I wonder what the impact of the publication of stories like this have on GrubHub's talent acquisition teams. I'd love for them to call me up, and I'd love to ask them about this. When I graduated, the director of my department encouraged us to participate in the Order of the Engineer, specifically to think about the ethical dilemmas faced in situations like this.
Somebody with technical skills performed the purchasing of these 1,000s of domains and setting up these fake sites. When that person continues on in their career, will they proudly exclaim to prospective employers, how they helped their company perform these tasks to leech off small businesses?
> Somebody with technical skills performed the purchasing of these 1,000s of domains and setting up these fronts.
Not really hard core technical skills....
> When that person continues on in their career, will they proudly exclaim to prospective employers, how they helped their company perform these tasks to leech off small businesses?
The tasks might be divided in various ways so that not one guy did it. For example the task of generating the front is delegated to an engineer who does this feature so that restaurant can easily generate a website for themselves if they want. What they leave out is telling that actually GrubHub sales employee registers the domains for GrubHub and generates the webistes with this one-click tool.
You can try and suggest there aren't ethical dilemmas here, but there are. Whether carried out by one or more than one individual, the intent would be clear what you are contributing, whether it's the domain purchases (I could only ponder why we're purchasing johnnyspizzanyc.com, for example, if we're GrubHub) or if you're the one in charge of putting up the phony site at the domain (which makes your role more obvious in the whole scheme).
I wasn't suggesting that there aren't ethical dilemmas, just explaining the processes how I think usually things like this work in bigger companies. Some low-skilled worker can do the ethically questionable thing. The skilled engineers just solve some cooler problems generally and provide tools to those who deal with the ethically questionable work. And I am pretty sure that most people, even talented engineers don't often think about that too much. They just want to solve cool problems.
It is quite obvious that someone with not so much skills is more willing to do unethical work than someone with higher skills and demand for those skills.
Somebody with technical skills performed the purchasing of these 1,000s of domains and setting up these fake sites. When that person continues on in their career, will they proudly exclaim to prospective employers, how they helped their company perform these tasks to leech off small businesses?