22 ms·

NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup

1328 points by pimterry 5y ago

kvakvs 5y ago
It is a valid behaviour to not join a company who use a technology you dislike. Rather continue looking for a job which will make you happy waking up every morning and starting your work.
0x456 5y ago
"We want to hire people like you to go and interview at other companies." "During the interview, you'll evangelise our clients' products."
prepend 5y ago
How much were they offering? I’ve heard of these kinds of “grassroots” type promotion jobs and the pay seems so low as to not be worth the bother.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  That's the thing, not only is this unethical, I can't imagine how much you would have to pay me to make it worthwhile to interview on a regular basis ...
  - prepend 5y ago
    Right. It seems unethical as well as misrepresented. Anyone good enough to actually do this must be charging $500-1000 or something per interview. So if it’s only $50/hour or something then the customers probably aren’t getting a good value of grassroots promotion either.
miga 5y ago
Many companies ask for enthusiasm for a particular technology in their job postings. I think this is a better explanation that having many companies that lose their money on unviable business model.
fortran77 5y ago
I'm certain this is being done today, too. See Rust, etc.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Yeah, the phrase Developer Advocacy is still being used, and I think most 'big' libraries and tools have it - it's a form of marketing. Ideally they manage to astroturf themselves into becoming popular, so that the people work with the tools become advocates themselves. I mean it works, to a point, as a sales / marketing tactic.
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
  What's the problem with rust?
  - 0x456 5y ago
    Often you'd see HN posts near the top, with few votes or comments. Although Rust sounds amazing, it has a Submarine* feel to it. Would the project be on the front page if the title didn't mention Rust? I think Haskell had this problem years ago as well: it was like any obscure algorithm you'd lookup on Wikipedia had sample code ... in Haskell only. * http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
    - hobofan 5y ago
      This is often being done by the mods of the site though, and not by the submitters. I've had it happen to a post of me, and I've seen multiple comments by other submitters that the post title was added to include "in Rust". I'm not sure what the incentive for the mods is here (overall higher engagement on the site?), or if it's still being done, but from a certain point on, I think it could even be harmful to Rust, by preventing it from being recognized as a "normal/mainstream" language.
- simias 5y ago
  I'm doing it for free! Jokes aside I don't think it's a plausible example, because it's not like Rust is a product people directly buy. Whose interest would it be to astroturf Rust adoption? If people only pretend to use a programing language, it's not going anywhere and not going to generate revenue for anybody.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
The author says they did not ultimately take the job, so, does that mean they had to sign an NDA just to interview?
- m_a_g 5y ago
  Signing an NDA before the interviews is a very common practice (unfortunately)
  - zeusk 5y ago
    maybe in UK, never heard of in US.
    - hhh 5y ago
      I have signed multiple NDAs for interviews in the states.
      - JoBrad 5y ago
        I’ve never done this in the states. It seems borderline unethical to require someone to sign a contract without any compensation.
        brianwawok 5y ago
        That’s ok, thousands of other people will. Seems weird to let leak “secrets “ during an interview that require a NDA though. Just be vague and tell them the secrets later.
        OJFord 5y ago
        And scrub whiteboards etc. every time you want to show around (or even just to the interview room) an interviewee?
        5y ago
MattGaiser 5y ago
> Oh, we work with loads of recruitment consultants. They get paid for every decent candidate who gets interviewed, so they give us a cut of their commission. Is this a thing? Could I offer to go interview at all the crappy companies I get recruiters for in exchange for $100?
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  http://www.June.win http://www.June.win
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Signed up.
- peteretep 5y ago
  No, recruiters get paid for placements, not interviews
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Some do and some get paided per interview, per resume. And some you have to pay.
    - peteretep 5y ago
      > some get paided per interview I guess over a large enough number you’ll find people doing anything, but with a long history with the recruitment industry in a couple of countries, I’ve never seen this. With good reason too: there is no end to the number of fake developer CVs I could generate. > some you have to pay In many countries that’s illegal, and I’m also yet to see this in the Real World
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    Fronk is like a cashback type of deal, but you also have to push ads.
incrudible 5y ago
"And it makes me wonder if Fronk is still out there...?" Fronk realized that people will voluntarily evangelize technology if it meets certain criteria. Having signed an NDA, I can not disclose what those criteria are.
huhtenberg 5y ago
Reminds me of something. I used to work with a senior guy who went freelance and then bunched together with several other freelancers, also seniors, to form... "an operation". The MO was that one of them would go and interview for a permanent job, impress the heck out of everyone and then say "there's more like me, be happy to help you out, but on a contract basis and as a group." They were basically bait-n-switching them to outsource parts of their development and in some cases it worked, because their fees were very reasonable. And the fees were reasonable because they did very little of the actual work themselves and instead re-outsourced it to some Ukranain dudes. Looked fishy as fuck and I'm not sure how it ended because I felt out of touch with the guy.
- fsloth 5y ago
  Bait-and-switch is consulting 101. Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work. That's what you generally get with any big-name consulting firm. This is not necessarily bad! The senior in this case is more like the "brand" of the operation. And - sorry about going now into stereotypes - Good Eastern europeans are really good coders. Would not hesitate a second outsourcing any development to ukraine or romania if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value.
  - warrenm 5y ago
    >Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work That's not "Bait-and-switch" That's smart business The "most senior person" (or, more likely, team) is still available - they're just acting as an escalation point, not doing grunt work Same basic concept as having a secretary to do the [necessary] grunt work of any specialized employee/team You don't send Babe Ruth to fetch foul balls, you send Babe Ruth to hit homeruns But without the ball boys going for fouls, Babe Ruth doesn't get to hit as many, or as fast
  - buran77 5y ago
    Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project. With IT consulting or MSPs this tends to be a far more extensive practice than in other fields from my experience. Whether the last hop of the outsourcing is in India, Poland, or Spain is not that important if you still get what you expect. The problem is when you get a fraction of what you expected or pay for. Interviews have been used as opportunities for evangelization, attempts to get technical assistance, or extract information about the competition or potential customers since forever. I haven't seen one which was overtly illegal but they're all certainly as shady as they get.
ackbar03 5y ago
This doesn't sound like a bad business model. Not sure if its the sort of thing to be VC backed but sounds like it should work
- bobthechef 5y ago
  Except that little bit about lying. You're going to an interview under false pretenses (no intention of accepting an offer, thus lying through your actions), lying about using the product you're promoting and how great it is in your experience, lying that you accepted a competing offer elsewhere and so on.
- peytn 5y ago
  Yeah actually maybe offer a little equity on top of flat fee per interview… Edit: not that it’s something I’d personally feel comfortable with ethically
- numpad0 5y ago
  This doesn’t sound like legal though
bhntr3 5y ago
