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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?

#261

Post by tsimionescu »

GJim wrote: post #243
IshKebab wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actual genius. You should write this up in detail!

It's hardly complicated! OP is simply describing what is common throughout government in the UK. This is known as the Revolving Door . Private Eye magazine wrote a special report on it some years back as, frankly, it is scandalous https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/revol... [PDF]

The revolving door is a completely different phenomenon, and it is a problem for a completely different reason. It's about politicians in positions of power over an industry later becoming business leaders or highly paid consultants in said industry. This is a huge problem because it works as a long-term bribe: instead of paying for the politician today and inviting inquiries and problems, you make an implicit promise to employ them when they get out of power as a future reward for preferential treatment today. This is an issue of corruption and excessive business influence of public policy.

In contrast, the issue with civil servants being let go and re-hired as contractors is a simple issue of inefficiency. The same person doing the same job has the same incentives, they're not being corrupted. However, our public resources are being spent inefficiently to hire the same person to do the same job for more money, with an added bonus of spending resources on the acquisition process itself.

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

#262

Post by Npovview »

shoo wrote: post #75
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 betwee…

Sir Humphrey explains the role of a civil servant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDdLWAdcbM

"Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic."

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

#263

Post by siskiyou »

GJim wrote: post #248
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…

> Employees were invited to invest their retirement savings in a mutual fund that contained only WorldCom stock. Investing in your own employer is an idiotic risk..... If the company goes titsup, then you lose your job and your savings. This happened to many people during the dotcom crash.

For decades after my WorldCom experience, I cashed out all equity grants immediately and invested the money elsewhere. Even if the company appears solid and is not run by criminals, it's still sound risk management. Bad things can happen to good companies as well.

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

#264

Post by xorcist »

vintermann wrote: post #173
jfengel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost; people insist on being paid more to have an insecure job. The uncertainty never goes away. You can pay someone else to suffer it, but it will always cost more than dealing with it yourself. And that can be ok. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're getting a bargain.

> Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost; people insist on being paid more to have an insecure job. This is true, but it's not the whole of it. In some cases the manager goes to a cabin in the woods to drunkenly shoot at moose with the head of the contracting company. It's a saying that "the purpose of a system is what it does". I…

> if the "mistakes" it makes [...] aren't in fact desired by some people in the system

This process goes both ways. The people in the system align to the process. So maybe the "mistake" wasn't desired to begin with, but once it's there someone things: if that's the way they want it let's change our ways to fit. That's why these things seem to dumb from the outside.

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

#265

Post by randallsquared »

Nearly two decades ago I worked briefly for a "startup" in the DC metro which (in retrospect, for me) existed only to show activity toward using an IP that was the subject of a lawsuit. The expected payout from the lawsuit would have rendered the cost of running the ~20 person startup meaningless, had they won. I suppose the lawsuit didn't go well, since the startup folded 4-6 months after I started, with paychecks being late, then stopping, and employees progressively not showing up. Fun times.

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

#266

Post by joe_mamba »

47282847 wrote: post #182
ffsm8 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Past that I don't see a way for C suite to wake up. 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

I honestly don’t get why anyone would give up their mental health like that and work for such places. In my reality there are plenty of honest and decent places to work at. I’m seen dark places yes but only as visitor - why would I want to be in hell for more than a day or two.

> In my reality there are plenty of honest and decent places to work at.

Like wich? In my experience all workplaces have something that's gonna be wrong with them, and you just need to compromise if what's wrong with THAT ONE is acceptable to you.

Like for example honest and decent places to work at tend to also come with lower pay, or pigeon-holing career-limiting type of work, discriminatory gatekeeping, or other such compromises. There's no free lunch where you can have your cake and eat it too, unless you're very lucky.

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

#267

Post by n4r9 »

patkai wrote: post #212
danans wrote: post #201

What's the old saying? "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Most common people throughout history made their living working in the systems owned by aristocrats whose wealth was usually built on both corruption and theft. Guess that hasn't changed much.

Behind many, but I sincerely hope not "every". A trivial counterexample is Warren Buffet: he simply saved and invested. Or consider inventors with patents.

Buffet is well known for acquisitions that pushed the boundaries of fair competition, and investments in other companies that did the same, or otherwise pursued deeply unethical practices. But he's trodden carefully around the law, so any "crime" would be a moral crime against society rather than a legally criminal act.

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

#268

Post by npodbielski »

calgoo wrote: post #256
dalvasorsali wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but I feel like leaving is much harder in reality for most people. Life gets in the way, you don't have the energy to apply, you're afraid of rejection, you are afraid you might end up in a worse environment, you justify it to yourself in any number of ways. Inertia, herd mentality and self-deception are much more powerful IRL than most people online seem to think (or at least write).

Add having a family to the mix and it gets worse. Being a sole provider for a family is scary when you go job hunting, especially if you live in an environment that is very expensive (where the jobs that pay decent are located normally).

Yep, I left one project because I think I was underpaid there. I could not find another job for like 3 months. I finally found one and I was also very stressful. No it is better, at the same project and I think I make more money than I would ever be able in a project I left. But on the other hand it was very stressful for my family. Was it worth it in the end? I do not know because even if money is better and company is bigger I could damage my kids development by being angry, sad and depressed for two years.

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

#269

Post by pjc50 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #237
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,…

Most large corporations treat these categories of employment as different budget line items with different rules and limitations: (1) full-time employees, (2) individual contractors, and (3) large contractor "body-shops" or outsourcing providers. Many times in my career, I have seen layoff a few from (1) then way over spend on (2) or (3). The mid-level manager who makes the decision gets to "claim" that expenses were…

Related to this, the massive advantage of AWS is that it allows staff to buy infrastructure without having to raise purchase orders. If you ask permission for spending, it's a very onerous and frustrating process. If you just deploy stuff and get billed for it, it's much easier! Even if that's more expensive than having your own cloud. Worse, if you have on-prem, you have to have staff. They might even be permanent. Businesses hate having to have important staff.

Not coincidentally, this results in massive overspend until someone notices and has to painstakingly go round checking what all your instances are for. And AWS is very profitable (well, margin rather than accounting profit).

Now, look at the billing model of AI, especially once flat rate goes away. People can spend millions on tokens without ever having to ask a manager! Obviously this is going to rake in money hand over fist, because it will be years before anyone catches up to ask "are we actually getting value for money here?" rather than "quick spend more tokens".

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

#270

Post by barrkel »

GJim wrote: post #251
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> whose failing businesses they bankroll Don't confuse a hobby business with a failing business. Plenty of people with independent means run loss making businesses for fun and/or support wives/children doing just that.

You see a lot of hobby shops in ultra-wealthy areas of major metropolises. Tiny art studios, interior decorators with a handful of items in stock, boutique fashion shops.
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