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.
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
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.
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+).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Attempting to do any form of security work using LLM is nigh impossible without a few steps of nudging it out of its “while user is asking me to do bad things: say no” loop.
After a year of heavy LLM use I’ve found the utility limits, my usage has peaked, and I’m developing very restrictive use cases.
Beyond functioning as an interactive O’Reilly manual, LLM only save time if you never read the code they produce. Which is a short term win, but things will blow up eventually, as with all code, and now you’ve got a bigger problem than you started with.
They all obey the same masters, be it the big tech companies providing subsidized cloud, VC, or the stock market (post-IPO).
Trying to delude oneself that company A is superior morally to company B without a very clear distinction between incentive structures (eg A makes money from causing pollution, B sells widgets for cleaning up pollution), which is not the case with these companies, is magical thinking.
Google has also magnificently shit the bed with Gemini; their ads business is getting raked over the coals in court; they are a twice convicted monopolist; and are driving away top talent in droves.
It reminds me of the old joke:
Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good.
People have been talking about the downfall of Google and FB/Meta for years now and yet every single year both of them still grow, still print money, and run the most used products in the world by far.
Google's generative ai models probably are used more in a day than the rest combined. Google is a highly profitable business that still has never not grown YoY in its nearly 3 decade history.
In you mind you might think Google is going down, but in reality they have only been going up for nearly 3 decades now.
I used the newly released gemini live mode. I thought they were positioning it against chatgpt live mode. But the voice is hilariously unnatural. It makes you not want to talk to it at all. If this is the best google can do, they are years behind the competition.
He's suggesting that acquisitions aren't happening because of antitrust enforcement. I'm pretty sure that has no bearing on the type of tiny acquisition we're talking about here but then again I don't actually know what I'm talking about.
1. The US would’ve been paying Russia about 10x the cost if SpaceX didn’t exist.
2. Boeing was awarded a ~$3B contract within the Artemis mission and, so far, the outcome is that they can’t safely bring back the astronauts they sent to space.
Those two factors alone indicate that it’s more a mutually beneficial relationship between SpaceX and the government with, arguably, SpaceX providing more benefit relative to the government.
You're pretty good at writing clickbait headlines yourself. Those huge checks are a DoD contract for unblockable internet coms not some handout and for $20 million a month it sounds like Elon is giving them a deal, at least compared to what Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman get every year. They don't just suck the teat, they eat half of it.
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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