Pro Tip: The "what questions can we answer about $COMPANY" section at the end of an engineering interview should be used to ask about the business model and revenue/monetization, not just the tech stack
The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
41–50 of 262 posts
Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#42Reminds 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 th…
You talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get up to on a daily basis.
Or rather "many big $biz_sector companies".
Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
You talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get up to on a daily basis.
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.
Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
You talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get up to on a daily basis.
indeed! But the question is ... can tax evasion be considered an ethical violation? :)
Well, by definition yes. Tax evasion and tax fraud are equivalent.
I think you mean tax avoidance, which is quite a different matter. While there's a lot of debate on the matter, in the United States at least, the general rule of thumb was laid down in 1934, and is as follows.
> Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes -- Judge Learned Hand
Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#45Maybe 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 find it difficult to understand how you would even interview & accept a job without understanding what the company did.
A nice tech jobs in a cushy air-conditioned office that lets you feed your family: Jobs like these don't grow on trees.
Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#46Interviewed at a company called Rakuten Loyalty in Boston a few years ago. At that time it was the exact same thing, a malware / adware browser toolbar company, and they also sold white label toolbars. Took me the entire interview to figure out what they actually did. Their website [0] now has very little information about what they actually do, with a generic contact form. But an archive.org [1] of their old website shows the truth. Funny how they hide what they actually do now.
[0] http://www.rakutenrewards.com/ [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121216021038/http://rakutenloy...
Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#47Reminds 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 th…
You talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get up to on a daily basis.
The problem is that when some manager asks to work on something unethical, the technical people fall over eachother in trying to implement it first.
Lesson: not everything which can be implemented should. And elegant solutions to unethical problems are still ugly.
Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#48Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#49I worked at a web development studio. One of our clients was MannaTech, basically a marketing company that sold snake-oil to parents of sick children, claiming it could "cure" everything from cancer to down syndrome. They were under investigation by the Texas DA at one point.
We tracked our work hourly, so I donated all the money I made from that particular work to St. Jude's hospital, which actually does cure cancer in children, but it still irks me to this day.
Re: The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do
#50I used to work for a company that was purchased by a Multi Level Marketing cough pyramidscheme cough 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…
Now I'm curious... How did they sell the change in focus to your team/company? What aspects about MLM did you find most surprising?
There was no change in focus per se. The company was an e-commerce site, and the parent company was going to simply be another vendor. They were using our in-house technology to power their external (to us) e-commerce presence, besides the placement of their products on our site.
However, their products started to receive more and more focus on our site. If their highly profitable products had competitors in certain categories, we would eliminate those other products. SEO was optimized for those products. The underlying tech focus did not change. The UI team continued working on UIs, mobile teams on the app, etc.
MLM was/is designed to fail. The barriers of entry for any form of compensation were incredibly high. If you satisfied some requirement of the program, there would be another one that was not achieved, invalidating any profits. I had zero insights on the parent company's network, but I simply do not see how a new person could make any money at all.
Although our location, at least those in tech, had nothing to do with the MLM program, except for putting the products on the site (through the standard vendor process), it was still uneasy to be part of. I was not starving. I had a choice to not be part of it, so I exercised that choice. I should add the MLMs are completely legal under strict federal guidelines. Nothing illegal was happening, it was a bit too immoral for my personal standards.