I love the implication that there's this shadow company, Fronk. Seemingly defunct, they're actually thriving secretly behind the facade of a failed startup. Every marketing manager has engaged them privately to boost their numbers. Every developer secretly works for them on the side. But no one anywhere ever talks about it until one day a former consultant notices an expired NDA.
- Breza 5y ago
  Reminds me of the G.K. Chesterton novel where a cop infiltrates a criminal organization only to learn that the entire group is composed of cops who have infiltrated it. I won't name the book to avoid spoilers.
- mathattack 5y ago
  It’s a great conspiracy theory. :-) The reality is the model survived in new firms. This is a strange counterpoint to managers interviewing people to learn about a market.
- gryn 5y ago
  this sound like the backstory of an SCP story waiting to be written.
- kaushalvivek 5y ago
  Fronk sounds like the Fight Club of the developer world. Convincingly wrapped in the busted-startup fabrication, the cult probably lives on. :')
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- itronitron 5y ago
  I would think that Fronk is actually Google, but I doubt that Google would ever put an expiration date on any of their NDAs.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
rcarmo 5y ago
Terence always had a great sense of timing. Loved the Infinidash mention :)
seumars 5y ago
Expired NDA stories are always weirdly insightful. I wonder where I could find a good compilation.
borplk 5y ago
The ethics of this is very clear cut, it's unethical. It's unethical for a company to interview candidates if they don't have the intention of offering anyone a job. And likewise it's unethical for a candidate to attend an interview if they have no intention of considering a potential offer.
- paulcole 5y ago
  I interview all the time for jobs I have no interest in. But I’m wrong about a lot and willing to hear someone else’s pitch. It’s the interviewers job to convince me I should work there. Plus I get interviewing practice and maybe get to meet interesting people.
  - noutella 5y ago
    Yet you could get convinced, which in my eyes makes what you do honest.
    - glitchc 5y ago
      You and a few others have said the same, but I don’t see the honesty angle. Window-shopping is not the same as entering a grocery store to buy milk. The intent is different in both cases regardless of the outcome. I condone the behaviour nor think it’s unethical. Talent should be able to shop the market, just as companies shop the market for talent. Edit: Whoops! Grammar
  - etrautmann 5y ago
    Yes - there are plenty of reasons to interview for a job you may not take. It’s crucial to have multiple offers when negotiating, practice interviewing, understanding the range of cultures, etc. I think it’s quite reasonable to interview somewhere if there’s a 10% chance or greater that you’d work there, which is hard to know before they’ve convinced you throughout the process.
  - acatnamedjoe 5y ago
    There's a big difference between interviewing for a job you're not interested in, but with an open mind, versus interviewing for a job where under no circumstances will you accept the role.
tiku 5y ago
Programming with the Joneses haha.
nicholassmith 5y ago
There's a plot point in Zero History by William Gibson where one of the characters does viral marketing by engaging people in conversation in bars and promoting various things, I always thought it was reasonably neat because we tend to pick things up organically like that. Fascinating to see that companies were actually trying approaches like that in the days where hearing about the hot new tech very much came from conversations with other engineers, rather than the wealth of places we have now for hearing about the latest & (potentially) greatest.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  This actually happened in some places. In Chicago, there were ad agencies who would hire actors to engage in "spontaneous" conversations on the subway about various products. I read a couple of articles about it in the newspaper at the time. This was around 2005ish. It's interesting to think back to that era. I wonder if a book or movie will ever capture the energy, optimism, and audacity of a time when everything seemed possible, urban startups were awash in cheap cash, and there were so many young people full of vim, ready to reinvent the world.
  - rswail 5y ago
    > This was around 2005ish. It's interesting to think back to that era. I wonder if a book or movie will ever capture the energy, optimism, and audacity of a time when everything seemed possible, urban startups were awash in cheap cash, and there were so many young people full of vim, ready to reinvent the world. I think it's sad that you don't thing there are many young people out there today, full of vim, ready to reinvent the world. They are always there, the next generation. They will have lived through a Great Recession and a pandemic, they know that climate change is real and must be avoided. The opportunities are endless and it's only older people that are holding them back.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      > they know that climate change is real and must be avoided. Uh, we knew that in 2005 already, quite a lot of educational projects following the Kyoto protocols !
tyingq 5y ago
Sounds silly, but I imagine it could have an impact. Especially if combined with stuffing the name of the product into the resume. I know if I starting seeing "ProductX" in a few resumes, and hadn't heard of it, I'd look it up.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
That's a riot! Guerrilla marketing at its most sleazy. Modern jargon is crazy. Really hard to verify. I guess that's why these "draw spunky" tests are so prevalent, these days, because we can't trust a word out of anyone's mouth. Makes me wonder why we would hire folks we can't trust, but I'm old-fashioned, and out of touch with what the kids are into, these days...
- beckingz 5y ago
  what is a "draw spunky" test? Besides horrifyingly named.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    I think he's referring to those white board coding sessions where the interviewer forgets that you're a human being and not a dog. "Draw Spunky" as a reference to the ubiquitous "If you can draw Tippy, you can be an artist!" ads in the back of comic books where a kid would connect the dots to form a turtle and then send five bucks to some fly-by-night diploma mill. Putting the two concepts together as "draw Spunky" you get a real-life CAPTCHA. Or maybe I've been smoking crack again.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      No, you got it. I’m old, so I remember “Draw Spunky.” I refer to the test, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-specification/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-...
  - comicjk 5y ago
    I'm guessing this is a psych/creativity test about drawing an abstract concept, like courage. "Spunky" would then be the abstract concept of spunkiness.
  - jfk13 5y ago
    I guess the Americans here may be blissfully unaware that this word could have other connotations on the right-hand side of the pond. https://british-american-dictionary.com/bad-words/spunk-uk/ https://british-american-dictionary.com/bad-words/spunk-uk/
avensec 5y ago
Similar but different. I recently closed out a Quality Engineering/CoE position and conducted two awkward phone screens where the "candidates" were running sales pitches for their side-gigs. The discussions started normally, but quickly became transparent. When I mentioned a challenge, they explained how they used some product/company to help with the solution. I thought it sounded familiar but couldn't figure out from where. After the candidate answered a second question similarly, I searched and found the site. The product is one of these consultancy projects is a thin wrapper on top of some other popular product. It finally hit me- Why the product sounded familiar is because I saw it on this candidate's LinkedIn page, listed as a founder. The other candidate, same situation, only he was a "board member."
mberning 5y ago
Reminds me of the guy that created a bunch of fake dating profiles in a small-ish town and essentially did a denial of service attack against other potential suitors.
lmilcin 5y ago
I had a candidate once. He was way overqualified for the position, so I asked him "Why do you want to work for us?" He said he doesn't, he just wanted to "sharpen his interviewing skills". He was very surprised I have unceremoniously ended the meeting immediately.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Suppose he had said: "The market is heating up and I'm looking around. You look like you're doing interesting work, and I think that I could prove my real value to you in a relatively short amount of time."
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    > "Why do you want to work for us?" "That's what I'm here to find out. Tell me, why should I pick you?"
