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

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

#91
post #76
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While a public company answers to it's shareholders, it also has a responsibility to support the community it lives within, because often success can be directly attributed to where the company started. Aggressively avoiding taxes could very well be considered unethical by some parties.

Some may consider avoiding taxes to be unethical, others might say not avoiding them would violate a fiduciary duty.

From my very minimal accounting course I remember my teacher, who was serving as part of the tax appeals board at the time, telling us that we were allowed to use any opening in the law to save tax but we were not allowed to lie.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, good point. We live in an age when a whole set of duplicitous practices are now just referred to as "growth hacking"

Ugh, the number of dark patterns trying to cost me money just to purchase a damned ticket on Ticketbastards today. Seriously by not clicking the right boxes I could have agreed to pay an extra $42 in add-ons/services for a $15 ticket that had its own $6 in fees added.

A fool and their money are soon parted.

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

#93
post #62

So what else is new. If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of tech" today. Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but Facebook never provided a full accounting (1). Or do you remember when Facebook literally…

Despite the examples you give, I don't think it's fair to lump Facebook and Google in with 50onRed. The former two are mostly above board, with some occasional exceptions, while the latter is completely, morally, underwater.

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

#94
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no case afaik, because they disclose everything in the original agreement when you install their software. Unethical, sure, but there's little the law can do to prevent people from agreeing to such things. Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent (like for cigarettes)?

It would be an interesting case if someone tried this with the venerable TV industry: rent/borrow/buy our special HDMI cable/tuner, let us replace your ads, and we'll pay half your cable bill if you let us put our ads up instead. Methinks the broadcasters would pounce down like a ton of bricks and their lawyers would use every loose corner of the law to bury you perpetually `a la Aereo.`

I have this vague recollection that friends whose families subscribed to HBO in the 1980s said they didn't show ads at all, because subscribers were directly paying for the programming through their subscriptions (whereas free-to-air stations felt they had to run ads because viewer weren't paying directly). Was this actually true? Does anyone else have a similar recollection?

I'm just wondering if there was a particular moment when people's intuitions about where you could expect to see ads on television changed.

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

#96
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While a public company answers to it's shareholders, it also has a responsibility to support the community it lives within, because often success can be directly attributed to where the company started. Aggressively avoiding taxes could very well be considered unethical by some parties.

So you are of course not taking any advantage of Pension tax reliefs in your 401K and IRA's ?

401K/IRA tax avoidance techniques are codified in law to encourage people to save for retirement so we don't have generations of elderly homeless people.

The tax loopholes that companies like Apple tax advantage of are another thing entirely.

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

#97
post #43
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed! But the question is ... can tax evasion be considered an ethical violation? :)

Possibly. However tax evasion and avoidance are often confused, for a public company not avoiding taxes would most certainly be an ethical violation.

But.. what about my version of ethics! If only there were a way to take a tally of issues among groups of people with different opinions of ethics and morals..

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

#98

Maybe I just forget what it's like to be a beginner, but how on earth do you work on Ad Injection software and not realize that you're working on Ad Injection?!

"The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons." - Jean Renoir Right out of school I worked at a company that builds deep packet inspection hardware and it seems like a dream job: good pay, smart people, interesting problems, reasonable schedule. Too bad about the product though.

I don't really see a problem with working on something like that. There's a legitimate use for technologies like that. The problems are laws and social structures that allow those technologies to be abused. I don't fault the engineer who makes a better gun, but I might fault the marketing department that sells it in a market knowing it will be used for harm (don't be a war profiteer), or the the politicians that resist sane restrictions .

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

#99
post #62

So what else is new. If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of tech" today. Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but Facebook never provided a full accounting (1). Or do you remember when Facebook literally…

Yeah, I think one of the dirty secrets that doesn't really come across until you've been in the entrepreneurial trenches for a while is that most people who make a lot of money end up doing so not by being paragons of morality, but by skirting rules and doing things other people may find questionable or unfair. YC itself acknowledges this to an extent by saying that good founders are moral, but that they are not "goody-two-shoes" and they break rules "that don't matter".

Of course, the material value of each rule is in the eye of the beholder; surely the cab drivers of the world felt that there was material value to adhering to their regulations and that it would not be moral or necessarily safe to circumvent those regulations. Then Uber came along and its founders entered the pantheon of those that break "rules that don't matter". Ditto for Airbnb.

Most types of marketing and PR are morally dubious. But you have to play that game if you're going to get anywhere.

That's the secret that entrepreneurs have to learn, the secret that doesn't get shown in the profile pieces or the television specials. "Might makes right" in this world and if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to loosen from a theoretical moral ideal to a practical one that is informed by the competitive landscape of capitalism. You can nitpick and find fault with most money-making techniques, so you just have to try to do something you can be reasonably comfortable with, acknowledging that in a competitive landscape, sometimes uncomfortable choices have to be made.

If you do find something that makes money and has no competitors, thus allowing you to not worry about underhanded techniques to steal your marketshare, take advantage of your early position to decisively corner the market. That means employing the same techniques that would be employed against you, because those techniques will be employed against you pretty soon. I know this because one of my companies was roundly beaten after a spammer started a competitor and engaged SEO link rings to inorganically alter his ranking, among other tactics that I was morally "above" until my company was pwned that way. Now I understand you must play that game, that everyone plays that game, and they just don't talk about it because it doesn't help them to do so. It helps them to keep potential competitors naive.

Playing by the rules may be the cool way to do it, but in the real world, it doesn't work, because there is someone who is willing to break those rules. How many entrepreneurs started on something like Uber but quit because they saw the regulatory landscape and a) didn't have the millions to fight cities and the cab industry; b) didn't want to run afoul of city regulations in the first place? Do what YC does: break whatever rules are in your way and then afterwards say they were rules that "didn't matter". If you say this from a position of success, people will believe you.

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

#100

Maybe I just forget what it's like to be a beginner, but how on earth do you work on Ad Injection software and not realize that you're working on Ad Injection?!

I got the impression that the employees in the article were making ads. When you make ads you don't necessarily notice how exactly those ads get in front of users. When they say that the didn't know how the company made money, they probably meant that they thought it worked like other ad companies: paying websites for ad spots.
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