I wanted to be more specific than that. A good principle should lay out, clearly, what you will NOT do.

I'm sure I could argue that, say, failing to mention that one of our candidates did poorly on a coding problem could be characterized as "not evil". The company I'm talking to will probably over-weight that observation, they might think themselves out of an otherwise-desirable hire, and the candidate might lose an opportunity! Surely it's right to just tell this one little white lie...

The reason for the phrasing I used is to make it clear that no, we don't do that. And this comes up all the time. I find myself reminding myself of that principle almost daily when those little temptations to just skew things just a little bit pop up.

That's hard to scale and they got too big.

That’s a cynical take but I have to agree. If your principles don’t scale, don’t scale.

I'm not sure it's about scale. Their current structure demands evilness, and they (or their investors) choose that structure.