I used to work with a senior guy who went freelance and then bunched together with several other freelancers, also seniors, to form... "an operation". The MO was that one of them would go and interview for a permanent job, impress the heck out of everyone and then say "there's more like me, be happy to help you out, but on a contract basis and as a group." They were basically bait-n-switching them to outsource parts of their development and in some cases it worked, because their fees were very reasonable. And the fees were reasonable because they did very little of the actual work themselves and instead re-outsourced it to some Ukranain dudes.
Looked fishy as fuck and I'm not sure how it ended because I felt out of touch with the guy.
Bait-and-switch is consulting 101. Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work. That's what you generally get with any big-name consulting firm.
This is not necessarily bad! The senior in this case is more like the "brand" of the operation.
And - sorry about going now into stereotypes - Good Eastern europeans are really good coders. Would not hesitate a second outsourcing any development to ukraine or romania if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value.
Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project. With IT consulting or MSPs this tends to be a far more extensive practice than in other fields from my experience.
Whether the last hop of the outsourcing is in India, Poland, or Spain is not that important if you still get what you expect. The problem is when you get a fraction of what you expected or pay for.
Interviews have been used as opportunities for evangelization, attempts to get technical assistance, or extract information about the competition or potential customers since forever. I haven't seen one which was overtly illegal but they're all certainly as shady as they get.
Many federal contracts require naming key personnel during the bidding phase to try to minimize this. Resumes for the key personnel become part of the proposal.
Aha! That explains an odd case where my company was subcontracting with another company to work on their project that was ultimately state-funded. This was essentially a museum installation, VFX work for a projection thing, and they wanted the names of the people who were going to be involved.
This was very odd to us, since our names wouldn't mean a thing to anyone on the client's end, but we chalked it up to red tape. Your explanation finally makes sense of it.
I've worked state engineering jobs like this, where the RFQ is basically nothing but the combined resumes of the A-team. The contract says they do the work, but it still gets sent to juniors.
At most, it gets the A-team's PE stamps, so they're at least professionally liable for the quality of work, but first project coordination/ outline meeting & final review are all they usually do. Occasionally take a call from a VIP.
Which is probably going to be followed by a no-cost contract modification to switch out the name of personnel who couldn't possibly wait for a job as long as it takes the contract to get to approval/award. Just in my experience.
That would depend on the government to notice and take action. I imagine if one person left and the company put a suitable replacement in, it may not be noticed and wouldn't likely draw any lawsuit. But swapping in a "D team" as described would likely provoke a response.
You'd have to have a major screwup mid-project, and they'd either freeze the project and/or start executing liquidation/damages clauses as soon as they realize the scalp they want isn't there to be had.
And when the project freezes indefinitely, so do the payouts.
When I was doing contractor jobs, in one of the projects personnel rotation was met with a hefty penalty. So the PMs tried their best to keep us happy, which meant a lot of the guys took advantage to ask for a generous raise. This was BTW a pretty non significant and easy support operations support project, so I imagine this terms were standard for other projects.
Oooookay. That explains... Some of the weirdness of applying for a Federal Government project. The number of wild gesticulations they asked me to do with my resume really turned me off from trying to take the job.
I asked why they were doing it, but no one gave me a straight answer. I mean, I get for them it was Tuesday, but when a major contractor starts asking you to brush right up against the line of equivocating, I can't justify moving forward without some serious explanations and levels of frankness I don't think many recruiters are comfortable with..
My first job out of college was a practically fly-by-night video game development house that had primarily D-team members except for a couple of contractors and me.
After my first successful project for them, their biggest client started demanding that I be assigned to their next big project (or one of the external contractors). We both ended up taking jobs elsewhere, and that client quit using the developer.
And the client? They were a full-on shovel-ware developer that barely cared about game quality. They just needed a game that would run reliably enough that Nintendo would approve it. So to be fired as a developer by that company was really embarrassing...
It's the same with large state contract I've seen as well. They key personnel may actually be provided in the request for proposal even before the agency signs a contract.
That was my experience when I worked at Boeing in IT. As soon as the contract was signed we got the most mediocre people.
Occasionally we’d get someone good but as soon as the consulting company figured out that they were good, they’d get rotated off our project and replaced with someone mediocre. They also never gave us any warning when they were going to switch someone.
Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best. So obviously, they don't exactly get the best.
The worst part is that all these D-tier, fresh out of school guys gain experience and some may even get good at their job. Unsurprisingly, these people start asking for raises and promotions, and the consulting companies tries to charge their customer more, I mean, we are talking quality now.
But the big company financial department doesn't like it, so they make a new call for cheap contracts, get a new round of incompetents, etc...
In the end, everyone loses. The consulting company makes little profit, sometimes even losses and the big company always get shit service, which usually costs them more than what they save. As for the employees, the work conditions are often terrible and they usually quit at the first occasion. But the financial department is happy, they have a lower number in the "expense" column.
I've worked for an organization that had a mixed hardware/software/services components. These were $50mm - $100mm+ contracts running for 5+ years, and the Service Component was just charged out at person years - flat fee, so - a project manager might go for $600k/year, an application engineer for $500k/year, a field-engineer for $300k/year and so on. Each project would then have so many person years at each stage of the project - project manager would be pretty flat at 1 project/manager/year, but in the initial years, it would be 3 application-engineers, 2 field engineers, etc...
Once the contract was won, we'd sub-contract to a local (to the region) contracting agency, who would in turn essentially do the equivalent of a craigslist search for a body, that we would interview to ensure that they could be taught, and then we'd take 30-60 days to teach them our product - depending on the initiative and experience of the candidate, the customer (who remember, was paying us $500k/year for an application engineer) - might get a recent-high school graduate that was making $30k/year and had never even heard of our technology a week prior.
> Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best.
I have trouble feeling sorry for the consulting company in that situation. If the budget your client offers is insufficient for the job, demand more or turn it down. Don't lie that you can do it and then bait-and-switch.
It’s been several years since I worked there but if I remember correctly it was a little more complicated because these were basically subcontracts under one larger contract. The company had a huge contract agreeing to purchase some volume of services from the consulting company. For each project a smaller contract would be created to define the terms of the project and the resources would be drawn from the parent contract’s pool of purchased resources.
This created a lot of internal pressure to use contract resources as much as possible.
Hiring contractors to work on your house tends to end up the same too. So much of what the early people say just magically disappears when the actual work gets done by a completely different set of people.
As an example, when we had our bathroom done, the guy they sent to finish things up couldn't even center and level the towel racks.
I saw this first hand while working for a high-end landscaping company. The first team sent out to a job site would be the A-Team and they would do about 50% of the work, whether they were done for the day or off to do another job. The next day (most jobs took 2 days ATL, some took more) another crew of less experienced workers would work the site until finished, then the owner would come inspect. The owner was on the "A-Team" and his work was amazing; I was on the "B-Team" and though I always put 110% into my work when I physically could, I constantly worked with slackers and corner-cutters who also came and went. It made sense the way it was explained to me, which was that the people working odd jobs who don't really care will get bummed out by the B-Team labour and pay, and if they don't they're added to the A-Team after a few months of good work and some more training.
A different flavor of this (in home re-modeling, hardscape etc.), is that the people who come to do the estimate are different than the people who come do the job. They are typically younger and pretty much clueless as to how the work would have to be done. So you can't ask them any detailed questions. All they can do is run the spreadsheet on their laptop and show you pictures of other work their company has done. They were trained on how to make a sale, that's it.
Had to go with someone who I had a little trouble communicating with, but at least I could verify he knew what they were doing and understood my concerns about how the work got done.
Talk to someone you trust who did the same thing. Managing anything related to construction can ruin marriages, and lives, the whole ordeal could last for years.
I would do this as a “Sales Engineer”. Not interviews but as sales support to handle any technical questions and win over our client’s internal devs. We didn’t outsource, but it’s really just sales.
I actually think it’s essential in medium+ size companies. The authenticity of having a highly technical person in sales works wonders.
> Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project.
Generally, you need the A-team at the start because there's a lot of very critical work that needs doing. After a while, it's mostly maintenance, so it's silly to keep your top people there... you can still call them in when they're needed.
The cost is already estimated with junior-levels in mind. If you want the A-team to be present all the time, say it upfront and surely proposals will be changed.
Ha. I work for an engineering consultancy and I pointed out that we actually do the opposite: bid on a project using a senior engineer rate, then when the project starts, realize that all our senior engineers are booked and only the Principal engineers (who cost about 30% more) are available.
I honestly wonder how this place makes money some days!
Not _every_ company does this – the consultancy I work at does not. We never outsource to third parties without the customer being involved, we do not hire [juniors or anyone else] for specific projects.
I imagine you also send your best not worst engineers for a bid or demo. For the rest, as I said it's just far more extensive in IT than in other fields. There will be exceptions.
And being able to scale on demand is a big part of providing a service. Otherwise you can't absorb any unexpected spikes in demand from already existing projects, or have to pass on lucrative opportunities, or you pay to keep a buffer of people on payroll.
This is only true for large companies that care about nothing but their shareholders and quarterly reports. There's another group of companies that not only care about delivering real value within the budget, but also have fun while doing it. I'm fortunately in a company part of that second group. The reaction we get from clients when we deliver more than they asked for, repeatedly, is priceless.
any company can do this, its just that the more people who feed themselves in the food chain, the more likely it is someone will start a race to the bottom of profit taking.
As someone who was part of that A team used to sell things, I spent a year jumping between projects fixing the problems the D team caused. Maybe it would’ve been worth it if I got paid more but I doubt it. It was stressful, you never learned much, and ultimately I burned out.
Honestly, I had quit and wanted to do a startup (not the best way to deal with burnout though). But we were also expecting my son so I took a pretty steady 9-5 job for 18 months.
But after working on the same problem set for that long I got interested again in solving tougher problems and went back out on the consulting scene.
But that job forever changed my views on work life balance so I am now very aggressive with balancing hours for people that report to me even if I don’t balance my own hours.
In theory all is fine. The problem is the A-team shows they have the skill, not the capacity. So in practice you'll never see that A-team again because that's not their job.
Some of the most successful engineers I know, got there by migrating over to engineering sales. I'm almost convinced if you are a moderately skilled software engineer, are very good looking, very charismatic, and have maybe a spoonful of general business knowledge, you can pretty much name your salary. They'll stick you in a suit, fly you around with the bizdev guys, and you only have to do anything if the client brings their tech guys to talk. You'll occasionally do some coding: write a few demos, maybe integrate your company's software with some other company's workflow, but mostly smile and talk about architecture, frameworks, blah blah blah. Nice work if you can get it. I was too much of a cynic and critic to make it in such a role, and I have the looks of a toad, so I never bothered.
Pretty much describes one of my (former) neighbors. She was a programmer who discovered that she could make a ton more money doing sales instead. Then moved up from there into a Sales Management position and never looked back.
How does one get one of these jobs? :-) It sounds lovely. Listen to all kinds of different business ideas and build proofs of concept. Talk to other nerds and hear about their experiences. Travel and get points (this last one, not so much).
As long as the job can be delivered to a mutually-satisfactory state, then it shouldn't matter if it's done by an A/B/C or D team. A lot of times in software "consulting" firms, the "profit" margin diminishes or is negative the closer you approach the top levels of developer in terms of quality/seniority. So it's in their best interest to get the most out of less-senior developers, otherwise they simply don't turn a profit.
