Ghost Developer
Several months ago I have read interesting article “Dead souls from overseas”. Yakov Fain has written his article about “big” developer’s team for customer, but it contains only several people. I want to describe you other situation, which could happen in your life.
So, you are developer in offshore company. You learn a lot of new stuff and all is going well. One day you have met your project manager or team leader. You have a short conversation and he involved you in some large enterprise project. No interviews or tests required. There is just one thing – you will work with someone else’s name. You are the ghost. Who will win? You or your company?
Company:
- Pros
- They could involve same developer in different projects. As the result they would get really great resume and much “better” finances.
- Cons
- There would be huge problem if ghost developer leaves company. Probably company would not be able to continue develop this project.
- Company has just several resumes for customer (but of course, they could fake CVs too).
- Organization could lose customers if someone would disclose information about real development process in the company.
Developer:
- Pros
- You have better salary.
- You have great opportunity to improve your skills and knowledge.
- You have a joker – you could disclose full information about the company. It would be better to have customer who can acknowledge your words.
- Cons
- Your own projects history is blank or has “blank” periods. And more time you work as ghost, worse resume you’ll get at the end.
- You could not add this project to your curriculum vitae.
- It’s too late to work in this project with your real name. You have only one way to change this – to get fixed up in a new job.
What about customer? I highly recommend you to met your employees in real world, but sometimes it’s hard to implement. In this case I have several advices for you.
- Pay attention to strange names, logins, emails in your project, version control system, on your staging server.
- Try to find anything about your employee and offshore company at all in the Internet, search for a recommendations.
- Schedule stand up meetings with your team.
I do not know who is the winner. If you are customer, be careful when choosing team for your project. For junior developers such companies are good starting point into the real development world. I hope any developer would prefer another company where he could work with his real name and his own career. I don’t know what to wish to the company, but I hope Ghost Hunters will kill all Ghosts in your office.
It is only my vision. You just should know about ghost developer.
Responses
Good tips, especially on researching prior to starting off on offshoring projects.
Yeah, some companies have a lot of ghosts, like an abandoned Gold Mine from HoM&M =) but unfortunately newbies have no choice - you have to make money, so you do a job w/o thinking about CV or something else, as salary takes 1st place. If you refuse to work as ghost, then you can be fired very soon. Ce la vie, messieurs
weird topic
ok. We may think on how ‘ghosting’ affects its players - customer, company and developer.
For the first sight it may looks like developer and customer are cheated here but although this kicks off developer’s CV ‘ghosting’ is not too much evil for “developers” and “customers”.
CUSTOMER. Customer on the whole is interested in product quality and if it is good then no one even think of checking for ghosts and if it is bad then even people with 5-star CVs working on a project is not an excuse for a company. So “customer” (assuming he gets good product) looses nothing.
COMPANY. The main beneficiary party here is of course “company”. While getting a little risk of being discovered it gets several good pros:
DEVELOPER. As i can see in the post above main cons of being a ghost is impossibility to add the project to your CV… Well it is so but… do you know how many really interesting offshore projects are done w/o NDA? Not many and those that are do not require ghosting. Voila! Almost all of the projects you’re working on as ghost can not be added to your CV so relax. Moreover - the company also can’t add it to its success-stories. Ce la vie
And the most interesting part of the story - did you read what you signed upon hiring? it’s about 70% you can not disclosure any information (thus can not add anything to CV except for “working for company XXX as major JAVA developer”).
i think i’ve degraded CVs weight now let’s see the pros you’ve missed:
BTW - what are benefits of “joker”?
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Ukraine is very strange country. Sometimes people may do anything that they want. You must have a good counter-evidence for returning them to real world. I think this joker is a good one.
what you’ve just said is nothing. “i got something to put someone from somewhere to anywhere”
how do you think you can use this “joker”? i want some concrete usecase…
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