Between Marc Tessier-Lavigne, operation Varsity Blues and SBF parents, the scandals involving Stanford keep on coming. It's not sending a good signal when it comes to the overall integrity of the institution.
Believe me, this isn't just Stanford. I give credit more to some kind of internal whistleblower investigative subculture there shining a light on things than it being something qualitatively different about Stanford as an institution.
For every one of these stories you hear, I am aware of others that will never ever see the light of day.
People forget VERY quickly. Think of all of the Meta scandals. People will still gladly hire anyone who worked there, it's an amazing brand name to have despite whatever damage to society. You'd have to get to an Enron-level fiasco for people to start looking at you suspiciously.
It's not about forgetting, it's about other people not caring about things that aren't relevant to a job they're hiring for. For example, Meta is known for having a relatively high bar for engineering talent, and that is the signal people are looking for.
Even in the Enron case, I know a bunch of people who were snapped up from Enron after they collapsed. The Enron fraud was concentrated among relatively few people at the company, so it's not like their failure tarnished people who weren't in on the fraud.
I think that is reasonable. The alternative is that all 80,000 Meta employees have their professional reputations tarnished by something that happened a decade ago that they probably had nothing to do with
This isn't true - I've been hiring programmers for many years and Meta/FB are definitely on my blacklist. I consider the damage they've already done far worse than Enron and they're not finished yet.
Fraud isn’t even negative at a certain point. Whichever person is the top of a prestigious fraud ring still deserves a kind of clout. There’s skills and talent involved not to mention how fraud itself is sadly valuable for most organizations.