The clients though, they want to pay the consulting firm relatively the same price they would pay for a standalone developer employee, per hour. The entire industry is broken and a lot of it has to do with broken recruiting, the recruiting industry, the "consulting firms" (body-shops) that are just resellers, and onerous employment regulations that make firms prefer outsourcing to shady outfits instead of hiring in-house developers.
The problem is that during the sales process, the client is led to believe that the "mutually-satisfactory state" that they are paying for is a certain bar of quality and will be built by "the A team".
But then, after many months and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars are already spent, their bar for "mutually-satisfactory state" has been lowered to "I guess we will accept this pile of mediocre shit that the D-team built, because we already wasted months on this and we are desperate for something, and it would be too expensive and just waste more time to try and argue with the consulting firm to fix it".
I spent a long career as a consultant at one of the top "prestigious" firms. Consulting firms almost always prey on this hope that the clients won't complain too much, even though everyone knows the end product that is delivered isn't anywhere close to what was pitched during the sales phase.
>Good Eastern europeans are really good coders. Would not hesitate a second outsourcing any development to ukraine or romania if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value.
The problem is not that America has a monopoly on good coders but that the good coders in any country will not work for the Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type foreign contracting firms.
I have seen this happen so often. A large company will want to outsource some of their development to India, hire some shady agency to facilitate this, pay half of the going rate for good talent, then come away with the conclusion "Indian developers are terrible".
If they are good, they have already moved to the US or some other higher income country. There’s probably a “good quality foreign contractor” living down the road from you.
As someone that decided to stay (even after getting visa sponsorship offers), not necessarily (although Uruguay is probably a "higher income country" these days).
Although the good contractors are SWAMPED for work, I definitely have to up my rate.
Just wanted to pipe in with my own experience, but I've seen it come from the clients perspective too. Initial phase of the project is very visible and critical to the client and is delivered with the A-team. Client starts to care less as the bottom barrel of features start being implemented and they want to reduce costs. Instead of losing the contract, we start dropping some of the more expensive devs save for 1 or 2 very good ones to keep the project moving and we backfill with more junior to increase their experience. The client starts wanting to reduce the expense even more and we keep the 1 or 2 very good devs/architect and we bring on a few near-shore devs. Project coasts for a year or two until they're done with us or they have another high priority item that kicks the project into overdrive again.
True and everyone knows it at some extent. I worked for a large consulting firm in the past for almost a decade.
I was the bait, indeed I was nearly not touching the projects at all except if the replacement failed it hard and then my employer would send me few days there to fix the mess.
My working time was divided between pre-sales and fireman to save projects from total failure.
It's not exactly "consulting vs contracting", its "hiring a single person vs hiring out a project". Many "consulting" shops do what you call "contracting", because "consulting" is a more "elite" word.
But a single person can be a "contractor" too.
(At big companies and non-IT fields, a contractor is often used for temporary professional employee-type labor for flexibly scaling the labor force that includes employees doing the same job, but a consultant is someone who provides a skill you don't have in house at all.)
I recently accepted a job at a consulting/contracting firm for a specific contract as a data scientist. I had three separate interviews with the company I'd be working indirectly for, and I wasn't the only one they'd been interviewing. There'll be no switching me out for a junior.
Along with “land and expand”. Where they use a small project to get over the initial hurdle, foot in the door so to speak. Then, they start trying to rebuild everything your company touches
IBM Global Services is particularly known for this.
Their flavor involves hiring people with a very high tolerance for complexity, and letting them propose the most complex solution to any problem. Eventually your own people get tired of trying to keep up with even the summaries, and just abdicate. Now that part of the system is only understood by IGS, and the rot begins to spread.
15 years ago when I was changing jobs one of the roles was Sun Microsystems - which I liked the company but the role was to suggest and be embedded in a company and embed Sun products into every project (and I assume prevent competitors). Did not take it.
As opposed to “divide and conquer.” Presumably the same idea as “land and expand,” but you conquer the client company by “providing” successively larger projects.
I've also seen the bait-and-switch with recruiters. Many years ago when I was young in my career, I decided to respond to a recruiter who worked for a recruiting firm. We had a good talk and there was a company he was working with that I expressed interest in and felt I was qualified for.
Nope. He kept pedaling this small, 10-15 person startup to me that I clearly wasn't qualified for and honestly was not interested in as there were some red flags. The commission must've been fat cause he didn't pitch me any other company and kept "circling back" if I changed my mind about them.
Not just consulting, also law firms. Same thing, you might get a partner when they are selling you, then the juniors do the actual work (and unless you are a big company that they actually care about, you’ll probably also get subpar work).
Benn there, done that, got a t-shirt. Two t-shirts actually. The first year was great, the second year with new developers was okay, the third meh, the fourth was a huge drag. We switched to another eastern-european outsourcer and the story reset: first year great, second year new team and meh, then I left but I doubt it went anywhere but downwards. Moral of the story? Longer term contracts are dangerous for you.
I can vouch for Eastern Euro developers. They do quality work. Their code is clean. I remember even when there was the whole issue with Russia, our developers in Ukraine were still highly productive.
I absolutely agree with this, been there first hand on both sides of the aisle.
And my experience of those I've worked with, has been that the smaller projects that remove this potential to deceive (not profitable or large enough for bait-and-switch - not enough get-foot-in-door to be worthwhile to take at a loss). And by smaller I mean less than £/€/$ 500k, and not leading to multi-million deal later on.
And go away from the RFP process that sucks and is just trying to get the lowest bidder, for a fixed-end-goal, rather than bringing good and experienced people to support your business/organisation/project on achieving something.
I'm trying to launch this myself, and I feel you can get the best of both worlds: great talented people who you pay fairly with a scale model for (eventually needed) growth, and some cost control for mid/longer term projects as you can't really have a fixed price.
At the same time you have to remove some of the downsides like this lack of transparency (and honesty?), whilst having the needed support in place for projects to succeed!
> if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value.
But how can you tell this is not just bait-and-switch itself? The most senior person with an impressive resume is vetted and proven to deliver value, but how can you know if the actual contractors you are getting from wherever are good?
Lots of parallels here as well between research/academia and consulting -- the senior PI is the name on the proposals to get funded but everyone knows the work is done by grad students at exploitative wages to keep research cheap.
That isn't really a bait-and-switch. Years of experience doesn't make people type faster (quite the reverse, really). It is good for making high level decisions that crop up about once a day or once every other day.
It makes sense to have juniors do the work and seniors to oversee the work.
The problem is that one senior person can’t oversee tons of unmotivated juniors on multiple projects. It’s not that the senior people aren’t typing all of the code, it’s that you’ll never see them again and your “architect”, “tech leads”, etc. will be a couple of people who have a couple years of excreting Java code into legacy apps for a bank.
When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail because of both Brooks’ law and simply their mandate being to stabilize things to the point where they can claim minimal satisfaction of the contract requirements, which will likely not include fixing the deep architectural problems.
> When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail ...
The argument there seems a little inconsistent to me. The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with.
> The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with.
You're thinking about it from the perspective of the customer, not the an ethically-challenged contractor focused on maximizing revenue. If you have an A-team which you use to close deals, cycling them from project to project to close the deals which you will then staff with the C-team will generate more revenue than having them work on just one project as long as you don't have many disasters where you have to eat the cost of fixing the project.
If the client is either overly-trusting or made enough mistakes to plausibly share responsibility and the punishment for failure is more billable hours, you're _way_ ahead financially if you get to bill 14000 hours of C-team-masquerading-as-A-team instead of 2000 hours of actual-A-team.
Splunk Proserve ABSOLUTELY does this (they have a few superstars they spread thinner than a WW2 kid spreads butter). They get in at the beginning, hand the project over to less experienced people, then parachute in only after the project has gone so far off the rails it's unrecoverable to a point that's truly what the customer needs, but good enough to get the customer off their back.
Source: extensive experience on projects with Splunk proserve.
I wonder if the provider is really that interested in productivity though. They are not usually bidding fixed price. The longer the project can go on, without the customer just getting so frustrated they admit defeat and cancel, the better for the vendor. So it makes complete sense to keep a close watch on the customer's pulse, and only send in the cavalry when cancellation is looming.
Having senior people write all of the code shuts down your ability to create new senior people. If you have a bimodal distribution of employment longevity for your devs, this may be why. If nobody gets promoted for three years because you can't trust new developers with the code (until they've memorized everything) this is probably why.
Nobody wants to touch the lead's code. The more of it there is, the slower things go. Or the more workarounds/end runs (duplicate functionality) you find in the code. It's best if the leads only stick their fingers into code that absolutely has to work, has a low expected rate of change, and relates directly to architectural or (better) operational concerns. Everything else they should keep an eye on, insist on quality, but otherwise butt out.
People write code that seems obvious to them. Very, very few of us make a conscious effort to do much more than that. You can write a great deal of solid code that is still write-only. Too much of this, and it makes it difficult to improve your bus numbers, and grooming people for growth is a huge investment of time, energy, and social capital (if you can do it at all). Rather than bringing the whole team up, people play favorites, because that's all they can afford.
I once interviewed a guy who put on a great show during the interview. The kind of interview that feels more like a well-practiced sales pitch than an honest conversation with the candidate.
Checking his LinkedIn, I discovered that he had a consulting company that ran concurrently with his most recent jobs. His most recent jobs were all less than 12 months of tenure, and the start/end dates didn’t match what he provided on his resume in some cases.
Curious, I started digging more. Through some LinkedIn friend-of-friend backchannel references I eventually deduced that he was trying to run his freelancing shop as his primary job while getting full-time employment at companies with flexible and/or remote employment where his real daily activities could go unnoticed (for a time). He collected a paycheck and benefits while running and building his freelance company. He would also try to recruit some of his coworkers to become part of his consulting company “on the side”. I suspect he was trying to outsource his own work to his freelancers as well.
Eventually each company would catch on and get sick of his behaviors, strange lack of availability and presence during the day, and work output that varied depending on how much contract work he was trying to do.
Then he’d move on to the next company to continue collecting benefits and a paycheck remotely while running his freelance shop.
One of the comments there raises an interesting question: this is plain old criminal fraud, right? (Whether this person is actually telling the truth is another matter, of course.)
That can be done in a non-sleazy way. For a long while there were effective caps on what you could earn as an IC, no matter how good. Everyone talks about 10x devs, but a decade ago the only real way to capitalize on it was to hold multiple remote gigs, each where you're accurately emulating the performance of say a $150-200k dev. 2-3 of those is very do-able, and a darn nice income if you're outside the major tech hubs.
As long as you're performing akin to your salary for each position, and you read your employment contracts carefully, I see nothing wrong w/ this approach.
He could have done his job and met all the requirements, including attendance, and had his side business. A former boss of mine worked for a city office where he was in the morning that let him have a flexible schedule, owned a consulting business where he worked in the afternoon, and was a partner in a gym where he worked in the evenings. He did all that for 6 years and eventually reached his goal -- no boss, all passive income (ownership of the gym, tanning salon, real estate), paid-off house, etc.
