At the time, I'd suggested talking to the local DA's office about the fraud claim. If no one has done that yet, this would be a really good time, with New York Times coverage. They can prevent the CEO from leaving the country until this is resolved.
My money is on this being a Visa scam company bringing Chinese nationals over. The poorer ones probably got screwed, while the ones who paid (400k from one of his employees???) have probably vanished into the country.
(I have nothing against the Chinese, or immigrants in general, I'm an immigrant myself, and I feel terrible for the innocent victims who have lost money, jobs, and for many, their american dream)
The only thing that makes no sense is why they hired Penny Kim. The business was seemingly imaginary, the only employees were the CEO's bros and his H1Bs. If the business was some sort of front, why hire a veteran marketing leader to publicize your scam operation? Especially someone who was not in on the scam and was highly likely to rebel? My money is on the CEO being a genuine egomaniac who thought he could will a legitimate business into existence with enough personal charm.
The business wasn't imaginary. The tech was real. The CTO and devs have been building since December 2015. He misrepresented the runway claiming to put in 2 million when he only had 400k to put in. That's why in the CTO's comment, he said he didn't understand what was the end game, why accelerate into a brick wall?
It made no sense why he hired so many people when he didn't have the money too.
They did have a room full of H1B visa holders doing the tech. It sounds like those guys got scammed hardest just on the face of it, it'd be awful if they also got scammed out of money for visas.
This seemed pretty likely to me the second I saw bouncing between tech/analyst positions and "CEO of mines in Asia and South America" on his LinkedIn (when he was mid-thirties at the latest?). There is only so far one can push it before all thered flags go up.
Actually the "CEO of mine in south america" thing isn't so far fetched. Except you have to know that a "mine" can be a 5 acre plot of land dredging up mud to feed into a processing machine.
Friends of mine do it each year. So technically they "own a mine in south america".
It's still bullshit puffery though. But you can do it for $20K.
HN is stripping the last "." out of the URL, but it's required for the link.
The organization named is the corporate entity that owns the Packers; there are >350k share owners and it's structured such that nobody can own more than 4% of the shares. It's grandfathered into the NFL rules which for the last 30 or so years have limited ownership groups to no more than 32 people, at least one of whom must own a >30% share.
In fact unless a court decision is made I think it technically unfair to the company and their employee the way the mob has brought out their pichfork.
We have only heard the story from one person - and it makes the company and its CEO look like Satan's spawns - which in my experience never is 100% true.
Having said that, I am always a little unnerved browsing LinkedIn - you have CEOs, CFOs, Management always complaining about their employees, and employees doing cringy asskissing :( It makes me deeply sad what LinkedIn has turned into, LinkedIn just gives employers more power.
On the other hand I have noticed that HN, reddit are places where Labour ( employees ) come to complain.
Its just an interesting trend where two social networks exists - one for the capitalists and one for labor.
The CTO of that company made a public comment on the Hacker News thread backing up her story... It should confirm that her perspective isn't just a rant. It's actually true.
I was concerned about the doxxing at the beginning. But now it's looking like getting the attention of an Internet mob was basically the only option for justice that Penny had left. (I wish I had more faith in the corporate legal system than this.)
It's not just one person. We have now had the story largely confirmed by WrkRiot's CTO (maybe I should say "former CTO", or maybe the entire company is effectively "former") and one of its former advisors.
We actually have heard at least a bit from the other party, e.g. "she's a disgruntled employee who was fired for cause". In any case, if it's the CEO of a company we haven't heard from on a major issue like this, that's most likely the CEOs fault, most likely because they have nothing constructive to say.
Also, I find your characterization of HN as a labor forum as opposed to capitalist rather curious, since its origin lies with one of the purest forms of capitalism possible, startups.
I've had a conversation like this before and it's full of nuance. The typical action of startups is to disrupt something about the current marketplace. That threatens some older entrenched interests, but supports the investors. Some capital loses, and some other capital wins. There is a messy fight somewhere in the middle as people try to cash in. Judgment of this process as pro or anti-capital is easily interpreted different ways, but it is definitely built into "how capitalism works" to some degree.
Ultimately, social responsibility plays a big role in outcomes. Companies that intend to blow up everything in their path, lie, cheat and steal their way into cashflow, and then have some key people escape before it all falls apart, are just destructive - they aren't even creatively destructive. Those companies are why startups have a common outsider's view of being shady ventures.
Definitely there is an aspect of capital competing against capital in startups, but I'd argue that is neutral in terms of the power capital holds (as you say, some wins, some loses).
But in terms of the systemic effect on power between capital and labour, I'd said people being entrepreneurial shifts power (in the political sense) towards labour, partly through increasing the independence of labour in aggregate, and partly through enabling labour to capture significantly more of the rewards of their work [1].
[1] For example, compare the typical amount of equity held by "last and least important founder" vs "first employee" to see that being a founder radically shifts power your way.
We have now heard one story from one person and read corroboration of that story from a professional news organization along with some new information in the form of interviews and requests for comment from the principals involved. That isn't "doxxing", it's news.
I use both LinkedIn and HN quite a lot and don't really see what you mean about the capital/ labor split between the sites, for what it's worth.
"Did you not read it"-style comments break the site rules, so please edit such bits out of your comments here. It's striking how much better a factual comment becomes when that sort of swipe is taken out.
Not only LinkedIn, same goes for Glassdoor too. I have seen Glassdoor deleting 1-2 year old reviews after promising that employers can't change the behavior.
The difference lies in how to grow your business. LinkedIn and Glassdoor cannot ask employees to pay them for being fair but can ask employers to pay them for deleting/managing the image of the company.
