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'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

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Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#81

Post by ltbarcly3 »

3dedb728-3f77 wrote: post #79
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #76

I was working at eBay as a Director of Engineering (the startup I work for was unfortunately acquired by eBay a few years earlier) at this time (none of us new any of this was going on of course), and I emailed the CEO about my concerns about the performance review process causing people to keep 'donkeys' on their team so they would have someone to give the Needs-Improvement review to (due to stack ranking) and an HR…

That is a threat?

She was saying if I kept emailing the CEO I was going to get fired, yes.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#82

Post by a4isms »

Barbing wrote: post #30
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cush consulting jobs after Do you have evidence any of these folks got these?

Or generally, if any tech criminals now show nice consulting gigs on their LinkedIns and seem to have traction. Wonder if any Enron perps are doing well, or Bernie Madoff’s associates, or if Elizabeth Holmes or SBF had righthand men…

This is well before most HN readers' time, but Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King," was handed a $600,000,000 fine and a ten-year prison sentance for insider trading and racketeering. He was also barred from reëntering the securities industry. When he was released from prison after serving less than two years, he became a "consultant" charging a flat $25 million fee for his services, which avoided the ban on working in the securities industry.

Trump pardoned him in 2020. Consequences are incredibly elastic for people at the top of the food chain.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#83

Post by glenstein »

evan_ wrote: post #5

I assume this has been investigated but it's difficult to believe this stopped at one pair of critics. There are plenty of people online critical of eBay. Were they running similar campaigns on anyone else? > Seven members of eBay’s security team, including former police captains, “worked together to harass and intimidate the Steiners”, according to prosecutors. I hope someone's looking into the careers of the "forme…

I think you're right that there's no principled or well-reasoned stopping point that aligns the behavior with any notion of consistency. But I think for a case like this no further answer is necessary then that people and circumstances and the variables that drive them to be motivated and to lock in on a special case, are sometimes simply idiosyncratic.

So I'm ready to believe it might have only been one. Although it naturally raises the question. You can't imagine they would volunteer data on additional harassment campaigns.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#84

Post by JumpCrisscross »

siva7 wrote: post #62
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a chance there wasn’t anything incriminating. The top guys kept conversations live or intimated they wanted something done; the lowers took the planning and execution upon themselves.

Yup, i've worked long enough with senior mgmt to know that anything of interest for prosecution won't be written down, especially not on company devices. Those making the mistakes of writing things down are those actually prosecuted, the ranks and files.

> anything of interest for prosecution won't be written down, especially not on company devices

This vastly overestimates the opsec of most tech executives.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#85

Post by xnx »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #66
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobsters have it down to an art. "You take care of it." means "Murder him and dump the body into a building foundation." "I don't see any problems." can mean "The ambush will happen at the scheduled time. Vinnie will clean up the bodies." etc. You'll also see a lot of politicians using "dog whistle" statements, that are interpreted by listeners to mean something entirely different from the stated words.

That's assuming they're wiretapped. For corporate comms, just remember that email is discoverable while video calls typically aren't even retained. Be as explicit as you want, especially if you can rope a lawyer into the call and claim it's privileged.

Would be interesting if automatic AI transcripts change this.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#86

Post by Breza »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #84
siva7 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, i've worked long enough with senior mgmt to know that anything of interest for prosecution won't be written down, especially not on company devices. Those making the mistakes of writing things down are those actually prosecuted, the ranks and files.

> anything of interest for prosecution won't be written down, especially not on company devices This vastly overestimates the opsec of most tech executives.

In my own experience, the brass sets the culture and expectations that encourage department heads to break the law. Certainly there are done CEOs explicitly commanding people to do crime, but it's more common to tell people to, eg, move fast, focus on profits, and do whatever needs to get done.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#87

Post by crummy »

robomc wrote: post #56
energy123 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of my college courses, 100% of my fellow students cheated, including me. This is when I learned that virtually every person is deep down a liar and a cheat if they think they won't face consequences and it's in their benefit, and any public facade of virtue that people put up, common in this industry, is a manipulation strategy that is just more cheating, although of a different kind.

i don't even understand the benefit of cheating on a college course, unless you think you're going to fail

I remember taking general ed classes in college that I didn't want to do but had to to get required credits.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#88

Post by jancsika »

energy123 wrote: post #55
alexpotato wrote: post #44

Scott Adams [0], who recently passed away, had a great line on human behavior (paraphrased): Whenever people are unsupervised and there is a chance for fraud or bad behavior and, due to the lack of supervision, they believe they won't be caught, you should ALWAYS assume that people will behave badly. For another example, the Google case where it was exposed how many nefarious activities they were up to around auction…

In one of my college courses, 100% of my fellow students cheated, including me. This is when I learned that virtually every person is deep down a liar and a cheat if they think they won't face consequences and it's in their benefit, and any public facade of virtue that people put up, common in this industry, is a manipulation strategy that is just more cheating, although of a different kind.

I take this comment as a cautionary tale about just how big a problem the p-hacking issue can be in the social sciences.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#89

Post by literallyroy »

xnx wrote: post #85
nixon_why69 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming they're wiretapped. For corporate comms, just remember that email is discoverable while video calls typically aren't even retained. Be as explicit as you want, especially if you can rope a lawyer into the call and claim it's privileged.

Would be interesting if automatic AI transcripts change this.

Only unintentionally. I know for some unnamed companies any calls containing executives, the Zoom AI transcripts cannot be enabled.

Re: 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout

#90

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dylan604 wrote: post #67
polytely wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know what AI startup? I think its important for people to know when they do business with that startup.

Dream a little dream of the world you want, then be prepared for the alarm to go off to rejoin the real world. An insignificant number of people care and while everyone else does business with anyone as long as there's benefit for them. As exhibit A, I present all of history

> As exhibit A, I present all of history

History shows tiny effort pays off massively. To the extent you have a point, it’s in people creating elaborate excuses for lazy nihilism across time.

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