4 ms·

Rant: when companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good? This is just companies getting back th

Rant: when companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good? This is just companies getting back the same treatment they've been subjecting their customers to for over a decade. In business this is called "business process outsourcing", aka send off sensitive data & permissions to sweatshops in third-world countries. While it's a shame that it happened to what I assume is a legitimate small/medium business that doesn't do the aforementioned practice, I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it. The market has reacted, and as more and more things go remote it allows the "little guys" to take a stab at it with varying degrees of success. (to be clear, I do not condone this behavior despite being approached several times to be a "front" for foreign developers - however, I totally understand the market dynamics that push them to do this)

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
It doesn't make sense to suggest that the OP's company deserves this because some other companies did some things you didn't like. This idea that all businesses are bad and deserve to be cheated by their employees is extremely immature. > When companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good? Subcontractors are engaged on different terms and with specific contracts that require subcontractors to also engage in specific contracts. If an individual employee hands their logins to someone else and says "pretend its me" then it's clear fraud, not to mention a breach of the documents you agreed to when you signed. > In business this is called "business process outsourcing", No, it's not. Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary. Hiring a programmer and giving them access to your company Slack and source code is entirely different.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary. So carefully limited that insiders from said sweatshops end up taking (laughably low) bribes to perform things like fraudulent SIM swaps, access customer accounts, etc? In theory it must be all well and controlled and in a proper world nobody would be doing fraud, whether for themselves or a third-party. In reality there's very little oversight over it on the companies' side (and a slap on the wrist if by some miracle regulators actually get involved) so seeing them complain about being on the receiving end of this is some sweet schadenfreude.
- lmm 4y ago
  > It doesn't make sense to suggest that the OP's company deserves this because some other companies did some things you didn't like. This idea that all businesses are bad and deserve to be cheated by their employees is extremely immature. When the business lobby (that represents, or at least purports to represent, businesses as a whole) has asked for, and got, the laws that make this profitable for them, the responsibility falls on all businesses to a certain extent.
jdminhbg 4y ago
> I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it. That seems like a sentiment better expressed in an instance where it actually happens then? I don't have much sympathy for burglars who fall through glass windows, but it doesn't have anything to do with OP's situation.
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
- ironmagma 4y ago
  It's a reaction to the sentiment - typically from rightists - that things like crime and fraud are good so long as it's the "correct" people (corporations) perpetrating it.
- malfist 4y ago
  Why are you bringing politics into this? GP did not mention politics at all.
hnfong 4y ago
I don't see how it's relevant. If you want a company to provide services without outsourcing to a third party, you can make it a requirement in the contract. But most likely you don't need this assurance, just that they maintain a certain level of quality. If a company misrepresents the quality of their goods/services it is essentially a breach of contract and it's not "fine". If they never made the promise in the first place and you're just bitter that some companies cut costs to achieve the bare minimum level of service, well that's capitalism for you. But irrelevant. Those companies could have hired dodgy people in-house and they'll still have shitty service. Finding somebody to interview then having another person show up at work is straight out fraud. That's also not OK.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
1) two wrongs don't make a right 2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud. 3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing.
- lmm 4y ago
  > 2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud. > 3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing. Is this asymmetry reasonable or fair? This kind of "identity fraud" seems to be much the same as business outsourcing (represent that the work is going to be done by one party, then it's actually done by another, cheaper and less skilled one); why should one be more illegal or immoral than the other?
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    There is no asymmetry. Regular business outsourcing isn't deceitful, it is expected and encouraged. If a business promises up and down that they don't outsource or subcontract and do, then of course it is amoral as well. I rarely see the 2nd situation with businesses.
    - lmm 4y ago
      Expected perhaps, encouraged no. And I don't see individuals promising thatthey don't outsource or subcontract either. So the only justification would seem to be that people have lower expectations for businesses, which is pretty unconvincing.
frellus 4y ago
Have some empathy, man. If you owned a company and hired someone, but the person who showed up isn't the same person, the word "fraud" is wholly appropriate and I feel bad for Op. When you are trying to hire the very best, and you do but someone else shows up in their place..? Not cool. There's no reason to have a comparison with companies outsourcing. Companies outsource to lower cost with, ideally, a balance between decreased customer service and standards. The alternative is to raise prices on consumers. Profit motivation is real and not immoral -- companies which outsource and lower their standard of service should get beaten up by the market and competition. That being said, when a company has a monopoly or some other anti-competitive practices there is no way to balance this.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
  >Have some empathy, man. If you owned a company and hired someone, but the person who showed up isn't the same person, the word "fraud" is wholly appropriate and I feel bad for Op. Fraud? Sure. But feeling bad for the person exploiting the value of one persons labor because they didn't get to exploit someone elses labor for more instead is fuckin nuts.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Who said anything about exploitation?
jrm4 4y ago
100%. If this wasn't on this end of the labor pipeline, it would be spun as "Marketing" or similar.
breischl 4y ago
Interesting parallel. I think I'd disagree that it's considered "fine" when company's do it, though. What the OP describes is basically a version of a "bait and switch" fraud, which is pretty widely illegal and not considered OK by anyone. Although you can find examples where people ride that line pretty closely[1], but even then people think it's bad behavior. A subtly different thing that's maybe closer to what you're talking about is hiring contractors and then blaming them for problems. A current major example being many of the Amazon-branded delivery trucks that only deliver for Amazon, but when they do something wrong "oh they're a subcontractor, not Amazon's fault!" So, not sure I agree 100%, but I understand the anger. [1] For example, this guy that found name-brand USB-C hubs had the same "guts" as cut-rate crap. https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
I remember seeing a couple of people post on here about basically becoming their own consulting company, by applying for the position (as their real selves) and then farming out the work to junior devs. They said they could juggle half a dozen "job" like this. Good for them, I guess, but that's real work, too; just very different work than programming. Then there was the guy who said he had enough rep to take jobs, do basically nothing until they figured out he wasn't producing, at which point they'd fire him, but meanwhile he'd collected 6 months of salary. Again, he had a half dozen of these "jobs" in the pipeline. In my own job, I've gotten roped into a years-long email chain where a legitimately hired programmer, working in our affiliated consultancy, in a foreign country, couldn't figure out how to install NodeJS to satisfy his ReactJS stack. LONG story, but who's at fault for hiring someone so clueless that they couldn't figure out one of the first steps of modern web development? I helped interview a replacement for a position I was leaving, and sat across the table from a guy who said he'd programmed several .NET and Rails applications. He was hired. When it came time for me to do the "knowledge transfer," I watched him literally open a browser, and type "Ruby on Rails." He'd never even heard of it. Again, LONG story, but they threw away everything I had written, and he used Java. It was the only thing he knew. He'd made up projects on his resume, and lied to our faces. All of these examples in this thread are just different data points along the sliding scale of trust. There are many different places to inject mistrust, and -- human nature being what it is -- someone will always find these holes, and try to take advantage of them. Don't trust. Verify.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