Anyone who think this isn't doxxing go have a look at Twitter, Reddit and even some of HN on how some employees who had nothing to do with the fraud have been treated.
On what was basically a junior employee not being compatible with their boss.
Which adults know is definitely two sided when one person tells the story (and normal).
I don't think that naming the name of the company involved was doxxing. I think of doxxing as getting personal information to use in coordinated harassment of an individual. To the degree that occurred, I think it's unfortunate. (And I imagine it did occur).
I found Penny's story very believable and felt really bad for many of the individuals involved (the H1-B workers most of all). There was probably a lot of professional pressure on Penny not to be seen as a troublemaker and not to name the company's name. There is a definite information asymmetry between management and workers and I feel like wrkriot was using that to exploit their employee's trust.
It seems fair to out them for that so they can't just change their name and do it again (which was clearly a pattern). Had they not been mostly a fraud, they might have been able to provide a reasonable defense against the story. Had the fraud continued, in order to protect innocent employees, it most likely would have just hurt more people.
It's definitely not black and white but I don't think we harassed them out of business either. It was definitely all about to fall apart regardless.
lol, wut? Anybody who has been here more than an hour is who expects fraud in SV. The first job I had in SV ended in a joint SEC/DOJ prosecution and jail time for multiple executive officers. Lawlessness, scams, and dishonesty are endemic in this area.
> Lawlessness, scams, and dishonesty are endemic in this area.
And homelessness. I was disappointed to see hundreds of helpless homeless people, some in horrible mental state, right there on streets in the middle of huge ivory towers that SV thumps its chest on. It's such a shame!
And with young kids coming out of those glass doors flashing gadgets and gizmos at each other, with that certain bay area flair … I mean the collective blindness of the place felt only surreal.
It's a personal thing but I guess my family will never be at home in the bay area.
Is like trying to help your drug addict friend get better. No matter what you do if they don't help themselves it is a lost cause. Eventually you just have to keep going with your life and wish them well.
In those countries do they imprison people that refuse help? If not, then I don't see how they can do any better with people that refuse to stay clean or refuse help entirely.
If a homeless person refuses help, it's probably not because they actively want to live an unstable, day-to-day life, not knowing where or what they'll eat tonight.
It's because the government has failed them in the past in its attempts to help. Not every government has decided that putting a permanent roof over the heads of anyone who needs it is a bad use of taxpayer's money.
>It's because the government has failed them in the past in its attempts to help.
No, this is incorrect. If someone continues to choose getting high over help, it has very little to do with the government failing them. Additionally, homeless people with mental disorders that make them paranoid or forgetful can refuse it regardless of past experiences.
>it's probably not because they actively want to live an unstable, day-to-day life, not knowing where or what they'll eat tonight.
No, but they may actively want something incompatible (like heroin or cocaine) more.
I would disagree. If someone chooses to choose getting high over getting help, it's a failure of drug policy in that country. The government has still failed them, you may just be blind to how.
Show me the government that only governs people without addictions. What you're saying is absurd. Proclivity to addiction is affected by DNA. So you either have to imprison them so they can't have what they want, or deal with the fact that you will have some drug addicts.
The reigning ethos in SV is something very close to nihilism, but we do believe in one thing: property. A homeless or insane person has been assigned a near-zero value by markets and is therefore to be ignored. When the only thing you recognize is the exchange of goods and money, how can you assign any value to a person having neither?
I thought SV was the world's hardest place to exercise your property rights? Just try demolishing a single-family house to set up a new low-income Section 8 apartment complex. Even if you wanted to, you couldn't.
San Francisco is like the polar opposite of the real-world Rapture you're envisioning it as.
Please stop posting this sort of intemperate rant to HN. It sheds no light on a difficult social problem like homelessness and turns discussion into a tire fire.
I don't like metadiscussions, and I can see you have your hands full with this circus of a post, but did you reply to the wrong comment? Mine only has two replies (ex. yours) but dozens of siblings and cousins. If there's a tire fire here, I didn't light it.
I'm describing what long experience has shown us that comments like that one do. Sorry for not making that clearer (and thanks for the convivial note about the circus).
I once accidentally stumbled into a street downtown LA in my early 20s. It was full of druggies and gangsters. I never felt so scared of my safety before. I definitely felt eyes staring a me like I didn't belong there.
I have travelled to many countries where some places are considered dangerous for travellers. And never have I been more afraid than that day.
I took a grey hound as a kid across country and made the mistake of getting out at LA to look around. It felt like the walking dead at the time! Was aggressively pan handled, lost five bucks, came out of it ok. But SF has nothing on LA.
Homelessness in Anchorage (Alaska) is a real issue. There are hundreds of chronically homeless, and not enough shelter beds to go around. Many winters 10+ people freeze to death on the streets.
There aren't any regularly operated buses from Anchorage to the rest of the US, and I'm fairly certain there aren't any homeless deportation programs (which would probably involve flying people commercially - there is a ferry, but its not really cheaper).
Not to the extend that SF has. I have never seen so many homeless people before. And its not like they were starving at all. I heard they get paid by the government a $1000 a month. I even saw some reading books at the park.
I mean... homeless people read books. Seems like a good use of time to me when you're unemployed and homeless. It sounds like you think is a problem for some reason?
It's just not something I see homeless people do. So I was quite unfamiliar with the sight. Everyone has the right to do what they want with their time, but for me, I would imagine trying to find a proper job would be more important. Off course, I don't know about their situation so I shouldn't judge.
Who do you think would hire a homeless person walking in off the street? There are other aspects to life that need stabilizing before they think about finding work.
