There was some hubbub in Sweden a while back about the armed forces putting up a _really_ specific job ad, like it was tailored to one person.

Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.

It’s an open secret in France that many, maybe most (?) calls for new teaching/research positions in university labs are designed to be won by someone already attached to the lab (like a doctoral student for example, or someone with a temporary contract).

In French it’s called being "fléché", as in attributed for someone. It’s of course totally contrary to the rules. (It’s most of the time somehow well intentioned, from the point of view of labs doing it, like there’s this great person doing a lot of work and they deserve this new opening the lab fought to get budgeted.)

The sad part is that some poor naive young researchers will prepare and cross the country to interview (hopefully now there will be more video calls) not knowing that the call is already custom fitted to someone in the lab.

The fun part is that, as there has to be a majority of external jury in the commission appraising the candidates, the external jury sometimes don’t even know that the call is rigged and pick another, clearly better candidate Then, a few months later the candidate starts their new job and is really puzzled at the attitude of this one person… the one that was supposed to win the call

France has this down to an art.

When the French government puts out an EU wide bid for something (As is the rule in the EU), the bid will be won by a French company. Every. Single. Time. And it's not by accident.

Finland, on the other hand, is playing things stupid.

We've had cases where a city's laundry services was won by an Estonian company(!) because they were the cheapest. They actually shipped all laundry 300km+ south, over the bay and to Estonia. Wash it and send it back. For some reason the people handling the bid were all suprised_pikachu.png when it turned out the arrangement didn't work AT ALL.

That's all down to knowing how to write the bid so that the winner will also be the best.

Estonia was probably chosen because Estonia has very good experience doing laundry of the Russians if you know what I mean.

Joke aside, it seems one of the winner of the Finland->Estonia washing contract is actually a Finnish national that incorporated a company in Estonia: https://www.aripaev.ee/article/2011/2/22/soome-pesupesijad-u...

Estonia has done a great job with these contracts. Washer salaries are 400Eur per month here and 1600eur per month in Finland so Estonians keep the washing factories open overnight.

For more context: When opening a permanent position, research institutions are required by law to advertise the position publicly and interview candidates.

We are talking about permanent positions guaranteed for life with fantastic perks. They're extremely competitive to get.

When a permanent position is opened, it's often for a position that's been contracted out for a while.

Want to hire the contractor who's been doing the job perfectly for 2 years? It's simply not possible because of the law above. Gotta advertise the job nationwide and run formal interviews. An interview panel will run interviews and pick whoever they like (it takes months).

It's not as rigged as the poster makes it out to be. The panel is 5+ random people selected among a very large company. They don't know that the position is tailored to someone and they couldn't care less either way, they're all people with a cushy position guaranteed for life, no favor to give. (It's really the opposite of Russia/China for those doing the comparison).

It's rigged in the sense that if there was somebody doing the job for year, they're probably more qualified than you are.

This rule exists to prevent middle managers from doing empire building and growing their headcount indefinitely. It works as you can see above where a better person was chosen.

I have a friend who was lucky enough to present himself and get such position. the reason was that the other guy made some mistake in the formal process (missed some required sheet of paper).

This is exactly how American companies game the h1b visa system. When I worked at AVG we would write job requirement so specific to an Israel developers who worked for one of our subsidiaries that it was clear no other human being in the world could qualify for it.

What you call gaming, I call working around the government’s idiotic visa requirements.

That depends on what you see as the purpose of the visa requirements. If the purpose is to support economic prospects for American citizens and current residents (which seems like a completely valid purpose of government), then putting hurdles to ensure the job opening was “shopped” to qualified existing authorized workers seems pretty reasonable.

(I should clarify that I’m fully in favor of immigration programs that serve to increase the density of highly qualified individuals in the US and to fill positions which would otherwise go vacant. If as a small side-effect, those programs depress wages via increased supply, that’s still an excellent trade for the population. I am not in favor of visa programs substantially/primarily aimed at decreasing wages.)

Increased supply of labor depresses wages ceteris paribus.

That is why George W Bush and older generation Republicans always supported legal AND illegal immigration. Their constituents were the businesss that thrived and made more profits from a cheaper laborforce.

