There are significantly worst things happening in the industry by much much bigger consultancy names. We, an enterprise, hire complete teams from the consultancy that would pick some of the work in different projects with their own product owner and so on but under our contract.
We seldom see all the people whom we interviewed for the teams, as devs, being present in the meetings that they are all expected to be present (of course it is most often the timezone difference that is the mentioned reason). Or people who join have their camera turned off, so no way to see them.
Code quality that comes, is not on par with the skillset we evaluated during the interviews and I suspect the whole consultancy is doing something similar with presenting top engineers in the interview and then moving them between many teams. Leaving the less skilled engineer to do the work.
Yes, I have direct first-hand experience with the "presenting one thing in initial talks pre-signature, and getting something completely different later" with the "big consulting firms". We spoke with actual senior engineers with highly relevant experience up front, and the dev team they sent to us to actually do work (completely with entire suite of product, ux, qa, etc etc etc...packing as many as possible) were people of a...lesser experience level. I'm being polite here.
I have a friend working in the business side of one of the large consulting firms, and the insight I got there is that sales is ahead of engineering staffing by _a lot_. In other words, the supply is being outstripped by the demand. Not wanting to leave money on the table these firms (or at least the very large "name brand" one my friend works for) will sign for projects which they do not have bench staff to fill. They then hit the streets and hire whoever can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Now we have to work alongside these people, who themselves are not so much to blame in many cases. They are pawns in the often-fraudulent game called Software Consulting, Inc. It's great fun. I feel for you.
All of them do this, having been on both sides of the equation.
I can't tell you how much it hurts your soul to work at a consulting firm or implementation shop. I took a job once where they said I could hire a team of great engineers for a very complicated/technical contract, we talked before about how much salary/benefits/timeframe it would be to get the right folks onboard to meet some project deliverables.
Once I was onboard, it was like "oh, well you said you needed $X, but we only have budget for $Y, so you will need to make due with these jr resources". They suggested I work with the sales team to get more business for the things we wanted to do. I suggested they find a replacement and bounced from that clusterfuck.
This is the nth time I see "have you experienced hiring fraud" ask-hn's in the last couple of months.
The frequency at which they show up on the front page makes me think someone's trying to build a narrative.
This is particularly concerning given that this website is also one of the tech sector's most respected hiring sites.
My main question isn't /whether/, as I have enough to go on that this is somehow deliberate. What I'm asking myself is what the ultimate goal of this is.
Dude, no. The sheet number of times I've seen candidates point blank lie to my face in a zoom is to high. Spend some time at the manager's side of the table in the interview process and you'll see this immediately. This is a major problem.
It's a major problem, but it's not new. I worked for a consulting firm (not one anyone here has heard of) and it was an issue with in-person candidates just the same as it is with virtual candidates now. It might be more prevalent now because it's marginally easier to pull it off, but that's about it.
It got to the point where we actually had a manager suggest taking a photo of candidates when they interviewed to confirm that the person coming in when they got hired was the same person.
This assumes I've never done any hiring... which I have done, massive amounts of.
You do get frauds. So what? It's always been the case. It hasn't appeared out of the blue this year, so why is there now an outcry about it? It hasn't increased one bit, all things considered. People have been running bait and switch scams since before the internet existed. Read up on penpal bride scams - you send a photo of a younger, more attractive sister or daughter and entrap a prospect. Or about "flattering portrait" matrimony scams - the same thing, but using paintings, since that was done in the middle ages, before photography.
So again, why is the narrative building being done?
Asking why "the narrative building" is happening presupposes it's some sort of coordinated thing, which I don't think it is. I agree that it's been going on since before widespread virtual work (I saw it first-hand almost immediately upon sitting on that side of the interview table). I don't agree that there's any sort of coordinated "narrative building" happening. You just have a bunch of junior managers or folks who have never hired before being shocked that people will try to make a lot of money by less than scrupulous means.
