As a junior software engineer, I worked at a large UK bank.
Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise.
One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team, without having incurred any procurement costs.
I once asked a more senior colleague how this made any sense. His answer stuck with me:
"You can’t stop people from doing their jobs. If someone thinks their job is to deliver X, they’ll find a way to deliver X. Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside."
Most large corporations treat these categories of employment as different budget line items with different rules and limitations: (1) full-time employees, (2) individual contractors, and (3) large contractor "body-shops" or outsourcing providers. Many times in my career, I have seen layoff a few from (1) then way over spend on (2) or (3). The mid-level manager who makes the decision gets to "claim" that expenses were reduced in (1) and "win" at year-end reviews. Yes, I know: This is total non-sense, but I have seen it many, many times at mega-corps.
Related to this, the massive advantage of AWS is that it allows staff to buy infrastructure without having to raise purchase orders. If you ask permission for spending, it's a very onerous and frustrating process. If you just deploy stuff and get billed for it, it's much easier! Even if that's more expensive than having your own cloud. Worse, if you have on-prem, you have to have staff. They might even be permanent. Businesses hate having to have important staff.
Not coincidentally, this results in massive overspend until someone notices and has to painstakingly go round checking what all your instances are for. And AWS is very profitable (well, margin rather than accounting profit).
Now, look at the billing model of AI, especially once flat rate goes away. People can spend millions on tokens without ever having to ask a manager! Obviously this is going to rake in money hand over fist, because it will be years before anyone catches up to ask "are we actually getting value for money here?" rather than "quick spend more tokens".
> One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team, without having incurred any procurement costs.
When I worked (well, was a contractor at) a very large company, they'd kicked out all their small contracting providers only to get the same people back via a single big one. I was told this was part of a vendor consolidation move, because maintaining their existing direct relationship with literally hundreds of thousands of vendors had a huge cost in itself.
I doubt they were dumb enough to think there was no markup, but going direct isn't free either. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Now, was it a net good move? That's both above my pay grade and not my expertise. But from the fact it took me a month of billed time to buy a license of that same company's own product[1], I wouldn't have called it an efficient bureaucracy.
[1] all purchases of own-company product had to be done through the 99% internal billing discount program.
when i worked for an australian bank, one co-worker in a nearby team had been working on the the banks systems as a sysadmin for over a decade.
the bank would go through cycles of "we need to reduce our headcount and outsource everything" and then 4 years later "we need to reduce spend on contractors and retain more knowledge and expertise in house". he'd survived multiple waves of it, switching back and forth between being an employee or a contractor through some external agency, as management trends changed, while essentially doing the same job.
I want through the same processen three times already.
I work in civil service but in a very specific job that needs certain degrees by law.
I've heard they were going to outsource my job (because civil servant are expensive) and registered a company that delivers the requested services. I entered a public procurement and upped my price a little because I knew there aren't many people with the right certifications. I won the public procurement and went from a civil servant to a self employed expert with a company car and all the perks.
Near the end of my contract they thought about hiring their own expert again because... money.
I applied for the job and went through an external hiring process and got selected. Because legislation changed my job went from middle management to a senior management position with extra benefits. Had to drop the car though...
A few months ago my colleagues were doing prekilinary budget talks and considered on finding an external company to do my job and getting me another position. I had to point out the cycle they fell into and somehow they forgot about it.
I love this, reminds me of a automation engineer, i got to see on quite a few projects, who always came in wearing the company t-shirt or jacket of the sending company. Its so funny, when its always the same guy coming in for different companies.
The revolving door is a completely different phenomenon, and it is a problem for a completely different reason. It's about politicians in positions of power over an industry later becoming business leaders or highly paid consultants in said industry. This is a huge problem because it works as a long-term bribe: instead of paying for the politician today and inviting inquiries and problems, you make an implicit promise to employ them when they get out of power as a future reward for preferential treatment today. This is an issue of corruption and excessive business influence of public policy.
In contrast, the issue with civil servants being let go and re-hired as contractors is a simple issue of inefficiency. The same person doing the same job has the same incentives, they're not being corrupted. However, our public resources are being spent inefficiently to hire the same person to do the same job for more money, with an added bonus of spending resources on the acquisition process itself.
I didn't say it is complicated. It is unusual for individuals not at the top of the ladder to set up their own companies and get exactly the same job twice. That's not what the "revolving door" is typically talking about.
Have y'all hit the "can genai do his job?" phase yet...
Early on I used to try to explain that things don't work as advertised. There are a lot of advantages but you need a human reviewing and directing.
These days I don't even bother. Call it being desensitized to the bullshit, but I'm waiting for some fancy AI agent to take out stuff in a way that no one can do anything. Past that I don't see a way for C suite to wake up.
I think it is that cycle where old projects will eventually seem less important with huge budgets for new projects by a new manager, that will have bigger allocations, and the bonuses will follow along with the brownie points to that genius.
I still have new „business„ guys joining org who try to make „cloud migration”.
We are cloud as a SaaS, we are running on VPS with virtual networks. But they come in and think „to be professional” we should be in „real cloud” like Azure or AWS.
I honestly don’t get why anyone would give up their mental health like that and work for such places. In my reality there are plenty of honest and decent places to work at. I’m seen dark places yes but only as visitor - why would I want to be in hell for more than a day or two.
There's the thought that all places are potentially s** in one way or another. This isn't entirely true but there's a significant possibility that any move could be just as bad or worse.
You look at your monthly outgoings and think about how long you have to look before your cash runs out.
I stuck it out too long several times. The most recent one left me unemployed for quite a long time and I was lucky to be in a position for it not to matter.
Now I'm in a job that's a step down - in a sense it's humiliating. On the other hand it more than pays the bills, it's low stress, I've lost 13 kg and I don't wake up in the middle of the night and instantly start thinking of the terrible things that happened in the week so that I can't sleep again.
Now I spend my spare time working in the garden instead of desperately trying to build the new feature on time. I'm digging a driveway. Perhaps this won't last but I realise how much I was killing myself by trying to stay in something bad.
Places are bad essentially because of bad people - it only takes a couple of idiots and it's impossible to fully judge that from an interview. You always get bad vibes from someone or other but you're trying to convince yourself it's ok because you need a job.
I don't see why that'd be humiliating by any sense of the word. We don't live long, and there's pretty much nobody who at the end of their life bemoans 'I sure regret not having spent even more time at the office.' More humiliating, at least from my perspective, is the person who works their life away, trying to find contentment from the accumulating of things which, of course, never succeeds. It's like society is full of people playing out what used to be the comical trope of a man in a mid-life crisis, and his new yellow convertible.
> In my reality there are plenty of honest and decent places to work at.
Like wich? In my experience all workplaces have something that's gonna be wrong with them, and you just need to compromise if what's wrong with THAT ONE is acceptable to you.
Like for example honest and decent places to work at tend to also come with lower pay, or pigeon-holing career-limiting type of work, discriminatory gatekeeping, or other such compromises. There's no free lunch where you can have your cake and eat it too, unless you're very lucky.
> I honestly don’t get why anyone would give up their mental health like that and work for such places.
Mostly for money, of course. And all the attendant improvements that can bring to one's life. Some people need it more than others, e.g. a H1B worker who is attempting to pull a whole family out of poverty.
I bet many go in thinking they will do it temporarily, until they pay their college debt, to give one example. But money is very addictive.
I agree with you, but I feel like leaving is much harder in reality for most people.
Life gets in the way, you don't have the energy to apply, you're afraid of rejection, you are afraid you might end up in a worse environment, you justify it to yourself in any number of ways.
Inertia, herd mentality and self-deception are much more powerful IRL than most people online seem to think (or at least write).
Add having a family to the mix and it gets worse. Being a sole provider for a family is scary when you go job hunting, especially if you live in an environment that is very expensive (where the jobs that pay decent are located normally).
Yep, I left one project because I think I was underpaid there. I could not find another job for like 3 months. I finally found one and I was also very stressful. No it is better, at the same project and I think I make more money than I would ever be able in a project I left. But on the other hand it was very stressful for my family. Was it worth it in the end? I do not know because even if money is better and company is bigger I could damage my kids development by being angry, sad and depressed for two years.
Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost; people insist on being paid more to have an insecure job.
The uncertainty never goes away. You can pay someone else to suffer it, but it will always cost more than dealing with it yourself.
And that can be ok. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're getting a bargain.
> Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost; people insist on being paid more to have an insecure job.
This is true, but it's not the whole of it. In some cases the manager goes to a cabin in the woods to drunkenly shoot at moose with the head of the contracting company.
It's a saying that "the purpose of a system is what it does". I think it's a pretty dumb saying. But it is often worth talking a look at a system and see if the "mistakes" it makes (such as wasting money on contacting companies) aren't in fact desired by some people in the system.
> if the "mistakes" it makes [...] aren't in fact desired by some people in the system
This process goes both ways. The people in the system align to the process. So maybe the "mistake" wasn't desired to begin with, but once it's there someone things: if that's the way they want it let's change our ways to fit. That's why these things seem to dumb from the outside.
There's always going to be a slight mismatch between the supposed aim of any organisation and the incentives of the management and every single employee unless they're all shareholders and even then...
I've seen this happen because of accounting/corporate finance policy.
Payroll is an ongoing commitment. Consultancy is a temporary service. Moving people from payroll to consultancy means they can reduce overhead in financial projections. Even though consultancy costs more, and employs the same people, it makes sense to do if it means you can convince shareholders and analysts that Opex will shrink in the future, and therefore profitability increase, and therefore the share price increases.
At a glance, maybe. But we also see this in government. The US has outsourced 10s of thousands of “permanent” jobs over the decades. The entire DC metro economy is based on this.
No. Fraud is a much higher bar than making a prediction about your plan for the future that may or may not pan out. There’s no deception here, management fully intend to end the contractor relationship in future, whether they’re able to or not.
> Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost;
I noticed this early, and spent the first half of my career leaning into it. If you negotiate every gig as a contract, you get to double (or more) your salary. And the only thing you're trading away is job security which, if you pay attention, you'll notice doesn't actually exist for your salaried counterparts either.
To nitpick, you also have to pay for your own health insurance. So subtract $200/month from that extra $15,000/month for the sort of catastrophic coverage plan that a 27 year old needs.
I wonder if this explains why I hear about this more from Europeans than from the SF tech scene. California is at-will employment, so you can fire an employee as easily as a contractor. Ironically this makes companies more willing to hire and retain employees, since they're not worried about getting stuck with a bad one — and most employees aren't bad, and are better for the company than contractors.
Its not about employees being bad, we have 6 month trial periods over here in the EU where you can be fired quite easily. Thats the excuse they use to keep at will employment. In reality they want to be able to reduce Opex costs which looks great on their end of year budgets. If you can then offload that cost into a project run under Capex, even at a higher cost, then its budgeted differently and the shareholders get their payout.
"Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic."
Something I hated about working in corporate America was surviving multiple leadership regimes, watching the same lessons being learned over and over, having to recount history to new regimes, it got really tiring, and particularly dealing with the attitudes and self regard of some.
I have often thought this - a wave of people learn something and on come the next wave to relearn it all. They can read books but they don't really "get" what the books say and have to learn it all from personal experience all over again. It's not just America.
It's very possible that this occurred during the IR35 shake-up - HMRC moved the liability for unpaid income tax (in a situation where a contractor was determined to be a de-facto employee) from limited company contractors themselves onto the client (the bank, in this case).
Banks had a very low risk appetite and so had to let these people go. What was going on in a lot of places was that vital staff who had to be dumped were intermediated by outsourcing providers. These companies either then paid the staff a very high salary and sold them in as temp labour, or took on the risk themselves and hired them as contractors for the same purpose.
This all made sense, but for a lot of contractors at the time, it felt like the apocalypse. The net effect was that HMRC exchanged flexibility in the labour market for immediate tax take. This may not have been a sensible decision.
I've seen that in a large management consultancy company. Part of their risk management procedures (both for the company and in terms of some EU law) meant they couldn't keep contractors for longer than x years. They'd have to convert to employee or separate for 12 months.
Bit that doesn't really work in knowledge systems. Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has, and their departure is costly.
Equally at the end of their contract a lot of time will need to be spend on a handover which slows down others even more.
So what happened? The contractor went via another middle man, which checked the correct boxes on the form, and everybody was happy.
> Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has
I think that's the part management teams are missing. They assume that employees are just human resources and they can replace a senior engineer with a 100% equivalent one when needed.
I worked for a large US bank that has a 10% biannual attrition target at all levels across the company. Twice a year they PIP 10-15% of staff, most of whom take a substantial buyout. Institutional knowledge is constantly being lost and experienced staff are being replaced with fresh cohorts of new grads, who then get replaced themselves right as they start becoming useful.
I knew multiple people there who made more in signing bonus, pay during training, and severance than they made for work actually performed.
