11 ms·

Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

847 points by advisedwang 3mo ago

Zhenya 3mo ago
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.
- wyldfire 3mo ago
  You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled? It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.
  - jchw 3mo ago
    I definitely had this feeling early on in my career, but it did flip around somewhere around halfway through. "We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years." The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.
    - denkmoon 3mo ago
      look at you you lucky devil, getting to delete code!
  - girvo 3mo ago
    > was it all for naught? I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :) Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright
    - xg15 3mo ago
      Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
      - alexashka 3mo ago
        Many people's enjoyment stems from knowing they do less work for more money than the people they grew up around. 'Useful' is not even a thought that's ever entered their brain.
      - vkou 3mo ago
        > doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. When the world starts paying people for the best use of their time, people will start prioritizing that.
      - fluoridation 3mo ago
        >40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. For almost everyone, working is not the best way to spend their time, it's just how they can afford the stuff they do the rest of the time. Obviously it's preferable if it's useful and/or enjoyable, but they're not necessary qualities. >It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does. Odd. "Agency" usually refers to the ability to exert will. Understanding would not seem to contribute towards that.
      - fgdgsdfgsdfdfgs 3mo ago
        Work can be useless for society. I do useless work for example. My clients are happy though and they pay and I receive money for tinkering with computers. It's a win-win. I'm under no illusion this all serves some grander purpose. I don't think anything does.
    - cm2012 3mo ago
      Yep 90% of companies don't matter and don't affect things. Only 10% of people do. That's just the way the world works. There's no way to know before you start so just live while you can enjoy.
  - bartread 3mo ago
    So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0]. However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago. [0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.
    - toast0 3mo ago
      Same same. I don't expect any of my product code to survive for very long. I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.
    - fgdgsdfgsdfdfgs 3mo ago
      Our work is extremely ephemeral by nature. Many times I only value the communication that happened and the shared understanding that was built. The code is an .. artifact. Nice to hang on the wall.
  - mingus88 3mo ago
    I worked at a company whose product was truly boneheaded. Without giving too much away, it’s the kind of technology that would have been useful if we lived in a world where smartphones weren’t being carried around by literally everybody. I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things. I came to the conclusion that the company was a grift, but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it. We had startup perks that were basically paid out in cash when the pandemic hit. The “gym” perk became $500 in cash which could be spent on anything vaguely fitness related, like an Apple Watch. The commuter benefits rolled into our accounts which gave me free tolls for years afterward. Instead of taking all the money, they cut us in. So yeah, maybe frustrating if you expected your startup to be successful, but that’s so often outside of the control of any engineer. It’s always a crap shoot. Get your best offer and make the most of it. You can do resume driven development even in the shadiest of firms.
    - cucumber3732842 3mo ago
      >but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it. All good grifts let some "little people" in on it so they go to bat for it.
      - cindyllm 3mo ago
        [dead]
    - ElevenLathe 3mo ago
      This attitude actually becomes the only viable strategy once you realize that the majority of the economy in the majority of the world is connected in some way with some kind of graft. Even honest salt-of-the-earth sewer workers or something are probably pawns in some larger fraud scheme. The "economy* is in some sense one large scam.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - antisthenes 3mo ago
    > You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled? I would have thought most people would grow out of having this kind of feeling after their 1st job. But I also definitely work to live, not live to work, so YMMV.
  - kakacik 3mo ago
    Do you get your major feeling of success primarily from work, or is it the rest of life? I don't think I need to spell what is viewed as the proper long term winning strategy here. I know folks who ride the work part, and let me tell you - unless you land a stellar employer and exceptional boss, its recipe for a lot of miserable days and worse, for decades. Its also a symptom of what I would call 'unfulfilled life', but thats my personal take please don't get offended quickly. With that mindset (or work-to-live or whatever you can call it), these things are just an afterthought. That after-work climbing session and that weekend meeting with friends or hiking trip in the mountains with kids mean world to me, and I fully indent to keep that mindset till retirement and continue with it further. If it means I won't get into top 1% or whatever I am fine with that, QoL is firmly above that and career rat races are meaningless (and fruitless) ego polishing / insecurities managing exercises.
- uberex 3mo ago
  I assume because it turns out it was a actual bullshit job, and they were probably proud of what they had achieved. They probably trusted and may have even got on well with their boss.
b0rsuk 3mo ago
[dead]
db48x 3mo ago
Love that second footnote.
comrade1234 3mo ago
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.
- idiotsecant 3mo ago
  That was your mistake. The grant recipient or department has as much incentive to fully spend the money as your consultant boss does to bill it. It's a implied understanding. Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time. Expensive projects are important projects. Important projects make careers. That is baked in several layers deep. You'd need to report it to a waste and fraud line, ombudsman, or similar. I'm not sure its unusual enough to bother, though.
  - SecretDreams 3mo ago
    This is all simultaneously true and simultaneously disappointing. It requires a certain forfeiture of morality to be a part of this status quo. But, especially on grants between academia and the government, this very much seems to be the status quo.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 3mo ago
      Is it actually true, or just a trope? Anyone in a position to manage hundreds of millions worth of projects is smart enough to know that some projects will run under budget.
Apreche 3mo ago
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.
- the_cat_kittles 3mo ago
  basically agree, though if you work for a transparently evil company you should care, and quit
  - Dusseldorf 3mo ago
    or stay, and be subtly bad enough at your job to negatively affect the progress of the enterprise.
- xg15 3mo ago
  It's a reasonable stance until the point where most of society is ran by for-profit companies. Then that mindset actively makes the world worse. Your bosses might not actually care about the work you do, but your users and customers sure will.
  - pdimitar 3mo ago
    Your proposed solution?
    - aurareturn 3mo ago
      Work hard, do a good job, earn more money for yourself and family, save money, start your own business? Also, when you do a good job, ex-coworkers will often reach out to you to give you better opportunities.
    - stevenhuang 3mo ago
      You do what you can to do good within the confines of the parameters available to you.
exac 3mo ago
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?
- raincole 3mo ago
  And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's what a healthy economy looks like.
  - shermantanktop 3mo ago
