1---
2date: 2025-01-21
3location: Playa del Carmen
4author: Anton
5---
6
7# Corruption
8
9Years ago I worked at a big tech company. Every employee had an “educational budget” - some fixed amount of money(I forgot how much it was, maybe 200 USD per year or so) per year that can be spent on books, courses etc.
10
11One day our CEO wrote some autobiography. As far as I can tell it wasn’t associated with the company.
12
13But everyone got email in the company to buy his book using our education budget. So we were told to go and purchase his book online and report that as educational expense so that we can get reimbursed from the educational budget.
14
15I don’t know all the details because they were no shared with us but from the point of view of random engineer it looked like this:
16- CEO wanted to get his book on the NYT bestsellers list
17-He used company’s employees and company budget to pump out sales numbers
18
19And maybe that was not true. But no one told us if the book was originally  sponsored by the company and if the company will get money back from the sales.
20
21That was all unclear and not communicated. In our current times we cannot assume good intentions anymore. Transparency is needed.
22
23Just it case it wasn’t clear the book was not good. It was one of those trashy autobiographies of the business person written by the ghost writer.
24
25I think it made it to the NYT bestsellers list at the time. And that is when I saw for myself the value of that list and how easy it can be gamed(if you have money).
26
27### Reflections:
28
29 - if you don’t want any suspicions of corruption - please disclose all the information(who paid for what etc).
30 - transparency will save you from bad rumors.
31 - mixing private affairs and company affairs(especially money) is not good.
32 - many systems seem to be gamed far too easy.
33 - in America we do not use word “corruption” much. “Corruption” is the thing that happens in the “third world countries”. In America we have lobbying  and collusion and interference and who knows how many more smart sounding words describing not good actions.