Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017)

stimmel-law.com

490 pointsVHRanger325 comments

> And, almost always, most would have made more money and had a more profitable career if they had simply stopped stealing and starting working honestly.

> I mean, figure it out. An embezzler has to not only do his or her job well so that no one is looking over his or her shoulder but has to do their job so well that they can steal for months or years and it won’t show up.

Performance and pay aren't 1:1, and sometimes quite far from it. That imbalance or perceived imbalance could certainly drive some to embezzle. Bit of a just world fallacy there.

Having met people like this, it's exactly like it's said here. It's compulsive for them, they have to do it. Pretty sure the reasoning is ad hoc.

So a better approach would be therapy instead of prison, I suppose?

Nope. Therapy produces results only when based on a sincere desire to make change.

Don't at least some of them want to gain control of their impulses?

If someone is caught in a vicious spiral not only does Therapy sound like a better option than prison but even just a one time bailout might allow them to self-correct... I still think it'd be a good idea to have the therapy in place though.

At the end of the day - people make mistakes, helping people out of those mistakes results in recidivism less often than you'd suspect.

That’s one flavor of embezzler, there probably a sociopath flavor as well. Sending a sociopath to therapy generally doesn’t work.

Yes - but it's very difficult to tell whether someone is a sociopath if they're good at it. I think it'd probably be safer to err on the side of therapy and let the therapist's recommendation or repeat offenses dictate whether jail time is justified.

> I think it'd probably be safer to err on the side of therapy and let the therapist's recommendation or repeat offenses dictate whether jail time is justified.

Repeat offenses as a signal? Sure!

Therapist's recommendation? I'm skeptical. Their primary data is whatever the subject self-reports, and their secondary data is their somewhat subjective opinion on whether the subject has improved.

If the subject does not want to stop and they are smart enough to figure out how to embezzle or to get high enough to embezzle, there's very little chance that the therapist would see through them.

It's like EQ tests - the subject can make the test results say whatever they want the test results to say.

Lots of things sounds like a better option when you remove the constraints of actual human behavior (see also: economics). Unfortunately human behavior is what it is regardless of whether your strategy accounts for it or not. So again, for the cheap seats, therapy is a complete waste of time in 100% of instances where the individual in question isn't genuinely pursuing change.

Yes, and an individual's convictions remain static forever and cannot be influenced by others. You can't convince me otherwise.

Your argument sounds tautological.

K. You probably shouldn't pursue a career as a therapist or have kids then unless you enjoy staggering around in a haze of cognitive dissonance.

I know of an employer at which one of the finance people had embezzled about 50K over the course of one or two years (from their employer). And at the same time they also embezzled 5K from the community sports league for which they did volunteer accounting/finance stuff.

They ended up being arrested and convicted for stealing from the sports league, and they went to jail for a few months but they had some arrangement where they could leave every weekday morning to go to work and then return to jail in the evening.

Their arrest and conviction was well known by and within their employer (from which they were known to have embezzled the 50K) since they needed to request leave to show up to court and also because the local papers covered it extensively due to it impacting the sports league.

They were not fired, presumably because their employer did not want to run the risk of tarnishing its sterling reputation of properly managing its finances.

Given the number of possible things wrong with a human that leads to bad behavior, it seems like an extreme claim to suggest that desire to make a change is a necessary component in any successful therapy. Part of therapy can be building that desire.

For example, therapy for issues stemming from learned helplessness are a counter example, as learned helplessness implies lacking a desire to make a change as they have already been conditioned to seeing it as impossible. The therapy involves building up that desire by having minor successes that end up breaking down the mental block which formed.

None of what you said is quantitative and/or objective data.

A "sincere desire to make change" isn't quantifiable in the first place.

> A "sincere desire to make change" isn't quantifiable in the first place.

Well, that's my entire point: why use it as a metric or target? How do you tell if you achieved the objective when the target metric is unmeasurable?

When the goal is (in GP's words) "building that desire to make a change", you can never tell anything about progress towards your goal: when you've achieved the goal, when you've not achieved that goal, when you're making progress, when you're making it worse - those things are all subjective.

All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.

> When the goal is (in GP's words) "building that desire to make a change", you can never tell anything about progress towards your goal:

> All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.

What's the purpose here, to treat the condition of being a sociopath, or just to enforce enough structure on them that they don't cause other people harm?

My problem with what you said is that the entire idea of "sociopathy" is that a person lacks what the diagnoser considers to be "emotion" and is simply "pretending" to be a "normal" human by copying how they see other people behaving. That diagnosis isn't quantifiable in the first place; it's the diagnoser deciding they know what's happening in a patient's head by (guess what?) observing their words and actions.

Farther up-thread, people were arguing sociopaths should go to prison and not receive therapy (particularly if they say they don't want therapy, but more generally if they've committed a crime). You're now taking that farther by saying even if they express a desire to make change, that shouldn't be taken into account when determining any treatment/punishment, because that's only an observation of words coming out of their mouth-- but that's the same route they were diagnosed via in the first place, so I find that hypocritical.

If you're just saying criminals should be punished without regard for their mental health/conditions simply because their victims were victimized regardless, that's a valid utilitarian view. But realize (it at least sounds like) you're essentially arguing that therapy for mental conditions is generally impossible/pointless.

Addiction is weird, though. A lot of the time, the addict doesn't actually want to be addicted.

Conversely they will often only go to rehab at the threat of imprisonment or abandonment by friends and family. I'm sure there's an underlying logic to addiction, but it creates behaviors that are extremely contradictory.

I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, the logic is just a failure of long-term planning to dominate over short-term planning. "I know I shouldn't smoke, but this one cigarette will feel so good".

That's definitely one way people get addicted, but I suspect not the most common.

A huge proportion of drug addicts (and I suspect addicts of sex, gambling etc I'm just less familiar with those addictions) started taking their drugs because of how tough their life was. And even if you know that starting to take opiates or whatever drug of choice might not be a sensible plan long term, if you feel so bad that you'd rather kill yourself than live in your head sober, it's possible to actually want to keep using what you re addicted to because you don't believe that life without that drug can be any better.

I don't know how common this is, but anecdotally I've known two people who used high dose prescription painkillers (obtained illegal) to give them enough positive feelings to be able to work on their mental health problems, both who would've been described as problematically addicted by most medical professionals, but who managed to use the opiates to work on their core mental health issues until such a time that they felt ready to not need opiates, at which point they found it relatively easy to stop. Because as horrible as it is to get the withdrawals, it's actually not very last longing and it can be considerably less painful than the pain of having such severe mental health issues that you were desperate to kill yourself before you started the drug use, not because you started the drug use. (Of course there's also people who get addicted because they think it will be fun, and end up suicidal because of it. And I also wouldn't recommend using opiates to work on your mental health, because despite my two anecdotes I believe the almost universal knowledge in medical circles is that it's much more likely to worsen your mental health than to improve it.

Ah, yes, I'm not talking so much about how they start, but about why it's hard to quit. The short term pleasure is always more compelling than the long term benefit of not being an addict.

But my point is that's not the only way people find it hard to stop.

If you're addicted because your life was roughly fine, but you discovered that a drug make you feel amazing, keep taking it too much, and get to the point where withdrawal is so painful that it's impossible to resist taking another dose to feel good again, then that's exactly how you describe it.

But if you're using heroin or whatever drug as a mental health treatment, e.g. because if you hadn't started using you would instead have killed yourself, then sure you'll still have the nasty withdrawals when you stop, but it's a totally different equation. For many addicts, taking illegal drugs is the only way to feel OK about life. Some of these people never manage to get clean, but the ones with this reason for addiction who do (or who try to) get clean, it can be surprisingly easy to deal with the withdrawals, because they're aware of how shit life was before they first started using the drug, and the idea that the rest of your life will be as shit as before you started using drugs can be a far more scary thought than someone who's life was basically good except for their getting hooked on a drug.

To quote one of the all-time great TV shows, and surely the best about authentic portrayals of drug users, dealers, and cops - The Wire - Waylon, a former addict and narcotics anonymous sponsor, says “Getting clean’s the easy part. And then comes life.” I guess that's true for both types of addict I've talked about, but it's even more true for the addicts who turned to drugs because they hated their lives than for people who had lovely lives until they accidentally got addicted to a drug that they thought was fun to try.

Yes, that agrees with the addiction theory of Johann Hari, who has a TED talk and a book[0]. Experiments with rats show a rat will quickly be addicted when the choice is only between water and an opiate. But give the rat something other than a stark lonely existence, like exercise and sexual partners and rat friends, and they hardly use the drug. Similarly, many US servicemen in Vietnam became addicted to heroin while in country, but almost all simply stopped heroin when they were back home around friends and family.

[0] Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Scream-Opposite-Addiction-Con...

> Similarly, many US servicemen in Vietnam became addicted to heroin while in country, but almost all simply stopped heroin when they were back home around friends and family.

I think this may be ahistorical, or at least vastly overstated. See Jeremy Kuzmarov’s research, published in “The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs.”

I was once told that the difference between a behavior being an addiction or the same behavior not being an addiction is that the non-addicted do the thing for some positive physical or psychological effect. The addicted do the thing in order to avoid a negative physical or psychological effect.

In this view, for example, people start using an addictive drug because it makes them feel good, but once addicted they use the drug in order to avoid withdrawal symptoms.

Going to rehab means to stop using, which brings withdrawal. I think this view explains why some addicted would only do it when they'll incur an even greater negative effect than withdrawal.

> I was once told that the difference between a behavior being an addiction or the same behavior not being an addiction is that the non-addicted do the thing for some positive physical or psychological effect. The addicted do the thing in order to avoid a negative physical or psychological effect.

TIL I am addicted to flossing.

Yeah and we could have a pretty interesting conversation on the success rates of court-mandated rehab programs.

In the cases I've witnessed, therapy would be pointless. They are sociopaths, pure and simple.

Alternate anecdata: Having met people like this the initial incidents are usually to try and right a perceived wrong. Being slighted on a bonus when another employee was over-compensated (from the perspective of the embezzler). An earned sales commission that was unpaid or underpaid. Things like that.

The embezzler spots an opportunity to get back some of what they are owed, they strike, and are successful. Then it spirals from there. Sometimes they get 'forced' to continue, the initial fraud case involved a fictitious vendor, or a subscription, or some other thing that is expected to be ongoing and would raise suspicious to suddenly stop.

In other cases I've seen the root cause just be straight up drugs and gambling addictions. An employee needs fast money, and probably need to hide it from family members, so a little embezzlement gets the job done. Then of course that never goes the way they intended, and they wind up doing it again and again until the whole thing implodes.

> embezzler spots an opportunity to get back some of what they are owed, they strike, and are successful. Then it spirals from there.

This strikes me as the typical fraudster more than embezzler. Making up the gains versus having actual profits that they then steal. Madoff was a fraudster; Bankman-Fried more an embezzler.

> Alternate anecdata: Having met people like this the initial incidents are usually to try and right a perceived wrong. Being slighted on a bonus when another employee was over-compensated (from the perspective of the embezzler). An earned sales commission that was unpaid or underpaid. Things like that.

Altnernate anecdata (N=1): One person I knew intimately enough definitely used a perceived wrong as a pretext to start something they had been looking to do already because of other issues.

I agree. It might not be that the person was truly wronged, only that the perception that they were slighted can be used as a pretext to excuse their own slights (getting progressively less slight).

With how comon wage theft is and how employers can conduct it with near impunity[0] Most often the perceived wrongs of people are justified.

[0] https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-bil...

But you only know that you've met the ones with obvious defects. How can you ever know when you've ever met the ones with no obvious, or no defects?

Sounds like he was underpaid by all 3!

I recall some research that indicated that embezzlers are far more likely to think that "everyone does it" as well.

That attitude is touched on near the end.

