A Silicon Valley Dream Collapses in Allegations of Fraud
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In fact unless a court decision is made I think it technically unfair to the company and their employee the way the mob has brought out their pichfork.
We have only heard the story from one person - and it makes the company and its CEO look like Satan's spawns - which in my experience never is 100% true.
Having said that, I am always a little unnerved browsing LinkedIn - you have CEOs, CFOs, Management always complaining about their employees, and employees doing cringy asskissing :( It makes me deeply sad what LinkedIn has turned into, LinkedIn just gives employers more power.
On the other hand I have noticed that HN, reddit are places where Labour ( employees ) come to complain.
Its just an interesting trend where two social networks exists - one for the capitalists and one for labor.
It's not just one person. We have now had the story largely confirmed by WrkRiot's CTO (maybe I should say "former CTO", or maybe the entire company is effectively "former") and one of its former advisors.
Also, I find your characterization of HN as a labor forum as opposed to capitalist rather curious, since its origin lies with one of the purest forms of capitalism possible, startups.
Also, I imagine as a non-founder I am in the majority here.
Ultimately, social responsibility plays a big role in outcomes. Companies that intend to blow up everything in their path, lie, cheat and steal their way into cashflow, and then have some key people escape before it all falls apart, are just destructive - they aren't even creatively destructive. Those companies are why startups have a common outsider's view of being shady ventures.
But in terms of the systemic effect on power between capital and labour, I'd said people being entrepreneurial shifts power (in the political sense) towards labour, partly through increasing the independence of labour in aggregate, and partly through enabling labour to capture significantly more of the rewards of their work [1].
[1] For example, compare the typical amount of equity held by "last and least important founder" vs "first employee" to see that being a founder radically shifts power your way.
I use both LinkedIn and HN quite a lot and don't really see what you mean about the capital/ labor split between the sites, for what it's worth.
Or "investigative journalism", as it used to be known. This is what the press is for. If they're wrong, I don't doubt it will end in litigation.
The difference lies in how to grow your business. LinkedIn and Glassdoor cannot ask employees to pay them for being fair but can ask employers to pay them for deleting/managing the image of the company.
Anyone who think this isn't doxxing go have a look at Twitter, Reddit and even some of HN on how some employees who had nothing to do with the fraud have been treated.
On what was basically a junior employee not being compatible with their boss.
Which adults know is definitely two sided when one person tells the story (and normal).
I found Penny's story very believable and felt really bad for many of the individuals involved (the H1-B workers most of all). There was probably a lot of professional pressure on Penny not to be seen as a troublemaker and not to name the company's name. There is a definite information asymmetry between management and workers and I feel like wrkriot was using that to exploit their employee's trust.
It seems fair to out them for that so they can't just change their name and do it again (which was clearly a pattern). Had they not been mostly a fraud, they might have been able to provide a reasonable defense against the story. Had the fraud continued, in order to protect innocent employees, it most likely would have just hurt more people.
It's definitely not black and white but I don't think we harassed them out of business either. It was definitely all about to fall apart regardless.
(I have nothing against the Chinese, or immigrants in general, I'm an immigrant myself, and I feel terrible for the innocent victims who have lost money, jobs, and for many, their american dream)
It made no sense why he hired so many people when he didn't have the money too.
Friends of mine do it each year. So technically they "own a mine in south america".
It's still bullshit puffery though. But you can do it for $20K.
I'm part owner of an NFL franchise, and it only cost me $250.
The organization named is the corporate entity that owns the Packers; there are >350k share owners and it's structured such that nobody can own more than 4% of the shares. It's grandfathered into the NFL rules which for the last 30 or so years have limited ownership groups to no more than 32 people, at least one of whom must own a >30% share.
I've always written my resume somewhat uniquely for SEO[1] and happen to work quite heavily in the Linux space. At the time several years ago, my resume was on the first or second page google search results for something along the lines of "linux system administrator" and variations.
The stars must have aligned as some poor schmuck thought he'd spruce up his resume by copy & pasting lines verbatim from the first 4-5 good Linux resumes he found via google. Unfortunately for him, one of them was mine. Also unfortunately for him, I'm known as a very technical interviewer that doesn't take any bs.
So besides the fact he wasn't qualified from a technical perspective for this position, I decided to see what he'd do. I stopped him mid interview and pulled up my resume on my phone. I handed it to him and asked him to read a few lines. Then I asked him to read a few lines that were verbatim from his resume. His face lost all color and he shuddered. There is simply no way I was buying that he and I both came up with the following 3 lines in a row:
* Re-implemented the global dns/ldap setup for higher availability. Used keepalived for auto-failover
* High performance computing, benchmarking, and kernel tuning. Constant review of upstream kernel activity
* Maintenance and engineering on a from scratch Linux distribution in support of high volume electronic trading
We told his recruiter the story and said if it was true we were going to immediately stop doing business with that recruiter and his company. He quickly and happily forwarded us every single email from that candidate clearly showing they'd done nothing other than rearrange the styling and put their awful logo on it. The recruiter decided to stop working with this candidate as well.
