Did my old job only exist because of fraud?(david.newgas.net) |
Did my old job only exist because of fraud?(david.newgas.net) |
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."
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.
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.
I dont think they're baffled, they just trying to show they're attempting to keep costs under control.
Management just really needs to make the next earnings look like what it should look. Next quarter is next quarter's problem.
That's 'normal' in Canada and France.
Contractor fees come out because of a different pot of money, so perverse incentives abound.
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) 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.
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 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.
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
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 weren’t committing fraud. You did real work. Now you’re in the US with a family and a career.
Happy Father’s Day.
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.
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.
> Did my old job only exist because the Product Owners didn't realize we didn't have product-market fit?
Which is maybe as it should be, but it does pit agonized debates over detailed technical work in perspective.
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.
imagine a world where SBF didn’t defraud the crypto world.
in that world anthropic may have not existed.
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.
Your bosses might not actually care about the work you do, but your users and customers sure will.
Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
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'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's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
High trust in society correlates strongly with being anti-innovative. Europe is going through another lost decade in a row because it got too addicted to social democracy. The fastest growing parts of Europe are some of the lowest trust (i.e. Poland). Please fleece the tax payer more.
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!
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.
'Useful' is not even a thought that's ever entered their brain.
All good grifts let some "little people" in on it so they go to bat for it.
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.
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.
1 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/02/15/het-subsidiepotje-moet-...
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.
It’s little surprise what happens under such a system: logical people over-reserve.