[Loughla]

With enough money, I'm like 99% sure I could put some fraud to bed in my conscience. From what I can tell, success tends to help people justify their actions in hindsight. So maybe there's something psychological there to help me forget, anyway.

If nothing else, as a billionaire, I could afford to do extremely good works to help people forget about how awful I was in the early days (remember when Bill Gates was the devil? I do).

[pas]

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, I vividly remember how people were constantly reminding each others about the evils of M$ and Gates. But even his ruthlessness wasn't fraud, right? Usually enterprise software simply stifles software engineering because of the very short-term oriented for-profit approach. Which leads to burnout, but ... still not exactly fraud.

[mongol]

Agreed, I don't think Gates can be descibed as fraudulent. He was like you say a ruthless businessman. But that is different than what this Nikola founder seems to have been.

[Loughla]

I guess, to me, fraud and unethical management/business practices are the same thing. If you can live with getting ahead by stepping on the backs of the people beneath you, why not commit a little fraud? Is there a difference, outside of legal differences?

I guess, maybe for me, it's; 'in for a penny, in for a pound' kind of thing. If you're going to be unethical, why not just commit fraud as well?

[pas]

I have no idea about Gates' early personal beliefs, but at that time they were competing with big corps like IBM. They were the underdog. They played the game on hard mode (even though most of us never had or will have the opportunity to get into Harvard and casually just drop out to start some crazy venture), and when they made it big, they were doing the same aggressive deals and the market eat it up, the whole company was basically built on this aggressiveness (quick and dirty software, that runs anywhere coupled with expensive licenses, strong copyright enforcement campaigns to force you to buy those expensive licenses, cater to enterprises, increase market share at any cost [vertical integration in IE, Office and Windows], dominate the market).

I have some minimal/passing familiarity with the previous cutthroat mindset. And I know that fraud is when you cross a line. When you explicitly promise one thing and deliver something else. The importance of willfully making false statements with the purpose of profiting off the victims' action(s).

I know some people test the ropes/limits so many times that the line disappears for them.

Now, that said, unethical management might be simply working the shit out of your team for some deadline (which regularly happens in game development) or it might be lobbying against workplace safety regulations like a few special asshole coal mine owners do.

MS treated contractors as second class citizens, they got sued and the contractors won. Plus MS had (has?) a tendency of demanding long hours. Are long hours unethical in software engineering when there are so many opportunities for engineers? Or it's just an option for those who prefer that kind of work-nolife balance? I don't know.

However, what Amazon does seems (is!) very troubling (overworking pickers to the point of causing them permanent joint damage/pain), especially considering that the low-skill labor market segment is words apart from the aforementioned velvet sweatshop problem of long hours for 6 figures.

...

Anyway. I've worked with guys who clearly have a warped sense of ethics (plus entitlement, self-importance, ego), and the line is usually crossed when later the fraudster cannot account for the money. That's a clear breach of fiduciary duties. Because even the shittiest explanation of why and how you had to spend weeks at a 5-star resort to "make deals" might be defendable, but the clear lack of any explanation is not.