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      This is bad take, very unlikely to get any favors from the recruiter. You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint. You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself. It is possible this gets overlooked or you might even get somebody impressed, especially if they are an engineer and share the sentiment, but very unlikely if it is going to be your future manager and he doesn't know anything else about you. Here is better way if you really absolutely need to go this route: "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed." Everybody knows you want to profit. Here you show it may even be possible for this to be beneficial to both sides.
      - myWindoonn 5y ago
        What you've revealed in this thread is a callous greed and desire to exploit your employees. But none of us are impressed by that. Rather, what we want in an employer is somebody who will leave us alone and not harm the world. It is up to you to show us that you're a respectful and decent employer. At the end of the day, it's not like you could write your own code. So you need to beg us to work for you, not the other way around.
PaulHoule 5y ago
It's funny -- this isn't too foreign to the way I think these days.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
Given the deeply unethical hiring and interviewing practices across the entire industry, I would not be worried about the ethics of leveraging the process for the benefit of the "smaller guy".
dogman144 5y ago
Reminds me of this threat model: Long term moles at a company, able to climb high and perform well due to remote work which enables: - never really meeting the mole - the “mole” is a superstar because they have a team of corporate raider-employed 10x’ers evaluating and executing everything that this mole does at work. The mole’s code is written by 3x MIT grads hot swapping on the keyboard. The mole’s biz ideas come from a few HBS grads. And so on. Productivity, business intuition, and engineering talent is off the charts for this mole. It rises far enough in the hierarchy such that it maneuvers the company towards favorable action for that corporate raider. Every idea the mole suggests, the corporate raider works in the background to enable via favorable market conditions. Whoever is the public face of the mole’a reputation might be in flames if found out, but what’s that vs netting 3% of a corporate buyout valuation.
- slumdev 5y ago
  It's an interesting idea, but ascending the ladder (beyond "senior" or "line manager") usually has very little to do with productive output.
  - dogman144 5y ago
    Right, but in come the MBAs and acting classes, and corporate raider smoothing the path on all strategic decisions this mole makes.
    - slumdev 5y ago
      Even doing all the right things, it's so rare to ascend without quitting. Spending 3 years, earning a single promotion, and then (not immediately but shortly after) quitting and going somewhere else (for another promotion) is the surest route if applied consistently. Another route is to parlay one's background as a senior at a large company into an outsized role at a small company. Perhaps even CTO if it's a startup. After a few years as CTO, that person can work his way back into senior management at bigcorp. It's difficult to see how someone could turn this into a profitable business. But if the backer isn't interested in profit, it's a great way to get assets inside the upper echelons of a lot of major companies...
werber 5y ago
Now I'm worried I've done that job with Fronk and was not paid. There's a handful of companies, with Algolia coming to mind first, that I've evangalized in interviews because the product did fix a huge problem.
cityzen 5y ago
shout out to AWS InfiniDash!
gwbas1c 5y ago
IMO: Part of the problem of "Fronk" is the assumption that everyone is a salesperson. IMO, developers who are also good salespeople, and enjoy selling, are a rare breed. They can probably find more rewarding work elsewhere.
z3t4 5y ago
Sometimes "a technology" can have a multi million marketing budget, and sometimes there is zero budget for anything related to it. And you don't really know... Sometimes you recommend a technology that you only heard people talk good about, whom in turn has never used it, just heard others talk good about...
tfehring 5y ago
I've interviewed a few DS candidates from teams that were very invested in particular data/ML platforms who I could have sworn were doing this. ("How would you implement X if $PLATFORM didn't implement it for you?" "I'm not sure, but I don't see a reason not to just use $PLATFORM.") I never really thought they were doing this, and I think they were employed by big well-known companies (definitely not the company that makes $PLATFORM). Just kind of a weird pattern.
- mmcdermott 5y ago
  It would almost make me feel better to find out they were doing this. The number of people who can't think laterally beyond the tool in front of them is scary.
altdataseller 5y ago
Fun story: I actually did something like this but on the opposite end of the spectrum. I would interview candidates, not intending to hire them but tell them about my product and offered them a free trial at the end of the interview. Didn’t work as well obviously since most didn’t work for another company at the time and it was a B2B product
BongoMcCat 5y ago
Why not name the company?
- creddit 5y ago
  I would bet because it's not a true story.
danvesma 5y ago
I was once asked to sign an NDA in order to discuss developing an app for someone. Upon signing, I learned that they wanted to make an App that let people check their makeup on their phone, without using the camera, by simply converting the pixels to 'mirror' colour. NEXT!
- Andrex 5y ago
  I had to re-read this several times to even understand what they were asking. That's absolutely insane.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  You mean turning the phone off?
  - leke 5y ago
    Easiest app to develop ever.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
wly_cdgr 5y ago
I definitely would have taken the job and then accepted the first good offer I got out of it
HumblyTossed 5y ago
> Every once in a while, I'll be interviewing a candidate who starts waxing lyrical about how rewriting everything in today's flavour of JavaScript really helped their last company. Or how their bosses were impressed with what this cool new bit of tech can do. Or why they could never work anywhere which didn't use this specific code editor. I do sometimes wonder if this is how popular frameworks, etc get ... um... popular. Not that I think there's a "Fronk" doing it, but, well, many Fronks.
- mmcdermott 5y ago
  A lot of conference talks are little more than marketing. So you work at a big-ish company and either write or evangelize your framework there first, then give a talk about it that advertises its benefits. The idea of doing this through interviews is painfully slow by comparison to the number of people that will listen to a talk or a user group presentation and send links to it later.
darepublic 5y ago
Which way I fly is Fronk; myself am Fronk; And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the Fronk I suffer seems a Knorf.
- jakeva 5y ago
  I had to know so I googled it. Paradise Lost, John Milton. The original quote is "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven."
adverbly 5y ago
What about if a company used their own employees for this? Having them apply to their customers, and also let the employees accept a job offer if they didn't want to match it. More/Less ethical? Sounds slightly more ethical to me. Perhaps less effective, but I've heard crazier growth hacking ideas...
deleted 5y ago
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pgroverman 5y ago
Corporate Espionage is real.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
Not a particularly interesting story. I bet there's tons more out there. Hoping for some anonymous and fresh HN accounts to pop up in this thread.
lkrubner 5y ago
Anyone interested in a story written in defiance of an NDA, I give you "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps": https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo... I wrote this because it seemed important to warn people about the dark corners of the startup world. So much of the coverage of startups is pure hype,so we need more books that offer a sober, realistic view of how chaotic these places can be. Oddly enough, the startup seemingly died in 2018, and one of the Board members went to jail, but (I just learned) they apparently got an injection of new capital and now they are trying it all again.
- ElijahLynn 5y ago