I’d say that depends. I got sucked into a couple of different “opportunities” that turned out to be clown shows and I had to leave under six months both times. It was pretty hard on my CV, but what are you going to do?
I got you beat (no offense intended). Back in the dotcom boom my company hired a guy who would come in to the office, throw his jacket over a chair and then go to his other full time job. It took them two months to catch on.
Not really. His team paid the price of carrying the burden of his laziness/treachery for a year. If they hired a competent person, they would have been better off.
Exactly. He was taking advantage of everyone around him to enrich himself. The companies were fine (most caught on quickly and fired him) but he left a mark on the teams he left behind.
There’s nothing heroic about joining a team and then sabotaging their work.
There's the "gives everything up for the company, no questions asked" types of people. Tesla et al come to mind for companies that like to hire this type. I don't get that to be honest. Your family and life are not worth whatever they're paying you, even if the work is 'fun' and engaging. YMMV as always.
Then there's the opposite end which you're alluding to but I'm not entirely sure where on the gradient you are. The slackers or someone like the guy described by the OP. I had someone like that recently. I caught it within the probation period and he was gone after 2 months.
Then there's what I would consider the proper position on the gradient line. You do your work, you do your best, every day without question or being 'made' to. But in return you ask for the company to be reasonable too. Proper pay and benefits, flexibility, nice perks but not the kinds of 'perks' that are just designed to make you 'live' at the office, mandatory 'fun' etc. No BS 'do this yesterday because I say so' requests. The list goes on.
There are companies out there, that are close enough to that/let you do that if you don't just say yes to everything :)
>Tesla et al come to mind for companies that like to hire this type. I don't get that to be honest. Your family and life are not worth whatever they're paying you, even if the work is 'fun' and engaging. YMMV as always.
On the other hand these companies are producing some great results. I religiously watch the teardown analysis of the Tesla cars vs others like the Ford Mach-E and the Tesla is just so much better designed in pretty much every regard(except things that require slow methodological improvement such as fit and finish). Whats more, all the Musk companies are moving at the speed of thought. They are so much faster in implementing any new innovation that any competitor makes that they dont have and incorporate it into their product faster than any other company does.
>Then there's what I would consider the proper position on the gradient line. You do your work, you do your best, every day without question or being 'made' to. But in return you ask for the company to be reasonable too. Proper pay and benefits, flexibility, nice perks but not the kinds of 'perks' that are just designed to make you 'live' at the office, mandatory 'fun' etc. No BS 'do this yesterday because I say so' requests. The list goes on.
Don't you think these companies are going to eventually be eaten by the companies that have the demanding work environment? For better or worse all else being equal, those companies get more done in the same amount of time.
I am experiencing this at my company, an old bloated payroll company. They have superb work life balance, I get my work done but I know the company is sinking to Silicon Valley rivals, its just a matter of time. The product is old and competitors are just doing a better job. Im currently in a dilemma where I get paid fairly well but not doing any advanced projects, that will bite me long term but the freedom and 0 stress is just so good. I get my stuff done and have time to take hour long breaks.
The kinds of people that work at such companies I am very very sure would do great things regardless. In fact, I know quite a few people like that, some of which I work with, which is awesome. It's like finally finding your true 'home' company wise, when you have that feeling that your are mostly working with people that both know their stuff and just want to do great work together.
In my book there's a huge difference in whether you have your own company for example and you work on something you love with other like minded people in every free minute you have. But when your kid is sick and needs to be fetched from daycare and mommy has an important meeting to attend it is absolute clear that you won't be working and instead driving to the daycare and nobody even blinks an eye at that and there's no bad feelings on your end, worrying what people might think. Of course you will take care of your kid. And no you won't be working all weekend long just because some sales guy promised the moon to a customer, you will actually be playing with your daughter. Some days you will work 10 hours because you just want to finish that one thing as you're on a roll or there's a Prod incident or something and your SO has got your back. Friday after you definitely go home early and enjoy the weekend. What's not OK is for some VP to have dragged his feet on something and when he remembers about that important presentation the next day he tells you to "get him those numbers by EOD or else".
The proper point on the gradient that I like is definitely _not_ the old bloated payroll company you are referencing. I think that sounds like the kind of company that has tolerated a probably >90% slacker population for way too long and I would be miserable, because I'd constantly ask myself why those guys get paid to be on Facebook all day or pretend that adjusting the background color of that button takes a whole sprint. Taking hours and hours of breaks and nobody blinks an eye is absolutely not OK at all. That's not "You do your work, you do your best, every day without question or being 'made' to". Absolutely that company _should_ get eaten.
>The kinds of people that work at such companies I am very very sure would do great things regardless. In fact, I know quite a few people like that, some of which I work with, which is awesome. It's like finally finding your true 'home' company wise, when you have that feeling that your are mostly working with people that both know their stuff and just want to do great work together.
This is not what I am talking about. Yes brilliant people are a prerequisite but I am referring to squeezing them hard to get that extra improvement out of them. You see it in the Tesla car vs something like the new Ford. They are both good cars clearly made by talented people. But then when you tear down the Ford you see how the battery pack is made in a manner where they didn't wring out every extraneous cost and they didn't squeeze every last bit of potential out of it. There is so much room for improvement compared to the Tesla. It seems as if Tesla just forces their people to burn 100 hours weeks all the time just for that little extra that ends up in their end product.
>or pretend that adjusting the background color of that button takes a whole sprint.
Im actually in that position right now getting paid 100k. It is depressing as I am wasting my late 20s early 30s but at the same time I see people like Elon getting insanely rich while so many people in the country are sinking beyond salvation. He is actually getting rich off not only the backs of the people he overworks but the parents that raised and invested in those people and the local communities that spent decades molding those people. And what happens in the end? He burns them out and replaces them with new blood.
It makes me realize that 95% of this tech stuff is BS and the few jobs that actually have some innovation are locked behind gates or require sacrificing everything else to achieve. If you are not naturally gifted to be in the top 5% then it is just not worth sacrificing everything else. I guess thats why companies like mine end up filled with people who take a whole sprint to change the background color. There is so much money floating around these companies that are all majority owned by a few mutual funds anyway that its downright stupid not to take as much as you can from them while you can.
I got bait-and-switched as a candidate thinking I was going in for a sales pitch to find out it was an interview. I thought it was my company they were hiring (which I guess they were, but with me being butt-in-chair at their office).
I got weirded out when they asked for a resumé mid-pitch, and I said, I don't normally hand anything like that out, and I could give them our portfolio. I kept using the words "we" and "our" they kept using the word "you" and eventually it all clicked. I had been recruited for a job not a sales meeting. I handed them a 5 year old resumé that was kind of crumpled up, gave them my spiel and our rates, still using "our" and "we" then left feeling like I just wasted half an afternoon on nothing.
Less than an hour after I left, I was offered the gig at a 5% discount from my rate but with a guaranteed 30 hours a week. I never thought I would hear from them again. They are actually still one of my "best" clients.
A second anecdote - Half a year later, I was asked my opinion on converting a HUGE legacy project to a different web framework in a rewrite attempt to modernize it. To which I discussed another clients project and how easy it was to get off the ground quickly using the new framework, but said I wouldn't recommend it for such a large legacy conversion. And the Manager asked, "wait, you have another job... you are supposed to work for me." - Apparently he was unaware of the fact that they hired a company to consult them, not a developer.
This happened to me with Google in 2002. Back in the heyday of the desktop widget craze, Google approached me several times via email wanting to discuss acquisition of my widget application. Bear in mind, this was when Google was just buying stuff up wholesale, rather than absorbing the team behind an acquired product. I eventually responded, and the rep and I set up a phone call - solely to discuss the sale of my code to them. I was pretty surprised when the person I spoke to jumped into a full-blown tech screen. I humored it initially, and was then subjected to meeting-reschedule-pinball. Super weird bait and switch by the googs.
Google flew me from the USA to Europe to do this in the late 2000s!
I thought I was going for two days to discuss Google acquiring my (very small) product and company. What actually happened was half of a two-day long tech interview, and me being a tourist with my second day...
I feel like I should be annoyed, but weirdly I look back on it all fondly. They obviously didn't get what they thought they were going to get - but I got a weird, interesting, day with them, a stay in a great hotel, and a free day of vacation...
I have issues with the lack of ethics on display, but as someone very senior and aging out, I’d much rather work with a group like this for a few years than simply retire now-ish which is my current plan.
I wish there was a way to discover/join groups like this. My specialty at this point is SW project rehab by just being a realistic, experienced adult. Modernization but avoiding the blog-oriented design plague. It would just be very nice to work in a mission-specific context with a very senior team.
Same here. I've talked to friends a few times about doing this, minus the sub-contracting and sales-by-interview, but nobody wants to do the admin/actual sales work.
I ended up retiring, and 3 years later got re-hired on a very part time, hourly contract basis.
I’ve had similar discussions with friends. The thing is we’re all spread out all over from a timeline perspective. I’m ready now, many of them won’t be for several years.
> It would just be very nice to work in a mission-specific context with a very senior team.
It would be for EVERYBODY. This is why it's so hard to find such an opportunity - there are very few senior people who love to get stuck in a 9-5 cubicle job instead of doing crack projects :)
Had a Candidate come in from a recruiter that I had worked with before without incident but from the very first question the guy turned it a pitch for moving all our development to his outsourced team in India. I was so caught off guard that I let the guy talk for a good 5 minutes before cutting him off and ended things. I laughed, the recruiter was thoroughly embarrassed and sent someone else.
This is more common that you would think. I’ve seen situations where it’s been hard to untangle ownership stakes in outside firms, and folks not disclosing family ties to new suppliers.
Makes me realize why there is so much red take on new vendors at large firms.
Some of the "bad outcomes during the process" can cost the company more in legal fees than a multi-year software project. Red tape tends to be concentrated in such areas. For example, exports control and anti-money-laundering regulations. After sitting through trainings on the former, I'm very glad I don't have to deal with traveling or sending physical devices around the world...
Compliance is painful because it’s hard to come up with precise NPVs on “we need to do it to avoid bad outcomes and because of the law.” It’s a shared tax that grows as the company grows, but the benefit is unseen. So compliance becomes a function of the political power of the leaders.
Apparently surgeons can do something similar. The experienced surgeon you talked to is just there you get to you agree to surgery, without explicitly telling you a first year (poorly/un)supervised resident will do all the cutting.
I'm not sure it's that straightforward, if it's their name on the case and they was totally absent, that would be a huge liability for them and the hospital.
Newbies need to learn, there's only so many cadavers you can cut into before you need experience on living flesh. Experienced surgeons are often observing the procedure, and step in as necessary if there is a complex part, or if the junior isn't doing something correctly.
Beyond just the surgeon there is a good number of incredibly professional secondary staff who are running the whole operating theatre, from imaging, instrument preparation, to labs and vitals. When you speak to a surgeon you're not just getting them, you get their entire team, junior to professional.
but that's exactly the same scenario as software - the experienced guy isn't just there to be a pretty face to make the sale, he's there because he's staking his reputation on the ability of his juniors to get the job done. if the juniors can't get the job done, the senior and the consultancy firm lose credibility.
100%. True experience with ACL surgery in New York: It's an assembly line with the junior surgeons cutting open and patching up. The main guy goes OT to OT and does the most critical part and then moves on to the next one. They schedule 6-7 surgeries at once; the whole process is quite impressive.
