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Comment by pclark | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand how you can connect the dots of LinkedIn's (admittedly crappy) marketing emails and Intro existing. It seems quite simple really:

People loved Rapportive, people wanted Rapportive outside of GMail, Rapportive delivered.

> It's one of the most basic rules of growing a company that pursuing short-term gains (1-2 years) with dodgy maneuvers, directly translate into long-terms losses in the 10-fold numbers of the short term gains. This is not too hard to understand, is the executive team of Linkedin not intelligent enough to get that?

http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-stock-performance-20...

Amazingly you've managed to crap not only on the Intro team, not only on the Intro team and LinkedIn executives, but every single LinkedIn employee – please tell me more about how to build this great culture you champion.

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I've said it before on HN (and was attacked for it), but I will say it again.

LinkedIn is not a tech company, it is a bunch of business people who hired technologists to build a website.

Sure, lots of good tech has been open sourced by LinkedIn employees, but none of them sit in decision making capacities (or Intro would not exist). THAT is the culture problem.

You seem to be implying that tech companies can have a higher moral ground. They're still run by people. Technologists can still be culpable even if they're in positions of authority precisely because they are people. Any other way of thinking is a gross over-generalization of people's ability and desire to do the right thing.

Besides, even if they aren't in the positions of authority, technologists can still be culpable. I thought we already had enough examples in history of culpable people who were "simply following orders" to render such types of discussions moot.

The implication here is that tech people are inherently more moral than business people, which I find more worthy of attack than any derivation from that premise.

The premise behind intro isn't a bad one. The employees (technical) who built it were excited about finding a way round Apple's very limiting system. I don't think subscribing to a particular view of corporate ethics is related to your technical skills. The scores of highly technical people working in the defense and finance industries is testament to that.

As a fairly technical person, I think Intro is a fairly neat product. There's definitely some implementation issues that mean that I'm not going to use it (I don't really want a linkedin advert in all my outgoing email), but I'd imagine it'd be pretty useful for some people. I already trust one large corporation with my email despite the fact I know they don't have my best interests at heart. Adding another one wouldn't be a deal breaker.

Thanks for the level headed comment! The LI signature is totally optional by the way: you can turn it off.

No problem! I'd imagine it's frustrating to see something you've worked on be attacked for having an agenda that you don't actually have. As far as I can see, the approach you took is the only reasonable one you could have taken to provide a service like Intro. Hopefully you can deal with problems like the one outlined in the article!

don't be evil.

The company that used that slogan had felt "the power of the dark side." :-)

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