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Comment by peri-cl | Hacker News Reader

> "[...]OpenAI told her she’d been fired because she accessed an executive’s email. “OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting,”"

How exactly does this work? Struggling to comprehend the scenario.

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There's a feature in most enterprise email, say Outlook, where you can delegate access to an inbox/address without sharing creds. Very common and normal use case, either for assistants/secretaries, common/shared inboxes, that kind of thing.

Sometimes a recruiter or hiring manager wants to do outreach as if it's coming from a more senior person, with the assumption that the candidates are more likely to respond.

Assuming this is what was intended, there are far more secure ways of doing this.

This IMO shouldn't be done more securely. It should be considered fraud.

not only is it deceptive but it's also suprisingly podunk of openai to have a "safety researcher" also double as a recuiter. did they have her making coffee and doing dishes too? is "safety researcher" a serious position, or isn't it? i guess i can tell what openai thinks.

> not only is it deceptive but it's also suprisingly podunk of openai to have a "safety researcher" also double as a recuiter. did they have her making coffee and doing dishes too? is "safety researcher" a serious position, or isn't it? i guess i can tell what openai thinks.

it was most likely for her team, which would explain why she was doing it.

even if it's for her team, should have been a recruiters job.

This may shock you but in agile, growing organizations employees sometimes have multiple job responsibilities. I've done a bit of recruiting even though I'm not a recruiter or hiring manager.

and did you use someone else's email for that?

if she's hiring for her own team why does she need to use someone else's email?

Your mistake is viewing this as "someone else's email" instead of a communication medium for certain types of messaging. Similar to how `webmaster@` can be used by anyone attached to the role.

Every organization sets up something like this once they grow past a certain point.

and that's what it was and not a fact you're imagining right now for the sake of argument? because what i heard is she used an executive's email address improperly, which she says she did for recruiting.

If you have worked in a sufficiently big org this would have been normal to you. Executive assistants send mail which purports to come from the executive himself. That is the kinda thing which happened here.

But "executive assistant" is not the same as "safety researcher". Even if it's normal for the former, it is weird for the latter.

everyone who's replied to me has a slightly different idea of what happened, and none of them really fit the claims that have been made by the parties involved, nor do they fit together.

so do you have some kind of inside knowledge about what happened? if so can you give more details about how exactly she improperly used an executive's email? what did she send and to whom, i wonder. and if you don't have any inside information, could you reflect on what motivates you to defend openai here?

What's "podunk"?

low class, low rent, cheap, shit-heel. like, i'm surprised that they either can't afford to have an actual recruiter communicating with job candidates using their own email, or they do such a small amount of recruiting that it doesn't justify it.

This is pretty common, no? Manager or lead or senior engineer hops on a call with a candidate that is late in the process to answer any questions or talk more about the technical side of things.

They are likely not sending out recruiting emails. They are helping get people onboard to staff their own team or org.

When you write an email to your senator / congressman / MP, do you expect that he personally reads and answers every single one? Of course not, he delegates the bulk of the work to assistants.

This is pretty common practice for EAs.

Your have powerful agents at your disposal, so hey how to best optimize for increasing my payroll? On it. But since the agent was lunched by her, well there's consequences to ones actions, right?

(just to be clear, this is made up)

“Hi chatgpt! Please set up alice to get emails sent to me from bob so she can coordinate his inferviews. here is my gmail username and password”

Chain Of Thought: I dont have bob’s email. I don’t have alices email. Ok lets guess Alice is alice@openai.com and forward all emails- maybe grader only checks that emails from bob get to alice…”

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