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Comment by dwater | Hacker News Reader

Many federal contracts require naming key personnel during the bidding phase to try to minimize this. Resumes for the key personnel become part of the proposal.

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Aha! That explains an odd case where my company was subcontracting with another company to work on their project that was ultimately state-funded. This was essentially a museum installation, VFX work for a projection thing, and they wanted the names of the people who were going to be involved.

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.

I've worked state engineering jobs like this, where the RFQ is basically nothing but the combined resumes of the A-team. The contract says they do the work, but it still gets sent to juniors.

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.

Which is probably going to be followed by a no-cost contract modification to switch out the name of personnel who couldn't possibly wait for a job as long as it takes the contract to get to approval/award. Just in my experience.

How does that work in practice? Say the personnel in question leave the company.

That would depend on the government to notice and take action. I imagine if one person left and the company put a suitable replacement in, it may not be noticed and wouldn't likely draw any lawsuit. But swapping in a "D team" as described would likely provoke a response.

You'd have to have a major screwup mid-project, and they'd either freeze the project and/or start executing liquidation/damages clauses as soon as they realize the scalp they want isn't there to be had.

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

In those cases the customer has to approve the replacement (within reason). Comes with a price premium though.

Oooookay. That explains... Some of the weirdness of applying for a Federal Government project. The number of wild gesticulations they asked me to do with my resume really turned me off from trying to take the job.

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..

When I was doing contractor jobs, in one of the projects personnel rotation was met with a hefty penalty. So the PMs tried their best to keep us happy, which meant a lot of the guys took advantage to ask for a generous raise. This was BTW a pretty non significant and easy support operations support project, so I imagine this terms were standard for other projects.

Here is one such "key personnel" clause: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/48/2052.215-70

My first job out of college was a practically fly-by-night video game development house that had primarily D-team members except for a couple of contractors and me.

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...

It's the same with large state contract I've seen as well. They key personnel may actually be provided in the request for proposal even before the agency signs a contract.

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