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.
Sounds like they could save a lot of money getting rid of the training requirement.
https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny...
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)
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
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.
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...
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.
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...
(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.)
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.
Today I learned another useful latin expression.
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.
edit: Speaking from direct American government experience.
However, I'm familiar with the term ‘kickback’...
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
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.
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.
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.
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-...
If you can’t get change orders to cover your budget overages, your company loses money.
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.
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”.
No corruption to see here folks, move along.