Casual embezzling on all levels of society was extremely common in communist Czechoslovakia (and probably other Eastern Bloc countries). For example construction workers might steal material from their job site to build their own house (often during work hours as well). There was even a popular adage normalizing this behaviour: "One who doesn't steal steals from his own family".

Years ago I recall a guy in Russia who documented over several years the continuous announcement of a given local road being improved. Every year trucks, supplies and such would show up at the appointed time, local news would show up with a local authorities and they'd point at things and film. Then the next day everything was just left in place, no workers, eventually each night the construction equipment would slowly vanish, and finally other trucks would come and slowly collect the supplies. Then next year same thing again, same spot, they'd dig up the same ground for TV, wash rinse, repeat.

This is why punishment for any non-trivial corruption by officials should be a life sentence. So they would know, if they are caught, it will be maximum possible penalty. Because, unlike usual theft, embezzlement affects lives of many people.

How would that work in Russia?

There's no independent judiciary, those in power are not going to jail ...

Good thing all my enemies are corrupt.

Stealing from work in the USSR was so normalized that people just referred to at as "carrying out". Workers sometimes picked careers based more on how much they could steal than on the nominal salary. An engineer had a higher monthly salary than a waiter, but a waiter could effectively earn more than the engineer by stealing food.

https://youtu.be/Jz4lD76nbds?si=iUXoDEAZI8SMJ8z4

If you own the means of production, is it really “stealing” though? /s

That's very much how it was justified. There was a saying in USSR:

"Tащи с работы каждый гвоздь - ты здесь хозяин, а не гость."

translating to:

"Grab every nail from work - you're the master here, not a guest."

essentially parroting the Soviet cliches about how proletariat was in charge etc.

Not to totally discount embezzlement, but I think people underestimate just how poor these countries were after world war 2.

Usually people are talking about the 60s-80s when sharing these stories since that’s what grandparent/parent generations remember. USSR did experience significant growth at least at the beginning of this period and most of that theft/embezzlement was certainly committed to later sell/exchange those goods for profit (e.g. working at coffee shops was were lucrative since you could just reuse the same ground coffee for 5+ cups and steal the rest).

This was a case in Poland as well. And the reason was simple: communist countries were in a constant supply crisis. Even when you had money you couldn't just go and buy material to build your own house, you had to steal it, otherwise you'd never get your house built. That's why all those great construction projects of communism like factories, power plants, etc. were so expensive: half of the material never made it to a site, being stolen along the way.

Or as I like to say: Eastern bloc communism was often so bad that it makes Objectivism look like a reasonable philosophy.

You see a similar phenomenon with propensity for litigation and pushing to limits of the letter of the law in the US. "everyone"'s doing it, which leads to people feeling like they have a right to and like they're missing out if they don't. But in the end most people lose out overall.

In USSR similar adage was: “No matter how much you steal from the State, you can’t get even.” (Сколько у государства не воруй — все равно своего не вернёшь.)

Had multiple leech brother in laws.

One was a lawyer who defrauded his elderly clients and the other just only worked for his parents his whole life after getting kicked from university for cheating and then attached himself directly to the teat after they retired. Once his father died he took over the life of his mother as she was descending into Alzheimer's and looted her assets with the help of his brother before he was disbarred.

Both thought that everyone else was doing it too- it was just about not getting caught. They literally couldn't comprehend the idea that others weren't just hypocrites.

> They literally couldn't comprehend the idea that others weren't just hypocrites.

I read a book once [0] that claimed sociopaths (who come in more-boring flavors than just Hollywood villainy) have a similar confusion: Since certain norms aren't as intuitive/automatic, it's as if everyone else is secretly playing a game with a set of unspoken barely-explained rules.

Some of them end up concluding it's all a cynical manipulative scam, and everybody else is the same as themselves except absurdly dedicated to keeping up the fiction.

[0] "The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout

A friends mom always said, "There are rules, you just dont know them yet"

But are they? Or are they just conventions backed by people with various degrees of certainty about them?

Why are you asking me?

That's exactly what rules are.

> Since certain norms aren't as intuitive/automatic, it's as if everyone else is secretly playing a game with a set of unspoken barely-explained rules.

That's exactly how I feel lol biggest reason why I minimize my interaction with most of the society

Anyway, I think that people in general assume that others behave in a way similar to theirs, which works if you're average, but doesn't if you're not. You can see this when two cultures with opposing attitudes meet: both of them think "obviously I'm normal, it's them who's acting weird".

See also Three Christs of Ypsilanti

I think that general feeling -- of playing a game where the majority of players know the rules and you don't -- is something most people have felt at one point or other. I've certainly felt like that in foreign countries or at new jobs. Friends report a similar feeling while starting the process of buying a house, or getting married, or re-entering the dating scene.

I used to feel like this when I was a teen. Now I think everyone are mostly clueless trying to make do with what they have.

> Some of them end up concluding it's all a cynical manipulative scam, and everybody else is the same as themselves except absurdly dedicated to keeping up the fiction.

See most people who use the phrase "virtue-signaling" pejoratively.

I think most behaviors in both corporate and actual politics are pretty much that of psychopaths. I don't believe this is true in general. Am I the psychopath?

If you cynically believe no one ever is truly empathetic towards an outgroup, or can hold altruistic values on the basis that you yourself do not, then I think it's a sign of something - perhaps not rising to the level of psychopathy - but it certainly shows a lack of imagination.

I use the phrase virtue signalling pejoratively to refer to things like https://www.shell.com/sustainability/nature.html. It's precisely because of the existence of real virtue that virtue signalling is able to be differentiated.

I suppose I should have specified when the pejorative is directed towards individuals. Companies are amoral, and have no values by definition.

So then it sounds like you agree that an identifiable subset of advocacy is only faking virtue, you just disagree with the scammers on which subset that is.

I do not agree.

Companies have always done brand advertising - Marlboro cigarettes didn't truly care about independence, ruggedness or cowboys - they just wanted to be associated with those themes to sell more product - hence the "Marlboro Man". Clint Eastwood, on the other had, seems to personally buy into that image in earnest - so Clint Eastwood doesn't "virtue-signal" about ruggedness and the old west and anyone who accuses[1] him of that is doing so in bad faith.

The culture warriors pretend companies pandering is new, and they term the branding/pandering they don't like "virtue-signalling"

1. He has some pretty strong opinions on who ought to be in westerns that I believe are misguided. My disagreeing wirh him doesn't mean he is insincere/virtue-signaling to the Country-music-listening demographic.

Okay sure. I’ll grant you that calling Clint Eastwood “virtue signaling” is misguided. But you were criticizing the use of the term in general, including for calling out ineffective actions that accomplish nothing substantive but make a brand look good. So you just moved the goalposts, if that matters to you.

Companies tend to be amoral, but nothing precludes from codifying a set of morals in their documents.

“Virtue signaling” absolutely designates a natural, useful category that, in no way, rejects the need for real virtue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474142

I ... can actually sympathize with that, even as I don't try to scam people (at least, I don't think I do). It can be infuriating to see others get what they want in a way that's "what??? Why does that work?" It can feel like the real rules are being deliberately concealed from you, and you are just fighting back by using the hacks that you think everyone else is.

I remember having this feeling hit me hard when I read the part of the Richard Feynman book when he calls a woman a selfish wh--- and that results in her adamantly wanting to sleep with him.[1]

If you can shuck the siren's call of the mob, you can sympathize with the incel and MGTOW crowd who felt they weren't taught the right model.

I've kind of taken it on as a life motto: "No cheat codes." If there's something that magically works, it deserves to be exposed so everyone can use it, and also learn why it works. That is, everyone deserves the same hack. Yes, even when it costs my information monopoly.

[1] Blog post summarizing it: https://geekfeminismdotorg.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/feynman-...

Old Dutch saying: ‘As the host is, he treats his guests.’

> They literally couldn't comprehend the idea that others weren't just hypocrites.

I've worked for/with a number of narcissistic sociopaths. They love to surround themselves with two types of people:

1. Loyal fawning adorers who give them narcissistic supply.

2. Other narcissistic sociopaths.

2 was a surprise to me when I figured it out. Why would they want to be around their competition?

Because they actually believe there are only those two types of people in the world. And Type 2 are "their tribe." Anybody who claims not to be one of those two (i.e. "Type 3") is obviously a lying hypocrite and is not to be trusted. We Type 3s make them very uneasy.

If you find Dracula lore amusing, it's astonishing how these 3 types map:

1. Humans (i.e. food)

2. Vampires

3. The Van Helsing family (i.e. vampire slayers)

"Everyone does it" is an incredibly common statement to justify all sorts of bad behavior, whether legal or not.

I think it's an expression of the natural human tendency to think that our personal experiences and attitudes are representative of the mean.

Another common one is "if I don't do it, someone else will". Which completely misses the point that even if true, it doesn't mean that it's ok to do it.

I think it is a utilitarian argument - if its true that someone will inevitably commit the crime then the fact that I commit the crime is victimless or at least had no additional victims than there would have been without my action.

To say that a victimless crime is wrong requires a more deontological approach to morality.

It's just far more likely to get you in trouble if you steal from the more powerful, IMO

embezzlers are far more likely to think that "everyone does it" as well

Funny, but I have observed this with regards to lying.

I'm a goody-two-shoes yet I also think all successful people must cheat. I don't see how anyone can compete against cheaters. It's like running a race where some people start at the halfway mark... You know for sure who the winners are going to be.

This just reads to me as a lawyer covering their ass. A blog post on a law firm's website saying crime pays? That's not a good look.

I remember a story of a bank branch manager who got into embezzling because of his gambling debts in this classic book

https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Computer-Donn-B-Parker/dp/06841...

I would not say he had a master plan but was making it up to go along and figured he’d win big at the track one day and pay everyone back, (We had someone like that who stole $750k from our county’s bus operator because of gambling too.)

Boy if these people were cogs in the machine and probably didn’t see a lot of upward mobility. The perp told the author of the book that he’d “learned his lesson” and that he came across as sincere but FBI agents told him that people like that (gambling addiction + embezzling) will reoffend almost always if given the chance. (One reason I think the European “right to be forgotten” is a problem is because it is a shield for people who use their social skills as a weapon.)

> One reason I think the European “right to be forgotten” is a problem is because it is a shield for people who use their social skills as a weapon.

Yeah, I wonder how the EU will deal with people who use that law to hide evidence of their misdeeds...

There some people who I've only tangentially heard about who, while not being charged with anything, definitely left a trail of broken promises, messes, blathering, whining, and excuses in their wake. Not that such people usually get called out by name in a blog post, but when they say "X is true" online and then someone else proves them wrong, I'd hope they can't use that law to just sweep their foolishness under the rug each time.

Some people need to have such things remembered, so others have an objective historical record, rather than only having subjective bluster to listen to.

>Yeah, I wonder how the EU will deal with people who use that law to hide evidence of their misdeeds...

Here in the US, we elect them to public office.

The other day I was testing out an input form with an autocomplete which led me to this group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Solutions_for_Winning...

which was run by politician Newt Gingrich which he had let go bankrupt and get evicted from its offices in 2011 so he could run for president in 2012 and I must say it boggles my mind that he didn't think this would have an effect on "do I trust this guy to be President?" or even "do I want to donate to his campaign?"

> which he had let go bankrupt and get evicted from its offices in 2011 so he could run for president in 2012

Right now, at least, the Wikipedia article states that the law required him to leave the organisation. It doesn’t sound like it was insolvent when he left, just that without him it found it hard to get additional donations. It also sounds like it was evicted after it was dissolved, many months after he terminated his relationship with it.

Lacking any other details, it sounds strange to blame him for what happened after his required-by-law departure.

Bankruptcy is just a smart business decision for the privileged.

For the working class, it is a moral failure. Or in the case of student loans not allowed.