  That looks like a good read. Can you publish it on Google Play Books too? I am not in the Kindle ecosystem.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  I bought your book, it’s a fun (frightening) read so far! Did you ever find out why John’s emails look like they’re written by a drunk and dyslexic person?
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    No, but I was just contacted by a programmer who worked there after me, and who had just read my book. The programmer told me that the bad spelling continues. He joked "That was a nice touch. Anyone who knows John knows about the bad spelling." John was just sloppy and uncaring I think. The company ran out of money and died, but I've just been told that in 2018 they got a new investor and the project came back to life. I hope you enjoy the rest of the story.
tablespoon 5y ago
>> Is this... what's the word... ethical? > "Our investors think so!..." Oh boy.
mromanuk 5y ago
It's interesting how they saw an untapped marketing channel to sell more garbage, at least it was creative.
tlholaday 5y ago
Randall Munroe "Suspicion": https://xkcd.com/632/ https://xkcd.com/632/
throwaway2939 5y ago
Reminds me of when I worked at the early stages of a (now large) startup (I'm sure most of you have heard of the company), the CEO used to go to industry conferences and sit on panels with other competitors, intentionally giving terrible advice to throw others astray. He'd come back to the office and brag about the shitty advice he gave that everyone was eating up. This is why I don't go to conferences anymore.
analog31 5y ago
I interviewed a guy once, after pleasantries he reached into his bag and pulled out a prototype of his invention, which he was trying to sell. It was a fascinating conversation, I basically let him educate me on its theory of operation, then it was the next person's turn on the interview team.
polynomial 5y ago
Maybe it's just bc InfiniDash was used as the example, but I had to keep reminding myself that this was real and not some completely made up parody. Now I really want to know how long Fronk lasted and if this sort of thing actually happens nowadays?
billytetrud 5y ago
This is some real life creepy pasta
Iv 5y ago
It should be taught somewhere at school that if your job involves lying, there is probably something deeply unethical about it.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  That's taught in kindergarten.
pts_ 5y ago
Jerk recruiters waste my time by calling me whole day for interviews which they get paid for. I should be paid for interviewing too.
spoonjim 5y ago
Native advertising taken to the extreme.
forgingahead 5y ago
Consensus building is a real thing that happens every day all the time. Most of us here who self-identify as "engineers" or "hackers" don't truly understand this - when we code, we rarely build actions by proxy, there are usually very explicit instructions being written and therefore we bias ourselves to assuming the rest of the world also works in an explicit, up-front way. This "startup" had a shady business model and sounds fishy as hell, but sadly every day some group, person, or org is trying to consensus-build us to thinking and feeling in a certain way.
roland35 5y ago
This seems like a service which is impossible to scale! The more well known it becomes, the less effective it will be. That said, some candidates have inspired me to check out a new tech or project from their resume.
mathgenius 5y ago
This sounds a bit like "Ad buddy", from a Netflix sci-fi series called 'Maniac': "If you’re broke, you can sell yourself to an “Ad Buddy,” whereby your bills get paid in exchange for a person accompanying you everywhere and spouting advertisements, like a human pop-up you can’t close." https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/maniac-statue-extra-liberty-ad-buddy-explained-1146114/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/maniac-statue-e...
jtwaleson 5y ago
I've often played around with the idea of doing reverse interviews for finding badly needed senior talent. After some time I realized that interviews are typically done by senior talent... So the idea is to go to good companies, make a good connection with the interviewers, and contact them later to try and hire them.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  I've seen this happen to a colleague. He interviewed someone who turned out to be the founder of some medical equipment startup and a week later he was working for him.
deleted 5y ago
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pjmanroe 5y ago
I worked for a company that only had one in-house programmer. The outsourced to the Ukraine for most of their programming needs. This was 20 years ago.
pjmanroe 5y ago
I worked for a company 20 years ago that only had one in-house programmer. The rest were contracted from the Ukraine. About 5 of them.
neilv 5y ago
Early on in dotcoms, what was called "buzz marketing" seemed to be a thing. (Going way beyond traditional "advertorials", etc.) I saw startups in the business of doing that. They were either executing it directly, or rewarding third-party operatives for doing it (in what later might be called "gig economy"). I haven't heard as much about it lately, but I'm not tracking startups as much. Maybe they're going strong, maybe they became more discreet about it, or maybe the money is in relatively conspicuous advertising (obvious ads on screens backed by modern intel/analytics, influencers, etc.). Interestingly, around the time some startups were figuring out the most society-destroying ways of exploiting people (e.g., "Let's change the world by paying people to manipulate their friends, and see what happens"), Google was doing things like being very clear in distinguishing sponsored placements from objective search hits. (Which had analogous precedent in respectable print publishing, but wasn't obvious that you had to do it in the dotcom gold rush new media, unless you were thoughtfully Don't Be Evil.)
neoCrimeLabs 5y ago
This makes me want to have candidates sign a document that states they are there interview for their own personal employment; not hired or otherwise paid to interview with us for the purposes of intelligence gathering or promotion of products or services. I wonder how enforceable that would be. Probably, "It depends." As my lawyer friends would tell me. :-) I also wonder how many candidates would see that and perhaps question their application to our company.
erdo 5y ago
Hmm, we did actually start using a CI product that we hadn't heard of before, because two people we interviewed mentioned it (after checking it out obviously)
bisRepetita 5y ago
>A company - let's call them "Fronk" - asked me to come in for a consultation about a Developer Advocacy programme So if I follow the logic, the OP must have signed an NDA for a consultation, then they talk about something quite different and fishy, and he feels bound by the NDA not to say anything. Wondering 2 things: is that a valid NDA? Should he have signed such an NDA?
erdo 5y ago
I've encountered a fake candidate before (recruiter with a fake linkedin profile applying for jobs to scope out the market and build contact lists). I don't think they went as far as actually turning up to anyone's interview of course. This particular person claimed to have worked as a senior developer in our team. Someone contacted them to ask who they were, they apologized and removed the linkedin profile. We were originally tipped off by another recruiter who had received the fake candidate's profile for one of their jobs.
ineedasername 5y ago
it makes me wonder if Fronk is still out there... It's definitely still out there in the context of evangelizers who will never consider another tool/language mostly because that's what they learned or resonated with them first. It might still be out there in the sense of paid shills on the level of the author's experience, but I think the majority of paid shills are probably getting their word out in other ways. #hashtagAWSissuperiortoAzure #reallyi'mjustsaying,totalynotpaidoranything
wiredone 5y ago
So is this a real story that just happens to use “Infinidash” as a stand in for their real product name, or is this just another artefact of the Infinidash ruse? https://twitter.com/jna_sh/status/1410178986978775040?s=21 https://twitter.com/jna_sh/status/1410178986978775040?s=21
fragbait65 5y ago
Sounds a bit weird? Who signs an NDA at a job interview?
eyelovewe 5y ago
Brilliant writing
Causality1 5y ago
Spending your work day interviewing for jobs sounds like the circle of hell you get sent to for making people work through lunch. I can't imagine being paid enough to do that.
crummybowley 5y ago
This is basically what google does to get folks to use google products at other companies.
duxup 5y ago
Makes me wonder what the value of "hey some rando guy mentioned this product in an interview" is. I'm thinking not much value.

