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How fresh grads with zero experience get hired as senior engineers

• nicholasjarnold 5y ago
  I've been involved in hiring decisions on teams I've been part of for a long time now. Blatant plagiarism, obvious embellishments and more subtle BS is literally part of the game unfortunately. This is particularly prevalent when dealing with (almost) any consultancy, large and small. I will not specifically call out names, but the some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill. It's sad, but honestly the prevalence of these practices (and perhaps growth of them?) only makes the genuine among us more valuable. Those who actually posses technical talent and experience will be needed more and more by companies who get burned by the frauds. Onward and upward I guess.
  • ameminator 5y ago
    >It's sad, but honestly the prevalence of these practices (and perhaps growth of them?) only makes the genuine among us more valuable. I wish this were the case, but I don't think it's true. On the one hand, real, proven experts do get called in to fix these phonies' messes. On the other, often these people succeed often enough that it devalues our labor as a whole. Finally, if employers cannot determine real experts from fake, then it means they won't pay real experts their full worth (eg 'full worth' of 100k, 5% chance it's a fake = pay of 95k). These costs of lower trust show up elsewhere, but they are hard to quantify and make everyone's life worse.
    • nebulous_two 5y ago
      If they succeed then aren't they an acceptable fit for the role? If it devalues the role then that means the job isn't as demanding as the title makes it seem.
      • ameminator 5y ago
        The definition of 'success' varies. If you mean 'completed the project on time with decent quality' -> then no, that doesn't happen as often as with tried and true experts. When I said 'success' I meant: 'achieved a basic level of competency after bungling one or several projects, often with unknown or unquantifiable bugs and then move onto the next company / role with few consequences'. More succinctly: caused harm to others/ project and still got a paycheck.
      • pvarangot 5y ago
        Yeah that would be great is success meant "sound engineering that meets the requirements and is delivered on time without generating friction with stakeholders or adding unneeded complexity". Unfortunately on some companies that don't actually ship much of what gets engineered success means "we got to the next financing round" or "our skills got noted by upper management so we are still allowed to hang around". Bad engineers survive in the last two environments and at the same time stockpile credentials about how many years they were senior at Google or Lyft or whatever, but they really can't actually engineer anything most of the time.
    • nicholasjarnold 5y ago
      You bring up a good point...the overall pull downward that the phonies bring to our field. Businesses trust (software) engineering teams less. Perhaps overall industry pay rates are brought down, too, though I don't have personal experience or knowledge about that. However, that point you make about the 'proven experts' getting called in is where my original (and perhaps overly broad) comment came from. If you can align yourself with the industry as one of those fixers, and then actually deliver on that promise, there is immense value to capture. If you can carefully build a small team of people that can do this regularly, there is even more value to capture and share with people who actually deserve it.
  • throwaway643464 5y ago
    I’ll call Infosys out. I’ve worked with people from there who literally did not know how to program. They were moved off quickly. There are some solid people there but hard to find in my experience. Akvelon consultants have been consistently better than some FTEs in my experience.
    • kelnos 5y ago
      I don't understand how Infosys still exists. Perhaps this is just my bubble showing, but it seems pretty well-known that they're a scam factory.
      • AdrianB1 5y ago
        It is not just them and it is a game everyone plays, including their clients. I had several engagements with them on various projects, we had to use them because the internal headcount was limited, while for external suppliers there was no limit, so we had up to 5 external people for every of ours. Most of these kind of companies behave the same, we had small specialized suppliers that provided good quality and value for the work, but the companies on a comment below are all in the same bucket of garbage.
      • manuelabeledo 5y ago
        Because it's not only Infosys, there is a whole industry of selling underskilled labour for the cheap. I haven't worked with Infosys, but I have with other four companies providing similar services, and they all do the same. It's extremely frustrating, because the budget folks only look at the bottom line and would sign contracts with any of these firms, leaving hiring managers with the responsibility of taking subpar consultants in.
    • thrower123 5y ago
      Infosys, Cognizant, Gap Gemini, TCS, ATT Global Services, Accenture, HCL, Kyndryl, and on, and on, and on goes the list.
    • zo1 5y ago
      The dirty secret in the industry is that there is a gigantic shortage of devs that can do something or anything. And the clients just don't want to pay the rates that help make that shortage go away. They all want it on the cheap and are spoiled by fancy "SAAS" salesmen that "magically" solve all their problems for "$30-$500" a month, because their SAAS is always the answer. Literally sitting with a client right now that has gone through at least 5 different CRM systems, each time paying a 3rd party boutique marketing agency to "set it up and migrate it" for them (along with some new ad-campaign software). 3 different attempts at a data warehouse (because they have a gazillion disparate white label and SAAS products in their company with no access to any of the data) and someone told them they need a "Data Warehouse Cluster", when they barely have 20k users. I could rant for hours because the industry is broken. Oh, and they literally blank stare you in the face as you explain things genuinely with detail and care, and then turn around saying they'll just "consult with their marketing agency" to get their advice. But hey, let's all blame "consulting" companies because they try make something useful using the bottom of the barrel devs. *Not defending Infosys or Accenture and their like, though, fully agreed there.
