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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?

#21

Post by xg15 »

Apreche wrote: post #6

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.

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

#22

Post by comrade1234 »

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…

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.

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

#23

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

SecretDreams wrote: post #20
idiotsecant wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#24

Post by zulux »

comrade1234 wrote: post #22
idiotsecant wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 pris…

You would have been fine: Your pay stubs reflected the correct time and your correct payment.

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

#25

Post by etothepii »

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."

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

#27

Post by alexashka »

xg15 wrote: post #18
girvo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#28

Post by comrade1234 »

zulux wrote: post #24
comrade1234 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pris…

You would have been fine: Your pay stubs reflected the correct time and your correct payment.

I was salary.

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

#29

Post by rwmj »

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.

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

#30

Post by zulux »

comrade1234 wrote: post #28
zulux wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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