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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

#101

Post by _dark_matter_ »

deathanatos wrote: post #97
haunter wrote: post #3

Brian Gilbert, 56, of San Jose, Calif., former Senior Manager of Special Operations for eBay’s Global Security Team, was sentenced to time served, one year of supervised release with the special condition that he have no contact with either of the victims in the case and a $20,000 fine Jim Baugh, 47, of San Jose, Calif., eBay’s former Senior Director of Safety and Security, was sentenced to 57 months in prison David…

> eBay entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and admitted to a detailed recitation of all the relevant facts about its conduct and agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $3 million, which is the statutory maximum fine for these six felony offenses. Scaled from eBay's $11.1B/y to a person making $70k/y, that's proportional to a $18.92 fine. "The statutory maximum for these six felony offenses."

I think it should be scaled to the salary of 6 people. So about $3.15

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

#102

Post by rootsudo »

zippyman55 wrote: post #71
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.

At my federal job, there was a student intern position that was available. The only requirement was a 3.0 gpa or better. Unofficial transcripts were submitted each semester. One day they asked for official ones and eight people immediately quit.

Tbf it costs $5-20 to submit official transcripts. Paying an amount to qualify for an interview for a position may be too much.

I understand what you’re inferring, just official transcripts aren’t free or easy enough.

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

#104

Post by zhivota »

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…

I worked at Milo and Wenig always seemed like an empty suit. Had much better experiences with Donahoe who helped us with the homepage revamp (I was on that team).

One thing I learned through that project was that eBay was a den of vipers when it comes to corporate backstabbing and turf protection, and since then I've come to believe every company above a certain employee count will inevitably become this due to unavoidable incentive pressure.

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

#105

Post by ltbarcly3 »

zhivota wrote: post #104
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…

I worked at Milo and Wenig always seemed like an empty suit. Had much better experiences with Donahoe who helped us with the homepage revamp (I was on that team). One thing I learned through that project was that eBay was a den of vipers when it comes to corporate backstabbing and turf protection, and since then I've come to believe every company above a certain employee count will inevitably become this due to unavo…

I was also at Milo! Have you noticed that the current ebay homepage is very close (but still not as good) as the original Feed demo?

My analysis of big companies, at least slow growth shitty ones like ebay, is that at VP and above levels there is a constant war of everyone against everyone to try to manage the largest organization and thus demand the best pay and promotion possibilities either at that company or by jumping ship. There's a zero-sum game, if everyone is B tier then everyone stays where they are and gets the same pay. Since the people at that level at companies like that tend to be imbeciles hired through nepotism or as a reward for previous crooked acquisitions or insider deals the easiest way to look better than your peers is to sabotage them. Since the next level up management is even more likely to be there due to nepotism of one kind of another they get away it.

I remember some large projects I was on where within 2 weeks of the project starting people were already setting up to place the blame on other teams when the project failed. It didn't matter if anything shipped, it only mattered that you weren't the team blamed for it not shipping.

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

#106

Post by jrflowers »

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…

Scott Adams had some deeply bizarre opinions about human behavior/relationships.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cursedcomments/comments/wqc1an/curs...

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

#107

Post by BrenBarn »

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.

That's why the burden of proof needs to shift and our thinking about responsibility needs to shift. Your liability should increase in parallel with the benefits you derive from your position. If you are getting rich from running ebay then you will lose that wealth when something like this happens; it doesn't matter whether you directed it or even knew about it; you don't get to get rich if bad things happen while you are in charge.

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

#108

Post by cindyllm »

BrenBarn wrote: post #107
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.

That's why the burden of proof needs to shift and our thinking about responsibility needs to shift. Your liability should increase in parallel with the benefits you derive from your position. If you are getting rich from running ebay then you will lose that wealth when something like this happens; it doesn't matter whether you directed it or even knew about it; you don't get to get rich if bad things happen while you…

[dead]

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

#109

Post by zippyman55 »

rootsudo wrote: post #102
zippyman55 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my federal job, there was a student intern position that was available. The only requirement was a 3.0 gpa or better. Unofficial transcripts were submitted each semester. One day they asked for official ones and eight people immediately quit.

Tbf it costs $5-20 to submit official transcripts. Paying an amount to qualify for an interview for a position may be too much. I understand what you’re inferring, just official transcripts aren’t free or easy enough.

I guess they were printing their grades and then fat fingering them to inflate their grades. I get your point, but it drives home how people can cheat if there’s a way. Probably the employer could fork over the fees to verify the grades would rectify most of this.

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

#110

Post by BobbyTables2 »

ebbi wrote: post #57

I just can't fathom how employees of a company would do all this because someone with a newsletter criticized the company often. I understand employees committing fraud for their own gain. I don't understand Directors and analysts doing this to someone, especially when senior execs weren't charged. Seems like there were a lot of cover ups going on.

There has to have been more going on, it sure doesn’t add up - unless Ebay was run by a group of cruel Kindergarteners..

At every place I’ve worked, the employees likely had worse thoughts, at least at times, than anything an outsider could publish about the company.

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