1328 points by pimterry 5y ago

It is a valid behaviour to not join a company who use a technology you dislike. Rather continue looking for a job which will make you happy waking up every morning and starting your work.

0x456 5y ago

"We want to hire people like you to go and interview at other companies." "During the interview, you'll evangelise our clients' products."

prepend 5y ago

How much were they offering? I’ve heard of these kinds of “grassroots” type promotion jobs and the pay seems so low as to not be worth the bother.

Ensorceled 5y ago
That's the thing, not only is this unethical, I can't imagine how much you would have to pay me to make it worthwhile to interview on a regular basis ...
- prepend 5y ago
  Right. It seems unethical as well as misrepresented. Anyone good enough to actually do this must be charging $500-1000 or something per interview. So if it’s only $50/hour or something then the customers probably aren’t getting a good value of grassroots promotion either.

miga 5y ago

Many companies ask for enthusiasm for a particular technology in their job postings. I think this is a better explanation that having many companies that lose their money on unviable business model.

fortran77 5y ago

I'm certain this is being done today, too. See Rust, etc.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Yeah, the phrase Developer Advocacy is still being used, and I think most 'big' libraries and tools have it - it's a form of marketing. Ideally they manage to astroturf themselves into becoming popular, so that the people work with the tools become advocates themselves. I mean it works, to a point, as a sales / marketing tactic.
_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
What's the problem with rust?
- 0x456 5y ago
  Often you'd see HN posts near the top, with few votes or comments. Although Rust sounds amazing, it has a Submarine* feel to it. Would the project be on the front page if the title didn't mention Rust? I think Haskell had this problem years ago as well: it was like any obscure algorithm you'd lookup on Wikipedia had sample code ... in Haskell only. * http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  - hobofan 5y ago
    This is often being done by the mods of the site though, and not by the submitters. I've had it happen to a post of me, and I've seen multiple comments by other submitters that the post title was added to include "in Rust". I'm not sure what the incentive for the mods is here (overall higher engagement on the site?), or if it's still being done, but from a certain point on, I think it could even be harmful to Rust, by preventing it from being recognized as a "normal/mainstream" language.
simias 5y ago
I'm doing it for free! Jokes aside I don't think it's a plausible example, because it's not like Rust is a product people directly buy. Whose interest would it be to astroturf Rust adoption? If people only pretend to use a programing language, it's not going anywhere and not going to generate revenue for anybody.

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

The author says they did not ultimately take the job, so, does that mean they had to sign an NDA just to interview?

m_a_g 5y ago
Signing an NDA before the interviews is a very common practice (unfortunately)
- zeusk 5y ago
  maybe in UK, never heard of in US.
  - hhh 5y ago
    I have signed multiple NDAs for interviews in the states.
    - JoBrad 5y ago
      I’ve never done this in the states. It seems borderline unethical to require someone to sign a contract without any compensation.
      - brianwawok 5y ago
        That’s ok, thousands of other people will. Seems weird to let leak “secrets “ during an interview that require a NDA though. Just be vague and tell them the secrets later.
        OJFord 5y ago
        And scrub whiteboards etc. every time you want to show around (or even just to the interview room) an interviewee?
        5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

> Oh, we work with loads of recruitment consultants. They get paid for every decent candidate who gets interviewed, so they give us a cut of their commission. Is this a thing? Could I offer to go interview at all the crappy companies I get recruiters for in exchange for $100?

gogopuppygogo 5y ago
http://www.June.win http://www.June.win
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Signed up.
peteretep 5y ago
No, recruiters get paid for placements, not interviews
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Some do and some get paided per interview, per resume. And some you have to pay.
  - peteretep 5y ago
    > some get paided per interview I guess over a large enough number you’ll find people doing anything, but with a long history with the recruitment industry in a couple of countries, I’ve never seen this. With good reason too: there is no end to the number of fake developer CVs I could generate. > some you have to pay In many countries that’s illegal, and I’m also yet to see this in the Real World
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  Fronk is like a cashback type of deal, but you also have to push ads.

incrudible 5y ago

"And it makes me wonder if Fronk is still out there...?" Fronk realized that people will voluntarily evangelize technology if it meets certain criteria. Having signed an NDA, I can not disclose what those criteria are.

huhtenberg 5y ago

Reminds me of something. I used to work with a senior guy who went freelance and then bunched together with several other freelancers, also seniors, to form... "an operation". The MO was that one of them would go and interview for a permanent job, impress the heck out of everyone and then say "there's more like me, be happy to help you out, but on a contract basis and as a group." They were basically bait-n-switching them to outsource parts of their development and in some cases it worked, because their fees were very reasonable. And the fees were reasonable because they did very little of the actual work themselves and instead re-outsourced it to some Ukranain dudes. Looked fishy as fuck and I'm not sure how it ended because I felt out of touch with the guy.

fsloth 5y ago
Bait-and-switch is consulting 101. Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work. That's what you generally get with any big-name consulting firm. This is not necessarily bad! The senior in this case is more like the "brand" of the operation. And - sorry about going now into stereotypes - Good Eastern europeans are really good coders. Would not hesitate a second outsourcing any development to ukraine or romania if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value.
- warrenm 5y ago
  >Entice client in with the most senior person with the impressive resume. Assign someone else to do the actual work That's not "Bait-and-switch" That's smart business The "most senior person" (or, more likely, team) is still available - they're just acting as an escalation point, not doing grunt work Same basic concept as having a secretary to do the [necessary] grunt work of any specialized employee/team You don't send Babe Ruth to fetch foul balls, you send Babe Ruth to hit homeruns But without the ball boys going for fouls, Babe Ruth doesn't get to hit as many, or as fast
- buran77 5y ago
  Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project. With IT consulting or MSPs this tends to be a far more extensive practice than in other fields from my experience. Whether the last hop of the outsourcing is in India, Poland, or Spain is not that important if you still get what you expect. The problem is when you get a fraction of what you expected or pay for. Interviews have been used as opportunities for evangelization, attempts to get technical assistance, or extract information about the competition or potential customers since forever. I haven't seen one which was overtly illegal but they're all certainly as shady as they get.

ackbar03 5y ago

This doesn't sound like a bad business model. Not sure if its the sort of thing to be VC backed but sounds like it should work

bobthechef 5y ago
Except that little bit about lying. You're going to an interview under false pretenses (no intention of accepting an offer, thus lying through your actions), lying about using the product you're promoting and how great it is in your experience, lying that you accepted a competing offer elsewhere and so on.
peytn 5y ago
Yeah actually maybe offer a little equity on top of flat fee per interview… Edit: not that it’s something I’d personally feel comfortable with ethically
numpad0 5y ago
This doesn’t sound like legal though

bhntr3 5y ago

I love the implication that there's this shadow company, Fronk. Seemingly defunct, they're actually thriving secretly behind the facade of a failed startup. Every marketing manager has engaged them privately to boost their numbers. Every developer secretly works for them on the side. But no one anywhere ever talks about it until one day a former consultant notices an expired NDA.

