
Ask HN: What is the least ethical thing you’ve done for your startup? - gnicholas
The recent thread on Home Depot’s deceptive empty boxes (and the many comments about reddit and other startups that “faked it till they made it”) led me to wonder what folks have done to get their startups off the ground.<p>Feel free also to share something unethical that you considered doing but decided not to.
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megamindbrian2
I've worked for many startups. 1) I wrote redundant code for displaying the
same information in a ASP master page project. Literally copying and pasting,
made it very hard to organize. 2) I didn't take any interest in the full stack
when the company needed a full stack developer. I only focused on front end
when the back end needed help. 3) I broke the key off inside a rackmount
server case accidentally and didn't tell anyone. 4) I built a rigid framework
on top of Symphony, a polymorphic ORM and a slow lazy loading system that is
hard to write code for and make updates to. I think this is why the company
didn't sell. 5-10) I didn't finish the product for the startup and it
sputtered.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> "2) I didn't take any interest in the full stack when the company needed a
> full stack developer."

I would consider this a good, ethical thing to do, and not at all unethical.
The company's needs don't always come before your needs to protect your
specialization and your work experience, not even in early-stage start-ups.
It's on the management to get the right people, not to trumpet around some
disingenuous "everyone wears many hats" philosophy to squeeze inappropriate
work out of you.

It can really be damaging to your career if you get hired into a start-up to
do X, but then because "wear many hats" or "we're a lean shop" or whatever
nonsense, you only spend your time doing Y.

After that, if your real passion was to work on X, it can be really hard to
get employers to look at you seriously for hiring for X. You'll be pigeonholed
into Y.

Since employers ought to care about career goals and growth of their staff, it
definitely makes this sort of thing more the employer's fault than the
employee's.

So, I would say item 2) is not unethical at all -- and in fact it's deeply
important for people around the industry to take a hard line with this sort of
thing when they need to protect a career-goal specialty.

~~~
megamindbrian2
Thank you.

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mlthoughts2018
Not a story about my own ethics, but those of a start-up I worked for.

I quit a good job once to join a start-up and also foolishly didn't take time
off in between the two jobs.

So Monday morning, bright-eyed, I flew to the company's main office for some
meet & greets, getting my company laptop, etc.

Literally the first thing that happened to me upon arriving at the office was
that I was marshaled into a conference room where the CEO, director of HR and
director of Sales were all sitting. Lunch was on the table.

They proceeded to ask me what my religious views were, and mentioned how the
three of them, along with various other staff all went to the same local house
of worship, and that they all had kids of the same age who participating in a
particular religious activity together.

I tried to rationalize it as just chatter, like someone talking about where
their kids go to college or something. Not my cup of tea, but hey, maybe it's
just 'getting to know you' sort of chatter.

Then the director of HR started listing off people I would meet later that
day, what their religions were, times he had "had a good debate" with them
about their chosen religion, while the other two just remained silent.

I quit that job about 3 months later. If I hadn't been a remote employee and
would have been forced to work in close proximity to those people, I probably
would have quit on the spot, regardless of not having a job lined up.

I remember in the meeting when it was happening, I was panicking inside and my
mind was racing. I had done many interviews with them, asked every question
under the sun, and had no idea this was going on. And I had just given up a
reasonably good job because I was an expert on some of the software tools this
particular start-up made and felt I could do a lot of good work there.

Really made my approach to job hunting change after that.

~~~
gnicholas
Sounds illegal, or at least quite borderline. It wouldn't be so problematic if
it'd just come up in conversation over the course of several weeks/months, or
if it hadn't been the senior leadership (including HR director!).

> _Really made my approach to job hunting change after that_

How so? That is, how does a candidate screen for this possibility in advance?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> "Sounds illegal, or at least quite borderline."

It absolutely was illegal, and it was the first time in my life I ever hired
an employment attorney (because of the way the company acted when I quit).

> "How so? That is, how does a candidate screen for this possibility in
> advance?"

Ask more probing questions about company culture, workflow processes, and
whether any particular things are mandated or enforced.

Ask how the company handles diversity and what their goals on with staff of
different backgrounds. Everyone will answer this with the same legalese
insincere crap, but _how_ they answer you can be very telling (e.g. are they
very impatient with this line of questioning?)

Biggest of all: never ever accept a position that doesn't offer a very large
severance package, usually in the range of 1 month of salary _plus_ benefits
for every 1 month of time listed in any non-compete, non-disclosure, or non-
disparagement agreements, or anything like that implied in a company handbook.