Exactly the same process for my mom's knee replacement in India. By the time the actual knee guy walks in, patient is knocked out, opened up and ready for the heavy hitter.
I'd say thats something different: letting others do the time-consuming routine parts, so the senior surgeon can concentrate on what he does best. This is actually desirable: more patients benefit of his skill that way.
This happened with my wife’s anesthesiologist during labor - the resident did his first epidural on her. I didn’t love it, but everyone has to learn at some point - and calling it out at the time could have caused more frustration, concern, and delay in the procedure (missing the window for getting one due to contractions). I also didn’t ask how many he had done, but I overheard it prior to him starting. I think asking him about his experience could have caused him to get nervous.
Experienced that. I was under a local anesthesia, so I could hear the surgeon hissing at that poor fellow things like "no, not there! here! - this is how you cut it!".
This does pose a sort of chicken-and-egg problem for residents, although I would hesitate to call it a bait-and-switch.
In a vacuum, everyone would choose the best care available to them. Of course this is expected. How can anybody be expected to do otherwise when it's their life (or family member's) at stake?
Atul Gawande talks about this experience in Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science [0], where his son had been cared for by a full team of cardiologists, ranging from fellows in specialty training to attendings who had practiced for decades. However, due to certain complications, they needed to choose a pediatric cardiologist with which to schedule follow ups and decide on what procedures would be necessary in the future. One of the fellows, who had been the one putting most of the time in caring for his son, proactively approached them the day before discharge and suggested setting up an appointment.
It's common for fellows to receive patients this way, and at any teaching hospital, an attending is there to supervise and take over if needed. The entire system is set up such that residents and trainees are given opportunities to learn.
He says:
> A resident intubated him. A surgical trainee scrubbed in for his operation. The cardiology fellow put in one of his central lines. None of them asked me if they could. If offered the option to have someone more experienced, I certainly would have taken it. But that was simply how the system worked—no such choices were offered—and so I went along. [...]
> The advantage of this coldhearted machinery is not merely that it gets the learning done. If learning is necessary but causes harm, then above all it ought to apply to everyone alike. Given a choice, people wriggle out, and those choices are not offered equally. They belong to the connected and the knowledgeable, to insiders over outsiders, to the doctor's child but not the truck driver's. If choice cannot go to everyone, maybe it is better when it is not allowed at all.
If everybody refused to let junior surgeons operate on them, juniors don't get the experience to become seniors. Fast forward 15 years, suddenly there's zero seniors left to operate on anybody.
Juniors have to learn somewhere. The reality - in Australia, at least - is that juniors learn in the public system where patients don't really have a choice.
You would know just before the surgery. The surgeon is supposed to be there before you are put down. At least it's what happened to me twice.
Last time I had a different anesthetist than the one I saw before. But I was happy because I did not have affinity with the one I met and the one I had was very welcoming and kind. Which is a really good trait for the person that is responsible to supplant your vital functions for some hours.
The nominal surgeon usually does the “heart” of the procedure: replacing your ACL, removing a tumor, etc. Their assistants just get you into/out of the state where that happens.
Surely you don’t expect the surgeon to personally do everything related to the case, right? Wash the drapes, prep the instruments?
They most likely didn't though as it would be a flat out lie. He probably explained the procedure etc but never commited to doing it himself specifically.
Or maybe something more important came up just prior. Ultimately people have the learn and have a go at some point - with your attitude they would be no more doctors.
There doesn't have to be any deception on anyone's part for their to be new surgeons. If a new surgeon is doing the operation, he/she should be the one to meet the patient and explain the operation
Exactly, there are "teaching" hospitals where the entire premise is that it's for newer doctors to learn. They're usually cheaper as well and people know this.
> "there's more like me, be happy to help you out, but on a contract basis and as a group."
Deception aside, this seems like a reasonable idea, and I've wondered if anyone might do this as a result of covid (as in, "we quit en masse when our employer wouldn't let us stay remote, wanna hire us?"). A mature team that's already worked together and gone through norming-storming-performing sounds like they'd be better than 5 freelancers thrown together.
> as in, "we quit en masse when our employer wouldn't let us stay remote, wanna hire us?"
Hiring entire teams together is risky. It can be difficult enough to integrate individual hires into the company’s way of operating, especially when companies grow quickly. A team that has already worked together can have a lot of resistance to changing their ways or integrating into the rest of the company’s way of operating.
I’ve been at companies that tried this in the past. The teams that came in together wanted to isolate themselves and operate independently, and they had little interest in changing anything or adopting the same tools that everyone else used (one team tried to refuse to adopt git because they all used and liked subversion).
Usually these teams were laid off together. A team that quit en masse because their employer wouldn’t cave to their demands would be even worse for trying to integrate with the company. You don’t want to bring in a group of people who tries to be the tail that wags the dog and will quit en masse again the next time the company doesn’t give in to their demands.
Funny, I've seen this happen multiple times and by any measure the companies and teams both did very well.
If you're spinning up a new project/org/whatever hiring all the expertise in a single shot is so much more efficient than one-by-one. If they have agency, it's often a recipe for success.
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. In the late 80s I worked for an engineering consulting firm that contracted out engineers to the US armed forces. I was between tasks, and my boss pulled me into a contract w/Air Force Logistics Command for a database to track parts failures in the field.
They'd had the contract for months, but it wasn't until a rep from AFLC was going to visit and write a progress report that they cared. I coded up a demo in 2 weeks, and showed that it had all the basic functionality called for in the contract (though it had a few bugs). My boss told the rep I was their chief engineered just hired for the project (I was actually pretty junior, but happened to know a few things about databases).
I actually thought it was a fun project. I wanted to finish it, but after the rep left they put it aside and moved me to another project.
In defense of Ukrainian dudes, I have experience outsourcing to some of them, and they've always been pretty awesome. However, I don't pretend that I'm doing the work myself. That's definitely fishy.
Same here. Had experience working with an Ukrainian shop that did fantastic job prototyping some very niche kernel stuff. Very knowledgeable, felt like they knew Windows better than Microsoft. Made you wonder though how they managed that ;)
In the UK the tax system actually promotes such behaviour. But this the domain of larger consultancies that charge 1000 and up per day per developer and hire junior developers on a lowest salary they can get away with and have a senior supervising them.
Now with IR35 changes this will be more common.
Long term moles at a company, able to climb high and perform well due to remote work which enables:
- never really meeting the mole
- the “mole” is a superstar because they have a team of corporate raider-employed 10x’ers evaluating and executing everything that this mole does at work. The mole’s code is written by 3x MIT grads hot swapping on the keyboard. The mole’s biz ideas come from a few HBS grads. And so on.
Productivity, business intuition, and engineering talent is off the charts for this mole. It rises far enough in the hierarchy such that it maneuvers the company towards favorable action for that corporate raider. Every idea the mole suggests, the corporate raider works in the background to enable via favorable market conditions. Whoever is the public face of the mole’a reputation might be in flames if found out, but what’s that vs netting 3% of a corporate buyout valuation.
This isn't that different from what probably happened an Nortel in the early 2000s. While their network was completely compromised by Chinese attackers, the C suite people downplayed the threat, and there are theories that this only happened because there were enough moles keeping everyone complacent so they wouldn't get too excited about the existential threat they faced. And now, after the most hostile of takeovers, they go by the name Huawei.
An alternative interpretation of what happened to Nortel is that they made a lot of money, got complacent, stopped innovating, sat on their laurels, utterly failed to adapt to changing demands from their customers, or to keep up with competing vendors, imploded, and then the C-suite covered for its numerous failings by blaming China.
"Hackers stole our sauce" may be a plausible explanation for why a competitor got a jump-start, but its not a plausible explanation for why your business fell apart - especially considering that Cisco, Nokia, RIM, and many, many other western communication vendors continued to thrive after Nortel's disaster.
Nortel died because it couldn't adapt, the same way that RIM invented the smart phone, and then died, because it couldn't compete with Apple.
Also, worth noting that Canadian tech firms don't pay well, so all the talent goes south, and then those same firms grouse about their inability to compete with the valley.
An ISP I was working for in the late 1990s, early 2000s were looking at acquiring new modem kit with higher port density (yes, this was totally sensible at the time). Among the providers we were looking at were Nortel.
Now, we had a price separation between multi-link PPP and single-link PPP and for a variety of reasons, we did this by having the multi-link calls terminate in dedicated equipment.
This worked fine for a day or so, until the Nortel CVX started rebooting in "peak dial-in time" (somewhere in the 3 PM - 4 PM bracket). And we could not for the LIFE of us understand why. Got Nortel on the case, they could not even recreate the crash in their lab. Until I happened to ask about their simulation parameters. They were doing a 1 multi to 5 non-multi mix, at about 75% of the incoming call rate we had.
That, alas, was not enough to tickle the bug, which was basically that the CVX had to shift either the first or the second call of a pair onto the same DSP, and if a new cal arrived between "start the move" and "finish the move", the call being moved would simply be lost to data corruption. And when the watchdog would go through and check for internal data sanity (once per second or so), it'd fall off the data chain and the watchdog timer would reset the chassis.
Nortel declined to fix the bug. We declined to keep (or pay) for the equipment. I was not massively surprised with Nortel eventually folding.
> An alternative interpretation of what happened to Nortel is that they made a lot of money, got complacent, stopped innovating, sat on their laurels, utterly failed to adapt to changing demands from their customers, or to keep up with competing vendors, imploded, and then the C-suite covered for its numerous failings by blaming China.
A third option is all the fraud that happened at the company. Hard to keep investor's confidence when everyone is being audited for accounting fraud [0].
> Also, worth noting that Canadian tech firms don't pay well, so all the talent goes south, and then those same firms grouse about their inability to compete with the valley.
Why would they do that? I recall someone telling me that an internship at BlackBerry was a positive signal, but a full time position not so much when looking at resumes. How do they think they can compete for talent?
I don't think low investor confidence was the reason for Nortel's spectacular negative cash flow, as much as customers losing faith with crappy, overpriced products.
That, and basing their business on selling film in an age of digital cameras.
I want to say there was a darknet diaries episode on something related to this - a long term IR engagement, about to kick out the attack, suddenly attackers disappear. Few days later, M&A announcement. Hacking as due diligence.
Sorry, I was being a bit too sarcastic for plain text. All the exfiltrated IP went to Huawei, which rose to global preeminence 5 or so years later, while Nortel was imploding (mostly decay of a complacent giant, as others have pointed out.)
This reminds me of the Key and Peele robber sketch when the heist plan is to get a job at the bank, work there 30 years, and get a regular paycheck so the bank is giving you the loot without ever suspecting it.
In the real world, I suspect most corporate threats require significantly less effort.
When I first started interviewing candidates I was surprised at how readily some people volunteered confidential information about their previous employer. I frequently have to ask people to stop sharing confidential details about their current projects or even problems their current employer is having.
I've long suspected that the easiest way to extract confidential information from a company would be to pose as a reputable recruiter from a glamorous company with high wages, then simply get in touch with a company's employees and ask them what they're working on.