The Democrats were historically hostile to immigration because their base was the working class. Now that Wall Street and Big Business has gone Democratic since Bill Clinton and the New Democrats there will be more supply of labor and thus lower wages ceteris paribus.

> ceteris paribus

Today I learned another useful latin expression.

Working for a subsidiary has a preferred status for getting a work permit in US.

It is called L-1 Intra-Company Transfer Visa: L-1A and L-1B for transfer of managers and specialists

https://workpermit.com/immigration/usa/employees-guide-us-im...

Why Israeli developers? Just out of curiosity, do you have any recommendations for anti-virus software for mobile or for desktops?

Oh just in this case I was working at a security company and everybody we imported were from Israel. I’ve worked st 3 security companies and they all either had Israeli offices or had acquired Israeli security startups. It just seems to be a thing there.

I don't think he meant israeli developers in general. Specific people.

There's a bassoonist urban legend (possibly true) that Bernstein wrote the ludicrous high Fs in the West Side Story bassoon part so that one of his pals who played bassoon would have to be hired for the pit orchestra, because he was the only one around who could play that high.

This is how hiring works in most public tech centers and colleges here in Spain.

The job postings are useless, if you want to work there what you need is an introduction (someone to give your CV to a lead that needs hands on deck). Then 2 to 3 months later a job posting with an almost complete copy of your CV will appear and they’ll hire you.

Do you have a link to the story? That sounds both hilarious and disappointing.

Here's a link in Swedish: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/70eXyK/forsvarsmaktens-...

Under the first bullet in the screendump in the article it says:

* Experience from personnel management positions and documented good leadership qualities (Here Henric lacks the clear experience why I think it should be moved to meritorious)

Couldn’t find an English version, but I’m sure you can run it through a translate and get the gist of it

https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny...

A quick google search didn't give me much but I found this https://www.france24.com/en/20200115-swedish-military-duped-...

> He rose to the rank of major despite not having completed mandatory training, and was even temporarily promoted to be able to serve at the military alliance headquarters, the newspaper said.

Sounds like they could save a lot of money getting rid of the training requirement.

That’s beautiful

Russia at some point instituted a law that all contracts have to be published in a centralized database. So, to award contracts to specific companies, an array of techniques was developed to prevent anyone from using that database to bid on those contracts. The names of the goods are misspelled, spelled using a mix of Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, the items are required to be of specific model with tiny modification from common one that only one (pre-arranged) provider happens to have, unusual names are used for goods, etc. etc. It's a whole branch of art now.

It's absurdly common and has nothing to do with Russia other than plenty of Russians also do it. The reason you pay more to get a political job than political jobs pay is because you get control of contracts. Contracts get you rich.

edit: Speaking from direct American government experience.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure we don't have a monopoly on such practices, only couldn't remember if I ever read about Western procedures and misconducts with these contests. Dunno even what they're properly called—it's a ‘tender’ here.

However, I'm familiar with the term ‘kickback’...

Also its less spectacular but more long term, "revolving door".

That term I do know, generally speaking. It's particularly associated for me with the industrial band Pigface.

This is quite common in the US.

For a while my entire job ended up writing proposals and all the related nonsense for federal an state government contracts. I did not like that one bit.

However spending week after week trying to divine the meaning behind phrases and terms.

It shortly became apparent that some parts of the government would consistently have requirements only applicable to one vendor.

That saved a lot of time since I could just skip them whenever they came out.

These types of «arrangements” often go all the way to congress promised pork for donors and secure job for voters.

If I have given the impression I was doing all the work myself that is not intended. We had a big team of all sorts of disciplines

What I don’t understand is why auditors can’t or won’t put a stop to this.

It's hard to put down a technically legal, as far as text of law goes, practice. Especially when there are no complaints to use as a base because all contenders for the contract were similarly shady. And sometimes some $RANDOM gets the contract because nobody serious will take it, thanks to anti-corruption/anti-loss measures that the populous voted in that made the contract impossible. So Honest John Federal takes the contract and finds a suitably desperate student/outsources it to cheapest vendor possible.

Meanwhile auditors (unless burned out) would love to get the contractors and buyer staked in court, but technically all checkboxes on the checklist are checked (pun intended) and there's no obvious better candidate to use as counter example.

