29 ms·

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...

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.
  - andi999 5y ago
    And it is OK. You do not want to hire who doesn't have an A team (so to speak) which cannot pull off the project if there is trouble.
    - buran77 5y ago
      In theory all is fine. The problem is the A-team shows they have the skill, not the capacity. So in practice you'll never see that A-team again because that's not their job.
      - neutronicus 5y ago
        You'll see one or two of them again when the project crashes and burns, haha
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - newsclues 5y ago
      The A team is the sales team, not the team that fixes the problems from outsourced work.
- conductr 5y ago
  Along with “land and expand”. Where they use a small project to get over the initial hurdle, foot in the door so to speak. Then, they start trying to rebuild everything your company touches
  - leetrout 5y ago
    I like the term “provide and conquer” as well.
    - cmpb 5y ago
      Google turned up very little, please elaborate
      - whoisburbansky 5y ago
        As opposed to “divide and conquer.” Presumably the same idea as “land and expand,” but you conquer the client company by “providing” successively larger projects.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    IBM Global Services is particularly known for this. Their flavor involves hiring people with a very high tolerance for complexity, and letting them propose the most complex solution to any problem. Eventually your own people get tired of trying to keep up with even the summaries, and just abdicate. Now that part of the system is only understood by IGS, and the rot begins to spread.
    - tmn007 5y ago
      15 years ago when I was changing jobs one of the roles was Sun Microsystems - which I liked the company but the role was to suggest and be embedded in a company and embed Sun products into every project (and I assume prevent competitors). Did not take it.
- ta1234567890 5y ago
  Not just consulting, also law firms. Same thing, you might get a partner when they are selling you, then the juniors do the actual work (and unless you are a big company that they actually care about, you’ll probably also get subpar work).
- chippy 5y ago
  > if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value. But how can you tell this is not just bait-and-switch itself? The most senior person with an impressive resume is vetted and proven to deliver value, but how can you know if the actual contractors you are getting from wherever are good?
- roenxi 5y ago
  That isn't really a bait-and-switch. Years of experience doesn't make people type faster (quite the reverse, really). It is good for making high level decisions that crop up about once a day or once every other day. It makes sense to have juniors do the work and seniors to oversee the work.
  - acdha 5y ago
    The problem is that one senior person can’t oversee tons of unmotivated juniors on multiple projects. It’s not that the senior people aren’t typing all of the code, it’s that you’ll never see them again and your “architect”, “tech leads”, etc. will be a couple of people who have a couple years of excreting Java code into legacy apps for a bank. When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail because of both Brooks’ law and simply their mandate being to stabilize things to the point where they can claim minimal satisfaction of the contract requirements, which will likely not include fixing the deep architectural problems.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      > it’s that you’ll never see them again ... > When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail ... The argument there seems a little inconsistent to me. The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with.
      - acdha 5y ago
        > The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with. You're thinking about it from the perspective of the customer, not the an ethically-challenged contractor focused on maximizing revenue. If you have an A-team which you use to close deals, cycling them from project to project to close the deals which you will then staff with the C-team will generate more revenue than having them work on just one project as long as you don't have many disasters where you have to eat the cost of fixing the project. If the client is either overly-trusting or made enough mistakes to plausibly share responsibility and the punishment for failure is more billable hours, you're _way_ ahead financially if you get to bill 14000 hours of C-team-masquerading-as-A-team instead of 2000 hours of actual-A-team.
- belter 5y ago
  Are we mixing consulting and contracting here? I worked as a consultant for more than 10 years. Every single time customers want to : - Review the Consultant CV - Interview the Consultant - Accept no switch unless for the obvious reasons of sickness or holidays. - And the team that starts is very much the team that finishes the project.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    I recently accepted a job at a consulting/contracting firm for a specific contract as a data scientist. I had three separate interviews with the company I'd be working indirectly for, and I wasn't the only one they'd been interviewing. There'll be no switching me out for a junior.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    It's not exactly "consulting vs contracting", its "hiring a single person vs hiring out a project". Many "consulting" shops do what you call "contracting", because "consulting" is a more "elite" word. But a single person can be a "contractor" too. (At big companies and non-IT fields, a contractor is often used for temporary professional employee-type labor for flexibly scaling the labor force that includes employees doing the same job, but a consultant is someone who provides a skill you don't have in house at all.)
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >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. The problem is not that America has a monopoly on good coders but that the good coders in any country will not work for the Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type foreign contracting firms.
  - atomicnumber3 5y ago
    "Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type" This is now in my lexicon. I loved the show as a kid and this so perfectly captures how I feel about some shops.