Moral of the story: Don't steal people's resume, they work hard making it and that is dishonest. Don't lie to technical people about your technical skills. It will ruin your future career prospects.
Additionally, you're a terrible interviewer if someone is failing miserably. There is no valuable data to use from this situation. Turn it down until they stop failing, and see how far it can be pushed. I'm sure you know this, but decided to be a prick instead.
There's nothing dishonest about using wording from someone else's resume. If I did it and someone asked about it, I'd definitely say "I saw how someone else phrased it and found it really good, so I used it too" and obviously wouldn't put it down if it wasn't true. This guy probably would have said something similar if you didn't throw it in his face and make him so uncomfortable.
He's conveying facts on a piece of paper that is handed to, at most, a few dozen people, who glance it at for about 20 seconds and then never see it again. He's not even implicitly claiming that everything on his resume is 100% unique, because more than half of resumes use the same structuring, wording, and general descriptive approaches. I thought this was common sense until your comment.
Calling this plagiarism is like saying the sentence "By using our Services, you are agreeing to these terms" in a terms of service is plagiarizing whoever wound up writing that first. It's ridiculous.
Perhaps you think that it wasn't actual plagiarism? That it could've been coincidence, or that SEJeff's phrasing is so routine that it doesn't count as something with real investment of thought? Have you tried Googling it?
"Re-implemented the global dns/ldap setup for higher availability. Used keepalived for auto-failover"
https://www.google.com/search?q="Re-implemented+the+global+d...
There are exactly 5 results, 2 of them which originate from this current discussion. That's just one of the bulletpoints, nevermind the same 3 in the same order.
For reference's sake, the odds that Melania Trump didn't plagiarize the following sentence from Michelle Obama -- values that you work hard for what you want in life that your word is your bond and you do what you say -- is about one in a trillion [0]
[0] https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/07/19/we-ran-melania-trum...
It sounds like you react to dishonesty with bad faith acts of your own, since you had no interest in giving that person a standard opportunity. The way you reacted sounds emotional and personal.
I'd say that's when the interview is over. What are you thinking, "well they may have proven to be untrustworthy and willing to lie to my face, but hey let's continue the interview and see if they have any redeeming qualities to make up for it".
I'd have asked them a few short low-ball questions about those three lines (just to have them dig a whole with some vague answers). Then confront them with the original, watch/enjoy the reaction for a short moment, and calmly tell them to get out of my office. No need to waste much more time on it than that.
Or are people suggesting that, maybe, this candidate might just actually have had experience with projects fitting those exact three descriptions, and merely Googled and copied the wording for its eloquence? Which would be plagiarism but not quite outright dishonesty. Kind of. Also I wouldn't believe it for a minute.
Now it seems like the CEO faked his past work experience as well.
In the 10+ companies I've been at, I could see one as having been fraudulent, that was mostly at the non-founder level pushing work overseas for kickbacks. His career has since stalled.
When things are easy and fast and loose, study the gold rush or any other similar history, these things will happen. Today, it's sad that those backing people like this don't use all the tools at their disposal to do deep do diligence. It seems like if you tell the right story, have people skills, and the surface isn't scratched, you can end up with a seed round that isn't warranted.
Somewhat misleading title. The article itself only mentions the resume once. For example, it doesn't provide examples of the fabrication.
If you read the original post. there is little new info. aside from revealed identities.
Sad.
If anyone has any leads/ideas, I'd love to hear them. Again, just incredibly curious.
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" is one of the site rules here. Please follow it, and especially please don't rewrite titles to make them more dramatic.
lol, wut? Anybody who has been here more than an hour is who expects fraud in SV. The first job I had in SV ended in a joint SEC/DOJ prosecution and jail time for multiple executive officers. Lawlessness, scams, and dishonesty are endemic in this area.
And homelessness. I was disappointed to see hundreds of helpless homeless people, some in horrible mental state, right there on streets in the middle of huge ivory towers that SV thumps its chest on. It's such a shame!
And with young kids coming out of those glass doors flashing gadgets and gizmos at each other, with that certain bay area flair … I mean the collective blindness of the place felt only surreal.
It's a personal thing but I guess my family will never be at home in the bay area.
It's because the government has failed them in the past in its attempts to help. Not every government has decided that putting a permanent roof over the heads of anyone who needs it is a bad use of taxpayer's money.
No, this is incorrect. If someone continues to choose getting high over help, it has very little to do with the government failing them. Additionally, homeless people with mental disorders that make them paranoid or forgetful can refuse it regardless of past experiences.
>it's probably not because they actively want to live an unstable, day-to-day life, not knowing where or what they'll eat tonight.
No, but they may actively want something incompatible (like heroin or cocaine) more.
This is not the only way a country has to be.
I thought SV was the world's hardest place to exercise your property rights? Just try demolishing a single-family house to set up a new low-income Section 8 apartment complex. Even if you wanted to, you couldn't.
San Francisco is like the polar opposite of the real-world Rapture you're envisioning it as.
It is an order of magnitude worse there than just about anywhere else I've been (and I have traveled a lot)
I live in Toronto, we have homeless people here too. So I guess the only real way to solve this is with data?