  • dvtrn 5y ago
    some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill Been my experience your regular software org does something very similar. Who among us hasn’t had to drop an entire epic’s worth of work to go spin up some MVP (that eventually becomes a bug-riddled production shitstorm) of a component because a claim got made on a sales call that “we’ve been working on it for weeks” and a promise got made that “we could have a demo ready to go just for you by the end of the quarter”? Because you’re “the senior”. Not saying it’s the norm. Just that it happens probably more than it should.
    • corpdronejuly 5y ago
      My response is. You lied not me, and I know how many recruiters emailed me this week and you don't. Please don't play those games, I am here because I want to be. Lies make me not want to be. Yeah I'm replaceable, but the pain of that replacement is usually more than the pain of making a sales guy eat some crow.
  • munificent 5y ago
    > is literally part of the game unfortunately I strongly disagree with this framing. There is no "game". There are just the actions of the individual players. Yes, in some sense, lying is part of the "game" in that some players will do it. But extending that to saying "it's part of the game" implies that all players must use those moves, which is absolutely false. It also implies that you are morally excused from doing so because you didn't choose to lie, you were just obliged to by the rules of the "game". A core concept behind something being a "game" is that it exists in a morally isolated sandbox. You can't be a good or bad person based on which legal moves you make in a game of chess. The whole point is to create an environment where you are able to play freely largely unencumbered by the social consequences of your moves. Hiring is the exact opposite of a game. Every move has significant stakes, moral implications, and long term consequences on the entire field. I have never lied on a resume and I would massively lose respect for anyone who did. They are doing something wrong and they should feel bad for it. The fact that other people do it doesn't excuse the act any more than the existence of litterers makes it OK to throw your trash out the window.
    • nicholasjarnold 5y ago
      How about this framing: It's part of a game that I've seen being played throughout my career in tech (software development). I am in no way advocating for that type of behavior. I'm merely pointing out that it exists, it seems to be a game to some and that those who choose a more genuine path can benefit from the follies of those others, however unfortunate that might be. It seems we are in agreement, though perhaps you interpreted my words differently than I had hoped people would.
    • LesZedCB 5y ago
      it is a game in a game-theoretical sense. if those other individual actors lie and massage their resume, does it increase my chance of success by being honest, or by lying a little better? all players do use that move. whether you realize it or not. your moral framework (one i completely agree with, fwiw) is only informing your own decisions, not other adversaries.
    • walleeee 5y ago
      > A core concept behind something being a "game" is that it exists in a morally isolated sandbox This is interesting; if true, what of game theory's seat at the core of many notions of strategy as deployed for explicitly moral purposes? Also, anecdotally, I've seen pretty good results putting some campy, tongue in cheek acknowledgement that I'm not playing games in the resume/cover letter space where these alleged "rules of the game" might otherwise dictate meaningless boilerplate should go Some employers seem to appreciate honesty and a reluctance to bullshit
  • corpdronejuly 5y ago
    It amazes me that simple honesty and integrity wind up being such a huge value add.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • srvmshr 5y ago
    > I will not specifically call out names, but the some of the largest and most well known consultancies do this as a matter of practice after they overbook themselves for projects for which they do not have staff on the bench to fill. Infosys, TCS & Accenture comes up immediately to my mind. There are hardworking people in these companies no doubt. Many times it gives an opportunity to the less fortunate as well. In general, however their workforces are poorly trained & business practices borderline unethical (The good ones quickly leave). These companies pay peanuts to their employees, and most of the latter are sticking for the promise of an onsite deployment. There are horrid tales of client having to lock horns with the TCS/Infosys service manager to get the contracted job done. Case in point: managers at a Japanese giant are shaking their head in frustration since they are locked-in to a Infosys contract. No way they can shake them off due to poor project documentation & shaky installations which require heavy service & maintenance. Choosing an alternative would bring in a tidal wave of expenses, so keeping the status quo. It is deeply unfortunate that they bill their clients higher for the same shoddy work culture as the number of years roll-by. I assume this will continue as long as the cost of renegotiated contracts are lesser than switching to a different firm, or the tech stack is rewritten for a newer project.
• rahimnathwani 5y ago
  The publish date on this post is today (Feb 11th) but I think I've seen this exact article posted to HN before (perhaps with a different title).
  • simmanian 5y ago
    Author here. I wrote this post after my comment on the post you're mentioning was rather well received. People asked me to write about that experience in more detail, so I did and shared it here. It's a related story, not an identical one.