It doesn't make sense to suggest that the OP's company deserves this because some other companies did some things you didn't like. This idea that all businesses are bad and deserve to be cheated by their employees is extremely immature. > When companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good? Subcontractors are engaged on different terms and with specific contracts that require subcontractors to also engage in specific contracts. If an individual employee hands their logins to someone else and says "pretend its me" then it's clear fraud, not to mention a breach of the documents you agreed to when you signed. > In business this is called "business process outsourcing", No, it's not. Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary. Hiring a programmer and giving them access to your company Slack and source code is entirely different.

Nextgrid 4y ago
> Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary. So carefully limited that insiders from said sweatshops end up taking (laughably low) bribes to perform things like fraudulent SIM swaps, access customer accounts, etc? In theory it must be all well and controlled and in a proper world nobody would be doing fraud, whether for themselves or a third-party. In reality there's very little oversight over it on the companies' side (and a slap on the wrist if by some miracle regulators actually get involved) so seeing them complain about being on the receiving end of this is some sweet schadenfreude.
lmm 4y ago
> It doesn't make sense to suggest that the OP's company deserves this because some other companies did some things you didn't like. This idea that all businesses are bad and deserve to be cheated by their employees is extremely immature. When the business lobby (that represents, or at least purports to represent, businesses as a whole) has asked for, and got, the laws that make this profitable for them, the responsibility falls on all businesses to a certain extent.

jdminhbg 4y ago

> I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it. That seems like a sentiment better expressed in an instance where it actually happens then? I don't have much sympathy for burglars who fall through glass windows, but it doesn't have anything to do with OP's situation.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago

ironmagma 4y ago
It's a reaction to the sentiment - typically from rightists - that things like crime and fraud are good so long as it's the "correct" people (corporations) perpetrating it.
malfist 4y ago
Why are you bringing politics into this? GP did not mention politics at all.

