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Comment by grovulent | Hacker News Reader

You say you understand that these agreements are illegal and unethical and at the same time admonish us to put ourselves in the shoes of those people who engaged in this illegal and unethical behaviour.

Okay. Let's do that shall we?

I am Eric Schmidt. I have made a conscious decision to collude illegally in order to suppress the wages of my own employees because I frankly don't think us folks at the top are getting enough of the pie. So we're going to take more - not through our talent, but through our power. Because fuck everyone below us. They're clearly greedy (your word) so they'll get what we give them.

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What most people fail to realize is that by colluding to repress wages, they essentially robbed the State of California of tax revenues, at a time when school teachers were being asked to do without teacher aides.

I have one word: Prison.

You should stay in prison for a few days before you suggest it so casually.

If you're going to start accusing folks of 'robbing' the State of California, you should carefully investigate the morality of compulsory taxation.

I think you'll find that the State does a damn site more robbery and extortion than any group of tech companies.

The point is these actions aren't any different than if they were enforcing any other ethical and legal policy. These emails aren't really shocking at all. It just shows its business as usual.

Which is part of the point. Employees are considered as commodities, and a career-ending breach of a (illegal) policy is treated as a fixing a bug in your code - jokes and all.

Hardly career ending. People get let go. It happens. You didn't see a "He'll never work in this town again!" This just seems to detract from the actual issue which is the policy itself.

Conditional on having an illegal policy, enforcing said policy in an effective manner similar to your enforcement of other (legal) policies should not earn you extra condemnation.

> Conditional on having an illegal policy, enforcing said policy in an effective manner similar to your enforcement of other (legal) policies should not earn you extra condemnation.

Why not?

Expressing outrage at extraneous facts surrounding a widespread unethical conspiracy to screw workers, should not earn you a pretentious lecture about compartmentalising your emotions.

Speaking of conspiracy...

Anybody else looked at AngelList and the salaries being offered?

Isn't it strange that the majority of salaries, cash and equity, top out at the same amount?

Isn't it amazing that in a free market, hundreds of start-up founders value engineers the same?

Smells like something fishy going at the angel funds and VCs to price fix wages of start-up worker bees...

Free markets tend to balance out at an equilibrium price.

Sounds a bit like saying "Conditional on being a thief, behaving like a douche should not earn you extra condemnation".

Some of the executives seem professional and that's ok, but others seem to take things rather personally, with all the marks of an ego trip.

Conditional on having an illegal policy, enforcing said policy in an effective manner similar to your enforcement of other (legal) policies should not earn you extra condemnation.

Sure it should. You should not be enforcing the policy, you should be denouncing it.

I'm not entirely certain that's the motive... I mean, as a CEO it is your responsibility to do what is best for the _company_. If you can save the company a lot of money in wages and prevent top talent from leaving then it's your responsibility to do so.

Not that I think what they did is ethical or legal, but I'm not entirely sure that greed is the motive here.

You may be right. I apologise for any inaccuracies in my shoe-placing. It's as good as I can do when trying to empathize with psychopathic assholes.

Overkill to let him off. 'psychopathic' almost implies internally generated impulses beyond conscious control. I suspect 'asshole' sums it up nicely.

You seem to have missed the irony.

To paraphrase jobs:

And what if you can make the company a lot of money by selling crack to kids? Or embezzling money from your customers' bank accounts? Or by cheating on your tax?

As a CEO it is your responsiblity to do what is best for the company _within the law_.

CEOs and companies can establish their own priorities. That may be profit or revenue, but it could be any number of other things like deliberately choosing "green" options even though it increases their costs and reduces their profit margin. Or even paying talent what they deserve. That isn't (by most standards) "best for the company", but it's the choice of those running the company, and in the long run may prove out to be the better choice. Quarterly thinking kills companies, and they deserve it for their short-sightedness.

And cutting wages and forcing people to stay, that might save money, but it's hardly "best" for the company. I've left two jobs because management thought that was a good idea. I was poor (a low, 4-digit bank balance poor) the first time, and I have no regrets. I'd do it again if put in the same position. Screw incompetent management.

Employees are 'the company.' Screwing over your employees is not in the companies best, long term interests.

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