    • gundmc 5y ago
      Thanks for the explanation - I, like OP, was experiencing some wild deja vu.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• barrenko 5y ago
  Maybe they've read "Designing Data-Intensive applications". (Semi-joke)
  • jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
    To be fair, if you can actually implement the strategies within using real technology (AWS, your own kafka cluster etc), then you deserve to be senior.
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    I'm not sure I get the joke... that's actually a great book. Is the joke that they read that book and no other book?
    • nicholasjarnold 5y ago
      I read it like: Someone reads (skims?) that book, vaguely grasps the power of the concepts therein and then begins to treat everything like a nail that needs their hammer...failing to realize that many times and at many companies a simpler approach is good enough and the better choice for many definitions of better. That insistence to see everything as a nail once you learn the hammer is the hubris of the not-actually-senior software engineer. Those who can determine when the complex approaches are warranted versus when they are not is the real senior.
  • notapenny 5y ago
    I'm reading it right now. Does that mean I get a pay raise? :D
• a4isms 5y ago
  There is no standard whatsoever for the adjective "Senior" when applied to engineers: Sometimes it means, "Able to work without someone looking over their shoulder at all times." Sometimes it means, "Able to lead and mentor others." And sometimes it means, "Has organizational skills above and beyond engineering skills, able to lead cross-team initiatives and deal with all the human/organization issues around the engineering." The latter definition is the most interesting to me, it describes what "Staff" and "Principal" engineers do in most orgs. But if I had to pick a line to draw, I'd say that while a Staff or Principal spends most or all of their time working on projects that involve the human/organization issues around the engineering, a senior engineer is one who does this at least part of the time. There are other, perfectly valid perspectives on what makes an engineer "senior," but what I like about this one that's relevant to TFA is that this kind of "seniority" is hard to fake.
  • austincheney 5y ago
    Looking at many job posts senior means capable of using React and capable of talking about, but not necessarily using, TypeScript. When senior sounds like faster junior I really have trouble finding what actually differentiates a senior from a junior at these organizations.
    • vp8989 5y ago
      It's quite common in larger companies for "senior" to actually mean "mid-level" or "not junior". This title inflation provides some flexibility to create a level below the new grad level, to hire people from non-traditional backgrounds who would otherwise fail a typical entry level screening but are willing to (temporarily) work for low $ to get themselves on the "engineering ladder". It also makes new grad offers cosmetically/psychologically more competitive. All else being equal, if company A offers you "junior software engineer" and company B offers you "software engineer" you might favor the latter.
  • gjsman-1000 5y ago
    If you look around Indeed, Senior Engineer is basically equal to 5 years experience.
• draw_down 5y ago
• xwdv 5y ago
  This reads like a human trafficking story, picking up cheap fresh grads and exploiting them to work way below market wages and making sure they can’t leave.
  • a4isms 5y ago
    Savour with a side of H-1B visa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
• paxys 5y ago
  I know a few people who have gone this route and now have very successful careers. Getting a job as a new grad is hard as it is, and if you are on a visa you barely have a month or two before you must obtain sponsorship or pack up and leave the country. "Consultancies" like this one give you a buffer, beef up your resume with fake experience and give you interview training, with the end goal of getting you a permanent tech job and getting a cut of your salary for the first N months. Honestly, I don't even fault them for it. The author seemed a bit naive about the situation he was getting into, and he left, which is fair. Ultimately this whole thing is just a symptom of a broken immigration and hiring system. If an embellished resume can fool an entire big tech interview panel and the candidate actually does good work for them moving forward, who should take the blame for it?
  • tgflynn 5y ago
    While I'm not at all surprised that foreign students could easily get sucked into this kind of scheme what really surprises me is that an American CS grad would not have much better options, especially with all the hype about "lack of workers".
    • paxys 5y ago
      I know at least a handful of people who graduated out of my CS program at a very reputed university but probably couldn't do fizzbuzz. And even otherwise, in recent years companies have massively cut down on new grad hiring because they don't want to spend time and money training them. Much easier to poach an experienced engineer from a competitor instead.
      • tgflynn 5y ago
        That strikes me as rather unlikely. Surely to pass at least some courses some not completely trivial amount of coding was required. Maybe the issue is the context in which the "Fibuzz" test is given is so different from that of class work or real work that the candidate just isn't used to operating under those conditions. I can especially see that if you're expected to recite every line of code perfectly over the phone or write them out on a whiteboard in front of a bunch of people.
• ijustwanttovote 5y ago
  I know people who got hired as Staff Engineers fresh from coding bootcamp.
  • exdsq 5y ago
    I got senior last summer after 7 and a half years... each to their own I guess! But even now I question the title so no idea how people can do it with 0 years experience and a little bit of JS/React knowledge
• user_7832 5y ago
  Side note: there are (legitimate) training services that teach coding and interviewimg skills that have a setup where they try to get you a job (without fudging your CV). If you don't get a job you pay very little, but if you get a (good) job you pay similar to 10% or your salary for a few years. A pretty smart and entrepreneurial arrangement in my opinion. (Unfortunate I don't remember the name or further details, I had read this in the newspaper in Mumbai perhaps 4 years ago.)