[1] http://fusion.net/story/148372/san-francisco-homelessness/
But really, only Alaska is relatively immune from this problem given that they just give homeless people a bus ticket to LA when winter hits.
I have travelled to many countries where some places are considered dangerous for travellers. And never have I been more afraid than that day.
There aren't any regularly operated buses from Anchorage to the rest of the US, and I'm fairly certain there aren't any homeless deportation programs (which would probably involve flying people commercially - there is a ferry, but its not really cheaper).
I mean... homeless people read books. Seems like a good use of time to me when you're unemployed and homeless. It sounds like you think is a problem for some reason?
Sometimes people need leisure, homeless or not.
I walk by the local drug dealers in the Tenderloin every day, and all the clientele I've seen are homeless people.
I lived in the third largest city in Sweden, and when I moved in there were the handful (like, probably less than 5) of homeless beggars that everyone knew. There were probably more homeless but they were sheltered by the state.
But by the time I moved out, in front of every supermarket there was a Romanian beggar with her head down.
I'll agree SF is definitely on a completely different level though. I've never seen anyone defecate in public outside of SF (and yeah I've been to China)
Should be pretty easy to investigate, arrest, deport them and forbid them to come back.
That's nice to hear!
I do realize now that my comment is naive; definitely only a tiny snapshot from the limited time that I spent over there and is not a complete picture or a total impression of the place.
But I still do wish that SV had a better situation/solution to these otherwise normal people problems.
Since it's SV we're talking about, this money could probably be used to find a better solution with a better outcome to the problem of homelessness all across America. And then other states can follow suit!
> San Francisco alone spends 241 million on homelessness per year.
The $241 million figure is a little misleading because it encompasses the total spending across homeless services and supportive housing. Supportive housing is $112 million and the people within are NOT counted as homeless (nor should they be but that $112 out of $241 million is not being used on homeless people). [1]
It certainly doesn't help that the amount of money actually used on the homeless is contracted out to many, many, many companies and split across other government groups making it effectively impossible to spend efficiently and to track (I really wish they'd get this corrected; I mean we're the city of Silicon Valley for crepes sake!)
> Most places deal with these "normal people problems" by criminalizing it
Many cities spend more money, year over year, to house, shelter, feed and medically treat the homeless. Sure they'll get arrested too and I'm sure there are exceptions but I couldn't find any information regarding further criminalization, in recent years, as a way to get rid of the homeless (if you have a source that would be great). In fact here in SF the supervisor wants to do away with tents calling them illegal [2]
> people leave to places like SF
Only 10% of the homeless in a 2015 report came from out of state. 71% of the homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, which is about 10% higher in just 2 years. I don't think very many are leaving to go to SF to be homeless. [3]
[1] http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-record...
[2] http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/01/25/s-f-supervisor-scott-wie...
[3] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
But that shouldn't technically count as homeless either. Honestly I can't really find any better numbers but I get your point and maybe there just are not any better numbers I dunno.
Maybe? It's difficult to track the money. Per capita SF doesn't even have the highest amount of homeless and yet you rarely see them on the streets in NYC and other major cities (and it's not because they're all in jail; NYC spent over a $1 billion in 2014 on homeless services and shelters and recently NY state started a $10 billion initiative to help the homeless). I wish SF did a better job tracking where the funds go and how effective they are being spent.
> a city that likely ships them here
This is a bit of a myth. In a 2015 report [1] only 10% of the homeless in SF came from another state. 71% of the homeless lived in SF itself and then became homeless.
> "takes care of it" so you don't see it
NYC has over 200 shelters. Many of the shelters in SF have waiting lists of several hundred people to the point where they have to live in tents which can be pretty dangerous in and of itself. Granted not all of the shelters are like that but many are and when you can't even stay in a shelter it doesn't really give them a lot of choice.
> The poor will always be with us, and we are judged by how we treat them.
I agree! It's far safer to have them off of the streets in many respects by providing affordable housing, temporary housing and even shelters. SF just doesn't have enough of that to go around for the homeless. I would love to see them expand their shelter services to provide more places for them to stay. But that certainly doesn't mean I want someone to "take care of it" so I "don't see it".
I think your comment came off a bit crass by assuming parent wanted to not see them and calling them naive.
[1] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
I have looked at the homelessness statistics in Silicon Valley and the vast majority here actually lived here before becoming homeless. You don't usually see homeless people in most of the valley because they tend to stay out of sight by the creeks or other out of the way areas, but you do see them in downtown San Jose and to a lesser extent downtown Palo Alto.
I don't know the budget for homeless spending down here in Silicon Valley, but I doubt it is that high.
It's apparently a thing for social workers and caregivers in places with drastically inadequate social support (i.e. most of the US) to just stick disabled/mentally ill people on a bus to SF; they'll at least have a better chance there.
What does "supported" even mean? What does SVB really do for you that another major bank couldn't? In contrast, they have less branches and ATMs, fewer business hours, weaker credit card offerings, more fees, and an utterly crap web interface.