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Comment by ListeningPie | Hacker News Reader

The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy is not something I’ve read about, but it must take a toll. A whistleblower, almost by definition, is a hero to strangers and a villain to those they know and work with.

Or he was simply executed like in many corporate espionage movies.

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The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy

This is a problem. Would you really see a whistleblower as your enemy? Is your identity so intertwined with your job that you take legal action against your employers so personally? Do you think your employer has that much loyalty to you? Boeing just had layoffs in December. I'm sure the issues this guy was uncovering played a part in that. We should all hold our bosses accountable. If they mess up, it's going to be bad for us.

>We should all hold our bosses accountable

And how are we supposed to do that? The entire point of a corporation's structure is that power flows exclusively down.

Luckily corporations are not the only structures in society. Courts, unions, citizens rights and democratically elected parliaments exist to counterbalance the incentives of the rich.

But not to give you health insurance.

Employer health insurance got its start in WW2 when Roosevelt instituted wage freezes. Shipping companies could not raise wages to attract more workers, so they raised wages indirectly by offering health insurance.

... except the rich can hire enough lawyers to use the courts as a weapon, and in the US, campaign contributions or other rewards for compliant politicians can mean that legislatures are often on the side of corporate interests.

This is ahistorical. These are institutions that largely exist to settle disputes between the rich and to punish the poor, and came into existence to balance the interests of debtor royals with those of the rich commoners who held that debt.

Corporations were a way to formalize public-private partnerships in which the sovereign would be able to shed the risks of beneficial ventures in its interest, by in exchange shielding private groups taking on those ventures from the normal legal consequences of their actions.

Unionize.

LOL, you venture capitalists sure modded that into the ground. You all will be the first ones to be pinned against the wall when the revolution comes.

I can't imagine that he would go through all this, and then decide it's not worth it anymore at the very end of his testimony.

People under extreme mental stress tend not to act rationally.

Yeah, some things you can only imagine, if you experience them.

Still, people murdered for way less.

Yet, in this case, aurareturn's comment seems way more plausible than yours.

> The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy is not something I’ve read about, but it must take a toll. A whistleblower, almost by definition, is a hero to strangers and a villain to those they know and work with.

Hmm I don't know, if I were a whistleblower I wouldn't really care what my colleagues would think. And I'd probably not continue working there anyway. After all I'd hate the company and my colleagues for all the wrongdoing that was the whole reason for the whistleblowing in the first place.

Of course people react very differently. And I'm very much not a team player so I'm pretty insensitive to peer pressure. I'm sorry that this person felt so bad.

> Or he was simply executed like in many corporate espionage movies.

When there's billions in market value on the line I don't think this possibility can be overlooked, no. I don't think it would have happened here but I don't think it's impossible

Barnett spent 32 years at Boeing. This would be like everyone you've ever worked with in your career being against you.

    Hmm I don't know, if I were a whistleblower I wouldn't really 
    care what my colleagues would think.

Also, many of his colleagues probably admire him. They are also aware of the problems and presumably want them fixed.

I gather that whistleblower claims are generally about systemic and management issues, and not "Bob from accounting is a stupid idiot."

Don't know anything about this guy, so just speculating, but I can easily see having a self-destructing behaviour being correlated with becoming a whistleblower since it is usually done at great personal expenses.

Subject of the amazing movie The Insider (1999), I might add for interested people.

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