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.

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.

This was very odd to us, since our names wouldn't mean a thing to anyone on the client's end, but we chalked it up to red tape. Your explanation finally makes sense of it.

At most, it gets the A-team's PE stamps, so they're at least professionally liable for the quality of work, but first project coordination/ outline meeting & final review are all they usually do. Occasionally take a call from a VIP.

And when the project freezes indefinitely, so do the payouts.

I asked why they were doing it, but no one gave me a straight answer. I mean, I get for them it was Tuesday, but when a major contractor starts asking you to brush right up against the line of equivocating, I can't justify moving forward without some serious explanations and levels of frankness I don't think many recruiters are comfortable with..

After my first successful project for them, their biggest client started demanding that I be assigned to their next big project (or one of the external contractors). We both ended up taking jobs elsewhere, and that client quit using the developer.

And the client? They were a full-on shovel-ware developer that barely cared about game quality. They just needed a game that would run reliably enough that Nintendo would approve it. So to be fired as a developer by that company was really embarrassing...

Occasionally we’d get someone good but as soon as the consulting company figured out that they were good, they’d get rotated off our project and replaced with someone mediocre. They also never gave us any warning when they were going to switch someone.

Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best. So obviously, they don't exactly get the best.

The worst part is that all these D-tier, fresh out of school guys gain experience and some may even get good at their job. Unsurprisingly, these people start asking for raises and promotions, and the consulting companies tries to charge their customer more, I mean, we are talking quality now.

But the big company financial department doesn't like it, so they make a new call for cheap contracts, get a new round of incompetents, etc...

In the end, everyone loses. The consulting company makes little profit, sometimes even losses and the big company always get shit service, which usually costs them more than what they save. As for the employees, the work conditions are often terrible and they usually quit at the first occasion. But the financial department is happy, they have a lower number in the "expense" column.

Once the contract was won, we'd sub-contract to a local (to the region) contracting agency, who would in turn essentially do the equivalent of a craigslist search for a body, that we would interview to ensure that they could be taught, and then we'd take 30-60 days to teach them our product - depending on the initiative and experience of the candidate, the customer (who remember, was paying us $500k/year for an application engineer) - might get a recent-high school graduate that was making $30k/year and had never even heard of our technology a week prior.

I have trouble feeling sorry for the consulting company in that situation. If the budget your client offers is insufficient for the job, demand more or turn it down. Don't lie that you can do it and then bait-and-switch.

This created a lot of internal pressure to use contract resources as much as possible.

As an example, when we had our bathroom done, the guy they sent to finish things up couldn't even center and level the towel racks.

Especially when the customers are female.

Had to go with someone who I had a little trouble communicating with, but at least I could verify he knew what they were doing and understood my concerns about how the work got done.

I actually think it’s essential in medium+ size companies. The authenticity of having a highly technical person in sales works wonders.

Generally, you need the A-team at the start because there's a lot of very critical work that needs doing. After a while, it's mostly maintenance, so it's silly to keep your top people there... you can still call them in when they're needed.

This is just resource efficiency.

I honestly wonder how this place makes money some days!

And being able to scale on demand is a big part of providing a service. Otherwise you can't absorb any unexpected spikes in demand from already existing projects, or have to pass on lucrative opportunities, or you pay to keep a buffer of people on payroll.

But yes, bigger consultancies absolutely do this.

Can I ask, does that mean you got so worn out so you couldn't work, had to stay at home / away-from-work for some time?

I wonder what happened afterwards. Seems you now work as an independent contractor now? (looking at your external profile, I hope you don't mind)

But after working on the same problem set for that long I got interested again in solving tougher problems and went back out on the consulting scene.

But that job forever changed my views on work life balance so I am now very aggressive with balancing hours for people that report to me even if I don’t balance my own hours.

The clients though, they want to pay the consulting firm relatively the same price they would pay for a standalone developer employee, per hour. The entire industry is broken and a lot of it has to do with broken recruiting, the recruiting industry, the "consulting firms" (body-shops) that are just resellers, and onerous employment regulations that make firms prefer outsourcing to shady outfits instead of hiring in-house developers.

But then, after many months and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars are already spent, their bar for "mutually-satisfactory state" has been lowered to "I guess we will accept this pile of mediocre shit that the D-team built, because we already wasted months on this and we are desperate for something, and it would be too expensive and just waste more time to try and argue with the consulting firm to fix it".

I spent a long career as a consultant at one of the top "prestigious" firms. Consulting firms almost always prey on this hope that the clients won't complain too much, even though everyone knows the end product that is delivered isn't anywhere close to what was pitched during the sales phase.

When has that ever happened?

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.

This is now in my lexicon. I loved the show as a kid and this so perfectly captures how I feel about some shops.

