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Comment by caffeine | Hacker News Reader

I think it shows closed-mindedness on his part. They taught him analysis at MIT, but they didn't teach him to think properly.

You're a guy with a degree from the top technical school in the world and you've got one of the world's most prestigious consultancies on your resume: you don't think you could go on to find a job in which you could afford your kids' education AND not be a hypocrite?

I respect him for standing up after the fact and saying "I'm a wealthy hypocrite." But I don't respect him for going to work there in the first place. You'd have to have spent junior year of college buried in sand not to know it's a game, mostly dirty.

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Well he was taking a double course-load and working, so that may count as being buried in sand.

But still, even if he didn't know beforehand, he figured it out very quickly upon arrival and then stayed for a long time for the money, so I agree with most of your point.

Did he stay a long time? It doesn't look that way to me from the article, but maybe I just missed something.

http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/06/third-day-... seems to imply that he started there in June 2009. http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/10/moral-impe... seems to imply he was still there in October.

... Ooh, and all four parts of the story of which the OP here is part 3 are together in one handy bundle at http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2010/03/dubai-and-... .

So, he was apparently there for at least 4 months and at most 9 months. I wouldn't call that "a long time" in this context.

However long he worked there, he didn't bite the hand that was feeding him, but when the party was over he did turn around to bite the hand that fed him.

Being moral about the NDA does not weigh up against working there in the first place, and I don't know what $16 K means to a high profile Dubai consultant, it may have been substantially less than the severance pay he was entitled to anyway.

I don't think anyone was claiming that being moral about the NDA does "weigh up" against working there in the first place. If he were trying to paint a glowing picture of his own morals, he wouldn't have written the article in the first place.

(Since he appears to have been there for something like 6 months before getting fired, I'll hazard a guess that his severance pay wasn't all that spectacular.)

10 K+ per month is not unusual, and depending on his contract they may have to 'buy you out' (for instance, after three months they might have signed a years contract with you including the first three months).

So the severance could be anywhere from $5K up to a very substantial amount of money. The fact that they're willing to pay another $16K just for signing an NDA suggests it was a pretty high salary.

He already said, kinda, what the salary was: with bonuses and whatnot, he expected to be getting $200k per year.

Given what he's possibly done to their reputation (I don't know; perhaps everyone already thought they were corrupt and dishonest anyway) that he wouldn't have been able to do if he'd signed the NDA, I don't see that an explanation in terms of salary is required: getting everyone to sign the NDA greatly reduces their exposure to this kind of bad publicity.

Comparing the writing there against the versions published in The Tech is a good case for the importance of editing.

The Assumption here seems to be that these kind of decisions are 'one second' ones. sadly, they are not. Most people in most situation take time in deciding one way or other. Mostly until they find a strong push in either direction. In this case it seems to be the confidentiality agreement.

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