    At a small company, anyone can damage the company prospects. But product people have outsized negative impact when they are wrong. They can tank the whole company in short order. Which is maybe as it should be, but it does pit agonized debates over detailed technical work in perspective.
    - pdimitar 3mo ago
      All true but every time I tried to help with an outsider's perspective -- and IMO us as engineers with systems thinking _can_ contribute -- I was told to shut up and stay in my lane (more politely than that but still crystal clear what's the underlying message + a clear show of we-will-not-debate-this-again). So let them do damage. I do what I am told, I have the strategic thinking but not many have made use of it. OK. It's their right. I still pocket a wage. They could have gotten more for their money but consciously chose not to. Who am I to stop them? (And not like I actually can.)
      - shermantanktop 3mo ago
        Same. I’m lucky to have some execs who appreciate that product people have a specific point of view (or agenda) and as a result are willing to at least listen to my views, wrt defect rates, availability, etc., but also about the occasional product idea. At the end of the day, if they choose spend their magic beans on shitty features, I’m still getting paid. Then again, I’m at a larger company, not a startup.
uberex 3mo ago
If we can see far, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of tyrants.
- talon8635 3mo ago
  The real version is much more applicable, because we can’t see far, because we are depressingly shortsighted. In this regard, we aren’t standing on shoulders of giants, we are like an immense asshole of a dad climbing ontop of his young child’s shoulders to win a chicken fight in the pool while his kid drowns below.
iparaskev 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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."
- rr808 3mo ago
  > Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise. I dont think they're baffled, they just trying to show they're attempting to keep costs under control.
  - etothepii 3mo ago
    Lots of shouting on one particular occasion left me with the impression that they genuinely had not anticipated this consequence of simultaneously pulling the "no contractors to be renewed" lever and the "any MD can sign contracts up to $1m with approved suppliers" lever. The people involved weren’t stupid. They were trying to achieve one outcome and got a different one because the rest of the organisation adapted to the incentives in front of them.
    - necovek 3mo ago
      How do you call when someone repeatedly does the same thing expecting a different outcome each time?
- betaby 3mo ago
  > One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. That's 'normal' in Canada and France.
actionfromafar 3mo ago
No Genie finally out of the bottle joke?
rwmj 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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
- cobbzilla 3mo ago
  > The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA. If you have a lot of money it’s fun to LARP the startup life. The experience working for such a company is highly varied and completely depends on the personality of the founder. But even if it’s a healthy place, it’s usually a black hole from a career development POV.
  - jamesfinlayson 3mo ago
    I know someone who is an accountant for very wealthy people and quite a few seem to have useless children whose failing businesses they bankroll.
    - kijin 3mo ago
      Startups are like sports cars nowadays. People think it makes you look cool if you own one. It doesn't matter if it costs a lot of money to maintain. Yachts and sports cars do the same. That's actually like the whole point of it, after all.
    - GJim 3mo ago
      > whose failing businesses they bankroll Don't confuse a hobby business with a failing business. Plenty of people with independent means run loss making businesses for fun and/or support wives/children doing just that.
      - 3mo ago
focusgroup0 3mo ago
[dead]
throwaway98797 3mo ago
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.
- NDlurker 3mo ago
  What's The link there?
  - nailer 3mo ago
    SBF was one of the earliest funders of Anthropic, Solana, Robinhood and Cursor, mostly around 2022.
    - senshan 3mo ago
      Is there evidence that no one else would fund Anthropic, Solana, Robinhood and Cursor?
siskiyou 3mo ago
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.
- sokoloff 3mo ago
  I feel like Worldcom got a modest amount of press coverage at the time but probably would have gotten a lot more if it hadn’t been front-run by the Enron scandal.
  - adastra22 3mo ago
    Why are these always one letter off from what they actually are? Worldcom-> World-con. Madoff -> Made-off
    - N_Lens 3mo ago
      Palantir are upfront!
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Scam Bankrun-Fraud
    - hyperadvanced 3mo ago
      Normative determinism is the term for that
      - pinkmuffinere 3mo ago
        *Nominative Determinism. Named after John Nominative, who first proposed the effect.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
big85 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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.
jackbucks 3mo ago
YES
phendrenad2 3mo ago
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.
- advisedwang 3mo ago
  In this particular case I believe it was mostly individual accredited investors, putting in anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. The case has records of the fund trying to get GE in too, but it doesn't look like they succeeded. Some of those individual investors may have been pretty small fry so I do feel a bit bad for them, but on the other hand if you want to dabble in Venture Capital, you need to be savvy.
bhickey 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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?
JMiao 3mo ago
https://hannahhowell.com/stuart-frost-drained-14m-from-investors-startups-and-walked-away-for-150k/ https://hannahhowell.com/stuart-frost-drained-14m-from-inves...
- kubb 3mo ago
  I wish I could pull this off on a smaller scale and just switch to a fulfilling life afterwards. The years I spend on nonsense will never come back.
3vo-ai 3mo ago
[flagged]
nikhiladithyan_ 3mo ago
[flagged]
satisfice 3mo ago
I bet those henchmen in Bond movies thought that the volcano base was merely a government-funded secret research facility.
jaimsam 3mo ago
[dead]
anovikov 3mo ago
I wonder what's even wrong about it. This is how funds normally operate: motivation for investors is upside, motivation for coders is to be able to code and get paid for it, motivation for people who run this circus, is fees. And yes i can relate to that. In 26 years of career, about half of the money i made and all of the money i saved, came from 3 clients (over the course of less than 5 years), all 3 of them being scams - one swindled investors for a thing he knew can't work, another one did a legit thing but when he realised it failed, exited to a dumb megacorp and ran away (literally vanished) when they started to realise they've been duped, and one more was in crypto field and whole project - which to me, all the way until past release, looked like a legit porn site - had a goal of imitating activity/interest to boost value of a crypto token. Even before i picked up coding - and i did it when i was in early teens around the fall of Communism - i knew coding as a separate field and a business was invented exactly for that purpose: it's a lot easier to steal money that way because it's a lot easier to inflate costs vs buying physical products. No surprise the party is over. People can't be duped for too long.
ChuckMcM 3mo ago
As someone who 'grew up' my career in Silicon Valley my first exposure to this sort of shenanigans was during the dot com bubble, where general partners at newish VC firms were fleecing limited partners (GP's got a salary to 'manage' the fund, LP's were the source of money for the funds.) They would tell the LPs well only one in ten is a real banger, looks like the fund you invested in wasn't a winner. It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again." The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it. But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.
- naishoya 3mo ago
