161–170 of 457 posts
As someone who 'grew up' my career in Silicon Valley my first exposure to this sort of shenanigans was during the dot com bubble, where general partners at newish VC firms were fleecing limited partners (GP's got a salary to 'manage' the fund, LP's were the source of money for the funds.) They would tell the LPs well only one in ten is a real banger, looks like the fund you invested in wasn't a winner. It reminded me…
The passengers on the bus are not blameless if they know or have reason to know that the bus driver was drinking before or while they went down a road with pedestrian crossings. They are not blameless if they take no action, but to sit in the seats and wait to see if anyone gets hit or they all get away with it and arrive at the destination.
Or if they remain in the seats after the first pedestrian and 'hope' it wont happen more.
And how 'blameless' are the 'non-passengers' along for the ride to perform ongoing maintenance and provide fuel and snacks to the driver while on this imaginary trip to hell.
So, I'm all out of 'you're not really the asshole' cards as we watch the whole kleptocratic SV system run Theranos' style over the total sum of human creative production.
Anyone who participates in building the toolchains of tyranny is complicit in the abuse of people with those tools, even if it just a tiny bit.
Sorry, not sorry, if that pricks the consciences of a few pricks; those that can feel shame are the better for it, and those who feel it not we must all be wary of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 betwee…
Have y'all hit the "can genai do his job?" phase yet... Early on I used to try to explain that things don't work as advertised. There are a lot of advantages but you need a human reviewing and directing. These days I don't even bother. Call it being desensitized to the bullshit, but I'm waiting for some fancy AI agent to take out stuff in a way that no one can do anything. Past that I don't see a way for C suite to w…
Didn't you mean to temporarily realign? I mean give it 2 years and another manager to show up, ready to get their bonus for the next attempt at it.
That's our reality and how we've structured our markets
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how we’re actively cheerleading third worldism now. Boring is good, bland is good, efficient systems that assume high trust are good. Unless you’re Norway or Denmark, you should try to make your country more like Singapore.
Boring is not good if you are interested in something that is not boring! More fun always come with more risk. Everyone has their own threshold. So it is pointless to say that "Boring is good". It might be good for you, but not for everyone.
Boring, high trust societies are conducive to risk taking. High trust reduces transaction costs. And people are more likely to take risks when they can trust the system under their feet is orderly, stable, and trustworthy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The defense and security-related sector is legendary for this. I had a friend who worked at a three-letter agency ~20 years ago who saw multiple colleagues quit, get hired by contractor firms and sold back to the agency to work on the exact same projects they had been working on as employees. They got a 2-3x pay bump, and the government paid 3-5x for their services. In one instance, my friend said, a guy clocked out…
This is especially useful when projects are wound down. Let's say you've contracted to an org for support or management on a project that you want to kill, you've already obligated some amount of funds, and you don't really want to make that organization angry by ripping millions away from them (the pool of contractors is not large). What to do? Well, you could take Joe and give him a raise by suggesting he work for the contractor instead of you directly. Money's already spent, anyways. So you save your own money that you can use for your pet projects or whatever, Joe gets a raise, the contractor doesn't get a termination that pisses everyone off. Everyone happy, right? Smh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The defense and security-related sector is legendary for this. I had a friend who worked at a three-letter agency ~20 years ago who saw multiple colleagues quit, get hired by contractor firms and sold back to the agency to work on the exact same projects they had been working on as employees. They got a 2-3x pay bump, and the government paid 3-5x for their services. In one instance, my friend said, a guy clocked out…
Per a friend, they are told to use more contractors in the government. Its also not clear if the contractor is actually making more money. Government benefits are significantly better than most contractors will give (I will be all of them).
In these cases I'm always curious who the investors were. I have the bad feeling it was you and me via our 401ks somehow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having morals doesn't mean you must self-sacrifice. If you have no obligations, you have no obligations .
He did report, he chose to report to the choice he thought would have no motion. He knew it was wrong, he consulted with what to do, then he chose the action that let him skate by while observing prison-levels of public fraud. His entire monologue is self-serving while trying to maintain a facade of responsibility/ethic.