    - hprotagonist 5y ago
      "aw man, Plank is sending us PRs now"
  - paxys 5y ago
    I have seen this happen so often. A large company will want to outsource some of their development to India, hire some shady agency to facilitate this, pay half of the going rate for good talent, then come away with the conclusion "Indian developers are terrible".
    - zadokshi 5y ago
      Great point. But also, if that’s what happens, that’s the reputation that develops.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    Suppose you were looking for good quality foreign contractors. How would you go about finding them?
    - zadokshi 5y ago
      If they are good, they have already moved to the US or some other higher income country. There’s probably a “good quality foreign contractor” living down the road from you.
- soco 5y ago
  Benn there, done that, got a t-shirt. Two t-shirts actually. The first year was great, the second year with new developers was okay, the third meh, the fourth was a huge drag. We switched to another eastern-european outsourcer and the story reset: first year great, second year new team and meh, then I left but I doubt it went anywhere but downwards. Moral of the story? Longer term contracts are dangerous for you.
- gremloni 5y ago
  I disagree on Eastern Europeans being good coders as a bloc. I’ve had some pretty bad security consultants out of Ukraine and really good work coming out of India when I paid what the work was worth.
- amcoastal 5y ago
  Lots of parallels here as well between research/academia and consulting -- the senior PI is the name on the proposals to get funded but everyone knows the work is done by grad students at exploitative wages to keep research cheap.
- xeromal 5y ago
  Just wanted to pipe in with my own experience, but I've seen it come from the clients perspective too. Initial phase of the project is very visible and critical to the client and is delivered with the A-team. Client starts to care less as the bottom barrel of features start being implemented and they want to reduce costs. Instead of losing the contract, we start dropping some of the more expensive devs save for 1 or 2 very good ones to keep the project moving and we backfill with more junior to increase their experience. The client starts wanting to reduce the expense even more and we keep the 1 or 2 very good devs/architect and we bring on a few near-shore devs. Project coasts for a year or two until they're done with us or they have another high priority item that kicks the project into overdrive again.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    "What's this 'sek-u-rity' thing?" "I don't know. Wow what do all these words in capital letters mean?" "Oh that doesn't matter. As long as you use the same words in the deliverable report, noone will ever double-check the code before the sale."
- js4ever 5y ago
  True and everyone knows it at some extent. I worked for a large consulting firm in the past for almost a decade. I was the bait, indeed I was nearly not touching the projects at all except if the replacement failed it hard and then my employer would send me few days there to fix the mess. My working time was divided between pre-sales and fireman to save projects from total failure.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    It's almost that the more senior you are, the less you get to do the "poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine" thing.
- DantesKite 5y ago
  Your last sentence made me wonder if there's a company that vets programmers.
- slezakattack 5y ago
  I've also seen the bait-and-switch with recruiters. Many years ago when I was young in my career, I decided to respond to a recruiter who worked for a recruiting firm. We had a good talk and there was a company he was working with that I expressed interest in and felt I was qualified for. Nope. He kept pedaling this small, 10-15 person startup to me that I clearly wasn't qualified for and honestly was not interested in as there were some red flags. The commission must've been fat cause he didn't pitch me any other company and kept "circling back" if I changed my mind about them.
- drivingmenuts 5y ago
  Bait and switch is not necessarily bad? You are defrauding the client by not providing the service and/or personnel advertised. How is this not, at a minimum, a criminal act?
- chaostheory 5y ago
  I can vouch for Eastern Euro developers. They do quality work. Their code is clean. I remember even when there was the whole issue with Russia, our developers in Ukraine were still highly productive.
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  I first experienced this getting legal work for setting up an LLC which the principal gave me the pitch and then handed the job to his paralegal.
- dmacedo 5y ago
  I absolutely agree with this, been there first hand on both sides of the aisle. And my experience of those I've worked with, has been that the smaller projects that remove this potential to deceive (not profitable or large enough for bait-and-switch - not enough get-foot-in-door to be worthwhile to take at a loss). And by smaller I mean less than £/€/$ 500k, and not leading to multi-million deal later on. And go away from the RFP process that sucks and is just trying to get the lowest bidder, for a fixed-end-goal, rather than bringing good and experienced people to support your business/organisation/project on achieving something. I'm trying to launch this myself, and I feel you can get the best of both worlds: great talented people who you pay fairly with a scale model for (eventually needed) growth, and some cost control for mid/longer term projects as you can't really have a fixed price. At the same time you have to remove some of the downsides like this lack of transparency (and honesty?), whilst having the needed support in place for projects to succeed!
mathattack 5y ago
This is more common that you would think. I’ve seen situations where it’s been hard to untangle ownership stakes in outside firms, and folks not disclosing family ties to new suppliers. Makes me realize why there is so much red take on new vendors at large firms.
- beckingz 5y ago
