Italian ‘king of absentees’ allegedly skipped work for 15 years
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
They informed me that no, he was on my team and were incredulous that I wasn’t managing him. I showed them that I had never received his name in any e-mail or Slack history since I started at the company, and no team members had ever worked with him. I messaged him in Slack to ask who he was working with, but he never responded despite being online.
HR was very secretive after that, but from what I can gather the employee was reorganized into my team but no one ever told me. He worked at a remote office, so he simply sat around waiting for someone to contact him with instructions for what to do next. I don’t know how long he managed to collect paychecks without doing anything at all, but he disappeared from Slack shortly after this incident.
HR at that company had other issues. I’m glad I don’t work there any more.
I was a tech project lead at a semi-famous internet portal startup, so worked across departments picking up staff for my projects. The DB guy assigned was Ron Brown. Went to onboard him and he wasn't at his desk. I ask the guy next to him. "Oh, he's on vacation this week."
I came by the next week. No Ron Brown. Where is he? I got a very specific story in response: "He was in a fire, he had his feet burned." Terrible! So I got someone else assigned as DB guy.
Never saw Ron Brown again. About six months later, I was down by his desk. Asked whatever happened to him. "Oh, last week we discovered he just stopped showing up to work, so we just fired him yesterday!"
This was in a company of <200 people, and certainly there were less than 10 DB experts, all onsite. So I'm sure these days it's totally possible.
*Name changed to protect guilty.
I thought first it was kind of funny, but this guy turned out to be a complete disaster. E.g. when I asked him about his progress he was talking about abstract concepts while trying to evade my question. Multiple times I tried to make him commit his code to our repository so I could at least provide feedback about his work, but his answer was every time that the code isn't in a shareable state. At some point I agreed with my boss that my patience is ending, and one of my direct reports was tasked by my boss to supervise his work.
Six months later, about one week before the deadline, a demo was scheduled and every action or click in the software resulted in errors. Since the result was planned to be presented in a broader context in the following week I promised to invest the weekend and fix the code. After looking into it for about 2h to determine where to start, I decided to completely rewrite the whole thing from scratch which I did in 12h. Only thing I reused were the webservice definitions since those were already communicated to others and their clients were waiting for our application.
In the end my boss was angry at me that I saved our face, because he was kind of forced to fire the guys ass. My boss even accused me to have done this deliberately because he hired him against my objections.
I had three months notice period where I handed over all my stuff. Initially we agreed that I will work until my last day and get remaining vacation days paid out. But after about 4 weeks I received a letter from HR asking me to use up my remaining vacation days which meant that I had to clear mybdesk within a couple of days.
What makes the whole thing worse is that during my vacation I was legally not allowed to start another job, and one month after my last official workday the global pandemic started.
I hope you find something nice soon. Don't be afraid of trying. I know it takes effort and is draining to get a new job but it's worth it.
The management was terrible in so many ways, it would be too long to explain here.
At first it was nice to spend my days on private stuff (I was "working" remotely because Covid), but after a while I was bored and it was hard to continue this way.
I highly suspect that a large amount of the employees were in the same situation, starting with my direct manager.
In this way organized criminality deals two important damages: it steals government money and it dramatically decreases life quality of the people living in those regions. For example, people from Calabria use to move to other regions when they need health treatments.
Disclosure: I'm Italian.
In a way, it's a coordination problem. If everyone outside of the mob were to unite at once against them, the mob wouldn't stand a chance. But that's not how activism works.
That's basically how the mafia works
Everyone in NYC thinks they know all the ways they can fix Buffalo
This sentence intrigued me, but as a life long Californian I wasn't sure what you meant.
Why would NYC try to solve Buffalo's problems? Isn't that the job of the Buffalo municipal government and state government in Albany?
Also, let me add that a radical approach had been taken by two judges, Falcone and Borsellino. They almost destroyed Cosa Nostra, at the cost of their own lives. They have been both murdered by Cosa Nostra, along with their security, in the 1992. For the curious, this is the wiki page of the State-Mafia Pact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-Mafia_Pact
This mafia thing is definitely cultural - "it is the way things are done there" - so it can be fixed by replacing/diluting people.
