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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

When Robert McNamara took over Ford, accounting was so messed up, they would weigh their invoices and if the amount wasn't too far off from the expected dollars/pound ratio, they would pay it.

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Even Google evnetually caught a few people who just cold sent in invoices and found that Google would pay.

One guy was caught doing that to the tune of $100 million to Facebook and Google. If he had stopped at $1 million or something he probably would have got away with it. I suspect others have.

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...

I was reading this whole thread flabbergasted and wondering "where the hell are people working that this happened" when it hit me:

I did work in a place where a manager was invoicing monthly "external design work" to the company to the tune of 5x his own salary, because the company's designer was "overwhelmed".

In the end he was just paying the hired designer a little extra to drag her feet and paying a Fiverr freelancer to do some cheap mockups with Figma. And obviously cashin' in the rest.

I only found out about several months after I left. It was interesting for me to have all this revealed because this guy was actively working to undermine all other engineering teams, with gossip and by blocking work. I didn't interact much with him or at all, but he was part of why I left.

The fun part: he was only fired a few months after the BOARD ITSELF fired the CTO, CPO and CEO all in the same day.

The company was 90 employees when I joined, 900 when I left, zero in 2024, and now was sold for scrap to a micro-sized competitor.

I wish I was a writer because the stories I have of that place would be an amazing book.

I wish you were a writer too, I'd love to read that book!

There is a similar book about Hubspot, a "sister company" of the place I used to work. It was published around the time I was there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disrupted:_My_Misadventure_in_...

I can say that the people we hired from HubSpot were 100% frat-house-boys so I 100% believe it.

But back to the company I worked, there were very stupid shit going on:

Around #MeToo, there was a group meeting with all men in the company because of fears of sexual harassment issues. Nobody close to me had any idea about the root cause, and there were some very strangely sexist comments in the meeting. Some people (including one later fired for non-sexual harassment) made it a personal soapbox and went into rants. The CEO completely mishandled it.

Also there was once an anonymous blog about the practices of the company that was totally blown out of proportion by management, and all employees had to attend a meeting to talk about it. Once again the CEO mishandled it, first by paying any attention and second for being incredibly awkward and super-defensive.

This was the main reason the CEO was ousted.

After I left the company there was a string of CEOs that acqui-hired all the competitors and basically drained the company's coffers. And of course the over-hiring, getting to 900 people on a pyramid scheme.

I forgot to tell the main product the company made: SEO blogspam. Yep.

Last year it collapsed because of our mutual friend, ChatGPT.

How was he caught? Involving the internal designer seems like a huge mistake. Keeping the scam quiet without collaborators or actively rocking the boat could have probably persisted for a long time.

The CFO had raised it as a problem but nobody ever bothered to check.

When a new CTO started, he actually checked it out on his first week and discovered the company emitting invoices belonged to the PM.

The CTO also demanded talking with the designer from Fiverr and in the end the amount of money actually paid to him was negligible.

I never really understood the involvement of the internal designer but she was also fired on the spot together with the PM and the company's highest paid engineer (but I don't think this one is involved).

Ah, so the scam was likely detected for being an aberration, but staff was too busy/lazy to investigate.

Fun story, which likely has versions everywhere of someone bilking the company through fake contract work.

From _Go Like Hell_ by A.J. Baime (2010):

> Ford Motor Company was hemorrhaging millions of dollars every month. It was impossible to give an exact number because there was no accounting system. “Can you believe it?” Henry II later remembered. “In one department they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale”

Or perhaps the dimension was length, rather than weight?

> the corresponding receipt, then pinned them together and sent out a check, usually a few months late. To figure out how much money the company owed, they stacked up all the bills, measured them with a ruler, and through a formula of unknown provenance turned feet into dollars.

From _The Fires_ by Joe Flood (2010) Cited in https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/18z6i09/comment...

But I could not find a quote in the Macnamara interviews from the _Fog of War_ https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html as cited by https://forum.woodenboat.com/forum/the-bilge/28529-the-film-...

I had no idea that piece of shit was associated with Ford at all.

He talks about it in The Fog of War (which is not going to make you change your ideia about him).

The Fog of War is definitely worth a watch. It was a fairly harrowing experience when I saw it. Actually, it is probably one of the hardest films I have watched. He clearly details the war crimes he presided over, and is open about the fact that he would have been tried as a war criminal had they lost.

He also pioneered the use of seat belts while at Ford. Which does make the morality-math a little more unusual.

> He also pioneered the use of seat belts while at Ford. Which does make the morality-math a little more unusual.

Is it unusual? A surviving driver from a car wreck needs a new car. Dead ones don't.

Lee Iococca from Chrysler wrote his seatbelt campaign can be countered by an anecdote of a person safely ejected into the grass and car falling off a cliff. I swear some brands are thriving on warm feelings.

To be clear, while McNamara was an advocate for seat belts, he wasn’t particularly instrumental in their development or adoption. In 1955 he introduced a paid option for Ford vehicles that included seat belts. But the option wasn’t popular with consumers, only 2% of new Fords the following year had it installed.

Saab was the first to include them as standard equipment in 1958, with Volvo introducing the modern 3-point seatbelts as standard equipment the following year. They remained unpopular in the US until after Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed which became a bestseller and prompted congress to pass the National Traffic & Motor Safety Act in 1966, and ultimately were made compulsory by states (presumably under a lot of lobbying pressure from insurers) starting in 1970.

That's how he got to DOD in the first place, by being the stereotypical "businessman who will clean up government." DOGE was not the first time politicans have talked about this kind of thing; it comes along every 20-30 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...

GWB was another one. The period seems to be shortening in the modern era.

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