Did my old job only exist because of fraud? • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by cdavid » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:19 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #98

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,…

I have a friend who left BigCo and then rejoined it as a contractor, plus some additional employees that he manages now. He cynically says "My job is to convert OpEx to CapEx when the finance department tells some director they can't have more headcount."

The same way cloud is about doing the exact opposite.

Understanding a bit of accounting / corporate finance opened my eyes to many things.

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

#112

Post by peteforde » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:19 AM UTC

First, you'll probably never know and this is one of those ouroboros questions that can drive you a little crazy if you let it. I urge you to not let it, because the only actual answer is that if you did work you were proud of and met the mother of your children, it quite literally doesn't matter. We should all be so lucky!

Second, very few things in life are so cut and dry. Legal cases are by nature simplified abstractions that attempt to render a three dimensional situation that unfolded over a long time in a few pages of a graphic novel.

Third, this sort of thing is so incredibly common. Often the only difference between fraud and IPO is whether it worked or not. That's not cynicism, just pragmatism.

If you ever read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - and you should - you'll quickly decide that the real fraud is late capitalism writ large.

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

#113

Post by em-bee » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

spwack wrote: post #85

Paracompact wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think of it the other way: If you have been given a $1 million budget, as a manager, your job is to purchase $1 million of Useful Stuff. The rank above you has decided "we need $1 million of software, go buy that." They don't know exactly how much stuff costs, so they use a dollar value as a rough proxy. If, as manager, you cut corners to save money, you're doing the wrong thing. They want the software! They don't to…

i think anther scenario is more likely: you say you need a 1 million budget to run the IT department, but you only spend part of it, then next year if you ask for 1 million again, they will say, but last year you only spent 700k, so we are going to give you only that much.

but the problem here is how budgets are assigned. instead of a fixed number it should have a lower and an upper bound. at least X, but no more than Y. the closer to you get the better, but next year the budget will be the same range. only if you drop below X you run into the above problem, but then it's much less likely and if you really spend that little something else is wrong or the budget really was to high.

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

#114

Post by vkou » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

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.

> Okay… do you not feel culpable at some point?

1. No mens rea.

2. He did what was expected of him.

3. You're always free to break into prison if you find yourself in his position, but you might discover yourself sitting in a pool of shit that was not of your own making.

4. Do you really want the parent poster to face the possibility of criminal prosecution, because his scumbag boss convinces the DOJ that the parent poster were the one fucking with the hours, and tried to pin it on him?

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

#115

Post by vkou » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:29 AM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #59

comrade1234 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They do get the benefit of the doubt, but when you're a defendant in a criminal trial, simply having the benefit of the doubt on your side will not mean that you're going to have a great experience with it.

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

#116

Post by vkou » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:33 AM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #18

girvo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was it all for naught? I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :) Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright

Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.

> doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.

When the world starts paying people for the best use of their time, people will start prioritizing that.

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

#117

Post by raincole » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

shermantanktop wrote: post #43

raincole wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's what a healthy economy looks like.

At a small company, anyone can damage the company prospects. But product people have outsized negative impact when they are wrong. They can tank the whole company in short order. Which is maybe as it should be, but it does pit agonized debates over detailed technical work in perspective.

A healthy economy permits the companies within it to fail.

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

#118

Post by toast0 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

bartread wrote: post #11

wyldfire wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled? It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.

So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0]. However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago. [0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questi…

Same same. I don't expect any of my product code to survive for very long.

I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.

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

#119

Post by iririririr » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:38 AM UTC

honestly, what's the difference?

if you don't own the capital and have full autonomy, what's the difference on fraud (that you know nothing about), some imoral thing like flock/advertising/surveillance, or some inane thing like animating characters for ads, or mailing spam letters for a small business, etc, etc, etc?

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

#120

Post by bawolff » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

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.

Do people really have a duty to fix every wrong in the world? He reported it to the project head, and resigned. He ensured he wasn't a part of the situation.

I don't think you have to be a full saint to fulfil your moral obligations. He ensured he wasn't implicitly participating and reported it to someone who had a responsibility to investigate/do something about it. That is a reasonable amount of effort to rectify the situation in my opinion.

> Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.

The person you are responding to did "blow the whistle". They reported it to the project head. That is blowing the whistle.