So, striping the place from its inhabitans, sending them to imperialist wars to be killed and kill, and bringing people from other countries to take their place?
Keeping the mafia sounds better than this scheme. Why not buldoze their houses and kill every first born while at it?
>This mafia thing is definitely cultural - "it is the way things are done there" - so it can be fixed by replacing/diluting people.
Yeah, like any cultural problem can be fixed by nuking a region.
Mafia isn't about people being literally forced to do something with the fear or death - such an approach totally doesn't scale, even Sicily is not a Nazi death camp. It's about deeply rooted tradition to say, "respect your village elders" and "don't put your family to shame by exposing issues". And people don't even realise they have those beliefs, everyone taken separately just acts "normally", letting the whole society be exploited. Just reducing proportion of people having these beliefs in the first place - to some percentage giving "herd immunity" from them because these informal links need to be able to sufficiently propagate - solve the problem.
This makes no sense at all. The government exists to serve those people who are getting replaced, so if you fix their problems by replacing them then nothing has actually been solved. You’re putting the importance of the government and the region over the people which is backwards.
That is social engineering (not the security term, the historical), and is associated with the worst totalitarianism (closely related to genocide and ethnocide). At the very least it's Machiavellian. And it's even more illegal than brainwashing!
This "solution" sees the population from outside, as assets to be replaced, manipulated, etc to solve an abstract problem.
But the problem is not "how to have Calabria without mafia" (that has several trivial solutions, from the suggested population replacement to nuking the area to a totalitarian government that maintains absolute control against the mafia).
The problem is rather, "how the population of Calabria can get rid of mafia".
In other words, e.g. Calabria is not just a named piece of land (for someone to rule as they see fit and do whatever to it, including removing the population) - it's first and foremost population and a culture.
If the culture can't change easily (or at all), tough luck. But replacement of the population is not a solution (at least not this side of Stalin).
What's bad about getting to that point by mixing/diluting the population?
Back to ethnic cleansing, i think categorically criticising it is an utter hypocrisy. All stable European states are products of ethnic cleansing done at some point. And while it is ancient history for Western Europe, in case of Central and Eastern Europe e.g. Poland, Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, it was done after 1945, mostly by decisions pushed by U.S. itself. Ethnic cleansing is good for everyone as long as it's done without too much violence. Middle East is just an example of region where formation of ethnic nationalities - process that predates ethnic cleansing - is not yet complete. There is little else fundamentally broken about Middle East - apart from territories being fragmented sometimes down to village level onto fractions of population divided by ethnic, religious and political lines with and hating each other - a process which must eventually result in some of them being butchered and others amalgamating into nations, divided by political borders and united by... something better than just force. In a piece of land where people who have nothing in common have to coexist, there is either a brutal dictatorship coercing them into bearing with each other, or unlimited all-on-all bloodshed (see pre-2011 and post-2011 Syria). Nothing can fix it apart from thorough ethnic cleansing.
Example of reverse is Poland. There is very little which could shake this country, so united in single culture, single ethnicity and single religion. It totally wasn't that way before post-1945 population transfers (ethnic cleansing).
You comment and line of reasoning is nothing short of pathetic.
There are two Polands since at least 2015. The right-winged, covertly pro-Russian, nationalist Poland, and the pro-EU Poland. The ruling party is using divide&conquer strategy on its own people (as opposed to on enemies, as practiced by ancient Romans).
You'd be surprised...
It's more being anti-EU than pro-Russian, but the geopolitics of Poland are brutal enough that these are both almost one and the same. And being a Catholic, at least of the variety we have here, pretty much requires you to be anti-EU. The effect is that, the warlike rethoric notwisthstanding, the right-wing Catholic nationalists are working hard to benefit Russia. I think this is where the word "covertly" comes from in the GP.
2. Of course you can. Church hierarchs in Poland are very conservative and often pro-Russian.
https://arbinfo.pl/skad-arcybiskup-jedraszewski-wzial-pomysl...
* 2007 - "Homosexuality - the plague of 21 century", a conference in Sankt Petersburg, Russia, attended by Protoiereus Aleksandr Grigoriew
* 2012 - patriarch Ciril (former KGB agent, codename: Michajłow/Mikhailov) meets Polish archbishop Józef Michalik
* 2013 - Polish Church starts a campaign against "gender", by the Russian playbook.