But they paid for said misdeeds, it's not that important that they pay forever, is it ? I mean it sounds annoying to allow an embezzler to be an accountant again, but I mean, he did his time, he's supposed to have reformed, what are we gonna do ? Consider that never again in his life he's gonna be honest ?

> ”probably didn’t see a lot of upward mobility”

There was a case in Brazil recently where a medicine student in a top university embezzled from her graduation party funds (she was at the party committee) to invest in cryptocurrency, make profit and return the money to the fund keeping the profit. But she lost money on crypto. Then she tried to gamble (playing a lot of money on the lottery) to earn what she lost. Lost everything and got caught. Expelled by the university.

She had a lot of potential for upward mobility as a doctor from the most prestigious school in Brazil. Still did it.

> She had a lot of potential for upward mobility as a doctor from the most prestigious school in Brazil.

Potential, and after couple more years of exhaustion and suffering (as graduating from a medical school is typically only first half of the journey)?

If potential far-away reward like this didn't discount to approximately 0 for most people, the world would've looked entirely different.

Strawman that indicates either extreme boredom and desire for interlocution, or a misanthropic streak. To see it, who are there all these rubes who stay in middle school even though most people discount far-away reward to 0? High school? College?

> Strawman that indicates either extreme boredom and desire for interlocution, or a misanthropic streak.

More like offering a potential counterpoint, motivated by general experience that people generally aren't stupid - even the most seemingly dumb behavior tends to have a motivation that feels reasonable(ish) to the person doing it. I don't think playing Devil's advocate is misanthropic.

> To see it, who are there all these rubes who stay in middle school even though most people discount far-away reward to 0? High school?

Do you even remember middle/high school? Obviously, kids stay in it because the law mandates so, and tolerate it because they meet other kids there and have some degree of autonomy over their social life. Consequences and rewards are both immediate.

Compare with: "you need to learn because it will be useful for you in the future / will help you get good job", an argument that's well-known to work on nearly zero teenagers ever.

> College?

Mixed motivations, but the fact that social life gets taken up to 11 definitely doesn't hurt :).

It's easy to keep long-term motivations in mind when following the path towards distant reward keeps yielding smaller rewards along the way. Take that away, and people check out or burn out.

More like offering a potential counterpoint, motivated by general experience that people generally aren't stupid

I would say that everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times. Being a smarter person is attaining greater competence at keeping the stupid in check.

> I don't think playing Devil's advocate is misanthropic.

Masterfully phrased :) i.e. you agree you were bored and looking for an interlocutor.

> Do you even remember middle/high school?

Yes.

> It's easy to keep long-term motivations in mind when following the path towards distant reward keeps yielding smaller rewards along the way. Take that away, and people check out or burn out.

Yeah I'm an economics college dropout from nowhere with a 2.8 GPA who couldn't make it to class. I flushed a 1560/1600 SAT and 173/180 LSAT down the toilet (read: Ivy League tier standardized test grades). I ended up working for Google as a SWE. How? After dropping out, I worked as a waiter, thought that rumored iSlate thing sounded pretty cool, and maybe I should make a restaurant app for it. Taught myself programming, launched after 2.5 years, sold it after 4, interviewed for Google expecting to fail.

To peer poster's point: everyone is smart and stupid at the same time, about different things at different times.

Someone who experienced the changing and flippant tides of fortune...

You learned your numbers at least mostly meant nothing, and seemingly learnt the valuable lesson of hardwork and luck (and a brain cell or two to rub together).

Maybe, someday you will be able to notice the rest of the drab populous, some of whom have no braincells, some that never learnt to work, or have never managed to have lady luck on their side, instead courting her cousins disease and malady, and you may regret your shortsighted and uninformed comment(s).

The road to riches is not lined with short term rewards, but with trials and many a tribulation, hardly any of it deserved...

> The road to riches is not lined with short term rewards, but with trials and many a tribulation, hardly any of it deserved...

I'd say it's both. It's like a simple board game[0], where you race on a line of steps, and the line is littered with bonuses and penalties, and each turn you move along according to the roll of the dice. A couple lucky rolls, you can be half-way to finish line in few turns. A couple unlucky rolls, and you quit playing, or plain lose to your lucky friend. If you somehow avoid both the bonuses and penalties, well the line is long and the game is fucking dull and you'll probably get bored half-way.

(Bonus point for making the line into a loop, so the game can take arbitrarily long, and initial advantage grows superlinearly, making the game beyond boring, a source of real-life conflicts between friends and families. Yes, I believe that game is called Monopoly.)

[0] - Like the ones we used to play as kids, not the modern Board Games that Board Gamers love to play at social events and Board Game Cafes.

I feel like you're very close to the realisation/philosophy that I hold here, which is that hard work doesn't pay off.

In the sense that you cannot willpower your way to a goal that requires a great deal of sustatined effort. You simply can't. People dont become olympic athletes by training hard so they can win. They become olympic athletes by training hard because they like training. They have friends there, and feel good at it, and get fulfillment from it, and found all sorts of little tricks to make it easier and not exact a psychological toll from them.

This all is to say, if you want to make a change in life, its not enough to try really hard. You have to set up structures, often social structures, to help it become fun.

You're right and I think you could go further. There's a carrot and there's a stick. You can join communities where change happens by force. Think of the guy who runs someone over in his car then becomes a priest to atone. He's not necessarily having fun. Think of slaves: they're not having fun, but the social structure ensures they'll remain slaves. As we speak there are teenage boys fighting each other in the Middle East and Europe - not because it's fun but because their society ensures they'll be thrown in jail or killed if they don't fight.

hard work is a necessary but not sufficient factor to achieve success.

Yes, but more importantly, "hard work" is unsustainable on its own, and leads to a burnout.

To use an engine analogy, it's not enough to supply fuel for the engine to burn and do work; you also need lubrication for the moving parts and cooling for the whole assembly if you want the engine to keep going.

Most countries other than the US don't have such rigorous training for doctors. After graduating medical school (which is typically done while others are doing their bachelors), you have your medical license and can start practicing. Medical school is 6 years in Brazil as opposed to the required 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, and 3-7 years of residency (not counting any fellowship that you may opt to do afterwards).

Which is all to say that she was right on the finish line before deciding to throw it all away.

> Most countries other than the US don't have such rigorous training for doctors

Where do you get this notion?

If Brazil is anything like Argentina -- and I bet it is in this context -- the study and internship stages of doctor training are positively grueling. Many doctors in training do drugs to cope. They work long hours and make all sorts of mistakes. Many are in terrible moods. And patients and people can get really rude and impatient with them.

It can be a really thankless, grueling job. I wonder why people choose it at all.

Used to be a desire to help people. Today, in countries like Brazil, mostly money - a doctor makes on average 20x the minimum salary, easily 40x.

To answer my own question, I do think people do want to help other people.

My question was mostlt rethorical, more of a reflection on the difficult life they choose for themselves. But thankfully some people do think of others!

There's an excellent essay on Anarchy Unbound about this. It analyses inter-group transactions and methods to not be cheated. Essentially, cheaters are defined as people who discount future transactions as 0. Therefore, I've easy to filter them out it's to require an upfront cost for any unknown person to transaction with you.

The thing that blew my mind was you can use non-monitary costs. E.g. if someone from an out group learns your language and your culture, that's a moderate investment. To recoup that, they need to make multiple transactions and are therefore less likely to cheat.

It's by no means a perfect metric - and it works much better in smaller, tribal settings - but it's still a fascinating analysis

Momentary emotions often trump long term rational planning in certain types of people.

Think of it as one of life's many filters - better such person didnt become a doctor, we wouldn't be talking about money being lost due to her stupidity.

In a different day and age (and with a bit more luck) she would have gone on to invent fractional reserve banking.

And if she had taken the govt route, she would have gone on to invenst quantitative easing.

I'd add that in the Brazilian these medical schools frequented by the children of the elite, graduation party funds add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Students are expected to pony up a sizeable monthly sum starting from the first year of the graduation.

Martin Shkreli was doing that, and he actually did win big enough to pay back and still went to jail.

SBF also will probably end up being able to pay people back, but it's jail for him too.

Does the right to be forgotten apply to the legal system as well? I thought it was more about online privacy etc

Similar to how you can get criminal convictions expunged so it doesn't affect employment etc but any terms of the expungement still hold

Disclaimer: not only am I not a lawyer, I'm also incredibly lazy and haven't even Google searched right to be forgotten laws

The legal system doesn't forget about you. The issue is more that if you google a potential business partner you might treat them differently if you find old articles about their conviction for embezzlement. Which is both good and bad.

There is a tension between protecting the innocent and the reformed from their past on one side, and protecting potential victims on the other.

it does for minors once they become adults?

Here the bank CEO was being scammed and allegedly embezzled: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-13/-pig-butc...

Prospect theory predicts people are more likely to gamble to prevent a sure loss.

> One reason I think the European “right to be forgotten” is a problem is because it is a shield for people who use their social skills as a weapon.

Contrarian counterposition: perhaps the problem rather is that so many people become easily bewitched by social skills? I do believe that even if there was no "right to be forgotten", such people would easily be capable of using their social skills to "wipe away" the warning signs of the criminal past.

Yeah but the right to be forgotten is because there's a perceived imbalance between now and 70 years ago: before, people would forget you, and nobody found it weird. Today, you're labelled forever in permanent databases, and it's hard to get a redeeming chance.

We believe, in Europe, that it's better to have a criminal re-offend, than to have no criminal being given a second chance, and that's totally a choice and we can change our mind later anyway. But for now, we want to try it.

the bank manager sounds like "Owning Mahony"

Many people have a sense that they could perform much better, given the right opportunities, the right environment, etc. In software development, the thoughts might be: if only the requirements didn't change, if only the codebase was more modern, if only the architecture had been designed with more foresight so we didn't have to shift the architecture while we were adding features. If only I wasn't being held back by these factors, I'd be performing brilliantly. And these factors have nothing to do with me. So don't I deserve to be paid and respected like a brilliant performer?

Conveniently forgetting that the people who perform brilliantly under actual adverse conditions have to be a lot better at the job, and work a lot harder, than someone who feels that they could hypothetically perform brilliantly under hypothetical ideal conditions.

I've never seen someone like this turn to embezzlement, but I've seen them aggrandize themselves into positions of respect through sheer confidence and then bounce from failure to failure, shifting blame to other people or external circumstances.

> Many people have a sense that they could perform much better, given the right opportunities, the right environment, etc.

Many people have a sense that they are as good as they appear to be, when what gave them the edge over others is just pure luck. And perhaps their persuasive capabilities to make others do the hard work.

And sometimes people who really are extremely good at their jobs forget that how good they are has a large element of luck in it, in addition to the work they put in.

It’s a free market fallacy. If you’re good at business you can create value and get rich. If you play the long game you collaborate and take the big prize.

I read this as "made more money over the course of their career" which is probably true because embezzlers are rarely stealing multiples of their salary every year. That's just too brazen. And even if they manage to steal 3x their salary, that just means they move their retirement back by 3 years. They'd have to repeatedly do this for 5-10 years without getting caught before they'd break even compared to a normal career. And that's before any fines and money they have to pay back.

Seems like a skill issue. If they’d really apply themselves, they could have successful career as a corporate raider or one of the other many forms of embezzlement that they don’t send you to jail for.

They just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop being lazy. I mean this stuff is kinda robber-baron 101.

My method for cheating on exams was to learn the material.

All things equal, one is far more exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceijkZQI1HM

I was about to quote post that exact line. I see this type of thinking everywhere. It shows that the majority of people who never tried to achieve anything have no clue how the system works.

Sam Bankman Fried was smart, raised in the US and he had decent connections too, look where he ended up.

In fact, I never met a smart totally honest person in my generation who got rich.