The CEO is convinced that this is the path to "top tech talent."
I assume management thinks this will lead to better documentation practices and standardized processes so it becomes easier and cheaper to introduce new employees. In practice the opposite happens, employees get scared for their jobs, hire bad new employees so it's the new people that will get PIP-ed.
Senior leaders in large companies I've worked at always had a fairly high turnover just because they all tend to be hyper competitive and engaged in their own Game of Thrones type competitions - which someone has to lose.
I have a friend who left BigCo and then rejoined it as a contractor, plus some additional employees that he manages now. He cynically says "My job is to convert OpEx to CapEx when the finance department tells some director they can't have more headcount."
Lots of shouting on one particular occasion left me with the impression that they genuinely had not anticipated this consequence of simultaneously pulling the "no contractors to be renewed" lever and the "any MD can sign contracts up to $1m with approved suppliers" lever.
The people involved weren’t stupid. They were trying to achieve one outcome and got a different one because the rest of the organisation adapted to the incentives in front of them.
In my experience, it's probably due to differences in budget line items. Usually, regular labor costs and outsourcing costs are budgeted separately. Some teams may not have the authority to hire an additional full-time employee, but they do have the authority to use external contractors. On top of that, the internal political landscape differs as well. When it comes to office politics, increasing headcount in a particular department means increasing that department's influence. There are also additional benefits and administrative costs that come with hiring permanent staff. Moreover, standard contracts usually come with overhead for contract management personnel and procedural costs, and these are often handled by the vendor side. In other words, direct employment comes with long-term responsibilities for performance and benefits, but when you outsource, most of that liability shifts to the external vendor.
In some cases it could be driven by the shape of the work & where the funding is allocated:
If there isn't enough guaranteed recurring work, it might not make sense to have a full time position, particularly in a country where its difficult to lay people off & if employees have additional overhead (pensions, employer funded heathcare or insurance, etc) vs contractors.
But, if there's funding allocated for some key project that's framed as a 6-12 month project, there might be a good business case to hire a contractor. Maybe the funding comes out of the project bucket, not the core funding for legacy product X bucket.
If the contractor is someone who was recently let go & has a good reputation within the company as someone who gets stuff done and is easy to work with, it's probably a no-brainer to re-engage them as a contractor vs rolling the dice on an unknown quantity.
Whoever is managing the budget of their old team gets a win as they were able to reduce headcount to fit in their budget
Whoever is managing the new project gets a win as they find a great contractor for their key project
The former employee returning as a contractor probably gets a win, as they get paid at a better daily rate while the project is rolling, provided they're able to line up more projects or land a new permie job once the project is completed.
If there's an outsourcer involved, they win by taking a cut. The former employee might also win by having the outsourcer involved if the company has some baroque process for engaging contractors with many compliance hoops to jump through -- in extreme cases (think banks, or public companies that need to demonstrate they don't do business with suppliers engaged in slavery, or so on) it could save the worker months of paperwork and tens of thousands in legal expenses to set up their own one-person agency and go through the compliance process to be able to work for their former employer, so they might not be able to win the contract work without piggybacking on an outsourcer who already has the contracts & compliance stuff sorted out.
most large companies have a 2-year limit on contractor employment so what they tend to do is they'll hire the same guy through a different contractor with another two-year agreement..... that's to get around the situation where if someone is working as a contractor for more than 2 years they can legally claim that they're actually an employee....see
Vizcaino v. Microsoft Corp., 120 F.3d 1006 (9th Cir. 1997) [0]...
this is just a guess by the way but it seems like a plausible one, as I've seen it happen in Fortune 500 a lot, where the same guy comes back through a different vendor 2 years later if he was really good and they needed him to come back....
The military is like this. Higher Headquarters decides to contract out maintenance and logistical support for $aircraft_fleet. Uniformed maintainers go home in Friday and show up Monday making a lot more money to do the same job but without risk of getting posted or deployed.
Contractor fees come out because of a different pot of money, so perverse incentives abound.
Yes, GP's description is incorrect (to be kind, it's just bullshit). If the position is removed (say H-60 maintenance at some base is now contracted out) then the enlisted members doing the work would not switch to contractors over the weekend or even over the span of a few weeks, they'd be moved to another base or another job on the same base.
Now, the people being hired by the contractors are often former enlisted maintainers, but it won't be the ones doing the job previously because of a switchover like this. Those crews will have PCS'd.
That’s pretty rare in the USAF. Most servicemembers will be sent to be retrained on a different airframe or even into a different career field unless their date of separation doesn’t make it worth it. Voluntary separation programs do sometimes pop up but they’re not that common.
It is common to have people separating and coming back immediately as contractors into basically the same job, but that’s usually because there is already a contracted workforce in place and they made connections while serving.
But it is the same affect as what the OP said. In a large organisation, attrition is so high that if you slow recruiting you will soon have a lower headcount. So yes the uniformed deployable military are replaced with civilian 9-5ers. But not the very same people, just the very same roles.
> Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside.
At my last performance review, at my last job (this is going back more than a decade now) one of my agreed KPIs was to take the lead on a 3-6 month project, making all the required technical decisions etc. and successfully delivering it on time and on budget.
I never got the opportunity, and quit that job six months later to start my own business, but still did contract work for them.
Got a social call a year later from my old boss (who also left, before I did) and got to tell them “so I hit my KPI, you’ll never believe what I had to do to make it happen…” :D
At the risk of injecting recent US politics into this, the shipyard I used to work at had five employees laid off under DOGE and replaced by the exact same individuals (there aren't actually that many naval architects in the US), now working as contractors at a higher base pay. I feel like there's a lot of that out there.
The defense and security-related sector is legendary for this. I had a friend who worked at a three-letter agency ~20 years ago who saw multiple colleagues quit, get hired by contractor firms and sold back to the agency to work on the exact same projects they had been working on as employees. They got a 2-3x pay bump, and the government paid 3-5x for their services. In one instance, my friend said, a guy clocked out on a Friday and came back to his exact same desk on Monday, with a new "employer" and a higher salary.
Per a friend, they are told to use more contractors in the government. Its also not clear if the contractor is actually making more money. Government benefits are significantly better than most contractors will give (I will be all of them).
The contractor has better take home pay. For them, it's maybe a wash whether they get the extra pay or the better benefits, but what they are paid is only a fraction of what the government pays to the contractor's company. For the government, giving those benefits is definitively a much better deal than using a contractor.
Who actually pays for what and how is so mangled that if you want to reallocate someone to another project (or even just pay them out of a different pool of funds!) often the easiest approach is to rehire them through a contractor, or a different contractor.
This is especially useful when projects are wound down. Let's say you've contracted to an org for support or management on a project that you want to kill, you've already obligated some amount of funds, and you don't really want to make that organization angry by ripping millions away from them (the pool of contractors is not large). What to do? Well, you could take Joe and give him a raise by suggesting he work for the contractor instead of you directly. Money's already spent, anyways. So you save your own money that you can use for your pet projects or whatever, Joe gets a raise, the contractor doesn't get a termination that pisses everyone off. Everyone happy, right? Smh.
That's because the bankers didn't realize they're not in the banking business anymore - they're in the IT business (which has a focus on tracking money).
I have made this same argument to a C level person in the US capital markets and told I don’t know what I’m talking about. As long as the check clears, I have no strong feelings on the topic, it’s just a performance on a stage.
I worked for Advanced Network and Services, which operated the NSFNET and was later acquired by America Online. Then one day the company was acquired by WorldCom. A few years later the CEO was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a ~$10 billion fraud. As a systems administrator I knew nothing about any of that, but I could tell that the new management included a lot of players and empire builders. That's the signal that told me to quit a few months after the acquisition. Employees were invited to invest their retirement savings in a mutual fund that contained only WorldCom stock. Many of them lost everything. Pay attention to those signals.
I feel like Worldcom got a modest amount of press coverage at the time but probably would have gotten a lot more if it hadn’t been front-run by the Enron scandal.
> Employees were invited to invest their retirement savings in a mutual fund that contained only WorldCom stock.
Investing in your own employer is an idiotic risk..... If the company goes titsup, then you lose your job and your savings. This happened to many people during the dotcom crash.
For decades after my WorldCom experience, I cashed out all equity grants immediately and invested the money elsewhere. Even if the company appears solid and is not run by criminals, it's still sound risk management. Bad things can happen to good companies as well.
I was on a government project where I found out I was being fraudulently billed on my hours. It was towards the end of the year and my manager was trying to use up the budget of the client. Although this is normal in the private sector I told him from the beginning that you can't do this on a government project.
The project was $1M+ which was enough for prison time. He had gone into our billing software and edited my entries - it wasn't as if he was submitting the fraudulent totals only - he was changing what I was entering.
I gathered as much documentation as I cloud and went to a law firm. They told me I had two options - report it to the Government Accounting Office or report it to the head of the project, an academic.
So I simultaneously resigned and reported it to the professor. I covered my butt. I'm pretty sure the professor hid the fraudulent billing but I didn't look into afterwards because basically that was what I was hoping he'd do so I wouldn't have to go to court and defend that my reported hours weren't really mine.
The full project was eventually awarded to another academic group.
Okay… do you not feel culpable at some point? Do you feel no obligation to expose these various individuals fleecing the tax payers? Your boss, the academics, and everyone else who participated or knows and remains silent. Obviously, you are now in the later group.
Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
Do people really have a duty to fix every wrong in the world? He reported it to the project head, and resigned. He ensured he wasn't a part of the situation.
I don't think you have to be a full saint to fulfil your moral obligations. He ensured he wasn't implicitly participating and reported it to someone who had a responsibility to investigate/do something about it. That is a reasonable amount of effort to rectify the situation in my opinion.
> Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
The person you are responding to did "blow the whistle". They reported it to the project head. That is blowing the whistle.
If you don’t have a duty to report, you don’t have a duty to report. You can’t predict what government prosecutors will do. If they start investigating and it turns out for whatever reason they can’t pin it on the boss, they could have pinned if on OP.
Think about it logically. If you’re the prosecutor, the guy whose time is fraudulent is presumptively the criminal. It could very well be that he was actually the one who was engaged in the fraud, but went to the authorities to protect himself by making it look like his boss did it.
Absolutely not. Honor does not pay the mortgage. Whistleblowers have no real protection, despite laws saying they should. If you blow that whistle, you will be retaliated against, guaranteed.
He just knows that someone on HN who is not using their real name has described witnessing government fraud at some unspecified point in the past and reporting it to the head of the project. He doesn't have any information about where it occurred other than probably the United States.
He's not really in a position to act usefully on this information, so had no reason to feel any culpability for not acting. It is only an interesting question when put to people were in a position where they had to make a choice.
What you know and what you can prove are different things.
I think most people would blow the whistle if they had evidence of personal-enrichment fraud. Suspecting that incentives are producing strange outcomes is one thing; accusing specific people of criminal conduct is quite another.
Hilariously, in the one case I heard about where an MD was eventually fired for taking kickbacks from contractors, the department then struggled to recruit competent staff. It turned out he had only been skimming from people who could actually do the job.
It was too risky. My boss was scummy and even though I had documentation about my hours being edited he would have fought it and we'd go to court and at that point it'd be a crap shoot. If I remember right, the prison time was five years and there is no parole with federal sentences.
To prevent this situation the peons should be given the benefit of the doubt by the courts.
In this case, either (1) the peon was lying about reported hours, the boss didn't notice, and then the peon reported himself... or (2) everything happened just like you said.
Aren't there bounties for reporting things like this? At the very least winning should include reimbursement for legal expenses.
They do get the benefit of the doubt, but when you're a defendant in a criminal trial, simply having the benefit of the doubt on your side will not mean that you're going to have a great experience with it.
3. You're always free to break into prison if you find yourself in his position, but you might discover yourself sitting in a pool of shit that was not of your own making.
4. Do you really want the parent poster to face the possibility of criminal prosecution, because his scumbag boss convinces the DOJ that the parent poster were the one fucking with the hours, and tried to pin it on him?
That's particularly egregious because there's a time-honored way to do this legally, namely have you shave yaks for 80 hours a week towards the end of the fiscal year (lot of USG contractors are skipping their vacations this summer for that exact reason).
The False Claims Act is one of my favorite things in the world, hands down. Who would have guessed that paying whistleblowers a fraction of the proceeds for high stakes financial crime would be so effective? Well, aside from every economist and financier who ever lived, I mean.
That was your mistake. The grant recipient or department has as much incentive to fully spend the money as your consultant boss does to bill it. It's a implied understanding.
Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time. Expensive projects are important projects. Important projects make careers. That is baked in several layers deep. You'd need to report it to a waste and fraud line, ombudsman, or similar.
I'm not sure its unusual enough to bother, though.
