However much I want to see these culprits caught and punished, I think it's a lot to ask a jobless, possibly homeless person to attract retribution from people who have already proven that they will do absolutely anything to maintain the appearance of success.
Even when you win, bogus lawsuits are expensive and painful to sort out. My mom was sued after a business deal went south. Seeing the judge find for her on all counts and upbraid the plaintiff and the plaintiff's lawyer was satisfying, but it was not worth the 18 months of severe stress or the substantial legal bills that we had to pay.
If you would like to see more names named, then try accompanying your request with a credible offer of a legal defense fund at least $100k in size. That's a lot more persuasive than the notion that random internet commenters will be disappointed.
So your argument is that this person has no rights to know who this person who is scamming startup employees is and that the "reasonable" action they should take is to offer $100k.
You can't seriously believe this makes sense, right?
I cannot quite fathom the confusion of ideas that results in your comment here.
What does a "right" to know something mean? Apparently you think that kelukelugames has the right to force Penny Kim to make public statements that would put her at the risk of a major lawsuit. Can kelukelugames compel this of everyone who has a bad employer experience? By what mechanism is the right enforced? What are the penalties if kelukelugames right to know is not enforced?
As far as I'm concerned, the only rights involved here are Penny Kim's rights to privacy and freedom of association. She was not obligated to publish this. Doing so was difficult and puts her at risk. It was a gift. I think it's ungracious to look at a gift and say, "YOU OWE ME MORE!"
If you would like people to publish more things like this, especially to the extent of naming names, then I think the best approach is to reduce the risk to whistleblowers. One way to do that is to create a legal defense fund large enough to handle a lawsuit over the naming of names. My guess is that $100k is about the minimum for that.
"Apparently you think that kelukelugames has the right to force Penny Kim to make public statements that would put her at the risk of a major lawsuit. Can kelukelugames compel this of everyone who has a bad employer experience? By what mechanism is the right enforced? What are the penalties if kelukelugames right to know is not enforced?"
Wait so is it that you don't understand my point or that you literally are making up my point? I never even made the slightest implication I believe any of that and you made up this entire system of beliefs for me. This is insane. Stop.
"I think it's ungracious to look at a gift and say, "YOU OWE ME MORE!""
Oh hey, another thing I didn't do! Fun! But yeah, you're right, this is unreasonable! You know what is reasonable though? Anyone who even dare ask a question should be forced to pay a six figure some because some guy on the internet said so and really that is it.
I'll let you get back to mocking behaviors you made up in other sub comments. Thanks for your contribution.
When you say, "X has a right to Y", a reasonable interpretation of that is, "Someone(Z) is punished if X is denied access to Y".
For example, I could say I have a right to structurally secure buildings. If the floor of the mall falls apart underneath me, I can sue them for damages for not obeying the building code. If the mall's owners refuse to pay, the police will storm their house to extract payment(and if they resist, they could be shot). The police could end up shooting someone to enforce this right.
When you say, "This commenter has a right to Penny's information", a reasonable interpretation is, "Penny or any other person declining to support this right and provide this information will be punished or hurt in some way."
It's specifically that word "right" that you used that's in question. It makes me think of "enforcement", and I don't consider the right you described to be worthy of enforcement.
You all seem to have this super bizarre belief that I was forcing someone to divulge information by saying I believed they should do it? Do you actually believe that or is this just a convenient thing to nit over?
Those are how rights work: through obligation and enforcement. A right to know is a positive right [1], which means other people are compelled to provide it for you. E.g., I have a legal right to know the financials of publicly traded companies. If a company fails to honor my right, the SEC will come after them. First with lawyers, then with people with guns.
> Oh hey, another thing I didn't do!
I was referring to the behavior I was originally objecting to. But I'm not sure you didn't do that, because your point on "rights" seems to imply that Penny Kim is obligated to do more.
If you would like to make clear what you actually meant, I'd be glad to read it.
Seriously, is there a single shred of your being that believe that I was compelling this stranger to provide information...?