This would be a more plausible conspiracy theory with state-level actors; I imagine the TLA's have the resources to do this, and it might make sense to do at somewhere like google/intel/microsoft with some juicy payoffs. Otherwise it seems like more work than actually starting a company to do whatever the mole is accomplishing. I like that the mole's preferred pronoun is "it"..
This is more common than you may think, but is carried out by state-sponsored actors because random people and corporations won't have the time, resources or even a real need to plan a decades-long operation. Also whether the position is physical or remote has very little bearing. Moles can be planted either way. Heck the Manhattan project had Soviet agents working for it.
This is possibly the most interesting thing I have read this week. It is possible this happening now. The pinnacle of a social engineering attack.
So how would this be detected and countered? It seems undetectable if the mole has perfect opsec. I guess an organizational structure with a lot of checks and balances might be resilient to their manipulation…
Even doing all the right things, it's so rare to ascend without quitting.
Spending 3 years, earning a single promotion, and then (not immediately but shortly after) quitting and going somewhere else (for another promotion) is the surest route if applied consistently. Another route is to parlay one's background as a senior at a large company into an outsized role at a small company. Perhaps even CTO if it's a startup. After a few years as CTO, that person can work his way back into senior management at bigcorp.
It's difficult to see how someone could turn this into a profitable business. But if the backer isn't interested in profit, it's a great way to get assets inside the upper echelons of a lot of major companies...
This isn't about dogman144 making CTO. It's BlackRock/private fund/whatever steering companies of interested towards long term, favorable outcomes, at the cost of the salaries for 20 people mole-strike team, tough NDAs, a large finder's fee at the end, and at the benefit of 0% of the negative publicity they get for doing this sort of action out in the open. No % shares reporting anymore, no PR, no protests for buying up residential real estate in bulk, and so on.
2) how much does the figurehead mole make, as this could be an excruciatingly stressful experience
Start with a fee model like 2/20 for hedge funds, and data like FireEye is getting bought out in "an all-cash transaction for $1.2 billion." At a 3% mole fee of the final transaction, thats a $36mil (edit, math :( ) payout for the mole, using FireEye numbers, putting aside 5-7 years of double-dipping Raider pay, FireEye pay. Kraft bought Cadbury for $19B. Some of the larger LBOs push $45B. There are a number of ways the incentives can work here - if this takes less time to make $3.6m than an IPO would, more surety of outcomes because you have a titan of a fund steering things, and guaranteed Partner at the fund once this is complete, and so on, the numbers likely make a bit of sense.
3) Jumping companies: also doable. Either way the mole team wants to play the long game: they really want X-company, and to do that they could do a few years of jumps. Few years at a single company, or a few years at separate companies until that "senior" mole team lands at the target company - same/same.
You nail it with this: it's a great way to get assets inside the upper echelons of a lot of major companies. And add in the above, the payouts look good too.
Is this legal, do you get on the wrong side of outside employment regs at the company, and so on? Not sure! But what's interesting to me is with remote work, this suddenly gets a whole lot more doable, an there are a lot of all-remote, pretty valuable companies (revenue, or IP access - see GitLab) out there. This puts aside all considerations of intel agencies doing this, as well.
A natural charmer is more valuable than someone with high tech ability. The charmer just needs enough tech prowess to come across well in brief interactions and their outsourced hacker team will help them with the meat of their work.
They're not talking about the mole outsourcing his work so he can slack. The whole operation runs at a net loss in order to place the mole in a position to support the financier's goals.
Exactly. The "mole" is a team in reality, a long term payout makes it worth it. Described it further down in another comment. Ya, this would be a huge undertaking with risks all over the place. But are there enough sociopaths at the funds who care about this area of corporate takeover and at tech companies doing shades of ethical stuff? I think there are, for sure.
I love the implication that there's this shadow company, Fronk. Seemingly defunct, they're actually thriving secretly behind the facade of a failed startup.
Every marketing manager has engaged them privately to boost their numbers. Every developer secretly works for them on the side.
But no one anywhere ever talks about it until one day a former consultant notices an expired NDA.
Reminds me of the G.K. Chesterton novel where a cop infiltrates a criminal organization only to learn that the entire group is composed of cops who have infiltrated it. I won't name the book to avoid spoilers.
And likewise it's unethical for a candidate to attend an interview if they have no intention of considering a potential offer.
This resonates with me and I'm also conflicted about it the same time.
I'm currently happy at my job, and don't think I'd like to consider another job any time soon. However, historically, in previous jobs, I usually don't notice that I want to move on, until it's too late, and I'm too burnt out to do well in interviews. It's been recommended to me, by multiple people to interview frequently, even if not interested in changing jobs, to get some practice in. But doing that feels unethical. I frequently consider it, but have never done it because it feels dishonest and unfair.
But then by the time I want to change jobs I'll be burnt out, and and out of practice interviewing, creating a very depressive loop of failing at job interviews, depressing me further.
I used to do this as well and I still advise others to do this.
It's worth reframing it. From: I love my current work and there's no way I would leave... To: What would be so awesome I would have to leave?
With this reframe I was always very up front to the hiring company. "I'm happy where I am but I'm open to interviewing and hearing what you have to offer." It puts you in a pretty powerful negotiating position (assuming you pass the interviews). Then if you like the company remind them that you are happy at your current job and ask for an amount (or hours, PTO, etc) that you would have no hesitation leaving your current job for. No ethical dilemma (in my opinion) and I've definitely accepted some of those offers.
Also it's fun to interview with no pressure to actually land a job. Not a totally fair comparison but my interview success rate at these is way higher than when I was actually looking for a job.
One funny downside is that if you do enough startups you end up with a few that do really well later on and then you're kicking yourself for not joining. I have to remind myself of all the others that I interviewed at that didn't make it.
I don't think it's unethical to interview for jobs. You don't have to lie to progress through interview rounds; just say you're keen to hear more about the role and what the possibilities are.
I don't see this as unethical because there is still the possibility that they will give you an offer that you would consider. It's just that they'd probably have to offer quite a bit in terms of compensation and opportunity to actually make you budge if you're happy with your current job.
Although, I have never done it either. I've always been too busy at work, and I view the dishonest aspect as the potential lie I have to make up to take off a day from my current job to go interview.
danluu talked tangentially about this in a recent twitt. He said that people are interviewing without intention to accept the offer, but roughly half of them end up switching jobs.
It seems that usually companies pay their long term employees below the market, and they only notice when/if they go job hunting.
Also, it sounds like the recruitment consultants might be in on it? If so, it’s also unethical for them to take commission on what they know is a fake candidate.
They could be paying a fee for candidates that get an offer.
Of course that incentivizes recruiters to get a single candidate multiple offers. On the face of it this is good for the candidate, but it makes me wonder about some of my previous experiences.
It may have been the case for some segment of the market one time, it is not the case now and I have never know it to be. So I'm not saying they were lying to him but given their ethics this is entirely possible.
> And likewise it's unethical for a candidate to attend an interview if they have no intention of considering a potential offer.
If FAANG recruiters keep contacting me without my applying to them, I think it's fair game to expect that you'll get a number of people who interview "for fun".
If you're going to use sales tactics to get future hires, you have to accept a certain level of waste.
Even if you interview "for fun", there's still a chance that you'll be so enticed by what they offer that you'd accept. There's nothing unethical about interviewing for a company that you don't think you'd want to work for -- it's their job to make the case that you should work there.
But this isn't the case if you're paid by another company to go to the interview and you are forbidden from accepting an offer.
But I’d point out that tech companies farm interviewees for ideas on how to approach problems all the time and don’t hire the vast majority of qualified candidates.
It’s unpaid labor.
It’s a bit of karmic justice to hear of people turning the table and using this as a way to inject ideas into a target company.
The second trade show I went to (as an exhibitor), someone warned me that a lot of wannabe investors walk the floor trying to get a gestalt of the tech industry. Those people are not going to buy our product so don't let them wind you up on a topic.
Very much explained some experiences I'd had at the previous trade show.
There's a big difference between interviewing for a job you're not interested in, but with an open mind, versus interviewing for a job where under no circumstances will you accept the role.
I struggle with this distinction. Almost any role I'd be willing to take for enough money. If you're upfront about those expectations I believe it's fine to take _any_ interview.
Something not mentioned in the article is how willing 'Fronk' was to match and exceed every interviewer's offer. Get offers from FAANG enough times and Fronk would be paying quite nicely to stay competitive. It's not only unethical but stupid to commit to turning down a better offer than the one you currently have.
You and a few others have said the same, but I don’t see the honesty angle. Window-shopping is not the same as entering a grocery store to buy milk. The intent is different in both cases regardless of the outcome.
I condone the behaviour nor think it’s unethical. Talent should be able to shop the market, just as companies shop the market for talent.
Yes - there are plenty of reasons to interview for a job you may not take. It’s crucial to have multiple offers when negotiating, practice interviewing, understanding the range of cultures, etc.
I think it’s quite reasonable to interview somewhere if there’s a 10% chance or greater that you’d work there, which is hard to know before they’ve convinced you throughout the process.
It is also unethical to abide by a NDA if the company is doing something unethical. It might or might not also be legal to talk though, ask a lawyer. Of course NDAs might not even be legal in the first place. If the company is doing something illegal, then the NDA doesn't have any meaning for sure.
That highly depends. You need to sign an NDA to do any classified work, and if you find illegal activity, you still can't just disclose classified information to uncleared individuals. If you want to be a whistleblower, you're supposed to either go the agency's ethics office, the IG, or possibly straight to whatever Senate subcommittee has oversight and clearance, but not just release to Wikileaks or Glenn Greenwald unless you want to spend the rest of your life in prison or permanent exile.
You've confused ethics and morals. The ethical action (which is about professional standards rather than your conscience) is usually to follow the legal agreement you've signed (barring something that supersedes the NDA like being legally required to report something to regulators).
So no, it isn't unethical for the author to abide by his NDA, arguably the exact opposite is true, though exposing these shenanigans at a personal risk could be argued to be the better moral decision.
Ethics and moral philosophy are synonymous. I don't think they're confused, but you can consult a dictionary if you like.
>The ethical action (which is about professional standards rather than your conscience)
No, as somebody who has studied moral philosophy academically, this is your own unique definition and not normal. Any amount of research from a credible source like plato.standord.edu or even wikipedia will support this.
The dictionary defines ethics as the field of knowledge dealing with moral principles, sure, and that's not at all what I'm talking about here. Perhaps I erred in using the word too generally and should have been specific in talking about ethics in the professional sense.
The ethical codes that are associated with a profession are different from moral principles that may usually guide us. The first example they gave when I studied this in engineering was that of a defense attorney: trying to help a guilty person get away with a serious crime violates most people's moral standards, but the code of ethics for attorneys demands that they defend guilty people anyway, because our law system is set up with that expectation.
To my original point, someone may claim a moral imperative to tell the world about the company in this article, but the fact of the matter is just about every professional ethics committee or handbook would tell you to uphold your NDA in the situation here. Wasting people's time under false pretenses may be bad, and it isn't ethical to do it yourself, but it isn't so bad that you can just drop your own obligations and blog about it.
And yes I admit some handwaving here since programming doesn't have widely adopted ethical codes yet, but I can guarantee that when they do exist, they won't tell you to violate a contract for something that won't injure anyone and doesn't break any laws.
