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Comment by clueless123 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the team. In short, they do it because it is profitable.

PS.. To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".

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In the contract houses I've been in the vast majority of contracts were repeat business. A good contracting house won't pull this kind of thing because the company doesn't survive if they piss off clients. I'm out of that world now but can still talk about it.

The non-scammy way this happens is senior engineers are part of the interviews and requirements gathering. They do the design and estimation. They develop task and proof of concept code for junior engineers.

During the work the senior engineer almost never 100% on a single project. They are on three different projects in different stages: design/early development on one that just started, resource and mentor on a second that's been going a while, writing quote for a third, and initial sales contacts for multiple other.

Based on availability it might not be the same senior person at any step of the process.

It's hard to impossible to a give you the same person who was part of the initial contact because by the time you get teh PO approved they are already hip deep in something else.

I upvoted you because parts of that are absolutely always true. Some of it depends on the type of consulting contract, though. Some of them call for a dedicated team of X headcount for Y time, and if the consultancy subs people in and out of that team without sufficient cause that's a big red flag.

Good point. There's a whole bigger world of contracting that I never saw.

I should be absolutely clear that my experience has been in small contract engineering firms. All of them were less than 20 engineers total and large projects were 3 engineers at any one time.

I don't even understand how that happens. At one point I was a consulting pimp for my dad, and multiple parts of the contract required me to attest that he would be doing the work and if he had help he would be doing the majority of the work and if his time on the contract dropped below 50% of the total the contract would be cancelled and there would be penalties.

There was no way I could have switched him with someone else without paying penalties.

Contracts have to be upheld by a court, to mean anything. I could write in a contract that you will be required to hand me your testicles if you miss the deadline, that doesn't mean I will actually go to court to get them. A lot of companies write aggressive contracts and never actually bother to enforce them, since it would be more costly than what they might actually gain.

Legally, yes - But remember that those provisions are there because someone tried that in the past and so they added legal provisions against it. And remember that those legal provisions are hard to prove; What is 50% of the work? How would they know if he'd had another developer submitting code?

> To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".

And then when they apply to work at their next company, and that company wants to verify previous employment, the previous company that got screwed over is too worried about the possibility of getting sued to accuse the person of lying about who they were... so they'll just say "yes, Y worked here for 6 months".

I'll admit straight up when I fire someone I am usually so relieved if they leave peacefully that I don't just say they worked for me, I will usually even give a semi positive review of them. Not a glowing praise or anything of the sort, but usually a review saying how they're a good team player, they get along well with others, and other aspects highlighting mostly soft skills.

As I've indicated many times on here... most incompetent people are genuinely good, nice people who get along well with others and it's devastating to have to fire them, so when I do fire them it can soften the blow for them to leave some good words, give some positive feedback which allows them to leave on good terms.

That's good of you to do. I think it's pretty rare to be unable to say anything good about someone, and it nice to focus on those things when their future employment might be on the line.

Haha that PS note is great. "Not only did we abuse you, we're going to tell everyone you loved us"

And in the meantime if the consultancy kept the contract and delivered, it was on a successful project. The C- team had little or nothing to do with it being successful, barring maybe filling headcount until the A team finished another billable project. Bonus points if it's a publicly notable new initiative for the consulting client.

i've seen this first hand dealign with a team from Mexico. By the time we fired them it had been 6 months of paid invoices.

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