After reading Matt Taibbi's recent post in the Rolling Stone about Mitt and his Bain existence, I started thinking about some things I have witnessed in the corporate world that is similar to what Romney and his buddies did at Bain, and wonder if others haven't seen these same patterns.
I have always been an observer of activity and interpersonal interaction since I was a kid, and these are some observations I have seen and that I feel are undermining many companies in a more subtle way than Bain capital, but felt it deserved some attention just the same. Look below the croissant for more.
I work in the Information Technology arena, and roughly a decade ago I noticed a trend happening. People being hired based solely on their resume, without any real investigation into the validity of the resume's claims. I had been working at a hospital when I first noticed this. They'd bring in a "consulting" company who was getting paid big bucks to try and analyze how we ran our IT department, and rated how we supported the various departments within the hospital.
At the time I was what I still considered a greenhorn, as I had less than 10 years of experience in the field. But what I had noticed was that these consultants came in dressed the part. The shoes were polished, hair was perfect, with the men wearing nice suits and the women wearing nice dress suits. But as well dressed and professional looking as they were, they were just as inept at gathering data metrics for our processes, having us fill out these silly Excel spreadsheets on a daily basis, that took upwards of 30 minutes to fill out. Needless to say, the walked away with a few million dollars, and after a year of "work", they were gone with handing over some lightweight reports that ended up telling us nothing more than we already knew.
Onward to my next job. We had been looking for a Director of New Technology, and being that I was one of their top developers, I was asked to screen a few of the candidates that corporate had suggested. Once candidate in particular stood out for his great breadth of knowledge on topics he and I spoke of, and best of all, he lived less than 40 minutes away.
But instead, corporate more or less told our President to hire this particular guy who had a pretty sharp resume with many of the characteristics we were looking for. Within a few weeks, the candidate was starting and was going to lead a major project we were looking at doing, that required some major changes to our techonological infrastructure, etc.
Within the first 2 weeks, I knew something was amiss. This guy not only had no clue about the technologies he claimed to have had, he seemed to be a master at deflecting the questions and would get back to us the next day with answers. We needed to start doing data modeling, and he had no idea what that even entailed, but he happened to know of a guy who could help us in this area. He fenagled a contract for this guy to come in and consult on our data modeling effort. In our first meeting, I knew this guy knew less about data modeling than I.
This same pattern continued, with hiring other "consultants" to assist us in new areas of technology. This went on for a few months and I finally had enough and voiced my concerns to my boss. But, because there was a younger brown noser trying to work his way up going along with everything this new guy wanted, I was looked at as a negative influence, and was relagated to a support role.
Pissed off, I started digging in to this Technology Directors past, and since I had a copy of his resume, for shits and grins I chose 2 random sentences from within his resume, and googled it. Holy hell, what did I find? This guy had copied another resume almost totally verbatim, and combined that with a sample resume, and that was his. It even had the mis-matched bullet points and all. This guy was a fraud.
I went to the President of the company and brought it to his attention, reminding the President that we had already invested more in this guys salary and consulting than we had spent the previous year for all of our development efforts. 8 weeks and a boatload of cash later, the guy was finally fired, only to move on to yet another gig pulling the same crap.
Now at my current employer, we have the same type of character who is doing much the same. Getting consulting contracts for "people I have worked with in the past", and he's what I call a resume builder. He jumps from job to job, each time leaving with a higher title than when he arrived, with a maximum of 2 years at any one place. All the while, draining this company of money to the tune of them having to layoff about 7% of our workforce to make up for all the money that he's spent so far, with nothing to show towards new development. I'm sure he'll be moving on soon. I figure he'll have one more article done about his great ideas in a trade rag, and then he's gone.
Anyone else seeing this sort of crap happening in their line of work? Where these guys come in, are placed on a pedestal without anyone vetting their credentials, only to have them strip all kinds of monies from the budget to help out their buddies, and then walk away with another notch in their resume's and some nice froggy skins in their wallet?