My employer (client) wants me to work in “ghost” mode [closed]

Question

Here's the context:

• I'm a freelance software architect/developer and have started working for a known company 3 weeks ago, for at least one year.
• They recruited me because they completely failed on a project during 6 months (an hybrid mobile application) and their customers are very angry because the application is quite unusable.
• Business and customers expect the IT team to fix every bug on the application and to improve drastically the performance.

In my contract, it is written that I would work there to lead and rebuild the entire application thanks to my programming skills and architecture knowledge (that unfortunately, none of their own people has).

Yesterday, the IT team included superiors told me: You will rebuild the entire application alone, because you are the one that can do that here. But we don't want to track your work in Jira like others, we don't want the business to be aware of your existence because they would not appreciate that we are rebuilding the whole app, even if it takes few months. They wouldn't want to even think that they failed to trust a previous external team during 6 months to build this shit version of the app.

We want you to work in ghost mode, knowing that nobody will be aware that you are doing the whole work.

I'm embarrassed. I don't want to repair the failures under the ground, rebuilding the whole product alone, without letting people knowing that they have effectively failed. It isn't part of my life principles.

Would you accept to make a huge work for a company without having anybody aware of your good work, even Jira to track your work like any other member of the team?

Would you accept to work in this context? Is it a good idea to expect my recruiter to change their mind, and start tracking my work like any other teammates?

I highlight that I'm not a simple employee but work on behalf of my own company (freelance).

Answer 1

Get everything in writing

The client wants you to do a job that is substantially different than what's in your employment contract.

They want you to do it under unusual and technically-challenging conditions.

These conditions are possibly unethical (for the managers) and carry significant potential risk for you (mostly reputational, possibly legal).

It definitely sounds like the kind of place where, if something goes wrong in the future, or somebody discovers this "ghost" project and raises a stink about it, or somebody is after a scapegoat, you'll be a prime target.

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Get everything in writing. All the requirements, all the conditions, all the instructions.

Then get the opinion of a good lawyer on your potential exposure.

Then negotiate for serious hazard pay. If they're asking you to do the work of an entire team, they'd better be paying you for it.

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Whether you're ethically prepared to do the work is an intensely personal decision that we can't help you with.

Whether it makes good business sense will depend on the above.

Think it all through, and then hey, if they're paying you enough to be worth it, and it's compatible with your ethics, go for it.

Answer 2

You're a freelancer, if you want the money do the job. If it interferes with your ethics, but you still want the money, go to church more often or rationalise it another way. If it's totally at odds with your ethics, turn it down.

Personally I don't care about what happened prior to me getting the work. My only focus is on the job itself. If I'm breaking laws then that's another matter and I'd turn it down.

The only way a statement like 'you're the only one can do the job' would impact on me is to make me rethink my prices upwards. Making waves as a freelancer over other peoples work is bad for your revenue stream and not beneficial.

Some freelancers are head and shoulders above a businesses employees, that's why they're hired, but getting a swelled head over it is detrimental in the long run.

Answer 3

I'm not going to comment on the ethical side of things, although this is certainly problematic, too.

I would say that JIRA and other issue tracking systems exist for a reason. If you don't set up your requirements and tasks and track how you will address and resolve these, but instead plan on building an entire application without any codified project management tools whatsoever (regardless of the reason for this!), you will run into all the same issues that other people run into that want to run a project in this manner for other reasons: mismatch between requirements and actual functionalities you build, poor to no resource planning, and later lots of blame, name-calling and "he said, she said" discussions going around.

Recommending that you don't do this is the easy way out for us here at Workplace.SE. However, I would certainly bring these issues up with your management, and tell them that you should at least be using some management tools for the good of the project. Whether the end customer needs to be told what exactly you are doing should be a separate discussion.

Answer 4

I'd say if the boss really wants you to do this work divorced from the rest of the team (almost surely a bad idea), then insist in setting up your own JIRA-or-whatever instances for project tracking. That will let you have real management tools, and some hope of doing things well, while giving him the cover he appears to want.

You're also going to want to make sure that he's got a real clue about how you'll find out what's supposed to be going on. Obviously the existing app is a problem, but there's a good chance that happened because various parties weren't talking. If that's the case, cutting you off from everyone is NOT going to help.

Also, you'll need to figure out how QA is going to work. Again, if you're ghosting, how does QA get done?

