The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do

I used to work for a company that was purchased by a Multi Level Marketing coughpyramidschemecough company similar to Herbalife. They purchased us for our technology to power their platform. There was supposed to be very little overlap with their business, so I did not feel too worried about it.

As time went on, our focus was more on how to sell more of the parent company's products. I also learned more on how the MLM business really worked, and I was disgusted at how the system preyed on the vulnerable. With very few jobs in the area, I continued working there. I eventually moved and turned down requests to work remotely.

None of my co-workers seemed to have cared. Either that, or they understood it was still one of the better tech opportunities in an area with very few.

It's good to hear that all the C[ETF]Os of adware business found their employment at Facebook/Google/Amazon.

Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting with one of the organizers who was clearly cut from different cloth, so I asked what he did the rest of the year. After a couple of rounds of vague responses about how he helped companies use email to get in touch with potential customers, it finally dawned on me that I was sitting at the table with a SPAMMER. Pretty much lost my appetite at that point.

My takeaway is that spammers, malware authors, even identity thieves, are among us. They can seem like perfectly nice people. They might even be perfectly nice people except for this one bad habit, this one ethical blind spot, that enables them to do things from which the rest of us would recoil in disgust. The company in this story might be an extreme case, but I'll bet a lot of people asking "how could they not know" have themselves worked at companies that made at least some of their money in less savory ways. Sometimes it might be why that company survived while contemporaries faded away. Silicon Valley from its earliest days has been full of people who benefited from carefully redacted history, whether they knew it or not.

There are many businesses that are built around exploiting vulnerable customers or users, and it is common for such businesses to have contrived complicated ethical justifications for their conduct. I'm thinking in particular of law and finance.

I had no idea there is a such a large industry doing this type of stuff until building a Windows 10 machine recently for VR. So many "free", seemingly kosher apps seem to install sneaky adware in the main app installation process these days

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

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-un...