Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

buzzfeed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–167 of 167 posts

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#161

Post by maxerickson »

lmm wrote: post #146
maxerickson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However arbitrary or dumb it might be, it's still a rather low bar. edit: which I think might not sound how I intend it. I meant to get at it not requiring a great deal of investment of time or other resources to become an insurance broker.

It shows a real lack of faith in the exam, I think. If the exam is testing the requirements of being an insurance broker correctly, why have an "x hours of training" requirement as well?

The interesting discussion from the occupational licensing story was whether a given licensing requirement creates an undue barrier to people that want to pursue the career. That's what I was getting at, regardless of how terrible this hours requirement might be, it doesn't create much of a barrier to people that want to become insurance brokers. It's little more than an inconvenience.

(There's an argument to be made that an inane hours requirement is unfair to people that must work long hours to support themselves, but in this case it was the company urging paid employees to spend their time otherwise)

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#162

Post by hitekker »

LukaAl wrote: post #143
hitekker wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you in return for thinking through my suggestion :-) Everything you said sounds fine, with the exception of what makes front-stabbing, front-stabbing. I agree that maturity is important for giving constructive feedback; just as important, in my opinion, is closeness. That closeness is certainly achievable in a small startup, but the company scales, I have strong doubts that it will match the level of honesty Em…

I love this conversation, and I'd like to give my feedback. First, no, you are coming across as a person who thought deeply about this concepts. I like the idea of closeness but, as you noted, it is not always possible. I think that empathy is the right word, but should be better characterized. Empathy is trying to establish a connection, is to bring the two people close when giving the honest feedback so that it is…

Excellent response, thank you for your thoughts.

I like the idea of empathy being a bridge between two sides-- closeness helps in building that bridge. If the sides are way too distant, the bridge will inevitably collapse into the abyss. But if the bridge itself is made of strong stuff, constructed in good faith, then absolute closeness isn't so big deal. So long as trade of ideas can safely go back and forth across that bridge, in equal measure. I might be stretching a metaphor a bit there.

Feedforward is indeed quite powerful between two receptive parties; the last time I got a peer review the person I was doing with did it to me, which made me all the respectful of him.

"empathy is the ability to bring someone close" indeed!

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#163

Post by dang »

uptown wrote: post #160
dang wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid I don't understand the question. What do you mean by "credit this version"?

When a link from a HN post is changed, and the link it's changed-to had previously been submitted by another user, should the "posted by" and karma attribution get re-assigned to the user who submitted the link to-which the story is re-pointed, or does attribution and karma continue to credit the user who submitted the link which was replaced? Just curious how the internals of link-replacement works.

It's the latter. We do try to privilege the original submission when we can, but that's not always easy.

It's a bit of a lottery who gets the karma in any individual case, but in the long run it evens out. We would like to make the duplicate detection system give more credit to original submitters. I used to think that didn't matter, but have changed my mind, because doing that would incentivize users to find good stories that no one has submitted yet, and that seems like it would be in the community's interest.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#164

Post by run4yourlives2 »

lmm wrote: post #148
run4yourlives2 wrote: post #50

Let's just forget about the entire ethical argument around breaking an existing policy/legal condition of doing business, as important as that is wrt health insurance. Who in their right mind thinks taking the time to design, then publish, a way to defeat a relatively straightforward education requirement is in any way a worthwhile thing to do? There is a level of ego there that goes beyond rational decision making:…

It could easily have been a bottom-up effort - someone got tired of watching the videos, wrote the macro (doesn't require a lot of programming expertise), passed it around to their friends who also used it, passed it up to their manager and eventually it became widespread. Have you ever had to watch 52 hours of mandatory training videos? I think that could easily be more unpleasant than 104 hours of hard labour.

Reports are saying the CEO actually wrote the actual macro though.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#165

Post by uptown »

dang wrote: post #163
uptown wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a link from a HN post is changed, and the link it's changed-to had previously been submitted by another user, should the "posted by" and karma attribution get re-assigned to the user who submitted the link to-which the story is re-pointed, or does attribution and karma continue to credit the user who submitted the link which was replaced? Just curious how the internals of link-replacement works.

It's the latter. We do try to privilege the original submission when we can, but that's not always easy. It's a bit of a lottery who gets the karma in any individual case, but in the long run it evens out. We would like to make the duplicate detection system give more credit to original submitters. I used to think that didn't matter, but have changed my mind, because doing that would incentivize users to find good st…

Thanks for the answer. Karma, while fun, isn't personally that big of a deal. Appreciate the clarification, and thanks for your continued oversight of the HN community.

Re: Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process

#166

Post by rhizome »

tyre wrote: post #132
rhizome wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does his code work?

This is a very low bar for success. When you're working with sensitive information or financial transactions, it isn't just about "working". If your code "works" but is impossible to reason about or untested, you're asking for people later on to introduce bugs. Code is not written in a vacuum. The hardest part, for three nines of software problems, is not just getting it to work. It's architecture and building an eng…

Not sure what your point is, but thanks for the condescending digression.
Post reply on HN