> > The writer already assumes that we think he is lying.
> Not quite. He assumes we think he could be mistaken. ("[…] it could be conceivable […] that, in my grief, I remotely logged in, sent the email and forgot I did it"). Still a bit fishy, but not as much as you make it sound.
Not quite assuming that we think he's lying, but a very common tell for lies is that the lier is preempting challenges to weak points in the story.
A lot hinges on his location and the exact job, but it smells very fishy that he apparently is set up for remote access to email (so it sounds like a "regular" knowledge worker job where checking your email from not-the-office at times is not uncommon), but when leaving very suddenly, ie. with no time to hand over work to colleagues, as you'd normally do for planned leave, he wouldn't bring the dongle with him, to be able to check in and make sure his colleagues have what they need to move on without him.
> There was no consent to install software onto their computers.
Higher up in the article when the author first introduces the software, they say this line:
> I just had to double check with an employee.
Very vague, yes. It's entirely plausible that the author deliberately hid details in that discussion, or just unintentionally communicated it poorly. But in the absence of any evidence towards that, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the author is telling the truth.
> you’ll notice that Mr X never promised to have the data. He instead said he lacked the data.
I don't know what the actual situation was, but what the parent typed seemed to indicate Mr X was implying he could provide his data later (but based on past experience, never will):
> "I don't have the data right now" — and it will never be provided
I'm all for people working a reasonable number of hours and getting plenty of sleep. But if you are steering major decisions, you need to be able to substantiate up your reasoning. Being overworked is not going to make your judgment better so everyone acting on your questionable directions without confirming data is made all the more risky.
> Weigh that against a CEO who accepted a resignation and re-hired for the position based on a single email alone without so much as a follow up call.
That is the part that smells to me too. I don't know any CEO, manager, or person otherwise responsible for employees, that would take a single resignation email as the one and only thing to start the paperwork and rehire a replacement.
The cynic in me, say that the CEO was unhappy with performance and/or the leave. Used his posistion to gain control and send the mail to get the ball rolling.
If it wasn't him, I would fully expect him to launch an investigations right then and there when it became apperant that someone spoofed an email. IT should have all the logs necessary to figure out where the email was send from.
> I see no reason for him to lie about any of this
I don't know the guy or his circumstances,but as someone who's been aggrieved by a former employer/manager, I can think of at least one reason he may want to stir up a raucous.
It doesn't sound like he's lying, but nothing he's said sounds particularly egregious - relative to practices at other American tech companies and startups. The worst he could be accused of may be exaggeration or having standards that far exceed common practice.
I don't know who any of these people are but I don't like the idea of hearing one person's account and automatically assuming it's true. At least not in the case of assertions that are potentially career-ruining.
> That first sentence feels a bit like an ad hominem attack to me. There's no call for that here.
I meant stuck in the past as in unwilling to move beyond email for primary communication, and that second part of the sentence as in not being able to see that his problems with IM might not be others'.
I have no idea why would you accuse GP of lying. You don't know him. Do you routinely judge if a person tells the truth based on some words he used?
Also, you confuse the GP's feelings about the situation right now with his attitude back then. Back when it happened, he didn't know of a 3 months long plot against him. Now he does know. He was shown the (obscenity censored because it would apparently alter the meaning of my post) documents, he read it black on white. Just before getting fired, too. It's nothing strange that his wording now is emotional and blunt, it says nothing about how he was back then.
Lastly, of course, there are polite ways of telling people to censored, you know why off politely. It's what assertiveness is all about. There are people, however, who don't really care about the form: they just can't stand others disagreeing with them. I don't think it's that rare a trait. How about that line of thinking:
"He's too polite, he's trying to hide something. And he dared to disagree with me, his superior. More than once! I don't have the time to deal with a time-bomb like him, which can blow up behind my back at any time. I need an army of easily controlled people to help me further my career. Yeah, it would be safer to spend a few minutes more and slip a couple of lies when working on his evaluations."
Preparing reports which are not true, yet are not outright lies, and which make some person look really bad doesn't really take much time. Especially if one does it for a living.
> Mark sent his client a copy of the Google Doc where he drafted the article, which included timestamps that demonstrated he wrote the document by hand. It wasn’t enough. Mark’s relationship with the writing platform fell apart. He said losing the job cost him 90% of his income.
The article is a little vague, but, assuming Mark is telling the truth, and the article is reporting reasonably, then I can think of a few possible explanations offhand...
Client/employer could be an idiot and petty. This is a thing.
Or they could just be culling the more expensive sources of content, and being a jerk in how they do it. (Maybe even as cover for... shifting to LLM content, but not wanting that exposed when a bunch of writers are let go, since unemployed writers can expose well on social media all day.)
Or an individual there could be trying to hit metrics, such as reducing expenses, and being evil about it.
Or an individual could be justifying an anti-cheat investment that they championed.
