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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?

#131

Post by bandrami »

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's particularly egregious because there's a time-honored way to do this legally, namely have you shave yaks for 80 hours a week towards the end of the fiscal year (lot of USG contractors are skipping their vacations this summer for that exact reason).

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

#132

Post by stackghost »

stackghost wrote: post #77
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.

s/in Friday/on Friday/g

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

#133

Post by jamesfinlayson »

cobbzilla wrote: post #65
scrubs wrote: post #32

I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better. The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA. Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned." The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo…

> The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA. If you have a lot of money it’s fun to LARP the startup life. The experience working for such a company is highly varied and completely depends on the personality of the founder. But even if it’s a healthy place, it’s usually a black hole from a career development POV.

I know someone who is an accountant for very wealthy people and quite a few seem to have useless children whose failing businesses they bankroll.

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

#134

Post by itwaswatson »

scrubs wrote: post #32

I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better. The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA. Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned." The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo…

> robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better.

I have been on the other side of this, building a frontend that connected to an external service robot that we, with a 5 minute script, managed to successfully prove internally was just a if/then/else state machine.

We got paid to make it, so we didn't care, but we knew someone was losing money.

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

#135

Post by charcircuit »

yCombLinks wrote: post #71
charcircuit wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Then you can argue why you still need the budget. It May make sense to temporarily allocate a bigger budget immediately to do those things instead of delaying, trying to save.

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

#136

Post by dummydummy1234 »

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…

Wait, did you get paid overtime when he modified your time sheet?

I guess it may not be normal but I got straight time overtime when I worked for a contractor. Made those weeks I really did do 80 hrs nice. But if they have any system involved the fact you did not get paid for the time would be a big red flag.

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

#138

Post by taneq »

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,…

> Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside.

At my last performance review, at my last job (this is going back more than a decade now) one of my agreed KPIs was to take the lead on a 3-6 month project, making all the required technical decisions etc. and successfully delivering it on time and on budget.

I never got the opportunity, and quit that job six months later to start my own business, but still did contract work for them.

Got a social call a year later from my old boss (who also left, before I did) and got to tell them “so I hit my KPI, you’ll never believe what I had to do to make it happen…” :D

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

#139

Post by edg5000 »

bandrami wrote: post #130
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,…

At the risk of injecting recent US politics into this, the shipyard I used to work at had five employees laid off under DOGE and replaced by the exact same individuals (there aren't actually that many naval architects in the US), now working as contractors at a higher base pay. I feel like there's a lot of that out there.

This is extremely common at govenments in the Netherlands as well.

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

#140

Post by Jtsummers »

LPisGood wrote: post #84
stackghost wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t those uniformed maintainers get reassigned to other military jobs or are they allowed to work as a contractor while being active military?

Yes, GP's description is incorrect (to be kind, it's just bullshit). If the position is removed (say H-60 maintenance at some base is now contracted out) then the enlisted members doing the work would not switch to contractors over the weekend or even over the span of a few weeks, they'd be moved to another base or another job on the same base.

Now, the people being hired by the contractors are often former enlisted maintainers, but it won't be the ones doing the job previously because of a switchover like this. Those crews will have PCS'd.

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