  The red tape is important for ensuring that bad outcomes don't happen during the process. Bad outcomes outside of the process like it taking years to buy software? Not any one person's fault.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Some of the "bad outcomes during the process" can cost the company more in legal fees than a multi-year software project. Red tape tends to be concentrated in such areas. For example, exports control and anti-money-laundering regulations. After sitting through trainings on the former, I'm very glad I don't have to deal with traveling or sending physical devices around the world...
    - mathattack 5y ago
      Compliance is painful because it’s hard to come up with precise NPVs on “we need to do it to avoid bad outcomes and because of the law.” It’s a shared tax that grows as the company grows, but the benefit is unseen. So compliance becomes a function of the political power of the leaders.
c17r 5y ago
Had a Candidate come in from a recruiter that I had worked with before without incident but from the very first question the guy turned it a pitch for moving all our development to his outsourced team in India. I was so caught off guard that I let the guy talk for a good 5 minutes before cutting him off and ended things. I laughed, the recruiter was thoroughly embarrassed and sent someone else. Never happened before, hasn’t happened since.
CalChris 5y ago
This is like rainmakers in law firms with associates doing the work.
jermaustin1 5y ago
I got bait-and-switched as a candidate thinking I was going in for a sales pitch to find out it was an interview. I thought it was my company they were hiring (which I guess they were, but with me being butt-in-chair at their office). I got weirded out when they asked for a resumé mid-pitch, and I said, I don't normally hand anything like that out, and I could give them our portfolio. I kept using the words "we" and "our" they kept using the word "you" and eventually it all clicked. I had been recruited for a job not a sales meeting. I handed them a 5 year old resumé that was kind of crumpled up, gave them my spiel and our rates, still using "our" and "we" then left feeling like I just wasted half an afternoon on nothing. Less than an hour after I left, I was offered the gig at a 5% discount from my rate but with a guaranteed 30 hours a week. I never thought I would hear from them again. They are actually still one of my "best" clients. A second anecdote - Half a year later, I was asked my opinion on converting a HUGE legacy project to a different web framework in a rewrite attempt to modernize it. To which I discussed another clients project and how easy it was to get off the ground quickly using the new framework, but said I wouldn't recommend it for such a large legacy conversion. And the Manager asked, "wait, you have another job... you are supposed to work for me." - Apparently he was unaware of the fact that they hired a company to consult them, not a developer.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  This happened to me with Google in 2002. Back in the heyday of the desktop widget craze, Google approached me several times via email wanting to discuss acquisition of my widget application. Bear in mind, this was when Google was just buying stuff up wholesale, rather than absorbing the team behind an acquired product. I eventually responded, and the rep and I set up a phone call - solely to discuss the sale of my code to them. I was pretty surprised when the person I spoke to jumped into a full-blown tech screen. I humored it initially, and was then subjected to meeting-reschedule-pinball. Super weird bait and switch by the googs.
  - jrmg 5y ago
    Google flew me from the USA to Europe to do this in the late 2000s! I thought I was going for two days to discuss Google acquiring my (very small) product and company. What actually happened was half of a two-day long tech interview, and me being a tourist with my second day... I feel like I should be annoyed, but weirdly I look back on it all fondly. They obviously didn't get what they thought they were going to get - but I got a weird, interesting, day with them, a stay in a great hotel, and a free day of vacation...
0x456 5y ago
Apparently surgeons can do something similar. The experienced surgeon you talked to is just there you get to you agree to surgery, without explicitly telling you a first year (poorly/un)supervised resident will do all the cutting.
- rswail 5y ago
  I would be suing the surgeon and reporting them to the surgical regulatory authorities if something like that happened.
  - h0h0h0h0111 5y ago
    I've never had surgery - how would you know? Is it even against regulations? (I imagine this is country dependent)
    - voakbasda 5y ago
      Bait and switch is illegal everywhere, right? If the surgeon stated that they were the one that would be doing the job, they are guilty of this.
      - goguy 5y ago
        They most likely didn't though as it would be a flat out lie. He probably explained the procedure etc but never commited to doing it himself specifically. Or maybe something more important came up just prior. Ultimately people have the learn and have a go at some point - with your attitude they would be no more doctors.
        derangedHorse 5y ago
        There doesn't have to be any deception on anyone's part for their to be new surgeons. If a new surgeon is doing the operation, he/she should be the one to meet the patient and explain the operation
allknowingfrog 5y ago
In defense of Ukrainian dudes, I have experience outsourcing to some of them, and they've always been pretty awesome. However, I don't pretend that I'm doing the work myself. That's definitely fishy.
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  Same here. Had experience working with an Ukrainian shop that did fantastic job prototyping some very niche kernel stuff. Very knowledgeable, felt like they knew Windows better than Microsoft. Made you wonder though how they managed that ;)
runjake 5y ago
We had this happen in an interview as well, except it was outsourced to low-end “programmers” in India. We took the bait and the code product was as bad as you would expect.
wooque 5y ago
That's how most outsourcing/consultancy companies work, lure you with a seniors and then replace them with a juniors/mediors
