What's your opinion about Alibaba mooncake incident?

On 12 September, China's eCommerce giant Alibaba fired a few employees for ordering mooncakes intended for internal employees by "cheating". The background of this incident is that Alibaba developed a mooncake ordering system open to internal employee just before the Chinese Mid-Autumn festival(15 September). Knowing about this news, 4 Alibaba security engineers and 1 Aliyun(Alibaba Cloud) engineer wrote some script to help order the mooncake automatically. When the system was open, the script started to work and ordered a total of 124 boxes of mooncakes. After this happened, the management team had a conversation with the 5 employees and fired them a few hours later because the management team thought their behavior violated Alibaba's value(honest, fair play). However, the engineers get fired said they were just using some technical method to assist them and didn't intend to order so many and contacted HR to report this on their own initiative. This triggered a big debate later in China. Lots of people think Alibaba is too stringent on this and it hurts the geek spirit of programmers. What do you think of it? What will happen if this happens in your company? Is this considered normal as a geek?

+1 (2 person want to ask the same question) Posted at 2016-09-16 12:53:57