Breza 5y ago
Reminds me of the G.K. Chesterton novel where a cop infiltrates a criminal organization only to learn that the entire group is composed of cops who have infiltrated it. I won't name the book to avoid spoilers.
mathattack 5y ago
It’s a great conspiracy theory. :-) The reality is the model survived in new firms. This is a strange counterpoint to managers interviewing people to learn about a market.
gryn 5y ago
this sound like the backstory of an SCP story waiting to be written.
kaushalvivek 5y ago
Fronk sounds like the Fight Club of the developer world. Convincingly wrapped in the busted-startup fabrication, the cult probably lives on. :')
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
itronitron 5y ago
I would think that Fronk is actually Google, but I doubt that Google would ever put an expiration date on any of their NDAs.
- robertlagrant 5y ago

rcarmo 5y ago

Terence always had a great sense of timing. Loved the Infinidash mention :)

seumars 5y ago

Expired NDA stories are always weirdly insightful. I wonder where I could find a good compilation.

borplk 5y ago

The ethics of this is very clear cut, it's unethical. It's unethical for a company to interview candidates if they don't have the intention of offering anyone a job. And likewise it's unethical for a candidate to attend an interview if they have no intention of considering a potential offer.

paulcole 5y ago
I interview all the time for jobs I have no interest in. But I’m wrong about a lot and willing to hear someone else’s pitch. It’s the interviewers job to convince me I should work there. Plus I get interviewing practice and maybe get to meet interesting people.
- noutella 5y ago
  Yet you could get convinced, which in my eyes makes what you do honest.
  - glitchc 5y ago
    You and a few others have said the same, but I don’t see the honesty angle. Window-shopping is not the same as entering a grocery store to buy milk. The intent is different in both cases regardless of the outcome. I condone the behaviour nor think it’s unethical. Talent should be able to shop the market, just as companies shop the market for talent. Edit: Whoops! Grammar
- etrautmann 5y ago
  Yes - there are plenty of reasons to interview for a job you may not take. It’s crucial to have multiple offers when negotiating, practice interviewing, understanding the range of cultures, etc. I think it’s quite reasonable to interview somewhere if there’s a 10% chance or greater that you’d work there, which is hard to know before they’ve convinced you throughout the process.
- acatnamedjoe 5y ago
  There's a big difference between interviewing for a job you're not interested in, but with an open mind, versus interviewing for a job where under no circumstances will you accept the role.

tiku 5y ago

Programming with the Joneses haha.

nicholassmith 5y ago

There's a plot point in Zero History by William Gibson where one of the characters does viral marketing by engaging people in conversation in bars and promoting various things, I always thought it was reasonably neat because we tend to pick things up organically like that. Fascinating to see that companies were actually trying approaches like that in the days where hearing about the hot new tech very much came from conversations with other engineers, rather than the wealth of places we have now for hearing about the latest & (potentially) greatest.

reaperducer 5y ago
This actually happened in some places. In Chicago, there were ad agencies who would hire actors to engage in "spontaneous" conversations on the subway about various products. I read a couple of articles about it in the newspaper at the time. This was around 2005ish. It's interesting to think back to that era. I wonder if a book or movie will ever capture the energy, optimism, and audacity of a time when everything seemed possible, urban startups were awash in cheap cash, and there were so many young people full of vim, ready to reinvent the world.
- rswail 5y ago
  > This was around 2005ish. It's interesting to think back to that era. I wonder if a book or movie will ever capture the energy, optimism, and audacity of a time when everything seemed possible, urban startups were awash in cheap cash, and there were so many young people full of vim, ready to reinvent the world. I think it's sad that you don't thing there are many young people out there today, full of vim, ready to reinvent the world. They are always there, the next generation. They will have lived through a Great Recession and a pandemic, they know that climate change is real and must be avoided. The opportunities are endless and it's only older people that are holding them back.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    > they know that climate change is real and must be avoided. Uh, we knew that in 2005 already, quite a lot of educational projects following the Kyoto protocols !

tyingq 5y ago

Sounds silly, but I imagine it could have an impact. Especially if combined with stuffing the name of the product into the resume. I know if I starting seeing "ProductX" in a few resumes, and hadn't heard of it, I'd look it up.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

That's a riot! Guerrilla marketing at its most sleazy. Modern jargon is crazy. Really hard to verify. I guess that's why these "draw spunky" tests are so prevalent, these days, because we can't trust a word out of anyone's mouth. Makes me wonder why we would hire folks we can't trust, but I'm old-fashioned, and out of touch with what the kids are into, these days...

beckingz 5y ago
what is a "draw spunky" test? Besides horrifyingly named.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I think he's referring to those white board coding sessions where the interviewer forgets that you're a human being and not a dog. "Draw Spunky" as a reference to the ubiquitous "If you can draw Tippy, you can be an artist!" ads in the back of comic books where a kid would connect the dots to form a turtle and then send five bucks to some fly-by-night diploma mill. Putting the two concepts together as "draw Spunky" you get a real-life CAPTCHA. Or maybe I've been smoking crack again.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    No, you got it. I’m old, so I remember “Draw Spunky.” I refer to the test, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-specification/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-...
- comicjk 5y ago
  I'm guessing this is a psych/creativity test about drawing an abstract concept, like courage. "Spunky" would then be the abstract concept of spunkiness.
- jfk13 5y ago
  I guess the Americans here may be blissfully unaware that this word could have other connotations on the right-hand side of the pond. https://british-american-dictionary.com/bad-words/spunk-uk/ https://british-american-dictionary.com/bad-words/spunk-uk/

avensec 5y ago

Similar but different. I recently closed out a Quality Engineering/CoE position and conducted two awkward phone screens where the "candidates" were running sales pitches for their side-gigs. The discussions started normally, but quickly became transparent. When I mentioned a challenge, they explained how they used some product/company to help with the solution. I thought it sounded familiar but couldn't figure out from where. After the candidate answered a second question similarly, I searched and found the site. The product is one of these consultancy projects is a thin wrapper on top of some other popular product. It finally hit me- Why the product sounded familiar is because I saw it on this candidate's LinkedIn page, listed as a founder. The other candidate, same situation, only he was a "board member."

mberning 5y ago

Reminds me of the guy that created a bunch of fake dating profiles in a small-ish town and essentially did a denial of service attack against other potential suitors.

lmilcin 5y ago

I had a candidate once. He was way overqualified for the position, so I asked him "Why do you want to work for us?" He said he doesn't, he just wanted to "sharpen his interviewing skills". He was very surprised I have unceremoniously ended the meeting immediately.

dsr_ 5y ago
Suppose he had said: "The market is heating up and I'm looking around. You look like you're doing interesting work, and I think that I could prove my real value to you in a relatively short amount of time."
- stickfigure 5y ago
  > "Why do you want to work for us?" "That's what I'm here to find out. Tell me, why should I pick you?"
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    This is bad take, very unlikely to get any favors from the recruiter. You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint. You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself. It is possible this gets overlooked or you might even get somebody impressed, especially if they are an engineer and share the sentiment, but very unlikely if it is going to be your future manager and he doesn't know anything else about you. Here is better way if you really absolutely need to go this route: "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed." Everybody knows you want to profit. Here you show it may even be possible for this to be beneficial to both sides.
    - myWindoonn 5y ago
      What you've revealed in this thread is a callous greed and desire to exploit your employees. But none of us are impressed by that. Rather, what we want in an employer is somebody who will leave us alone and not harm the world. It is up to you to show us that you're a respectful and decent employer. At the end of the day, it's not like you could write your own code. So you need to beg us to work for you, not the other way around.

