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Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

david.newgas.net

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Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#11

Post by bartread »

wyldfire wrote: post #5
Zhenya wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#12

Post by mingus88 »

wyldfire wrote: post #5
Zhenya wrote: post #3

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 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.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#13

Post by [deleted] »

wyldfire wrote: post #5
Zhenya wrote: post #3

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.

[deleted]

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#14

Post by idiotsecant »

comrade1234 wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#15

Post by raincole »

exac wrote: post #10

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?

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's what a healthy economy looks like.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#18

Post by xg15 »

girvo wrote: post #9
wyldfire wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#19

Post by uberex »

Zhenya wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#20

Post by SecretDreams »

idiotsecant wrote: post #14
comrade1234 wrote: post #4

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…

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…

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.
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