I decided to take the advice of my lawyers who specialized in the topic of government projects. Based on the budget someone could have easily gone to prison and it probably would have been me because it looked like I was billing 80-hours a week when it was just one of many projects and so I was actually billing ~20/wk. The $1M threshold wasn't an anecdote - at the time it really was the limit in project size for prison time.
Ages ago, my girlfriend at the time worked for a company that routinely got SIBR (small business innovation research) grants. Such grants made up part of her total workload.
The crazy thing was that if she worked for 10 hours on SBIR stuff, then worked 40 hours on her normal work stuff (so overtime), the SBIR billing would get scaled down to 8 hours (that is, 25% of 40 hours). There would be no way to bill 80 hours.
The other thing that seemed somewhat crazy is that it was also common to have multiple SBIR contracts going on at the same time. If they bought a $10K tool for SBIR grant #1 and SBIR grant #2 needed it two, they'd have to buy a second one. So the tool would be out, then when switching between work on the grants, the tool would go into a locked cabinet, then the second copy of the tool would get unlocked from a different cabinet. I understand that firewalling like that prevents a company from "borrowing" expensive equipment for their own work, but it lead to waste like I just described.
Why not float a company to buy the tool and then let that company charge money to lease the tool to the using companies for the specific non-overlapping period instead of borrowing? Leasing can't be prohibited too?
Wait, did you get paid overtime when he modified your time sheet?
I guess it may not be normal but I got straight time overtime when I worked for a contractor. Made those weeks I really did do 80 hrs nice. But if they have any system involved the fact you did not get paid for the time would be a big red flag.
If you were salary and not benefitting from it, there's literally no chance you would have gone to jail. This was the equivalent of panicking about running a yellow light in terms of overreaction. The only thing you had to do was write an email, cc your personal email, and tell your boss you think the punches are messed up and that they reflect more than you worked. Your boss would tell you not to worry about it and you're done.
> Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time.
I've always heard of this nugget of wisdom but never really understood it. By punishing those who underspend (by making the next application harder), wouldn't you incentivise inflated research costs, or worse, fraud. Seems like a quick path to a positive feedback loop towards the degradation of trust in academic spending, leading to "poor government efficiency".
It makes zero sense to me either, yet it is an omnipresent influence in who gets tasked to what in my work. At my level, I do not know anyone who endorses it, they merely react to it.
That's the paradox that causes the problem, perhaps paradox is not the correct term, conflicting view points?.
From above(the manager of the program) the job is to budget the funds thriftily and fairly, each project getting the amount it needs.
From below(the team working on the project) this feels like you are punished if you are able to save money and rewarded when you waste money.
I suspect this is probably the major problem with having a more command orientated economy. While it should be fairer(free market economies are notoriously unfair). The inversion in incentive hurts performance.
Think of it the other way: If you have been given a $1 million budget, as a manager, your job is to purchase $1 million of Useful Stuff.
The rank above you has decided "we need $1 million of software, go buy that." They don't know exactly how much stuff costs, so they use a dollar value as a rough proxy.
If, as manager, you cut corners to save money, you're doing the wrong thing. They want the software! They don't to keep want the money, that's why it was allocated in the budget. Go buy us more Useful Stuff!
i think anther scenario is more likely: you say you need a 1 million budget to run the IT department, but you only spend part of it, then next year if you ask for 1 million again, they will say, but last year you only spent 700k, so we are going to give you only that much.
but the problem here is how budgets are assigned. instead of a fixed number it should have a lower and an upper bound. at least X, but no more than Y. the closer to you get the better, but next year the budget will be the same range. only if you drop below X you run into the above problem, but then it's much less likely and if you really spend that little something else is wrong or the budget really was to high.
Or certain project related items in the overall budget have their own budget. If (when) the project slips into a future accounting period then so does the budget.
But what if you need to save up to buy something that you can't afford in one year? Or you're trying to reduce cost in one place enough to hire a team to do some other project?
Then you can argue why you still need the budget. It May make sense to temporarily allocate a bigger budget immediately to do those things instead of delaying, trying to save.
Congratulations. Your budget is now permanently smaller because your appeals are completely irrelevant to the machine and you get to do less. Forever. Maybe you have to fire some people.
This is all simultaneously true and simultaneously disappointing. It requires a certain forfeiture of morality to be a part of this status quo. But, especially on grants between academia and the government, this very much seems to be the status quo.
Is it actually true, or just a trope? Anyone in a position to manage hundreds of millions worth of projects is smart enough to know that some projects will run under budget.
I work as a federal contractor. It's very true (epistemic status: my managers and project leads tell me as much and I act accordingly, I don't deal with it directly nor understand the bureaucratic larger picture). You will not get funding from Department X again if you ask for more money on a project than you wind up spending. Now, is that the sin of overquoting, or the virtue of overdelivering? For some reason, every agency treats it as the former, and I haven't the foggiest idea why. My coworkers acknowledge how stupid and perverse of an incentive it is, yet treat it like a fundamental force of nature.
Most solutions to this problem are essentially what the OP recognized as nakedly illegal---that is, exaggerating productive hours---but most contractors are savvy enough to do it in less auditable and more positively regarded ways, such as stretching out timelines (four 20-hour work weeks raise fewer flags than one 80-hour week), adding more chefs than the kitchen calls for, or funding unnecessary little side projects. Straight-up tampering with timecards is an impatient and dangerous way of achieving (IMO) the same wasteful evil as happens everywhere else in the public and private sector.
The Dutch University of Delft systematically 'maximized' grants and shuffled the money between projects, according to investigative journalists of the NRC[1].
I work with people who are well smart enough to know that.
It’s also still a reasonable question to ask “well, last year we budgeted $15M and you got acceptable results while spending only $14M; perhaps you only need $14M/yr…” And despite its reasonableness, many people would prefer to oversee a $15M/yr budget.
I think a reason for this is suppose the next year you run into some difficulties so it requires 14.2M. Now you have to fight to request an extra 0.2M added to your budget that you wouldn't have to worry about if you had 15M.
Totally! And it drives me crazy to get very few questions and mostly positive ones if I underspend by 5-10% but going over by 1-2% is a massive problem.
It’s little surprise what happens under such a system: logical people over-reserve.
Nearly two decades ago I worked briefly for a "startup" in the DC metro which (in retrospect, for me) existed only to show activity toward using an IP that was the subject of a lawsuit. The expected payout from the lawsuit would have rendered the cost of running the ~20 person startup meaningless, had they won. I suppose the lawsuit didn't go well, since the startup folded 4-6 months after I started, with paychecks being late, then stopping, and employees progressively not showing up. Fun times.
At least you didn't work for an online gambling company....or assist with manipulating the political views of billions of people to their detriment...or work on better ways of killing people...
Also, who hasn't worked at a company that produced a product and then abandoned it? I feel like that has happened often to me - many years of effort for nothing. It's not fraud exactly but it represents almost the same thing other than the intention.
What's the old saying? "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
Most common people throughout history made their living working in the systems owned by aristocrats whose wealth was usually built on both corruption and theft. Guess that hasn't changed much.
Behind many, but I sincerely hope not "every". A trivial counterexample is Warren Buffet: he simply saved and invested. Or consider inventors with patents.
Buffet is well known for acquisitions that pushed the boundaries of fair competition, and investments in other companies that did the same, or otherwise pursued deeply unethical practices. But he's trodden carefully around the law, so any "crime" would be a moral crime against society rather than a legally criminal act.
I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better.
The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA.
Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned."
The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo (big fish in this tiny, tiny world) and left.
Even they knew this company was never really trying to do anything serious. Strange indeed
> The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA.
If you have a lot of money it’s fun to LARP the startup life. The experience working for such a company is highly varied and completely depends on the personality of the founder. But even if it’s a healthy place, it’s usually a black hole from a career development POV.
You see a lot of hobby shops in ultra-wealthy areas of major metropolises. Tiny art studios, interior decorators with a handful of items in stock, boutique fashion shops.
Semantics. If the hobby business never makes a profit and is capturing losses for tax benefits, that’s a failing business. It can be failing indefinitely as long as there’s money to support it, but you can’t call it a successful business.
You appear to be suggesting that fun hobbies which don't make money are a 'failure' rather than a success. Not everything is judged by how much money it makes.
It's really not that deep: they're characterising the business, you're characterising the hobby. The owner having a good time doesn't make it a successful business. A failing business can be a successful hobby, sure, that's still a failing business.
> robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better.
I have been on the other side of this, building a frontend that connected to an external service robot that we, with a 5 minute script, managed to successfully prove internally was just a if/then/else state machine.
We got paid to make it, so we didn't care, but we knew someone was losing money.
fwiw, you’ve perfectly described the feeling of working for a “tax write-off” and how to recognize those vibes.
It could’ve been worse, it could’ve been a fraud! But it’s merely a business designed to lose money. It won’t land you in jail but it’s not a place anyone would advance a career.
Why wait for IPO? Prediction markets already let non-US persons bet on startup stock prices while the startup is still private. Eg a few weeks ago you could have used a non-US VPN, shorted spacex, and lost all your money :)
One time I worked for a client who entire idea for a product was "it's going to do the same as <specific popular open source dev tool>, except in Go and with GraphQL!" They literally had zero vision beyond duplicating effort for no reason. During the first meeting I sat in, I asked them directly why someone would choose to use their version instead of the existing one, and they didn't have an answer. Something like one or two years went by before they decided to end the contract with us, and I never learned what they hoped to achieve.
At a small company, anyone can damage the company prospects. But product people have outsized negative impact when they are wrong. They can tank the whole company in short order.
Which is maybe as it should be, but it does pit agonized debates over detailed technical work in perspective.
All true but every time I tried to help with an outsider's perspective -- and IMO us as engineers with systems thinking _can_ contribute -- I was told to shut up and stay in my lane (more politely than that but still crystal clear what's the underlying message + a clear show of we-will-not-debate-this-again).
So let them do damage. I do what I am told, I have the strategic thinking but not many have made use of it. OK. It's their right. I still pocket a wage. They could have gotten more for their money but consciously chose not to. Who am I to stop them? (And not like I actually can.)
Same. I’m lucky to have some execs who appreciate that product people have a specific point of view (or agenda) and as a result are willing to at least listen to my views, wrt defect rates, availability, etc., but also about the occasional product idea.
At the end of the day, if they choose spend their magic beans on shitty features, I’m still getting paid. Then again, I’m at a larger company, not a startup.
I have been in fairly senior roles at large corporates. The amount of money that is squandered without serious evaluation for something managers „want“ is mind boggling. I have often wondered whether corporate budgets are actually investor fraud in disguise.
You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled?
It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.
I definitely had this feeling early on in my career, but it did flip around somewhere around halfway through.
"We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years."
The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.
Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.
It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
>40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.
For almost everyone, working is not the best way to spend their time, it's just how they can afford the stuff they do the rest of the time. Obviously it's preferable if it's useful and/or enjoyable, but they're not necessary qualities.
>It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
Odd. "Agency" usually refers to the ability to exert will. Understanding would not seem to contribute towards that.
Yep 90% of companies don't matter and don't affect things. Only 10% of people do. That's just the way the world works. There's no way to know before you start so just live while you can enjoy.
I worked at a company whose product was truly boneheaded. Without giving too much away, it’s the kind of technology that would have been useful if we lived in a world where smartphones weren’t being carried around by literally everybody.
I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things.
I came to the conclusion that the company was a grift, but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it.
We had startup perks that were basically paid out in cash when the pandemic hit. The “gym” perk became $500 in cash which could be spent on anything vaguely fitness related, like an Apple Watch. The commuter benefits rolled into our accounts which gave me free tolls for years afterward. Instead of taking all the money, they cut us in.
So yeah, maybe frustrating if you expected your startup to be successful, but that’s so often outside of the control of any engineer. It’s always a crap shoot. Get your best offer and make the most of it. You can do resume driven development even in the shadiest of firms.
So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0].
However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago.
[0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.
Same same. I don't expect any of my product code to survive for very long.
I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.
> You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled?
I would have thought most people would grow out of having this kind of feeling after their 1st job. But I also definitely work to live, not live to work, so YMMV.
Do you get your major feeling of success primarily from work, or is it the rest of life? I don't think I need to spell what is viewed as the proper long term winning strategy here. I know folks who ride the work part, and let me tell you - unless you land a stellar employer and exceptional boss, its recipe for a lot of miserable days and worse, for decades. Its also a symptom of what I would call 'unfulfilled life', but thats my personal take please don't get offended quickly.
With that mindset (or work-to-live or whatever you can call it), these things are just an afterthought. That after-work climbing session and that weekend meeting with friends or hiking trip in the mountains with kids mean world to me, and I fully indent to keep that mindset till retirement and continue with it further. If it means I won't get into top 1% or whatever I am fine with that, QoL is firmly above that and career rat races are meaningless (and fruitless) ego polishing / insecurities managing exercises.