I think the defense attorney example seems to be a bit of an exception. Even in that scenario, the law also requires a prosecutor. The partiality of each opposing side is required for the system itself to be impartial, and if the defense attorney has a sense of ethics, they will only participate if they know that someone else is arguing the prosecution's side as well (or if they're about to run out of food and have no other alternatives, but that's a different story).
Re moral imperatives and tradeoffs: even these guys had a code of ethics https://www.bullmarketgifts.com/Framed-Enron-Code-of-Ethics-... The "ethical thing to do" does not always come from a book or a committee, instead it's dictated by the moral principle most specific to the situation at hand and taking into consideration the widest breadth of weighted personal interests and needs. In any case, I'm not sure I agree with this statement "just about every professional ethics committee or handbook would tell you to uphold your NDA". Nor do I believe that I can speak for just about every committee without consulting them beforehand, so I can't know what they would come up with in this situation.
In the end, I just fail to see why ethics in the professional world should receive special treatment. Different domain, same principles and rules.
To the extent there is a difference, I'd say that "ethics" is what you say you would do, and "morals" is what you actually end up doing when placed in a specific situation.
But, it's been well over two decades I was pursuing a degree in philosophy.
It is you who is confused - ethics and morals are basically the same thing, and both are about processes to figure what is ethical and what isn't according to some set of ideas; neither is about prescribing anything, and there certainly isn't anything like The Set of Ethical Things and The Set of Unethical Things. "X is ethical" is always a short-hand for "within the framework I and/or my surroundings or audience subscribes to X can be argued to be ethical".
Has he confused them? The only code of professional ethics in this industry I've ever been asked to consider is the ACM one. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
By my reading of it, I'd feel obligated to publicly address this, and I don't consider it a breach of any sort of ethics I'd believe in, besides.
> Computing professionals should protect confidentiality except in cases where it is evidence of the violation of law, of organizational regulations, or of the Code. In these cases, the nature or contents of that information should not be disclosed except to appropriate authorities.
This code of ethics, like all others, has limitations. Here, it has failed to consider all cases, namely the case where the entity whose confidentiality is being protected doesn't exist anymore. That doesn't necessarily mean your quote isn't relevant, just that it shouldn't be given the final say until we've balanced it out with the rest of the document and looked at the tradeoffs involved.
Not breaking the NDA is an issue w/r/t:
- 1.2 "Well-intended actions, including those that accomplish assigned duties, may lead to harm. When that harm is unintended, those responsible are obliged to undo or mitigate the harm as much as possible."
- 2.2 Maintain high standards of professional competence, conduct, and ethical practice.
- 2.7 "As appropriate to the context and one's abilities, computing professionals should share technical knowledge with the public"
- 2.7 again "a computing professional should respectfully address inaccurate or misleading information related to computing."
Lastly, since the company's actions were clearly in violation of the Code and potentially causing harm, I could simply argue that the public is the ultimate appropriate authority (since none seem to be more appropriate in this case) and that not breaking the NDA would have been unethical by the very passage you chose to quote.
I don’t know why the ethics for this is clear cut or what priors that statement is built on. Technical interviews are a relatively new social development. People are saying x or y are unethical, but it would be nice to see some actual justification one way or the other.
Because you're wasting the company's time and money, making them spend resources on interviewing someone with no intention of actually joining the company. All in order to underhandedly advertise to them without their knowledge or consent.
Not unethical if you make your intentions clear from the get go and recruiters/hiring managers are still not willing to take no for an answer. Every single day I'll reply to a cold call with "not interested" and the recruiter will still press on.
So because the recruiters keep wasting minutes of your time, you're going to waste hours of it in an interview? That seems like exactly the wrong answer.
It also just seems grueling. Some interviews are stressful for me, even if I'm a little skeptical going in.
It's not just the interview: It's picking the right clothes, going somewhere I've never been, getting there on time, and the general disruption to my day. I once went to an interview where it took me 90 minutes to find parking. Another time I got super-confused coming in the door because there was no receptionist and no one told me where to go in the building.
I would never take such a job, but it is probably a lot less stressful if you don't really care at all how well you do.
Oddly, you would probably also do much better, since wanting to do well at an interview is bad for one's interview performance. Desperation is a turn-off. You might end up with a lot of job offers. Until you decide to leave this company, of course, in which case you might suddenly lose your appeal...
There's a plot point in Zero History by William Gibson where one of the characters does viral marketing by engaging people in conversation in bars and promoting various things, I always thought it was reasonably neat because we tend to pick things up organically like that.
Fascinating to see that companies were actually trying approaches like that in the days where hearing about the hot new tech very much came from conversations with other engineers, rather than the wealth of places we have now for hearing about the latest & (potentially) greatest.
My favorite version of this was “ Find the Mystery Cougher” by Ricola. This was like… 2005? Basically they had a contest where they announced they’d be sending someone to various cities, walking around and coughing. If you offered the mystery cougher a Ricola, you’d win the contest and get a million dollars or whatever.
It’s like inverse astroturfing, and also arguably incentivizes friendly social behaviors. Genius.
I'm not sure how often this happens post-2008, but before that I knew several people (most would describe them as "beautiful young women") who were paid to go to busy bars and order a particular brand of alcohol. Or to encourage other people to buy those drinks for them, I guess. It seemed like a waste of money to me until I realized that I'd started ordering Jack Daniel's Honey liqueur because they'd installed one of those machines with the upside-down whiskey bottles at a bar I was in, and it sounded interesting.
So people are pretty susceptible to steering on things like alcohol preference, and it doesn't seem to take much to steer us.
My understanding is that bars in Vegas do this with “atmosphere models” who are payed to fill out bars and encourage people to order more drinks in general. I heard about it in this podcast:
nodumbquestions.fm/listen/2021/5/20/109-what-happens-in-vegas
starting at 37:00 with context and about 39:50 when he gets into atmosphere modeling. This guy started working in the back of a bar for a few days a week and part of the deal was he would spend some nights sitting in a related bar. He also goes into a lot of other interesting stuff that happens in Vegas which I don’t remember off the top of my head.
In fact, the PR firm for the makers of a vodka brand did hire someone to order <insert brand> Vodka with a loud voice in various places when exporting it to the USA began, according to Carl Hamilton's book about the design of the bottle.
The practice is known as astroturfing, for the artificial grass. Okdo seems to do alot of it for Raspberry Pi. At this point I'm more or less expecting to see articles and videos on having Raspberry Pi take out the trash. If it could be done with any microcontroller or SBC, but it is pushed, the headline always includes the brand.
FWIW, I don’t know if I’ve read too much Gibson or not Enlight marketing textbooks, but <insert brand> Vodka would be visually attractive to me on a bottle label.
I had the idea of going out and flirting with guys directly, then giving them your onlyfans as your contact. I imagine this would effectively be a money printer.
I'm surprised onlyfans women don't do this routinely. If you were an even marginally attractive women, and you could hold a decent conversation for 20 minutes, I probably would be stuck ponying up $10 to see you naked. Even knowing that I got played.
You gotta think about conversion rates and expected value. If flirting with a guy for twenty minutes gives you an 80% conversion rate, it might work if they go for the higher tiers. If it gives you a 1% conversion rate, that's a lot of work for not a lot. An hour of conversation with three people for $10-$15? You may as well go get an actual hourly job. For $0.45? No.
You also have to know that word will get around pretty quickly. People do not like being misled like that and will compare notes and bars do not like being parasitized this way. Instead the spammers (and these people are spammers!) go for dating apps and Instagram to spread their links.
Remember, Onlyfans is a power law thing. Only a small percentage do well. The rest are struggling and dumping lots of work into something that only brings in a few bucks. It's pretty far from printing money for most.
The efficient way to do it is to go to clubs or parties, chat with a bunch of guys, get numbers or social medias, and then later text them links to your OnlyFans page.
Girls can easily clean up and grab about 20-30 guys a night like this.
Later you can try to go after the whales by going on 1 on 1 dates and making them special offers for higher tier content.
I'd laugh in their face if they ended a little flirtation with a link to their only fans page. I'm waiting on good ol' Musky to spam my waking hours with thought intrusive advertising, not your average bar goer.
In Chicago, there were ad agencies who would hire actors to engage in "spontaneous" conversations on the subway about various products. I read a couple of articles about it in the newspaper at the time.
This was around 2005ish. It's interesting to think back to that era. I wonder if a book or movie will ever capture the energy, optimism, and audacity of a time when everything seemed possible, urban startups were awash in cheap cash, and there were so many young people full of vim, ready to reinvent the world.
> This was around 2005ish. It's interesting to think back to that era. I wonder if a book or movie will ever capture the energy, optimism, and audacity of a time when everything seemed possible, urban startups were awash in cheap cash, and there were so many young people full of vim, ready to reinvent the world.
I think it's sad that you don't thing there are many young people out there today, full of vim, ready to reinvent the world. They are always there, the next generation.
They will have lived through a Great Recession and a pandemic, they know that climate change is real and must be avoided. The opportunities are endless and it's only older people that are holding them back.
They exist, but it's not the same. Not in the same numbers. You're right that a bunch of it is economy-driven, but every generation goes through hard times. Millennials (I assume you reference Millennials) like to moan a lot, but they had it easier than a lot of people before them. Millennials have never known food rationing, mass migrations because of natural disasters, gas shortages, a real war, or many other things that older Americans have.
They will have lived through a Great Recession and a pandemic
They weren't the first. They won't be the last.
they know that climate change is real
I'll give you that one.
it's only older people that are holding them back.
That's simple ageism. The "older" people created all the things you take for granted: computers, space travel, cell phones, satellites, jet travel. You're standing on the shoulders of giants.
A friend of mine did something similar in San Francisco, in the 90s. She was paid to go to expensive bars, look fabulous and have a good time drinking Hennessey Martinis, occasionally mentioning the booze and buying drinks.
I believe they called her a 'coolhunter' in that book. Which I was, at my age, surprised to learn was even a term once. But that sort of guerrilla marketing does seem very effective.
You helped him sharpen the skill of never putting all your cards on the table. Having a convincing answer to that particular question other than "I need to pay the rent and think maybe I wouldn't hate this job" is a key interviewing skill.
I pretty much always go with a straight answer like I need to pay the rent. Also when people ask where I see myself in ten years, I always say retired. When they ask about career growth I always say I’m already at the top of my game. What you call a “convincing answer” strikes me as ceremonial dishonesty.
You want to be snarky, it is your choice. But from my experience this is just going to show you don't understand how to behave befitting the situation.
When you are meeting your family do you tell them to their face that you don't want to sit with them because you have something more interesting to do, or do you play the game and try to extricate yourself gracefully?
It is the same thing, really. Showing you know how to behave.
Both sides might be playing a game, but the fact you are playing the game shows you have comprehension and you are a player.
If you show you are willing to make problems on such a simple question you may leave impression you are unreasonable and nobody wants to work with unreasonable divas, even if they are highly capable.
A company is not your family, the pretense that you are super interested in working this job instead of doing what you actually want in your life, and if you do anything else except toeing that line you are an unacceptable candidate is frankly nauseating.
Nobody is being a "diva" by upfront stating things everyone already knows, but lies about. It doesn't require being an asshole about it either.
By expressing interest in a professional relationship?