If you see a non-homeless person reading a book, do you automatically assume they are neglecting their spouse, kids and job? And do you not have anything more important to do than read HN?
Homeless people go to California because the weather is good and the locals are rich. What do you want SF residents to do about it? Giving the homeless more will just lead to more of them moving in.
No disagreement here. It's a rational decision for a homeless person to move to California, but the locals don't have to be happy about it or encourage them.
You can judge, but SF goes further than any city I've seen to provide services to the homeless. So much so that it's a mild weather Mecca to many. So you can turn up your nose and go back home to a city that likely ships them here or "takes care of it" so you don't see it -- but you are being naive. The poor will always be with us, and we are judged by how we treat them.
Have you been outside of the US? Coming from Europe, SF is utterly shocking. I've never seen anywhere else like it. Government provides a lot of support for low-income and homeless people in EU.
Part of the reason there are so many homeless in SF is because the SF government and local charities provide food and shelter. The tourists handing out money doesn't help with attracting them. Much of the panhandling money is used for drugs, as basic needs such as food and shelter are already covered by the government and nonprofits. If you really want to help them, volunteer at a homeless kitchen or directly donate to them.
I walk by the local drug dealers in the Tenderloin every day, and all the clientele I've seen are homeless people.
Wow that's some serious reactionnary stupid stuff. You are pretending that these people are homeless because the State provides for them? Man, you are such a model person for this new techno-aristocracy.
Yes I've traveled quite extensively and nothing has ever come close to SF. I don't for a moment pretend to understand all the issues that contribute to this. I'm simply making an anecdotal observation based on my own experiences.
The EU is too big to speak of a one entity. And things are changing too.
I lived in the third largest city in Sweden, and when I moved in there were the handful (like, probably less than 5) of homeless beggars that everyone knew. There were probably more homeless but they were sheltered by the state.
But by the time I moved out, in front of every supermarket there was a Romanian beggar with her head down.
I'll agree SF is definitely on a completely different level though. I've never seen anyone defecate in public outside of SF (and yeah I've been to China)
That's probably not what you think. The beggars you saw in front of supermarkets were likely part of a criminal gang and had a handler collecting their money.
Should be pretty easy to investigate, arrest, deport them and forbid them to come back.
> You can judge, but SF goes further than any city I've seen to provide services to the homeless...
That's nice to hear!
I do realize now that my comment is naive; definitely only a tiny snapshot from the limited time that I spent over there and is not a complete picture or a total impression of the place.
But I still do wish that SV had a better situation/solution to these otherwise normal people problems.
San Francisco alone spends 241 million on homelessness per year. Most places deal with these "normal people problems" by criminalizing it to the point where people leave to places like SF or are jailed.
Well, that's a lot of money! I hope it's being effectively used.
Since it's SV we're talking about, this money could probably be used to find a better solution with a better outcome to the problem of homelessness all across America. And then other states can follow suit!
> San Francisco alone spends 241 million on homelessness per year.
The $241 million figure is a little misleading because it encompasses the total spending across homeless services and supportive housing. Supportive housing is $112 million and the people within are NOT counted as homeless (nor should they be but that $112 out of $241 million is not being used on homeless people). [1]
It certainly doesn't help that the amount of money actually used on the homeless is contracted out to many, many, many companies and split across other government groups making it effectively impossible to spend efficiently and to track (I really wish they'd get this corrected; I mean we're the city of Silicon Valley for crepes sake!)
> Most places deal with these "normal people problems" by criminalizing it
Many cities spend more money, year over year, to house, shelter, feed and medically treat the homeless. Sure they'll get arrested too and I'm sure there are exceptions but I couldn't find any information regarding further criminalization, in recent years, as a way to get rid of the homeless (if you have a source that would be great). In fact here in SF the supervisor wants to do away with tents calling them illegal [2]
> people leave to places like SF
Only 10% of the homeless in a 2015 report came from out of state. 71% of the homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, which is about 10% higher in just 2 years. I don't think very many are leaving to go to SF to be homeless. [3]
"Lived in SF before becoming homeless" is self-reported in a survey of people who do not want the city to start sending them elsewhere, and "lived on a friend's couch" technically counts but shouldn't. What we want to know is whether they were ever able to support themselves here, and only 30% of them owned or rented.
But that shouldn't technically count as homeless either. Honestly I can't really find any better numbers but I get your point and maybe there just are not any better numbers I dunno.
> SF goes further than any city I've seen to provide services to the homeless.
Maybe? It's difficult to track the money. Per capita SF doesn't even have the highest amount of homeless and yet you rarely see them on the streets in NYC and other major cities (and it's not because they're all in jail; NYC spent over a $1 billion in 2014 on homeless services and shelters and recently NY state started a $10 billion initiative to help the homeless). I wish SF did a better job tracking where the funds go and how effective they are being spent.
> a city that likely ships them here
This is a bit of a myth. In a 2015 report [1] only 10% of the homeless in SF came from another state. 71% of the homeless lived in SF itself and then became homeless.
> "takes care of it" so you don't see it
NYC has over 200 shelters. Many of the shelters in SF have waiting lists of several hundred people to the point where they have to live in tents which can be pretty dangerous in and of itself. Granted not all of the shelters are like that but many are and when you can't even stay in a shelter it doesn't really give them a lot of choice.
> The poor will always be with us, and we are judged by how we treat them.
I agree! It's far safer to have them off of the streets in many respects by providing affordable housing, temporary housing and even shelters. SF just doesn't have enough of that to go around for the homeless. I would love to see them expand their shelter services to provide more places for them to stay. But that certainly doesn't mean I want someone to "take care of it" so I "don't see it".
