on Elon as I see it.

The direction that it's coming from matters

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

Oh no, accountability!

Some companies already do a credit check on you during hiring, even if you're not handling money. It's already here and three private companies get all the say. It also disproportionately affects low earners, who are also more likely to have bad credit due to the nature of the cycle of poverty.

This, forcing exposure of personal skin in the corporate game, would fix an untold number of issues.

This would be fine in a world that where it’s generally considered OK to fail. Unfortunately, this is not the world we live in, given the wide publicity reach that would be required for your idea to be effective.

(Similarly, in a much better world a politician who had changed their mind or did not have an informed opinion would need to say that out loud; but when I teach—smart, motivated young adults!—I have to make them unlearn so much fear of being wrong and shame of not understanding things that I can’t see admitting ignorance working out in real-world politics.)

In narrower circles, this could probably work. Amazon is already forced to pay newly-hired programmers above market rate, I hear,—would a former Amazon executive need to?

What's that, you say? Individuals choosing whether to behave ethically because a shoddy reputation can have horrible impacts on their future career? I can't even imagine a world like that! *faints*

1. The fiction of corporate personhood with an inability to pierce that corporate veil. There should be a public record of everyone associated with a particular venture plainly visible to all.

2. Most startups fail, they tend to abandon their customers with little or no warning, and then write a boastful blog post like it's okay and normal to throw away what could've been a business to someone else if they tried to find a home for it. To me, that's disrespectful of both investors' and customers' time and money.

3. Most "brands" on Amazon tend to be meaningless nonsense because a reseller overseas decided to satisfy the need to call it something and just pick whatever because they don't intend to stick around. As soon as people find out they're selling junk or they have a problem, they throw it away and pull another brand from the disposable brand box.

We once used a large SaaS company with very bad service and very bad customer support. They changed their name and we joked they only did it so people googling them would not find the old stuff.

It's not without precedent. Comcast's response to being the most hated brand in the US for multiple years running was to keep everything exactly the same but rebrand their consumer division as Xfinity.

In big enough companies is already hard to know who owns what even when you are working there, I cant image how to track this from outside.

You're not trying to trace ownership, you want to track the people who make the stupid/unethical decisions.

Sounds like cancel culture on steroids.

"burn them at the stake" vibes

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