I assume because it turns out it was a actual bullshit job, and they were probably proud of what they had achieved. They probably trusted and may have even got on well with their boss.
I have a serious question for everyone who reading through comments: If you get a great paying position in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed, given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove, just an engineer closing issues and merging patches, would you reject it?
I would consider your two statements as distinct and separate:
> "in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed"
> "given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove"
Consider:
1/ If it's a biz that's purposely mucking about without success...or a loss making entity for tax breaks:
I have no problem in working here (Consider that I am in my 40s, used/abused in various "start-ups" and burnt-out. I need the money, and I'll take it.)
2/ If it's a company involved in criminal fraud:
I'd run away as fast as my feet could take me. The problem with fraud is that eventually the authorities will catch up. If the owner is a criminal, he'll do anything to save his backside...even throwing innocent employees under the bus.
You might be exonerated eventually. But that eventually might take years...decades.
I don't think I could give an honest reply in the abstract setting without actually being in that situation. But a significant factor would likely also be the actual work and whether it is something I find particularly interesting/exciting to work on.
Then again, if it is doomed to fail from the start, it is unlikely that I would really enjoy working on it.
Why? If it isn't illegal, nor amoral, just a moonshot then its basically typical SV startup reaching for stars.
Sure, 99.9% of startups may not get there but we saw in the past some wild unexpected successes. Plus things may change along the path as markets evolve and if they pivot successfully into new areas they may win the first mover situation, even if original mission won't ever be accomplished.
The real version is much more applicable, because we can’t see far, because we are depressingly shortsighted.
In this regard, we aren’t standing on shoulders of giants, we are like an immense asshole of a dad climbing ontop of his young child’s shoulders to win a chicken fight in the pool while his kid drowns below.
I'm sorry, this sucks. It must be painful to know that you were used to defraud people, and that you worked for years on something which was never intended to be successful.
From my perspective, you're a victim of this fraud too. I think the pursuit of meaningful work is an important way many people find meaning in life, and it sucks that someone took advantage of you. From this piece, I get the impression that you would never have spent so much time and effort on this role if you had known it was just a way to scam investors.
So, don't be hard on yourself. It's normal to feel guilty, but if you didn't have a perspective on the entire company or knowledge of the fraud, I don't know what you could have done.
As someone who 'grew up' my career in Silicon Valley my first exposure to this sort of shenanigans was during the dot com bubble, where general partners at newish VC firms were fleecing limited partners (GP's got a salary to 'manage' the fund, LP's were the source of money for the funds.) They would tell the LPs well only one in ten is a real banger, looks like the fund you invested in wasn't a winner.
It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again."
The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it.
But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.
I like the analogy, but lets stretch it to the situation where workers can see that there is fraud and still do nothing.
The passengers on the bus are not blameless if they know or have reason to know that the bus driver was drinking before or while they went down a road with pedestrian crossings. They are not blameless if they take no action, but to sit in the seats and wait to see if anyone gets hit or they all get away with it and arrive at the destination.
Or if they remain in the seats after the first pedestrian and 'hope' it wont happen more.
And how 'blameless' are the 'non-passengers' along for the ride to perform ongoing maintenance and provide fuel and snacks to the driver while on this imaginary trip to hell.
So, I'm all out of 'you're not really the asshole' cards as we watch the whole kleptocratic SV system run Theranos' style over the total sum of human creative production.
Anyone who participates in building the toolchains of tyranny is complicit in the abuse of people with those tools, even if it just a tiny bit.
Sorry, not sorry, if that pricks the consciences of a few pricks; those that can feel shame are the better for it, and those who feel it not we must all be wary of.
Its a reasonable extension. At some point if you discover that you are aiding or abetting the harm of others you have to ask yourself what kind of person you are. That said, I get that "but I need a job!" is a powerful thing and it takes someone with a strong sense of personal integrity to leave. A good friend of mine quit their game developer gig because the product manager and management were more interested in addictive behaviors and reselling eyeballs than they were in game development. But they also knew that was probably the last paying gig they were going to have in the 'games' business because it had gone from people making great games, to things on a phone/browser pulling you down.
So yeah, it is going to test you and you might come up short. I don't judge people who stay when they know, but I do grieve for the damage they do to their souls when they see themselves as someone they no longer recognize.
This is a fantastic outcome - lots of money and U.S citizenship! And your product didn't even hurt anyone unlike working for Meta, in fact no one even used it!
I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.
I look at everything now as a journey not a destination. When connecting one's work carrier with a bank, one must keep in mind that some other people might have joined the organisation because of quite distinct reasons than we did. So yes there might be a fraud ongoing in our company, but it's not our fault
At the end of the day he wrote some software which sounds legitimate and useful. What management did without his knowledge isn't really his problem.
At the other end of this extreme is if you have a good job in a bad industry, like gambling or boiler room frauds. You should feel responsible even if your job is just maintaining the servers.
I think it doesn't really matter if the fund manager was committing a fraud. The author had fun, met their spouse and just enjoyed life with the information they had at that point.
I worked for a company that did opt-in spam email. Their main offices were in Silicon Valley, but they had a startup thing in LA that I worked at. Ostensibly we were building a self-service email campaign app to be bundled with Weblogic Commerce Server (which itself was basically DOA).
It became pretty obvious to me from the get-go that nothing was being built, and the startup was just siphoning money off the parent company. I'm not sure if there was any fraud going on beyond a bunch of people collecting a paycheck.
I think the boss was skimming off of the captive H1Bs, and there was a guy in NYC who never did anything as far as I could tell. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of kickback going on there.
My first day, I went out for sushi with the top devs, who proceeded to tell one horror story after another about the boss. Awesome way to start a job. I lasted 3 months.
First, you'll probably never know and this is one of those ouroboros questions that can drive you a little crazy if you let it. I urge you to not let it, because the only actual answer is that if you did work you were proud of and met the mother of your children, it quite literally doesn't matter. We should all be so lucky!
Second, very few things in life are so cut and dry. Legal cases are by nature simplified abstractions that attempt to render a three dimensional situation that unfolded over a long time in a few pages of a graphic novel.
Third, this sort of thing is so incredibly common. Often the only difference between fraud and IPO is whether it worked or not. That's not cynicism, just pragmatism.
If you ever read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - and you should - you'll quickly decide that the real fraud is late capitalism writ large.
One of the many reasons to never actually care about the work you are doing if it is a for-profit endeavor, and you are not the owner. You are there to collect a paycheck so you can survive. If you want a job that you should care about then work in public service, at a non-profit, or for yourself.
> If you want a job that you should care about then work in public service
I did that in the health sector of my local gov, the whole place was full of consultant who either got contracted directly from Oracle, used to work at Oracle before but moved there or took the Oracle pill early on and never got the idea to see how things get done elsewhere. It was impossible to ship anything that's not made of Oracle technologies and that was not an accident but a deliberate construction.
Another option is to do work you care about, in a way that doesn't attract the attention of people who might thwart it. I think plenty of socially or personally redeeming work can be done this way, for instance within very large companies. Enough of this work, in fact, that the net outcome for people and society is actually beneficial.
In this particular case I believe it was mostly individual accredited investors, putting in anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. The case has records of the fund trying to get GE in too, but it doesn't look like they succeeded. Some of those individual investors may have been pretty small fry so I do feel a bit bad for them, but on the other hand if you want to dabble in Venture Capital, you need to be savvy.
I wonder what's even wrong about it. This is how funds normally operate: motivation for investors is upside, motivation for coders is to be able to code and get paid for it, motivation for people who run this circus, is fees.
And yes i can relate to that. In 26 years of career, about half of the money i made and all of the money i saved, came from 3 clients (over the course of less than 5 years), all 3 of them being scams - one swindled investors for a thing he knew can't work, another one did a legit thing but when he realised it failed, exited to a dumb megacorp and ran away (literally vanished) when they started to realise they've been duped, and one more was in crypto field and whole project - which to me, all the way until past release, looked like a legit porn site - had a goal of imitating activity/interest to boost value of a crypto token.
Even before i picked up coding - and i did it when i was in early teens around the fall of Communism - i knew coding as a separate field and a business was invented exactly for that purpose: it's a lot easier to steal money that way because it's a lot easier to inflate costs vs buying physical products.
No surprise the party is over. People can't be duped for too long.
if you don't own the capital and have full autonomy, what's the difference on fraud (that you know nothing about), some imoral thing like flock/advertising/surveillance, or some inane thing like animating characters for ads, or mailing spam letters for a small business, etc, etc, etc?
As a junior software engineer, I worked at a large UK bank.
Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise.
One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team, without having incurred any procurement costs.
I once asked a more senior colleague how this made any sense. His answer stuck with me:
"You can’t stop people from doing their jobs. If someone thinks their job is to deliver X, they’ll find a way to deliver X. Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside."
Most large corporations treat these categories of employment as different budget line items with different rules and limitations: (1) full-time employees, (2) individual contractors, and (3) large contractor "body-shops" or outsourcing providers. Many times in my career, I have seen layoff a few from (1) then way over spend on (2) or (3). The mid-level manager who makes the decision gets to "claim" that expenses were reduced in (1) and "win" at year-end reviews. Yes, I know: This is total non-sense, but I have seen it many, many times at mega-corps.
Related to this, the massive advantage of AWS is that it allows staff to buy infrastructure without having to raise purchase orders. If you ask permission for spending, it's a very onerous and frustrating process. If you just deploy stuff and get billed for it, it's much easier! Even if that's more expensive than having your own cloud. Worse, if you have on-prem, you have to have staff. They might even be permanent. Businesses hate having to have important staff.
Not coincidentally, this results in massive overspend until someone notices and has to painstakingly go round checking what all your instances are for. And AWS is very profitable (well, margin rather than accounting profit).
Now, look at the billing model of AI, especially once flat rate goes away. People can spend millions on tokens without ever having to ask a manager! Obviously this is going to rake in money hand over fist, because it will be years before anyone catches up to ask "are we actually getting value for money here?" rather than "quick spend more tokens".
> One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team, without having incurred any procurement costs.
When I worked (well, was a contractor at) a very large company, they'd kicked out all their small contracting providers only to get the same people back via a single big one. I was told this was part of a vendor consolidation move, because maintaining their existing direct relationship with literally hundreds of thousands of vendors had a huge cost in itself.
I doubt they were dumb enough to think there was no markup, but going direct isn't free either. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Now, was it a net good move? That's both above my pay grade and not my expertise. But from the fact it took me a month of billed time to buy a license of that same company's own product[1], I wouldn't have called it an efficient bureaucracy.
[1] all purchases of own-company product had to be done through the 99% internal billing discount program.
when i worked for an australian bank, one co-worker in a nearby team had been working on the the banks systems as a sysadmin for over a decade.
the bank would go through cycles of "we need to reduce our headcount and outsource everything" and then 4 years later "we need to reduce spend on contractors and retain more knowledge and expertise in house". he'd survived multiple waves of it, switching back and forth between being an employee or a contractor through some external agency, as management trends changed, while essentially doing the same job.
I want through the same processen three times already.
I work in civil service but in a very specific job that needs certain degrees by law.
I've heard they were going to outsource my job (because civil servant are expensive) and registered a company that delivers the requested services. I entered a public procurement and upped my price a little because I knew there aren't many people with the right certifications. I won the public procurement and went from a civil servant to a self employed expert with a company car and all the perks.
Near the end of my contract they thought about hiring their own expert again because... money.
I applied for the job and went through an external hiring process and got selected. Because legislation changed my job went from middle management to a senior management position with extra benefits. Had to drop the car though...
A few months ago my colleagues were doing prekilinary budget talks and considered on finding an external company to do my job and getting me another position. I had to point out the cycle they fell into and somehow they forgot about it.
I love this, reminds me of a automation engineer, i got to see on quite a few projects, who always came in wearing the company t-shirt or jacket of the sending company. Its so funny, when its always the same guy coming in for different companies.
That's actual genius. You should write this up in detail!
It's hardly complicated!
OP is simply describing what is common throughout government in the UK. This is known as the Revolving Door.
Private Eye magazine wrote a special report on it some years back as, frankly, it is scandalous https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/revol... [PDF]
The revolving door is a completely different phenomenon, and it is a problem for a completely different reason. It's about politicians in positions of power over an industry later becoming business leaders or highly paid consultants in said industry. This is a huge problem because it works as a long-term bribe: instead of paying for the politician today and inviting inquiries and problems, you make an implicit promise to employ them when they get out of power as a future reward for preferential treatment today. This is an issue of corruption and excessive business influence of public policy.
In contrast, the issue with civil servants being let go and re-hired as contractors is a simple issue of inefficiency. The same person doing the same job has the same incentives, they're not being corrupted. However, our public resources are being spent inefficiently to hire the same person to do the same job for more money, with an added bonus of spending resources on the acquisition process itself.