  I like the analogy, but lets stretch it to the situation where workers can see that there is fraud and still do nothing. The passengers on the bus are not blameless if they know or have reason to know that the bus driver was drinking before or while they went down a road with pedestrian crossings. They are not blameless if they take no action, but to sit in the seats and wait to see if anyone gets hit or they all get away with it and arrive at the destination. Or if they remain in the seats after the first pedestrian and 'hope' it wont happen more. And how 'blameless' are the 'non-passengers' along for the ride to perform ongoing maintenance and provide fuel and snacks to the driver while on this imaginary trip to hell. So, I'm all out of 'you're not really the asshole' cards as we watch the whole kleptocratic SV system run Theranos' style over the total sum of human creative production. Anyone who participates in building the toolchains of tyranny is complicit in the abuse of people with those tools, even if it just a tiny bit. Sorry, not sorry, if that pricks the consciences of a few pricks; those that can feel shame are the better for it, and those who feel it not we must all be wary of.
solid_fuel 3mo ago
I'm sorry, this sucks. It must be painful to know that you were used to defraud people, and that you worked for years on something which was never intended to be successful. From my perspective, you're a victim of this fraud too. I think the pursuit of meaningful work is an important way many people find meaning in life, and it sucks that someone took advantage of you. From this piece, I get the impression that you would never have spent so much time and effort on this role if you had known it was just a way to scam investors. So, don't be hard on yourself. It's normal to feel guilty, but if you didn't have a perspective on the entire company or knowledge of the fraud, I don't know what you could have done.
p0w3n3d 3mo ago
I look at everything now as a journey not a destination. When connecting one's work carrier with a bank, one must keep in mind that some other people might have joined the organisation because of quite distinct reasons than we did. So yes there might be a fraud ongoing in our company, but it's not our fault
weatherlite 3mo ago
This is a fantastic outcome - lots of money and U.S citizenship! And your product didn't even hurt anyone unlike working for Meta, in fact no one even used it!
MASNeo 3mo ago
I have been in fairly senior roles at large corporates. The amount of money that is squandered without serious evaluation for something managers „want“ is mind boggling. I have often wondered whether corporate budgets are actually investor fraud in disguise.
xivzgrev 3mo ago
This arrangement is bizarre. The VC business model is predicated on extreme growth. The last thing you would want to do is siphon dividends out vs reinvesting into growth. They must have preyed on newbie founders, dangling large valuations. Oh the fees? Well you will make it big and it will be a drop in the bucket!
- advisedwang 3mo ago
  I suspect initially the fund was earnestly trying to make some huge exits, and the incubator was really a support for that. But as time went on it looked less and less like a big exit was in the cards. A stream of money to fund a lavish life was right there for the taking, and perhaps it's human nature to shift the priority to keeping the good times going.
danans 3mo ago
What's the old saying? "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Most common people throughout history made their living working in the systems owned by aristocrats whose wealth was usually built on both corruption and theft. Guess that hasn't changed much.
- patkai 3mo ago
  Behind many, but I sincerely hope not "every". A trivial counterexample is Warren Buffet: he simply saved and invested. Or consider inventors with patents.
  - n4r9 3mo ago
    Buffet is well known for acquisitions that pushed the boundaries of fair competition, and investments in other companies that did the same, or otherwise pursued deeply unethical practices. But he's trodden carefully around the law, so any "crime" would be a moral crime against society rather than a legally criminal act.
  - worldthruword 3mo ago
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-generated-double-markets-043109009.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-generated-doub... https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2022746722191938017 https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2022746722191938017 Chamath explains Warren Buffett’s secret to success: “Markets thrive when there's information asymmetry” “Now I'm gonna get a lot of people really upset with me.” “This is an example of Warren Buffet's returns pre- and post-Reg FD. Now what do you see?” “His returns were double the market returns when this kind of information sharing was legal.” “And the minute that it became illegal and you had to act on the same edge as everybody else, his returns went to the market return. He generated zero alpha. In fact, he probably, on the margins, lost a little bit.” “So this is the single best investor in the world. This is what happens when you have information symmetry.” “So it's just meant to explain that markets thrive when there's asymmetry. Billions and billions of dollars will be made in asymmetry.” “The prediction markets today, unless they are regulated out of existence or shut down, will look like the stock market pre-Reg FD, and there's nothing we can do except choose not to bet it, because otherwise what you're going to have are a ton of sharps taking advantage of a ton of squares.”
blobbers 3mo ago
Yes it did, but you are not your job. Your current state may be based on a fraud, but the fraud is not you.
t43562 3mo ago
At least you didn't work for an online gambling company....or assist with manipulating the political views of billions of people to their detriment...or work on better ways of killing people... Also, who hasn't worked at a company that produced a product and then abandoned it? I feel like that has happened often to me - many years of effort for nothing. It's not fraud exactly but it represents almost the same thing other than the intention.
- worldthruword 3mo ago
  > Also, who hasn't worked at a company that produced a product and then abandoned it? I feel like that has happened often to me - many years of effort for nothing. It's not fraud exactly but it represents almost the same thing other than the intention. You can look at it this way. It trained you to be a better developer. So you got paid to learn and solve problems which developed skills will be used somewhere else.
estetlinus 3mo ago
Well, you did good and got paid. It all sounds very serendipitous. Isn’t like 99% of all tech fraud?
xnickb 3mo ago
Wanna know what the guy is up to now? Sure enough, he is a founder of an "AI That Knows Why" company.
yowo 3mo ago
I have a serious question for everyone who reading through comments: If you get a great paying position in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed, given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove, just an engineer closing issues and merging patches, would you reject it?
- lowdude 3mo ago
  I don't think I could give an honest reply in the abstract setting without actually being in that situation. But a significant factor would likely also be the actual work and whether it is something I find particularly interesting/exciting to work on. Then again, if it is doomed to fail from the start, it is unlikely that I would really enjoy working on it.
- kakacik 3mo ago
  Why? If it isn't illegal, nor amoral, just a moonshot then its basically typical SV startup reaching for stars. Sure, 99.9% of startups may not get there but we saw in the past some wild unexpected successes. Plus things may change along the path as markets evolve and if they pivot successfully into new areas they may win the first mover situation, even if original mission won't ever be accomplished.
- RaSoJo 3mo ago
  I would consider your two statements as distinct and separate: > "in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed" > "given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove" Consider: 1/ If it's a biz that's purposely mucking about without success...or a loss making entity for tax breaks: I have no problem in working here (Consider that I am in my 40s, used/abused in various "start-ups" and burnt-out. I need the money, and I'll take it.) 2/ If it's a company involved in criminal fraud: I'd run away as fast as my feet could take me. The problem with fraud is that eventually the authorities will catch up. If the owner is a criminal, he'll do anything to save his backside...even throwing innocent employees under the bus. You might be exonerated eventually. But that eventually might take years...decades.
