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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

What difference would that make? Path could still fire him, oath or no oath, and I can't see their decision being much influenced there.

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They certainly could. The talent pool would certainly hear about it as well.

Publicity. He writes a blog "Path fired me for not breaking the oath" and then communities like this one will rally around that whistle-blower.

Yeah, that negative publicity around Foxconn's workplace conditions really tanked Apple.

I get your point, but these guys don't have anywhere near the same clout that Apple has.

Path is young (and building a service, not a device/OS) and it can be abandoned for something similar since all they're keeping is data. Once you buy a gadget, that's an investment on your part which will make a lot of people hesitant to give it up and the culture it that surrounds it.

And I wouldn't bet that Apple will be able to survive scandal after scandal and still survive unscathed. Cook is no Jobs.

Maybe not, but Apple changed their practices pretty darn quick. They now review suppliers much more closely than they did before, and Foxconn's practices have changed a bit as well. You can argue it didn't have ENOUGH effect, but you can't claim it made no difference.

The goal was not to tank apple, but to improve the working conditions at the factory floor and transparency on apple's part. Apple' supply chain is much more transparent after the noise. On another note, our outrage/disagreement cannot be outcome based. We hope the bad publicity will change things. many times it does not.

This assumes that Path (or any company) would be foolish enough to make their intentions clear.

If a developer refused to implement a feature due to their ethics then the company would do the following:

* Move engineer to different project

* Set unrealistic goals/deadlines/expectations

* After engineer fails, voice concern about performance

* Set up performance review and improvement plan

* After causing engineer to fail a second time due to unrealistic expectations, fire them due to poor performance

Even if that engineer writes a blog post, enough has happened between his initial refusal and termination as to make conclusive proof impossible. The discussion will be a he-said-she-said affair as his former employer makes a counter-blog post explaining the engineer's poor performance.

A lawsuit is similarly out of the question as most companies have sufficient funds to cause delays in court, thereby causing you to spend all your money on attorney fees and bleeding you dry.

Yup. SOP in the food service industry is to give employees who are underperforming 4 hours per week, on the slowest shift, and just leave them there until they quit.

Honestly, if you refuse to do something on ethical grounds and then are moved around, you know what's going on. Most people aren't clueless to office politics and at that point it's your decision to blow the whistle or shut up and watch it happen in spite of your oath.

It's not like hospitals haven't contended with this exact thing for a very long time. The wills of surgeons/doctors and their hospital administrators do not always match up.

How would this be any different from the situation today, where he writes a blog post titled, "Path fired me for not spamming millions of people's phones" and the community rallies around the whistle-blower?

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