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Ask HN: What is the least ethical thing you’ve done for your startup?
36 points by gnicholas on June 8, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments
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.

Feel free also to share something unethical that you considered doing but decided not to.



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.


> "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.


Thank you.


Haha, this is reminiscent of Chunk's confession in The Goonies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5UG7ISJfP0


>3) I broke the key off inside a rackmount server case accidentally and didn't tell anyone.

You monster!


In my experience, those keys are usually made of incredibly cheap metal.


You broke a key?! How scandalous!


It's not the breaking that's unethical. It's the not telling anyone.


Yup. I still think about turning the case on its side to look for wall attachment brackets and the key snapping off. I could have easily bought a replacement lock and screwed it in without anyone noticing.


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.


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?


> "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.


> 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?


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.


Which country was that in?

How did you change your approach to job hunting?


Protestants or Mormons?


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"


I was hoping that people might share a couple types of responses:

1: unethical things they've done that they're not proud of (and whether or not it worked)

2: unethical things they considered doing but didn't (and whether they later regretted it — perhaps as a result of hearing about other successful folks doing things that are at least as unethical)

3: unethical things that they considered doing but didn't, in favor of a more ethical strategy to accomplish the same goal.

The reason I'm interested in this is that I'm super risk-averse about stuff like this, and hearing stories about what other people have done has made me wonder whether I've been too conservative, to the detriment of my startup's growth.


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


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


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


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


Yes, and I've heard that it can be surprisingly difficult to anonymize yourself properly.


I can't imagine. Internet bragging rights? Ugh. Forget it.

For instance, I was once asked by an employer to do something unethical, and refused. I ended up talking them into something ethical instead.

But I'm still not going to say what it was, even though we never did it. That'd just be dumb.


I don't see why not. Humans aren't perfectly moral, we've all done things we're ashamed of (or at least not proud of, hopefully) in order to get a leg up on the competition. Some honesty could lead to some interesting discussion, or at least some good warning stories.

Plus, HN is somewhat anonymous (if you're careful). It's not like you're incriminating yourself.


Sadly, I think there are plenty of people who see doing unethical things as a point of pride.


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.


I think this is common practice when building any new community from scratch.


I dunno. I grew a (small) software-user community once and it was initially done using a single account - my own - in a support forum. Eventually there were a few more staff accounts - one for each - and some very active forum members. That was ethical by any reasonable definition.

I don't intend to mean that what Reddit did is very unethical - or indeed unusual. And if anything it was a good idea and it worked. But what we did strikes me as different from using multiple accounts to impersonate different users and chat with yourself's and your colleagues' multiple personae.


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


Being ethical and breaking law are different things. Not everything legal is ethical.


I can't think of what would be unethical about simply creating "astroturfed" user accounts on your own site.

Some specific action that a "fake" account might take could be unethical, though it's hard to imagine what that could be such that it wouldn't be unethical coming from a "real" account.

Well, that depends: if someone believes that user IDs X and Y are different people, when in fact they are one, has there been a breach of ethics from that situation alone.


Many consider deception to be unethical. However, on the scale of deceptions, many of us would consider faking a userbase in order to jump-start a community to be toward the white lie end of the spectrum.


There are obvious examples of deception being thoroughly ethical.


I have a nice printer at home; is it equally ethical to print money?

But that money doesn't only exist in your home!, you might cry out. To which I say: you think all those profiles were just sitting and talking to each other? Were they paying the dating site proprietor?


What the profiles are doing is a separate question from whether it is ethical for them to exist.


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


(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.)


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


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...


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.


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.


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.


Top 3:

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


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

Got any good examples of this?


What's unethical about 1 or 3?


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


Lead projects related to ads technology.


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


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




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