No justice in life but what we make…

Skill and pay in many fields seem pretty inversely related. You can learn software skills in a few years and make six figures. Tell that to an accompanist. There isn’t one accompanist alive that has less than a decade of serious hard work to get where they’re at. Average salary for an accompanist in California is under $40000. Even in software, game dev is considerably harder than most positions and it’s the lowest paying.

>stopped stealing and starting working honestly.

Yeah but that requires actual real work embezzling is actually kind of mindless once the cycle is started. Stealing is usually easier,even if you disagree on that part. The embezzling still has one thing going, its almost always faster. Why would the embezzler work for 30-40 years to be rich when they can have a chance at retiring well before they are starting to age.

I once worked somewhere that was significantly embezzled. I knew the people that did it personally. I actually had this same discussion with other coworkers there. Yeah they could have made more money honestly. However what they did instead (by our estimates from various public evidence) bank around 50-60 mil and vanish before they were 35 years old. Still in good health and young enough to enjoy life.

The best engineer I ever worked with had 3 full time W-2 jobs remote in the US.

It was really unfortunate when all 3 companies found out at the same time and he was fired from all 3. Not unfortunate that he was fired, but unfortunate that his talent went to waste.

He was brilliant. But also a con artist.

Edit: I was his direct manager, and when I say he "was brilliant" I mean that he was extremely smart, extremely good at thinking about architecture, all the characteristics of a great engineer, etc. But he simply didn't have the time to execute because he was secretly splitting his time between 3 companies. So he was fired for low productivity, even though he had all of the skills needed to be extraordinarily productive.

Probably should have paid him triple the salary to be the best engineer you ever worked with then.

Nah. I know a guy who does this, he views it as a game and all the money coming in is his score. Tripling his salary would just raise his high score and he'd keep playing as hard as ever.

Isn’t it, though? Why do most people work? For the joy of making their employer richer? Or to take home the bacon and make a better life for themselves and people they care about?

I used to be the type to make loyalty to my great exalted employer first and foremost, sacrificing chunks of my personal life beyond what my salary required. Then I wised up and now view it as how much I can extract as quickly as possible. Coincidentally, the quality of my work shot up when I viewed myself as mostly a mercenary, consistent raises, consistently good reviews even though I care less and less. So I see where he is coming from and I wish more people thought like him.

100%, and I have a ton of respect for how he thinks about work. While I can't bring myself to do the multiple FTE positions thing, I've spent half my career doing freelance/consulting work for multiple clients at once, and I love the mindset since I feel like it gets to the core of what "work" is.

In a lot of ways the "overemployment" thing comes down to treating full-time jobs like agency clients. Which I'm all for in theory and I'm a lot happier when I'm working with clients instead of employers. But I can't personally handle the dishonesty required.

> Why do most people work?

People work for satisfaction as well as money. You even give your own examples of a non-financial motivation before you got "wise". Only caring about money sounds like hell to me. Look at everyone that chooses a calling or career that doesn't pay well like teaching or much of our health system. Please don't assume they are stupid people making bad decisions - they often know exactly what they are doing (e.g. my extremely smart teacher friends) and part of their gross income is the non-financial payoffs of the job.

Personally I think society depends strongly on people chasing satisfaction from their jobs, and sectors which only chase the money have a rather sick ambiance (although perhaps necessary sectors?). Every good tradie is proud of their work.

There are a lot of taker/user jobs and bosses - perhaps avoiding those is the trick if you want satisfaction.

I work because it's a nice way to live. I made enough to retire on a long time ago. I know a (eg) fancy car isn't going to meaningfully affect my happiness.

I've been in jobs with nothing to do. It sucks.

Work is an important component of a happy life. If I ever get tired of software maybe I'll go garden or something.

I’d be curious to know if he was paid any meaningful premium at all.

“We gave him the max 5% raise” doesn’t come close to cutting it.

How long did he last? As if he gets a job within 2 years after working for a year, he is still ahead.

> even though he had all of the skills needed to be extraordinarily productive.

Why should he want to be productive? Does your company reward such a thing proportionally?

I still think he is ahead of where he would otherwise be.

> Why should he want to be productive? Does your company reward such a thing proportionally?

Companies rely on at least a minimum level of productivity from their employees. He had the skills to be extraordinarily productive, but he probably only needed to be 'ordinarily' productive, and according to GP, he was not.

Depending on how long he lasted, there could be a strong case for being a repeated C player.

Since he could've been valued at up to 3x what the company was paying him, why doesn't that make the company the con artist?

Well, apparently he couldn't have been, because in the end he wasn't actually capable of doing 3x the work.

Guessing here, but I'd bet he was fully capable if he could arrange his own schedule, but the companies insisted the work be done (and meetings attended) 9-5 M-F.

Probably the lack of lying in this specific arrangment that seems otherwise straight forward and honest. Also who values an employee based on how well they can work for other companies. This lad just made a bet and lost.

If you actually get paid 3X, most of it goes to tax. Whereas, every embezzled dollar is yours.

Not nearly "most" of it, for the vast majority of us.

If you're single in the US, you have to earn over $578,125 taxable dollars in a year to have a single dollar of you income taxed at the highest rate, 37%. So considering only federal taxes there is no way most of anyone's income goes to tax in the US. The highest state tax bracket in the US, a quick search tells me, is 13.3%. In California, any dollars of taxable income you earn over $1 million gets taxed at this rate. So if you earn $2 over this threshold, the majority of these two dollars, rounding up, will be taxed. If you manage to earn enough above this threshold for the extra 0.3% tax to make up for the lower tax brackets you crossed on the way to this threshold, you are a pretty rare individual indeed.

You're supposed to declare earnings from crime to the IRS. Otherwise you're committing 2 crimes, which is worse once you get caught.

24% tax rate for single filers $89,076 to $170,050 or for a married couple $178,151 to $340,100

I realize there are other tax burdens but you are hard pressed to get higher than 45%

His fraudulence created an illusion that suckered 3 employers into paying him a salary. I don't think that implies he's worth 3 salaries.

Seriously though, -if- he's performing up to expected standards at each of this three jobs, and there is no conflict of interest between these companies, why is it a problem? The only real problem seems to be that he didn't disclose it--not that there was anything inherently immoral about taking more than one job.

When someone holds down three low-paid service jobs, we congratulate them for working their ass off. But when someone on salary does the same thing, employers cry foul.

From the original comment,

> But he simply didn't have the time to execute because he was secretly splitting his time between 3 companies. So he was fired for low productivity...

Missed OP's additional edit. In that case, yea, sucks for him. Don't over-extend yourself!

I'm not a lawyer, but in general I think it would come down to the laws where this took place, the nature of the work, and the impact on the employee's ability to fulfill their job duties.

My understanding is there could be a common law duty to the employer at play, even when the employee didn't sign a noncompete and there's nothing specifically called out in the employment agreement.

It's also my understanding that if the employee acted to the detriment of the employer, such as compromising their own ability to perform job duties (as happened here) or competed against that employer, they may be in breach of that duty and could be terminated for cause depending on the specific laws.

So, if anybody is thinking about trying this, it's probably worth checking into local laws and potentially keeping records such as the hours worked for each employer. I would assume it's slightly more cut and dry when an hourly employee is in breach, since the hours are normally already tracked.

Where's the fraud if he did what was asked of him?

Evidently, he didn't.

>So he was fired for low productivity

My comment was posted before the edit. The comment made it seem like he was fired for working at multiple companies, not low productivity.

He was fired for poor performance.

So clearly he was only capable of temporarily pretending to have three times the value.

Seems like startup senior management potential to me.

In the defense and aerospace industry I've known - and continue to know - a number of engineers and specialists who do this. Leadership will often turn a blind eye, because the particular skill is so specialized, they'd need to give up a product line (or the whole business) if they terminate the guy. But, this being a very sick industry, they can't actually pay the guy more, so you get these terrible arrangements.

Why can't they pay people more?

Stock market go brrr.

Since the eighties we've generally trended towards executives making awful decisions in service of the great number in the sky - irrational and arbitrary layoffs, consistent undercompensation, wealth hoarding, underinvestment in long term profits... these are all common place or expected in your standard 9-5 corporate America job.

So it's not a can't but won't situation?

Yes. If some people get more, other people will ask for more and the company can't ^H^H^H^H won't afford that, so better to lose a few individuals than pay everyone more. So, if you're a project manager, you sometimes need to turn a blind eye to make things work for you.

This explains Boeing.

Unless of course one steals company secrets or something, why do they feel the need for exclusivity in the first place?

It's so that they are dependent on them and they have the leverage.

It's also because no matter what he delivers and how happy they are with it, they always think they could have pushed him to deliver more, if they squeezed more of his hours.

Like a crappy restaurant owner who makes the waiters also mop the floor or do whatever when no patrons have arrived yet, because they can't fathom paying them to "sit".

There are pay caps that do not correspond to reality, and you often don’t need such capable people for 40+ hours a week. When I consulted I explicitly told my clients that they do not need me full time, and I will have two clients add spend half of my time each week on each. I billed each client half my full time amount. Whether their accounting department knew all that is none of my business.

Most defense industry contracts are awarded to the low bidder, so contractors underbid just to continue operating. But then that leaves them without sufficient revenue to pay market rate wages to employees with the specialized skills to deliver on the contracts. Most defense companies still manage to muddle through somehow but it's messy.

I don’t think that's true.

Most large contracts are cost-plus. Contractor direct costs + some agreed upon margin.

Contracts where all profits scale 1:1 with costs are a relatively small slice of total spending due to obvious poor incentives.

Fuel and similar commodities may look kind of like a cost+ contract, but it’s market price + X$ not market price * some profit margin so the incentives are different. It’s a net win for both sides if such variables are removed from the equation.

The pay scales are locked down by two primary components: 1) the project contract document locks charges pretty severely for the project, to the point where a single high pay scale putting in hours will probably require a revision to the charges, but more importantly, 2) the owning Big Defense Conglomerate has armor plated pay ceilings for non-managerial employees - non-financial technicians are interchangeable cogs, that's the doctrine, regardless of any particular realities of skill shortage or availability.

Disregard what the Overlords might tell you; 2 is way more important, because when it comes to 1, the military program offices are VERY open to revisiting the charge schedule, if it means they get transparency and a better chance of something that might work. Those non-managerial pay ceilings were laughable pre-Covid, and now it's gotten just surreal, still based on a flat national average of what they consider the job role to be, something that's also gotten surreal, with Kinkos employees being included in sw engineer pay codes.

It's worsened by the fact they can't really take advantage of remote workers, somewhere with less CoL, in Alabama or Pakistan or whatever. Everything's on site, and it really does seem like every defense company I've ever worked is sited in some random shitty place where the local economy - if there is one - is composed of the company and three Applebees-like chains that service it.

Rates are set by the government.

They’re high, but not Meta high.

Employers in this industry could pay more out of overhead but then their numbers wouldn’t look as good as their competitors, the stock would underperform, and access to favorable credit terms would be restricted and in an industry with such astronomically (heh) high capital costs that’s very bad.

Please tell me this doesn’t happen in medtech too

I worked with a guy who had multiple jobs like that, was supposed to be on call 24/7 for the job that he had in common with me. One day he finally answered the wrong phone with the wrong company name when his boss was out of town and some director tried to contact him in an emergency.

He was highly skilled, but also was not well liked by his peers. He knew how to suck up to no end, deflect blame for his own mistakes, and how to get out of work (presumably so he could do his other jobs) and get it dumped on others.

He was hated by his peers and it was no surprise (to anyone who worked with him as a peer one on one) when he got caught.

It was a similar situation where his skills were excellent when tried, but he chose to put them to use put to use to shaft other coworkers and honestly not do much at all / work elsewhere.

I ran into him later and as usual he was all about the excuses and about how he felt the folks at the company were bad people and so on, but it was like everything with him, a little truism that he bent to mean that he should get his no matter what the cost to anyone.