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I once interviewed a guy who put on a great show during the interview. The kind of interview that feels more like a well-practiced sales pitch than an honest conversation with the candidate. Checking his LinkedIn, I discovered that he had a consulting company that ran concurrently with his most recent jobs. His most recent jobs were all less than 12 months of tenure, and the start/end dates didn’t match what he provided on his resume in some cases. Curious, I started digging more. Through some LinkedIn friend-of-friend backchannel references I eventually deduced that he was trying to run his freelancing shop as his primary job while getting full-time employment at companies with flexible and/or remote employment where his real daily activities could go unnoticed (for a time). He collected a paycheck and benefits while running and building his freelance company. He would also try to recruit some of his coworkers to become part of his consulting company “on the side”. I suspect he was trying to outsource his own work to his freelancers as well. Eventually each company would catch on and get sick of his behaviors, strange lack of availability and presence during the day, and work output that varied depending on how much contract work he was trying to do. Then he’d move on to the next company to continue collecting benefits and a paycheck remotely while running his freelance shop.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  True hero of the resistance
  - sonograph 5y ago
    Not really. His team paid the price of carrying the burden of his laziness/treachery for a year. If they hired a competent person, they would have been better off.
    - wly_cdgr 5y ago
      That's their problem...shoulda worked less hard
      - breakfastduck 5y ago
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Legends
ineptech 5y ago
> "there's more like me, be happy to help you out, but on a contract basis and as a group." Deception aside, this seems like a reasonable idea, and I've wondered if anyone might do this as a result of covid (as in, "we quit en masse when our employer wouldn't let us stay remote, wanna hire us?"). A mature team that's already worked together and gone through norming-storming-performing sounds like they'd be better than 5 freelancers thrown together.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > as in, "we quit en masse when our employer wouldn't let us stay remote, wanna hire us?" Hiring entire teams together is risky. It can be difficult enough to integrate individual hires into the company’s way of operating, especially when companies grow quickly. A team that has already worked together can have a lot of resistance to changing their ways or integrating into the rest of the company’s way of operating. I’ve been at companies that tried this in the past. The teams that came in together wanted to isolate themselves and operate independently, and they had little interest in changing anything or adopting the same tools that everyone else used (one team tried to refuse to adopt git because they all used and liked subversion). Usually these teams were laid off together. A team that quit en masse because their employer wouldn’t cave to their demands would be even worse for trying to integrate with the company. You don’t want to bring in a group of people who tries to be the tail that wags the dog and will quit en masse again the next time the company doesn’t give in to their demands.
  - ineptech 5y ago
    I meant as contractors; the attraction would be that they don't need to be integrated.
  - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    Funny, I've seen this happen multiple times and by any measure the companies and teams both did very well. If you're spinning up a new project/org/whatever hiring all the expertise in a single shot is so much more efficient than one-by-one. If they have agency, it's often a recipe for success.
foobiekr 5y ago
I have issues with the lack of ethics on display, but as someone very senior and aging out, I’d much rather work with a group like this for a few years than simply retire now-ish which is my current plan. I wish there was a way to discover/join groups like this. My specialty at this point is SW project rehab by just being a realistic, experienced adult. Modernization but avoiding the blog-oriented design plague. It would just be very nice to work in a mission-specific context with a very senior team.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Same here. I've talked to friends a few times about doing this, minus the sub-contracting and sales-by-interview, but nobody wants to do the admin/actual sales work. I ended up retiring, and 3 years later got re-hired on a very part time, hourly contract basis.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    I’ve had similar discussions with friends. The thing is we’re all spread out all over from a timeline perspective. I’m ready now, many of them won’t be for several years. Ah well.
- ddalex 5y ago
  > It would just be very nice to work in a mission-specific context with a very senior team. It would be for EVERYBODY. This is why it's so hard to find such an opportunity - there are very few senior people who love to get stuck in a 9-5 cubicle job instead of doing crack projects :)
varispeed 5y ago
In the UK the tax system actually promotes such behaviour. But this the domain of larger consultancies that charge 1000 and up per day per developer and hire junior developers on a lowest salary they can get away with and have a senior supervising them. Now with IR35 changes this will be more common.
dcuthbertson 5y ago
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. In the late 80s I worked for an engineering consulting firm that contracted out engineers to the US armed forces. I was between tasks, and my boss pulled me into a contract w/Air Force Logistics Command for a database to track parts failures in the field. They'd had the contract for months, but it wasn't until a rep from AFLC was going to visit and write a progress report that they cared. I coded up a demo in 2 weeks, and showed that it had all the basic functionality called for in the contract (though it had a few bugs). My boss told the rep I was their chief engineered just hired for the project (I was actually pretty junior, but happened to know a few things about databases). I actually thought it was a fun project. I wanted to finish it, but after the rep left they put it aside and moved me to another project.
secondcoming 5y ago
This is Accenture