PaulHoule 5y ago

It's funny -- this isn't too foreign to the way I think these days.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago

Given the deeply unethical hiring and interviewing practices across the entire industry, I would not be worried about the ethics of leveraging the process for the benefit of the "smaller guy".

dogman144 5y ago

Reminds me of this threat model: Long term moles at a company, able to climb high and perform well due to remote work which enables: - never really meeting the mole - the “mole” is a superstar because they have a team of corporate raider-employed 10x’ers evaluating and executing everything that this mole does at work. The mole’s code is written by 3x MIT grads hot swapping on the keyboard. The mole’s biz ideas come from a few HBS grads. And so on. Productivity, business intuition, and engineering talent is off the charts for this mole. It rises far enough in the hierarchy such that it maneuvers the company towards favorable action for that corporate raider. Every idea the mole suggests, the corporate raider works in the background to enable via favorable market conditions. Whoever is the public face of the mole’a reputation might be in flames if found out, but what’s that vs netting 3% of a corporate buyout valuation.

slumdev 5y ago
It's an interesting idea, but ascending the ladder (beyond "senior" or "line manager") usually has very little to do with productive output.
- dogman144 5y ago
  Right, but in come the MBAs and acting classes, and corporate raider smoothing the path on all strategic decisions this mole makes.
  - slumdev 5y ago
    Even doing all the right things, it's so rare to ascend without quitting. Spending 3 years, earning a single promotion, and then (not immediately but shortly after) quitting and going somewhere else (for another promotion) is the surest route if applied consistently. Another route is to parlay one's background as a senior at a large company into an outsized role at a small company. Perhaps even CTO if it's a startup. After a few years as CTO, that person can work his way back into senior management at bigcorp. It's difficult to see how someone could turn this into a profitable business. But if the backer isn't interested in profit, it's a great way to get assets inside the upper echelons of a lot of major companies...

werber 5y ago

Now I'm worried I've done that job with Fronk and was not paid. There's a handful of companies, with Algolia coming to mind first, that I've evangalized in interviews because the product did fix a huge problem.

cityzen 5y ago

shout out to AWS InfiniDash!

gwbas1c 5y ago

IMO: Part of the problem of "Fronk" is the assumption that everyone is a salesperson. IMO, developers who are also good salespeople, and enjoy selling, are a rare breed. They can probably find more rewarding work elsewhere.

z3t4 5y ago

Sometimes "a technology" can have a multi million marketing budget, and sometimes there is zero budget for anything related to it. And you don't really know... Sometimes you recommend a technology that you only heard people talk good about, whom in turn has never used it, just heard others talk good about...

tfehring 5y ago

I've interviewed a few DS candidates from teams that were very invested in particular data/ML platforms who I could have sworn were doing this. ("How would you implement X if $PLATFORM didn't implement it for you?" "I'm not sure, but I don't see a reason not to just use $PLATFORM.") I never really thought they were doing this, and I think they were employed by big well-known companies (definitely not the company that makes $PLATFORM). Just kind of a weird pattern.

mmcdermott 5y ago
It would almost make me feel better to find out they were doing this. The number of people who can't think laterally beyond the tool in front of them is scary.

altdataseller 5y ago

Fun story: I actually did something like this but on the opposite end of the spectrum. I would interview candidates, not intending to hire them but tell them about my product and offered them a free trial at the end of the interview. Didn’t work as well obviously since most didn’t work for another company at the time and it was a B2B product

BongoMcCat 5y ago

Why not name the company?

creddit 5y ago
I would bet because it's not a true story.

danvesma 5y ago

I was once asked to sign an NDA in order to discuss developing an app for someone. Upon signing, I learned that they wanted to make an App that let people check their makeup on their phone, without using the camera, by simply converting the pixels to 'mirror' colour. NEXT!

Andrex 5y ago
I had to re-read this several times to even understand what they were asking. That's absolutely insane.
phendrenad2 5y ago
You mean turning the phone off?
- leke 5y ago
  Easiest app to develop ever.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

wly_cdgr 5y ago

I definitely would have taken the job and then accepted the first good offer I got out of it

HumblyTossed 5y ago

> Every once in a while, I'll be interviewing a candidate who starts waxing lyrical about how rewriting everything in today's flavour of JavaScript really helped their last company. Or how their bosses were impressed with what this cool new bit of tech can do. Or why they could never work anywhere which didn't use this specific code editor. I do sometimes wonder if this is how popular frameworks, etc get ... um... popular. Not that I think there's a "Fronk" doing it, but, well, many Fronks.

mmcdermott 5y ago
A lot of conference talks are little more than marketing. So you work at a big-ish company and either write or evangelize your framework there first, then give a talk about it that advertises its benefits. The idea of doing this through interviews is painfully slow by comparison to the number of people that will listen to a talk or a user group presentation and send links to it later.

darepublic 5y ago

Which way I fly is Fronk; myself am Fronk; And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the Fronk I suffer seems a Knorf.

jakeva 5y ago
I had to know so I googled it. Paradise Lost, John Milton. The original quote is "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven."

adverbly 5y ago

What about if a company used their own employees for this? Having them apply to their customers, and also let the employees accept a job offer if they didn't want to match it. More/Less ethical? Sounds slightly more ethical to me. Perhaps less effective, but I've heard crazier growth hacking ideas...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pgroverman 5y ago

Corporate Espionage is real.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

Not a particularly interesting story. I bet there's tons more out there. Hoping for some anonymous and fresh HN accounts to pop up in this thread.

lkrubner 5y ago

Anyone interested in a story written in defiance of an NDA, I give you "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps": https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo... I wrote this because it seemed important to warn people about the dark corners of the startup world. So much of the coverage of startups is pure hype,so we need more books that offer a sober, realistic view of how chaotic these places can be. Oddly enough, the startup seemingly died in 2018, and one of the Board members went to jail, but (I just learned) they apparently got an injection of new capital and now they are trying it all again.