> but he chose to put them to use put to use to shaft other coworkers and honestly not do much at all / work elsewhere.

No. he put his skills to use to maximize his income and a side effect of that was screwing over his coworkers.

I'm not sure what the "No" part is here. Your statement seems very similar to what I said.

They look similar but there's a difference.

His primary goal wasn't to hurt those people, his primary goal was to make money. the hurting people was a side effect.

I didn't think of it as his primary goal, but it is who he is / he doesn't care. Work with someone like that and their intent doesn't matter as far as its impact on you.

Wait -- being fired for low productivity wouldn't require his multiple jobs being discovered. But you say he was fired when the companies found out. So they (or rather... you, his direct manager?) didn't notice his low productivity until they noticed he was working three jobs? Or perhaps you noticed but weren't sure what to do about it until you discovered the extra jobs?

(Incidentally, I don't approve of working multiple jobs simultaneous like this without your employers knowing, I think it's unethical. But also... let's be real, many supervisors and companies don't in fact seem to notice or fire people with low productivity, and productivity varies wildly between people who aren't secretly working extra jobs too)

Being fired for low productivity is usually a long and slow process even in the US

Having a solid reason can mean instead of PIPs etc you just immediately terminate

When we're talking about a "brilliant" engineer, the "best I ever worked with", the wise manager looks for ways to adjust the employer-employee relationship keep him, not seeks reasons to immediately terminate.

So if they were fired more quickly than they could be fired for low productivity, it sounds like they were fired for something other than low productivity, no?

> I don't approve of working multiple jobs simultaneous like this without your employers knowing, I think it's unethical.

Why is that unethical? I don't think it's my employer's business what I do with my time outside of work hours. Where "work hours" should be a flexible thing, especially for knowledge work, outside of required meeting attendance.

Ultimately as long as I get my job done to my employer's satisfaction, that should be all that matters. Seems like that was the real problem with the guy who got fired upthread; the discovery of the multiple-jobs thing was a convenient way to fire him without having to deal with documenting the low performance, a PIP, etc.

What I think is unethical is companies making employees sign a "I won't work anywhere else while employed here" thing when they start work.

You say he was fired for productivity, but you also say he was fired when his employers found out he was working for all 3. It seems to me that the real reason wasn't his productivity, because he would have been fired for that without waiting for his employers to find out about his multiple jobs.

Did he did what you asked him to do? And was that about creating/delivering something specific? Or did you pay him for sitting on a chair for 8+ hours thinking exclusively for you? If one hires an X and he gets the X job done, then why would it matter if he works in 200 other jobs?

I see this edit added later:

>But he simply didn't have the time to execute because he was secretly splitting his time between 3 companies. So he was fired for low productivity, even though he had all of the skills needed to be extraordinarily productive.

That would be a legit reason to fire them!

Or it could be a post-facto rationalization ("he worked elsewhere too, so he couldn't have been productive"). Parent already said he was fired when they found out he working at another 2 places, which is different from the new story that they saw "low productivity".

It sounds like X job wasn't getting done. If one hires an X, and only gets .2 X, it becomes material that there are 4 other jobs trying to happen.

  Parent already said he was fired when they found out he working at another 2 places, which is different from the new story that they saw "low productivity".

If someone is seems smart and skilled enough to have high output, but actually has low output, most companies/managers will spend a lot of effort and time trying to improve the situation. Obviously the guy is smart, so perhaps we just haven't onboarded him properly, or $POTENTIAL_REASONS.

It might take 2-4 months before you're sure enough it's never going to work out. You hope things will improve.

But if, during that 2-4 months, you find out the guy has another job, that hope disappears instantly.

This is my most charitable read of what happened, and I've heard of cases just like this.

If you've got the "best engineer I ever worked with" in your employ, is firing him really the best option? Was he even asked how to get 100% of his time, effort and attention? Or even 50%? What if instead of trying to squeeze 3 jobs into Mon-Fri 9-5 he was given free reign to schedule his own hours, including nights and weekends?

It just seems that terminating the relationship without exploring other options is more of a jealousy/pissed-off reaction than a rational decision.

So let's imagine this is how it went down:

1. The person impresses everyone during the interview process with their skills and potential.

2. Initially, the person doesn’t meet the expected productivity levels. They give various plausible reasons and commit to improving.

3. Time passes but there is no significant improvement in their output. Management invests time and resources in identifying possible support and interventions to help enhance their performance.

4. It’s eventually discovered that the person is only dedicating 2-3 hours per day to their role with your company, instead of the agreed 8 hours, because they are simultaneously pulling the same scam with two other companies.

In this situation, I don't think it would be rational for a manager to try and work out a suitable working relationship. The person has already shown they are dishonest and cannot be trusted. This not about envy or anger, but about using past behaviour to predict future behaviour.

There was no mention of any warnings or interventions or probationary periods. The OP said he was fired for working 3 jobs, and then later edited that to say it was due to low productivity.

Lets be real -- a "brilliant" engineer knows what is expected, knows how to do quality work, and certainly is capable of meeting minimum output to avoid getting fired, even just putting in 10-15 hours a week. The whole story seems kind of off.

OK I think the point I was trying to make is getting lost.

All I'm saying is:

1. The fact that someone hasn't yet been fired for underperformance doesn't mean they're meeting expectations, and will be retained indefinitely without improved performance.

2. If someone in that situation is subsequently discovered to have a secret second job, then the reason for underperformance will be obvious (they never intended to put in the effort that would be reasonable to expect for a full time job), so there's no longer any good reason to believe their performance might improve.

And I'm saying, the "best engineer you ever worked with" is fully capable of avoiding the low, low bar of being fired for underperformance, even splitting his time 3 ways. So something about the story doesn't seem exactly right.

The bar depends on the level at which they were hired.

> is fully capable of avoiding the low

Maybe you’ve just worked with different engineers and at companies that have different minimum standards?

Or, maybe the original story was true that he was actually fired simply for having multiple jobs, because the bosses were butthurt, and the later edit about low performance was not really entirely accurate.

It doesnt sound a bit strange to you when the OP states that "his talent went to waste"? Don't you think the "best engineer you ever worked with" could pass an interview rather easily (I mean, he already did at least 3 times) and get back to work somewhere else? Is the OP implying that losing this particular job was so devastating that this brilliant engineer quit the industry?

You never want to work with a dishonest person, even if they are brilliant.

> Parent already said he was fired when they found out he working at another 2 places, which is different from the new story that they saw "low productivity".

Exactly, which is reason to be at least a bit skeptical that this story went down as described.

> post-facto rationalization

Highly likely.

Once the entire world suddenly shifted to remote in Q2 2020, everybody and their mother thought about juggling multiple jobs, and a few went ahead and tried it. Why wouldn't a brilliant engineer give it a shot? Instead of firing this dude, management should have taken a hard look in the mirror and ask if they have failed to compensate top-tier talent sufficiently, and whether they provide proper motivation, freedom, and insulation from bullshit meetings and time-wasters.

I'm not saying don't ever fire him, but that should be an absolute last resort. The initial steps should be to figure out a way to retain his services and contributions.

Can you say how all 3 companies found out?

There is a whole subreddit for this with 300,000 subscribers:

https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/

When I read the stories I question the payoff matrix a bit - it seems like most have 2-3 $150K/year jobs, but if you're really good at one job and aggressively switch to the highest-payoff opportunities, you can easily make into the millions per year. But it makes a lot of sense for people that are stuck at the bottom of the company ranks and want to generate more transactions for themselves that actually result in more dollars.

I sometimes I wish I had the balls to pull something like that off. I'd always been transparent with my employer about my side work so that it was put into my employment agreement.

My wife had two poor performers who she fired this year because they were over-employed and doing shitty work.

You can make millions in only a handful of careers. Even in software development, making it to principal at a FAANG is much harder than simply meeting expectations at 3 senior engineering jobs.

What do you mean? There are 3 man-days each day, just enough for 3 jobs :D

There's nothing illegal about this, although Hacker News for some reason has the peculiar belief that there is.

Any contract purporting to prevent an employee from earning money elsewhere is an illegal restraint of trade. Indeed the company would be the criminal if they tried to write this into their employment agreements.

This is a common kind of belief among rational people about how the world should work, based on a casual reading of early law. In general they fail to take into account the fact that there has been decades+ of many smart and awful people chipping away at these laws with exceptions and loopholes until they effectively apply nowhere anymore. For instance, the idea of "exempt" employees was originally only for executive-level people, but now just applies to everyone with an office job. The law is what the modern courts say it is, not what we wanted it to be 100 years ago.

Source?

"Exempt employee" has to do with overtime, not moonlighting. It's not relevant to this discussion.

So strange. Was firing him really the best decision for you? Given the challenges of finding and onboarding top-tier talent (this guy was brilliant, the best you ever worked with), couldn't your company have worked something out? There are a million arrangements possible -- agreeing to him working one (but not two) additional jobs (going from 33 to 50% of his time is a 50% increase for you), giving him a raise or some equity component, switching to some sort of contracting/1099 arrangement, allow him to be a "thought leader" on architecture and big-picture but not a day-to-day coder, whatever.

The decision to just fire this brilliant guy without considering other options seems so short-sighted and sub-optimal (for the company).

The company I work for has a lot of stupid bullshit. My coping mechanism for this stupid bullshit is to complain loudly about it, and try ineffectually to get it changed. What I will not do, ever, is lie to my bosses and use that bullshit as some justification. Both of these things are true: (1) their company should deal with their own bullshit so they can actually retain top talent, and also (2) firing the liar was absolutely the right move. Lies have no place in the professional world, ever.

You're projecting. Nowhere in the story is any mention of lying, or denying that he had multiple jobs.

> He was brilliant. But also a con artist.

Yes, it was very clearly stated that he was a liar. A "con artist" is a significantly bigger liar than a mere "liar".

> You're projecting.

Hmm. "It's not OK to do X. I refuse to do X and you should not tolerate people who do it." That's projecting? I think you need to look up what that word means. Unless you're literally accusing me of being a liar specifically because I am against lying? Some kind of "takes one to know one" Grade-school jab? What exactly are you on about?

If the managers found evidence that he was working 3 jobs, asked him about it, and he denied it, then yes 100% he'd be a liar. Nowhere in the story does it say he denied anything, protested, faked or exaggerated his contributions, etc. His only deficiency, according to the story, was not enough time.

I'm saying you're projecting because you assumed he lied in some way, when the story doesn't say that.

FWIW, the stories on this Web site appear to be fictional. I just read the lengthy https://www.stimmel-law.com/en/articles/story-13-adverse-pos... which is about a retired machinist engaging in boat jousts on Shaw Lake in Golden Gate Park. There's no trace of a real person named Benjamin McIsserson, and no Shaw Lake in Golden Gate Park. (It's probably a stand-in for Spreckels Lake, which was built for model boats but which has never hosted combat between them.)

So take it with a grain of salt.

>There's no trace of a real person named Benjamin McIsserson

I don't think this has any bearing on the whether the story itself is fictitious or not. I imagine all of the real names have been substituted in all of the stories, to prevent any unnecessary conflict/drama/liability/etc.

Protecting a person makes sense, but a lake is not going to sue for its role in the story. These details feel sketchy, and that is sort of the take away from the original piece: when someone is unreliable in one area, they are more suspect in others. To be charitable, the author maybe lost that detail of the story, but they could easily have substituted a generic 'lake in Golden Gate Park'. Or they could just use Google Maps to find Stow, Lloyd, Spreckles lakes (Elk Glenn, and the Chain of Lakes lakes would be unsuitable for boat jousts).

If it was just a name, I’d agree. But there’s no way someone built a razor-sharp remote controlled boat and sent it running around a lake in Golden Gate Park sinking other boats without making the news.

