Slashdot Mirror
Apple Fires Five Employees for Downloading Leopard
BuzzardsBay writes "The good folks at VARBusiness are quoting a ThinkSecret report that claims five Apple employees got canned over the unauthorized downloading of the Leopard OS. According to the article: one of the employees says:
"Because we had the character to tell the truth and to face the consequences of our actions, we were terminated. If we all lied and denied it would we still be working at Apple today? Even more so, is that the kind of person that Apple wants working for them?""
Is that the type who steals or the type who thinks being honest about their crimes absolves them of punishment?
More like if you use the same penalty for those who tell the truth as those who lie and get caught, you remove all the incentive to tell the truth in the first place.
From an ethical perspective, you have two things:
1. Employee does something that runs counter to the company's stated policy in an important way. Bad employee - no biscuit.
2. Employee tells the truth when lying might have saved their job. Good person - refused to lie even when lying seemed to be of benefit.
There's no reason to mix these two - they're separate actions. One's a mistake, one's a sign of character. So of the mistake, you say "oh shit, that was really stupid, I wish I hadn't done that." And of the truth-telling, you say "yay, I'm glad I did that."
When you try to mix the two, it wrecks the good taste of telling the truth. Don't regret doing the right thing. Just take this lesson forward and try to avoid doing the wrong thing in the future.
--Speaking as one who was burned by exactly this kind of thinking in high school, and wasted a lot of emotional energy on it.
Oh c'mon! WTF is wrong with you all? Is the world so black and white in Slashdot that if someone protests about being punished too hard, they can only be advocating no punishment at all?
The (ex)Apple employees are protesting that they came clean and yet endured the same punishment they'd have endured if they had not come forward but been caught anyway. The complaint is not that they were punished at all, it's that the punishment was excessive and gives nobody any incentive to be honest.
And they have a point. And this not about murder, where arguably the action is so severe that the appropriate punishment should always be dealt, it's about a case of copyright infringement. Yes, there's room for Apple to take a more lenient line with truth tellers than with those who lie. Especially when given the case is ultimately about whether an employee can be trusted with the company's proprietary inside information, the issue of whether they lied or not in an investigation is actually relevent.
Apple has arguably over-reacted. And whether it did or not, it has most certainly cut off its own nose to spite the face of others. Firing is an expensive act. Apple can expect to lose the productivity the fired employee would have given to the company during the time it recruits and trains the replacement, and recruiting is hardly cheap either. Further, it has made its own future investigations harder because it will not get the cooperation of employees who see themselves as ultimately loyal.
Apple can hire and fire whoever they want, for whatever (legal) reason. But that doesn't make this anything other than, at face value, assuming there's not more to it than TFA, a dumb decision. And certainly, the logic Slashdotters promote of "IF THEY HATE THERE PUNISHMANT, TEHY MUST FINK BEENG PUNICHED IS RONG!!1" is utterly irrelevent and idiotic.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It is this inability to read and comprehend what someone else has actually written, instead insisting on merely glancing at their words and assuming they say what you expect, that makes me despair for the future of society.
Let's do some reading.
What you claim: "You act as if they have a God-given-right to work at Apple."
What he really said: "Apple can hire and fire whoever they want, for whatever (legal) reason."
What you claim: "What we have now is the whining of somebody who doesn't like that he is being held accountable for his own actions."
What he really said: "The complaint is not that they were punished at all, it's that the punishment was excessive and gives nobody any incentive to be honest."
Welcome to the wonderful world of the straw man argument, where answering people's points is too hard, so you just pretend they said something stupid instead and tell them how stupid they were to say it. You've got a bright future ahead of you in politics.