Or an individual could've made a mistake in terminating the writer, and now that they know the writer has evidence of the mistake, is just covering it up. (This is the coverup-is-worse-than-the-crime behavior not-unusual in organizations, due to misalignment and sometimes also dumbness.)
> Many with the ability to do so have confirmed it.
Would you happen to have a link handy? I don't mean to be adversarial. That screenshot is just so incredibly outlandish that it comes across as something from an overdone movie and I honestly find it difficult to take at face value.
Basic human decency and social norms aside, I just can't comprehend what manager would fail to recognize something like that committed in writing as a huge legal liability.
> So 3 employees involved with security and not 1 employee. Also, they were pushed out AFTER alerting about security issues.
How much credibility do you put in such testimonies though? Especially if everyone is a "anonymous source", you can basically invent just about anything and publish it and pretend for it to be a genuine article without any fact under the hood.
From what I've seen it wasn't as straightforward as that. The operator, Null, shared the email exchange and there seems to have been less than 24 hours between Byuu's first message and his last.
Null's last message was this, after which he went to bed (apparently, idk the timezones involved in this). It doesn't seem like a "no".
> I feel like you're being genuine. There's a fear here that you're just trying to prank me to show people "look, Josh just wants money", but it's one of the small subsets of concerns at play here.
>
> So hear me out: Send me your resume, I'll make you a counter offer.
It's also the correct word; he is seeking to obtain value from another party by material misrepresentation of the facts.
> I think he should come clean about the automation to his employer (he doesn't have to say its been going on for 6 months, of course). Unless the employer is a total ghoul, it is unlikely that this would get him into trouble.
Well, without the intentional introduction of errors, I would agree with you. With that, I think lots of employers would say “Good job on the automation, but you are terminated, for cause, for the deliberate sabotage.”
> If the story is true, the guy is NOT a fraudster.
If the story is true, the guy chose to become a fraudster as a precaution against the risk that the automation might not be appreciated.
> Also, as I understand, all Krebs has done is wrote "X told me about Y". How is that statement false, if X really contacted Krebs and told about Y?
My advice would be to read the actual complaint[0]. It goes into detail why they are doing this and their various points. The part that is interesting to me at least is Krebs intentionally labeling Sharp differently depending on the sentence in the same article.
> 6. Krebs alternated his descriptions of Sharp, first he describes Sharp as a current employee. He then describes Sharp as a “former Ubiquiti developer” to deceive readers into believing that the sourcing for his original story was a legitimate source—someone other than Sharp. Krebs, therefore, intentionally concealed the fact that the only support for his reporting came from the very person who had just been indicted for hacking and attempted blackmail.
> I have no idea why would you accuse GP of lying.
He claims that he "politely" told someone to "fuck off". It's not really a question of lying, but a question of possibility. You can't politely tell someone to fuck off. Either you didn't tell them to fuck off or you didn't do it politely. "Fuck off" is not polite. It's not supposed to be polite. If you politely ask someone to leave you alone, you're not telling them to fuck off.
> Do you routinely judge if a person tells the truth based on some words he used?
Not that it's really relevant, but yes. How else would you judge a person's truthfulness except through the words they use? Your words matching the facts is basically the definition of truth.
Do you routinely assume that everything anyone claims is accurate?
> Also, you confuse the GP's feelings about the situation right now with his attitude back then.
No, I'm reading his description of what happened. He gives two versions, one of which (fuck off) is intrinsically unpolite. The other (mind your own business) is pretty rude, too. Given his descriptions in general, it's hard to imagine that this was actually a polite exchange.
It's also difficult to believe that his politeness was rewarded by months of revenge plotting and spite. It would be easier to believe this if he presented this as an isolated story. Instead he presents this as an example of how terrible "99%" of HR employees are. So either 99% of HR employees are actually pointlessly spiteful and terrible, or he's intentionally lying, or he has had so many bad interactions that he believes it to be true. If it's the last case, I've got to wonder if the problem is really all of HR or if it's the one guy who keeps having problems with HR.
> One mans 'obliviousness' is another man's 'innocence'. In other words, it helps to not mis-understand this situation as the work of the ill-informed or 'incompetent'.
What do you propose? Just because some people understand it as a deception or a possible deception, that understanding is not universal. Plenty of people accept these "ignorance" claims making it so that executives are able to effectively use the plausible deniability gambit. How else can we work around it?
> Not quite. He assumes we think he could be mistaken. ("[…] it could be conceivable […] that, in my grief, I remotely logged in, sent the email and forgot I did it"). Still a bit fishy, but not as much as you make it sound.
Not quite assuming that we think he's lying, but a very common tell for lies is that the lier is preempting challenges to weak points in the story.
A lot hinges on his location and the exact job, but it smells very fishy that he apparently is set up for remote access to email (so it sounds like a "regular" knowledge worker job where checking your email from not-the-office at times is not uncommon), but when leaving very suddenly, ie. with no time to hand over work to colleagues, as you'd normally do for planned leave, he wouldn't bring the dongle with him, to be able to check in and make sure his colleagues have what they need to move on without him.
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