Culture issue. From How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] by Paul Graham:
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
Sam Altman clearly has no qualms with lying and being unethical and eventually was at the front of Y Combinator, so that question either doesn’t care for ethics, doesn’t do a good job of filtering, or specifically filters in favour of unethical behaviour.
Fair. An interesting question: how quickly can we detect something without being thwarted by anisotropy / the multiplicity of backward paths? ie- retrodiction
Let’s organize the temporal order a bit. This is what some research turned up.
“Groups of senior employees, concerned with Altman’s leadership and lack of transparency, asked Loopt’s board on two occasions to fire him as C.E.O., according to Hagey.”
“As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup.”
Those are definitely not entirely orthogonal. Especially in business where most unethical behavior starts with or is sustained by deception – which is itself unethical – the two are very much related.
The way to tell between that and factual / culturally-fluent: were you able to any strengths of other cultures? Weaknesses of your own?
Or did you go off on an (in this case ill-informed) rant about "they bad"?
The way to cure it is a mixture of reading: business books on culture (like Meyer and Hofstede) and NATO ones. Those are places people need to work together, as opposed to woke ideology.
A significant number of cybercrime today is committed by people from the former Soviet Bloc.
A significant number of intellectual property theft is committed by people from East Asia.
A significant number of rape in Europe is committed by people from Southeast Asia.
A significant number of managers here, with roots in India, only hire people with roots in India.
A significant number of forcibly retracted academic papers are by Asians, even in journals with major ownership stakes by the Chinese government. In contrast, a significant number of voluntarily retracted academic papers are by Westerners.
A significant number of Medicare and Medicaid fraud convictions in the past twenty years have been of people from the former Soviet Bloc and Asia.
A significant number of scams defrauding US victims remotely and in person, in the past decade, have been committed by crime rings out of West Africa, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe.
That’s not racist.
It is unfortunate reality.
If you blindly hire employees without regard to their cultural background, which includes ethnic origin and national identities, even religious beliefs, you are doing a disservice to your organization and your hires.
These former Apple employees were set up to fail by multiple layers of management that did nothing to curb theft, instill loyalty, and train these people that Asian beliefs about intellectual property are considered disloyalty here.
The problem is your last two paragraphs. The rest is, as you say, unfortunate reality. But in your last two paragraphs, you go from "a significant number of problems are caused by people from these places" to "you should treat all people from these places with suspicion". That's where it turns into racism.
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
> we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.
1: https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html