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.
- andi999 5y ago
  And it is OK. You do not want to hire who doesn't have an A team (so to speak) which cannot pull off the project if there is trouble.
  - buran77 5y ago
    In theory all is fine. The problem is the A-team shows they have the skill, not the capacity. So in practice you'll never see that A-team again because that's not their job.
    - neutronicus 5y ago
      You'll see one or two of them again when the project crashes and burns, haha
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - newsclues 5y ago
    The A team is the sales team, not the team that fixes the problems from outsourced work.
conductr 5y ago
Along with “land and expand”. Where they use a small project to get over the initial hurdle, foot in the door so to speak. Then, they start trying to rebuild everything your company touches
- leetrout 5y ago
  I like the term “provide and conquer” as well.
  - cmpb 5y ago
    Google turned up very little, please elaborate
    - whoisburbansky 5y ago
      As opposed to “divide and conquer.” Presumably the same idea as “land and expand,” but you conquer the client company by “providing” successively larger projects.
- hinkley 5y ago
  IBM Global Services is particularly known for this. Their flavor involves hiring people with a very high tolerance for complexity, and letting them propose the most complex solution to any problem. Eventually your own people get tired of trying to keep up with even the summaries, and just abdicate. Now that part of the system is only understood by IGS, and the rot begins to spread.
  - tmn007 5y ago
    15 years ago when I was changing jobs one of the roles was Sun Microsystems - which I liked the company but the role was to suggest and be embedded in a company and embed Sun products into every project (and I assume prevent competitors). Did not take it.
ta1234567890 5y ago
Not just consulting, also law firms. Same thing, you might get a partner when they are selling you, then the juniors do the actual work (and unless you are a big company that they actually care about, you’ll probably also get subpar work).
chippy 5y ago
> if the contractors are vetted and proven to deliver value. But how can you tell this is not just bait-and-switch itself? The most senior person with an impressive resume is vetted and proven to deliver value, but how can you know if the actual contractors you are getting from wherever are good?
roenxi 5y ago
That isn't really a bait-and-switch. Years of experience doesn't make people type faster (quite the reverse, really). It is good for making high level decisions that crop up about once a day or once every other day. It makes sense to have juniors do the work and seniors to oversee the work.
- acdha 5y ago
  The problem is that one senior person can’t oversee tons of unmotivated juniors on multiple projects. It’s not that the senior people aren’t typing all of the code, it’s that you’ll never see them again and your “architect”, “tech leads”, etc. will be a couple of people who have a couple years of excreting Java code into legacy apps for a bank. When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail because of both Brooks’ law and simply their mandate being to stabilize things to the point where they can claim minimal satisfaction of the contract requirements, which will likely not include fixing the deep architectural problems.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > it’s that you’ll never see them again ... > When the project falters, attempting to parachute the actual skilled people back in will fail ... The argument there seems a little inconsistent to me. The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with.
    - acdha 5y ago
      > The skilled people aren't going to be rushing from failed project to failed project - that is less productive than just getting involved to start with. You're thinking about it from the perspective of the customer, not the an ethically-challenged contractor focused on maximizing revenue. If you have an A-team which you use to close deals, cycling them from project to project to close the deals which you will then staff with the C-team will generate more revenue than having them work on just one project as long as you don't have many disasters where you have to eat the cost of fixing the project. If the client is either overly-trusting or made enough mistakes to plausibly share responsibility and the punishment for failure is more billable hours, you're _way_ ahead financially if you get to bill 14000 hours of C-team-masquerading-as-A-team instead of 2000 hours of actual-A-team.
belter 5y ago
Are we mixing consulting and contracting here? I worked as a consultant for more than 10 years. Every single time customers want to : - Review the Consultant CV - Interview the Consultant - Accept no switch unless for the obvious reasons of sickness or holidays. - And the team that starts is very much the team that finishes the project.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  I recently accepted a job at a consulting/contracting firm for a specific contract as a data scientist. I had three separate interviews with the company I'd be working indirectly for, and I wasn't the only one they'd been interviewing. There'll be no switching me out for a junior.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  It's not exactly "consulting vs contracting", its "hiring a single person vs hiring out a project". Many "consulting" shops do what you call "contracting", because "consulting" is a more "elite" word. But a single person can be a "contractor" too. (At big companies and non-IT fields, a contractor is often used for temporary professional employee-type labor for flexibly scaling the labor force that includes employees doing the same job, but a consultant is someone who provides a skill you don't have in house at all.)
whatshisface 5y ago
