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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?

#41

Post by mickael-kerjean »

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.

> 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.

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

#42

Post by comrade1234 »

talon8635 wrote: post #36
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…

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.

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.

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

#43

Post by shermantanktop »

raincole wrote: post #15
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.

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.

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

#44

Post by pet_the_bird »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #23
SecretDreams wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-...

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

#45

Post by siskiyou »

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.

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

#46

Post by cucumber3732842 »

mingus88 wrote: post #12
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.

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…

>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.

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

#47

Post by betaby »

etothepii wrote: post #25

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,…

> 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.

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

#49

Post by OptionOfT »

etothepii wrote: post #25

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,…

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.

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