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Comment by fhdsgbbcaA | Hacker News Reader

Define “fraud”? If you get your work done in two hours and can’t progress until a teammate does their end, is it better or worse if you are scrolling HN in an office or at home?

I run my own company, I do not give a single fuck how, where, or when people get their job done. I only care they deliver.

Likewise, people who need to be watched over are not the employees I want in the first place. I’m not running a daycare for children. Adults can make their own decisions, if you need me over your shoulder to deliver you aren’t useful to me to start with.

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> Define “fraud”?

the BigCorp owns your life, the rights to tell you where to be 75% of your waking hours and what to do.

get the eight hour job done in two hours and slack off for the rest? that's theft and fraud. get it done in two hours and admit to it? that's more work for you for the same pay, to fill the rest of your time.

then you go online and some overly enthusiastic yc sponsored clown will dunk on you for not giving your life away to a corporation

> Define “fraud”?

He lived in another state but paid taxes where he supposed to be living. The company was held liable.

> I run my own company

Then you should understand what for you can be held liable and what your responsibilities are. It may be very expensive not to know. In extreme cases you may be held criminally liable.

> I do not give a single fuck

It’s just a recommendation: I’d suggest you do because your tax authorities certainly do.

For people making tangential points about tax compliance, no shit. Obviously I’m talking about work environment, not saying I’m cool with tax fraud and embezzlement.

The point I’m making is if you want to feel like a Big Boss go ahead and stand over people, if you want an a-team doing a-team shit hire people who don’t need a babysitter.

The point you are making is completely irrelevant. You might not care, and if you have people you trust, good for you. But it’s still irrelevant, you asked to define „fraud”, which I did for you. All you do in response is virtue signalling.

A lot of business don't want to bother performance managing that closely. Plenty just worked off of trust.

* You hire someone, and then figure out someone else is doing the work (usually because they are making stupid mistakes, and the person you hired can't be that dumb)

* Your staff work odd hours that make coordinating hard (side gigs / hussle's etc).

* I think the rumored record of multiple full time jobs someone was working was 5+.

* We interviewed someone who was upfront they would be working for us while working for her full time day job remotely.

We deal with sensitive information. Having data go overseas etc is a no go for our business at least.

Note: If you have to deal with government agencies that have gone remote you KNOW that the throughput is sometimes < 50% what it was before. You can almost immediately tell as someone dealing with them. No one answers their phones, all voicemail, all super long delays (week+).

> * I think the rumored record of multiple full time jobs someone was working was 5+.

> * We interviewed someone who was upfront they would be working for us while working for her full time day job remotely.

I'm not sure how this is justified as a problem.

CEO of multiple companies: A-OK

SVP serving on multiple companies' boards of directors: A-OK

Salaried office worker working for multiple companies remotely: Fraud

Hourly worker working three jobs to make ends meet: A-OK

Capital patches out any attempt of non-capital to exit the system quickly.

I wouldn't call it fraud, but it is probably violating the terms of the employment contract. I know it is for my company (I bet people still do it anyway)

What's the recourse for violating your employment contract beyond termination? Ineligibility for unemployment because you were fired "for cause"? Seems like it's worth the risk since you can be fired for no reason at all.

That’s just, like, your opinion, mahn. I don’t recall anyone else saying that those things were OK, or that they were comparable, which they aren’t? Your MO seems to be to just make your comment so high-effort to reply to that nobody will bother.

CEOs and SVPs have contracts that deal with these issues. Salaried workers commit to full time hour commitment.

My employer allows outside employment for some roles if appropriate. It requires disclosure and may not be possible depending on what you do. Double dipping is not acceptable.

I’m a VP level person who serves on a couple of boards and help with a family business. It’s all disclosed and approved with mutually agreeable boundaries.

Another example is an attorney - it’s ok for some private practice, but not ok if that practice will reasonably involve an entity that the company is likely to interact with.

I know a person who is absolutely brilliant, first class intellect. They have two remote jobs and have gotten softly reprimanded at both for essentially making other people look bad because they get so much done.

As far as I see it, both companies get an a-tier person who outperforms the rest of their staff. This person gets two paychecks. Everybody wins.