If they aren't willing to offer competitive severance benefits, I take it as a
sign that at best they want to costless restructure people at their whim
without giving them fair compensation for the harm it would cause them, but at
worst when they run away from severance, it means they take a top-down,
dictatorship attitude to employees, and do not want anyone having any degree
of bargaining power to disagree with how they are behaving (e.g. like outright
religious discrimination).

Sure, some companies are earnest and just don't want to budget for the
severance. But the cost of incorrectly rejecting them is OK, compared with
accidentally ending up in some place where you have to keep your head down
when there is rampant religious abuse going on.

~~~
skellera
> never ever accept a position that doesn't offer a very large severance
> package, usually in the range of 1 month of salary plus benefits for every 1
> month of time listed in any non-compete, non-disclosure, or non-
> disparagement agreements, or anything like that implied in a company
> handbook.

What level can you expect this? I haven’t personally come across this. Am I
missing out on something?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
It’s simple: just decline jobs that don’t offer it. Unless you are desperate
for work or otherwise willing to compromise on it for personal reasons, turn
it down.

If a company says they either don’t offer severance as a policy, or that
severance is calculated like, e.g. 1 week for each year of tenure, just push
back or walk away.

When I’ve negotiated this before, it hasn’t been an issue, in mid-level
individual contributor engineering roles, one senior engineer role, and
currently in a managerial role.

Most companies will start out saying they won’t do it. But if you say that’s
too bad, they’ll either pass on you (doing you a favor) or they’ll negotiate
like grown ups.

Is IBM going to do this for you? Of course not. So don’t work there. But a lot
of places will, or at least will negotiate a large portion of the type of
severance I discussed above.

It’s not about levels. It’s about sensing that severance-minimization at the
cost of missing out on a good candidate is a telling characteristic of
dysfunction to be avoided. So just don’t work at those places.

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jpm_sd
Why would anyone answer this question? The rule of thumb for the electronic
age is "Never write down anything you don't want to see on the front page of
the NYTimes"

~~~
KirinDave
Because perhaps destroying the infallible startup memes is of more value than
a little bit of egg on one's face?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Some people's admissions of unethical behavior could result in a little more
than "egg on one's face".

~~~
dolessdrugs
have you heard of this thing called the internet where you can be anonymous

~~~
staticautomatic
Yeah. It's now relegated to the history books.

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ddebernardy
Reddit famously had its staff run hundreds of fake accounts to bootstrap
discussions when there wasn't enough traffic yet.

This is far from unique, too. My understanding is that dating websites tend to
get bootstrapped using purchased profiles from other dating websites.

~~~
kazinator
This is perfectly ethical. You can create whatever objects you want on your
own server, if you aren't breaking any law.

~~~
mrguyorama
"You can physically do it" is not the definition of "ethically fine"

~~~
kazinator
(I speak a dialect of English in which "can" doesn't exclusively refer to the
physical ability to perform an action. For instance "can I be excused for a
moment?" isn't normally interpreted as "does there exist a speaker in this
room who is capable of giving me permission to leave for a moment?"; in
context, the meaning is that of asking for the permission.)

~~~
mrguyorama
Nevertheless, isn't "Can" still different from "Should" in this dialect?

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sethammons
Not my story, but FedEx, back in the day, had to hit Vegas BlackJack at one
point to turn 5k to nearly 30k to make payroll and fuel.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/fedex-saved-from-
bankruptcy-w...](http://www.businessinsider.com/fedex-saved-from-bankruptcy-
with-blackjack-winnings-2014-7)

~~~
captain_perl
Southwest Airlines tops that one. The CEO told his pilot on their maiden
flight to run over any obstacles on take-off (ie. security vehicles) or the
company was finished.

One of their competitors was trying to lawyer them into dissolution.

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throwaway201806
We scraped YouTube captions to provide better search and data about YouTube
videos we were aggregating. We used mitmproxy and headless browsers to steal
the captions automatically for new channels and videos we used. For a long
time, direct quotes were searchable in our main search area to bring up
specific videos.

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throwaway201806
We used sparklines fed by logarithmicly accurate, but wildly inflated numbers
to show trend information on our site prior to securing our series A. This was
to prevent someone from viewing source to see our real (low) usage.

------
KirinDave
Top 3:

1\. Sell it. 2\. Undisclosed Personnel issues I deeply regret. 3\. Listen to
customers too much without thinking critically about it.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> Listen to customers too much without thinking critically about it.

Got any good examples of this?

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himom
Minor mischief is fine, but throwing one’s integrity out the window for money
says something.

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eevilspock
Lead projects related to ads technology.

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cartercole
inject ads into every page the user visited and then geolocated about 200k
people in less than 5 min

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oceanghost
This IT guy was trying to get me fired, so I had sex with his wife.