I think your comment came off a bit crass by assuming parent wanted to not see them and calling them naive.
Admittedly the poster's complaint was about Silicon Valley, not SF.
I have looked at the homelessness statistics in Silicon Valley and the vast majority here actually lived here before becoming homeless. You don't usually see homeless people in most of the valley because they tend to stay out of sight by the creeks or other out of the way areas, but you do see them in downtown San Jose and to a lesser extent downtown Palo Alto.
I don't know the budget for homeless spending down here in Silicon Valley, but I doubt it is that high.
My understanding is that that's largely because SF is actually a pretty good (or at least "less awful") place to be homeless in, so homeless people from other areas travel or are sent there in hopes of finding a better life.
It's apparently a thing for social workers and caregivers in places with drastically inadequate social support (i.e. most of the US) to just stick disabled/mentally ill people on a bus to SF; they'll at least have a better chance there.
The interesting part is that the technology exists to better vet and monitor investments. For example, why don't startup-friendly banks offer authorized investors read-only access to bank accounts, and maybe an investor alert service that notifies them whenever a charge/check of more than $X posts to the company bank account or credit card, or when a wire goes out, etc? Most types of fraud are absurdly easy to spot; the tools and the will to spot them just aren't very strong atm.
That's because there are currently no "startup-friendly" banks. The ones who say that are just using marketing speak and are no better and often worse to deal with than the majors.
That is not true at all. Silicon Valley Bank is absolutely friendly to startups, helps fund them, and supports them with a great network of early stage company get-togethers many times per year. They supported my startup from first funding right through to the $42 million we have raised to date.
Every big bank will also help you if you're about to put millions in an account with them. And some random "get-togethers" aren't really a big deal and not something I'm looking for from a bank.
What does "supported" even mean? What does SVB really do for you that another major bank couldn't? In contrast, they have less branches and ATMs, fewer business hours, weaker credit card offerings, more fees, and an utterly crap web interface.
I guess you fake it until you make it? Obviously not the same thing but when reddit originally started didn't the founders use bots to submit stories. Theros got billions. Kind of sucks for the H1Bs they might lose their visa.
"Fake it 'til you make it" is more about pretending to have confidence before you really have it and less about falsifying your past in a way that's easy for someone to fact check.
Early in my career I was a bit gray on some skills. For instance, I may have done some tutorials on ActiveX and oversold my knowledge, but by the time I started the job, I put in the work to ensure I could back up my BS.
Correct. I'm familiar with the trajectory of the "Fake it 'till you make it" meme, but I have never understood it to be a PC synonym for fraud, or passing yourself off as something that you are not (including missing payroll and falsifying investor interest or mundane things like your C.V.)
Yeah, I imagine he was hoping investor / VC money would come through and it would all be good. The faking wire transfers thing was weird though - he would have been better off just saying they were out of cash and trying to raise some.
It's really sad. I grew up in the Bay Area and felt like the propensity for fraud was very low if not non-existent. I guess it's not like that anymore or maybe it never was and I've been lucky to work for and with people who don't commit fraud.
Here is some more information including a contact number.
Domain Name: WRKRIOT.COM
Creation Date: 25-aug-2016
Registrant Name: ISAAC CHOI
Registrant Organization: 1FOR.ONE CORPORATION
Registrant Street: 2005 DE LA CRUZ BLVD
Registrant Street: SUITE 131
Registrant City: SANTA CLARA
Registrant State/Province: CA
Registrant Postal Code: 95050
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.4083447484
Registrant Email: MYSUBS@HALLFORONE.COM
All: please don't post, and do flag, comments that publish identifying personal details on others in the context of attacks on them. (Especially when they're newly-christened public enemies.) Maybe someone has done bad things; reacting to that by becoming a mob is also a bad thing, and we don't want it here.
From what I have read on Kim's blog and other articles, this appears to be more a case of the CEO Choi being an immature and incompetent individual who started out to earn some big bucks but couldn't handle failures and ended up creating one fraud after another. To me it doesnt look like he started the company with the intention of committing some grand scam.
This reminds me of my last job, where the karma gods smiled upon me and not so much for another guy.
I've always written my resume somewhat uniquely for SEO[1] and happen to work quite heavily in the Linux space. At the time several years ago, my resume was on the first or second page google search results for something along the lines of "linux system administrator" and variations.
The stars must have aligned as some poor schmuck thought he'd spruce up his resume by copy & pasting lines verbatim from the first 4-5 good Linux resumes he found via google. Unfortunately for him, one of them was mine. Also unfortunately for him, I'm known as a very technical interviewer that doesn't take any bs.
So besides the fact he wasn't qualified from a technical perspective for this position, I decided to see what he'd do. I stopped him mid interview and pulled up my resume on my phone. I handed it to him and asked him to read a few lines. Then I asked him to read a few lines that were verbatim from his resume. His face lost all color and he shuddered. There is simply no way I was buying that he and I both came up with the following 3 lines in a row:
* Re-implemented the global dns/ldap setup for higher availability. Used keepalived for auto-failover
* High performance computing, benchmarking, and kernel tuning. Constant review of upstream kernel activity
* Maintenance and engineering on a from scratch Linux distribution in support of high volume electronic trading
Amongst two or three additional ones, it was too much of a cooincidence. He swore that the recruiter had doctored his resume and that the recruiter was a liar. I gave him a shot at doing tech for the rest of the interview. However, I turned it up to 11 and was visibly agitated at this point that he'd stolen from my work trying to market myself. Now I'm normally extremely friendly in interviews, but teched him so hard it hurt my brain. He failed miserably.