edge_trader_41 3mo ago
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walkjoy8 3mo ago
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ayesha-ashu 3mo ago
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randallsquared 3mo ago
Nearly two decades ago I worked briefly for a "startup" in the DC metro which (in retrospect, for me) existed only to show activity toward using an IP that was the subject of a lawsuit. The expected payout from the lawsuit would have rendered the cost of running the ~20 person startup meaningless, had they won. I suppose the lawsuit didn't go well, since the startup folded 4-6 months after I started, with paychecks being late, then stopping, and employees progressively not showing up. Fun times.
RandyRanderson 3mo ago
In Canada this is a huge scam. The government advertizes that it's funding incubators. Great, right? The money doesn't go to the start ups - it all goes to large tech companies like IBM, etc, because, obviously, IBM knows about innovation. The cover is that the government doesn't know tech so it will give money to trusted partners and they will choose who to give the money to because they've been doing such a great job innovating in Canada. Surprise: they gave the money to themselves! You might have wondered why all these incubators in the crypto era were desperate to get you to go to their office. You might have also wondered: what fool is paying for this nice office in downtown Toronto where the prices are crazy-high? The taxpayer. All of that money was completely wasted and worse, little of it went to actual start ups.
- franze 3mo ago
  Sounds like Europe....
  - cs02rm0 3mo ago
    https://www.plexal.com/our-partners/ https://www.plexal.com/our-partners/
  - cubefox 3mo ago
    Yes, I remember someone explaining that a similar thing happens with all kinds of research grants in the EU. Some companies specialize in writing very complex grant proposals in just such a way that they are likely accepted, and then produce some useless bullshit reports. Actual specialized companies with expertise in the matters the grant is about don't have the knowledge of how to fill out grant proposals in a way that gets them accepted by bureaucrats because they don't know how the decision process works. Depressing.
    - timkam 3mo ago
      Indeed. Also, companies with a genuine and socially at least somewhat useful business model prefer focusing on customers buying their actual products as the main revenue source. The state- and EU-driven funding ecosystem is so convoluted that one either mostly ignores it in favor of value-creating work, or specializes in exploiting it, unfortunately.
jessinra98 3mo ago
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greengreengrass 3mo ago
Not commenting specifically on the companies and VC/PE firm discussed there, but this and the comments demonstrate just how many firms exist to do things other than make a profit. I think I understand why people with the big bucks can play these games and why it's tax-efficient for them. I often reflect on how much I've grown personally in companies that are clearly not going anywhere. Trying to do more with less can lead to... interesting... technical solutions. And in every company I've worked in, I have at one time or another been on a "cloud costs reduction" squad, which normally shortly precedes my deciding to move on from said company. I've also worked at the opposite end of this scale – companies with so much cash and no desire to turn a profit any time soon - and that's more problematic, as there's just no pressure to actually ship anything and every problem (and I mean _every_ problem) is solved with money or by hiring specialists. There's sometimes a fine line between a legitimate business pursuing ambitious goals that are ultimately doomed to failure and one that exists to commit fraud. And it's often not possible for an employee (even a fairly high-ranking employee), who often has limited information, to determine which is which.
gpjanik 3mo ago
A lot (all?) VCs charge some form of fees (typically capped at 20% of the entire fund, split in various percentages through 4 years investing, 4 divesting period). These fees often are only paid out only based on the actively deployed capital, and are not the only incentive: the main incentive is shares in gains (carry). The reason they're based on actively deployed capital isn't that the LPs (people who give VCs money to invest) want them to deploy the money in a stupid way, but they definitely don't want VCs to get the fees if the money wasn't invested. Therefore, VCs: 1. Want to raise as much money as possible 2. Want to deploy as much money as possible Ideally, as quickly as possible. There's nothing fraudulent about the idea of calculating VCs fees in various scenarios. There's however the extremely dodgy part of the portfolio companies paying their investor (VC) fees for anything. This is an obvious conflict of interests, and should never happen, but I personally know of multiple VC funds here in Europe (will skip the names to not get sued, lol) who base their entire operational model on funding shitty companies that have 0 chance of success, charging them for the office space and often "shared services" they provide. Unsure if this is a regulatory overlooking, or something that's deliberately legal, but IMHO shouldn't be. Probably they talked their LPs into agreeing to this on paper.
dbg31415 3mo ago
Why don't you ask Twitter, Tesla, or SpaceX employees how they feel about the situation.
cwoolfe 3mo ago
I've come to realize this: we are all raising money more than we admit. Whether it's from venture capital or donations to fund non-profits, money is more political than I realized because it's all about the idea of value, which is subjectively determined by humans.
BLACKCRAB 3mo ago
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DobarDabar 3mo ago
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gwbas1c 3mo ago
I lived in Silicon Valley for almost a decade, and stuck my fingers in the startup scene for awhile. One thing I learned is that a some people running startups are "poker players." They run the company to keep up appearances: Their goal is to get more investment and eventually sell the business at a profit. (And then what the purchaser does is their business.) There's nothing wrong with working for companies like this! You might not realize it going in; or the investors might see through the bluff and replace the leadership, creating a great job for you. In contrast, you could join a business run by honest people, and they could sell out to a poker player who then ruins it. Or, more typically, the honest people turn out to be so-so business people and the business fails. (This is what happened when I tried to run a startup.) At the end of the day, working for a startup always involves risk and the leadership structure will always change as the company grows, pivots, or fails.
__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
I was worried that here in the US it's fraud all the way down, but just yesterday I met somebody who actually makes things, so I guess it's just fraud most of the way down.
c-b 3mo ago
I mean, there are far more nefarious things happening in big tech, so if the author feels they were somehow being "used" in an immoral sense, I think they should feel ok about themselves based on the types of knowingly wrong but technically legal things happening in large companies.
hiccuphippo 3mo ago
Sounds straight out of The Producers.
RajT88 3mo ago
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
akitowerns 3mo ago
What's striking is how long it takes to notice. The incentives to keep believing the job is real — salary, identity, colleagues — are much stronger than the incentive to question the foundation. Sunk cost at the organizational level.
xkcd1963 3mo ago
Big tech companies are a scam in themselves. Doing something useful (that would pay itself by definition) while the main revenue is advertising? really?
splitstud 3mo ago
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siriuslv 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago
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- deleted 3mo ago
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silexia 3mo ago
Bootstrap yourself, or investors take everything.

