Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
david.newgas.net
Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
1–10 of 457 posts
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#2Love that second footnote.
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#3Why 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.
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#4I 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.
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#5Why 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.
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#6One 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.
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#7Why 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.
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#8One 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.
basically agree, though if you work for a transparently evil company you should care, and quit
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#9Why 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.
> 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
Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
#10Fraud 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?