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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?

#51

Post by cindyllm »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #46
mingus88 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#52

Post by charcircuit »

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…

But if someone doesn't need a big budget it makes sense to decrease it. It reduces efficiency if you force yourself to spend the whole budget.

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

#53

Post by nailer »

NDlurker wrote: post #48
throwaway98797 wrote: post #38

sometimes fraud leads to positive outcomes. imagine a world where SBF didn’t defraud the crypto world. in that world anthropic may have not existed.

What's The link there?

SBF was one of the earliest funders of Anthropic, Solana, Robinhood and Cursor, mostly around 2022.

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

#54

Post by big85 »

I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.

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

#55

Post by jojobas »

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,…

This doesn't seem to answer why an engineer is let go and gets rehired through an outsourcer.

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

#56

Post by tokioyoyo »

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.

Easier to say than do.

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

#57

Post by suzzer99 »

I worked for a company that did opt-in spam email. Their main offices were in Silicon Valley, but they had a startup thing in LA that I worked at. Ostensibly we were building a self-service email campaign app to be bundled with Weblogic Commerce Server (which itself was basically DOA).

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.

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

#58

Post by sokoloff »

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.

I work with people who are well smart enough to know that.

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.

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

#59

Post by Buttons840 »

comrade1234 wrote: post #42
talon8635 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To prevent this situation the peons should be given the benefit of the doubt by the courts.

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.

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

#60

Post by sokoloff »

siskiyou wrote: post #45

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 th…

I feel like Worldcom got a modest amount of press coverage at the time but probably would have gotten a lot more if it hadn’t been front-run by the Enron scandal.
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