847 points by advisedwang 3mo ago

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.

wyldfire 3mo ago
You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled? It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.
- jchw 3mo ago
  I definitely had this feeling early on in my career, but it did flip around somewhere around halfway through. "We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years." The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.
  - denkmoon 3mo ago
    look at you you lucky devil, getting to delete code!
- girvo 3mo ago
  > was it all for naught? I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :) Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright
  - xg15 3mo ago
    Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
    - alexashka 3mo ago
      Many people's enjoyment stems from knowing they do less work for more money than the people they grew up around. 'Useful' is not even a thought that's ever entered their brain.
    - vkou 3mo ago
      > doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. When the world starts paying people for the best use of their time, people will start prioritizing that.
    - fluoridation 3mo ago
      >40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. For almost everyone, working is not the best way to spend their time, it's just how they can afford the stuff they do the rest of the time. Obviously it's preferable if it's useful and/or enjoyable, but they're not necessary qualities. >It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does. Odd. "Agency" usually refers to the ability to exert will. Understanding would not seem to contribute towards that.
    - fgdgsdfgsdfdfgs 3mo ago
      Work can be useless for society. I do useless work for example. My clients are happy though and they pay and I receive money for tinkering with computers. It's a win-win. I'm under no illusion this all serves some grander purpose. I don't think anything does.
  - cm2012 3mo ago
    Yep 90% of companies don't matter and don't affect things. Only 10% of people do. That's just the way the world works. There's no way to know before you start so just live while you can enjoy.
- bartread 3mo ago
  So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0]. However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago. [0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.
  - toast0 3mo ago
    Same same. I don't expect any of my product code to survive for very long. I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.
  - fgdgsdfgsdfdfgs 3mo ago
    Our work is extremely ephemeral by nature. Many times I only value the communication that happened and the shared understanding that was built. The code is an .. artifact. Nice to hang on the wall.
- mingus88 3mo ago
  I worked at a company whose product was truly boneheaded. Without giving too much away, it’s the kind of technology that would have been useful if we lived in a world where smartphones weren’t being carried around by literally everybody. I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things. I came to the conclusion that the company was a grift, but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it. We had startup perks that were basically paid out in cash when the pandemic hit. The “gym” perk became $500 in cash which could be spent on anything vaguely fitness related, like an Apple Watch. The commuter benefits rolled into our accounts which gave me free tolls for years afterward. Instead of taking all the money, they cut us in. So yeah, maybe frustrating if you expected your startup to be successful, but that’s so often outside of the control of any engineer. It’s always a crap shoot. Get your best offer and make the most of it. You can do resume driven development even in the shadiest of firms.
  - cucumber3732842 3mo ago
    >but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it. All good grifts let some "little people" in on it so they go to bat for it.
    - cindyllm 3mo ago
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  - ElevenLathe 3mo ago
    This attitude actually becomes the only viable strategy once you realize that the majority of the economy in the majority of the world is connected in some way with some kind of graft. Even honest salt-of-the-earth sewer workers or something are probably pawns in some larger fraud scheme. The "economy* is in some sense one large scam.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- antisthenes 3mo ago
  > You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled? I would have thought most people would grow out of having this kind of feeling after their 1st job. But I also definitely work to live, not live to work, so YMMV.
- kakacik 3mo ago
  Do you get your major feeling of success primarily from work, or is it the rest of life? I don't think I need to spell what is viewed as the proper long term winning strategy here. I know folks who ride the work part, and let me tell you - unless you land a stellar employer and exceptional boss, its recipe for a lot of miserable days and worse, for decades. Its also a symptom of what I would call 'unfulfilled life', but thats my personal take please don't get offended quickly. With that mindset (or work-to-live or whatever you can call it), these things are just an afterthought. That after-work climbing session and that weekend meeting with friends or hiking trip in the mountains with kids mean world to me, and I fully indent to keep that mindset till retirement and continue with it further. If it means I won't get into top 1% or whatever I am fine with that, QoL is firmly above that and career rat races are meaningless (and fruitless) ego polishing / insecurities managing exercises.
uberex 3mo ago
I assume because it turns out it was a actual bullshit job, and they were probably proud of what they had achieved. They probably trusted and may have even got on well with their boss.

b0rsuk 3mo ago

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db48x 3mo ago

Love that second footnote.

comrade1234 3mo ago

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.

idiotsecant 3mo ago
That was your mistake. The grant recipient or department has as much incentive to fully spend the money as your consultant boss does to bill it. It's a implied understanding. Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time. Expensive projects are important projects. Important projects make careers. That is baked in several layers deep. You'd need to report it to a waste and fraud line, ombudsman, or similar. I'm not sure its unusual enough to bother, though.
- SecretDreams 3mo ago
  This is all simultaneously true and simultaneously disappointing. It requires a certain forfeiture of morality to be a part of this status quo. But, especially on grants between academia and the government, this very much seems to be the status quo.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3mo ago
    Is it actually true, or just a trope? Anyone in a position to manage hundreds of millions worth of projects is smart enough to know that some projects will run under budget.

