Severance is compensation. Compensation is a contracts issue, done at market terms. His first point captures all the ethical concerns required to fairly negotiate contracts. Near as I can tell, formal severance guarantees are also rare, meaning that you're often negotiating for it against other candidates who won't demand it.
Employees aren't intrinsically entitled to severance pay, as some sort of natural law of business.
Another way to rebut the idea that severance is an ethical requirement is to say that the same ethics would demand giving engineers raises, or paying them the maximum amount the business can bear paying. That's sometimes true, but often not, depending on the role of engineering in the company.
I take it more to be a point about the size of the severance compensation relative to the company's resources. IE, don't claim poverty (and thus no severance) when you've been funded. Basically a variation on "Don't lie to your employees about money".
If I ask you to be my reference then you can say "Sorry mate I won't give you a positive reference because I don't believe you produce quality work. HR can confirm your start and finish date but if they talk to me I won't have anything positive to say." And that's completely ethical.
On the other hand if you say "Yeah great mate no problem" and then tell my potential new employer they shouldn't hire me you are acting like a scumbag.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. I'm not talking about or supporting lying. I'm saying an employer needs to be professional when providing a reference.
If you cannot be professional about it and understand that context is very difficult to convey over the phone with somebody you don't know then let HR handle it and at least be upfront that you aren't going to provide a good reference.
That also applies to "Not behaving in a way that damages the reputation of his/her company or of YC."
I agree with what you say downthread about "the demands of honesty", and so insofar as mchurch believes what you believe he believes, I disagree with him (ha, how convoluted).
But I think that it's an ethical issue to grant employees and ex-employees the same sort of reputational respect that you would grant your company, or YC, etc.
What I have to say about your perspective on references is that I will never, under any circumstances, work with, for, or over someone who believes what I think you're saying you believe about references. "Bad reference => war", to me, is essentially an endorsement of professional dishonesty.
Related to the earlier thread: how do you (tptacek, moc, or others) feel about hiding expunged criminal convictions. Or vacated ones. e.g. if you were Randall Schwartz, or weev.
I actually think I'm sympathetic to not putting even a regular felony on a resume, or disclosing it to HR/early screening; only bringing it up later in the process, but before accepting the job.
I'd personally try to bring it up after I've "sold" the company on tech/etc. skills, but before offer letter is prepared. This is assuming it's not asked earlier in the process -- I've never seen "applications" for real jobs (where job app forms often do include "have you been arrested? convicted of a felony?). Even if it is asked I'd rather leave it blank or asterisk or whatever vs. a simple "yes" at the screening stage.
But that's about as far as I'd bend things. (and IMO it's wrong to even waste people's time if a felony is obvious disqualification, like for a national security job.)
In infosec, it seems like a weird dichotomy between CFAA being a clear "cannot possibly be hired" or "wow, kinda cool". What would be shitty is having a non-professional non-minor-drug-or-traffic conviction, like some kind of sex crime. Finding a job even in infosec with even a minor sex crime on one's record has to suck.
I have no ethical problem with people lying to get jobs, as long as the lies don't pertain to the job itself.
Job fraud (getting a job you can't perform, or where the risks are too high) is unethical. If you claim you're a doctor and you're not (quackery) or lie in a government security clearance process, you're doing something immoral (and also quite illegal).
However, people often lie, in effect, (a) to inflate their social status, (b) to simplify a complicated story under the (correct) assumption that most people are shallow and averse to complexity, (c) to improve their apparent leverage in negotiation, and (d) to hide embarrassments that are irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I have no problem with people who do that, even if they're lying about objective facts (job titles, performance reviews, dates of employment). The currencies they are counterfeiting (workplace social status, managerial blessing) have no legitimacy anyway.
Someone on the Internet also wants The Joel Test added to the list of Founder Ethics, but that doesn't make Hallway Usability Tests an ethical issue.