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Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

I think most people did ok. Enron had a lot of really smart people. Morally bankrupt, but very smart. No different than any of these big tech companies. People like money, smart people will be attracted to it. Companies like smart people so I don't think they will have a hard time getting another job.

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I've interviewed several smart people from Palantir and naturally I did not hire them. They might as well wear a scarlet letter.

I wonder if your employer appreciates your injection of your own personal ideological axe-to-grind into their hiring pipeline. If I found out that any of my employees was rejecting candidates we were paying to bring on-site out of hand due to their previous employer, I would fire that person instantly.

My employer has specifically asked us to make ethics the top item in our interview feedback, thanks for asking.

You've said many foolish things in this thread, but you should at least consider the fact that if your employer considers ethics important, and then asks you to interview prospects from such an "unethical" company, your own company's ethics are clearly contrary to your own.

So you made a biased decision about a candidate based on where they worked rather than evaluate them on their ability to perform in the role relative to other candidates?

No, I evaluated their lack of a functioning moral framework to conclude they couldn't possibly perform a function in my organization because ethics are much more important than the ability to traverse directed graphs in pseudo-code on whiteboards.

If a candidate told me they got fired for intentionally sabotaging Palantir's production operations, that would neutralize the issue. So far haven't met that person.

Why bother interviewing them at all?

You seem very confident they won’t find anything morally objectionable with your company and decide to sabotage your operations.

If it's so difficult to discern a difference between your company and Palantir, you've got a problem.

You seem very convinced that everyone shares the same moral framework you do. Just because you find your company’s work unobjectionable doesn’t mean everyone else does. I mean, there are Unabomber types out there who think all tech is inherently bad, how do you know the person you are hiring isn’t or won’t turn into one of those people?

Clearly not everyone in tech shares my moral framework, or the internet wouldn't be infested with ads, spyware, and malware, thanks to these "prestigious" companies.

You’re not wrong, I also think carefully about whether candidates show signs of being acutely deranged privacy freaks, sovereign citizens, gold bugs, and a bunch of other modern-day mental illnesses. Sad but that’s how it goes these days. Maybe I should just ask for their HN handles?

Anyone that worked at Palantir is potentially a mole.

How is that different to microsoft logging your keystrokes or google reading your email? Having to deal with old fashioned employee espionage seems quaint.

Most people can tell the difference between an activity that provides a clear benefit, like classifying my emails, and one that provides no personal benefit, such as selling mass surveillance as a service to the highest bidder. If you can’t tell the difference than your ethical framework isn’t serving you.

I don't know what you mean. Snowden docs showed google moving domestic US data to the UK and back again so the data is considered foreign and thus readable by spy agencies.

The ability for google to legally and materially read my emails transcends law, classifying emails and my knowledge. Ethics doesnt even start when its done outside society. Advertising is second order financial gain derived from their absolute power over retained information. There's a bigger picture.

As with many corrupt organizations Enron was full of good people who had no power and never did anything morally wrong.

A select few held the power or agency to act selfishly and did so.

It didn’t become apparent to many employees that something was amiss until shortly before the FBI raided them.

Of course we can't paint all employees of any company with one brush, but I don't think we should let the majority of Enron employees off the hook so easily. That kind of systemic fraud requires cooperation or at least a large number of individuals to look the other way. I realize some innocent people's reputation will be hurt, but there needs to be some social pressure for whistle blowers otherwise the risk reward is always such that "a few bad apples" will take the risk enabled by the silent majority "just doing their jobs".

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