Apreche 3mo ago

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.

the_cat_kittles 3mo ago
basically agree, though if you work for a transparently evil company you should care, and quit
- Dusseldorf 3mo ago
  or stay, and be subtly bad enough at your job to negatively affect the progress of the enterprise.
xg15 3mo ago
It's a reasonable stance until the point where most of society is ran by for-profit companies. Then that mindset actively makes the world worse. Your bosses might not actually care about the work you do, but your users and customers sure will.
- pdimitar 3mo ago
  Your proposed solution?
  - aurareturn 3mo ago
    Work hard, do a good job, earn more money for yourself and family, save money, start your own business? Also, when you do a good job, ex-coworkers will often reach out to you to give you better opportunities.
  - stevenhuang 3mo ago
    You do what you can to do good within the confines of the parameters available to you.

exac 3mo ago

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?

raincole 3mo ago
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's what a healthy economy looks like.
- shermantanktop 3mo ago
  At a small company, anyone can damage the company prospects. But product people have outsized negative impact when they are wrong. They can tank the whole company in short order. Which is maybe as it should be, but it does pit agonized debates over detailed technical work in perspective.
  - pdimitar 3mo ago
    All true but every time I tried to help with an outsider's perspective -- and IMO us as engineers with systems thinking _can_ contribute -- I was told to shut up and stay in my lane (more politely than that but still crystal clear what's the underlying message + a clear show of we-will-not-debate-this-again). So let them do damage. I do what I am told, I have the strategic thinking but not many have made use of it. OK. It's their right. I still pocket a wage. They could have gotten more for their money but consciously chose not to. Who am I to stop them? (And not like I actually can.)
    - shermantanktop 3mo ago
      Same. I’m lucky to have some execs who appreciate that product people have a specific point of view (or agenda) and as a result are willing to at least listen to my views, wrt defect rates, availability, etc., but also about the occasional product idea. At the end of the day, if they choose spend their magic beans on shitty features, I’m still getting paid. Then again, I’m at a larger company, not a startup.

uberex 3mo ago

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

talon8635 3mo ago
The real version is much more applicable, because we can’t see far, because we are depressingly shortsighted. In this regard, we aren’t standing on shoulders of giants, we are like an immense asshole of a dad climbing ontop of his young child’s shoulders to win a chicken fight in the pool while his kid drowns below.

iparaskev 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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."

rr808 3mo ago
> Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise. I dont think they're baffled, they just trying to show they're attempting to keep costs under control.
- etothepii 3mo ago
  Lots of shouting on one particular occasion left me with the impression that they genuinely had not anticipated this consequence of simultaneously pulling the "no contractors to be renewed" lever and the "any MD can sign contracts up to $1m with approved suppliers" lever. The people involved weren’t stupid. They were trying to achieve one outcome and got a different one because the rest of the organisation adapted to the incentives in front of them.
  - necovek 3mo ago
    How do you call when someone repeatedly does the same thing expecting a different outcome each time?
betaby 3mo ago
> One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. That's 'normal' in Canada and France.

actionfromafar 3mo ago

No Genie finally out of the bottle joke?

rwmj 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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

cobbzilla 3mo ago
> The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA. If you have a lot of money it’s fun to LARP the startup life. The experience working for such a company is highly varied and completely depends on the personality of the founder. But even if it’s a healthy place, it’s usually a black hole from a career development POV.
- jamesfinlayson 3mo ago
  I know someone who is an accountant for very wealthy people and quite a few seem to have useless children whose failing businesses they bankroll.
  - kijin 3mo ago
    Startups are like sports cars nowadays. People think it makes you look cool if you own one. It doesn't matter if it costs a lot of money to maintain. Yachts and sports cars do the same. That's actually like the whole point of it, after all.
  - GJim 3mo ago
    > whose failing businesses they bankroll Don't confuse a hobby business with a failing business. Plenty of people with independent means run loss making businesses for fun and/or support wives/children doing just that.
    - 3mo ago

focusgroup0 3mo ago

[dead]

throwaway98797 3mo ago

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.

NDlurker 3mo ago
What's The link there?
- nailer 3mo ago
  SBF was one of the earliest funders of Anthropic, Solana, Robinhood and Cursor, mostly around 2022.
  - senshan 3mo ago
    Is there evidence that no one else would fund Anthropic, Solana, Robinhood and Cursor?

siskiyou 3mo ago

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.

sokoloff 3mo ago
I feel like Worldcom got a modest amount of press coverage at the time but probably would have gotten a lot more if it hadn’t been front-run by the Enron scandal.
- adastra22 3mo ago
  Why are these always one letter off from what they actually are? Worldcom-> World-con. Madoff -> Made-off
  - N_Lens 3mo ago
    Palantir are upfront!
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Scam Bankrun-Fraud
  - hyperadvanced 3mo ago
    Normative determinism is the term for that
    - pinkmuffinere 3mo ago
      *Nominative Determinism. Named after John Nominative, who first proposed the effect.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

big85 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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.

jackbucks 3mo ago

YES

phendrenad2 3mo ago

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.

advisedwang 3mo ago
In this particular case I believe it was mostly individual accredited investors, putting in anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. The case has records of the fund trying to get GE in too, but it doesn't look like they succeeded. Some of those individual investors may have been pretty small fry so I do feel a bit bad for them, but on the other hand if you want to dabble in Venture Capital, you need to be savvy.

bhickey 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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?

JMiao 3mo ago

https://hannahhowell.com/stuart-frost-drained-14m-from-investors-startups-and-walked-away-for-150k/ https://hannahhowell.com/stuart-frost-drained-14m-from-inves...

kubb 3mo ago
I wish I could pull this off on a smaller scale and just switch to a fulfilling life afterwards. The years I spend on nonsense will never come back.

3vo-ai 3mo ago

[flagged]

nikhiladithyan_ 3mo ago

[flagged]

satisfice 3mo ago

I bet those henchmen in Bond movies thought that the volcano base was merely a government-funded secret research facility.

jaimsam 3mo ago

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anovikov 3mo ago

I wonder what's even wrong about it. This is how funds normally operate: motivation for investors is upside, motivation for coders is to be able to code and get paid for it, motivation for people who run this circus, is fees. And yes i can relate to that. In 26 years of career, about half of the money i made and all of the money i saved, came from 3 clients (over the course of less than 5 years), all 3 of them being scams - one swindled investors for a thing he knew can't work, another one did a legit thing but when he realised it failed, exited to a dumb megacorp and ran away (literally vanished) when they started to realise they've been duped, and one more was in crypto field and whole project - which to me, all the way until past release, looked like a legit porn site - had a goal of imitating activity/interest to boost value of a crypto token. Even before i picked up coding - and i did it when i was in early teens around the fall of Communism - i knew coding as a separate field and a business was invented exactly for that purpose: it's a lot easier to steal money that way because it's a lot easier to inflate costs vs buying physical products. No surprise the party is over. People can't be duped for too long.