>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. The problem is not that America has a monopoly on good coders but that the good coders in any country will not work for the Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type foreign contracting firms.
- atomicnumber3 5y ago
  "Ed-Edd-n'-Eddy type" This is now in my lexicon. I loved the show as a kid and this so perfectly captures how I feel about some shops.
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    "aw man, Plank is sending us PRs now"
- paxys 5y ago
  I have seen this happen so often. A large company will want to outsource some of their development to India, hire some shady agency to facilitate this, pay half of the going rate for good talent, then come away with the conclusion "Indian developers are terrible".
  - zadokshi 5y ago
    Great point. But also, if that’s what happens, that’s the reputation that develops.
- SamBam 5y ago
  Suppose you were looking for good quality foreign contractors. How would you go about finding them?
  - zadokshi 5y ago
    If they are good, they have already moved to the US or some other higher income country. There’s probably a “good quality foreign contractor” living down the road from you.
soco 5y ago
Benn there, done that, got a t-shirt. Two t-shirts actually. The first year was great, the second year with new developers was okay, the third meh, the fourth was a huge drag. We switched to another eastern-european outsourcer and the story reset: first year great, second year new team and meh, then I left but I doubt it went anywhere but downwards. Moral of the story? Longer term contracts are dangerous for you.
gremloni 5y ago
I disagree on Eastern Europeans being good coders as a bloc. I’ve had some pretty bad security consultants out of Ukraine and really good work coming out of India when I paid what the work was worth.
amcoastal 5y ago
Lots of parallels here as well between research/academia and consulting -- the senior PI is the name on the proposals to get funded but everyone knows the work is done by grad students at exploitative wages to keep research cheap.
xeromal 5y ago
Just wanted to pipe in with my own experience, but I've seen it come from the clients perspective too. Initial phase of the project is very visible and critical to the client and is delivered with the A-team. Client starts to care less as the bottom barrel of features start being implemented and they want to reduce costs. Instead of losing the contract, we start dropping some of the more expensive devs save for 1 or 2 very good ones to keep the project moving and we backfill with more junior to increase their experience. The client starts wanting to reduce the expense even more and we keep the 1 or 2 very good devs/architect and we bring on a few near-shore devs. Project coasts for a year or two until they're done with us or they have another high priority item that kicks the project into overdrive again.
- exikyut 5y ago
  "What's this 'sek-u-rity' thing?" "I don't know. Wow what do all these words in capital letters mean?" "Oh that doesn't matter. As long as you use the same words in the deliverable report, noone will ever double-check the code before the sale."
js4ever 5y ago
True and everyone knows it at some extent. I worked for a large consulting firm in the past for almost a decade. I was the bait, indeed I was nearly not touching the projects at all except if the replacement failed it hard and then my employer would send me few days there to fix the mess. My working time was divided between pre-sales and fireman to save projects from total failure.
- exikyut 5y ago
  It's almost that the more senior you are, the less you get to do the "poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine" thing.
DantesKite 5y ago
Your last sentence made me wonder if there's a company that vets programmers.
slezakattack 5y ago
I've also seen the bait-and-switch with recruiters. Many years ago when I was young in my career, I decided to respond to a recruiter who worked for a recruiting firm. We had a good talk and there was a company he was working with that I expressed interest in and felt I was qualified for. Nope. He kept pedaling this small, 10-15 person startup to me that I clearly wasn't qualified for and honestly was not interested in as there were some red flags. The commission must've been fat cause he didn't pitch me any other company and kept "circling back" if I changed my mind about them.
drivingmenuts 5y ago
Bait and switch is not necessarily bad? You are defrauding the client by not providing the service and/or personnel advertised. How is this not, at a minimum, a criminal act?
chaostheory 5y ago
I can vouch for Eastern Euro developers. They do quality work. Their code is clean. I remember even when there was the whole issue with Russia, our developers in Ukraine were still highly productive.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
I first experienced this getting legal work for setting up an LLC which the principal gave me the pitch and then handed the job to his paralegal.
dmacedo 5y ago
I absolutely agree with this, been there first hand on both sides of the aisle. And my experience of those I've worked with, has been that the smaller projects that remove this potential to deceive (not profitable or large enough for bait-and-switch - not enough get-foot-in-door to be worthwhile to take at a loss). And by smaller I mean less than £/€/$ 500k, and not leading to multi-million deal later on. And go away from the RFP process that sucks and is just trying to get the lowest bidder, for a fixed-end-goal, rather than bringing good and experienced people to support your business/organisation/project on achieving something. I'm trying to launch this myself, and I feel you can get the best of both worlds: great talented people who you pay fairly with a scale model for (eventually needed) growth, and some cost control for mid/longer term projects as you can't really have a fixed price. At the same time you have to remove some of the downsides like this lack of transparency (and honesty?), whilst having the needed support in place for projects to succeed!