Although the good contractors are SWAMPED for work, I definitely have to up my rate.

"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."

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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!

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

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?

You are defrauding the client by not providing the service and/or personnel advertised. How is this not, at a minimum, a criminal act?

It makes sense to have juniors do the work and seniors to oversee the work.

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.

> 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.

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.

Source: extensive experience on projects with Splunk proserve.

Nobody wants to touch the lead's code. The more of it there is, the slower things go. Or the more workarounds/end runs (duplicate functionality) you find in the code. It's best if the leads only stick their fingers into code that absolutely has to work, has a low expected rate of change, and relates directly to architectural or (better) operational concerns. Everything else they should keep an eye on, insist on quality, but otherwise butt out.

People write code that seems obvious to them. Very, very few of us make a conscious effort to do much more than that. You can write a great deal of solid code that is still write-only. Too much of this, and it makes it difficult to improve your bus numbers, and grooming people for growth is a huge investment of time, energy, and social capital (if you can do it at all). Rather than bringing the whole team up, people play favorites, because that's all they can afford.

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.

"I currently have 10 fully remote engineering jobs"

As long as you're performing akin to your salary for each position, and you read your employment contracts carefully, I see nothing wrong w/ this approach.

There’s nothing heroic about joining a team and then sabotaging their work.

There's the "gives everything up for the company, no questions asked" types of people. Tesla et al come to mind for companies that like to hire this type. I don't get that to be honest. Your family and life are not worth whatever they're paying you, even if the work is 'fun' and engaging. YMMV as always.

Then there's the opposite end which you're alluding to but I'm not entirely sure where on the gradient you are. The slackers or someone like the guy described by the OP. I had someone like that recently. I caught it within the probation period and he was gone after 2 months.

Then there's what I would consider the proper position on the gradient line. You do your work, you do your best, every day without question or being 'made' to. But in return you ask for the company to be reasonable too. Proper pay and benefits, flexibility, nice perks but not the kinds of 'perks' that are just designed to make you 'live' at the office, mandatory 'fun' etc. No BS 'do this yesterday because I say so' requests. The list goes on.

There are companies out there, that are close enough to that/let you do that if you don't just say yes to everything :)

On the other hand these companies are producing some great results. I religiously watch the teardown analysis of the Tesla cars vs others like the Ford Mach-E and the Tesla is just so much better designed in pretty much every regard(except things that require slow methodological improvement such as fit and finish). Whats more, all the Musk companies are moving at the speed of thought. They are so much faster in implementing any new innovation that any competitor makes that they dont have and incorporate it into their product faster than any other company does.

>Then there's what I would consider the proper position on the gradient line. You do your work, you do your best, every day without question or being 'made' to. But in return you ask for the company to be reasonable too. Proper pay and benefits, flexibility, nice perks but not the kinds of 'perks' that are just designed to make you 'live' at the office, mandatory 'fun' etc. No BS 'do this yesterday because I say so' requests. The list goes on.

Don't you think these companies are going to eventually be eaten by the companies that have the demanding work environment? For better or worse all else being equal, those companies get more done in the same amount of time.

I am experiencing this at my company, an old bloated payroll company. They have superb work life balance, I get my work done but I know the company is sinking to Silicon Valley rivals, its just a matter of time. The product is old and competitors are just doing a better job. Im currently in a dilemma where I get paid fairly well but not doing any advanced projects, that will bite me long term but the freedom and 0 stress is just so good. I get my stuff done and have time to take hour long breaks.

The kinds of people that work at such companies I am very very sure would do great things regardless. In fact, I know quite a few people like that, some of which I work with, which is awesome. It's like finally finding your true 'home' company wise, when you have that feeling that your are mostly working with people that both know their stuff and just want to do great work together.

In my book there's a huge difference in whether you have your own company for example and you work on something you love with other like minded people in every free minute you have. But when your kid is sick and needs to be fetched from daycare and mommy has an important meeting to attend it is absolute clear that you won't be working and instead driving to the daycare and nobody even blinks an eye at that and there's no bad feelings on your end, worrying what people might think. Of course you will take care of your kid. And no you won't be working all weekend long just because some sales guy promised the moon to a customer, you will actually be playing with your daughter. Some days you will work 10 hours because you just want to finish that one thing as you're on a roll or there's a Prod incident or something and your SO has got your back. Friday after you definitely go home early and enjoy the weekend. What's not OK is for some VP to have dragged his feet on something and when he remembers about that important presentation the next day he tells you to "get him those numbers by EOD or else".

The proper point on the gradient that I like is definitely _not_ the old bloated payroll company you are referencing. I think that sounds like the kind of company that has tolerated a probably >90% slacker population for way too long and I would be miserable, because I'd constantly ask myself why those guys get paid to be on Facebook all day or pretend that adjusting the background color of that button takes a whole sprint. Taking hours and hours of breaks and nobody blinks an eye is absolutely not OK at all. That's not "You do your work, you do your best, every day without question or being 'made' to". Absolutely that company _should_ get eaten.