> accidently rammed one of the toy sail boats, shattering its mast, sinking the little vessel.

"accidentally" doesn't sound like some asshole is just going around ruining kid's days with a demon boat. it's not too far fetched to imagine someone in the SFMYC accidentally hitting another boat and that not making the news. they're not the WWCC, which would go around sinking each other's ships and is active at Maker faire.

SF model yacht club western warship combat club

Even if the story is fiction, the author has certainly come across the exact same type of embezzler that I have.

As far as I can tell, these type of fraudsters are deeply wounded narcissistic people who were utterly twisted by their caregivers as children.

> narcissistic people who were utterly twisted by their caregivers as children

Please don't be too quick to blame parents - remember we used to blame autism on refrigerator mothers: https://en-wp.org/wiki/Refrigerator_mother_theory -- society tends to victimise mothers and without knowing the people involved nasty stereotypes are unhealthy.

Mayo clinic says:

  Although the cause of narcissistic personality disorder isn't known, some researchers think that overprotective or neglectful parenting may have an impact on children who are born with a tendency to develop the disorder.

That is: parenting can be a cause but please don't jump to the harmful generalisation that parenting is always the cause.

Perhaps Stow Lake?

Spreckels is where people run the toy boats.

BTW Stow Lake was renamed a few months ago: https://sfrecpark.org/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=1696

Fictional, or simply "Names Changed"? An awful lot of public stories are done pseudononymously and with the names changed for the simple fact that it's harder to prove libel if it's not talking about real people. And in this kind of legal story, you can bet that the persons involved are going to be quick to sue for libel. The linked article lends creedence to this, it introduces the businessman/embezzler as "Eddie Chan (not his real name)"

He mentions in the article he uses pseudonyms. But that’s an obvious assumption to make also imo.

Reading this story and doing some googling sadly makes me pretty confident that this linked one (about boat jousts) is fake. The ending details an explosion and there is no news article of that anywhere in the specified time period (which he says is a few months before the invasion of Iraq). Would love to be wrong though.

According to the firm that redesigned the website in 2017, Lee Stimmel had written over 600 articles.

https://www.baydesignassociates.com/article/website-redesign...

Mostly relatively dry discussions, but they do seem a lot better structured than the average blog post, and (thankfully) not AI garbage. He is a good writer.

The story OP posted is tagged with "War Stories", and these do seem to be far more literary, with first-person perspective and novel-like dialogue.

https://www.stimmel-law.com/en/articles/category/lessons-com...

I suspect the same writer really has written all of these. It may be the actual person credited, Lee Stimmel, but it impossible to know if it's a ghostwriter without other samples of Stimmel's writing. But I don't think the technical details of the law would be well captured by a ghostwriter. There is a distinct change of style between both kinds of articles, but to me it feels like the same person writing.

It’s all really fun writing and I lost a few hours reading through them. Love this kind of stuff.

I'm kinda on the fence with this one.

I mean, the site is apparently a real law firm in San Francisco, so even if it's fictional (the names definitely should be!), the stories are probably based on real events.

Unless one of the partners has a side hobby of writing fiction on stories about law!

The stories are fascinating though, spent a couple hours reading some of those.

thanks for linking to that; real or not it was a great and absorbingly-written story

I've been reading through these (number 15 is long, but worth it), and I'm pretty sure all of the "Phelps" stories are fiction, with a cast of interlinked characters. The others are... maybe, maybe not, but told straight. I'm glad to have found this site.

This story meshes with every incident of long term fraud or embezzlement I've seen in my business life (I've had to deal with four, so it is annecdata):

1. The fraudster is really, really nice and often has a disarming appearance. Often it's pretty or handsome. The one that got the most, an book keeper who got $143,000 via petty cash looked like everyone's Grandma.

2. The money is always spent quickly and on things that were not obvious to others at work. Vacations, gifts for family members, luxury items... One guy spent it all on guitars and amplifiers.

3. When caught, the fraudster/embezzler admits it readily and cooperates with everyone... The reason every one gave was right out of a Michael Chrichton book, "The Great Train Robbery":

Judge: Now, on the matter of motive, we ask you: Why did you conceive, plan and execute this dastardly and scandalous crime?

Edward Pierce: I wanted the money.

Why do you rob banks?

Because that's where the money is

I wonder, were they of some type? Lonely, disconnected, depressed?

I know from personal experience that having no life, you get in a strange space, start thinking strange thoughts. Ridiculous things become plausible. Take the money? Why not! It's not like things can get worse for me.

>Since what Eddie didn’t understand is that people are not only in business for the money. Oh, it’s important, but it’s never just the money in my experience. It’s a dozen other things, the joy of creating something from nothing, the excitement of success, the comradeship one gets from working in a team that is good and effective, etc, etc. Business may be competitive, but there are rules and it is not war. To Eddie, business was not only war, but war with the only rules being do not get caught if you can and make all the money you can. And trust no one.

Same with most of those "good guys" businessmen he constasts him with - who wouldn't hesitate to exploit, take advantage of, backstab, pull shady or even illegal shit on competitors, cut margin by selling shit, and of course, fire employees whenever they want to look good on paper and not give a fuck about it.

Like Zuck did to the Winklevoss twins and Saverin, and the billions of people the platform mind fucks with its algorithm to sell ads and collect data.

Or like Bill Gates and the Microsoft he run.

Or like Larry Elisson.

Or like Musk.

Or like Bezos.

Or the WeWork guy.

Or the Uber guys.

The list goes on.

Reading the article, I just kept thinking of Donald Trump (as a “smart” embezzler).

I think the author is confusing "well-spoken" for "nice."

Eddie can speak poetically in court. Cool. But he thinks that fact alone makes him better than other people. “Your courts are not used to hearing an honest statement, are they?” You're a professional con artist, bud, don't go patting yourself on the back for "honesty."

"Necessities of life are the proper destination of grim jobs with little men working at little desks." This guy is a stereotype of a Smug Rich Villain. If a movie character talked like that, you'd think it was a little over-the-top.

Maybe he’s recycling some handy words from a movie or novel.

> I think the author is confusing "well-spoken" for "nice."

There is at least some overlap with the meaning of "nice", though, as in "nice guy", where it refers to a kind of person who is not genuinely courteous or kind for the sake of another's good (the benefit for them being spiritual reward), but someone who does it with an ulterior motive, to get something (typically unspoken, as it is underhanded) in return. The "nice guy" is likewise a conman, because his whole dishonest performance is to ingratiate himself with someone, as if doing so entitles him to something in return (think of the "nice guy" who tries to please women in order to receive attention, affection, or sexual favors, and then either pouts and whines, or becomes nasty, either overtly or in passive aggressive ways, when he doesn't receive them).

Being "nice" is not the same as being "good". We should always be good, never nice.

I see what you're saying, but remember the "Nice Guy" trope is sarcastic. "Nice Guys" are not actually nice guys. There's nothing wrong with being genuinely nice.

Reminds me of the time I spent HOURS preparing to cheat for a history map test in middle school, didn't pass, and realized later how much easier actually studying for the test would have been.

I had a slightly better experience. For the thrill of it, I spent hours preparing for a couple of test papers making a number of little cheat sheets in tiny handwriting. At the end of the exercise I found I didn't need the cheat sheets - the stuff had gone right into memory and I did quite well in the tests.

I learned Spanish vocabulary writing words on my hands to cheat off of, but ended up too nervous to look at them during quizzes. Amazing how the desire to do well, fear of getting caught cheating, can turn into a hyper-powered study technique.

This was basically my studying strategy throughout my schooling, by preparing perfectly viable cheatsheets. Got everyone suspiciously staring, seeing the sheets on my desk as I reviewed them, only for me to visibly throw them out or put them away right before the exam started.

My study method was to try to think of questions that might be on a test from the material as I was reading it. I'd write up the questions as I went along and then write up the answers and study the answers. It worked great until someone saw my made up questions and they were close enough to the real questions that it was decided I had stolen the test.

> I had another client about the same time, an elderly business man disliked by almost all that knew him, a truly unpleasant individual who never praised anyone, made more money than anyone I knew and could be cast as Scrooge except for his enjoyment of fishing which was all that he truly cared about other than money. But honest…he often would give more to the other side in the bargain than they asked because it was better business tactics to have a vendor who was making good money with you than not.

> “Eddie’s just more honest than a lot of the business men I know... They grab a nickel here and lose a dollar in the long run.”

I have seen this so many times, over and over. People burning bridges over relatively small amounts of money, discounting the longterm relationship, and most disastrous of all, ignoring that everyone has their own network and whisper to everyone what "really happened". You get a reputation as an asshole and then you wonder why everyone else seems like they don't treat you fairly.

The article makes a point that for people capable of embezzling, the embezzling is less lucrative long term than what they could have done legally with their abilities.

I think in general there's immense power in the narratives people tell themselves. "I am too good/smart to be a straight-forward worker" can then land you in a significantly worse scenario than you can actually attain as a "straight-forward worker."

But it's not like the ego is doing those ROI calculations.

> Then what difference does it make if someone you don’t trust is involved? You don’t trust anyone anyway. If your systems work, they work.

This is where "Eddie's" argument falls through imo. Never assume your system works perfectly. Use every piece of supplementary information you have. Including knowledge of whether someone is willing and able to break the system.

Right, part of the system is not allowing in people who you already know to be untrustworthy.

I always thought the gentleman thief was a fictional character. Assuming this is more or less real (the detailed dialogue is a bit concerning) it’s fascinating.

Sociopaths who become con men may appear gentlemen. I've met one who posed as a fashion designer. Absolutely dangerous individual, but you'd never guess it from looking or meeting him.

How did you figure it out?

When he got close to what he wanted, he started lying about everything and anything. Eventually I realised he was trying to commit real estate fraud, and trying to illegally take over property through a series of stratagems. The lying was the giveaway. He just couldn't stop lying.

Anything and everything you asked him, he was: - always the victim - going to get his lawyers - subtly threatening violence - demanding something strange or bizarre, like documents he didn't need access to.

For people not used to it, it was a shock. He seemed affluent by every standard.

You have to at least be able to put on a veneer of decency to get into these jobs at some point.

Otherwise you would piss everyone off.

Madoff is the obvious example

It’s about time to re-read Going Postal; a fine reminder.

This is well worth the read, and though it's a Discworld novel it can stand pretty much alone if you want it to.

Once you realize just how firmly you're on the side of Moist and how identical Gilt is, then you can meditate for awhile on the world.

"Who are you trying to fool, Mr. Lipwig?"
"Me, i think. I've fallen into good ways. I keep thinking I can give it up any time I like, but I don't. But I know if I /couldn't/ give it up any time I liked, I wouldn't go on doing it. Er. There is another reason, too --"
"And that is -- ?"
"I'm not Reacher Gilt. That's sort of important. Some people might say there's not a lot of difference, but I can see it from where I stand and it's there.

It's like a golem not being a hammer."

I generally prefer the discworld books that are more firmly part of an overall storyline, like The Watch, since they have such great long character arcs. But Going Postal is a masterpiece in itself imho.

Terry Pratchett was always great at making you empathise with flawed characters. Also, he was exceptional at creating "bad" or "evil" characters with believable and complex motivations, which never excused their actions.

So many of his villains are multi-faceted, so much so that you start to think he actually cannot write an unsympathetic "pure evil/Sauron" style villain, and then he hits you right in the face with Carcer or Gilt.

Truly a phenomenal author. It's fun to watch how his one-dimensional parody characters take on a life of their own over the series; you can really tell he has a love for them, even if they're not his cup of tea.

Yes, how much I hated them, they're just written so well!

And your other point also hits home, I've read or listened to pretty much all of the discworld books at least three times by now and I love it when I come across a character without a name who is just used as a throwaway joke in an earlier book, and then to realise that they are fully fleshed out in the later books.