I didn't say it is complicated. It is unusual for individuals not at the top of the ladder to set up their own companies and get exactly the same job twice. That's not what the "revolving door" is typically talking about.
Have y'all hit the "can genai do his job?" phase yet...
Early on I used to try to explain that things don't work as advertised. There are a lot of advantages but you need a human reviewing and directing.
These days I don't even bother. Call it being desensitized to the bullshit, but I'm waiting for some fancy AI agent to take out stuff in a way that no one can do anything. Past that I don't see a way for C suite to wake up.
> Past that I don't see a way for C suite to wake up.
Didn't you mean to temporarily realign? I mean give it 2 years and another manager to show up, ready to get their bonus for the next attempt at it.
That's our reality and how we've structured our markets
I think it is that cycle where old projects will eventually seem less important with huge budgets for new projects by a new manager, that will have bigger allocations, and the bonuses will follow along with the brownie points to that genius.
This is what I do believe will happen.
I still have new „business„ guys joining org who try to make „cloud migration”.
We are cloud as a SaaS, we are running on VPS with virtual networks. But they come in and think „to be professional” we should be in „real cloud” like Azure or AWS.
I honestly don’t get why anyone would give up their mental health like that and work for such places. In my reality there are plenty of honest and decent places to work at. I’m seen dark places yes but only as visitor - why would I want to be in hell for more than a day or two.
There's the thought that all places are potentially s** in one way or another. This isn't entirely true but there's a significant possibility that any move could be just as bad or worse.
You look at your monthly outgoings and think about how long you have to look before your cash runs out.
I stuck it out too long several times. The most recent one left me unemployed for quite a long time and I was lucky to be in a position for it not to matter.
Now I'm in a job that's a step down - in a sense it's humiliating. On the other hand it more than pays the bills, it's low stress, I've lost 13 kg and I don't wake up in the middle of the night and instantly start thinking of the terrible things that happened in the week so that I can't sleep again.
Now I spend my spare time working in the garden instead of desperately trying to build the new feature on time. I'm digging a driveway. Perhaps this won't last but I realise how much I was killing myself by trying to stay in something bad.
Places are bad essentially because of bad people - it only takes a couple of idiots and it's impossible to fully judge that from an interview. You always get bad vibes from someone or other but you're trying to convince yourself it's ok because you need a job.
I don't see why that'd be humiliating by any sense of the word. We don't live long, and there's pretty much nobody who at the end of their life bemoans 'I sure regret not having spent even more time at the office.' More humiliating, at least from my perspective, is the person who works their life away, trying to find contentment from the accumulating of things which, of course, never succeeds. It's like society is full of people playing out what used to be the comical trope of a man in a mid-life crisis, and his new yellow convertible.
> In my reality there are plenty of honest and decent places to work at.
Like wich? In my experience all workplaces have something that's gonna be wrong with them, and you just need to compromise if what's wrong with THAT ONE is acceptable to you.
Like for example honest and decent places to work at tend to also come with lower pay, or pigeon-holing career-limiting type of work, discriminatory gatekeeping, or other such compromises. There's no free lunch where you can have your cake and eat it too, unless you're very lucky.
> I honestly don’t get why anyone would give up their mental health like that and work for such places.
Mostly for money, of course. And all the attendant improvements that can bring to one's life. Some people need it more than others, e.g. a H1B worker who is attempting to pull a whole family out of poverty.
I bet many go in thinking they will do it temporarily, until they pay their college debt, to give one example. But money is very addictive.
I agree with you, but I feel like leaving is much harder in reality for most people.
Life gets in the way, you don't have the energy to apply, you're afraid of rejection, you are afraid you might end up in a worse environment, you justify it to yourself in any number of ways.
Inertia, herd mentality and self-deception are much more powerful IRL than most people online seem to think (or at least write).
Add having a family to the mix and it gets worse. Being a sole provider for a family is scary when you go job hunting, especially if you live in an environment that is very expensive (where the jobs that pay decent are located normally).
Yep, I left one project because I think I was underpaid there. I could not find another job for like 3 months. I finally found one and I was also very stressful. No it is better, at the same project and I think I make more money than I would ever be able in a project I left. But on the other hand it was very stressful for my family. Was it worth it in the end? I do not know because even if money is better and company is bigger I could damage my kids development by being angry, sad and depressed for two years.
Because companies tend to enshittify over time. Especially if they get acquired. Doubly so if the buying company is PE.
Really small “lifestyle” companies might be fairly immune, but it doesn’t take much for them to fail, there’s a different risk profile.
At some point I just work here man, and my job is to do whatever dumb shit management wants me to do this quarter, no matter how dumb it is.
Many times places change because a manager changed and then you have the boiling frog thing where it doesn't become awful all at once.
Just got my morning coffee and read "genai" like some elusive Japanese person's name.
So, can Genai san do his job?
> So, can Genai san do his job?
If not, will become Genai Sans job.
Oh stop it.
Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost; people insist on being paid more to have an insecure job.
The uncertainty never goes away. You can pay someone else to suffer it, but it will always cost more than dealing with it yourself.
And that can be ok. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're getting a bargain.
> Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost; people insist on being paid more to have an insecure job.
This is true, but it's not the whole of it. In some cases the manager goes to a cabin in the woods to drunkenly shoot at moose with the head of the contracting company.
It's a saying that "the purpose of a system is what it does". I think it's a pretty dumb saying. But it is often worth talking a look at a system and see if the "mistakes" it makes (such as wasting money on contacting companies) aren't in fact desired by some people in the system.
> if the "mistakes" it makes [...] aren't in fact desired by some people in the system
This process goes both ways. The people in the system align to the process. So maybe the "mistake" wasn't desired to begin with, but once it's there someone things: if that's the way they want it let's change our ways to fit. That's why these things seem to dumb from the outside.
There's always going to be a slight mismatch between the supposed aim of any organisation and the incentives of the management and every single employee unless they're all shareholders and even then...
I've seen this happen because of accounting/corporate finance policy.
Payroll is an ongoing commitment. Consultancy is a temporary service. Moving people from payroll to consultancy means they can reduce overhead in financial projections. Even though consultancy costs more, and employs the same people, it makes sense to do if it means you can convince shareholders and analysts that Opex will shrink in the future, and therefore profitability increase, and therefore the share price increases.
The problem arises when moving someone from payroll to consulting creates the illusion they are not necessary.
At a glance, maybe. But we also see this in government. The US has outsourced 10s of thousands of “permanent” jobs over the decades. The entire DC metro economy is based on this.
Also because of corporate policy. I know of a company where the VPs are heavily targeted on headcount reductions. Contractors are not headcount.
> if it means you can convince shareholders and analysts that Opex will shrink in the future
Isn't that just fraud?
No. Fraud is a much higher bar than making a prediction about your plan for the future that may or may not pan out. There’s no deception here, management fully intend to end the contractor relationship in future, whether they’re able to or not.
A vague promise which you pretend to beleave and can make believable to other is just business advice unfortunately.
It doesn't actually make sense tho. It just "makes sense" within the rules of a fundamentally nonsensical system.
That system however is no law of nature. It's just broken nonsense no one bothers to fix because we haven't yet run out of money.
> Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost;
I noticed this early, and spent the first half of my career leaning into it. If you negotiate every gig as a contract, you get to double (or more) your salary. And the only thing you're trading away is job security which, if you pay attention, you'll notice doesn't actually exist for your salaried counterparts either.
To nitpick, you also have to pay for your own health insurance. So subtract $200/month from that extra $15,000/month for the sort of catastrophic coverage plan that a 27 year old needs.
A stable environment with a great culture has lower costs.
But then they have to hire good managers and for that you need to be a good manager yourself.
I wonder if this explains why I hear about this more from Europeans than from the SF tech scene. California is at-will employment, so you can fire an employee as easily as a contractor. Ironically this makes companies more willing to hire and retain employees, since they're not worried about getting stuck with a bad one — and most employees aren't bad, and are better for the company than contractors.
Its not about employees being bad, we have 6 month trial periods over here in the EU where you can be fired quite easily. Thats the excuse they use to keep at will employment. In reality they want to be able to reduce Opex costs which looks great on their end of year budgets. If you can then offload that cost into a project run under Capex, even at a higher cost, then its budgeted differently and the shareholders get their payout.
Sir Humphrey explains the role of a civil servant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDdLWAdcbM
"Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic."
I hope he was able to get a paybump each switch!
Sometimes(most of the time?) that is the only way to get a pay bump.
This is what I do.
I love watching them cringe when they see my new daily rate.
Something I hated about working in corporate America was surviving multiple leadership regimes, watching the same lessons being learned over and over, having to recount history to new regimes, it got really tiring, and particularly dealing with the attitudes and self regard of some.
I have often thought this - a wave of people learn something and on come the next wave to relearn it all. They can read books but they don't really "get" what the books say and have to learn it all from personal experience all over again. It's not just America.
It's very possible that this occurred during the IR35 shake-up - HMRC moved the liability for unpaid income tax (in a situation where a contractor was determined to be a de-facto employee) from limited company contractors themselves onto the client (the bank, in this case).
Banks had a very low risk appetite and so had to let these people go. What was going on in a lot of places was that vital staff who had to be dumped were intermediated by outsourcing providers. These companies either then paid the staff a very high salary and sold them in as temp labour, or took on the risk themselves and hired them as contractors for the same purpose.
This all made sense, but for a lot of contractors at the time, it felt like the apocalypse. The net effect was that HMRC exchanged flexibility in the labour market for immediate tax take. This may not have been a sensible decision.
I've seen that in a large management consultancy company. Part of their risk management procedures (both for the company and in terms of some EU law) meant they couldn't keep contractors for longer than x years. They'd have to convert to employee or separate for 12 months.
Bit that doesn't really work in knowledge systems. Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has, and their departure is costly.
Equally at the end of their contract a lot of time will need to be spend on a handover which slows down others even more.
So what happened? The contractor went via another middle man, which checked the correct boxes on the form, and everybody was happy.
> Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has
I think that's the part management teams are missing. They assume that employees are just human resources and they can replace a senior engineer with a 100% equivalent one when needed.
I worked for a large US bank that has a 10% biannual attrition target at all levels across the company. Twice a year they PIP 10-15% of staff, most of whom take a substantial buyout. Institutional knowledge is constantly being lost and experienced staff are being replaced with fresh cohorts of new grads, who then get replaced themselves right as they start becoming useful.
I knew multiple people there who made more in signing bonus, pay during training, and severance than they made for work actually performed.
The CEO is convinced that this is the path to "top tech talent."
That sounds like Enron. It breeds a culture of short termism, arse covering, and often... bending the numbers a bit
If we called it by the literal term, decimation, you would get a good sense of the effect. "I have a new policy, I'm going to decimate my own company"
I assume management thinks this will lead to better documentation practices and standardized processes so it becomes easier and cheaper to introduce new employees. In practice the opposite happens, employees get scared for their jobs, hire bad new employees so it's the new people that will get PIP-ed.
Does the approach apply to senior management?
Senior leaders in large companies I've worked at always had a fairly high turnover just because they all tend to be hyper competitive and engaged in their own Game of Thrones type competitions - which someone has to lose.
There's some level where it stops, but that's after you've got 100+ reports.
I don't know that I interacted with anybody senior enough to avoid this process in the time I worked there.
I have a friend who left BigCo and then rejoined it as a contractor, plus some additional employees that he manages now. He cynically says "My job is to convert OpEx to CapEx when the finance department tells some director they can't have more headcount."
How is hiring a contractor Capex?
>the finance department tells some director...
Don't shoot the messenger. The finance department is implementing the board's policy.
The same way cloud is about doing the exact opposite.
Understanding a bit of accounting / corporate finance opened my eyes to many things.
> Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise.
I dont think they're baffled, they just trying to show they're attempting to keep costs under control.
Lots of shouting on one particular occasion left me with the impression that they genuinely had not anticipated this consequence of simultaneously pulling the "no contractors to be renewed" lever and the "any MD can sign contracts up to $1m with approved suppliers" lever.
The people involved weren’t stupid. They were trying to achieve one outcome and got a different one because the rest of the organisation adapted to the incentives in front of them.
How do you call when someone repeatedly does the same thing expecting a different outcome each time?
> One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider.
That's 'normal' in Canada and France.
I think I have a simpler answer: quarterly results.
Management just really needs to make the next earnings look like what it should look. Next quarter is next quarter's problem.