Not Russia but eastern Europe. A long time ago I was working at this company 'subscribed' to government contracts. There was a new project for the army/nato and my colleague was writing our bid offer. Right next to him sat an army officer whispering him exactly what to write down to win the bid. Needless to say all public contracts where won by a small group of companies in the same manner. But sometimes the bribes were even higher, and companies hq-ed in central and western Europe, like IBM and the likes, would win the contracts and then sub-contract my company to do the work.

Reminds me of an RFP for the Pennsylvania Land Trust Assocation I spent $10k preparing a bid for when I was young and naïve before I understood that RFPs were often a sham to give auditors the illusion of due diligence and that it would have been impossible for us to win the contract.

It's not that it reads like a Russian government contract, it reads a bit like any government contract.

The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.

> it reads a bit like any government contract.

I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems like fire alarm, where if a Siemens system is in the building, you must sub out the work to Siemens, or if there’s a Johnson Controls BAS system, you’ll need to sub out that work to JCI.

I know there is a decent amount of corruption in local/state construction contracting so I cannot claim there is 0 fraud for federal construction contracts either.

Construction projects are more understood than software projects, as you have a tangible result that either meets the specs and passes inspection, or doesn’t. It’s a bit different than contracts software or a new plane where the specs can be interpreted in looser ways.

It's good this doesn't occur in all areas, but at least for software systems (the area of vendor contracts I'm familiar with) it's not uncommon. A vendor provides an opaque system that requires relatively deep knowledge of it to perform integrations etc. A third party would need to dig deep into the system & documentation to work with it.

I've seen this with SunGard/Ellucian, and also Oracle. They would not make their documentation & technical manuals publicly available. A third party arose offering general maintenance & other services, and used customer's documentation copies to do so. SunGard sued them, and the customer [0]. Oracle has done something similar [1].

Unfortunately, this is a common practice by providers of large proprietary systems, and whether or not the vendor prevails is almost irrelevant: customers now know that competitive bidding brings a risk of costly litigation.

Personally I don't think suing your customers is a very good business practice for long term customer loyalty. Then again some industries only have the choice of a few vendors, roughly equally litigious, to choose from. The alternative is to create your own custom system, but that's an option only available to very large customers.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319233444/http://blog.thehi...

[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-small-company-promising-...

So what is the downside of blowing your budget for the bid?

Are you asking what happens if you have the low bid and you go over budget on the project?

If you can’t get change orders to cover your budget overages, your company loses money.

Russian government certainly doesn’t have the monopoly of that kind of practice. It’s a standard practice in wordlbank projects as well : wordlbank finances the development of a system in a foreign country, and the projects requirements are written in such a way that only US companies can answer.

That's nothing to do with Russia. I had a client make an RFP based on my company's service specs. The entire intent (stated behind the scenes) was to have us get the work. We'd already done other work - they wanted to keep us involved for the next phase of work. We lost to someone local. They charged basically the same as we did, but they were local so didn't have to include travel costs, so they 'won'. The client lost out because there was no consideration for continuation of knowledge/experience - we'd done an initial training course for them - our teams knew each other and had done some informal prototyping already while on site. But... "the other bid was lower".

This also happens a lot in some European countries, where governments/municipalities buy/lease cars for. They specify features list in the way, that only one car model form particular manufacturer matches the requirements. Pure corruption.

This is endemic in tender processes the world over.

I used to work in a role where I had to respond to tenders for the software I led, and it was obvious that if the requirements list wasn’t written by our competitor, the institution had decided they wanted their software and listed every feature they knew only that company offered.

Seems like the software procurement process itself is broken.

I guess this could happen with hardware too. But adding more features is much easier in software. Marketing can then argue that it makes a certain product “better”.

It’s not just software. Military hardware procurement is also notoriously corrupt, ditto with local infrastructure projects.

Sounds like poland and hungary today :)

It reminds me of how during the Iraq war (fiasco), Halliburton, partly owned by dick Cheney, was awarded a huge "no bid" contract (no competitor by design, no bid required) for logistical support in Iraq.

No corruption to see here folks, move along.