NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
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.
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.
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.
Can I ask, does that mean you got so worn out so you couldn't work, had to stay at home / away-from-work for some time?
I wonder what happened afterwards. Seems you now work as an independent contractor now? (looking at your external profile, I hope you don't mind)
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.
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.
When has that ever happened?
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.
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.
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.
This created a lot of internal pressure to use contract resources as much as possible.
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.
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.
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.
And when the project freezes indefinitely, so do the payouts.
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..
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...
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.
But yes, bigger consultancies absolutely do this.
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.
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.
Especially when the customers are female.
I actually think it’s essential in medium+ size companies. The authenticity of having a highly technical person in sales works wonders.
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.
This is just resource efficiency.
I honestly wonder how this place makes money some days!
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.
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?
It makes sense to have juniors do the work and seniors to oversee the work.
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.
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.
Source: extensive experience on projects with Splunk proserve.
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.
Every single time customers want to :
- Review the Consultant CV
- Interview the Consultant
- Accept no switch unless for the obvious reasons of sickness or holidays.
- And the team that starts is very much the team that finishes the project.
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.)
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.
This is now in my lexicon. I loved the show as a kid and this so perfectly captures how I feel about some shops.
Although the good contractors are SWAMPED for work, I definitely have to up my rate.
"I don't know. Wow what do all these words in capital letters mean?"
"Oh that doesn't matter. As long as you use the same words in the deliverable report, noone will ever double-check the code before the sale."
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.
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.
You are defrauding the client by not providing the service and/or personnel advertised. How is this not, at a minimum, a criminal act?
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!
That's not "Bait-and-switch"
That's smart business
The "most senior person" (or, more likely, team) is still available - they're just acting as an escalation point, not doing grunt work
Same basic concept as having a secretary to do the [necessary] grunt work of any specialized employee/team
You don't send Babe Ruth to fetch foul balls, you send Babe Ruth to hit homeruns
But without the ball boys going for fouls, Babe Ruth doesn't get to hit as many, or as fast
Makes me realize why there is so much red take on new vendors at large firms.
Bad outcomes outside of the process like it taking years to buy software? Not any one person's fault.
Never happened before, hasn’t happened since.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It turned out fine.
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.
In the UK, the most senior doctors are actually called “consultants” - they consult on the work being done by the others
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.
We took the bait and the code product was as bad as you would expect.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
There’s nothing heroic about joining a team and then sabotaging their work.
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.
"I currently have 10 fully remote engineering jobs"
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think “we held our previous employer to ransom” is the sales pitch I’d go with.
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.
I ended up retiring, and 3 years later got re-hired on a very part time, hourly contract basis.
Ah well.
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 :)
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.
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.
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...
1) who is behind it, actually.
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.
This seems more plausible.
But still, you make a good point about the size of the reward. A low probability of success might be OK if the payoff is measured in billions.
It's almost certainly illegal, but I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the specifics.
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…
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.
Edit: if you want a thorough version of the Nortel story, I recommend this podcast: https://malicious.life/chinas-unrestricted-warfare-part-1/
"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.
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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel#After_the_Internet_bubb...
That, and basing their business on selling film in an age of digital cameras.
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.
I was curious about this statement but on reading up on the topic, it doesn't seem to me that Nortel was "taken over" by Huawei?
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.
This is a strange counterpoint to managers interviewing people to learn about a market.
It's unethical for a company to interview candidates if they don't have the intention of offering anyone a job.
And likewise it's unethical for a candidate to attend an interview if they have no intention of considering a potential offer.
It’s the interviewers job to convince me I should work there.
Plus I get interviewing practice and maybe get to meet interesting people.
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.
Edit: Whoops! Grammar
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.
I don't think the difference is as big as you seem to think. Everyone has a price. :)
The standard practice is for recruiters to be paid only in case of successful placement (and often only in case of successful probation period).
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.
In fact in this case I wouldn't have expected the things the NDA is stopping me from talking about were even things.
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
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.
But, it's been well over two decades I was pursuing a degree in philosophy.
It is basically spamming, not in email, SMS, or robo-calls, but in job interviews.
It seems there are no bounds to the areas that marketers will go to insert their message into your life, welcome or not.
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.
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...
Similar but less clear cut whether it's unethical is when people go on 'practice' interviews where they don't have a serious interest in the position.
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.
Very much explained some experiences I'd had at the previous trade show.
And likewise it's unethical for a candidate to attend an interview if they have no intention of considering a potential offer.
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 also struggle with staying too long in jobs.)
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.
It seems that usually companies pay their long term employees below the market, and they only notice when/if they go job hunting.
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.
Is this... what's the word... ethical?
"Our investors think so!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uh, we knew that in 2005 already, quite a lot of educational projects following the Kyoto protocols !
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.
She had a great time doing it.
So people are pretty susceptible to steering on things like alcohol preference, and it doesn't seem to take much to steer us.
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.
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.
edit: typo
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 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.
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.
https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/stealth-marketing-pit...
It’s like inverse astroturfing, and also arguably incentivizes friendly social behaviors. Genius.
"Viral marketing" has a whole different feeling now...
He was way overqualified for the position, so I asked him "Why do you want to work for us?"
He said he doesn't, he just wanted to "sharpen his interviewing skills".
He was very surprised I have unceremoniously ended the meeting immediately.
"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."
"That's what I'm here to find out. Tell me, why should I pick you?"
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.
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.
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....
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.
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
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.
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?"
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?
Have you ever asked your plumber or handyman why they want to work for you ? Same circumstances, there also you want someone passionate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, except don't think for a minute you're a player in that situation, you're the one being played.
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.
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.
What did they say after that?
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."
"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."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/maniac-statue-e...
Seems weird to let leak “secrets “ during an interview that require a NDA though. Just be vague and tell them the secrets later.
Well, in this case, probably exactly what is in this article?
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".
Signing an NDA before taking a job is indeed very atypical in the UK.
Makes coding meetups a bit awkward at those places tho.
Guerrilla marketing at its most sleazy.
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...
Besides horrifyingly named.
"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.
Or maybe I've been smoking crack again.
I’m old, so I remember “Draw Spunky.” I refer to the test, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-...
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...
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.
Did you ever find out why John’s emails look like they’re written by a drunk and dyslexic person?
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.
I hope you enjoy the rest of the story.
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.
"During the interview, you'll evangelise our clients' products."
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.
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
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.
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.)
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?
That said, some candidates have inspired me to check out a new tech or project from their resume.
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.
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.
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 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.
> "Our investors think so!..."
Oh boy.
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.
#hashtagAWSissuperiortoAzure #reallyi'mjustsaying,totalynotpaidoranything
Edit: not that it’s something I’d personally feel comfortable with ethically
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.
More/Less ethical?
Sounds slightly more ethical to me. Perhaps less effective, but I've heard crazier growth hacking ideas...
I think this is a better explanation that having many companies that lose their money on unviable business model.
So if it’s only $50/hour or something then the customers probably aren’t getting a good value of grassroots promotion either.
I'm thinking not much value.