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Comment by Ligma123 | Hacker News Reader

Only europeans people with no contact with non-europeans believe the rest of the world works the same way as we do.

If you want to do anything in those regions, bribes should be part of your budget, all the way down.

Even the workers that need to travel to those places should have a budget for those bribes, as in some places even the police will try to get you in trouble if you don't give them money, or in some African countries, even food is accepted.

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>europeans people with no contact with non-europeans

I think you mean 5-10 countries in Western, Northern Europe right? Most of Europe is rife with corruption on every level and always has been.

How do you explain that the author apparently had no trouble closing large contracts without bribing?

Seems there was lots of bribery going on all the time, he just didn't know about it, didn't take part in it himself:

> many employees younger than me, in lower positions, were driving luxury cars and purchasing homes

and it took until this event, for him to start connecting the dots:

> the partner in the deal [...] had been terminated four months earlier for poor performance on the sales team, and corporate policy prohibits former employees from working as partners

I didn’t get the impression that there was any bribery going on in the deals he closed himself. Even if he only became aware of that after the fact, he’d have mentioned that more explicitly. Instead, he argues that he was fired despite very good performance, and it would be hypocritical if that performance was only made possible by bribes. So I don’t think this adds up.

I knew a guy who had some business to do with a Government office in an African country. Specifically he was trying to get GIS data for a certain region. He met with the local branch of the concerned department and got nowhere for a while with the excuse that all their systems were old and slow and he didn't have the right signatures anyway. He looked around the office, agreed the computers were all super old, offered to replace them all, and after that suddenly the remaining signatures were not important anymore. He supplied about ten PCs and he got the data he was looking for.

In the case of Microsoft, Europe is not that different:

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

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hungary-subsidiary-microsoft-...

Even if your point is granted it does not account for Microsoft employees stealing from Microsoft.

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