  • RMPR 5y ago
    Immediately Microverse and Outco come to mind. I am pretty sure there are many other businesses like that though.
• TrackerFF 5y ago
  The place I used to work at hired fresh grads into senior positions exclusively to make the job more attractive. Sr. Engineering (position) had a much wider salary band, so it was apparently easier to hire fresh grads with a Masters degree into those positions, on the lower end of the band, and keep them there for 2-3 years before actually handing out any raises. We also had very cheap company housing, and a lot of other perks.
• tdeck 5y ago
  As soon as I saw the word "consulting" it was all I needed to know. These companies want to bill someone out to the client as a senior engineer while paying them new grad wages. That's all there is to it. If you've ever worked with consultants this won't be a surprise.
• uncomputation 5y ago
  This is another reason that, while I understand people’s complaints, I still believe CS interviews should include algorithmic and whiteboard tests. I know they may seem “outdated” or “irrelevant” to some, and yes, it is very unlikely that you will need to implement Dijkstra’s algorithm by hand without any reference, but it is more that it shows a general competence in computing which will transfer to other, more relevant areas. Also, another key insight to whiteboarding is whether you can recognize the fundamental nature of the problem as an instance of another problem, which is essential to CS since the entire field is about solving problems efficiently.
  • digisign 5y ago
    > shows a general competence in computing It shows you've solved a similar problem recently and have gonads of steel, with a bit of overlap of how good an employee you'll be. A short test contract after a bit of legwork is far more revealing imho.
  • ThalesX 5y ago
    Funnily enough in my career, whenever I took a job after an algorithm and whiteboard test, I would find myself doing the most basic CRUD applications whereas when I interviewed in a more humane way, by talking and exploring the knowledge set I bring to the table, I ended up working with cool algorithms in some highly technical areas.
    • babyshake 5y ago
      You mean you're not constantly balancing binary trees and implementing your own bubble sort algorithms? I figured from interviews that this is 95% of what engineers at SaaS companies are doing.
  • lnenad 5y ago
    I'm a firm believer that you should include them, if they are part of the job. If not, especially if they're completely unrelated, then they're just a reason somebody is going to have a harder time passing your interview. If you want that, that's your prerogative, but generally IMHO you should focus on finding owners, people who are going to give it their best to provide quality and love their code/contribution. Whether they know how to rock from day one, or they're going to learn it on the job. It's not an easy thing to look for, I know, but it's what we should be striving towards IMHO and what I'm focusing on. So far it has had great results, with a few misses, but a better success rate than just handing out technical stuff.
• druadh 5y ago
  Not senior, but junior... I recently started Web Development (well, it's been almost a year now). I am technically in a 'Junior' position, but I've read articles stating that it's only detrimental to list yourself as a Junior. What are your thoughts? Am I still a Junior after a year? Should I keep the "Junior" label on my resume/linkedin if I'm still a Junior?
  • wccrawford 5y ago
    My standard advice is to use a job title that fits your ability. If you don't, it's going to be a bad fit. That said, if you're looking for a new job and are still a junior, you're probably switching far too quickly. My plan was to switch at 3 years experience, at which point I'd drop the junior title for sure. I ended up staying longer (because they increased my pay very well the first 3 years, and then started screwing me over) and my second job was "lead developer", which I still have 11 years later. I'm sure I could get more money if I switched, but I like my job and my company and my coworkers, so it's been hard to find anything I want more, no matter the money. In short, no, if you switch jobs, you shouldn't call yourself a junior, one way or another.
    • silicon2401 5y ago
      > That said, if you're looking for a new job and are still a junior, you're probably switching far too quickly. couldn't disagree more. people should change jobs every week if they're able to. why stay at company A making X, if company B is willing to hire you now, for 1.5-3x? if you stay at a company for an arbitrarily long period of time, you're just throwing away tons of money
      • ratorx 5y ago
        From a pure immediate money perspective, sure changing immediately to a higher paying job makes sense. However, generally each new job comes with a ramp up time before you become useful and then a further ramp up before you can develop new skills (in my limited experience). I don’t think I could properly progress in my career by building higher level skills if I had to learn new organisational practices and technical skills every few months. And arguably, IMO proper progress is essential to securing significantly higher salaries in the future (but I’m not sure how the total money aspect works out though).