By trying to endear yourself to the person you're going to spend 8 hours per day with for the forseeable future?
Look, I'm as anticapitalist as the next guy, but trying to make yourself appealing as a coworker in a job interview is not a sign that you're "being played". Having an appealing answer to the question "why do you want to work here?" isn't a symbol of class oppression, it's a common-sense attribute of work life.
It's not snark at all. It is setting expectations. At this point in my career nobody should hire me because of what I might grow into. They should hire me because they need what I already do. Concocting some flim-flam about my growth goals would be misleading.
Anyway, this approach has always succeeded for me, including when I told the fintech company that I wanted to work there because it was the job in my industry nearest to my house. Both sides seemed happy with the outcome.
There's honesty (which is indeed largely good) and then there's being honest about your overinflated ego, which is what I suspect is earning you the downvotes above.
>I pretty much always go with a straight answer like I need to pay the rent
I always find this reasoning confusing. As a reasonably competent engineer, I've always felt like I have many employment options open to me. Yes I need to pay rent, but I always have an honest answer to the question that goes well beyond that. If I only cared about paying my rent, I would go work for a FANNG and triple my salary. I don't, because there are genuinely much more interesting reasons to work for a particular organization than money.
At least in tech there's a genuine distinction to be made between people who want to keep progressing as engineers and ICs their whole lives and people who want to move into management type roles.
I had an interview recently where the hiring manager went through his usual list of questions ("why do you want to work for us?" "Why are you looking to switch?" "what interests you about the role?") and my only answer was "your recruiter hounded me for weeks and begged me to do this interview."
This is how all my Amazon contacts with recruiters go. They contact me N times a year (one particular recruiter emailed me 3 times in 2 months). Then at some point in the conversation, they always ask "Why do you want to work for us?" My response is always "You contacted me, not the other way round."
"The market is heating up and I'm looking around. You look like you're doing interesting work, and I think that I could prove my real value to you in a relatively short amount of time."
It doesn't matter. I just expect an intelligent answer that reflects understanding of the circumstances in which you, as a candidate, are in. I also look for signs that you might be bad fit, a risk, a fraud or a waste of time.
We all know that most people don't exactly love their jobs. I think it is fine. Just because I do doesn't mean everybody has to. You can still be productive without being workaholic and abandoning your friends and family and promising eternal love and devotion to your company.
But I am also obligated to find people that will actually help the project and bring value to the company and try to find a compromise between seeking perfection and filling positions.
On that end I need to somehow judge, from a very limited amount of information during a very broken process if it is worth to continue with somebody.
If you can't find a semi-convincing answer to a question you should have expected to be asked, there is probably some problem with you. Do I really want to spend effort trying to figure it out?
All good points. Why do you want to work here is just a dumb question for this purpose. It basically forces me to lie and say you guys sound awesome instead of just saying your company ticks the right boxes for me.
Have you ever asked your plumber or handyman why they want to work for you ? Same circumstances, there also you want someone passionate.
it's very different in some ways and the same in another. In this situation it's not the same.
There is no real online review of software jobs seekers. There is word of mouth recommendations of who is good at their job like with a trade.
In plumbing and short contract jobs it matters less what the company does, it's a one off job. If one were hiring a short term contractor dev then it would be the similar, not a full time dev.
For a full time software hire it makes sense to ask their motivation of where they want to spend most of their waking time. There's a huge different between someone just working for money who'd work at a pay day lender just as willingly as working at an outdoor lifestyle brand versus someone into that brand. Most situations will fall in between, but who would you hire, the person who has some connection to the field or something about the company, or just wants to earn a buck and doesn't care.
This is bad take, very unlikely to get any favors from the recruiter. You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint. You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself.
It is possible this gets overlooked or you might even get somebody impressed, especially if they are an engineer and share the sentiment, but very unlikely if it is going to be your future manager and he doesn't know anything else about you.
Here is better way if you really absolutely need to go this route:
"I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed."
Everybody knows you want to profit. Here you show it may even be possible for this to be beneficial to both sides.
The term "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed." rings so untrue to me. I'd have to resist the temptation to roll my eyes.
What you've revealed in this thread is a callous greed and desire to exploit your employees. But none of us are impressed by that. Rather, what we want in an employer is somebody who will leave us alone and not harm the world. It is up to you to show us that you're a respectful and decent employer.
At the end of the day, it's not like you could write your own code. So you need to beg us to work for you, not the other way around.
It's not "callous desire to exploit employees" to prefer not to hire candidates whose ego isn't so enormous they think interviews should consist of employers begging them, or indeed to prefer to hire the candidates that have enough motivation to take the job or at least basic social skill to be able to think of a reason it might be interesting or suited to them.
Candidates usually get the opportunity to ask the employer what's good about working for them at the end of the interview if the interviewer hasn't spent the entire interview emphasising it anyway, and also have the opportunity to say no if they're not impressed. If their answer was "we're the ones with cash, and you're the one who's short enough of cash to be interviewing here", I suspect quite a lot of candidates would pass....
These two positions ("employer is trying to exploit me", "candidate expects employers to beg them") are both ridiculous strawmen.
Employment is little different from dating. If someone asks "tell me why you want to date me", you're well within social norms to demand they answer the same question first. It's a rude question that attempts establish a mental framing and nobody over the age of 25 should be swayed by stupid jedi mind tricks like this.
Any employer who expects candidates to beg for positions is probably an abusive prick. Any employee who demands to be treated like a primadonna is probably too annoying. Great, now let's move on to the part of the interview that matters: Do we like each other? That's a two-way information exchange.
If someone fed me that "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed" line in an interview I'd struggle not to write them off as a B-school ass-kisser. There's nothing genuine about it.
I'd have said "candidate expects employers to beg them" was a straw man if I wasn't replying to someone literally insisting that's the role of the interviewer. Would have said much the same about comparing interview questions to Jedi mind tricks! And tbh if someone asked me interview style questions during a date I'd run a mile...
It's not a "stupid Jedi mind trick" to ask people why they want a job, it's a pretty straightforward way of finding out whether they have a particular skill, interest or aspiration that might lead to further relevant questions and a filter to remove people who either don't want the job, haven't read the job spec, think they're too important to answer questions or somehow both realise that framing matters and think framing themselves as uninterested is a good move. "I am here to find out how I can help you succeed" or regurgitating the list of the company's "principles" off their website probably comes off as fake, "no, you tell me why I should take the job" certainly comes across as egotistical: perfectly acceptable answers include talking about being good with their tech stack, knowing their market, looking for a more senior role or wanting to find a new employer that values x more (do you value x?) and can include followup questions.
I go back to my earlier point: if you get to the inevitable point in the interview where you're asking them questions and their answer to what's good about the job or what they like about the company is "no, what's good about you" or "um....", the alarm bells start ringing. The whole point of interviews being a two way information exchange is not setting off the same alarm bells in employers' minds
> You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint.
I'm not trying to do that at all. The question makes sense if I apply to your company. The reality is that it's a recruiter who contacted me cold. They need to tell me what their needs are and why they contacted me.
What you describe makes sense if there is a 2-way conversation and 2-way data sharing. In most of my interviews, it's always going in one direction, and then the company perfectly describes this sentiment of yours:
> You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself.
with "you" being the company/manger/interviewer. I'm happy to have a detailed conversation on how I can help the company, if you're ready to have a detailed conversation about how you can help me. When they ask me if I have any questions, I often say "Sell this position to me." They never have a prepared answer. In fact, they never have good answers to any behavioral question I ask them, but somehow they expect me to have good answers.
That just makes you sound like you have no idea what the company does, and you're only here because a recruiter said they have a great ping-pong league (which is pretty common, actually, I've had candidates who couldn't describe what the company does).
But it's a fine answer if you can remove that aspect. "Oh I'm interested in a company that does Widgets, and I hear your company is one of the best in the Widget business. Tell me, is that true?"
Similar but different. I recently closed out a Quality Engineering/CoE position and conducted two awkward phone screens where the "candidates" were running sales pitches for their side-gigs.
The discussions started normally, but quickly became transparent. When I mentioned a challenge, they explained how they used some product/company to help with the solution. I thought it sounded familiar but couldn't figure out from where. After the candidate answered a second question similarly, I searched and found the site.
The product is one of these consultancy projects is a thin wrapper on top of some other popular product. It finally hit me- Why the product sounded familiar is because I saw it on this candidate's LinkedIn page, listed as a founder. The other candidate, same situation, only he was a "board member."
I was once asked to sign an NDA in order to discuss developing an app for someone. Upon signing, I learned that they wanted to make an App that let people check their makeup on their phone, without using the camera, by simply converting the pixels to 'mirror' colour. NEXT!
This sounds a bit like "Ad buddy", from a Netflix sci-fi series called 'Maniac':
"If you’re broke, you can sell yourself to an “Ad Buddy,” whereby your bills get paid in exchange for a person accompanying you everywhere and spouting advertisements, like a human pop-up you can’t close."
As long as we're signing things before an interview, maybe we should be adding clauses like "I'm in this interview solely for the purpose of applying for this job" and "I have no other commercial interest in this interview."
Or, to put it another way, this is not a large-scale sustainable enterprise for a startup; even if it "succeeded", the business environment will adapt to eliminate it. Interviews are too expensive to let companies be screwing around getting paid to pitch crap at you in an "interview".
I've never seen this (though also not interviewed a ton). What are they afraid is going to leak from an interview? Presumably you're not diving into trade secrets with someone you're merely deciding whether you're going to work with?
Many years ago I interviewed at a military contractor. Every time we walked through a work area someone went ahead and announced I was coming through to ensure nobody had something that would require a clearance to see.
I was responding to a suggestion not to use an NDA, and to 'just share secrets later'. Just pointing out that that's more involved than simply not breaking down (explicitly, in the actual interview) exactly how your middle-out compression algorithm works or whatever.
Yes, again, I was replying to the suggestion that 'oh it's easy no need for NDA, just share the secrets later if they get the job'. Point was it's not just deliberate sharing of secrets you need to avoid in that case. When candidates are asked to sign an NDA, it's probably not because they're going to be explicitly told anything sensitive.
The author does say that he was doing a consultation for a DevRel programme. That sounds to me like it was either paid consultation, or essentially a sales process by the author to generate consultancy work. NDAs are common in both of those scenarios.
Signing an NDA before taking a job is indeed very atypical in the UK.
I have exclusively signed NDAs for jobs before final interview stages in the UK. And now in Finland come to think of it. I don’t really see it as particularly controversial- obviously I can’t expect to walk into an office and tell the world about what I saw and the projects and clients a company had, and yet I’d quite like to know about them before committing to work full time there.
Modern jargon is crazy. Really hard to verify. I guess that's why these "draw spunky" tests are so prevalent, these days, because we can't trust a word out of anyone's mouth.
Makes me wonder why we would hire folks we can't trust, but I'm old-fashioned, and out of touch with what the kids are into, these days...
I think he's referring to those white board coding sessions where the interviewer forgets that you're a human being and not a dog.
"Draw Spunky" as a reference to the ubiquitous "If you can draw Tippy, you can be an artist!" ads in the back of comic books where a kid would connect the dots to form a turtle and then send five bucks to some fly-by-night diploma mill.