This is not what I am talking about. Yes brilliant people are a prerequisite but I am referring to squeezing them hard to get that extra improvement out of them. You see it in the Tesla car vs something like the new Ford. They are both good cars clearly made by talented people. But then when you tear down the Ford you see how the battery pack is made in a manner where they didn't wring out every extraneous cost and they didn't squeeze every last bit of potential out of it. There is so much room for improvement compared to the Tesla. It seems as if Tesla just forces their people to burn 100 hours weeks all the time just for that little extra that ends up in their end product.

>or pretend that adjusting the background color of that button takes a whole sprint.

Im actually in that position right now getting paid 100k. It is depressing as I am wasting my late 20s early 30s but at the same time I see people like Elon getting insanely rich while so many people in the country are sinking beyond salvation. He is actually getting rich off not only the backs of the people he overworks but the parents that raised and invested in those people and the local communities that spent decades molding those people. And what happens in the end? He burns them out and replaces them with new blood.

It makes me realize that 95% of this tech stuff is BS and the few jobs that actually have some innovation are locked behind gates or require sacrificing everything else to achieve. If you are not naturally gifted to be in the top 5% then it is just not worth sacrificing everything else. I guess thats why companies like mine end up filled with people who take a whole sprint to change the background color. There is so much money floating around these companies that are all majority owned by a few mutual funds anyway that its downright stupid not to take as much as you can from them while you can.

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.

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...

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.

I ended up retiring, and 3 years later got re-hired on a very part time, hourly contract basis.

Ah well.

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 :)

Never happened before, hasn’t happened since.

Makes me realize why there is so much red take on new vendors at large firms.

Bad outcomes outside of the process like it taking years to buy software? Not any one person's fault.

Newbies need to learn, there's only so many cadavers you can cut into before you need experience on living flesh. Experienced surgeons are often observing the procedure, and step in as necessary if there is a complex part, or if the junior isn't doing something correctly.

Beyond just the surgeon there is a good number of incredibly professional secondary staff who are running the whole operating theatre, from imaging, instrument preparation, to labs and vitals. When you speak to a surgeon you're not just getting them, you get their entire team, junior to professional.

Exactly the same process for my mom's knee replacement in India. By the time the actual knee guy walks in, patient is knocked out, opened up and ready for the heavy hitter.

In the UK, the most senior doctors are actually called “consultants” - they consult on the work being done by the others

It turned out fine.

In a vacuum, everyone would choose the best care available to them. Of course this is expected. How can anybody be expected to do otherwise when it's their life (or family member's) at stake?

Atul Gawande talks about this experience in Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science [0], where his son had been cared for by a full team of cardiologists, ranging from fellows in specialty training to attendings who had practiced for decades. However, due to certain complications, they needed to choose a pediatric cardiologist with which to schedule follow ups and decide on what procedures would be necessary in the future. One of the fellows, who had been the one putting most of the time in caring for his son, proactively approached them the day before discharge and suggested setting up an appointment.

It's common for fellows to receive patients this way, and at any teaching hospital, an attending is there to supervise and take over if needed. The entire system is set up such that residents and trainees are given opportunities to learn.

He says:

> A resident intubated him. A surgical trainee scrubbed in for his operation. The cardiology fellow put in one of his central lines. None of them asked me if they could. If offered the option to have someone more experienced, I certainly would have taken it. But that was simply how the system worked—no such choices were offered—and so I went along. [...]

> The advantage of this coldhearted machinery is not merely that it gets the learning done. If learning is necessary but causes harm, then above all it ought to apply to everyone alike. Given a choice, people wriggle out, and those choices are not offered equally. They belong to the connected and the knowledgeable, to insiders over outsiders, to the doctor's child but not the truck driver's. If choice cannot go to everyone, maybe it is better when it is not allowed at all.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4477.Complications

Juniors have to learn somewhere. The reality - in Australia, at least - is that juniors learn in the public system where patients don't really have a choice.

Last time I had a different anesthetist than the one I saw before. But I was happy because I did not have affinity with the one I met and the one I had was very welcoming and kind. Which is a really good trait for the person that is responsible to supplant your vital functions for some hours.

The nominal surgeon usually does the “heart” of the procedure: replacing your ACL, removing a tumor, etc. Their assistants just get you into/out of the state where that happens.

Surely you don’t expect the surgeon to personally do everything related to the case, right? Wash the drapes, prep the instruments?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t think “we held our previous employer to ransom” is the sales pitch I’d go with.

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.

We took the bait and the code product was as bad as you would expect.