I don't believe in such closely occurring coincidences, which follow the exact same playbook. But even if (big if): why aren't these getting knocked off the FP for being re-runs?
It's happened to everyone. I'm not even saying you made this up. You definitely have something to say about this, as it is a common occurrence.
What I'm saying is that it's worrying that there are many front-page posts that /ask specifically about this/. It's like facebook groups being flooded with "Ask FB: anyone live close to a 5G tower and get headaches?" Most people in cities do. It's the /question/ that builds the narrative. Not your anecdote.
So again, why is this specific point being dredged up this often recently?
> So again, why is this specific point being dredged up this often recently?
This sort of fraud has always been around, however covid-19 changed the equation dramatically in favour of the scammers, due to many more companies being willing and able to hire remote employees.
This has allowed the scammers to scale in ways that were previously not possible.
As the profitability increases due to scale, more scammers are attracted to it, which leads to more people experiencing it, which leads to more people talking and posting about it, which leads to those posts ending up on the front page of HN.
I don't think it's a driven narrative, however one of the consequences will be companies lowering their appetite for remote-only work.
> covid-19 changed the equation dramatically in favour of the scammers
I disagree. The same scam could be pulled any day of the year before the pandemic. And eventually those who saw the extreme profitability of this made a "plausibly deniable" outsourcing shop and ran things that way.
Yes, the scammers could have pulled this scam any day of the year before the pandemic, and I’m sure they did, but that’s only one side of the equation.
Now consider how many companies were willing to hire fully remote workers before the pandemic, and how many were willing to hire fully remote workers during and after the pandemic, and that will answer why the scammers have been able to scale.
Even with "frustratingly common" problems, recent-duplicate discussions are knocked off the front page with extreme prejudice. Plus you'd assume people who come to HN to ask questions also come to... read the front page, so they'd know that the exact same discussion has happened literally a few weeks ago.
Imagine if every week you got "ask hn: what's the best git tutorial?" or something equally trivial and open-ended on the front page. This simply does not seem like a natural occurrence.
No, of course not, but there's plenty of apologists that will show up and tell you that these companies are actually very important because replicating their enormous "domain knowledge" or whatever is impossible.
Nevermind the fact that even if such domain knowledge existed in them, they probably wouldn't have a process for transferring it to the juniors they throw in the fire pit to actually "execute" a project.
Best you can get with these companies is avoiding a complete crash landing and "only" striking the tail.
They've found a way to dupe corporations into hiring them and also are riding the ubiquitous "outsourcing for lower cost cutting" trend of late, so no one really questions if it makes sense to hire them.
I've seen managers hire them a couple times - usually, it's often when the manager's department is very understaffed, incompetent and frankly a bit clueless (even as to what the strategic direction should be) [1]. Then, in comes the TCS salespeople, who convince the department head to effectively outsource the department to them, and they'll just execute all its functions, and provide strategic direction as well. They promise to implement "top industry standards", and, if you're say a head of department in a bank, it sort of makes sense to believe that these people have been to dozens of banks, and have collected a body of knowledge on what the best practices are. Also, I think it's extremely tempting for the department head, since he'll just have to deal with TCS managers from now on, and not run his department. Not to mention the cost savings. All in all, on paper, their offer is very enticing (also for the manager who makes the decision, as it looks like TCS will make his job much easier), and, given the outsourcing trend in the industry, it's not controversial, so managers very often go for it. Afterwards, the execution is always a disaster and huge disappointment (and manager's career is very likely seriously damaged) - but TCS makes its money in the process.
Oh, and on top of that, there's of course also just regular graft, if the manager is willing to take the bribes.
Basically, the likes of TCS are a parasite, exploiting systemic weaknesses of corporate management.
[1] The other common scenario is when the CEO/CFO demand x% cost cuts from the department and is basically suggesting outsourcing himself.
I have the strangest feeling people hire Accenture because they have a “no one ever got fired for hiring Accenture” vibe about them for some unknown reason.
