Invasion of the pod people

I’ve had a long, satisfying IT career — and hopefully you have, too — but I bet you’ve never experienced anything like this.

Our company hired a highly skilled, high-end contractor. Or at least, that’s what management told us.

As she arrived on site, I heard rumors that this person was a member of a religious cult that specialized in scamming unsuspecting companies. They allegedly placed unqualified people into short-term IT contracts at sky-high prices. The contractor would try to hang on as best he could, while gathering the client’s money, and forking it all over to the cult leader.

My reaction was that this was unsubstantiated rumor and I wasn’t going to credit it. I would treat this contractor the same as anyone else. One’s religious affiliation has absolutely nothing to do with the work place.

I did notice this person exhibited rather odd personal characteristics. One day she would be friendly; the next, she would avoid saying “hi” and act like she didn’t know you. But so what? Some very talented IT engineers are introverted or even odd. As long as she did her job, it didn’t matter.

After this contractor had been with us for a couple weeks, she was asked to manage the installation of some patches to our Unix systems. She downloaded the updates — and applied them directly to our Production servers! No testing. No applying them to our test or development systems first.

I became worried. This person didn’t know standard IT practices or principles. I surreptitiously took a peek at a scripting program she was writing for us and found that the “thousand-line program” she described to us was really the same dozen lines of code, repeated over and over, once for each input. She didn’t know that a “do loop” could have reduced the entire thing down to a few dozen lines!

I started checking her background and found that she did indeed belong to a group cited in the press as a “destructive religious cult.” The cult consisted of several hundred followers of a single charismatic leader. They were placed into IT contracting positions, sometimes using false resumes, references or credentials. They would move into a city, live together in a single apartment at subsistence-level expenditures, and send their earnings back to their wealthy guru. It wasn’t clear what he did for them, other than attend to their psychological needs (and allegedly have sex with the female followers).

As our star contractor’s job performance shortcomings became known to us staff, we approached management with our concerns. They didn’t believe us. Apparently the contractor had already approached them and had “helpfully and confidentially” discussed our team’s shortcomings with them. But even this preemptive attack, buttressed by the big lie technique, didn’t work for long. This person truly was unable to do the job. Not even close. Eventually management saw the wisdom of valuing the unanimous opinion of their entire staff over the accusations of a single individual who had been with us for a total of one month.

But management wasn’t ready to get it right just yet. They told us to watch this contractor at all times while she was on site. We were not to let her touch the machines while unsupervised.

I heard they didn’t let her go because they feared a religious discrimination lawsuit (a technique the cult apparently used to make even the firing of their unqualified people pay).

While a poor hiring choice could happen to any of us, this decision was unbelievable. If management was afraid of a lawsuit, all they had to do was to pay off her contract in full and ask her to leave. This was not a religious issue, it was an issue of job competence. No lawsuit would go far if the company paid the full contract amount. Instead, we staff were forced to suffer through several disruptive months before this potentially destructive individual completed her contract and left.

The lessons here? One: verify who you hire. The placement firm for this person successfully stampeded our management into hiring this “expert” — without allowing us a technical interview — because someone of her high skill level “just wouldn’t be available for long.” Two: if IT management finds themselves in uncharted waters, ask the company lawyers for legal advice. This person never should have remained on site once her lack of qualifications — an actual threat to our IT operations — became known.

Oh, and about the guru. He died a couple years ago under suspicious circumstances. He fell off the dock at his multimillion dollar estate on Long Island and drowned while under the influence. Some believe he was murdered by one of the many acolytes he victimized. Others think he just partied too hard. The police never figured it out.

Some of his former followers are still out there contracting today.