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Comment by wilschroter | Hacker News Reader

Last week at this time it was popular to pile on Onlive's CEO to say "he fired everyone and stole the company!".

No one asked why he did it. The common thread was "he was greedy!"

That really pisses me off. We come to find out a week later that the company was days away from total insolvency and that structuring an ABC to deal with $40 million of debt was the only way to keep anyone's jobs. It's a brutally painful place to be.

Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.

I fear the media's growing lack of interest in the why.

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The unanswered question is how much he profited from the move of selling the company. If firing all of the old people, devaluing their stock to $0, and reforming the company netted him a $1M bonus, then he is still a greedy bastard and donating a few thousand dollars to a fund doesn't change that. When something similar happened at my previous company, the people in charge got a large cash award as part of the acquisition while a bunch of employees lost their jobs and had their stock devalued to $0 so it is plausible that the same thing happened here. At another company I was at, the CEO laid off a large portion of the company for budget reasons but also paid us 2 weeks of salary out of his personal account in addition to our normal severance pay.

$50k split between all the people who made this decision is a trivial amount of money compared to their salaries and bonuses.

Let's first agree that none of us knows.

What if he did NOT profit? What if he lost millions of his own personal net worth? Would you consider him the opposite of a bastard?

There are very few instances where a company takes a complete header like this and the CEO gets paid handsomely. And how can you compare being in $40 million of cash debt and putting the company to ABC against selling a company in an acquisition?

> Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.

This is the essence of many of the problems in our lives.

When somebody does something awful, usually there is a reason other than that they are a 'bad person', there are complex reasons, maybe wrong reasons, but there are reasons why they did what they did, and is important to understand those reasons before criticizing.

Some times an awful thing is the best you can do, because the alternatives are even worse. Those decisions are the most difficult and painful to make, and rarely anyone appreciates it.

I believe in psychology this is called the "Fundamental Attribution Error."

Some times an awful thing is the best you can do, because the alternatives are even worse.

That is a slippery slope and a possible excuse for loosing dignity.

"The hard part was getting the brain out. HAHAHA"

-Professor Hubert J Farnsworth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUZg11EtUP8

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