They all do, but here's an actual example from Tata (TCS). The company I used to work for hired them to support a complicated product requiring an unusual skillset, and the usual story ensued: they wooed the decision makers with the A team and then actually gave them the B team. They got even greedier, though: I stumbled on their hiring ads in the market in question (with the rare skillset requirements), and it was obvious they actively lowered the salary they were offering as the engagement went on, in order to boost their own margins. One year in even the B team was all gone and we were left with D to F- players.
The first symptom will be a few fresh faces in training sessions who aren't billed to your project.
Then systematically the experienced engineers will be pulled off your project (and dangled in front of a new client), while being replaced with the new chaps. Who are now billed, of course, at the full rate.
Within a few weeks they'll replace every guy with new hires.
But try explaining this to the bean counters.
I can't believe they're still getting away with these stunts. I first saw it in 1999.
All of them. I used to work for one. Every government/private sector contract is like this. A giant waste of money. This is where we spend so much money on the military and government projects with poor results.
I always worked with individual contract engineers. I mentioned it here, a couple of weeks ago[0]. The type of work we did was waaaaayyyy too dicey to chance on "just anyone."
In the Days of Yore, they had "Contractor Agents," that acted like talent agents. We would deal with them, to get introduced to the ICs that they represented.
A counter view - how long are your purchase decision cycles? I ask because that matters. The internals of a large consulting firms are:
- Resumes are often used "as an example". Consulting teams who present are usually in between staffed roles, and are not the exact you'd see face to face. They do this because ... others are working on existing engagements and taking that client's calls.
- Big companies decide very, very slowly. And they might not even sign on a deal. So consulting firms have to continually juggle team members + skills + their own staff's needs to fill slots. The members you spoke with may have been available when you talked to them 2 months ago - but were staffed on a different project while this one closed.
Managing consultancies is a full-time job in itself.
If you don't have someone in your company scrutinizing everything and spot-checking work that comes across, they will notice and they will take advantage of it. Starting with strong developers to impress a client and then swapping them out with newbies is standard practice.
When we engage with agencies, we make it clear that the people working on our project are expected to be present for the one weekly meeting and that they will be the ones doing the work.
We also reserve the right to "fire" specific agency team members and request a replacement if they're not working out. This is crucial as the agencies will often send teams of three: 1 strong developer, 1 strong communicator, and 1 straggler who needs a lot of supervision from the first two. You pay for all of the developers, so you might as well insist that you're getting what you pay for.
The only time I’ve seen working with bodyshops work out was when we had a senior spend most of his time checking their work and managing the project they were staffed on. He also happened to be from the same country/willing to talk with them outside of normal PST working hours.
They still didn’t produce great work but they did produce work that was usable and did what we wanted to do.
Most of my team actually had started out in consultancies earlier in their career so they knew exactly how things worked. A few times we had to “send someone back” when we got someone who was claimed to be an expert on X but was barely able to do basic tasks on the computer.
I’ve seen some consultancies with a much higher hit rate compared to WITCH and co though, on par with regular hiring. I am not privy to the financial details but I suspect they are a lot more expensive.
Which leads to another paradox (that I think I first saw Joel Spolsky point out, but I can't find the reference). Business software - and consulting services - always costs $20 either or $200,000. If it costs $20, you just buy it and use it. Once it gets over a certain price point - around $1000 or so - it requires approvals before it can be purchased. This leads to vendors having to develop full in-house departments dedicated to navigating those approval processes, so the price of the software has to be hiked to account for the additional headcount.
I’be been the developer in your trio. 3 or 4 years in noname large consulting stuff.
Lead of a teams of joyful green horns in a loosely specify environment. Delivering shit software on loosy deadline.
And then I switch to place where everyone is pretty senior.
It’s less fun, I like to explain stuff and kinda miss it.
But damn, not having to manage junior allow me to just produce large chunk of code faster.
And knowing that the guy next door is solid as well allow us to agreed on a contract and call it a day. ( it actually works )
I have little interaction with my coworker and yet our review are actual review. Syntax or petty issue are rarely mentioned. We agreed on linter months ago.