We told his recruiter the story and said if it was true we were going to immediately stop doing business with that recruiter and his company. He quickly and happily forwarded us every single email from that candidate clearly showing they'd done nothing other than rearrange the styling and put their awful logo on it. The recruiter decided to stop working with this candidate as well.
Moral of the story: Don't steal people's resume, they work hard making it and that is dishonest. Don't lie to technical people about your technical skills. It will ruin your future career prospects.
You sound like a huge asshole. You knew going into this you wouldn't hire him, yet you wasted his time anyway. You make it sound like he plagiarized a book you wrote and was trying to sell his own. He found people that worded their resume really well and decided to use it for his own. It's not like there's some sanctity to the wording of resumes. Get over yourself.
Correction, he wasted my time, but interviewing for a position he wasn't remotely qualified to perform. Honestly is the most important trait in any team member. How do you not see this?
Because job listings are overwhelmingly asking for more than they mean. "10+ years experience" means "a couple years if we like you". "CS degree or similar required" may as well not be there on the listings that have it. The responsibility of figuring out whether they're qualified is yours, not the candidate's. How the hell is he supposed to know what your needs are? You should have figured this out in an email or quick phone screen.
Additionally, you're a terrible interviewer if someone is failing miserably. There is no valuable data to use from this situation. Turn it down until they stop failing, and see how far it can be pushed. I'm sure you know this, but decided to be a prick instead.
There's nothing dishonest about using wording from someone else's resume. If I did it and someone asked about it, I'd definitely say "I saw how someone else phrased it and found it really good, so I used it too" and obviously wouldn't put it down if it wasn't true. This guy probably would have said something similar if you didn't throw it in his face and make him so uncomfortable.
The concept of it being amoral to plagiarize a resume is laughable. He's not creating some original piece of writing or trying to demonstrating his writing abilities. He's not submitting some piece of writing as part of his job responsibilities or for any sort of publication.
He's conveying facts on a piece of paper that is handed to, at most, a few dozen people, who glance it at for about 20 seconds and then never see it again. He's not even implicitly claiming that everything on his resume is 100% unique, because more than half of resumes use the same structuring, wording, and general descriptive approaches. I thought this was common sense until your comment.
Calling this plagiarism is like saying the sentence "By using our Services, you are agreeing to these terms" in a terms of service is plagiarizing whoever wound up writing that first. It's ridiculous.
Well it was my original work, that I spent a lot of time on. I found it terribly insulting that he blatantly ripped much of it off, AND that he couldn't at least back a single bit of it up. I guess you wouldn't mind if someone totally ripped off something you worked hard on and passed it off as their own? Totally cool, right?
Then you have a differing opinion from me and SEJeff on what is needed to create a good résumé. If all it required were a reciting of simple facts, then presumably the candidate would not need to have copied from SEJeff. I don't have to look at other people's work when writing the school I attended or year that I graduated, or number of years that I have in some skillset.
Perhaps you think that it wasn't actual plagiarism? That it could've been coincidence, or that SEJeff's phrasing is so routine that it doesn't count as something with real investment of thought? Have you tried Googling it?
"Re-implemented the global dns/ldap setup for higher availability. Used keepalived for auto-failover"
There are exactly 5 results, 2 of them which originate from this current discussion. That's just one of the bulletpoints, nevermind the same 3 in the same order.
For reference's sake, the odds that Melania Trump didn't plagiarize the following sentence from Michelle Obama -- values that you work hard for what you want in life that your word is your bond and you do what you say -- is about one in a trillion [0]
Dialing up the interview to 11 means that you are now a confounding factor to your own hiring processes. Removal of confounding factors means an improved ability of a company to develop evidence-based hiring strategies.
It sounds like you react to dishonesty with bad faith acts of your own, since you had no interest in giving that person a standard opportunity. The way you reacted sounds emotional and personal.
I don't quite understand the other replies, or maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think you did wrong except maybe not kicking him out your office sooner. Since when is it okay to lie on your resume? Seriously, is that a cultural thing maybe? IMO, it's fine to word things so that they sound more impressive (also, many people would understate their real achievements otherwise), but to state actual untruths, falsehoods in your resume?
I'd say that's when the interview is over. What are you thinking, "well they may have proven to be untrustworthy and willing to lie to my face, but hey let's continue the interview and see if they have any redeeming qualities to make up for it".
I'd have asked them a few short low-ball questions about those three lines (just to have them dig a whole with some vague answers). Then confront them with the original, watch/enjoy the reaction for a short moment, and calmly tell them to get out of my office. No need to waste much more time on it than that.
Or are people suggesting that, maybe, this candidate might just actually have had experience with projects fitting those exact three descriptions, and merely Googled and copied the wording for its eloquence? Which would be plagiarism but not quite outright dishonesty. Kind of. Also I wouldn't believe it for a minute.
Gold rushes bring in the fraudsters. @honkhonkpants response, I take it tongue in cheek. Born and raised here. There is a lot of good that does happen, the Valley used to be more balanced (tech, manufacturing, ag, etc)...
In the 10+ companies I've been at, I could see one as having been fraudulent, that was mostly at the non-founder level pushing work overseas for kickbacks. His career has since stalled.
When things are easy and fast and loose, study the gold rush or any other similar history, these things will happen. Today, it's sad that those backing people like this don't use all the tools at their disposal to do deep do diligence. It seems like if you tell the right story, have people skills, and the surface isn't scratched, you can end up with a seed round that isn't warranted.
There's no chinese firm. It's chinese students with OPT visas who needed sponsors to get into the H1B lottery and now they risk getting deported if they don't find another sponsor within 90 days (probably less since they used some of the clock to find this current position)
Daniel Tunkelang, the advisor mentioned, is trying to find new homes for the Python developers, so they don't get kicked out of the country. Message him if you're hiring.