ChuckMcM 3mo ago

As someone who 'grew up' my career in Silicon Valley my first exposure to this sort of shenanigans was during the dot com bubble, where general partners at newish VC firms were fleecing limited partners (GP's got a salary to 'manage' the fund, LP's were the source of money for the funds.) They would tell the LPs well only one in ten is a real banger, looks like the fund you invested in wasn't a winner. It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again." The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it. But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.

naishoya 3mo ago
I like the analogy, but lets stretch it to the situation where workers can see that there is fraud and still do nothing. The passengers on the bus are not blameless if they know or have reason to know that the bus driver was drinking before or while they went down a road with pedestrian crossings. They are not blameless if they take no action, but to sit in the seats and wait to see if anyone gets hit or they all get away with it and arrive at the destination. Or if they remain in the seats after the first pedestrian and 'hope' it wont happen more. And how 'blameless' are the 'non-passengers' along for the ride to perform ongoing maintenance and provide fuel and snacks to the driver while on this imaginary trip to hell. So, I'm all out of 'you're not really the asshole' cards as we watch the whole kleptocratic SV system run Theranos' style over the total sum of human creative production. Anyone who participates in building the toolchains of tyranny is complicit in the abuse of people with those tools, even if it just a tiny bit. Sorry, not sorry, if that pricks the consciences of a few pricks; those that can feel shame are the better for it, and those who feel it not we must all be wary of.

solid_fuel 3mo ago

I'm sorry, this sucks. It must be painful to know that you were used to defraud people, and that you worked for years on something which was never intended to be successful. From my perspective, you're a victim of this fraud too. I think the pursuit of meaningful work is an important way many people find meaning in life, and it sucks that someone took advantage of you. From this piece, I get the impression that you would never have spent so much time and effort on this role if you had known it was just a way to scam investors. So, don't be hard on yourself. It's normal to feel guilty, but if you didn't have a perspective on the entire company or knowledge of the fraud, I don't know what you could have done.

p0w3n3d 3mo ago

I look at everything now as a journey not a destination. When connecting one's work carrier with a bank, one must keep in mind that some other people might have joined the organisation because of quite distinct reasons than we did. So yes there might be a fraud ongoing in our company, but it's not our fault

weatherlite 3mo ago

This is a fantastic outcome - lots of money and U.S citizenship! And your product didn't even hurt anyone unlike working for Meta, in fact no one even used it!

MASNeo 3mo ago

I have been in fairly senior roles at large corporates. The amount of money that is squandered without serious evaluation for something managers „want“ is mind boggling. I have often wondered whether corporate budgets are actually investor fraud in disguise.

xivzgrev 3mo ago

This arrangement is bizarre. The VC business model is predicated on extreme growth. The last thing you would want to do is siphon dividends out vs reinvesting into growth. They must have preyed on newbie founders, dangling large valuations. Oh the fees? Well you will make it big and it will be a drop in the bucket!

advisedwang 3mo ago
I suspect initially the fund was earnestly trying to make some huge exits, and the incubator was really a support for that. But as time went on it looked less and less like a big exit was in the cards. A stream of money to fund a lavish life was right there for the taking, and perhaps it's human nature to shift the priority to keeping the good times going.

danans 3mo ago

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

patkai 3mo ago
Behind many, but I sincerely hope not "every". A trivial counterexample is Warren Buffet: he simply saved and invested. Or consider inventors with patents.
- n4r9 3mo ago
  Buffet is well known for acquisitions that pushed the boundaries of fair competition, and investments in other companies that did the same, or otherwise pursued deeply unethical practices. But he's trodden carefully around the law, so any "crime" would be a moral crime against society rather than a legally criminal act.
- worldthruword 3mo ago
  https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-generated-double-markets-043109009.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-generated-doub... https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2022746722191938017 https://x.com/theallinpod/status/2022746722191938017 Chamath explains Warren Buffett’s secret to success: “Markets thrive when there's information asymmetry” “Now I'm gonna get a lot of people really upset with me.” “This is an example of Warren Buffet's returns pre- and post-Reg FD. Now what do you see?” “His returns were double the market returns when this kind of information sharing was legal.” “And the minute that it became illegal and you had to act on the same edge as everybody else, his returns went to the market return. He generated zero alpha. In fact, he probably, on the margins, lost a little bit.” “So this is the single best investor in the world. This is what happens when you have information symmetry.” “So it's just meant to explain that markets thrive when there's asymmetry. Billions and billions of dollars will be made in asymmetry.” “The prediction markets today, unless they are regulated out of existence or shut down, will look like the stock market pre-Reg FD, and there's nothing we can do except choose not to bet it, because otherwise what you're going to have are a ton of sharps taking advantage of a ton of squares.”

blobbers 3mo ago

Yes it did, but you are not your job. Your current state may be based on a fraud, but the fraud is not you.

t43562 3mo ago

At least you didn't work for an online gambling company....or assist with manipulating the political views of billions of people to their detriment...or work on better ways of killing people... Also, who hasn't worked at a company that produced a product and then abandoned it? I feel like that has happened often to me - many years of effort for nothing. It's not fraud exactly but it represents almost the same thing other than the intention.

worldthruword 3mo ago
> Also, who hasn't worked at a company that produced a product and then abandoned it? I feel like that has happened often to me - many years of effort for nothing. It's not fraud exactly but it represents almost the same thing other than the intention. You can look at it this way. It trained you to be a better developer. So you got paid to learn and solve problems which developed skills will be used somewhere else.

estetlinus 3mo ago

Well, you did good and got paid. It all sounds very serendipitous. Isn’t like 99% of all tech fraud?

xnickb 3mo ago

Wanna know what the guy is up to now? Sure enough, he is a founder of an "AI That Knows Why" company.

yowo 3mo ago

I have a serious question for everyone who reading through comments: If you get a great paying position in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed, given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove, just an engineer closing issues and merging patches, would you reject it?

lowdude 3mo ago
I don't think I could give an honest reply in the abstract setting without actually being in that situation. But a significant factor would likely also be the actual work and whether it is something I find particularly interesting/exciting to work on. Then again, if it is doomed to fail from the start, it is unlikely that I would really enjoy working on it.
kakacik 3mo ago
Why? If it isn't illegal, nor amoral, just a moonshot then its basically typical SV startup reaching for stars. Sure, 99.9% of startups may not get there but we saw in the past some wild unexpected successes. Plus things may change along the path as markets evolve and if they pivot successfully into new areas they may win the first mover situation, even if original mission won't ever be accomplished.
RaSoJo 3mo ago
I would consider your two statements as distinct and separate: > "in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed" > "given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove" Consider: 1/ If it's a biz that's purposely mucking about without success...or a loss making entity for tax breaks: I have no problem in working here (Consider that I am in my 40s, used/abused in various "start-ups" and burnt-out. I need the money, and I'll take it.) 2/ If it's a company involved in criminal fraud: I'd run away as fast as my feet could take me. The problem with fraud is that eventually the authorities will catch up. If the owner is a criminal, he'll do anything to save his backside...even throwing innocent employees under the bus. You might be exonerated eventually. But that eventually might take years...decades.