mathattack 5y ago

This is more common that you would think. I’ve seen situations where it’s been hard to untangle ownership stakes in outside firms, and folks not disclosing family ties to new suppliers. Makes me realize why there is so much red take on new vendors at large firms.

beckingz 5y ago
The red tape is important for ensuring that bad outcomes don't happen during the process. Bad outcomes outside of the process like it taking years to buy software? Not any one person's fault.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Some of the "bad outcomes during the process" can cost the company more in legal fees than a multi-year software project. Red tape tends to be concentrated in such areas. For example, exports control and anti-money-laundering regulations. After sitting through trainings on the former, I'm very glad I don't have to deal with traveling or sending physical devices around the world...
  - mathattack 5y ago
    Compliance is painful because it’s hard to come up with precise NPVs on “we need to do it to avoid bad outcomes and because of the law.” It’s a shared tax that grows as the company grows, but the benefit is unseen. So compliance becomes a function of the political power of the leaders.

c17r 5y ago

Had a Candidate come in from a recruiter that I had worked with before without incident but from the very first question the guy turned it a pitch for moving all our development to his outsourced team in India. I was so caught off guard that I let the guy talk for a good 5 minutes before cutting him off and ended things. I laughed, the recruiter was thoroughly embarrassed and sent someone else. Never happened before, hasn’t happened since.

CalChris 5y ago

This is like rainmakers in law firms with associates doing the work.

jermaustin1 5y ago

I got bait-and-switched as a candidate thinking I was going in for a sales pitch to find out it was an interview. I thought it was my company they were hiring (which I guess they were, but with me being butt-in-chair at their office). I got weirded out when they asked for a resumé mid-pitch, and I said, I don't normally hand anything like that out, and I could give them our portfolio. I kept using the words "we" and "our" they kept using the word "you" and eventually it all clicked. I had been recruited for a job not a sales meeting. I handed them a 5 year old resumé that was kind of crumpled up, gave them my spiel and our rates, still using "our" and "we" then left feeling like I just wasted half an afternoon on nothing. Less than an hour after I left, I was offered the gig at a 5% discount from my rate but with a guaranteed 30 hours a week. I never thought I would hear from them again. They are actually still one of my "best" clients. A second anecdote - Half a year later, I was asked my opinion on converting a HUGE legacy project to a different web framework in a rewrite attempt to modernize it. To which I discussed another clients project and how easy it was to get off the ground quickly using the new framework, but said I wouldn't recommend it for such a large legacy conversion. And the Manager asked, "wait, you have another job... you are supposed to work for me." - Apparently he was unaware of the fact that they hired a company to consult them, not a developer.

andrew_ 5y ago
This happened to me with Google in 2002. Back in the heyday of the desktop widget craze, Google approached me several times via email wanting to discuss acquisition of my widget application. Bear in mind, this was when Google was just buying stuff up wholesale, rather than absorbing the team behind an acquired product. I eventually responded, and the rep and I set up a phone call - solely to discuss the sale of my code to them. I was pretty surprised when the person I spoke to jumped into a full-blown tech screen. I humored it initially, and was then subjected to meeting-reschedule-pinball. Super weird bait and switch by the googs.
- jrmg 5y ago
  Google flew me from the USA to Europe to do this in the late 2000s! I thought I was going for two days to discuss Google acquiring my (very small) product and company. What actually happened was half of a two-day long tech interview, and me being a tourist with my second day... I feel like I should be annoyed, but weirdly I look back on it all fondly. They obviously didn't get what they thought they were going to get - but I got a weird, interesting, day with them, a stay in a great hotel, and a free day of vacation...

0x456 5y ago

Apparently surgeons can do something similar. The experienced surgeon you talked to is just there you get to you agree to surgery, without explicitly telling you a first year (poorly/un)supervised resident will do all the cutting.

rswail 5y ago
I would be suing the surgeon and reporting them to the surgical regulatory authorities if something like that happened.
- h0h0h0h0111 5y ago
  I've never had surgery - how would you know? Is it even against regulations? (I imagine this is country dependent)
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    Bait and switch is illegal everywhere, right? If the surgeon stated that they were the one that would be doing the job, they are guilty of this.
    - goguy 5y ago
      They most likely didn't though as it would be a flat out lie. He probably explained the procedure etc but never commited to doing it himself specifically. Or maybe something more important came up just prior. Ultimately people have the learn and have a go at some point - with your attitude they would be no more doctors.
      - derangedHorse 5y ago
        There doesn't have to be any deception on anyone's part for their to be new surgeons. If a new surgeon is doing the operation, he/she should be the one to meet the patient and explain the operation

allknowingfrog 5y ago

In defense of Ukrainian dudes, I have experience outsourcing to some of them, and they've always been pretty awesome. However, I don't pretend that I'm doing the work myself. That's definitely fishy.

huhtenberg 5y ago
Same here. Had experience working with an Ukrainian shop that did fantastic job prototyping some very niche kernel stuff. Very knowledgeable, felt like they knew Windows better than Microsoft. Made you wonder though how they managed that ;)

runjake 5y ago

We had this happen in an interview as well, except it was outsourced to low-end “programmers” in India. We took the bait and the code product was as bad as you would expect.

wooque 5y ago

That's how most outsourcing/consultancy companies work, lure you with a seniors and then replace them with a juniors/mediors