• kodah 5y ago
  > While I certainly don't approve of these practices, I'm also not saying that these companies are only evil. I view that they serve a very strong need in some corners of the system, like a coding bootcamp for the less fortunate. Absolutely not. I was in college for CS/CE, dropped out during an economic crisis, joined the military, and had to work my way through technician, network engineer, systems engineer, DevOps, SRE, and finally I am a very senior SWE. That was over a decade long journey and has made quite an impact on how I've lived my life. I didn't lie to get jobs or interviews, I didn't embellish. Instead I had to research what was being done with my resume, I had to work with third-party recruiters, I had to write letters to hiring managers to get interviews. The people that are the subject of this article had the privilege to go to and finish college, that is your free pass. You don't get to cheat the job market just because you think you deserve it. If you can't tell, I'm incredibly frustrated reading this post. Edit: I do feel for people who have a lack of opportunity. I was there, I lived it, I felt it. That said, it's certainly not the only emotion I connect with when reading this story.
  • simmanian 5y ago
    Thank you for sharing and I think your opinion is certainly valid and it would create more trust if everyone shares your principles. I was just trying to convey this idea that they are there because they serve a need. If we want to imagine a world without these practices, we should probably start by tackling the system itself, not by attacking the surface level actors only.
    • kodah 5y ago
      I wish the world would've been that charitable to me. Instead, had I failed I'd be a +1 on another DOD statistic. I wouldn't have even registered in turnover for most software companies. Nobody would've missed the SWE without a degree beyond my friends. There are few, if any, DEI dashboards that would've tracked a SWE without a degree or an enlisted veteran. On one hand, I hate that people seek accountability so much from individuals. I think individual decisions are so low level most of the time that it makes seeing the bigger picture very difficult, if not impossible. On the other hand, this story is the antithesis of my professional life, and the very principles that may have projected my career also did damage to my personal life because of the focus they demanded. I know what's lost and that makes reading about someone who just wanted more than what they were already given so hard to read. Edit: I do feel for people who have a lack of opportunity. I was there, I lived it, I felt it. That said, it's certainly not the only emotion I connect with when reading this story.
• softwaredoug 5y ago
  Staff is the new senior Senior is the new “mid level” dev Dev is the new “junior” dev Especially in times when managers want to retain their best, they often can’t get HR to budge on salaries. So they promote them to get them into a competitive salary range.
  • dumbfounder 5y ago
    s/Staff/Lead/
  • AdrianB1 5y ago
    It depends on the company. In my company (100,000 employees, but in IT less than 3,000) "senior" can be a college student, even "senior manager" can be a 22 year old college student, while "director" is the lowest level manager (with people reporting). They changed the titles recently saying "we have to align to the market", but it was to compensate the low salaries with high, meaningless titles. For example a colleague was hired as an electrical engineer in a manufacturing plant in Germany. Because she did not speak German well enough (she is an immigrant), they gave her the position of plant IT manager with "senior manager" title. She is not even an IT person, just graduated college in EE, she does not know to write a line a code if her life depends on it. But hey, she is a senior! that is the point of the article.
• kayson 5y ago
  I feel like I read this exact story on HN a few months ago...
  • cdiamand 5y ago
    Couple of days ago, even: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343&p=2#30151071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343&p=2#30151071
• ipaddr 5y ago
  A developer doesn't become a senior developer until they realize they know nothing and can truly start to learn. As a junior you want to master the syntax and framework. As an senior immediate developer you have mastered the framework/language and you can do anything. You are sure you have found the way and will share and fight for this way over all others. As a senior developer you see more and realize you actually know very little. The stack you mastered is one of many and the one way can be replaced by a number of different ways. As a true master developer you realize the framework/language has been programming you.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Jesus Christ what an everloving nightmare.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  This is actually really shocking to me, I had no idea.
• g051051 5y ago
  The apartment mentioned in the article stirred up some memories. Back in the early 90's, I worked for a company that had a long term contract for software development and support in another city. The team that worked on that project would rotate up and stay in an apartment that the company maintained there. While I never worked on the project and never saw the apartment, I heard many tales about it, which indicated that it was terrible. Too small, non-functioning amenities, just an utter dive. The team that worked there would just grouse about it to other devs, but never said anything to management, because they assumed they were just being cheap. Well, someone finally mentioned it (probably during an exit interview) and management was shocked. They had been paying top dollar for what they thought was a luxury apartment, and instead were getting ripped off. I think they wound up getting a different, better apartment for the devs.
  • trhway 5y ago
    >management was shocked after 30+ years in the industry whenever i read things like this the Casablanca always comes first to mind.
• dave_sid 5y ago
  Grad schemes are generally the way any graduates get introduced to a company in any career.
• bigmattystyles 5y ago
  I feel like these titles are a big reason we don't disclose our salaries in the US (beyond other cultural issues) - the title is our flex. It's always seemed to me that they are a bit meaningless though. I'm a super senior engineer at my current company because I've been here for a lifetime. I have a lot of skills that port from company to company, but to my current company, I'm even more valuable because I know how to keep this train moving and how to get the tracks switched if need be. I have no doubt I'd need time to become that useful as an engineer at another company. My point is, titles are to some extent, onjly pertinent to your current setting.