I'm curious - did NYTimes amend the title of their article? I'm asking because the title of this post on HN doesn't correspond to the title on NYTimes and I was under the impression the submission guideline here says to use the 'original title'. In addition, I read the NYTimes article before I saw this posting on HN and while the NYTimes article questioned 3 items on his resume, I can't conclude his entire resume is fraudulent since the article neither contained the full resume nor did it list all the companies/schools on his resume.
It looks to me like the submitter broke the HN guidelines by rewriting the title when it was neither misleading nor linkbait. (The submitted title was "WrkRiot CEO's entire resume fraudulent", and we've since changed it to the NYT headline.) Not 100% sure, though, because NYT has a habit of changing its headlines.
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" is one of the site rules here. Please follow it, and especially please don't rewrite titles to make them more dramatic.
It was perfectly on-topic. The OP was appealing for assistance in extending the visas of immigrants who arguably never should have been granted those visas in the first place, which I pointed out.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadNow it seems like the CEO faked his past work experience as well.
(I have nothing against the Chinese, or immigrants in general, I'm an immigrant myself, and I feel terrible for the innocent victims who have lost money, jobs, and for many, their american dream)
It made no sense why he hired so many people when he didn't have the money too.
Friends of mine do it each year. So technically they "own a mine in south america".
It's still bullshit puffery though. But you can do it for $20K.
I'm part owner of an NFL franchise, and it only cost me $250.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bay_Packers,_Inc.
The organization named is the corporate entity that owns the Packers; there are >350k share owners and it's structured such that nobody can own more than 4% of the shares. It's grandfathered into the NFL rules which for the last 30 or so years have limited ownership groups to no more than 32 people, at least one of whom must own a >30% share.
In fact unless a court decision is made I think it technically unfair to the company and their employee the way the mob has brought out their pichfork.
We have only heard the story from one person - and it makes the company and its CEO look like Satan's spawns - which in my experience never is 100% true.
Having said that, I am always a little unnerved browsing LinkedIn - you have CEOs, CFOs, Management always complaining about their employees, and employees doing cringy asskissing :( It makes me deeply sad what LinkedIn has turned into, LinkedIn just gives employers more power.
On the other hand I have noticed that HN, reddit are places where Labour ( employees ) come to complain.
Its just an interesting trend where two social networks exists - one for the capitalists and one for labor.
It's not just one person. We have now had the story largely confirmed by WrkRiot's CTO (maybe I should say "former CTO", or maybe the entire company is effectively "former") and one of its former advisors.
Also, I find your characterization of HN as a labor forum as opposed to capitalist rather curious, since its origin lies with one of the purest forms of capitalism possible, startups.
Also, I imagine as a non-founder I am in the majority here.
Ultimately, social responsibility plays a big role in outcomes. Companies that intend to blow up everything in their path, lie, cheat and steal their way into cashflow, and then have some key people escape before it all falls apart, are just destructive - they aren't even creatively destructive. Those companies are why startups have a common outsider's view of being shady ventures.
But in terms of the systemic effect on power between capital and labour, I'd said people being entrepreneurial shifts power (in the political sense) towards labour, partly through increasing the independence of labour in aggregate, and partly through enabling labour to capture significantly more of the rewards of their work [1].
[1] For example, compare the typical amount of equity held by "last and least important founder" vs "first employee" to see that being a founder radically shifts power your way.
I use both LinkedIn and HN quite a lot and don't really see what you mean about the capital/ labor split between the sites, for what it's worth.
Or "investigative journalism", as it used to be known. This is what the press is for. If they're wrong, I don't doubt it will end in litigation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The difference lies in how to grow your business. LinkedIn and Glassdoor cannot ask employees to pay them for being fair but can ask employers to pay them for deleting/managing the image of the company.
Anyone who think this isn't doxxing go have a look at Twitter, Reddit and even some of HN on how some employees who had nothing to do with the fraud have been treated.
On what was basically a junior employee not being compatible with their boss.
Which adults know is definitely two sided when one person tells the story (and normal).
I found Penny's story very believable and felt really bad for many of the individuals involved (the H1-B workers most of all). There was probably a lot of professional pressure on Penny not to be seen as a troublemaker and not to name the company's name. There is a definite information asymmetry between management and workers and I feel like wrkriot was using that to exploit their employee's trust.
It seems fair to out them for that so they can't just change their name and do it again (which was clearly a pattern). Had they not been mostly a fraud, they might have been able to provide a reasonable defense against the story. Had the fraud continued, in order to protect innocent employees, it most likely would have just hurt more people.
It's definitely not black and white but I don't think we harassed them out of business either. It was definitely all about to fall apart regardless.
lol, wut? Anybody who has been here more than an hour is who expects fraud in SV. The first job I had in SV ended in a joint SEC/DOJ prosecution and jail time for multiple executive officers. Lawlessness, scams, and dishonesty are endemic in this area.
And homelessness. I was disappointed to see hundreds of helpless homeless people, some in horrible mental state, right there on streets in the middle of huge ivory towers that SV thumps its chest on. It's such a shame!
And with young kids coming out of those glass doors flashing gadgets and gizmos at each other, with that certain bay area flair … I mean the collective blindness of the place felt only surreal.
It's a personal thing but I guess my family will never be at home in the bay area.
It's because the government has failed them in the past in its attempts to help. Not every government has decided that putting a permanent roof over the heads of anyone who needs it is a bad use of taxpayer's money.
