>In his own memorandum to the court, requesting that he be sentenced to a year of house arrest, Kail, 49, described himself as a “global power leader, top dev ops influencer and a thought leader.” So very humble of him.
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Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
261–270 of 413 posts
Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, there's Bernie Madoff stuff, and then there's this. Are you comfortable with big corporations and government hegemony muscling employees into compliance? I'm not. The guy should undoubtedly be sued, but it feels wrong to create an equivalency here with violent offenders.
This guy defrauded the company to the tune of millions of dollars. I am perfectly comfortable with big corporations and governments muscling people into compliance, where thing to comply with is “not stealing from the company”. Imagine you run a business, and your employee just steals one of the company vehicles. Do you think you should have any recourse beyond firing them? I mean, it’s only a few tens of thousands o…
I think that's a bit of a false equivalency. The guy incorporated a domestic LLC, which unless he's a total moron, I assume the guy just thought that this is how business is conducted, and the US government would be okay to know about it. I don't believe any small business employee is going to incorporate an "I Steal Trucks LLC."
The American public gets defrauded by corporations daily. I seldom see white knights in the government volunteering to prosecute them on our behalf.
Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh, yea. Good observation. This reminds me of the ridesharing debacle. Uber was operating an illegal taxi service which upset a lot of local governments. It was taken to the courts multiple times. Uber won but one of the lessons to young founders was to go for it even if it's not strictly legal - laws can change. Now I'm not saying what Uber did was necessarily a bad thing. But if I had the idea to disrupt taxi serv…
YouTube got huge largely due to rampant piracy, in the early days. Straight-up posting copyrighted material unmodified, and all kinds of use of media (songs, especially) in ways that aren't protected by fair use. All while copyright cartels were going after torrent users—YouTube? Made a bunch of people rich, none of them paid for what they knowingly did, and no-one thinks 1/10 as ill of any of them as they do of this…
I don’t think the lesson is that it’s necessary; but rather that if you are successful as a business, you will probably get away with the crimes.
Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
People often set up an LLC for their consulting thinking it will help with 1) taxes and 2) liability. But neither of those are quite right: 1) the same tax deductions are available on your normal schedule C 2) while acting on behalf of your LLC you’re still personally liable for your actions (let alone your illegal schemes).
It can depend and IANAL buuuut I do have an LLC taxed as an S Corp, because you can dramatically reduce your tax burden. Essentially you buffer your money in your LLC and pay yourself a "reasonable salary". For example: maybe you earn $200k this year as a software contractor. You go to glassdoor and find that mean salary for software engineers is $96k/yr. You pay yourself $8k/mo (pre-tax), deducting payroll taxes and…
See below; this S-corp "reasonable salary" thing was called out to me as an audit flag by my accountant, and other people have stories of friends being audited. It's not worth it (and the ethics of it aren't great; most people can't work for S-corps they own, and can't avail themselves of this "favorable treatment".)
Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of "I don't get why this is wrong?" going on in this thread would seem to support the prosecutors' view that this is a widespread practice. Long ago, before Dotcom went Dotbomb, I worked for a firm where the CIO was being paid kickbacks by our hardware reseller. He was terminated for other reasons and, shortly after he left, our head of network ops got a call from the distributor asking where they should s…
I used to work for a company that actively sought out and hired the adult children of high level executives. Even those that weren't very competent were hired since if they were part of the same Ivy League alumni network. I have no knowledge of the business dealings but the company definitely appeared to benefit from having those connections.
“Nepotism”
Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social Security stops at something under $150K per year. If you’re going to try to avoid it by paying no salary and all distributions for work that you personally did, you’ll likely fall afoul of the “reasonable salary” test, designed to prevent exactly this.
Everyone needs to understand this. I’ve had two friends get audited and fined for massively underpaying themselves for contract work via their LLCs. Many of the people I run into who claim all kinds of benefits from this route are actually commiting low level tax fraud, knowingly or otherwise.
100% this, get an accountant and maybe a lawyer. It is very, very worth it.
Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of "I don't get why this is wrong?" going on in this thread would seem to support the prosecutors' view that this is a widespread practice. Long ago, before Dotcom went Dotbomb, I worked for a firm where the CIO was being paid kickbacks by our hardware reseller. He was terminated for other reasons and, shortly after he left, our head of network ops got a call from the distributor asking where they should s…
> The amount of "I don't get why this is wrong?" going on in this thread would seem to support the prosecutors' view that this is a widespread practice. I think it's because a lot of "hustle" culture and stories of the early business careers of very successful founders involve a bunch of stuff that sure looks like fraud or otherwise like something that ought to be illegal (it may not be, but I mean that it feels like…
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Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can depend and IANAL buuuut I do have an LLC taxed as an S Corp, because you can dramatically reduce your tax burden. Essentially you buffer your money in your LLC and pay yourself a "reasonable salary". For example: maybe you earn $200k this year as a software contractor. You go to glassdoor and find that mean salary for software engineers is $96k/yr. You pay yourself $8k/mo (pre-tax), deducting payroll taxes and…
See below; this S-corp "reasonable salary" thing was called out to me as an audit flag by my accountant, and other people have stories of friends being audited. It's not worth it (and the ethics of it aren't great; most people can't work for S-corps they own, and can't avail themselves of this "favorable treatment".)
Oh no thank you! I'll look around and get a 2nd opinion. Kindness evidently does exist over the internet :)
Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#269> There was just one catch to landing that deal: It had to hire the streaming company’s vice president of IT operations, Michael Kail, as a consultant and an advisor, and pay him with fees and stock options. I completely get how a startup would take this deal, however gross it is, but what I don't understand is how the exec got away with it from Netflix's side. And the fact this wasn't just 1 but 8 other startups he…
HR and rules are for the little people. VPs can do pretty much whatever they want for a LOOOONG time at large tech companies before any consequence catches up with them.
Big pharma CTO mandated the use of a certain software while everyone knew they were coming from the company and sits on their board. I'm certain the kickbacks are still happening but in different forms: job, advisory role ...so on and so forth.
Re: Former Netflix executive convicted of receiving bribes from contractors
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes it is, captain obvious. now what is the entitlement you allude to?
That you expect HN to work the way you want it to, instead of the way it already worked when you joined. You've been here 8 years, enough time to familiarize yourself with what's in the package. Besides that, a moderator going out of their way to mention that they have made an edit to your post, as well as specifically what edit they made is more than you could reasonably expect, and you already have that. Anything o…
- "you expect"- wrong! - at no point did i express my "expectation". I was voicing my opinion on how I think the UX should work for this use case
- "instead of the way it already worked when you joined." Just because it worked this way does not mean it is right.
- "HN -> HN's rules." Yes, Captain Obvious. this does not mean their rules make sense and certainly does not mean a user voicing an opinion on how the rules should be changed is entitled.