• stillbourne 5y ago
  Titles seem to have more to do with pay scales than they do with skill.
• imwillofficial 5y ago
  A shorter article: Greed is how they get hired.
• trashacct6969 5y ago
  Throwaway account for obvious reasons. I had a really similar experience as my first software dev job and this post brought up a lot of old memories. I ended up writing quite a lot, but I hope it's helpful for someone else in a situation like this. It wasn't until I started reading HN that I began realizing how common these types of experiences may be. The company I worked for was a small consultancy specialized in customizing/integrating an enterprise software package sold by one of the big old names in enterprise IT. There were several F500 companies in their clients list. The interview was extremely cursory and positive, like the one described in this article. I was offered a position almost immediately which was quite surprising given my lack of experience with their domain. The company also had a very "family-like" atmosphere, everybody I dealt with, including the owner, was actually very friendly and supportive throughout. Single digit headcount. There were a couple H1-B visa holders on staff, but it was not the majority. They cultivated the same kind of "we are all in this together" kind of attitude. It wasn't until I went on site for my first assignment that I realized how they operated. I went through about two weeks of training then was flown out to the HQ of one of our biggest clients. Huge, household name F500 company, I had no experience with that kind of organization before. I vividly remember the first day on site. I am just off the flight and eating in the client's cafeteria with the owner of the consultancy and two coworkers. The owner tells me that he has told everyone on the client's team that I am a senior consultant with 5 years experience. At that time, I was just a couple years out of college with no relevant work experience, only some hobby level programming skills. I was totally blindsided and was immediately put into meetings with the client's team where I had to think fast in order to present myself properly. I was presented as a resource for the client's team to learn from, meaning I had to field questions, equivocate, then follow up later after I had asked my co-workers at the consultancy for help. I'm sure I was no use at all during those first couple weeks and I shudder to think of how I presented to the client's team. I know there was at least one other co-worker who was put in a similar position at the same time. At the time, for me personally there was no question about whether I should go along with this or not. I had hotel and flights paid for and no other immediate career prospects. To be totally honest, I didn't immediately feel an ethical conflict, mostly a naive sense of responsibility to not let my coworkers down and a curiosity about whether I could actually do the technical work that the client expected. I was also very curious about the large, corporate environment which I had never worked in before. I gradually learned that our consultancy's headcount was overstated by a factor of 10 to 100, depending on the client. Members of our extremely small team were rotated in and out to clients in order to give the appearance of a much larger team. I believe my boss' strategy was to use the inevitable staffing difficulties this caused as leverage in negotiations with our clients, in order to demonstrate that we were highly in-demand experts. I also learned that the software we specialized in was completely oversold relative to the customer's needs, and shipped with huge swathes of functionality missing or broken. These missing or broken features were responsible for generating a ton of revenue for not only our consultancy, but at least two other, much larger firms. One would almost think it was a deliberate design decision. The post mentions imposter syndrome, I would be curious to hear more about how this experience affected that for the author. Oddly enough, my own experience with a shady consultancy had a huge personal benefit in overcoming my own feelings of imposter syndrome. I am a good communicator and realized that I could quickly learn the jargon and social conventions of this workplace. After a couple weeks on the job I was actually productive and built out some major chunks of custom functionality. I learned quickly and the work was not really that technically challenging. If anything, it showed me that you could survive in large organizations like our client company by being an effective communicator and that most of the people employed there weren't intimidating wizards. I actually really enjoyed working with many of our client's staff and wish I could have done so under better circumstances. I left after a little over a year. The amount of pay wasn't too bad but there were several unannounced late paychecks that spooked me. Also, even though my skills were up to the task and I worked well with my teams, the feeling of constantly looking over one's shoulder and having to keep up the management's lies really took a mental toll. At first it was exhilarating, but eventually I came to the same conclusion that the OP did where I felt I could not build a career on this foundation. I completely changed industries to shake up the depression that settled on me. Shortly afterwards, I learned my boss was engaging in some sort of tax scheme that caught up with him, resulting in him dissolving the company then fleeing the US for a time. Ultimately working for this company taught me a lot of soft skills and not a lot of transferable technical skills. My opinion is that the burnout I felt, leading me to change careers, probably had a detrimental effect on my long-term career prospects. I later realized I actually enjoyed and excelled at software dev and could have been much further along that path by now if my first experience wasn't so bad. Overall I have very mixed feelings about the experience but it was formative for younger me learning how the world works.
• AmericanBlarney 5y ago
  When I was interviewing developers from a very large offshoring firm, they covertly had an account manager listening in to take down the questions for future candidates. Each interview, I'd ask a slightly different variation and it became obvious what was going on when a candidate gave a textbook answer to the question I'd asked the previous candidate, including references to tables I hadn't mentioned and that had no purpose in the problem I presented them. Also had an incident where I interviewed one person but am pretty sure someone different showed up and was completely clueless about the most basic tasks. Within a week I think they figured out that I was onto them and made some excuse to quit about taking a contract closer to home. Honestly, at this point many American companies have an office of their own offshore, and it's generally considered more prestigious and better condensated to work for those companies directly, so I assume there's close to zero talent left in the large outsourcers.
