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.
It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.
"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.
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.
All good grifts let some "little people" in on it so they go to bat for it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
the bank would go through cycles of "we need to reduce our headcount and outsource everything" and then 4 years later "we need to reduce spend on contractors and retain more knowledge and expertise in house". he'd survived multiple waves of it, switching back and forth between being an employee or a contractor through some external agency, as management trends changed, while essentially doing the same job.
Bit that doesn't really work in knowledge systems. Even with the best documentation people will build up knowledge that no one has, and their departure is costly.
Equally at the end of their contract a lot of time will need to be spend on a handover which slows down others even more.
So what happened? The contractor went via another middle man, which checked the correct boxes on the form, and everybody was happy.
I dont think they're baffled, they just trying to show they're attempting to keep costs under control.
That's 'normal' in Canada and France.
[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/120...
Your bosses might not actually care about the work you do, but your users and customers sure will.
I did that in the health sector of my local gov, the whole place was full of consultant who either got contracted directly from Oracle, used to work at Oracle before but moved there or took the Oracle pill early on and never got the idea to see how things get done elsewhere. It was impossible to ship anything that's not made of Oracle technologies and that was not an accident but a deliberate construction.
> Did my old job only exist because the Product Owners didn't realize we didn't have product-market fit?
Which is maybe as it should be, but it does pit agonized debates over detailed technical work in perspective.
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.)
imagine a world where SBF didn’t defraud the crypto world.
in that world anthropic may have not existed.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure enough, he is a founder of an "AI That Knows Why" company.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