But in the “we own your time and soul” employee relations model he’s a “crook” or a “fraud” because they aren’t sitting in the company canteen talking about bollocks all day.

That's why he should have kept it a secret. Envy is a pervasive effect. Do everything possible to counteract it.

It is a secret, they’ve been doing it since pandemic started!

If you want to work like a hourly contractor, be one. Work your hours.

If you want to be a $250k engineer and fuck around on Netflix waiting for something for 75% of the workday, you’re demonstrating a lack of maturity and professionalism. Or you work for a really dysfunctional place.

If you’re running your own shop, you’re empowered to run it to your needs. That’s awesome. Mine are different.

My point is about supervision. If an engineer making a quarter mill needs somebody over their shoulder to produce, that’s the core issue.

If during an afternoon where they have to wait for somebody else, I’d rather they go for a casual walk and think through a hard issue slowly and carefully than sit at a desk artificially, writing dumb emails to keep up the charade they are “busy”.

(Of course the person they are waiting on now has to read said emails instead of finishing their task - busy work is net drag on everyone.)

For jobs that require thought we do very little to provide space for reflection, and imho that’s dumb.

And it should be that way. The responsibility for tax cheats should rest entirely on the person not paying. But that's not how it works. Our government has passed authoritarian laws that put the responsibility on the employer too even if they have no knowledge of the crime.

And if you find out that your developers were actually in North Korea and you've violated sanctions, would you care then?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-n...

They’re literally doing the work. They’re not accused of placing backdoors, they’re not accused of anything aside from the US government running an antiquated sanctions regime, and just doing the work. The US government isnt charging companies with OFAC violations, so there is no reason to care. North Koreans learned how to be a fake Staff Software Engineer and do non-fake things for real RSUs.

Companies shouldnt burden the rest of their employees for social verification, for something that isnt a problem for the company.

That sounds akin to saying a security breach doesn't matter until there are consequences. Not many companies would be comfortable being in the position that they have not verified the identities of employees who have access to payment processing data.

They did verify the identity to the standard required. The employee lied.

Although analogies compare dissimilar things with a common attribute, your analogy relies on saying all employees are security breaches. These are employees competent to work in medium sized all the way to big tech companies as software engineers.

Every company with sensitive data need to consider insider threat risk. Many compliance standards require background checks specifically because employees can lie. My point is simple, it's not as simple as "employee complete tasks? Y/N" but that every employee is a potential liability that businesses need to do risk management according to their role. Remote work makes that more complicated, and requires different controls.

You could have them turn up to an office for a few days when they start work if you wanted

So the logic is that even though they may get their required work done, the risk that they may one day flee to North Korea and cause you to violate sanctions requires that you have to constantly bring in all of your employees to a central location and soft surveil them to mitigate this?

Why not just require a single background check or interview them on-site?

I was responding to someone that says they only care that they deliver. And that was the statement I took issue with, there are numerous factors that employer should care about beyond performance. As another example, the liability raised from creating a toxic workplace. I said nothing about bringing people in. You raise two things that would be good controls for identity fraud.

Don’t worry. Most people here that “run their own business” are in VC-funded startup la la land anyway. It says very very very little about knowing how to actually productively steer a group of people.

Why do we do this all the time? Somebody makes a slightly hyperbolic statement, and everybody replies to them with the most outlandish and extreme examples of things that would be problems if they literally meant the exact thing they said.

"People can wear anything they want out in public, I don't care"

"Yeah, well if they wore a suit made of plutonium, or one covered with guns that fired randomly in every direction, I bet you'd care then".

I'm going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and assume that he probably does the due diligence to verify that his employees are legally able to work wherever the company is, and aren't using company resources to launch cyberattacks on the NSA, aren't international terrorists trying to destroy the moon, etc, etc.

The Internet, where the comment section contains a bunch of people cosplaying as compilers that somehow manage to be more pedantic than the Rust borrow checker.

Surely nobody is referring to scrolling HN during work hours as “fraud”

No, I think the current buzzword for that is "time theft".

Hiring?

Quietly and carefully.

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