  • osrec 5y ago
    Large outsourcing companies are not really hired for talent (at least not from what I saw in the investment banking world). They're hired as scapegoats, and attached to an already failed project. Then they're publically blamed for the failure, while the actual guy responsible gets away with murder (and maybe even hops into a new internal role with better pay). If I was to rename the consulting/outsourcing industry, I would probably call it the "professional scapegoat" industry.
  • raincom 5y ago
    Indian offshoring companies like Wipro, TCS, etc pay $500 per month for fresh graduates from the engineering colleges, where lecturers are incompetent. In a team of 10, only two are capable, all others are for billable hours for these companies. Some of these newbies can learn and improve skills and jump to other companies in a couple of years. In the end, what matters is the cheapest labor, and billable hours. Account managers are judged on how much profit they bring.
    • known 5y ago
• bitwize 5y ago
  Oh God, I got two paragraphs in and thought, "This sounds like Unbounded Solutions/BrighterBrain/Enhance IT." They called me a few times, then I looked them up and discovered their business model, and everything in me said "avoid, avoid, avoid". Knowing there's another firm doing this, and hearing the sordid details, has me feeling blackpilled at the state of the industry.
• vmception 5y ago
  End justifies the means, to me this doesn’t cross the line, except for the potentially visa fraud part and the feeder org could just be upfront about what they’re doing. For the us citizens into something like that it doesn’t matter to me. Once you get in the organization and good salary figure it out, it’s the big tech that has an inefficiency screening process that isn’t good for anyone. They should be having their own bootcamps imo, train your potential employees. Given what software engineer actually do at all levels, there is no reason to waste your life and time on a ladder unless you personally want to feel more comfortable in the role
• giantg2 5y ago
  I swear this story was already posted earlier in the week with another popular post. I can't find it though.
• stefanba3 5y ago
  A hiring manager friend at a Seattle unicorn once asked me to look over resumes. I didn't have a full grasp of how prevalent these "consultancies" are and was puzzled by all the jargon-filled, similar-looking resumes from people who were clearly working for "consultancies". Now I know, they were all looking for a ramp off! Some (many?) may even make great hires, but it' s hard to tease them out by looking at those resumes.
• waynesonfire 5y ago
  Don't care what your title reads. Show me the money. Then, we'll see how senior you are.
• manuelabeledo 5y ago
  This whole tale could have been me in Europe, 17 years ago. I was desperately looking for a job, and these consulting firms are a dime a dozen. So there I went, fresh off uni, interview with a medium sized consulting firm from Mexico. First day, one of the managers bragged about putting half dozen engineers in a motel, at walking distance from the customer offices, three per room, only things they did were work, eat and sleep, for six straight months. Knowing no better and in dire need of money, I took the job. Six months in, and after several weeks working 60 hours, I quit the day after I had a heat stroke because they moved us in a new office space with no windows or A/C. I learnt afterwards that they were charging the customer 4x the rate they were paying me. Of course, they had "sold" me as a "senior developer".
• Uptrenda 5y ago
  There are also companies that post fake jobs and then use the good resumes with minor tweaks to help market their own employees. It's so dodgy, wish there was a way to improve transparency.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  This is an H1B "consulting" body shop. Emphasis on "body". Of course you are housed like a morgue.
• Ensorceled 5y ago
  Hiring consultants has really gone into the toilet. Senior Data Engineers who don't know what upsert is. Senior Developers who can't answer simple questions about a stack they have "3 years experience" in. Senior AWS Architects who stumble on simple architecture questions and insist on switching an 80K qps stack to API Gateway. I presume because the real seniors these consulting firms depended on are working for FANNG/MAMMA? Of course all of these firms want 2 weeks of "exploration" up front...
• ziggus 5y ago
  I've mentioned this before, but I think the conflation of 'developer' and 'software engineer' can really cause confusion when hiring. These are different roles that most HR, management and even most 'developers' aren't clear on. When you aren't clear on what a 'software engineer' actually does, and don't hire based on what that role really means but based on some other semi-related criteria like 'works well with clients' or 'bills lots of hours', you're going to wind up with a lot of confusion. Here's the IEEE's take on the differences, based on their certification programs: https://www.computer.org/education/certifications https://www.computer.org/education/certifications
• vjust 5y ago
  I was the sole tech guy (backend/frontend/help desk).. and my boss during the annual review asked me to pick a job title any title. I was already senior engineer, so went for Technology Director. CTO would have worked against me on my next job move.