* 2015 - archbishop Jędraszewski uses the word "plague" to describe homosexuals, women, and the liberal left.
* 2019 - the archbishop calls the LGBT movement "plague".
Grzegorz Rzeczkowski has recently written a book "Katastrofa Posmoleńska", about how the plane crash in 2010 was used to sow dissent and divide. One of the major points of contention was a catholic cross illegally placed in front of the presidential palace to honor the dead. There were pilgrimages, pious crowds, angry people insulting the new president, etc.
Ordo Iuris is a para-legal branch of the Brasilian sect TFP. It successfully campaigns for strict law based on catholic orthodoxy - for example abortion punishable with jail, next up: no divorces. Attorney General Zbigniew Ziobro supports it. It has support from other politicians, like Grzegorz Braun and Krzysztof Bosak (his wife is in OI). That it's not "real" catholicism doesn't matter, because the society at large can't tell the difference. The resemblance is where their power comes from.
Also, the whole Konfederacja Targowicka was highly conservative, nationalist, catholic and pro-Russian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targowica_Confederation
Not to mention that training people as soldiers to keep them out of organized crime sounds like a method primed to backfire when they leave the service and filter back to their homes and old ways of life, now complete with military training?
And then you go on to suggest what amounts to barely obfuscated ethnic cleansing. Radical indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
But also in Medieval times and many centuries before. E.g when Sweden gained control over Scania (Southern tip of today's Sweden) from Denmark in the 17th century they relocated a lot of native Swedes into that area to pacify the population. (I may need to reference this, I am only remembering school history classes...)
All to establish control, though we see it sometimes does quite the opposite. Though I would also think some of it is natural migration. So not always forced, but probably "encouraged".
Though always more when borders have changed. Not to combat an internal "culture"/crime problem.
The demographic replacement across Europe is progressing very well, I think it would be a mistake to train and incite young European men in any way. Patience is key now. Shalom.
This court proceeding for example was the result of a raid where 2500 police officiers participated (and years of work).
See for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/13/italy-mafia-tr...
Unfortunately English-language reporting is pretty light on the details presented in court but here are two articles to get you started.
About the trial: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55633091
About the prosecutor: https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/mafia-trial...
So yeah—a radical approach was taken to fix it, and then organized crime was reinstalled by the OSS and the CIA.
After rabbitholing for a bit I realize now that they are still very much around.
They remind me of the Mexican Cartels a little bit.
We have whole criminal families and such, "cosa nostra", "'ndrangeta" and many more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime_in_Italy
Unfortunately they are all very much still alive, and I am pretty sure a lot of those are older than Italy
Feels like I'm reading a technical manual on organized crime.
Any idea why Italy is so susceptible to this compared to the rest of Europe? Or is the Italian version just glamourized by the media more?
Mexican cartels kind of make sense being the gate way for drugs from South America to the U.S.
Does Italy serve a similar function for Europe maybe?
First of all, Italy is a profoundly divided country geographically, to the point where the North and the South are almost operating as if they were different countries. Specifically, there are regions with unemployment numbers that are almost unbelivable for a first-world country: https://www.statista.com/statistics/778264/unemployment-rate.... The "Southern Question" ("questione meridionale") is a recurrent theme in the political discourse and has been so literally since Italy has been a country.
The lack of economic development in the South is also compounded by a very ineffective national welfare system, and, more generally, by an incredibly inefficient but very large public sector.
This is a hotbed for organized criminal associations, who are always ready to prey on corrupt local officials and widespread discontent.
Also bear in mind that the average Italian company is much smaller than the average American (or even German or French) company, which (aside from being in and of itself an economic problem) makes criminal schemes easier to set in motion, either directly or through corrupt politicians.
Another major issue is that criminal organizations have deep ties with the political power itself, to the point where such ties are referred to as "a pact": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-Mafia_Pact
As for the media issue, it's probably true that we know more about the Italian mafia due to its ties with American criminal organizations, but I don't feel one could say it's just media coverage, it's a massive problem, at least when compared with other European countries.
Eventually I got to speaking with the site manager and I mentioned in passing the cards. He clammed up immediately and I shrugged it off.