Anyway; sorry. Long détour to say that as much as I enjoy getting down with the stragglers, being in a mature team is pretty great.
Swapping the team that did initial meet&greet for B team to do actual work is classic contractor move especially if client makes the mistake of not including specific names on the written contract or doesn’t care to. I’ve seen it in non-IT industries like construction too.
All consultancies (IBM global services, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Deloitte, Pwc, Accenture, etc) just want billable hours. Only way to make a fat profit: by underpaying. Who will take "less" pay? Of course, less qualified people. Since every consulting company is doing this, there is no incentive for big companies to switch from Infosys to TCS or from TCS to IBM.
Hiring managers do get kickbacks from consulting companies. These kickbacks are sophisticated, and there is no way to prosecute them, esp if immigrants are the hiring managers.
Former consultancy managing partner here. (My conscience would only allow me to be in that industry for 3 years.)
Consultancies exist for one reason only: to maximize the delta between what we charge customers and what we pay employees/contractors. Charging $400/hr for someone we're paying $80/hr is non unusual. In fact, it's probably the norm.
>Charging $400/hr for someone we're paying $80/hr is non unusual
It's a funny business, as these posts reveal. But there's nothing magical about the profit margins in consulting. There are some efficiency gains with streamlining HR and expertise and knowledge sharing. Throw in some profit, and that's what they are able to charge clients.
If it was excessively expensive, companies would do the work themselves. Many do, to lesser or greater degrees of success.
Yes, more than 10 years ago when I was hired as engineer 2 in a startup, I had to work with a remote team working as contractors. The manager was in Alaska but the team was in India. The CEO used them to create the first prototype of the product and raise money.
We worked with them for 3 months. I tried to train them but there was a big ethical problem. It was clear they were not honest. We supposedly had 3 engineers. One was good, the other 2 were not good at all. It was clear that they were not working full time on our project and the good engineer was working even less with us (pretty much when the CTO was having discussion with the guy in Alaska). There were times when he asked: "Did you do task X?" Answer: "Yes!" CTO: "Can you show me the code?" contractor: "I did not do it."
There was also a language gap and the good guy ended up leaving to work with Microsoft.
We let them go and we started put that codebase in maintenance mode.
At that time we also got a new talented designer and we started building the new features in a different codebase.
What was the pay? Oftentimes outsourcing means trying to get software for 1/10th of the real cost. Then when another company amazingly delivers any software at all, they are blamed for the quality problems that are really the result of the completely unrealistic budget.
And sorry to say but racism often plays a part in these stories.
I’m a contractor and I don’t get this attitude. It’s my responsibility as a contractor to do the things I agree to do and if I can’t do them due to whatever reason, be upfront about that as soon as possible. In fact as a contractor that’s pretty much my only responsibility. I’ve definitely worked with people who weren’t good managers and had projects not work out but what parent is describing is just flat out fraud.
I worked at a smaller 130 or so person consultancy. I have a masters in CS, so my resume was always included in the resume pack sent to people. It was listed as "representative". A woman with a PHD (Physics) and a guy with a PHD in Systems Science Math (ORR) were the other usual suspects. This was in around 2005. Benefit for me was that sales was always updating my resume every time they went out to sell so it was in great shape and I did no work on it.
But who worked on the contract was just based on who was free at the time based on who was needed on other contracts. It was very likely I was tied up on another contract as a lead most of the time. Acutally one anti-pattern I pushed against was that we took the person on the bench and had them write the proposals... I pointed out this both landed us with bad implementations but also was likely less efficient than having the leads do the writing.
Anyway, this is very common, you can't hire people to fill seats until you have a contract in hand or you're taking someone else's risk. It's also likely that less effective employees are more often free to go sit on a new project. At the start of the project those extra folks are super numerary anyway while the leads design with the customer. Same at the end of the project where you're just cleaning up core deliverables.