No, this is incorrect. If someone continues to choose getting high over help, it has very little to do with the government failing them. Additionally, homeless people with mental disorders that make them paranoid or forgetful can refuse it regardless of past experiences.
>it's probably not because they actively want to live an unstable, day-to-day life, not knowing where or what they'll eat tonight.
No, but they may actively want something incompatible (like heroin or cocaine) more.
This is not the only way a country has to be.
I thought SV was the world's hardest place to exercise your property rights? Just try demolishing a single-family house to set up a new low-income Section 8 apartment complex. Even if you wanted to, you couldn't.
San Francisco is like the polar opposite of the real-world Rapture you're envisioning it as.
It is an order of magnitude worse there than just about anywhere else I've been (and I have traveled a lot)
I live in Toronto, we have homeless people here too. So I guess the only real way to solve this is with data?
[1] http://fusion.net/story/148372/san-francisco-homelessness/
But really, only Alaska is relatively immune from this problem given that they just give homeless people a bus ticket to LA when winter hits.
I have travelled to many countries where some places are considered dangerous for travellers. And never have I been more afraid than that day.
There aren't any regularly operated buses from Anchorage to the rest of the US, and I'm fairly certain there aren't any homeless deportation programs (which would probably involve flying people commercially - there is a ferry, but its not really cheaper).
I mean... homeless people read books. Seems like a good use of time to me when you're unemployed and homeless. It sounds like you think is a problem for some reason?
Sometimes people need leisure, homeless or not.
I walk by the local drug dealers in the Tenderloin every day, and all the clientele I've seen are homeless people.
I lived in the third largest city in Sweden, and when I moved in there were the handful (like, probably less than 5) of homeless beggars that everyone knew. There were probably more homeless but they were sheltered by the state.
But by the time I moved out, in front of every supermarket there was a Romanian beggar with her head down.
I'll agree SF is definitely on a completely different level though. I've never seen anyone defecate in public outside of SF (and yeah I've been to China)
Should be pretty easy to investigate, arrest, deport them and forbid them to come back.
That's nice to hear!
I do realize now that my comment is naive; definitely only a tiny snapshot from the limited time that I spent over there and is not a complete picture or a total impression of the place.
But I still do wish that SV had a better situation/solution to these otherwise normal people problems.
Since it's SV we're talking about, this money could probably be used to find a better solution with a better outcome to the problem of homelessness all across America. And then other states can follow suit!
> San Francisco alone spends 241 million on homelessness per year.
The $241 million figure is a little misleading because it encompasses the total spending across homeless services and supportive housing. Supportive housing is $112 million and the people within are NOT counted as homeless (nor should they be but that $112 out of $241 million is not being used on homeless people). [1]
It certainly doesn't help that the amount of money actually used on the homeless is contracted out to many, many, many companies and split across other government groups making it effectively impossible to spend efficiently and to track (I really wish they'd get this corrected; I mean we're the city of Silicon Valley for crepes sake!)
> Most places deal with these "normal people problems" by criminalizing it
Many cities spend more money, year over year, to house, shelter, feed and medically treat the homeless. Sure they'll get arrested too and I'm sure there are exceptions but I couldn't find any information regarding further criminalization, in recent years, as a way to get rid of the homeless (if you have a source that would be great). In fact here in SF the supervisor wants to do away with tents calling them illegal [2]
> people leave to places like SF
Only 10% of the homeless in a 2015 report came from out of state. 71% of the homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, which is about 10% higher in just 2 years. I don't think very many are leaving to go to SF to be homeless. [3]
[1] http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-record...
[2] http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/01/25/s-f-supervisor-scott-wie...
[3] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
But that shouldn't technically count as homeless either. Honestly I can't really find any better numbers but I get your point and maybe there just are not any better numbers I dunno.
Maybe? It's difficult to track the money. Per capita SF doesn't even have the highest amount of homeless and yet you rarely see them on the streets in NYC and other major cities (and it's not because they're all in jail; NYC spent over a $1 billion in 2014 on homeless services and shelters and recently NY state started a $10 billion initiative to help the homeless). I wish SF did a better job tracking where the funds go and how effective they are being spent.
> a city that likely ships them here
This is a bit of a myth. In a 2015 report [1] only 10% of the homeless in SF came from another state. 71% of the homeless lived in SF itself and then became homeless.
> "takes care of it" so you don't see it
NYC has over 200 shelters. Many of the shelters in SF have waiting lists of several hundred people to the point where they have to live in tents which can be pretty dangerous in and of itself. Granted not all of the shelters are like that but many are and when you can't even stay in a shelter it doesn't really give them a lot of choice.
> The poor will always be with us, and we are judged by how we treat them.
I agree! It's far safer to have them off of the streets in many respects by providing affordable housing, temporary housing and even shelters. SF just doesn't have enough of that to go around for the homeless. I would love to see them expand their shelter services to provide more places for them to stay. But that certainly doesn't mean I want someone to "take care of it" so I "don't see it".
I think your comment came off a bit crass by assuming parent wanted to not see them and calling them naive.
[1] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
I have looked at the homelessness statistics in Silicon Valley and the vast majority here actually lived here before becoming homeless. You don't usually see homeless people in most of the valley because they tend to stay out of sight by the creeks or other out of the way areas, but you do see them in downtown San Jose and to a lesser extent downtown Palo Alto.
I don't know the budget for homeless spending down here in Silicon Valley, but I doubt it is that high.
It's apparently a thing for social workers and caregivers in places with drastically inadequate social support (i.e. most of the US) to just stick disabled/mentally ill people on a bus to SF; they'll at least have a better chance there.
