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VoteHere Whistleblower Suit
astar writes "VoteHere is a DRM electronic voting machine vendor.
Dan Spillane is sueing them for wrongfull termination in a whistleblowers suit."
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I think it's obvious the poster added the DRM bit to be inflammatory but why does /. insist on using these submissions? Nowhere in the article does it mention or refer to DRM yet there it is, like the ugly weed sitting in the crack of the sidewalk for all to see. Not even the VoteHere website mentions DRM in their products decriptions.
After checking the VoteHere website I also discovered some discrpencies between what Dan Spillane is claiming in his suit and the products VoteHere is offering. According to the company their voting system called VHTi includes a verifiable paper trail. Their other product called RemoteVote was a bit sketchier about the audit trail but considering you can use means of voting that make printingvery difficult or impossible (cell phones, PDAs, etc.) this is not surprising. Perhaps Dan Spillane was simply an annoying prick that tried to make a mountain out of a molehill and got fired for it.
He was there less than six months, and he filed over 250 error reports, often citing them as being priority one. Now anyone who has worked closely with testers know that the good ones are like gold and the bad ones can only bog down the system. And how much loyalty does a company have to a six month employee anyway? Especially one that comes in doing things in his way (citing standards, but those can always be interpreted in many ways) Last time I checked, we were employment at will, and if he wanted to be considered a "whistleblower", he would have done it 1.5 years ago and to a goverment or news agency. A little on my background.. I've been with my current employer just over six months after getting laid off for the second time after college. A lot of that time was learning how their systems work and improving those I understood. I've seen people come and go in that brief time that thought they knew it all and that they were going to shake things up. Problem is, they didn't want to work with people, they wanted to do things their way, other peoples opinions be damned. Andto some extent it is unfortunate that this guy was able to get a settlement from the company. I bet they, and others aware of the lawsuit, are going to think twice before hiring someone who is legitimately energetic and wants to improve the system.
Reading the documents looks a bit like the average engineer under the gun. Release report regarding volitility of software, and numerous bugs in need of resolution, management goes "Oh those aren't THAAT bad" rather than fix them, they wanna keep to the release schedule on budget.