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I once interviewed a guy who put on a great show during the interview. The kind of interview that feels more like a well-practiced sales pitch than an honest conversation with the candidate. Checking his LinkedIn, I discovered that he had a consulting company that ran concurrently with his most recent jobs. His most recent jobs were all less than 12 months of tenure, and the start/end dates didn’t match what he provided on his resume in some cases. Curious, I started digging more. Through some LinkedIn friend-of-friend backchannel references I eventually deduced that he was trying to run his freelancing shop as his primary job while getting full-time employment at companies with flexible and/or remote employment where his real daily activities could go unnoticed (for a time). He collected a paycheck and benefits while running and building his freelance company. He would also try to recruit some of his coworkers to become part of his consulting company “on the side”. I suspect he was trying to outsource his own work to his freelancers as well. Eventually each company would catch on and get sick of his behaviors, strange lack of availability and presence during the day, and work output that varied depending on how much contract work he was trying to do. Then he’d move on to the next company to continue collecting benefits and a paycheck remotely while running his freelance shop.

wly_cdgr 5y ago
True hero of the resistance
- sonograph 5y ago
  Not really. His team paid the price of carrying the burden of his laziness/treachery for a year. If they hired a competent person, they would have been better off.
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    That's their problem...shoulda worked less hard
    - breakfastduck 5y ago

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Legends

ineptech 5y ago

> "there's more like me, be happy to help you out, but on a contract basis and as a group." Deception aside, this seems like a reasonable idea, and I've wondered if anyone might do this as a result of covid (as in, "we quit en masse when our employer wouldn't let us stay remote, wanna hire us?"). A mature team that's already worked together and gone through norming-storming-performing sounds like they'd be better than 5 freelancers thrown together.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> as in, "we quit en masse when our employer wouldn't let us stay remote, wanna hire us?" Hiring entire teams together is risky. It can be difficult enough to integrate individual hires into the company’s way of operating, especially when companies grow quickly. A team that has already worked together can have a lot of resistance to changing their ways or integrating into the rest of the company’s way of operating. I’ve been at companies that tried this in the past. The teams that came in together wanted to isolate themselves and operate independently, and they had little interest in changing anything or adopting the same tools that everyone else used (one team tried to refuse to adopt git because they all used and liked subversion). Usually these teams were laid off together. A team that quit en masse because their employer wouldn’t cave to their demands would be even worse for trying to integrate with the company. You don’t want to bring in a group of people who tries to be the tail that wags the dog and will quit en masse again the next time the company doesn’t give in to their demands.
- ineptech 5y ago
  I meant as contractors; the attraction would be that they don't need to be integrated.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  Funny, I've seen this happen multiple times and by any measure the companies and teams both did very well. If you're spinning up a new project/org/whatever hiring all the expertise in a single shot is so much more efficient than one-by-one. If they have agency, it's often a recipe for success.

foobiekr 5y ago

I have issues with the lack of ethics on display, but as someone very senior and aging out, I’d much rather work with a group like this for a few years than simply retire now-ish which is my current plan. I wish there was a way to discover/join groups like this. My specialty at this point is SW project rehab by just being a realistic, experienced adult. Modernization but avoiding the blog-oriented design plague. It would just be very nice to work in a mission-specific context with a very senior team.

mcguire 5y ago
Same here. I've talked to friends a few times about doing this, minus the sub-contracting and sales-by-interview, but nobody wants to do the admin/actual sales work. I ended up retiring, and 3 years later got re-hired on a very part time, hourly contract basis.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  I’ve had similar discussions with friends. The thing is we’re all spread out all over from a timeline perspective. I’m ready now, many of them won’t be for several years. Ah well.
ddalex 5y ago
> It would just be very nice to work in a mission-specific context with a very senior team. It would be for EVERYBODY. This is why it's so hard to find such an opportunity - there are very few senior people who love to get stuck in a 9-5 cubicle job instead of doing crack projects :)

varispeed 5y ago

In the UK the tax system actually promotes such behaviour. But this the domain of larger consultancies that charge 1000 and up per day per developer and hire junior developers on a lowest salary they can get away with and have a senior supervising them. Now with IR35 changes this will be more common.

dcuthbertson 5y ago

This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. In the late 80s I worked for an engineering consulting firm that contracted out engineers to the US armed forces. I was between tasks, and my boss pulled me into a contract w/Air Force Logistics Command for a database to track parts failures in the field. They'd had the contract for months, but it wasn't until a rep from AFLC was going to visit and write a progress report that they cared. I coded up a demo in 2 weeks, and showed that it had all the basic functionality called for in the contract (though it had a few bugs). My boss told the rep I was their chief engineered just hired for the project (I was actually pretty junior, but happened to know a few things about databases). I actually thought it was a fun project. I wanted to finish it, but after the rep left they put it aside and moved me to another project.

secondcoming 5y ago

This is Accenture