In my experience, it's probably due to differences in budget line items. Usually, regular labor costs and outsourcing costs are budgeted separately. Some teams may not have the authority to hire an additional full-time employee, but they do have the authority to use external contractors. On top of that, the internal political landscape differs as well. When it comes to office politics, increasing headcount in a particular department means increasing that department's influence. There are also additional benefits and administrative costs that come with hiring permanent staff. Moreover, standard contracts usually come with overhead for contract management personnel and procedural costs, and these are often handled by the vendor side. In other words, direct employment comes with long-term responsibilities for performance and benefits, but when you outsource, most of that liability shifts to the external vendor.
This doesn't seem to answer why an engineer is let go and gets rehired through an outsourcer.
In some cases it could be driven by the shape of the work & where the funding is allocated:
If there isn't enough guaranteed recurring work, it might not make sense to have a full time position, particularly in a country where its difficult to lay people off & if employees have additional overhead (pensions, employer funded heathcare or insurance, etc) vs contractors.
But, if there's funding allocated for some key project that's framed as a 6-12 month project, there might be a good business case to hire a contractor. Maybe the funding comes out of the project bucket, not the core funding for legacy product X bucket.
If the contractor is someone who was recently let go & has a good reputation within the company as someone who gets stuff done and is easy to work with, it's probably a no-brainer to re-engage them as a contractor vs rolling the dice on an unknown quantity.
Whoever is managing the budget of their old team gets a win as they were able to reduce headcount to fit in their budget
Whoever is managing the new project gets a win as they find a great contractor for their key project
The former employee returning as a contractor probably gets a win, as they get paid at a better daily rate while the project is rolling, provided they're able to line up more projects or land a new permie job once the project is completed.
If there's an outsourcer involved, they win by taking a cut. The former employee might also win by having the outsourcer involved if the company has some baroque process for engaging contractors with many compliance hoops to jump through -- in extreme cases (think banks, or public companies that need to demonstrate they don't do business with suppliers engaged in slavery, or so on) it could save the worker months of paperwork and tens of thousands in legal expenses to set up their own one-person agency and go through the compliance process to be able to work for their former employer, so they might not be able to win the contract work without piggybacking on an outsourcer who already has the contracts & compliance stuff sorted out.
most large companies have a 2-year limit on contractor employment so what they tend to do is they'll hire the same guy through a different contractor with another two-year agreement..... that's to get around the situation where if someone is working as a contractor for more than 2 years they can legally claim that they're actually an employee....see Vizcaino v. Microsoft Corp., 120 F.3d 1006 (9th Cir. 1997) [0]...
this is just a guess by the way but it seems like a plausible one, as I've seen it happen in Fortune 500 a lot, where the same guy comes back through a different vendor 2 years later if he was really good and they needed him to come back....
[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/120...
The military is like this. Higher Headquarters decides to contract out maintenance and logistical support for $aircraft_fleet. Uniformed maintainers go home in Friday and show up Monday making a lot more money to do the same job but without risk of getting posted or deployed.
Contractor fees come out because of a different pot of money, so perverse incentives abound.
Don’t those uniformed maintainers get reassigned to other military jobs or are they allowed to work as a contractor while being active military?
Yes, GP's description is incorrect (to be kind, it's just bullshit). If the position is removed (say H-60 maintenance at some base is now contracted out) then the enlisted members doing the work would not switch to contractors over the weekend or even over the span of a few weeks, they'd be moved to another base or another job on the same base.
Now, the people being hired by the contractors are often former enlisted maintainers, but it won't be the ones doing the job previously because of a switchover like this. Those crews will have PCS'd.
Sometimes they do but often they quit because the work life balance is much better.
If you’re enlisted (or even commissioned in most cases), you quite literally don’t get to quit.
They're dismissed due to a reduction in force.
That’s pretty rare in the USAF. Most servicemembers will be sent to be retrained on a different airframe or even into a different career field unless their date of separation doesn’t make it worth it. Voluntary separation programs do sometimes pop up but they’re not that common.
It is common to have people separating and coming back immediately as contractors into basically the same job, but that’s usually because there is already a contracted workforce in place and they made connections while serving.
But it is the same affect as what the OP said. In a large organisation, attrition is so high that if you slow recruiting you will soon have a lower headcount. So yes the uniformed deployable military are replaced with civilian 9-5ers. But not the very same people, just the very same roles.
I don't think this changes how I feel about it.
s/in Friday/on Friday/g
> Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside.
At my last performance review, at my last job (this is going back more than a decade now) one of my agreed KPIs was to take the lead on a 3-6 month project, making all the required technical decisions etc. and successfully delivering it on time and on budget.
I never got the opportunity, and quit that job six months later to start my own business, but still did contract work for them.
Got a social call a year later from my old boss (who also left, before I did) and got to tell them “so I hit my KPI, you’ll never believe what I had to do to make it happen…” :D
At the risk of injecting recent US politics into this, the shipyard I used to work at had five employees laid off under DOGE and replaced by the exact same individuals (there aren't actually that many naval architects in the US), now working as contractors at a higher base pay. I feel like there's a lot of that out there.
The defense and security-related sector is legendary for this. I had a friend who worked at a three-letter agency ~20 years ago who saw multiple colleagues quit, get hired by contractor firms and sold back to the agency to work on the exact same projects they had been working on as employees. They got a 2-3x pay bump, and the government paid 3-5x for their services. In one instance, my friend said, a guy clocked out on a Friday and came back to his exact same desk on Monday, with a new "employer" and a higher salary.
Per a friend, they are told to use more contractors in the government. Its also not clear if the contractor is actually making more money. Government benefits are significantly better than most contractors will give (I will be all of them).
The contractor has better take home pay. For them, it's maybe a wash whether they get the extra pay or the better benefits, but what they are paid is only a fraction of what the government pays to the contractor's company. For the government, giving those benefits is definitively a much better deal than using a contractor.
Who actually pays for what and how is so mangled that if you want to reallocate someone to another project (or even just pay them out of a different pool of funds!) often the easiest approach is to rehire them through a contractor, or a different contractor.
This is especially useful when projects are wound down. Let's say you've contracted to an org for support or management on a project that you want to kill, you've already obligated some amount of funds, and you don't really want to make that organization angry by ripping millions away from them (the pool of contractors is not large). What to do? Well, you could take Joe and give him a raise by suggesting he work for the contractor instead of you directly. Money's already spent, anyways. So you save your own money that you can use for your pet projects or whatever, Joe gets a raise, the contractor doesn't get a termination that pisses everyone off. Everyone happy, right? Smh.
This is extremely common at govenments in the Netherlands as well.
That's because the bankers didn't realize they're not in the banking business anymore - they're in the IT business (which has a focus on tracking money).
I have made this same argument to a C level person in the US capital markets and told I don’t know what I’m talking about. As long as the check clears, I have no strong feelings on the topic, it’s just a performance on a stage.
I worked for Advanced Network and Services, which operated the NSFNET and was later acquired by America Online. Then one day the company was acquired by WorldCom. A few years later the CEO was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a ~$10 billion fraud. As a systems administrator I knew nothing about any of that, but I could tell that the new management included a lot of players and empire builders. That's the signal that told me to quit a few months after the acquisition. Employees were invited to invest their retirement savings in a mutual fund that contained only WorldCom stock. Many of them lost everything. Pay attention to those signals.
I feel like Worldcom got a modest amount of press coverage at the time but probably would have gotten a lot more if it hadn’t been front-run by the Enron scandal.
Why are these always one letter off from what they actually are? Worldcom-> World-con. Madoff -> Made-off
Scam Bankrun-Fraud
Normative determinism is the term for that
*Nominative Determinism. Named after John Nominative, who first proposed the effect.
Palantir are upfront!
> Employees were invited to invest their retirement savings in a mutual fund that contained only WorldCom stock.
Investing in your own employer is an idiotic risk..... If the company goes titsup, then you lose your job and your savings. This happened to many people during the dotcom crash.
For decades after my WorldCom experience, I cashed out all equity grants immediately and invested the money elsewhere. Even if the company appears solid and is not run by criminals, it's still sound risk management. Bad things can happen to good companies as well.
I was on a government project where I found out I was being fraudulently billed on my hours. It was towards the end of the year and my manager was trying to use up the budget of the client. Although this is normal in the private sector I told him from the beginning that you can't do this on a government project.
The project was $1M+ which was enough for prison time. He had gone into our billing software and edited my entries - it wasn't as if he was submitting the fraudulent totals only - he was changing what I was entering.
I gathered as much documentation as I cloud and went to a law firm. They told me I had two options - report it to the Government Accounting Office or report it to the head of the project, an academic.
So I simultaneously resigned and reported it to the professor. I covered my butt. I'm pretty sure the professor hid the fraudulent billing but I didn't look into afterwards because basically that was what I was hoping he'd do so I wouldn't have to go to court and defend that my reported hours weren't really mine.
The full project was eventually awarded to another academic group.
Okay… do you not feel culpable at some point? Do you feel no obligation to expose these various individuals fleecing the tax payers? Your boss, the academics, and everyone else who participated or knows and remains silent. Obviously, you are now in the later group.
Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
Do people really have a duty to fix every wrong in the world? He reported it to the project head, and resigned. He ensured he wasn't a part of the situation.
I don't think you have to be a full saint to fulfil your moral obligations. He ensured he wasn't implicitly participating and reported it to someone who had a responsibility to investigate/do something about it. That is a reasonable amount of effort to rectify the situation in my opinion.
> Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
The person you are responding to did "blow the whistle". They reported it to the project head. That is blowing the whistle.
If you don’t have a duty to report, you don’t have a duty to report. You can’t predict what government prosecutors will do. If they start investigating and it turns out for whatever reason they can’t pin it on the boss, they could have pinned if on OP.
Think about it logically. If you’re the prosecutor, the guy whose time is fraudulent is presumptively the criminal. It could very well be that he was actually the one who was engaged in the fraud, but went to the authorities to protect himself by making it look like his boss did it.
Absolutely not. Honor does not pay the mortgage. Whistleblowers have no real protection, despite laws saying they should. If you blow that whistle, you will be retaliated against, guaranteed.
Now that you know, do you feel culpable?
He just knows that someone on HN who is not using their real name has described witnessing government fraud at some unspecified point in the past and reporting it to the head of the project. He doesn't have any information about where it occurred other than probably the United States.
He's not really in a position to act usefully on this information, so had no reason to feel any culpability for not acting. It is only an interesting question when put to people were in a position where they had to make a choice.
He can report the incident to digital crimes unit who can subpoena HN/YC for identity of the poster, and then they can take it from there.
There is always something you can do — whether you are going to bother is an altogether a different matter.
I'm supposed to dox this person or something? What are you asking exactly?
What you know and what you can prove are different things.
I think most people would blow the whistle if they had evidence of personal-enrichment fraud. Suspecting that incentives are producing strange outcomes is one thing; accusing specific people of criminal conduct is quite another.
Hilariously, in the one case I heard about where an MD was eventually fired for taking kickbacks from contractors, the department then struggled to recruit competent staff. It turned out he had only been skimming from people who could actually do the job.
It was too risky. My boss was scummy and even though I had documentation about my hours being edited he would have fought it and we'd go to court and at that point it'd be a crap shoot. If I remember right, the prison time was five years and there is no parole with federal sentences.
To prevent this situation the peons should be given the benefit of the doubt by the courts.
In this case, either (1) the peon was lying about reported hours, the boss didn't notice, and then the peon reported himself... or (2) everything happened just like you said.
Aren't there bounties for reporting things like this? At the very least winning should include reimbursement for legal expenses.
They do get the benefit of the doubt, but when you're a defendant in a criminal trial, simply having the benefit of the doubt on your side will not mean that you're going to have a great experience with it.
Easier to say than do.
> Okay… do you not feel culpable at some point?
1. No mens rea.
2. He did what was expected of him.
3. You're always free to break into prison if you find yourself in his position, but you might discover yourself sitting in a pool of shit that was not of your own making.
4. Do you really want the parent poster to face the possibility of criminal prosecution, because his scumbag boss convinces the DOJ that the parent poster were the one fucking with the hours, and tried to pin it on him?
That's particularly egregious because there's a time-honored way to do this legally, namely have you shave yaks for 80 hours a week towards the end of the fiscal year (lot of USG contractors are skipping their vacations this summer for that exact reason).
Someone hasn't heard of qui tam
Qui tam (and the federal false claims act) are brilliant, such an elegant solution to a classic problem in government (corruption).
The False Claims Act is one of my favorite things in the world, hands down. Who would have guessed that paying whistleblowers a fraction of the proceeds for high stakes financial crime would be so effective? Well, aside from every economist and financier who ever lived, I mean.
Thank you for this tidbit of information!
That was your mistake. The grant recipient or department has as much incentive to fully spend the money as your consultant boss does to bill it. It's a implied understanding.
Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time. Expensive projects are important projects. Important projects make careers. That is baked in several layers deep. You'd need to report it to a waste and fraud line, ombudsman, or similar.
I'm not sure its unusual enough to bother, though.
