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Comment by oreally

4 months ago

It starts when companies decide they have a right to time outside the employee's official hours and that they shouldn't have to properly reflect it in their employees' salaries, nor in their employment guarantees.

And furthermore, as an employee end of the day it's your right to have to be look out for yourself. You probably don't realize that because you're infected with startupitis where everyone has to be all in to succeed.

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oreally

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neilv  4 months ago

I do realize that employees have to look out for themselves (because companies, including startups, will usually take, take take from the employee, and then throw away the carcass, if they can).

However, employees work in a company with other people, so we'd like to know what we can and can't trust from each other.

If a colleague engages in criminal fraud, do they have a rigorous philosophy about when and when not to do that? How do they behave towards the team? Is defrauding the company OK, over something they think they company shouldn't demand anyway, but they will still be honest and responsible towards their teammates? That would be very good to know.

If so many people weren't so anxious to downvote things that don't suit their kneejerk reactions, we could discuss this.

  • crazygringo  4 months ago

    A response to your comment could fill a book.

    In short: it's complicated. Nobody minds about the technically "criminal fraud" when somebody brings home a couple dollars' worth of office supplies for private use. Everybody agrees that embezzling a million dollars should send you to jail. Meanwhile, something like grabbing a second lunch from the free company cafeteria and taking it home to eat as dinner will result in a lot of disagreement as to how bad that really is. But it also probably doesn't have a whole lot to do with whether you can trust that person's code reviews, because people are multifaceted and use different moral standards in different areas.

    > so we'd like to know what we can and can't trust from each other.

    Alas, we can't know. There are the things that are obviously fine, the things that are obviously not, and a GIGANTIC gray area in the middle which nobody is going to agree on, and companies will try to make policies that will always go too far in some parts and employees will always evade some of the policies they think are bad or unimportant.

    And I think that when a company has a bad policy of overreaching in trying to claim ownership over things you do on your own time, and employees respond by falsely claiming that something they made predated their employment, that it's a fascinating example of that gray area.

  • oreally  4 months ago

    > If a colleague engages in criminal fraud, do they have a rigorous philosophy about when and when not to do that? How do they behave towards the team? Is defrauding the company OK, over something they think they company shouldn't demand anyway, but they will still be honest and responsible towards their teammates? That would be very good to know.

    I think the question you're really asking is whether or not they can be trusted down the line so that the system 'works'.

    So here's the thing: You can never have a 100% guaranteed trust that someone is going to be doing as the company wills and wishes them to be, even if you have a written contract, and even if you shove a bunch of extra rules in it.

    When it comes down to it, people will always have to look out for their best interests eventually, and having extra unneeded rules will push them to think transactionally, system and morals be damned. So the solution would be to treat them well enough to not have them think about it in the first place.