Always keep your pink flimsies in reach in case the corporate ____ ever hits the fan.

Mr. Pony works at X now. Poor guy.

"He was the company's chief engineer. He'd come with the company, and had hung on because at 58, with twinges in your knuckles, a sick wife, and a bad back, you think twice about grand gestures such as storming out."

I remember that; it was a great sequel to The Soul of a New Machine.

"Get the money any way you can, any time you can, short-term thinking, everyone is a crook anyway, so what’s the big deal?"

Reminds me of special someone y'all know caught snoozing in a court room this afternoon.

> I spent it on sweet, stupid things that make life an appropriate journey. Little things with some elegance attached. Things only worth buying because they have little value in the long run. Like life, itself.

Feel like I can oddly relate to this quote; not sure what that says about me, hah.

This reminds me of "All The Queen's Horses"[1], where a woman embezzled $53 million through careful accounting. I seem to recall it was mentioned how the perpetrator was described as nice and generous by her friends.

[1] https://www.allthequeenshorsesfilm.com/

> described as nice and generous by her friends.

I really hate these takes. Yes she was stealing a shit ton of money so she didn’t mind paying for stuff for friends and giving expensive gifts so people thought she was nice and generous.

Take away the money and likely she would have been seen as greedy and nitpicky.

It’s like people going “yea, he did steel a lot of cars, but I still think he was a pretty decent guy who always showed up in a nice looking car”

Yes, this says more about how awful humans are at judging others than it does about the people committing these crimes.

Plain old narcissism. This was the charm-heavy love bombing phase. The contempt, the passive aggression, the "your money is on its way", and perhaps the outright rages would have come later.

The real point of the interview was the reassure the narcissist that he was still smarter, still more significant, and still more of an operator than the lawyer who convicted him.

At the very least he got his prosecutor to turn up, which must have been a small consolation thrill.

I don't think I really understand the takeaway of this article... the case wasn't really made ever that Eddie, let alone most grifters, are particularly nice. If anything, I think the takeaway is that grifters will always grift, because it's in their nature to find cracks in society they can use to their advantage. It's not about right or wrong, it's about seeing the world in a different way than most people do.

And, since we're on HN, I think it's fascinating that many of us have the same mentality, except with computers/systems rather than people/money. (One of YC's application questions is how you hacked a system to your advantage.)

That being said, I did find the dialogue to be quite beautiful. "I spent it on sweet, stupid things that make life an appropriate journey. Little things with some elegance attached."

Yeah, that brought a tear to my eye. Then,

> Of course I spent it. Why else take it? Money taken like that should not be spent on necessities of life but on luxuries of life. Necessities of life are the proper destination of grim jobs with little men working at little desks.

sucked the tear right back in.

The is a deeper truth to this statement that you are letting your resentment get in the way of.

Most of us live grim lives and little desks, when there is so much in the world to offer. We are the ones being wronged, not because we shouldn't do the work, but because they will never offer us enough to experience the other side.

No, that's pretty much exactly where I am with this as well. There are two classes of people in this world, those who sell their labor to live and those who live off the labor of others, neither because of their ingenuity or efficiency or lack thereof but the circumstances of their birth. The latter gets to enjoy all that the world has to offer at a baseline, and the former gets a taste of it when the latter deems it appropriate. This goes far beyond embezzlers and embezzlees, it's baked into the social contract itself.

I'd generalize this to psychopaths; it's called superficial charm for a reason. They can be quite nice to talk to but they don't have any concept of loyalty and so will betray you without a second thought as soon as its advantageous. The smarter ones do very well in large organizations.

"The people back in the studio on TV after this - they were talking about it like - who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000?"

"Scott says he was kind of overworked and unhappy with his job, so everything felt a little less important. Maybe that had something to do with it. But he says crossing over that line was somehow just not as hard as it should have been."

- Planet Money, Episode 671: An Insider Trader Tells All https://www.npr.org/transcripts/460689797

What's not mentioned is that just about anyone can be an embezzler given the opportunity. I remember reading that most embezzlers start small. They have the trust of a company or person and know that they can take a few bucks without anyone knowing. It starts small at first and grows to levels where they get caught.

I knew a guy who was a cashier. The company he worked for decided to save a few bucks and got rid of the person who cashed him out each night and verified his transactions. He decided that he could steal a few bucks since no one would know. He started small and increased a bit. It was never a lot but he did it regularly. He continued and eventually, he got caught. What's interesting is that it wouldn't have happened had he not had the easy opportunity of take the cash.

Money taken like that should not be spent on necessities of life but on luxuries of life.

Sylvia Bloom, master of insider trading, disagrees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Bloom

Sylvia Bloom (c. 1919 – 2016) was an American legal secretary. By copying her bosses' investment decisions she secretly accumulated a significant fortune and donated the bulk of it—US$8.2 million—for scholarships for underprivileged students upon her death. She lived modestly in a rent-controlled apartment, and even her closest friends and family did not know about her wealth.

I'm not sure how much fiction reflects reality, but it seems like in every Chinese novel I read, the majority of officials are corrupt and greedy. The worst of them usually get in trouble, but a lot of them get away with it.

I would rather someone file bogus expense reports for a vacation in Belize than overcomplicate my work to justify their own importance and in the practice stop me from advancing and getting a raise to go on my own vacation in Belize. The later case is super common, 100% legal and 100% greater asshole because I am deprived not only of some of my money but also my time and dignity. Everything comes in degrees and I would rather deal with someone who is a little crooked but still well meaning towards me than someone completely honest and a complete jerk.

At one company I worked at someone had been fired for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company didn't even press charges. I guess the PR issue wasn't worth it. Wild.

The Wizard Of Oz is based on a book written in 1900.

There is a long history of embezzlement and snake oil salesmanship in the United States.

The hardest form of embezzlement to put a check on is is things such as when you promise that GPUs, if they are powerful enough, will one day produce AGI by running code because intelligence is a "property of matter". Kind of "if you compute it, it will show up".

I found it incredible that such brilliant and attractive people would be dumb enough to risk it all for the relatively paltry gains that embezzlement can earn. I kept looking to see the underlying motivations...

In one of the Star Wars movies, Luke takes a starfighter and flies to another planet, pursues training with Yoda etc. I'm pretty sure the other timelines in the movie don't reasonably match up and I don't recall this causing a big hullabaloo.

What people will blithely accept in a popular movie tells you something about their mental processes. It tells you something about how tolerant they will be of half-truths and stories not quite adding up IRL. And some people like exploiting that fact for some reason.

They usually have an excuse -- "I'm some minority group or other and we never get a fair shake." But the reality is, as the author says, they just like it for some reason.

Most people have partial info and make decisions based on simple rubrics, not comprehensive overviews of some unknown future. People routinely see what they want to see -- "Look! Free money -- again!" -- and blithely ignore inconvenient truths -- "Oops! Arrested again."

Comments suggesting "right to be forgotten" is problematic are correct. It typically just teaches people they can get away with it.

I took a bunch of meetings with the CEO of a company providing HR/payroll services.

Super nice guy and I thought his business/offering was really compelling, it just wasn't right for me at the time.

Like 6 months later it comes out that he had stolen like $25 million from clients over the year (money that was supposed to be used to pay payroll taxes).

Never would've guessed it.

> I pushed my cannelloni around while he expounded on the future of Hong Kong and when he finally wound down, asked, “Does it not occur to you that people want to do business with honest people they can trust? Not dishonest people they have to watch?”

> He became exasperated. “Didn’t you tell your client you have to create checks and balances in the company and watch each and every employee?”

> “Yes, but…”

> “And don’t you insist on systems being created in every company so that no one can get away with cooking the books or taking from the company no matter who is in charge?”

> “Yes…”

> “Then what difference does it make if someone you don’t trust is involved? You don’t trust anyone anyway. If your systems work, they work. I am not any more of a danger to you than any other person. I don’t see the problem.”

Eddie would have made a good security consultant.

The risk for the employer is (risk that an employee is an embezzler) x (risk that your systems fail to catch them), though, so you probably want to minimize both terms?

Not quite because they are correlated. As he says, embezzlers are smart. So lowering the second risk also lowers the first as a smart embezzler is not likely to try when the risk of getting caught is high.

If I’m careful, I’m sure I could pet a tiger. If it sees me take enough precautions, it’s less likely to try and eat me. If it judges that’s it’s worth a pop and I don’t take sufficient precautions, I’m dinner.

Or I can pet my dog that won’t even think to try.

Which should I do?

Which is not to say that every nice person is an embezzler.

I was given the advice early in my career of being mindful of very nice people. I misunderstood it as "be a disgusting person".

You need to be nice and be a honest person of integrity. That's the magic. Not "OR" but "AND".

I think this is important. At the end of the day you have to live with yourself, and it's easier to live with a person who is nice rather than one who is mean.

100%.

This was a piece of advice I used to often get from my parents as a child. Didn't really understand it for the longest time, I used to think "they're my friends! they're going to help me out too when I need it". Took a few times of getting into one-sided friendships to realize what they meant, nowadays anyone being excessively nice without a reason sets of alarms unless I know enough about them.

It's really a balance, but yes, I too have been in relationships like the ones you describe.

Definitely an english major

That's why the writing style was so stuffy and stolid. The best writers are drunks, drug addicts, and dilettantes.

Psychopaths are nice people. Well they are not nice, but they are very charismatic so they appear nice. They also really like taking risks, doing high adrenaline activities and generally turning things up to eleven. This adds to their charm as if they have a secret to enjoying life better than normal people. The truth is actually quite the opposite. They have a physiological mental problem that prevents them from feeling ordinary feelings and they dial things up to eleven just to get a chance to feel anything.

To paraphrase the great writer John le Carre they do not take risks because they enjoy life they do it because they are dead inside. By the way, John le Carre had the very bad luck to have a psychopath for a father and he suffered greatly for it. But he did get a very good book out of that experience — “the perfect spy”, one of the best descriptions of a psychopath in literature. Much recommended.

Unfortunately the lack of feeling translates to a complete lack of compassion towards others so that leads psychopaths to do so much damage to innocent people.

In their desire to feel something anything, psychopaths tend to gamble and do stimulant drugs. They also tend to think they’re special and the rules of society do not apply to them.

So if you meet a charismatic person that likes to take big risks and do crazy stuff and/or gambles, stay away.

I say that having fallen victim to a vile disgusting psychopath and still trying to get him to leave me alone. So beware, it is not fun.

Embezzlers are not smart nor brilliant. Its easy to steal its much harder and more luck is needed to earn the same amount. Id say about 100 to 1

> Business may be competitive, but there are rules and it is not war. To Eddie, business was not only war, but war with the only rules being do not get caught if you can and make all the money you can. And trust no one.

Eh, what? Don't most rich self-made people, and people at the top of big corps, think this way? (Not all, but a good-size majority?) I can assure you that the majority of such people worry only about the appearance of honesty and morality, not the substance.

The 'elderly businessman' he quotes in the next paragraph has it pretty much right.

We live in Hobbes' world. Or rather, we created it, by allowing such people to gain power and influence, and even seeing it as a good.

(Btw, I'm not defending the subject's behavior, he clearly deserves a long spell in jail and needs to make right what he's done. But his argument that "everyone does it" isn't too far from the truth.)

> Don't most rich self-made people, and people at the top of big corps, think this way? (Not all, but a good-size majority?)

It's very hard to know! (It's not like you can send a survey around and ask.)

But for what it's worth, I think this is overblown. It's not that it's not a thing. But I don't think it's as much of a thing as people tend to think. I think most people, including fancy business people, want to be the hero of their own story, and that a smaller-than-imagined proportion of people find "the only rules [are] do not get caught if you can and make all the money you can[, a]nd trust no one" to be compatible with their own heroes journey.