I decided to take the advice of my lawyers who specialized in the topic of government projects. Based on the budget someone could have easily gone to prison and it probably would have been me because it looked like I was billing 80-hours a week when it was just one of many projects and so I was actually billing ~20/wk. The $1M threshold wasn't an anecdote - at the time it really was the limit in project size for prison time.
Ages ago, my girlfriend at the time worked for a company that routinely got SIBR (small business innovation research) grants. Such grants made up part of her total workload.
The crazy thing was that if she worked for 10 hours on SBIR stuff, then worked 40 hours on her normal work stuff (so overtime), the SBIR billing would get scaled down to 8 hours (that is, 25% of 40 hours). There would be no way to bill 80 hours.
The other thing that seemed somewhat crazy is that it was also common to have multiple SBIR contracts going on at the same time. If they bought a $10K tool for SBIR grant #1 and SBIR grant #2 needed it two, they'd have to buy a second one. So the tool would be out, then when switching between work on the grants, the tool would go into a locked cabinet, then the second copy of the tool would get unlocked from a different cabinet. I understand that firewalling like that prevents a company from "borrowing" expensive equipment for their own work, but it lead to waste like I just described.
Why not float a company to buy the tool and then let that company charge money to lease the tool to the using companies for the specific non-overlapping period instead of borrowing? Leasing can't be prohibited too?
You would have been fine: Your pay stubs reflected the correct time and your correct payment.
I was salary.
Shit. That does make it hard. I suspect you made the right move to protect yourself from drama.
Wait, did you get paid overtime when he modified your time sheet?
I guess it may not be normal but I got straight time overtime when I worked for a contractor. Made those weeks I really did do 80 hrs nice. But if they have any system involved the fact you did not get paid for the time would be a big red flag.
If you were salary and not benefitting from it, there's literally no chance you would have gone to jail. This was the equivalent of panicking about running a yellow light in terms of overreaction. The only thing you had to do was write an email, cc your personal email, and tell your boss you think the punches are messed up and that they reflect more than you worked. Your boss would tell you not to worry about it and you're done.
Your faith in the criminal justice system amuses me.
Abuses happen. But they are the exception, not the rule. There's no need to be so cynical and mocking about it.
> Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time.
I've always heard of this nugget of wisdom but never really understood it. By punishing those who underspend (by making the next application harder), wouldn't you incentivise inflated research costs, or worse, fraud. Seems like a quick path to a positive feedback loop towards the degradation of trust in academic spending, leading to "poor government efficiency".
It makes zero sense to me either, yet it is an omnipresent influence in who gets tasked to what in my work. At my level, I do not know anyone who endorses it, they merely react to it.
That's the paradox that causes the problem, perhaps paradox is not the correct term, conflicting view points?.
From above(the manager of the program) the job is to budget the funds thriftily and fairly, each project getting the amount it needs.
From below(the team working on the project) this feels like you are punished if you are able to save money and rewarded when you waste money.
I suspect this is probably the major problem with having a more command orientated economy. While it should be fairer(free market economies are notoriously unfair). The inversion in incentive hurts performance.
Think of it the other way: If you have been given a $1 million budget, as a manager, your job is to purchase $1 million of Useful Stuff.
The rank above you has decided "we need $1 million of software, go buy that." They don't know exactly how much stuff costs, so they use a dollar value as a rough proxy.
If, as manager, you cut corners to save money, you're doing the wrong thing. They want the software! They don't to keep want the money, that's why it was allocated in the budget. Go buy us more Useful Stuff!
i think anther scenario is more likely: you say you need a 1 million budget to run the IT department, but you only spend part of it, then next year if you ask for 1 million again, they will say, but last year you only spent 700k, so we are going to give you only that much.
but the problem here is how budgets are assigned. instead of a fixed number it should have a lower and an upper bound. at least X, but no more than Y. the closer to you get the better, but next year the budget will be the same range. only if you drop below X you run into the above problem, but then it's much less likely and if you really spend that little something else is wrong or the budget really was to high.
Or certain project related items in the overall budget have their own budget. If (when) the project slips into a future accounting period then so does the budget.
But if someone doesn't need a big budget it makes sense to decrease it. It reduces efficiency if you force yourself to spend the whole budget.
But what if you need to save up to buy something that you can't afford in one year? Or you're trying to reduce cost in one place enough to hire a team to do some other project?
You buy it with financing in that case. And you fit your reductions and hires into the same fiscal year.
Then you can argue why you still need the budget. It May make sense to temporarily allocate a bigger budget immediately to do those things instead of delaying, trying to save.
Congratulations. Your budget is now permanently smaller because your appeals are completely irrelevant to the machine and you get to do less. Forever. Maybe you have to fire some people.
If you don't need a big budget then yes you should continue onwards with a smaller budget. That's not a surprising conclusion.
This is all simultaneously true and simultaneously disappointing. It requires a certain forfeiture of morality to be a part of this status quo. But, especially on grants between academia and the government, this very much seems to be the status quo.
Is it actually true, or just a trope? Anyone in a position to manage hundreds of millions worth of projects is smart enough to know that some projects will run under budget.
I work as a federal contractor. It's very true (epistemic status: my managers and project leads tell me as much and I act accordingly, I don't deal with it directly nor understand the bureaucratic larger picture). You will not get funding from Department X again if you ask for more money on a project than you wind up spending. Now, is that the sin of overquoting, or the virtue of overdelivering? For some reason, every agency treats it as the former, and I haven't the foggiest idea why. My coworkers acknowledge how stupid and perverse of an incentive it is, yet treat it like a fundamental force of nature.
Most solutions to this problem are essentially what the OP recognized as nakedly illegal---that is, exaggerating productive hours---but most contractors are savvy enough to do it in less auditable and more positively regarded ways, such as stretching out timelines (four 20-hour work weeks raise fewer flags than one 80-hour week), adding more chefs than the kitchen calls for, or funding unnecessary little side projects. Straight-up tampering with timecards is an impatient and dangerous way of achieving (IMO) the same wasteful evil as happens everywhere else in the public and private sector.
The Dutch University of Delft systematically 'maximized' grants and shuffled the money between projects, according to investigative journalists of the NRC[1].
1 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/02/15/het-subsidiepotje-moet-...
I work with people who are well smart enough to know that.
It’s also still a reasonable question to ask “well, last year we budgeted $15M and you got acceptable results while spending only $14M; perhaps you only need $14M/yr…” And despite its reasonableness, many people would prefer to oversee a $15M/yr budget.
I think a reason for this is suppose the next year you run into some difficulties so it requires 14.2M. Now you have to fight to request an extra 0.2M added to your budget that you wouldn't have to worry about if you had 15M.
Totally! And it drives me crazy to get very few questions and mostly positive ones if I underspend by 5-10% but going over by 1-2% is a massive problem.
It’s little surprise what happens under such a system: logical people over-reserve.
Nearly two decades ago I worked briefly for a "startup" in the DC metro which (in retrospect, for me) existed only to show activity toward using an IP that was the subject of a lawsuit. The expected payout from the lawsuit would have rendered the cost of running the ~20 person startup meaningless, had they won. I suppose the lawsuit didn't go well, since the startup folded 4-6 months after I started, with paychecks being late, then stopping, and employees progressively not showing up. Fun times.
At least you didn't work for an online gambling company....or assist with manipulating the political views of billions of people to their detriment...or work on better ways of killing people...
Also, who hasn't worked at a company that produced a product and then abandoned it? I feel like that has happened often to me - many years of effort for nothing. It's not fraud exactly but it represents almost the same thing other than the intention.
What's the old saying? "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
Most common people throughout history made their living working in the systems owned by aristocrats whose wealth was usually built on both corruption and theft. Guess that hasn't changed much.
Behind many, but I sincerely hope not "every". A trivial counterexample is Warren Buffet: he simply saved and invested. Or consider inventors with patents.
Buffet is well known for acquisitions that pushed the boundaries of fair competition, and investments in other companies that did the same, or otherwise pursued deeply unethical practices. But he's trodden carefully around the law, so any "crime" would be a moral crime against society rather than a legally criminal act.
I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better.
The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA.
Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned."
The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo (big fish in this tiny, tiny world) and left.
Even they knew this company was never really trying to do anything serious. Strange indeed
> The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA.
If you have a lot of money it’s fun to LARP the startup life. The experience working for such a company is highly varied and completely depends on the personality of the founder. But even if it’s a healthy place, it’s usually a black hole from a career development POV.
I know someone who is an accountant for very wealthy people and quite a few seem to have useless children whose failing businesses they bankroll.
> whose failing businesses they bankroll
Don't confuse a hobby business with a failing business.
Plenty of people with independent means run loss making businesses for fun and/or support wives/children doing just that.
You see a lot of hobby shops in ultra-wealthy areas of major metropolises. Tiny art studios, interior decorators with a handful of items in stock, boutique fashion shops.
Semantics. If the hobby business never makes a profit and is capturing losses for tax benefits, that’s a failing business. It can be failing indefinitely as long as there’s money to support it, but you can’t call it a successful business.
You appear to be suggesting that fun hobbies which don't make money are a 'failure' rather than a success. Not everything is judged by how much money it makes.
Have you ever wondered why kids climb trees?
It's really not that deep: they're characterising the business, you're characterising the hobby. The owner having a good time doesn't make it a successful business. A failing business can be a successful hobby, sure, that's still a failing business.
Startups are like sports cars nowadays. People think it makes you look cool if you own one.
It doesn't matter if it costs a lot of money to maintain. Yachts and sports cars do the same. That's actually like the whole point of it, after all.
> robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better.
I have been on the other side of this, building a frontend that connected to an external service robot that we, with a 5 minute script, managed to successfully prove internally was just a if/then/else state machine.
We got paid to make it, so we didn't care, but we knew someone was losing money.
fwiw, you’ve perfectly described the feeling of working for a “tax write-off” and how to recognize those vibes.
It could’ve been worse, it could’ve been a fraud! But it’s merely a business designed to lose money. It won’t land you in jail but it’s not a place anyone would advance a career.
I can't wait for these AI companies to IPO and be harpooned.
Why wait for IPO? Prediction markets already let non-US persons bet on startup stock prices while the startup is still private. Eg a few weeks ago you could have used a non-US VPN, shorted spacex, and lost all your money :)
https://hannahhowell.com/stuart-frost-drained-14m-from-inves...
I wish I could pull this off on a smaller scale and just switch to a fulfilling life afterwards.
The years I spend on nonsense will never come back.
Fraud aside, I think a more common thought among developers is
> Did my old job only exist because the Product Owners didn't realize we didn't have product-market fit?
That's the job: experiment until you find product-market fit... or die trying.
One time I worked for a client who entire idea for a product was "it's going to do the same as <specific popular open source dev tool>, except in Go and with GraphQL!" They literally had zero vision beyond duplicating effort for no reason. During the first meeting I sat in, I asked them directly why someone would choose to use their version instead of the existing one, and they didn't have an answer. Something like one or two years went by before they decided to end the contract with us, and I never learned what they hoped to achieve.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's what a healthy economy looks like.
At a small company, anyone can damage the company prospects. But product people have outsized negative impact when they are wrong. They can tank the whole company in short order.
Which is maybe as it should be, but it does pit agonized debates over detailed technical work in perspective.
All true but every time I tried to help with an outsider's perspective -- and IMO us as engineers with systems thinking _can_ contribute -- I was told to shut up and stay in my lane (more politely than that but still crystal clear what's the underlying message + a clear show of we-will-not-debate-this-again).
So let them do damage. I do what I am told, I have the strategic thinking but not many have made use of it. OK. It's their right. I still pocket a wage. They could have gotten more for their money but consciously chose not to. Who am I to stop them? (And not like I actually can.)
Same. I’m lucky to have some execs who appreciate that product people have a specific point of view (or agenda) and as a result are willing to at least listen to my views, wrt defect rates, availability, etc., but also about the occasional product idea.
At the end of the day, if they choose spend their magic beans on shitty features, I’m still getting paid. Then again, I’m at a larger company, not a startup.
A healthy economy permits the companies within it to fail.
Did someone disagree with that?
Well, that might be part of the reason why it's your old job and not your current one. :)
I have been in fairly senior roles at large corporates. The amount of money that is squandered without serious evaluation for something managers „want“ is mind boggling. I have often wondered whether corporate budgets are actually investor fraud in disguise.
Why does any of this actually matter? Why were you shaken?
You weren’t committing fraud. You did real work. Now you’re in the US with a family and a career.
Happy Father’s Day.
You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled?
It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.
I definitely had this feeling early on in my career, but it did flip around somewhere around halfway through.
"We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years."
The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.
look at you you lucky devil, getting to delete code!
> was it all for naught?
I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :)
Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright
Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.
It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
>40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.