We both know that you can't believe that, so why are you arguing your point as if you do...? What offends you so much that some stranger on the internet said that it was right for this information to be out in the open? Are you just completely desperate to argue with a stranger over nothing and change the topic to argue semantics? Maybe try reddit?
A bunch of people were complaining about Penny's not naming names. I pointed out that she didn't do it for a reason. For her to do so could be very costly. I said that if people really wanted her to talk, they should offer to share in the costs by putting together a legal defense fund.
You then responded by saying I couldn't be serious, and talking about "this person" (presumably kelukelugames) and whether I thought they had "no rights to know" more.
Assuming you were serious, I expanded on what an actual "right to know" would mean, showing that the idea has significant implementation problems. If you meant something else, you could have cleared that up by saying what you did mean.
> What offends you so much that some stranger on the internet said that it was right
The reason I objected is that when people take a gift and are immediately critical that the gift was not larger, it discourages the giving of gifts. If we want more whistleblowers, we must make sure their experience of whistleblowing is a positive one. If all they hear is, "Y U NO GIVE MOAR", that is not a positive experience.
I think it's particularly important here because this instant entitlement is a perennial problem for open source project maintainers.
Does that make my motivations clearer?
> Are you just completely desperate to argue with a stranger
Pal, you are the one who responded to me, and you did it with a lot of attitude. The person I was responding to thought my point was reasonable. You appear to be the only one excited for an argument here.
"The reason I objected is that when people take a gift and are immediately critical that the gift was not larger, it discourages the giving of gifts. If we want more whistleblowers, we must make sure their experience of whistleblowing is a positive one. If all they hear is, "Y U NO GIVE MOAR", that is not a positive experience.
I think it's particularly important here because this instant entitlement is a perennial problem for open source project maintainers."
So basically you have a bunch of reasons why you're upset about this but none have even a remote relationship to the topic at hand? Because you feel open source software maintainers have a certain problem, by logical extension we must be facing the exact same thing in this totally different situation.
That you cannot see the relationship is not proof of no relationship, especially given your repeated struggles understanding my posts. And even if there were no relationship, my fondness for whistleblowers would have been enough to motivate the comment.
Just to be clear, your offer is this ex-employee possibly gets to pay a $x00k legal bill for your convenience, right?
Read about, eg, what happened to Mother Jones when a billionaire sued them. It's easy for one person with more money than the other to impose huge costs in our legal system.
I guess I'll give a non sarcastic reply even though I didn't think it would be necessary to give your obviously rhetorical, snark question that had no connection to reality:
"Just to be clear, your offer is this ex-employee possibly gets to pay a $x00k legal bill for your convenience, right?"
nah you're right, we should all be generous and give all YOUR money and things away. not our stuff though, we wanna keep those. let's just give away YOUR money.
I know that this is hackernews and being super obtuse and snarky trumps logic at all times, but uhhhh, where exactly do you believe I implied other people should be giving their money away?
You appear to believe that Penny Kim should have named names. That would have increased her risk of a lawsuit. Lawsuits are expensive. Ergo, if you argue for her naming names, you believe she should be willing to spend a lot of money on what you want.
Exactly. It strikes me as the same sort of entitlement dynamic that so many open source project maintainers face. "You gave me a free thing? Well it's wrong and you should give me a much better free thing. For free!"
I don't mind people wanting things. We all want things. But I think it's a problem when that crosses the line into expectation or demand.
Where exactly do you believe I "demanded" anything? I simply mocked YOUR demand (funny how this ended in me getting criticized for being demanding...) if someone dare even ask who these founders are, they must give her a six figure sum...
I did not in fact demand anything. I said explained a way that people could make whistleblowers more comfortable if they really wanted more information public.
Okay, great. Thanks for the contribution in telling anyone that if they want to know information they should offer a stranger six figures. Great contribution. I was clearly wrong.
I agree with you too. Speaking up is a privilege. Hard to do with a mortgage and a family. That's why when I worked at Redfin, employees rather leave instead of complain. Retaliation is real.