A few months later after I left, the manager and I were having a beer and grouching about that site and he told me that those cards were for the local .. well mafia for lack of a better word. They were clocked in by a senior member every day, and clocked out at the end, the pay cheques were sent off and as a result we never had any break ins.
Crazy.
It opened my eyes up a lot and over the years since then I have seen similar things in a few other industries, eg in Japan and hospitality we had a very friendly grandpa style gentleman visit the restaurant once a month, hand over a receipt to the manager and she paid him some cash. Turns out he was Yakuza and that was our payment for the month
In this specific case, there is no need whatsoever for the threatening employee to be part of a criminal association. In a land where many people have little to lose and are, by culture, prone to up their threats until they have their way, victims are afraid of refusing their requests. This in turn further encourages the behaviour. The issue, more than the power of the mafia, is the weakness of the state: extremely slow, sloppy and reluctant in prosecuting crime (big or small), very quick in pardoning convicted criminals.
(Italian here, too)
I had to send it to a friend last year. He started a new job, in the meantime the team he was assigned to was disbanded so no one really knew where to put him. Never got access card, computer etc. Had to call his manager every morning to be let in, so it's not like he tried to hide. Never got assigned any tasks. When covid hit he had home office but still no tasks other than checking in each morning on some standup and saying he worked on nothing. After about half a year a new project finally started and he got something to do. But then he was so tired of it all he quit and got a job where he actually does something meaningful with his days.
The investigation and article focuses too much on "attendance" instead of measuring real work and raising the question as to which other positions are actually useless?
Tons of paper pushing positions exist so that politicians and high level appointed bureaucrats can do favors for people whom they owe favors. Someone (like the deadbeat brother of someone who donated to the governor's campaign or whatever, just making up a reasonable example) who could never hold such a well paying job on their own merits will be given a job and as long as they continue to punch the clock (though per TFA that's not a hard requirement in Italy) the will continue to get paid.
The Vice President launched her career with a position like this, which she received from her married boyfriend, Willie Brown.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-la...
> Granlund said the appointment seemed brazen at the time because of the relationship between Harris and Brown. “Screwing the speaker has its rewards,” he said. “Stevie Wonder could have seen through that play.”
IMO getting a job by pulling strings isn't as morally dirty as a job existing for no reason other than to transfer money from the taxpayer to someone with connections.
I grew up in a socialist country and this type of stuff was the default and not something newsworthy at all. Everyone did it. All the dads in my residential unit would go sign the attendance sheet and come back home by 11 am and have rest of the day to themselves to garden, grow food, take a nap, play cards ect.
How do proponents of govt run services and production units address this core flaw. I've asked many people but have never gotten a good response.
And re: the investors, don't governments issue bonds? i.e. all governments that issue bonds have investors.
As you say, its 100% a function of the incentives. This is a general flaw with "command" economies where resources are based on who can argue for them best as opposed to demand for the outputs. There is a lot that can be done in terms of SLAs for operational departments and discretion to the operational side on how money gets spent, to try and come closer to a market driven system, but there is no political will for it.
What you are saying is typical of almost any big organization, public or private.
In government we all get harmed, and the only way to exit the situation is by abandoning ones homeland.
Small stock owners have not more power than voters, even less in some cases.
Why would someone vote the same if system is clearly corrupt.
Wouldn't this imply that this guy wouldn't have gotten away had people voted "different". Its peoples fault for indirectly voting for this?
> Small stock owners have not more power than voters, even less in some cases.
I usually simply sell the stocks of company that i no longer believe in. Thats how i vote. What do you mean by have no power. Its not mandatory for me to own certain stocks like it is mandatory for some ppl to go to a govt hospital.
Because the system is not "clearly corrupt", it's just a human organization and it's always going to be some corruption and inefficiency (public or private). You just have to strive to improve it.
">>What do you mean by have no power. Its not mandatory for me to own certain stocks like it is mandatory for some ppl to go to a govt hospital. "
In your analogy, selling stocks is basically leaving the country, that's something that you can do also normally, but probably is better to try to improve it. I believe, that big stockholders practice something called activist investment, where they push for changes.
