Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

db48x

Love that second footnote.

Zhenya

Why does any of this actually matter? Why were you shaken? You weren’t committing fraud. You did real work. Now you’re in the US with a family and a career. Happy Father’s Day.

comrade1234

I was on a government project where I found out I was being fraudulently billed on my hours. It was towards the end of the year and my manager was trying to use up the budget of the client. Although this is normal in the private sector I told him from the beginning that you can't do this on a government project. The project was $1M+ which was enough for prison time. He had gone into our billing software and edited my entries - it wasn't as if he was submitting the fraudulent totals only - he was changing what I was entering. I gathered as much documentation as I cloud and went to a law firm. They told me I had two options - report it to the Government Accounting Office or report it to the head of the project, an academic. So I simultaneously resigned and reported it to the professor. I covered my butt. I'm pretty sure the professor hid the fraudulent billing but I didn't look into afterwards because basically that was what I was hoping he'd do so I wouldn't have to go to court and defend that my reported hours weren't really mine. The full project was eventually awarded to another academic group.

Apreche

One of the many reasons to never actually care about the work you are doing if it is a for-profit endeavor, and you are not the owner. You are there to collect a paycheck so you can survive. If you want a job that you should care about then work in public service, at a non-profit, or for yourself.

exac

Fraud aside, I think a more common thought among developers is > Did my old job only exist because the Product Owners didn't realize we didn't have product-market fit?

uberex

If we can see far, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of tyrants.

iparaskev

I think it doesn't really matter if the fund manager was committing a fraud. The author had fun, met their spouse and just enjoyed life with the information they had at that point.

etothepii

As a junior software engineer, I worked at a large UK bank. Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise. One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team, without having incurred any procurement costs. I once asked a more senior colleague how this made any sense. His answer stuck with me: "You can’t stop people from doing their jobs. If someone thinks their job is to deliver X, they’ll find a way to deliver X. Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside."

actionfromafar

No Genie finally out of the bottle joke?

rwmj

At the end of the day he wrote some software which sounds legitimate and useful. What management did without his knowledge isn't really his problem. At the other end of this extreme is if you have a good job in a bad industry, like gambling or boiler room frauds. You should feel responsible even if your job is just maintaining the servers.

scrubs

I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better. The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA. Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned." The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo (big fish in this tiny, tiny world) and left. Even they knew this company was never really trying to do anything serious. Strange indeed

throwaway98797

sometimes fraud leads to positive outcomes. imagine a world where SBF didn’t defraud the crypto world. in that world anthropic may have not existed.

siskiyou

I worked for Advanced Network and Services, which operated the NSFNET and was later acquired by America Online. Then one day the company was acquired by WorldCom. A few years later the CEO was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a ~$10 billion fraud. As a systems administrator I knew nothing about any of that, but I could tell that the new management included a lot of players and empire builders. That's the signal that told me to quit a few months after the acquisition. Employees were invited to invest their retirement savings in a mutual fund that contained only WorldCom stock. Many of them lost everything. Pay attention to those signals.

big85

I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.

suzzer99

I worked for a company that did opt-in spam email. Their main offices were in Silicon Valley, but they had a startup thing in LA that I worked at. Ostensibly we were building a self-service email campaign app to be bundled with Weblogic Commerce Server (which itself was basically DOA). It became pretty obvious to me from the get-go that nothing was being built, and the startup was just siphoning money off the parent company. I'm not sure if there was any fraud going on beyond a bunch of people collecting a paycheck. I think the boss was skimming off of the captive H1Bs, and there was a guy in NYC who never did anything as far as I could tell. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of kickback going on there. My first day, I went out for sushi with the top devs, who proceeded to tell one horror story after another about the boss. Awesome way to start a job. I lasted 3 months.

phendrenad2

In these cases I'm always curious who the investors were. I have the bad feeling it was you and me via our 401ks somehow.

bhickey

Well that's a blast from the past. When I lived in London I hung out with some of the geniedb team (hey Alaric).

peteforde

First, you'll probably never know and this is one of those ouroboros questions that can drive you a little crazy if you let it. I urge you to not let it, because the only actual answer is that if you did work you were proud of and met the mother of your children, it quite literally doesn't matter. We should all be so lucky! Second, very few things in life are so cut and dry. Legal cases are by nature simplified abstractions that attempt to render a three dimensional situation that unfolded over a long time in a few pages of a graphic novel. Third, this sort of thing is so incredibly common. Often the only difference between fraud and IPO is whether it worked or not. That's not cynicism, just pragmatism. If you ever read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - and you should - you'll quickly decide that the real fraud is late capitalism writ large.

iririririr

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