Name and shame the firm at least?
I can't tell you how much it hurts your soul to work at a consulting firm or implementation shop. I took a job once where they said I could hire a team of great engineers for a very complicated/technical contract, we talked before about how much salary/benefits/timeframe it would be to get the right folks onboard to meet some project deliverables.
Once I was onboard, it was like "oh, well you said you needed $X, but we only have budget for $Y, so you will need to make due with these jr resources". They suggested I work with the sales team to get more business for the things we wanted to do. I suggested they find a replacement and bounced from that clusterfuck.
The frequency at which they show up on the front page makes me think someone's trying to build a narrative.
This is particularly concerning given that this website is also one of the tech sector's most respected hiring sites.
My main question isn't /whether/, as I have enough to go on that this is somehow deliberate. What I'm asking myself is what the ultimate goal of this is.
Imagine if every week you got "ask hn: what's the best git tutorial?" or something equally trivial and open-ended on the front page. This simply does not seem like a natural occurrence.
You do get frauds. So what? It's always been the case. It hasn't appeared out of the blue this year, so why is there now an outcry about it? It hasn't increased one bit, all things considered. People have been running bait and switch scams since before the internet existed. Read up on penpal bride scams - you send a photo of a younger, more attractive sister or daughter and entrap a prospect. Or about "flattering portrait" matrimony scams - the same thing, but using paintings, since that was done in the middle ages, before photography.
So again, why is the narrative building being done?
It got to the point where we actually had a manager suggest taking a photo of candidates when they interviewed to confirm that the person coming in when they got hired was the same person.
What I'm saying is that it's worrying that there are many front-page posts that /ask specifically about this/. It's like facebook groups being flooded with "Ask FB: anyone live close to a 5G tower and get headaches?" Most people in cities do. It's the /question/ that builds the narrative. Not your anecdote.
So again, why is this specific point being dredged up this often recently?
This sort of fraud has always been around, however covid-19 changed the equation dramatically in favour of the scammers, due to many more companies being willing and able to hire remote employees.
This has allowed the scammers to scale in ways that were previously not possible.
As the profitability increases due to scale, more scammers are attracted to it, which leads to more people experiencing it, which leads to more people talking and posting about it, which leads to those posts ending up on the front page of HN.
I don't think it's a driven narrative, however one of the consequences will be companies lowering their appetite for remote-only work.
I disagree. The same scam could be pulled any day of the year before the pandemic. And eventually those who saw the extreme profitability of this made a "plausibly deniable" outsourcing shop and ran things that way.
Now consider how many companies were willing to hire fully remote workers before the pandemic, and how many were willing to hire fully remote workers during and after the pandemic, and that will answer why the scammers have been able to scale.
Ending remote work?
Nevermind the fact that even if such domain knowledge existed in them, they probably wouldn't have a process for transferring it to the juniors they throw in the fire pit to actually "execute" a project.
Best you can get with these companies is avoiding a complete crash landing and "only" striking the tail.
I've seen managers hire them a couple times - usually, it's often when the manager's department is very understaffed, incompetent and frankly a bit clueless (even as to what the strategic direction should be) [1]. Then, in comes the TCS salespeople, who convince the department head to effectively outsource the department to them, and they'll just execute all its functions, and provide strategic direction as well. They promise to implement "top industry standards", and, if you're say a head of department in a bank, it sort of makes sense to believe that these people have been to dozens of banks, and have collected a body of knowledge on what the best practices are. Also, I think it's extremely tempting for the department head, since he'll just have to deal with TCS managers from now on, and not run his department. Not to mention the cost savings. All in all, on paper, their offer is very enticing (also for the manager who makes the decision, as it looks like TCS will make his job much easier), and, given the outsourcing trend in the industry, it's not controversial, so managers very often go for it. Afterwards, the execution is always a disaster and huge disappointment (and manager's career is very likely seriously damaged) - but TCS makes its money in the process.
Oh, and on top of that, there's of course also just regular graft, if the manager is willing to take the bribes.
Basically, the likes of TCS are a parasite, exploiting systemic weaknesses of corporate management.
[1] The other common scenario is when the CEO/CFO demand x% cost cuts from the department and is basically suggesting outsourcing himself.
The first symptom will be a few fresh faces in training sessions who aren't billed to your project.
Then systematically the experienced engineers will be pulled off your project (and dangled in front of a new client), while being replaced with the new chaps. Who are now billed, of course, at the full rate.
Within a few weeks they'll replace every guy with new hires.
But try explaining this to the bean counters.
I can't believe they're still getting away with these stunts. I first saw it in 1999.