I don't think there is any country in the world where is mandatory to go to the hospital, but there is some where not hospital is available to part of the population.
You didn't address this in my previous comment and repeated it here. You are implying that this guy getting away for 15 yrs wouldn't have happened had people voted "different" and its their fault for not "striving" enough?
> I don't think there is any country in the world where is mandatory to go to the hospital, but there is some where not hospital is available to part of the population.
I clearly said "for some people" in my comment. Not sure why you are repeating what i just said in my own comment.
"it is mandatory for some ppl to go to a govt hospital."
> In your analogy, selling stocks is basically leaving the country,
This is not an analogy at all. For starters, I can move my money from bad company to a good company. Almost no one in bad countries is allowed to pack up and leave to a better country. Millions of ppl would move to USA in a heartbeat if that was the case.
> better to try to improve it
Ugh. You keep saying this. Are you seriously suggesting that this is the result of people not joining "transparency organizations" (whatever that means). This is such weird circular logic that can never be dis proven. System is not working because we aren't trying hard enough to make it work.
What I'm saying is not so complicated (maybe I complicated it): any human organization will have the same kind of problems. You seem fixated in public vs. private, I don't think that distinction is so important as you do. Can organizations be fixed? Some organizations can be fixed, normally it's hard work.
I will not go beyond that because it would be a pointless discussion here, maybe with a few hours and a few beers we would arrive to some agreement. Obviously I don't have a so good opinion about private markets as the solver of all problems like it seems you do.
A democracy provides those "checks and balances", in a better way than opaque and undemocratic "investors".
Italy is a democracy. What explains this particular case ?
See Bullshit Work [1] and empire building [2]. They exist in any large org, since the typical incentives for management to advance are to grow a larger headcount under their 'management'.
Of course this is a similar level to measure progress of designing and building an airplane by how much it weighs. But the fact that this management rule is fundamentally stupid does not prevent executives or politicians from using it because it is easier to measure heads and payroll than actual productivity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire-building
Moreover, in functioning democracies, turnover happens frequently, and there are checks and balances that help keep it in line, including a free press which just loves to expose waste and inefficiency whenever it can.
Also notice that the events in TFA occurred in the area of Italy that is roughly the birthplace of their organized crime syndicates.
This is the kind of thing that happens when governments become dysfunctional, and are captured by authoritarians and/or criminals, not a normally functioning democratic government.
Also note that it is a particularly egregious and spectacular example and makes news, not the ordinary everyday operations.
The country subject of the article - Italy - is extremely inefficient (I don't doubt that there is worse, of course). Absenteism is relatively tolerated; it's not correct that it's a product of organized crime. Sadly, it's a very simple phenomenon of a system without the checks and balances yo mention.
I've observed it first hand, and the absenteist was even open about it - they were actually bragging about it (I'm not joking). I remember another employee waiting to be transferred to another (specific) city, so that he could "do nothing all the day".
> Moreover, in functioning democracies, turnover happens frequently
> This is the kind of thing that happens when governments become dysfunctional, and are captured by authoritarians and/or criminals, not a normally functioning democratic government.
Italy can still be classified as a democracy nonetheless, and it's not going to fail because of inefficiency and corruption.
A company as efficient as the Italian's administration would not survive in a free market, without any doubt.
You are assuming two things that are not true. First, that this always happen in public services. That's false.
Second that this kind of thing doesn't happen in private companies. That's false too. For instance, I have worked in a big private company where some very well payed executives (a lot better payed than the guy in this article) dedicated all their time and effort to office politics. In my personal opinion, in some cases, it would have be better for the company if they just stayed home.
How do you address this? Like everything in society: you create a system of check and balances and work hard to keep them in place.
The hard limit on it in a private company is it going bust but there is no such constraint in the public sector
In terms of resources wasted, how the inefficient of public services would fare against the resources spend in all the companies, not only the surviving ones?
It's something I have never read about, I don't know if some work has been done on this.
One is still arguably fulfilling their responsibilities under their employment contract, the other is very blatantly not
They'd probably first challenge your premise that it is a flaw. A key tenet of socialism is that all are taken care of, including the lazy and incompetent (and their children). Giving such people bullshit jobs to keep them involved in the system, without overly encouraging their lazyness or allowing them to overly disrupt the system, seems like a feature, not a bug.
