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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?""
congratulations, you faced em.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Is that the type who steals or the type who thinks being honest about their crimes absolves them of punishment?
From the article: "The next-generation operating system, which is scheduled to ship early next year, were previewed by Apple executives at the Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco during the week of Aug. 7-11. " So it seems the terminated employees were fired for downloading an advance copy. Whoever uploaded it in the first place is probably looking at some sort of repercussions as well. If they can be found.
Oh no, not again.
Honestly who is suprised by this? Dur they would have fired you. Back when you interveiwed for min wage jobs and they asked you, "is it ever 'ok' to steal from a company you work for?" ... heres a hint.. DON'T SAY YES!
Would Apple have continued investigating? How would they have investigated? According to the ThinkSecret article this is based on http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0608retailleak.htm l? there may be dozens more people getting fired fairly soon.
Good on Apple. The product isn't done yet, so it doesn't deserve to be seen.
Oh no, not again.
"All of us know that we violated our NDA and ethics policy. Therefore, because we had the character to tell the truth and to face the consequences of our actions, we were terminated," said one of the fired employees, who spoke with Think Secret on condition of anonymity.
If you are full well aware that you violated the Non-Disclosure agreement -- in addition to the ethics policy -- you signed when you came on board, then, well, you should be full well aware of the fact that all you can expect is to be fired over it. NDAs are sort of a big deal for companies. Ethics, on the other hand, are a big deal unless if you have enough power.
The summary left out a big piece of information, in my opinion. They were just retail employees, not developers. I was puzzled why some developers at Apple *didn't* have Leopard at first.
"All of us know that we violated our NDA and ethics policy. Therefore, because we had the character to tell the truth and to face the consequences of our actions, we were terminated,"
How about the lack of character you showed by violating the NDA in the first place. If you had any character (or ethics) you would have obeyed the obligations of the contract you signed.
On your next job application where it asks "Why did you leave your most recent job?", now you can write "I was fired because I was fucking stupid."
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Would Dreamworks have fired office staff if they had been talking about downloading a hot new Dreamworks movie via BitTorrent like "Over the Hedge"? What if the movie was still unreleased like "Dream Girls", or "Flushed Away" or "Transformers: The Movie". Even though it'd be bad publicity for DreamWorks to fire employees who are enthusiastic believers about their own products, it'd be worse to give them a wink and say "That's okay" if they really want secrecy.
Whether I agree or disagree with Apple's PR department about the wisdom of offering Leopard preview releases to developers only, that's the choice they made. It's not up to me, even if I were an employee of Apple, to try and change that policy or think that I'm somehow exempt from it. Apple's discouraging developers from talking about releases they have on Apple developer mailing lists even. It's doubtful that they'd make exemptions from their closed lips policy for staff in the Apple retail stores.
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.
The 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination applies only to the government (to the federal government directly, and to the various state governments by virtue of the 14th Amendment). Thus, you can't assert this right against a private employer, who is perfectly free to fire you for refusing to answer such questions.
If people admit to having done something, in particular something that would otherwise go undetected, they have expressed remorse and almost certainly realized that their action was wrong, which means they are likely not going to do it again. Therefore, a good part of the purpose of any consequences has already been achieved. So, in that case, "accepting responsibility" does indeed mean that the people involved should face significantly less severe consequences than people who lied and were found out.
That's an entirely different situation many politicians and corporate leaders are in: they often "accept responsibility" for things simply because they can't hide them anymore, and there is usually no remorse or realization involved that their actions were wrong. In those cases, "accepting responsibility" is a meaningless gesture.
I find your cynical attitude and unthinking approach to ethics reprehensible.
That's all there is to corporate ethics policies, nothing more and certainly nothing on which anyone should being using to judge a person's character.
As for violating Apple's NDA - sounds like they used bittorrent to get a copy of the software from someone else who had originally made it public. That means they did not themselves take an internal copy from Apple and redistribute that. They only did what any other person on the net was capable of - go to a public website like isohunt and use the public information to get into the public torrent for the files.
Because bittorrent makes you a redistributor as well as a simple downloader, I am sure they are technically in violation of Apple's NDA - but realistically their employment at Apple had nothing to do with their downloading of a copy.
Thirdly - Apple, or rather whatever uptight member of lower middle management who actually made the call to fire these guys, is cutting off their nose to spite their face. Any retailer should be ecstatic to have store employees as interested in their own products as these guys (kids?) are. How many times have you all gone to best buy, or compusa or circuit city, etc, etc and been told absolute bullshit by some ignorant "sales associate?" When you've got employees that are so into your own products that they hunt down pre-release versions on the internet just check out for themselves, you need to keep them around, not fire them for trivialities.
Last and probably least, but it made me chuckle, did anyone else notice the plagarism at VAR Business? Their link to the story at ThinkSecret includes an unnecessary "?www.reghardware.co.uk" in the URL, which is another computer news website. Looks like a violation of corporate ethics policy to me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Reminds me of a joke that went somewhat like this:
A businessman was teaching his son about ethics and the ethical dillemas in busines, "Let me give you a practical example, son. See, there's this old friend and business associate of mine, whom I loaned some money to last year. So yesterday he came around and gave me my money back. When I counted the money, I noticed that two banknotes were stuck together, and he had given me a hundred dollars more than he owed me. Which, of course, raised the ethical problem: should I tell your mom too about the extra money, or not?"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Look, RTFA.
The employee admits to violating the company's NDA AND their ethics policy. Any NDA will spell out the consequences of that violation. They were found to possess copies of an unreleased product. HOW they got it doesn't matter. WHERE they got it doesn't matter. It is something that, according to company policy, they had no need or authorization to have. Therefore, that possession violates the NDA. Period, end of story. No need to dither about torrents or any other source.
Question from Management: "Do you have a copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard?"
Answer from Mall Store Employee: "Yes."
Reply from Management: "Ok, you violated your NDA, the consequence of which is Termination. You're fired."
This whole case goes to honesty and integrity. Either you have it or you don't. They didn't, and paid for it. Nuff said.
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
Many years ago I was arrested (erroneously, but no matter) and while awaiting my turn in court I got to see the previous night's arrests being arraigned. There had been a prostitution raid, and a number of women were brought into court. One by one they would approach the bench, plead guilty, get fined $500 and be released. One woman, indignantly denying being a hooker, said she was only on her way to the corner store for groceries when she was arrested. When she pleaded not guilty the judge set bail at $1500 and remanded her to custody. Her response: "Wait a minute! If I'm guilty I pay $500 and go home? If I'm innocent I pay $1500 or go to jail? I plead guilty!" The public defender tried in vain to dissuade her, but to no avail. The judge accepted her guilty plea and she went home.
The moral: I don't know.
Heck, I'd commend the five and give them promotions. No, make that two promotions! By conciously doing something that explicitly violated their company's policies and then having the honesty to admit that they did something wrong makes these people heroes in my opinion and they should be promoted to management. It takes a lot of balls to do something wrong, admit it, and then expect to be an exception to the rules and consequences. Let's hear it for these five heroic whiners!
Erik http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~rattles
In violating the NDA to which you agreed, you're an idiot.
In admitting your wrongdoing, you're honest.
You're an honest idiot. You're idiotically honest.
Either way, you're an idiot, and the consequences of your idiocy is termination.
(I'd say 'QED' at this point, but I'm sure someone here will rip this up...)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Congratulations on being honest enough to admit your were cheating your employer. Now you have the opportunity to pay for your actions with your jobs.
No of course apple (or any company) wouldn't want employees lying to them. They also wouldn't want employees leaking their software you freaking dumbasses.