An aside that seems relevant to a general discussion of "name vs not name": I've noticed that you (or a set of users that share your very unique username, perhaps) spend a ton of time attacking Redfin on various social media accounts (HN, Reddit, Facebook). I used to work there, too, and it's strange that you consistently describe the company in a negative way that is unfamiliar at best and completely unwarranted to the best of my knowledge.
It sounds like you had a really bad experience, which of course is your prerogative. But generalizing your experience to attack an entire company seems to demand a higher burden of evidence and credibility -- a standard that is tough to ascribe to an anonymous hit-and-run commenter who seems to have the sole motive of flinging as much dirt as possible.
I guess the question I'm posing, to you and to this forum, is the following: to what extent can you take a non-specific, general denunciation seriously without a name and a real reputation behind it? Penny did a brave, good thing in writing about her experiences for public consumption. If you want anyone to take you at your word, I'd encourage you do the same. I look forward to reading about your perspective, with a name and context attached, since it's worlds apart from mine.
A ton of time is an exaggeration. I think this is the first time Redfin is mentioned by name on HN.[1] And I don't think my account is anon if you and Glenn both can figure out who I am. I enjoyed working at Redfin, and I believe they are disrupting real estate in a good way. I would say I love the site. I spend a ton of time advocating for Redfin. But I wish Glenn tried to build a more inclusive work environment.
When I worked at Redfin, a number of people complained about racist and sexist incidents. All of them were minor. For example, boss touching a black woman's natural hair. No one wanted to escalate it to management, because they didn't feel it was safe or that people wouldn't care. Some co-workers were empathetic, while others expressed disbelief and defensiveness. Many were dismissive because "it's worlds apart" from their experiences. A couple of us eventually escalated to management. The lack of empathy was disappointing but not unexpected. A handful of my friends have left or want to leave partly due to these incidents. That's not good.
What would you do? Feel free to PM me. I think a private conversation would be more honest and involve less posturing.
Thanks for sharing these experiences, man. I never heard of an incident like the one you describe, but I can totally believe that experiences like these happen by the law of large numbers. To employ a tired but accurate adage, no organization of any meaningful size is immune to this category of concerns, especially not in the tech world.
Which of course is no excuse; where my experience remains different than yours is in your characterization of the management team. I've found them to be proactive and sensitive in forwarding inclusiveness and educating employees on the ways inadvertent discrimination can cause harm -- and as a minority, I never had any problems. As I'm early in my career I don't have much of a benchmark, but I'd love to PM you to understand what you would have done better. Above all, thanks for engaging productively -- I apologize for coming in hot, but hope you understand that I feel loyal to an organization and leadership team that, in my view, has done a fantastic job making me feel welcome.
You are still being dismissive. In an office of ~200 people, I personally know four women who left for reasons ranging from the hair incident to being told that having a child is a career limiting move. I don't think a 2% departure rate is due to the law of large numbers when the company culture is small enough to be shaped by Glenn.
Anyway, when did you work there? There is a good chance you benefited from a more sensitive management team caused by a few awkward exits.
It's fine, I'm pretty sure I know the guy. I think he's an engineering manager. Managers like him are why so few are willing to speak up. People get defensive real quick. See the video posted below.
He knows my facebook account so I don't see how he thinks I'm trying to stay anonymous. Though I'm flattered he read thousands of my tweets to find the four or five about Redfin.
I am not an engineering manager -- and for what it's worth, not a manager at all, just a regular old line employee (or was until a few months ago). As I said, I'm just an ex-Redfinnian who is a minority and experienced an environment that is very different from what you describe, which made me very curious to understand the gap between our experiences -- and if I'm being completely honest, eager to defend a company which has been generally wonderful to me with regards to fostering an inclusive and safe work environment, and unequivocally not one that "retaliates" in the manner you describe.
Okay, so you worked there after me. When I started, devs still checked sex jokes into the code base. Just one of the many things I tried to fix. You are welcome, I guess?
You're right that it isn't the best word choice -- I meant to say that it's not my place or anyone else's to comment on the lived experience of an individual at or with an institution. What I take issue with is generalizing a subjective experience to color and characterize an entire institution.
