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Comment by mrlyc | Hacker News Reader

At one place I worked, programmers weren't allowed to print anything and creative accounting was used to calculate our wages, something I didn't realise until I left as there were no payslips. One time, the CEO came storming into the programming room, extremely upset that someone had called the company and asked to leave a message for a programmer. "At my next company" he yelled, "there will be no phone system!" Another time, he waltzed into the room and proudly announced that he had taken a whole year to pay a bill.

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Ah, good old American "look at how many unethical and morally questionable things I can get away with" Republicans. Market economy!

I've seen plenty of that in the UK - what I never understood was the reason for bragging about being unethical and/or immoral - what does it achieve? Is it a recognition signal between sociopaths?

It's a "I'm strong enough that it doesn't matter that I'm being brazen about it, I'm not going to face any consequences anyways" sort of thing.

I remember a similar HN discussion, months ago. Someone posed the question - given there's evidence that people do better work when they're treated well, why don't more places go out of their way to look after their workers? It seems to be a no-brainer.

There was one response that I wish I'd bookmarked. They basically said that there is a sociopathic kind of leader who actually derives much of their feeling of success from being "above" their workers.

That one comment really changed my view on the subject. One tends to assume that leaders are rational and will optimise for the success of the company. I've started to think my old assumptions weren't true, there's actually a type of person that derives their self-worth from being "alpha" and will even act against the interests of their company in the pursuit of this feeling.

So I think perhaps these people don't even realise how bad it sounds when they're bragging about unethical behaviour. To them it's part and parcel of being "successful".

It's utterly alien to me, but viewing the actions of managers through this new lens has helped to make sense of some of the apparently irrational decisions I've seen in the past.

"leaders are rational and will optimise for the success of the company"

More like leaders are rational and will optimise for their own personal success which may or may not involve optimising for the success of the company. Of course we all do this to a certain extent just that, from what I've seen, senior leadership types of large companies tend to be much more obviously dedicated to personal success at all costs.

A while back I worked at a multinational and, being fairly senior, was directly exposed to the whims of the executive class - which frequently seemed rather odd (to say the least). When a colleague explained how bonus compensation was linked to their decision making things became much clearer!

"They basically said that there is a sociopathic kind of leader who actually derives much of their feeling of success from being "above" their workers.

...there's actually a type of person that derives their self-worth from being "alpha" and will even act against the interests of their company in the pursuit of this feeling."

I was a senior BA (contract) on a govt project for about $22 million (not a big deal in the scheme of things). The tech lead, looking back, was the classic narcissist (CN) and probably on the sociopathic scale - incompetent, bullying when questioned, believed his crap and had got away with it for years. One unfortunate day I deigned to question this guy's pronouncement of take all the low hanging fruit from the design and do them first. There was no thought of future impact to infrastructure or scale. And disappointingly, the PM, BA, Dev & Test teams didn't stand up to him - only bitched behind his back.

Cut a long story short, from then on he ghosted me in meetings and after spitting my coffee (in what I discovered was my last meeting) at more of his bs, I was told on the Friday I had 'negative feedback' and had to work my two weeks notice and finish up. I asked his pet PM how that worked as they obviously had no confidence and crickets followed - I never returned.

The project failed and made a couple of paragraphs in the papers, I was interviewed by the minister's team months down the track, explained why the project failed and watched the carpet get lifted up and $22 million of tax payers cash get swept under it.

CN is still there as it's next to impossible to fire govt employees in this country, but apparently he has little or no responsibility now. Small mercies for the tax payer I guess.

I have many other stories from two decades in this game, but this is the most recent and the first where I didn't finish my contracted time.

> I remember a similar HN discussion, months ago. Someone posed the question - given there's evidence that people do better work when they're treated well, why don't more places go out of their way to look after their workers? It seems to be a no-brainer.

I tend towards the evolutionary explanation. In primitive times, when people lived in small bands it was beneficial if everyone helped each other to make the group strong to survive. Perhaps some men found it more beneficial for them to humiliate all their male peers so that they would become the alphas of the groups and the females would mate with them instead...

>> what I never understood was the reason for bragging about being unethical and/or immoral

http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

Lots of people misunderstand their unethical behaviour as naughtiness.

In the example given if you make your customers pay on delivery or pay 30 days after month end of invoice date, and you can pay your suppliers 60 or 90 days after month end of invoice date you've given your company a cashflow advantage. For unethical people if 60 days is good 365 days is obviously better.

It's saddening really, someone I've known since University became that guy. To give some context, we'd been friends through the trials of going through our 20's 30's and early 40's - marriages, divorces, failures and successes - I'd let a fair bit of spurious/shady stuff that he'd done go prior to this go, then last year he told me a story about how he'd called a company wide meeting and screamed at his teams about failure to hit targets would mean people (with families and mortgages) would be fired.

He laughed as he told me it was all bollocks as he wanted a new Aston Martin. I explained in four letter words what I thought of him and left. What was bizarre was he kept calling and texting afterwards, which I ignored - but in retrospect, I was the only friend he had left who knew him before he became the 'big shot'. Somewhere in that head of his, he maybe felt he'd lost the connection to the part of himself who started with next to nothing and wasn't a self centred, greedy, lying c*nt in an expensive suit, posh mini-mansion and a 4 year old Aston.

Sorry, rant over... it's sad to lose a long time friend, but fuck him.

Its not an American thing, in my opinion. Its more like an Ayn Rand'ian thing ..

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