ElijahLynn 5y ago
That looks like a good read. Can you publish it on Google Play Books too? I am not in the Kindle ecosystem.
TechBro8615 5y ago
I bought your book, it’s a fun (frightening) read so far! Did you ever find out why John’s emails look like they’re written by a drunk and dyslexic person?
- lkrubner 5y ago
  No, but I was just contacted by a programmer who worked there after me, and who had just read my book. The programmer told me that the bad spelling continues. He joked "That was a nice touch. Anyone who knows John knows about the bad spelling." John was just sloppy and uncaring I think. The company ran out of money and died, but I've just been told that in 2018 they got a new investor and the project came back to life. I hope you enjoy the rest of the story.

tablespoon 5y ago

>> Is this... what's the word... ethical? > "Our investors think so!..." Oh boy.

mromanuk 5y ago

It's interesting how they saw an untapped marketing channel to sell more garbage, at least it was creative.

tlholaday 5y ago

Randall Munroe "Suspicion": https://xkcd.com/632/ https://xkcd.com/632/

throwaway2939 5y ago

Reminds me of when I worked at the early stages of a (now large) startup (I'm sure most of you have heard of the company), the CEO used to go to industry conferences and sit on panels with other competitors, intentionally giving terrible advice to throw others astray. He'd come back to the office and brag about the shitty advice he gave that everyone was eating up. This is why I don't go to conferences anymore.

analog31 5y ago

I interviewed a guy once, after pleasantries he reached into his bag and pulled out a prototype of his invention, which he was trying to sell. It was a fascinating conversation, I basically let him educate me on its theory of operation, then it was the next person's turn on the interview team.

polynomial 5y ago

Maybe it's just bc InfiniDash was used as the example, but I had to keep reminding myself that this was real and not some completely made up parody. Now I really want to know how long Fronk lasted and if this sort of thing actually happens nowadays?

billytetrud 5y ago

This is some real life creepy pasta

Iv 5y ago

It should be taught somewhere at school that if your job involves lying, there is probably something deeply unethical about it.

alisonkisk 5y ago
That's taught in kindergarten.

pts_ 5y ago

Jerk recruiters waste my time by calling me whole day for interviews which they get paid for. I should be paid for interviewing too.

spoonjim 5y ago

Native advertising taken to the extreme.

forgingahead 5y ago

Consensus building is a real thing that happens every day all the time. Most of us here who self-identify as "engineers" or "hackers" don't truly understand this - when we code, we rarely build actions by proxy, there are usually very explicit instructions being written and therefore we bias ourselves to assuming the rest of the world also works in an explicit, up-front way. This "startup" had a shady business model and sounds fishy as hell, but sadly every day some group, person, or org is trying to consensus-build us to thinking and feeling in a certain way.

roland35 5y ago

This seems like a service which is impossible to scale! The more well known it becomes, the less effective it will be. That said, some candidates have inspired me to check out a new tech or project from their resume.

mathgenius 5y ago

This sounds a bit like "Ad buddy", from a Netflix sci-fi series called 'Maniac': "If you’re broke, you can sell yourself to an “Ad Buddy,” whereby your bills get paid in exchange for a person accompanying you everywhere and spouting advertisements, like a human pop-up you can’t close." https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/maniac-statue-extra-liberty-ad-buddy-explained-1146114/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/maniac-statue-e...

jtwaleson 5y ago

I've often played around with the idea of doing reverse interviews for finding badly needed senior talent. After some time I realized that interviews are typically done by senior talent... So the idea is to go to good companies, make a good connection with the interviewers, and contact them later to try and hire them.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
I've seen this happen to a colleague. He interviewed someone who turned out to be the founder of some medical equipment startup and a week later he was working for him.

deleted 5y ago

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pjmanroe 5y ago

I worked for a company that only had one in-house programmer. The outsourced to the Ukraine for most of their programming needs. This was 20 years ago.

pjmanroe 5y ago

I worked for a company 20 years ago that only had one in-house programmer. The rest were contracted from the Ukraine. About 5 of them.

neilv 5y ago

Early on in dotcoms, what was called "buzz marketing" seemed to be a thing. (Going way beyond traditional "advertorials", etc.) I saw startups in the business of doing that. They were either executing it directly, or rewarding third-party operatives for doing it (in what later might be called "gig economy"). I haven't heard as much about it lately, but I'm not tracking startups as much. Maybe they're going strong, maybe they became more discreet about it, or maybe the money is in relatively conspicuous advertising (obvious ads on screens backed by modern intel/analytics, influencers, etc.). Interestingly, around the time some startups were figuring out the most society-destroying ways of exploiting people (e.g., "Let's change the world by paying people to manipulate their friends, and see what happens"), Google was doing things like being very clear in distinguishing sponsored placements from objective search hits. (Which had analogous precedent in respectable print publishing, but wasn't obvious that you had to do it in the dotcom gold rush new media, unless you were thoughtfully Don't Be Evil.)

neoCrimeLabs 5y ago

This makes me want to have candidates sign a document that states they are there interview for their own personal employment; not hired or otherwise paid to interview with us for the purposes of intelligence gathering or promotion of products or services. I wonder how enforceable that would be. Probably, "It depends." As my lawyer friends would tell me. :-) I also wonder how many candidates would see that and perhaps question their application to our company.

erdo 5y ago

Hmm, we did actually start using a CI product that we hadn't heard of before, because two people we interviewed mentioned it (after checking it out obviously)

bisRepetita 5y ago

>A company - let's call them "Fronk" - asked me to come in for a consultation about a Developer Advocacy programme So if I follow the logic, the OP must have signed an NDA for a consultation, then they talk about something quite different and fishy, and he feels bound by the NDA not to say anything. Wondering 2 things: is that a valid NDA? Should he have signed such an NDA?

erdo 5y ago

I've encountered a fake candidate before (recruiter with a fake linkedin profile applying for jobs to scope out the market and build contact lists). I don't think they went as far as actually turning up to anyone's interview of course. This particular person claimed to have worked as a senior developer in our team. Someone contacted them to ask who they were, they apologized and removed the linkedin profile. We were originally tipped off by another recruiter who had received the fake candidate's profile for one of their jobs.

ineedasername 5y ago

it makes me wonder if Fronk is still out there... It's definitely still out there in the context of evangelizers who will never consider another tool/language mostly because that's what they learned or resonated with them first. It might still be out there in the sense of paid shills on the level of the author's experience, but I think the majority of paid shills are probably getting their word out in other ways. #hashtagAWSissuperiortoAzure #reallyi'mjustsaying,totalynotpaidoranything

wiredone 5y ago

So is this a real story that just happens to use “Infinidash” as a stand in for their real product name, or is this just another artefact of the Infinidash ruse? https://twitter.com/jna_sh/status/1410178986978775040?s=21 https://twitter.com/jna_sh/status/1410178986978775040?s=21

fragbait65 5y ago

Sounds a bit weird? Who signs an NDA at a job interview?

eyelovewe 5y ago

Brilliant writing

Causality1 5y ago

Spending your work day interviewing for jobs sounds like the circle of hell you get sent to for making people work through lunch. I can't imagine being paid enough to do that.

crummybowley 5y ago

This is basically what google does to get folks to use google products at other companies.

duxup 5y ago

Makes me wonder what the value of "hey some rando guy mentioned this product in an interview" is. I'm thinking not much value.