Or is "cover your ass no matter what it takes" acceptable here?
Answers advising people not to incriminate or dig themselves into a hole are fine, even when the person might deserve the hole they were going to dig themselves into. That is decidedly not what this answer is, though.
The answer suggests several things that if not illegal are highly unethical, so unethical as to be completly unacceptable in any reasonable workplace. Among other things, it suggests:
- Emotional manipulation to discourage the potential witness from reporting the incident
- If she reports the incident, actions that threaten her career, livelyhood, and standing in the company
- Advising the OP to lie through their teeth throughout
- Possibly up to and including committing perjury and filing a false lawsuit against the witness in a bid to discourage reporting or further action
I don't know how this got 90 upvotes, but the discussion we should be having isn't whether or not it should stand, it should be whether we should rude/abusive delete it or merely normally delete it.
This answer being left up (on a HNQ question no less) is extremely bad optics for the workplace and the whole of stack exchange. You think the hububb about IPS on twitter was bad? Wait until outside attention gets put on this here answer that our site is right now advertising to outsiders as highly voted and valued solution to OPs problem. Just no.