[charlesdm]

> I mean, clearly, you buy your way into the authorized vendors list; but how do you buy your way into the authorized vendors list?

Example: Let's say you want to get on the preferred vendor list of AT&T. Whenever AT&T hires a contract software developer, they contact the 2-4 recruiters on that list for that specialization.

The CEO could easily put you on the list if he wanted to. Let's say I'm buddies with the CEO, and if I asked my buddy, he wouldn't mind doing that for me. I'd owe him one. How much would that be worth to a recruitment company, maybe $5-10m a year? How much should the person facilitating that be paid? Probably quite a lot, maybe 20-30% of the value of that deal, i.e. $1-3m? How does it get divided if a friend of mine needs a favor from my buddy the CEO?

Now, would you rather put the deal together or go source the people? :)

Replace CEO with some high powered VP - that would work as well. Or a friend of a friend.

Ethics aside of course, because this all gets very grey very fast. Though if you provide quality service, it doesn't matter all that much.

[lsc]

See, this is why my ethical intuition doesn't work here. I'm sure that the deal, as you propose, is legal and above board, assuming nobody looks too closely at what you "owe" the CEO over it.

However, if we take that same scenario, but instead I hand you a wad of cash equivalents, you take some percentage and pass the rest on to the CEO directly in exchange for getting me on the list, most people would agree that this is very unethical; at the very least the CEO would be liable to his or her shareholders, and at most, you, I and the CEO might all face criminal charges for defrauding the shareholders of T.

My ethical intuition doesn't see any difference between those two situations, even though one is completely normal and probably legal, while the other is certainly not