Putting the two concepts together as "draw Spunky" you get a real-life CAPTCHA.
I'm guessing this is a psych/creativity test about drawing an abstract concept, like courage. "Spunky" would then be the abstract concept of spunkiness.
This makes me want to have candidates sign a document that states they are there interview for their own personal employment; not hired or otherwise paid to interview with us for the purposes of intelligence gathering or promotion of products or services.
I wonder how enforceable that would be. Probably, "It depends." As my lawyer friends would tell me. :-)
I also wonder how many candidates would see that and perhaps question their application to our company.
I wrote this because it seemed important to warn people about the dark corners of the startup world. So much of the coverage of startups is pure hype,so we need more books that offer a sober, realistic view of how chaotic these places can be.
Oddly enough, the startup seemingly died in 2018, and one of the Board members went to jail, but (I just learned) they apparently got an injection of new capital and now they are trying it all again.
No, but I was just contacted by a programmer who worked there after me, and who had just read my book. The programmer told me that the bad spelling continues. He joked "That was a nice touch. Anyone who knows John knows about the bad spelling." John was just sloppy and uncaring I think.
The company ran out of money and died, but I've just been told that in 2018 they got a new investor and the project came back to life.
"And it makes me wonder if Fronk is still out there...?"
Fronk realized that people will voluntarily evangelize technology if it meets certain criteria. Having signed an NDA, I can not disclose what those criteria are.
Now I'm worried I've done that job with Fronk and was not paid. There's a handful of companies, with Algolia coming to mind first, that I've evangalized in interviews because the product did fix a huge problem.
I interviewed a guy once, after pleasantries he reached into his bag and pulled out a prototype of his invention, which he was trying to sell.
It was a fascinating conversation, I basically let him educate me on its theory of operation, then it was the next person's turn on the interview team.
> Oh, we work with loads of recruitment consultants. They get paid for every decent candidate who gets interviewed, so they give us a cut of their commission.
Is this a thing? Could I offer to go interview at all the crappy companies I get recruiters for in exchange for $100?
I guess over a large enough number you’ll find people doing anything, but with a long history with the recruitment industry in a couple of countries, I’ve never seen this. With good reason too: there is no end to the number of fake developer CVs I could generate.
> some you have to pay
In many countries that’s illegal, and I’m also yet to see this in the Real World
Consensus building is a real thing that happens every day all the time. Most of us here who self-identify as "engineers" or "hackers" don't truly understand this - when we code, we rarely build actions by proxy, there are usually very explicit instructions being written and therefore we bias ourselves to assuming the rest of the world also works in an explicit, up-front way.
This "startup" had a shady business model and sounds fishy as hell, but sadly every day some group, person, or org is trying to consensus-build us to thinking and feeling in a certain way.
Early on in dotcoms, what was called "buzz marketing" seemed to be a thing. (Going way beyond traditional "advertorials", etc.)
I saw startups in the business of doing that. They were either executing it directly, or rewarding third-party operatives for doing it (in what later might be called "gig economy").
I haven't heard as much about it lately, but I'm not tracking startups as much. Maybe they're going strong, maybe they became more discreet about it, or maybe the money is in relatively conspicuous advertising (obvious ads on screens backed by modern intel/analytics, influencers, etc.).
Interestingly, around the time some startups were figuring out the most society-destroying ways of exploiting people (e.g., "Let's change the world by paying people to manipulate their friends, and see what happens"), Google was doing things like being very clear in distinguishing sponsored placements from objective search hits. (Which had analogous precedent in respectable print publishing, but wasn't obvious that you had to do it in the dotcom gold rush new media, unless you were thoughtfully Don't Be Evil.)
>A company - let's call them "Fronk" - asked me to come in for a consultation about a Developer Advocacy programme
So if I follow the logic, the OP must have signed an NDA for a consultation, then they talk about something quite different and fishy, and he feels bound by the NDA not to say anything.
Wondering 2 things: is that a valid NDA? Should he have signed such an NDA?
Sometimes "a technology" can have a multi million marketing budget, and sometimes there is zero budget for anything related to it. And you don't really know... Sometimes you recommend a technology that you only heard people talk good about, whom in turn has never used it, just heard others talk good about...
Sounds silly, but I imagine it could have an impact. Especially if combined with stuffing the name of the product into the resume. I know if I starting seeing "ProductX" in a few resumes, and hadn't heard of it, I'd look it up.
Given the deeply unethical hiring and interviewing practices across the entire industry, I would not be worried about the ethics of leveraging the process for the benefit of the "smaller guy".
I've encountered a fake candidate before (recruiter with a fake linkedin profile applying for jobs to scope out the market and build contact lists). I don't think they went as far as actually turning up to anyone's interview of course.
This particular person claimed to have worked as a senior developer in our team. Someone contacted them to ask who they were, they apologized and removed the linkedin profile.
We were originally tipped off by another recruiter who had received the fake candidate's profile for one of their jobs.
> Every once in a while, I'll be interviewing a candidate who starts waxing lyrical about how rewriting everything in today's flavour of JavaScript really helped their last company. Or how their bosses were impressed with what this cool new bit of tech can do. Or why they could never work anywhere which didn't use this specific code editor.
I do sometimes wonder if this is how popular frameworks, etc get ... um... popular. Not that I think there's a "Fronk" doing it, but, well, many Fronks.
A lot of conference talks are little more than marketing. So you work at a big-ish company and either write or evangelize your framework there first, then give a talk about it that advertises its benefits.
The idea of doing this through interviews is painfully slow by comparison to the number of people that will listen to a talk or a user group presentation and send links to it later.
I've interviewed a few DS candidates from teams that were very invested in particular data/ML platforms who I could have sworn were doing this. ("How would you implement X if $PLATFORM didn't implement it for you?" "I'm not sure, but I don't see a reason not to just use $PLATFORM.")
I never really thought they were doing this, and I think they were employed by big well-known companies (definitely not the company that makes $PLATFORM). Just kind of a weird pattern.
It would almost make me feel better to find out they were doing this. The number of people who can't think laterally beyond the tool in front of them is scary.
It's definitely still out there in the context of evangelizers who will never consider another tool/language mostly because that's what they learned or resonated with them first.
It might still be out there in the sense of paid shills on the level of the author's experience, but I think the majority of paid shills are probably getting their word out in other ways.
Reminds me of when I worked at the early stages of a (now large) startup (I'm sure most of you have heard of the company), the CEO used to go to industry conferences and sit on panels with other competitors, intentionally giving terrible advice to throw others astray. He'd come back to the office and brag about the shitty advice he gave that everyone was eating up. This is why I don't go to conferences anymore.
Except that little bit about lying. You're going to an interview under false pretenses (no intention of accepting an offer, thus lying through your actions), lying about using the product you're promoting and how great it is in your experience, lying that you accepted a competing offer elsewhere and so on.
I've often played around with the idea of doing reverse interviews for finding badly needed senior talent. After some time I realized that interviews are typically done by senior talent...
So the idea is to go to good companies, make a good connection with the interviewers, and contact them later to try and hire them.
I've seen this happen to a colleague. He interviewed someone who turned out to be the founder of some medical equipment startup and a week later he was working for him.
What about if a company used their own employees for this? Having them apply to their customers, and also let the employees accept a job offer if they didn't want to match it.
More/Less ethical?
Sounds slightly more ethical to me. Perhaps less effective, but I've heard crazier growth hacking ideas...
Maybe it's just bc InfiniDash was used as the example, but I had to keep reminding myself that this was real and not some completely made up parody. Now I really want to know how long Fronk lasted and if this sort of thing actually happens nowadays?
IMO: Part of the problem of "Fronk" is the assumption that everyone is a salesperson. IMO, developers who are also good salespeople, and enjoy selling, are a rare breed. They can probably find more rewarding work elsewhere.
It is a valid behaviour to not join a company who use a technology you dislike. Rather continue looking for a job which will make you happy waking up every morning and starting your work.
Spending your work day interviewing for jobs sounds like the circle of hell you get sent to for making people work through lunch. I can't imagine being paid enough to do that.
Which way I fly is Fronk; myself am Fronk; And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the Fronk I suffer seems a Knorf.
I had to know so I googled it. Paradise Lost, John Milton. The original quote is "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven."
Reminds me of the guy that created a bunch of fake dating profiles in a small-ish town and essentially did a denial of service attack against other potential suitors.
Hmm, we did actually start using a CI product that we hadn't heard of before, because two people we interviewed mentioned it (after checking it out obviously)
I worked for a company that only had one in-house programmer. The outsourced to the Ukraine for most of their programming needs. This was 20 years ago.
That's the thing, not only is this unethical, I can't imagine how much you would have to pay me to make it worthwhile to interview on a regular basis ...
Fun story: I actually did something like this but on the opposite end of the spectrum. I would interview candidates, not intending to hire them but tell them about my product and offered them a free trial at the end of the interview. Didn’t work as well obviously since most didn’t work for another company at the time and it was a B2B product
So is this a real story that just happens to use “Infinidash” as a stand in for their real product name, or is this just another artefact of the Infinidash ruse?
Jokes aside I don't think it's a plausible example, because it's not like Rust is a product people directly buy. Whose interest would it be to astroturf Rust adoption? If people only pretend to use a programing language, it's not going anywhere and not going to generate revenue for anybody.
I agree that it's being done, but I don't think it's being done by a company paid by clients. If I really really loved Rust, or OCaml, or whatever, joining with a few people to promote it (by talking about it, writing articles, but also writing high quality libraries and contributing to the ecosystem) would be the logical thing to do. You often hear "I'd love to use $NEW_THING but the ecosystem isn't big enough.". That's something you can start fixing with a few dedicated people. If you really believe in a technology, or really love it, you can try to influence its course and popularity. You can promote it at your job, try it on a greenfield project, etc.
Yeah, the phrase Developer Advocacy is still being used, and I think most 'big' libraries and tools have it - it's a form of marketing. Ideally they manage to astroturf themselves into becoming popular, so that the people work with the tools become advocates themselves.
I mean it works, to a point, as a sales / marketing tactic.
Often you'd see HN posts near the top, with few votes or comments. Although Rust sounds amazing, it has a Submarine* feel to it. Would the project be on the front page if the title didn't mention Rust?
I think Haskell had this problem years ago as well: it was like any obscure algorithm you'd lookup on Wikipedia had sample code ... in Haskell only.
This is often being done by the mods of the site though, and not by the submitters. I've had it happen to a post of me, and I've seen multiple comments by other submitters that the post title was added to include "in Rust".
I'm not sure what the incentive for the mods is here (overall higher engagement on the site?), or if it's still being done, but from a certain point on, I think it could even be harmful to Rust, by preventing it from being recognized as a "normal/mainstream" language.
I used to work with a senior guy who went freelance and then bunched together with several other freelancers, also seniors, to form... "an operation". The MO was that one of them would go and interview for a permanent job, impress the heck out of everyone and then say "there's more like me, be happy to help you out, but on a contract basis and as a group." They were basically bait-n-switching them to outsource parts of their development and in some cases it worked, because their fees were very reasonable. And the fees were reasonable because they did very little of the actual work themselves and instead re-outsourced it to some Ukranain dudes.
Looked fishy as fuck and I'm not sure how it ended because I felt out of touch with the guy.