For almost everyone, working is not the best way to spend their time, it's just how they can afford the stuff they do the rest of the time. Obviously it's preferable if it's useful and/or enjoyable, but they're not necessary qualities.
>It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
Odd. "Agency" usually refers to the ability to exert will. Understanding would not seem to contribute towards that.
Many people's enjoyment stems from knowing they do less work for more money than the people they grew up around.
'Useful' is not even a thought that's ever entered their brain.
> doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.
When the world starts paying people for the best use of their time, people will start prioritizing that.
Yep 90% of companies don't matter and don't affect things. Only 10% of people do. That's just the way the world works. There's no way to know before you start so just live while you can enjoy.
I worked at a company whose product was truly boneheaded. Without giving too much away, it’s the kind of technology that would have been useful if we lived in a world where smartphones weren’t being carried around by literally everybody.
I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things.
I came to the conclusion that the company was a grift, but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it.
We had startup perks that were basically paid out in cash when the pandemic hit. The “gym” perk became $500 in cash which could be spent on anything vaguely fitness related, like an Apple Watch. The commuter benefits rolled into our accounts which gave me free tolls for years afterward. Instead of taking all the money, they cut us in.
So yeah, maybe frustrating if you expected your startup to be successful, but that’s so often outside of the control of any engineer. It’s always a crap shoot. Get your best offer and make the most of it. You can do resume driven development even in the shadiest of firms.
>but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it.
All good grifts let some "little people" in on it so they go to bat for it.
So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0].
However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago.
[0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.
Same same. I don't expect any of my product code to survive for very long.
I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.
> You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled?
I would have thought most people would grow out of having this kind of feeling after their 1st job. But I also definitely work to live, not live to work, so YMMV.
Do you get your major feeling of success primarily from work, or is it the rest of life? I don't think I need to spell what is viewed as the proper long term winning strategy here. I know folks who ride the work part, and let me tell you - unless you land a stellar employer and exceptional boss, its recipe for a lot of miserable days and worse, for decades. Its also a symptom of what I would call 'unfulfilled life', but thats my personal take please don't get offended quickly.
With that mindset (or work-to-live or whatever you can call it), these things are just an afterthought. That after-work climbing session and that weekend meeting with friends or hiking trip in the mountains with kids mean world to me, and I fully indent to keep that mindset till retirement and continue with it further. If it means I won't get into top 1% or whatever I am fine with that, QoL is firmly above that and career rat races are meaningless (and fruitless) ego polishing / insecurities managing exercises.
I assume because it turns out it was a actual bullshit job, and they were probably proud of what they had achieved. They probably trusted and may have even got on well with their boss.
I have a serious question for everyone who reading through comments: If you get a great paying position in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed, given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove, just an engineer closing issues and merging patches, would you reject it?
I would consider your two statements as distinct and separate:
> "in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed"
> "given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove"
Consider:
1/ If it's a biz that's purposely mucking about without success...or a loss making entity for tax breaks: I have no problem in working here (Consider that I am in my 40s, used/abused in various "start-ups" and burnt-out. I need the money, and I'll take it.)
2/ If it's a company involved in criminal fraud: I'd run away as fast as my feet could take me. The problem with fraud is that eventually the authorities will catch up. If the owner is a criminal, he'll do anything to save his backside...even throwing innocent employees under the bus. You might be exonerated eventually. But that eventually might take years...decades.
I don't think I could give an honest reply in the abstract setting without actually being in that situation. But a significant factor would likely also be the actual work and whether it is something I find particularly interesting/exciting to work on.
Then again, if it is doomed to fail from the start, it is unlikely that I would really enjoy working on it.
Why? If it isn't illegal, nor amoral, just a moonshot then its basically typical SV startup reaching for stars.
Sure, 99.9% of startups may not get there but we saw in the past some wild unexpected successes. Plus things may change along the path as markets evolve and if they pivot successfully into new areas they may win the first mover situation, even if original mission won't ever be accomplished.
If we can see far, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of tyrants.
The real version is much more applicable, because we can’t see far, because we are depressingly shortsighted.
In this regard, we aren’t standing on shoulders of giants, we are like an immense asshole of a dad climbing ontop of his young child’s shoulders to win a chicken fight in the pool while his kid drowns below.
Wanna know what the guy is up to now?
Sure enough, he is a founder of an "AI That Knows Why" company.
I'm sorry, this sucks. It must be painful to know that you were used to defraud people, and that you worked for years on something which was never intended to be successful.
From my perspective, you're a victim of this fraud too. I think the pursuit of meaningful work is an important way many people find meaning in life, and it sucks that someone took advantage of you. From this piece, I get the impression that you would never have spent so much time and effort on this role if you had known it was just a way to scam investors.
So, don't be hard on yourself. It's normal to feel guilty, but if you didn't have a perspective on the entire company or knowledge of the fraud, I don't know what you could have done.
As someone who 'grew up' my career in Silicon Valley my first exposure to this sort of shenanigans was during the dot com bubble, where general partners at newish VC firms were fleecing limited partners (GP's got a salary to 'manage' the fund, LP's were the source of money for the funds.) They would tell the LPs well only one in ten is a real banger, looks like the fund you invested in wasn't a winner.
It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again."
The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it.
But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.
I like the analogy, but lets stretch it to the situation where workers can see that there is fraud and still do nothing.
The passengers on the bus are not blameless if they know or have reason to know that the bus driver was drinking before or while they went down a road with pedestrian crossings. They are not blameless if they take no action, but to sit in the seats and wait to see if anyone gets hit or they all get away with it and arrive at the destination.
Or if they remain in the seats after the first pedestrian and 'hope' it wont happen more.
And how 'blameless' are the 'non-passengers' along for the ride to perform ongoing maintenance and provide fuel and snacks to the driver while on this imaginary trip to hell.
So, I'm all out of 'you're not really the asshole' cards as we watch the whole kleptocratic SV system run Theranos' style over the total sum of human creative production.
Anyone who participates in building the toolchains of tyranny is complicit in the abuse of people with those tools, even if it just a tiny bit.
Sorry, not sorry, if that pricks the consciences of a few pricks; those that can feel shame are the better for it, and those who feel it not we must all be wary of.
Its a reasonable extension. At some point if you discover that you are aiding or abetting the harm of others you have to ask yourself what kind of person you are. That said, I get that "but I need a job!" is a powerful thing and it takes someone with a strong sense of personal integrity to leave. A good friend of mine quit their game developer gig because the product manager and management were more interested in addictive behaviors and reselling eyeballs than they were in game development. But they also knew that was probably the last paying gig they were going to have in the 'games' business because it had gone from people making great games, to things on a phone/browser pulling you down.
So yeah, it is going to test you and you might come up short. I don't judge people who stay when they know, but I do grieve for the damage they do to their souls when they see themselves as someone they no longer recognize.
This is a fantastic outcome - lots of money and U.S citizenship! And your product didn't even hurt anyone unlike working for Meta, in fact no one even used it!
This arrangement is bizarre.
The VC business model is predicated on extreme growth. The last thing you would want to do is siphon dividends out vs reinvesting into growth.
They must have preyed on newbie founders, dangling large valuations. Oh the fees? Well you will make it big and it will be a drop in the bucket!
I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.
I look at everything now as a journey not a destination. When connecting one's work carrier with a bank, one must keep in mind that some other people might have joined the organisation because of quite distinct reasons than we did. So yes there might be a fraud ongoing in our company, but it's not our fault
At the end of the day he wrote some software which sounds legitimate and useful. What management did without his knowledge isn't really his problem.
At the other end of this extreme is if you have a good job in a bad industry, like gambling or boiler room frauds. You should feel responsible even if your job is just maintaining the servers.
I think it doesn't really matter if the fund manager was committing a fraud. The author had fun, met their spouse and just enjoyed life with the information they had at that point.
Well, you did good and got paid. It all sounds very serendipitous. Isn’t like 99% of all tech fraud?
Yes it did, but you are not your job. Your current state may be based on a fraud, but the fraud is not you.
I worked for a company that did opt-in spam email. Their main offices were in Silicon Valley, but they had a startup thing in LA that I worked at. Ostensibly we were building a self-service email campaign app to be bundled with Weblogic Commerce Server (which itself was basically DOA).
It became pretty obvious to me from the get-go that nothing was being built, and the startup was just siphoning money off the parent company. I'm not sure if there was any fraud going on beyond a bunch of people collecting a paycheck.
I think the boss was skimming off of the captive H1Bs, and there was a guy in NYC who never did anything as far as I could tell. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of kickback going on there.
My first day, I went out for sushi with the top devs, who proceeded to tell one horror story after another about the boss. Awesome way to start a job. I lasted 3 months.
Love that second footnote.
First, you'll probably never know and this is one of those ouroboros questions that can drive you a little crazy if you let it. I urge you to not let it, because the only actual answer is that if you did work you were proud of and met the mother of your children, it quite literally doesn't matter. We should all be so lucky!
Second, very few things in life are so cut and dry. Legal cases are by nature simplified abstractions that attempt to render a three dimensional situation that unfolded over a long time in a few pages of a graphic novel.
Third, this sort of thing is so incredibly common. Often the only difference between fraud and IPO is whether it worked or not. That's not cynicism, just pragmatism.
If you ever read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - and you should - you'll quickly decide that the real fraud is late capitalism writ large.
Well that's a blast from the past. When I lived in London I hung out with some of the geniedb team (hey Alaric).
One of the many reasons to never actually care about the work you are doing if it is a for-profit endeavor, and you are not the owner. You are there to collect a paycheck so you can survive. If you want a job that you should care about then work in public service, at a non-profit, or for yourself.
It's a reasonable stance until the point where most of society is ran by for-profit companies. Then that mindset actively makes the world worse.
Your bosses might not actually care about the work you do, but your users and customers sure will.
Your proposed solution?
Work hard, do a good job, earn more money for yourself and family, save money, start your own business?
Also, when you do a good job, ex-coworkers will often reach out to you to give you better opportunities.
You do what you can to do good within the confines of the parameters available to you.
> If you want a job that you should care about then work in public service
I did that in the health sector of my local gov, the whole place was full of consultant who either got contracted directly from Oracle, used to work at Oracle before but moved there or took the Oracle pill early on and never got the idea to see how things get done elsewhere. It was impossible to ship anything that's not made of Oracle technologies and that was not an accident but a deliberate construction.
Another option is to do work you care about, in a way that doesn't attract the attention of people who might thwart it. I think plenty of socially or personally redeeming work can be done this way, for instance within very large companies. Enough of this work, in fact, that the net outcome for people and society is actually beneficial.
However: work is more fun if you care about it.
basically agree, though if you work for a transparently evil company you should care, and quit
or stay, and be subtly bad enough at your job to negatively affect the progress of the enterprise.
Do you think people at Merk or Pfizer or Disney don't care about what they work on?
In these cases I'm always curious who the investors were. I have the bad feeling it was you and me via our 401ks somehow.
In this particular case I believe it was mostly individual accredited investors, putting in anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. The case has records of the fund trying to get GE in too, but it doesn't look like they succeeded. Some of those individual investors may have been pretty small fry so I do feel a bit bad for them, but on the other hand if you want to dabble in Venture Capital, you need to be savvy.
I bet those henchmen in Bond movies thought that the volcano base was merely a government-funded secret research facility.
sometimes fraud leads to positive outcomes.
imagine a world where SBF didn’t defraud the crypto world.
in that world anthropic may have not existed.
What's The link there?
SBF was one of the earliest funders of Anthropic, Solana, Robinhood and Cursor, mostly around 2022.
Is there evidence that no one else would fund Anthropic, Solana, Robinhood and Cursor?
YES
No Genie finally out of the bottle joke?
I wonder what's even wrong about it. This is how funds normally operate: motivation for investors is upside, motivation for coders is to be able to code and get paid for it, motivation for people who run this circus, is fees.
And yes i can relate to that. In 26 years of career, about half of the money i made and all of the money i saved, came from 3 clients (over the course of less than 5 years), all 3 of them being scams - one swindled investors for a thing he knew can't work, another one did a legit thing but when he realised it failed, exited to a dumb megacorp and ran away (literally vanished) when they started to realise they've been duped, and one more was in crypto field and whole project - which to me, all the way until past release, looked like a legit porn site - had a goal of imitating activity/interest to boost value of a crypto token.
Even before i picked up coding - and i did it when i was in early teens around the fall of Communism - i knew coding as a separate field and a business was invented exactly for that purpose: it's a lot easier to steal money that way because it's a lot easier to inflate costs vs buying physical products.
No surprise the party is over. People can't be duped for too long.
honestly, what's the difference?
if you don't own the capital and have full autonomy, what's the difference on fraud (that you know nothing about), some imoral thing like flock/advertising/surveillance, or some inane thing like animating characters for ads, or mailing spam letters for a small business, etc, etc, etc?