hnfong 4y ago

I don't see how it's relevant. If you want a company to provide services without outsourcing to a third party, you can make it a requirement in the contract. But most likely you don't need this assurance, just that they maintain a certain level of quality. If a company misrepresents the quality of their goods/services it is essentially a breach of contract and it's not "fine". If they never made the promise in the first place and you're just bitter that some companies cut costs to achieve the bare minimum level of service, well that's capitalism for you. But irrelevant. Those companies could have hired dodgy people in-house and they'll still have shitty service. Finding somebody to interview then having another person show up at work is straight out fraud. That's also not OK.

s1artibartfast 4y ago

1) two wrongs don't make a right 2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud. 3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing.

lmm 4y ago
> 2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud. > 3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing. Is this asymmetry reasonable or fair? This kind of "identity fraud" seems to be much the same as business outsourcing (represent that the work is going to be done by one party, then it's actually done by another, cheaper and less skilled one); why should one be more illegal or immoral than the other?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  There is no asymmetry. Regular business outsourcing isn't deceitful, it is expected and encouraged. If a business promises up and down that they don't outsource or subcontract and do, then of course it is amoral as well. I rarely see the 2nd situation with businesses.
  - lmm 4y ago
    Expected perhaps, encouraged no. And I don't see individuals promising thatthey don't outsource or subcontract either. So the only justification would seem to be that people have lower expectations for businesses, which is pretty unconvincing.

frellus 4y ago

Have some empathy, man. If you owned a company and hired someone, but the person who showed up isn't the same person, the word "fraud" is wholly appropriate and I feel bad for Op. When you are trying to hire the very best, and you do but someone else shows up in their place..? Not cool. There's no reason to have a comparison with companies outsourcing. Companies outsource to lower cost with, ideally, a balance between decreased customer service and standards. The alternative is to raise prices on consumers. Profit motivation is real and not immoral -- companies which outsource and lower their standard of service should get beaten up by the market and competition. That being said, when a company has a monopoly or some other anti-competitive practices there is no way to balance this.

bobkazamakis 4y ago
>Have some empathy, man. If you owned a company and hired someone, but the person who showed up isn't the same person, the word "fraud" is wholly appropriate and I feel bad for Op. Fraud? Sure. But feeling bad for the person exploiting the value of one persons labor because they didn't get to exploit someone elses labor for more instead is fuckin nuts.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Who said anything about exploitation?

jrm4 4y ago

100%. If this wasn't on this end of the labor pipeline, it would be spun as "Marketing" or similar.

breischl 4y ago

Interesting parallel. I think I'd disagree that it's considered "fine" when company's do it, though. What the OP describes is basically a version of a "bait and switch" fraud, which is pretty widely illegal and not considered OK by anyone. Although you can find examples where people ride that line pretty closely[1], but even then people think it's bad behavior. A subtly different thing that's maybe closer to what you're talking about is hiring contractors and then blaming them for problems. A current major example being many of the Amazon-branded delivery trucks that only deliver for Amazon, but when they do something wrong "oh they're a subcontractor, not Amazon's fault!" So, not sure I agree 100%, but I understand the anger. [1] For example, this guy that found name-brand USB-C hubs had the same "guts" as cut-rate crap. https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

I remember seeing a couple of people post on here about basically becoming their own consulting company, by applying for the position (as their real selves) and then farming out the work to junior devs. They said they could juggle half a dozen "job" like this. Good for them, I guess, but that's real work, too; just very different work than programming. Then there was the guy who said he had enough rep to take jobs, do basically nothing until they figured out he wasn't producing, at which point they'd fire him, but meanwhile he'd collected 6 months of salary. Again, he had a half dozen of these "jobs" in the pipeline. In my own job, I've gotten roped into a years-long email chain where a legitimately hired programmer, working in our affiliated consultancy, in a foreign country, couldn't figure out how to install NodeJS to satisfy his ReactJS stack. LONG story, but who's at fault for hiring someone so clueless that they couldn't figure out one of the first steps of modern web development? I helped interview a replacement for a position I was leaving, and sat across the table from a guy who said he'd programmed several .NET and Rails applications. He was hired. When it came time for me to do the "knowledge transfer," I watched him literally open a browser, and type "Ruby on Rails." He'd never even heard of it. Again, LONG story, but they threw away everything I had written, and he used Java. It was the only thing he knew. He'd made up projects on his resume, and lied to our faces. All of these examples in this thread are just different data points along the sliding scale of trust. There are many different places to inject mistrust, and -- human nature being what it is -- someone will always find these holes, and try to take advantage of them. Don't trust. Verify.