• vjust 5y ago
  And I suppose this is the opposite of Apple's strategy. There was a recent WashingtonPost article, apparently, any employee once they quit Apple (and become ex-employee) - HR changes their title to "Associate" - this affects future job verification & prospects, and someone filed a lawsuit on this.
• jcun4128 5y ago
  Where I was at senior was the base title. Then there were numbers after the title and team lead after. At the time I would not have marketed myself as a senior but that's what they paid me as/my title and I kept the job for almost two and a half years so I guess I'm senior? I avoid using the word engineer though as I don't have a degree.
• lkrubner 5y ago
  I remember when I was in high school, I had some friends who studied karate, and they were like, "I finally made it to black belt." Meaning, they were a master now. They were 16 years old, and had maybe 3 years experience. In Taiwan, in the 1890s... uh, they would not be regarded as black belt. Even then it was clear that there was a lot of "belt inflation" happening. The karate schools like the children to feel like they are making progress, so every 6 months the children got a new belt, until finally they were black belts. It seems like the same thing has been happening with engineering titles.
  • ok_dad 5y ago
    > In Taiwan, in the 1890s Karate is Japanese, but I get your point.
    • lkrubner 5y ago
      We are both wrong. I was thinking "Island south of Japan" and I said Taiwan, but I should have said Okinawa, which was conquered by Japan and part of the Japanese empire in the 1890s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate Taiwan was also conquered by Japan and was part of the empire in the 1890s, which I think is why I confused it with Okinawa.
  • mrexroad 5y ago
    Fwiw, black belt was basically when you actually started learning. Everything up until then was really just gaining what you needed in order to actually start learning. IIRC the “black” represented the dirt (effort) accumulated over time.
• raincom 5y ago
  This game of getting OPT,CPT, H4-EAD candidates and putting them though some boot camp and free housing is at least 24 years—remember Y2K and dot com. Indian and Chinese international students in the USA know about it.
• sangnoir 5y ago
  This article sounds like uninformed speculation. Every semi-serious will do (or outsource) candidate background checks to verify identity and employment history. It may be possible to fake histories to customers at body shops/WITCH because the employer is in on it, everywhere else, the lies will be short lived.
• rmk 5y ago
  Looks like H-1B abusers have touched a new nadir of chicanery and skullduggery. They prey on people who are not able to get interviews or jobs on their own, but have compelling reasons, such as crushing debt incurred to study in the U.S., to even consider debasing themselves in this way. There have been a couple of enforcement actions by the DoJ in Jersey and a few other places, but they have barely touched the tip of the iceberg. Once a company sponsors an employee for a Green Card application, it has every incentive in the world to exploit and mistreat the employee. And many companies routinely act on the incentives. It's unfortunate that a lot of the mass focus is on illegal immigrants, who have less of a legal standing and moral case than those who have followed the laws of their host country to the letter, but still find themselves treated like dirt. This is one of the unfortunate byproducts of electoral politics and representative democracy: sometimes, there are groups that are unlikely to matter electorally given their numbers, and their concerns are always given short shrift no matter how legitimate. Of course, the H-1B system itself has done enormous damage to the industry by enabling companies such as IBM to mass fire entire cohorts of older people. As usual, efforts at reform have been fitful, uneven, and have been subject to the vagaries of the political winds.
• einpoklum 5y ago
  > I accepted a job offer ... They promised they would When an employer you don't know promises something other than in writing, ask them to put it in writing. If they don't, you might still take the offer, but it would be an offer _without_ said promise.
• haidev 5y ago
  As a fresh graduate I can really relate with this article. The number of recruiters that reached out to me since I started applying two months ago is insane, some of them just want a Microsoft Word version of my resume, some straight up asked me to add fake projects and internships on my resume. That's without bringing the number of recruiters that wants you to pay them a weekly fee and "guarantee" you a job in X number of weeks. I'll end with one funny recruiter that reached out two weeks ago from a similar recruiting firm. I made it clear from the beginning that I will NEVER lie on my resume neither allow them to edit my resume. He offers me this job that he found for me. I started asking about the compensation and he says 18$/hour, I laughed and said that this rate won't work for me especially in the Bay Area. He said he'll circle back with his manager and try to get me 65K/year like I asked which I believe is fair for someone fresh off school like me, I am not chasing after a FAANG salary especially being a recent grad. Anyways long story short, he calls me back and offers me $20/hour without any benefits this time. I just humbly declined and politely asked him to not reach me again. The market seems to be hot for Senior developers, which leaves recent grads struggling to find jobs especially in a remote setting. I'm grateful that I am like OP where I can fall back on my parents and keep looking for a job neither do I need sponsorship.
• kthejoker2 5y ago
  A thing that will never cease to irk me is the flattening of titles in tech. Seeing people with similar titles to my own who I wouldn't trust with my toaster much less my MLOps pipelines is infuriating, because it just dilutes the signals to recruiters, employers, prospective clients.