Right. I've been on both sides of this (person proposed for contract I did not end up on, as well as working with teams different than proposed).
For the client, one way to ensure you get what you want, if it's important, is 'named resources' section of the contract. Use it wisely and with awareness.
Other way is to be predictable and forthcoming during sales/negotiation/signing process. This is not meant to victim blame in the least, but there's lack of appreciation sometimes that people don't sit and twiddle their thumbs while internal processes grind the approval process to a halt: Frequently, who comes to oral presentation as part of sales cycle is who was available at the time, and who comes to perform the work is who is available at this other time, which may have been a predictable 2 weeks later, or (all too often) a completely unpredictable random 6 months and three weeks later. People you saw in February may not be waiting for you to finally sign and start come September.
Oh, and all the other bait & switch practices as well, sometimes intentional -<
In practical terms, it largely depends how actually "representative" people during orals were of the actual quality of workforce to deliver the project. Sometimes it's a close match, sometimes not. Ideally it's a fixed-price contract and it doesn't matter - it's vendor's responsibility to deliver, whether with many junior members supervised by senior members or however else, and hopefully contract and SLA and CAT/UAT are well designed.
It always amazed me how insistent clients were on specific people but also slow to sign contracts as if it was possible for us to hold heads for 6 months while they decided to greenlight a project. That's really on feasible if you pay them to be on the bench, or you deal with us not starting for 3-6 months after you greenlight."
Other thing that amazed me was clients dictating when we had heads active versus not. Generally I'd go for a right shifted gradual increase and sharp tail off. But many of our contracts wanted "all heads down" on day one. They also refused to do a shorter term in parallel design contract while we were negotiating.
Essentially their requirements were forcing us to burn money with idle hours.
Based on my experience with such firms this is the prevalent modus operandi. Hence I don't trust them. In our company we cannot commit code without review, and this turns up these "replacement" developers pretty quick. But it's pretty disheartening. You don't even make it 5 lines and there is .ToString() on a string, and it just gets worse from there.
I used to take some effort in trying to be nice about it figuring the person probably who wrote the code doesn't know they're a replacement and is just doing the best they can, but I eventually stopped caring. Now I just butcher them, point my boss at it, and see how long it takes before they get fired.
This has always been my experience hiring consultant teams. (Unless you're hiring a team from a consultancy that only has enough staff to field a single team, that is.)
I'm not sure if this is specific to government procurement, but when hiring teams for federal contracts, some personnel on the team described in the proposal would be "key" and others would not. Key personnel could only be replaced by mutual agreement, and non-key personnel could be replaced at will by the bidder.
This happened to a former employer back in 2008. They sold us on their A-team and we got the guys they hid in the backroom closet. We cancelled the contract after their second code dump. They threatened to sue and my former CEO openly challenged them to. In the end they backed off.
Unfortunately this happens in all sorts of consultancies and agency work. The partner makes the sale and (hopefully) at least reasonably supervises the associates or others doing most of the actual work.
I think that hiring organizations by now should have been immune to this kind of "switcheroo" or "bait and switch" tactics on the supply side of labor.
It always amazes me that some businesses still fall for this kind of deception, it's like the oldest trick in the book.
> Code quality that comes, is not on par with the skillset we evaluated during the interviews
Could it be that your interview process is not evaluating the correct skill set? As an engineer with 15 years of experience, very few of the many interview processes I've completed were actually an acurate reflection of my abilities.
It is a very common practice for these companies to rotate competent people between multiple projects. Friend used to work as a senior exec for CG in India
We seldom see all the people whom we interviewed for the teams, as devs, being present in the meetings that they are all expected to be present (of course it is most often the timezone difference that is the mentioned reason). Or people who join have their camera turned off, so no way to see them.
Code quality that comes, is not on par with the skillset we evaluated during the interviews and I suspect the whole consultancy is doing something similar with presenting top engineers in the interview and then moving them between many teams. Leaving the less skilled engineer to do the work.