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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?

#71

Post by yCombLinks »

charcircuit wrote: post #52
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…

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.

But what if you need to save up to buy something that you can't afford in one year? Or you're trying to reduce cost in one place enough to hire a team to do some other project?

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

#73

Post by adastra22 »

sokoloff wrote: post #60
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.

Why are these always one letter off from what they actually are? Worldcom-> World-con. Madoff -> Made-off

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

#74

Post by jijji »

jojobas wrote: post #55
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.

most large companies have a 2-year limit on contractor employment so what they tend to do is they'll hire the same guy through a different contractor with another two-year agreement..... that's to get around the situation where if someone is working as a contractor for more than 2 years they can legally claim that they're actually an employee....see Vizcaino v. Microsoft Corp., 120 F.3d 1006 (9th Cir. 1997) [0]...

this is just a guess by the way but it seems like a plausible one, as I've seen it happen in Fortune 500 a lot, where the same guy comes back through a different vendor 2 years later if he was really good and they needed him to come back....

[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/120...

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

#75

Post by shoo »

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,…

when i worked for an australian bank, one co-worker in a nearby team had been working on the the banks systems as a sysadmin for over a decade.

the bank would go through cycles of "we need to reduce our headcount and outsource everything" and then 4 years later "we need to reduce spend on contractors and retain more knowledge and expertise in house". he'd survived multiple waves of it, switching back and forth between being an employee or a contractor through some external agency, as management trends changed, while essentially doing the same job.

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

#76

Post by sokoloff »

jaredsohn wrote: post #70
sokoloff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a reason for this is suppose the next year you run into some difficulties so it requires 14.2M. Now you have to fight to request an extra 0.2M added to your budget that you wouldn't have to worry about if you had 15M.

Totally! And it drives me crazy to get very few questions and mostly positive ones if I underspend by 5-10% but going over by 1-2% is a massive problem.

It’s little surprise what happens under such a system: logical people over-reserve.

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

#77

Post by stackghost »

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,…

The military is like this. Higher Headquarters decides to contract out maintenance and logistical support for $aircraft_fleet. Uniformed maintainers go home in Friday and show up Monday making a lot more money to do the same job but without risk of getting posted or deployed.

Contractor fees come out because of a different pot of money, so perverse incentives abound.

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

#79

Post by Paracompact »

fyredge wrote: post #31
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…

> Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time. I've always heard of this nugget of wisdom but never really understood it. By punishing those who underspend (by making the next application harder), wouldn't you incentivise inflated research costs, or worse, fraud. Seems like a quick path to a positive feedback loop towards the degradation of trust in aca…

It makes zero sense to me either, yet it is an omnipresent influence in who gets tasked to what in my work. At my level, I do not know anyone who endorses it, they merely react to it.

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

#80

Post by tzs »

post-it wrote: post #66
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.

Now that you know, do you feel culpable?

He just knows that someone on HN who is not using their real name has described witnessing government fraud at some unspecified point in the past and reporting it to the head of the project. He doesn't have any information about where it occurred other than probably the United States.

He's not really in a position to act usefully on this information, so had no reason to feel any culpability for not acting. It is only an interesting question when put to people were in a position where they had to make a choice.

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