edge_trader_41 3mo ago

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walkjoy8 3mo ago

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ayesha-ashu 3mo ago

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randallsquared 3mo ago

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

RandyRanderson 3mo ago

In Canada this is a huge scam. The government advertizes that it's funding incubators. Great, right? The money doesn't go to the start ups - it all goes to large tech companies like IBM, etc, because, obviously, IBM knows about innovation. The cover is that the government doesn't know tech so it will give money to trusted partners and they will choose who to give the money to because they've been doing such a great job innovating in Canada. Surprise: they gave the money to themselves! You might have wondered why all these incubators in the crypto era were desperate to get you to go to their office. You might have also wondered: what fool is paying for this nice office in downtown Toronto where the prices are crazy-high? The taxpayer. All of that money was completely wasted and worse, little of it went to actual start ups.

franze 3mo ago
Sounds like Europe....
- cs02rm0 3mo ago
  https://www.plexal.com/our-partners/ https://www.plexal.com/our-partners/
- cubefox 3mo ago
  Yes, I remember someone explaining that a similar thing happens with all kinds of research grants in the EU. Some companies specialize in writing very complex grant proposals in just such a way that they are likely accepted, and then produce some useless bullshit reports. Actual specialized companies with expertise in the matters the grant is about don't have the knowledge of how to fill out grant proposals in a way that gets them accepted by bureaucrats because they don't know how the decision process works. Depressing.
  - timkam 3mo ago
    Indeed. Also, companies with a genuine and socially at least somewhat useful business model prefer focusing on customers buying their actual products as the main revenue source. The state- and EU-driven funding ecosystem is so convoluted that one either mostly ignores it in favor of value-creating work, or specializes in exploiting it, unfortunately.

jessinra98 3mo ago

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greengreengrass 3mo ago

Not commenting specifically on the companies and VC/PE firm discussed there, but this and the comments demonstrate just how many firms exist to do things other than make a profit. I think I understand why people with the big bucks can play these games and why it's tax-efficient for them. I often reflect on how much I've grown personally in companies that are clearly not going anywhere. Trying to do more with less can lead to... interesting... technical solutions. And in every company I've worked in, I have at one time or another been on a "cloud costs reduction" squad, which normally shortly precedes my deciding to move on from said company. I've also worked at the opposite end of this scale – companies with so much cash and no desire to turn a profit any time soon - and that's more problematic, as there's just no pressure to actually ship anything and every problem (and I mean _every_ problem) is solved with money or by hiring specialists. There's sometimes a fine line between a legitimate business pursuing ambitious goals that are ultimately doomed to failure and one that exists to commit fraud. And it's often not possible for an employee (even a fairly high-ranking employee), who often has limited information, to determine which is which.

gpjanik 3mo ago

A lot (all?) VCs charge some form of fees (typically capped at 20% of the entire fund, split in various percentages through 4 years investing, 4 divesting period). These fees often are only paid out only based on the actively deployed capital, and are not the only incentive: the main incentive is shares in gains (carry). The reason they're based on actively deployed capital isn't that the LPs (people who give VCs money to invest) want them to deploy the money in a stupid way, but they definitely don't want VCs to get the fees if the money wasn't invested. Therefore, VCs: 1. Want to raise as much money as possible 2. Want to deploy as much money as possible Ideally, as quickly as possible. There's nothing fraudulent about the idea of calculating VCs fees in various scenarios. There's however the extremely dodgy part of the portfolio companies paying their investor (VC) fees for anything. This is an obvious conflict of interests, and should never happen, but I personally know of multiple VC funds here in Europe (will skip the names to not get sued, lol) who base their entire operational model on funding shitty companies that have 0 chance of success, charging them for the office space and often "shared services" they provide. Unsure if this is a regulatory overlooking, or something that's deliberately legal, but IMHO shouldn't be. Probably they talked their LPs into agreeing to this on paper.

dbg31415 3mo ago

Why don't you ask Twitter, Tesla, or SpaceX employees how they feel about the situation.

cwoolfe 3mo ago

I've come to realize this: we are all raising money more than we admit. Whether it's from venture capital or donations to fund non-profits, money is more political than I realized because it's all about the idea of value, which is subjectively determined by humans.

BLACKCRAB 3mo ago

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DobarDabar 3mo ago

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gwbas1c 3mo ago

I lived in Silicon Valley for almost a decade, and stuck my fingers in the startup scene for awhile. One thing I learned is that a some people running startups are "poker players." They run the company to keep up appearances: Their goal is to get more investment and eventually sell the business at a profit. (And then what the purchaser does is their business.) There's nothing wrong with working for companies like this! You might not realize it going in; or the investors might see through the bluff and replace the leadership, creating a great job for you. In contrast, you could join a business run by honest people, and they could sell out to a poker player who then ruins it. Or, more typically, the honest people turn out to be so-so business people and the business fails. (This is what happened when I tried to run a startup.) At the end of the day, working for a startup always involves risk and the leadership structure will always change as the company grows, pivots, or fails.

__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago

I was worried that here in the US it's fraud all the way down, but just yesterday I met somebody who actually makes things, so I guess it's just fraud most of the way down.

c-b 3mo ago

I mean, there are far more nefarious things happening in big tech, so if the author feels they were somehow being "used" in an immoral sense, I think they should feel ok about themselves based on the types of knowingly wrong but technically legal things happening in large companies.

hiccuphippo 3mo ago

Sounds straight out of The Producers.

RajT88 3mo ago

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

akitowerns 3mo ago

What's striking is how long it takes to notice. The incentives to keep believing the job is real — salary, identity, colleagues — are much stronger than the incentive to question the foundation. Sunk cost at the organizational level.

xkcd1963 3mo ago

Big tech companies are a scam in themselves. Doing something useful (that would pay itself by definition) while the main revenue is advertising? really?

splitstud 3mo ago

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siriuslv 3mo ago

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silexia 3mo ago

Bootstrap yourself, or investors take everything.