> have rest of the day to themselves to garden, grow food
Honestly people gardening and growing their own food sounds like a positive for society, more so than sitting in a cubicle pushing papers or pixels of dubious value.
I suspect this sort of frauds are way more widespread than people realize
My mother used to work as an artisan in a theatre and the two worst offenders of this sort were:
-Sceneshifters, whose relations with their superior were a little bit too good so instead of doing their jobs they left the work to my mom's co-workers at the same time reporting hours for that.
-Actors with a long-term employment contract. In theory they were required to participate in at least one play every two years, but in reality the theatre could not afford to lose them and their brand, so they went years without even stepping in the building.
On a smaller scale every sufficiently large corporation will have at least one such a person per team.
He sent a couple more messages like this, still not coming in. After 2 or 3 weeks he just stopped saying anything at all. He totally ghosted us.
It took a really long time for him to officially be fired and we eventually had to break into his desk to get stuff out of it. I also heard we were suing him because he still had his work laptop. Bizarrely enough he tried to connect with a couple of us on LinkedIn afterwards so we knew where he went to work next.
A few months later at a tech meetup we met someone from the team we saw he went to work for. They had the same bizarre experience as us. Showed up like normal for awhile and then just stopped coming in.
Even better was that another person in that group had said their company just hired him!
He was a perfectly competent manager and seemed like a nice guy so I can only imagine what the real story was.
Companies I worked for were branches of American ones. They were receiving funds from US, paying salary to software developers, and did not sold anything on local market, no cash was used, hence the workaround with fake employee.
It doesn't sound like it's worked out well for him in the end. In fact, given the forgery and extortion charges, it actually sounds like he worked pretty hard at being so lazy.
Half a million for threatening someone and forging some signature? And now the money's gone, presumably the wife and kids miraculously got more wealthy, and what will they do to a 67 year old? Two years of probation? The risk of him doing that again are pretty slim.
Sounds like it worked out and paid extremely well.
What always gets me about these con artists is both how talented they are and how much work they do. It never seems like they lack the skills or work ethic to make a legitimate living.
He was an incredibly clever bloke, sharp as a tack. Despite getting into multiple police pursuits, plus various other stupid situations that would've ended with a 10+ year sentence, he didn't end up in jail.
If he wanted to, he would've been able to find legitimate work with great pay. But because of some weird self-loathing complex that he had, he just wasn't keen on it.
FWIW I am an Italian living abroad since 14 years
Italy has that organically!
UBI is a better thing, when you have extreme inefficient bureaucracy, and need to deal with it on a daily basis, this is not a good thing, it is actually slowing down the good parts that are left in the economical system
You want to get rid of unproductive people hindering the productive ones, and UBI is a much better solution.
So it's not organic, unless you mean like cancer is organic, in that sense I might agree.
UBI in contrast, can be seen as something more benign
Costly infrastructure building is actually neutral or maybe even net positive because people have the impression that they are screwing the government over, which is always good for self esteem.
I bet this guy who skipped work for 15 years was super confident and extremely prone to spending the money he pocketed (but did not earn)
UBI sounds pretty good in these situations.
I light a candle to his memory now and again.
After a while, having become a bit closer with them, they confessed to how they did it: they had found a bug in the company's control system, where each of them could approve the other guy's expenses. So they would take turns signing off their lunches; after a while, they felt confident enough to invite other people to them.
I stopped working with them soon after that, but I heard they kept up this act for quite a while.
I don't care what they say - greatest president ever.
https://www.publico.es/sociedad/funcionario-estuvo-15-anos-v...
wasn't he worried he'd be found out?
how did he manage to make so many people lie for him to keep him employed?
so many questions, from, erm, an academic stand point...
If this wasn't broadly considered ok he wouldn't have gotten away with it for 15yr and they wouldn't be going back 15yr to find "alleged threats" he made. Based on my experience the threat was something along the lines of "you know if you take a hard stance on this misconduct your career progression is dead" which is something that not everyone has to be explicitly told but a situation that damn near every career public servant (not just in italy) will have to deal with at some point.
2,094 ghost employees working in USC: report