What does "supported" even mean? What does SVB really do for you that another major bank couldn't? In contrast, they have less branches and ATMs, fewer business hours, weaker credit card offerings, more fees, and an utterly crap web interface.
[0] http://www.wired.com/2013/04/fakeit/
Sad.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/09/01/business/01STARTU...
I'd ask for a refund from that Chinese scrubbing company
All: please don't post, and do flag, comments that publish identifying personal details on others in the context of attacks on them. (Especially when they're newly-christened public enemies.) Maybe someone has done bad things; reacting to that by becoming a mob is also a bad thing, and we don't want it here.
I've always written my resume somewhat uniquely for SEO[1] and happen to work quite heavily in the Linux space. At the time several years ago, my resume was on the first or second page google search results for something along the lines of "linux system administrator" and variations.
The stars must have aligned as some poor schmuck thought he'd spruce up his resume by copy & pasting lines verbatim from the first 4-5 good Linux resumes he found via google. Unfortunately for him, one of them was mine. Also unfortunately for him, I'm known as a very technical interviewer that doesn't take any bs.
So besides the fact he wasn't qualified from a technical perspective for this position, I decided to see what he'd do. I stopped him mid interview and pulled up my resume on my phone. I handed it to him and asked him to read a few lines. Then I asked him to read a few lines that were verbatim from his resume. His face lost all color and he shuddered. There is simply no way I was buying that he and I both came up with the following 3 lines in a row:
Amongst two or three additional ones, it was too much of a cooincidence. He swore that the recruiter had doctored his resume and that the recruiter was a liar. I gave him a shot at doing tech for the rest of the interview. However, I turned it up to 11 and was visibly agitated at this point that he'd stolen from my work trying to market myself. Now I'm normally extremely friendly in interviews, but teched him so hard it hurt my brain. He failed miserably.We told his recruiter the story and said if it was true we were going to immediately stop doing business with that recruiter and his company. He quickly and happily forwarded us every single email from that candidate clearly showing they'd done nothing other than rearrange the styling and put their awful logo on it. The recruiter decided to stop working with this candidate as well.
Moral of the story: Don't steal people's resume, they work hard making it and that is dishonest. Don't lie to technical people about your technical skills. It will ruin your future career prospects.
[1] http://www.digitalprognosis.com/resume.htm
Additionally, you're a terrible interviewer if someone is failing miserably. There is no valuable data to use from this situation. Turn it down until they stop failing, and see how far it can be pushed. I'm sure you know this, but decided to be a prick instead.
There's nothing dishonest about using wording from someone else's resume. If I did it and someone asked about it, I'd definitely say "I saw how someone else phrased it and found it really good, so I used it too" and obviously wouldn't put it down if it wasn't true. This guy probably would have said something similar if you didn't throw it in his face and make him so uncomfortable.
He's conveying facts on a piece of paper that is handed to, at most, a few dozen people, who glance it at for about 20 seconds and then never see it again. He's not even implicitly claiming that everything on his resume is 100% unique, because more than half of resumes use the same structuring, wording, and general descriptive approaches. I thought this was common sense until your comment.
Calling this plagiarism is like saying the sentence "By using our Services, you are agreeing to these terms" in a terms of service is plagiarizing whoever wound up writing that first. It's ridiculous.
Perhaps you think that it wasn't actual plagiarism? That it could've been coincidence, or that SEJeff's phrasing is so routine that it doesn't count as something with real investment of thought? Have you tried Googling it?
"Re-implemented the global dns/ldap setup for higher availability. Used keepalived for auto-failover"
https://www.google.com/search?q="Re-implemented+the+global+d...
There are exactly 5 results, 2 of them which originate from this current discussion. That's just one of the bulletpoints, nevermind the same 3 in the same order.
For reference's sake, the odds that Melania Trump didn't plagiarize the following sentence from Michelle Obama -- values that you work hard for what you want in life that your word is your bond and you do what you say -- is about one in a trillion [0]
[0] https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/07/19/we-ran-melania-trum...
It sounds like you react to dishonesty with bad faith acts of your own, since you had no interest in giving that person a standard opportunity. The way you reacted sounds emotional and personal.
I'd say that's when the interview is over. What are you thinking, "well they may have proven to be untrustworthy and willing to lie to my face, but hey let's continue the interview and see if they have any redeeming qualities to make up for it".
I'd have asked them a few short low-ball questions about those three lines (just to have them dig a whole with some vague answers). Then confront them with the original, watch/enjoy the reaction for a short moment, and calmly tell them to get out of my office. No need to waste much more time on it than that.
Or are people suggesting that, maybe, this candidate might just actually have had experience with projects fitting those exact three descriptions, and merely Googled and copied the wording for its eloquence? Which would be plagiarism but not quite outright dishonesty. Kind of. Also I wouldn't believe it for a minute.
In the 10+ companies I've been at, I could see one as having been fraudulent, that was mostly at the non-founder level pushing work overseas for kickbacks. His career has since stalled.
When things are easy and fast and loose, study the gold rush or any other similar history, these things will happen. Today, it's sad that those backing people like this don't use all the tools at their disposal to do deep do diligence. It seems like if you tell the right story, have people skills, and the surface isn't scratched, you can end up with a seed round that isn't warranted.
If anyone has any leads/ideas, I'd love to hear them. Again, just incredibly curious.
Somewhat misleading title. The article itself only mentions the resume once. For example, it doesn't provide examples of the fabrication.
If you read the original post. there is little new info. aside from revealed identities.
https://twitter.com/dtunkelang/status/771148199427989505
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" is one of the site rules here. Please follow it, and especially please don't rewrite titles to make them more dramatic.