Those two are not contradictory, though. One way to be a hero of one's own story is to demote everyone else to NPC. And once you do that, well, you're the hero, on some clearly important quest ... and they're just an NPC, they don't really matter, so what's the big deal about sticking to the rules regarding them? Especially if nobody finds out?

I covered this. I think that:

> a smaller-than-imagined proportion of people find "the only rules [are] do not get caught if you can and make all the money you can[, a]nd trust no one" to be compatible with their own heroes journey.

I just truly don't think this sort of thing is as common as the cynical-people-on-the-internet crowd seems to take it as obvious fact to be. I think it's more often reached for as a convenient simpler explanation for human behavior that is actually more complex and nuanced.

Right, but I wouldn't quite say that we created Hobbes' world. It's rather a reality born from the simple nature of things. Any reality in which people may differ in what it is they want/will, and not everyone can always have their way... is a Hobbesian world.

They embezzle because they like it. They like the rush. They need money now, not in five years. They like being smarter than the drudges they figure are around them. And they embezzle, I am convinced, because they want to get caught sooner or later and that pattern is usually repeated over and over.

You can embezzle for some of the reasons listed above, and not others. Or something completely different, like a conviction that the victim (which could be an employer or government agency or cofounder) owes you for some real or imagined damage or injustice.

And some people do it for love.

There was a case a few years back involving a nebbish CFO at an old-school family-run firm, Alden Shoe Company. This guy was utterly besotted with a former TV news anchor who was trying to start her own entertainment brand, and embezzled millions to fund her business and impress her as a moneyed knight in shining armor.

He stole the money from a reserve account and family trust, and wasn't particularly smart about it:

In 2011, according to criminal and civil court filings, Hajjar started writing checks to himself from that Santander account and depositing them in his personal bank accounts. That year, he wrote himself eight checks totaling $585,000. The next year, 17 checks for $1.2 million. He also transferred money from the cash reserve to a defunct Alden trust account, and then over to his personal accounts. In 2013, he used this method to take $1.2 million, and again to steal $4 million in 2014—the same year de la Garza started Lucky Gal Productions. ...

At the end of each year, Hajjar simply moved money from an Alden line of credit into the Santander account, so everything looked copasetic for the year-end review. Then, after a successful review, he returned the borrowed funds to the Alden line of credit and no one was the wiser that the Santander account was missing money.

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/07/13/richard-hajja...

The theft totalled $17 million. He didn't try hard to cover his tracks, and when the CEO of the shoe company figured it out, he admitted it right away.

I don't think this guy was a born con artist or serial grifter or particularly brilliant. He'd been with the same company his entire career, and there wasn't any evidence of earlier embezzlement until he met the TV personality.

I think he got 5 years in prison.

Wow Alden of all places. Glad they survived it seems

Wow, I own like 10 pairs of Alden shoes/boots. I recall hearing something about this at the time but didn’t realize it was that much, which I imagine is an amazing amount for them… I’d doubt their annual revenues amount to that much.

Scam artists have to be superficially nice to their victims otherwise they'll never gain their confidence.

I always assume embezzlers are just people who have higher tolerance for boundary pushing. Exploring boundaries is a primal urge. Kids learn to do it at a young age. If you have ever trained an animal, you know they do it also. To me, embezzlement always appears as someone who pushed "perks of the job" into illegality.

If you are going to be a successful embezzler the lag between pushing a boundary (from small office supplies, to stealing petty cash, to full on corporate embezzlement) must be pretty long. By the team the punishment comes, there is enough time to disconnect the action from the result and create alternate justifications. This gives a people a long time to escalate. Being a likable person likely gives you even more time.

In the corporate world the lines are also a bit fuzzier. Is expensing a not-quite business dinner with overpriced wine embezzlement? Depends on who you ask. But doing so will surely embolden your next action. These people probably also display some level of narcissism/sociopathy. Minimizing victims by calling them "small people." Nonrecognition of emotional damage. I wonder how many of these people surround themselves with a cadre of enablers who are more willing to look the other way. And when its all said and done, they are on to the next thing.

What I don't understand is why fund managers don't just form groups with each other and take possessions of their clients hidden offshore assets... Then collectively gaslight their clients about the non-existence of the assets. It would be easy nowadays. Their clients are tax avoiders so it would be ethical... Some of their clients are public figures who wouldn't want to draw attention to their offshore assets with a big news article about their asset managers embezzling funds.

Who doesn't like Gilligan?

"The brighter and shinier something or someone is,

the darker and longer is it's cast."

That's heavy, as it can be true even without crime or hurting others.

If you stop and think about it, almost every business is a scam of sorts that relies upon the weaknesses of human nature to thrive.

In a lot of cases we're too lazy to do it ourselves. Or we need it NOW. Or we're too stupid to care or we're overwhelmed by other emotional factors. All these things and more impede our ability to make a clear distinction between value, cost and need.

It's really hard to tell the difference between late stage capitalism and fraud. They're only divided by a thin legal line full of semantics and double speak. Words dont seem to have meanings. ie) Guaranteed, Free, Unlimited, etc. We've become entrapped in a web of tort law and legal ridiculousness.

So in the end this guy tells it like it is... He's the known known, the honest thief.

People want stuff and want to accomplish more than they have time to do on their own.

I have no idea why you want to twist that into dark desires and laziness.

There are entire departments at large corporations that do nothing but think of ways to sneak in more fees and higher costs. Its endemic throughout corporate Americas largest industries.

Insurance Banking Finance Media Energy Software

All are infused with opaque business practices and layers of legal protections hiding behind 1000 page contracts.

That's absolutely true.

And it's also true that most Americans don't work at large corporations and that most companies are not large.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/county-employment-and-wages/estab...

Shrinkflation is one very clear example of this in action.

Is selling a candy bar that is half the size of the packaging yet the same cost as it was before they shrank the product fraud or is it just business?

It fits the definition of fraud more than anything...misrepresenting the outcome by hiding the facts. Seems pretty fraudulent to me...

No argument here.

But most Americans don't work at large corporations and that most companies are not large.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/county-employment-and-wages/estab...

The parent post said that most businesses are fraudulent and pointed at practices by large businesses.

I agree with this "It's really hard to tell the difference between late stage capitalism and fraud".

The best example to illustrate this principle is the unholy alliance between Big Pharma and the government, particularly the FDA.

Big Pharma lobbyist write the rules that the FDA enforces and the most ambitious people working at the FDA, after a few years, leave to work at Big Pharma.

The covid19 pandemic exposed the public at large to the way this unholy alliance works, but there have been numerous cases of abuse by the Big Pharma companies who consider paying fines like these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical... a cost of doing business.

In the context of AI, we are assisting to another of these abusive practices in the making particularly if an FDA-styled agency is created to regulate AI.

Yes, and it is so much worse. We have very few actual choices for major services and are forced into business with them because life without these services is next to impossible.

Think about the tax code as an example. We literally have to buy software or pay a professional to decipher the madness. It's by design in order to keep all these people and companies profitable!

Or shrinkflation. Is selling a candy bar that is half the size of the packaging yet the same cost as it was before they shrank the product fraud or is it just smart business?

It fits the definition of fraud more than anything...

I think it depends on what you consider a weakness of human nature. We're susceptible to sugary foods, even though they're bad for us: are bakeries frauds? If we suddenly stopped feeling emotions tomorrow - if we all started acting totally rationally, how many industries would fall apart, even though we're theoretically way more efficient?

The same goes for our need for convenience and luxury. We could have all survived on brick phones or Blackberries, but we now employ so much of our population making slightly-more-luxurious iPhones. At some point, these impediments are what cause us to grow.

Ok I just stopped and thought about it, and concluded that this is BS.

I'm glad that all these businesses exist, so that I can specialize in a particular kind of work, and they can specialize in doing things I don't do, and then I can transact with them using a standard medium of exchange to trade my special skills for theirs.

None of that has anything to do with "the weaknesses of human nature" or laziness, or false urgency, or an impeded ability to distinguish value, cost, and need. It's just a trade of my time for theirs, on terms I find acceptable.

There is nothing fraudulent about any of this. The coffee shop I bought my coffee from this morning and the restaurant I bought my lunch from this afternoon did not fool me, I just enjoyed drinking the coffee and eating the food they prepared, and considered their prices fair. No semantic legalities or double speak or meaningless words required, I just wanted some goods and services, and was happy to purchase them.

That's honest, not thievery.

You honestly feel this way about your bank, your cell provider, your health insurance company, your insurance company? When you read your bills, and see countless arbitrary fees, do you feel as if you're in a personal relationship with the service and in control?

The small shop owner or tradesmen, sure. The giant corp with no human connection and nothing but a walled presence? No way.

Yes, all of those businesses provide me useful services. Do I have my criticisms of all of them? YES. Does that mean they are scams that rely on human weaknesses to thrive? No, that would be a very naive and, frankly, silly conclusion to draw.

This isn't boolean math, there's a whole continuum between "everything is perfect" and "everything is a corrupt scam".

Someone is naive, that's a fact...

Good luck negotiating or even communicating with ATT or American Airlines or any major provider of services you think you buy... Let alone your hospital bill, your car insurance, your health insurance or your taxes... The list goes on and on and on. We're what they call "Captive customers". You literally have no choice.

It's actually astounding that you support this stuff let alone respect it. However, in a world where people put tattoos of Tesla on their bodies, it makes sense.

Once again, you are describing things that are very bad and annoying and which I desperately want to see improved, but you are not describing things that are scams or fraudulent.

It would certainly be a scam if I were convinced to pay AT&T or American Airlines, and then they didn't actually build any cell towers or fly any airplanes. But that's clearly not the case! Absolutely yes, complain about poor business practices and bad provision of service, that's an important back-pressure mechanism. And yeah, it is naive to be all dewy-eyed and worshipful of a business and its leaders (like I see way too many people being with Musk, and have seen with other companies and people at other points in the past).

But your view that these businesses do nothing useful is just as inaccurate as the view of those blind worshippers. What you want to do when evaluating stuff in the world, is to draw conclusions as accurately as possible. Setting out two buckets for "good" and "bad" and tossing everything you see into one of the two of them is only going to lead you to having a distorted inaccurate view of everything.

Insurance can be a scam, when you pay premiums while the provisions for payout are so thin as to never be triggered. But it's pretty hard to run an insurance scheme that never pays and just fully pockets the premiums, without being prosecuted.

And health insurance in particular is further from a scam than most, because a huge amount of money is paid out for medical care on a constant basis, and a large portion of that is paid by health insurance companies. It can certainly be a bad deal for individual healthy people, but in aggregate, it is certainly not a scam.

What "stuff" is it astounding that I support? You want me to, what, think that it's bad that phone companies provide cell service and airlines fly planes? I don't. I think it's good that they do those things. That doesn't mean that I think everything about their business practices is good. These are not conflicting thoughts, in any way.

> every business is a scam of sorts that relies upon the weaknesses of human nature to thrive

Yes, the next time you go to buy a computer or mobile phone you should just skip it because it's a scam. Just manufacture and assemble the hardware yourself and create the operating system/ecosystem of apps while you're at it. It just pure laziness not too. Or maybe consider that capitalism and the division of labor benefits you massively.

I'm not convinced that "laziness" is a weakness of human nature. Businesses are ultimately a way to specialize production without central planning. Allocating some people to bake all the bread in a factory frees up other people who would otherwise have to spend an hour or two every day baking bread. Or from a market perspective, you're willing to pay a premium for not having to put in the labour. Businesses certainly can be exploitative, but I don't think all or even most of them are by nature.

This story took place in the 70s.

The value arbitrage corporations get from their workers today makes shareholders embezzling from workers just the way of the world now.

He wasn't just charming -- he was nihilistically prescient. He knew where the world was going, and that other businessman at the end, he wouldn't survive in today's environment.

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