Answer 5

This is potentially extremely concerning. If the IT team don't want the rest of the company to know that you have been employed, then this suggests that HR are not aware of you. So:

• who's guaranteeing your payroll?
• are you covered on business liability insurance?
• who signed your contract, and did they have any legal authority to do so?
• are you really, technically, formally employed by them at all?

I would not even dream of entering into such an arrangement.

On the other hand, if your employment is all above board, and it's only the day-to-day specifics of what you'll be working on that your superiors do not want leaking outside of the IT team… well, that smells like rather poor management but I wouldn't be terribly concerned from a strictly practical point of view.

Answer 6

That's the kind of thing that you get hired for as a freelancer, and it's the kind of thing that makes you get paid more per working day than an employee.

Obviously source code control and a tool like JIRA are useful or they wouldn't exist. So whatever you are doing, you are probably running "private" source code control and "private" JIRA (which the responsible manager should be able to access, and which would be handed to your successor should you get hit by a bus). This is also evidence that you are doing a good and productive job, should it be doubted.

If the company wants to have their own JIRA with fewer work items I'd leave that up to them. I know I would be no good whatsoever at faking a JIRA history.

But the principle: Should you do this? I would assume the choice is between you doing it or someone else doing it. In a year when you are finished, the development team will get the praise and higher management will be told that you didn't actually achieve much. That's what you are hired for, and that's why you are paid top money. That happens at higher levels as well, where a company in trouble may hire a new CEO for the sole purpose of making all the unpopular decisions that need to be made and implementing them, and then getting fired - which everyone knows and which is included in the pay.

Answer 7

You have to consider three things, just like you would with any other gig:

1. Will I have the resources I need to do the job correctly?
2. Will I be properly compensated for doing the job correctly?
3. Will I receive references to get future jobs?

For the first, I'm not so sure that you do. You won't have junior developers to delegate minor tasks to. You won't have active testers in the business side, since they don't even know you're doing it. You don't have the latest specs and refinements and wish-lists, because again no one knows you're doing it. You don't have the tracking tools you need (although you could set up your own Bugzilla or something.) Now, each of these can be mitigated, especially if you can find a business user your management trusts to help you, but they do need to be mitigated somehow.

For the second, it sounds like you will. After all, they desperately need this new version. Your management definitely seems like the "throw money at the problem type" and you're the target they're throwing money at. That being said, do keep documentation of all the work you do, because being under the radar and not using the approved ticketing system will mean you need to dot all your T's and cross all your I's when it comes time to proving you did the work you agreed to.

For the third, this might be tricky. Maybe once you release they can admit that you exist and be like "Mik has been instrumental in cleaning up the bugs and releasing this shiny new... interface ... wink" and then you can get references. But they might just as easily shove you out the door and say "thanks for cleaning up after us, we're gonna get back to #^@%^ing things up again! Tata!"

Now, as for ethics, I can't help you there. If they want to run their business shady, they can. I'm contracted to do a job under certain constraints, I do the job under those constraints as long as I'm set up for present and future success. The ethical side you'll have to reach on your own.

Answer 8

I think this is really something you have to decide for yourself. Different people want different types of rewards (other than the money of course) for the work they do, and you seem to want recognition for your work.

This is fine, personally it wouldn't bother me in the slightest but everyone is different. So you need to decide for yourself if all you're getting for your work is worth you doing the work in your opinion. If not, then say no (or renegotiate) if it's OK then go ahead and do it.

Of course there are one or two practical questions:

As a freelancer, you will probably want to take credit for the work to help win future clients, and the question is, will this be possible if you can't even tell the current client's own staff that you're doing it?

There's also the matter that if your time is not being tracked is it possible there'll be a dispute over their payment to you? (e.g. if you're being paid by the hour they'll need a way of knowing how many hours you've worked) - Make sure this is worked out in advance.

On the ethics of the situation, I don't think there's a problem really. The company offered you a particular set of terms, and it's up to you whether you want the job or not. There's no real need to tell them they have failed... They're not your staff, it's not your company, it's up to their own managers to worry about that kind of thing.

Answer 9

There's not inherently wrong with working discreetly. There are many areas where it is preferable for everyone involved that not every single detail of the work be made public to everyone.

From what you've written, it appears that they want to save face by secretly starting over on some sub-standard work they've done. IMHO, they should skip the secrecy, and go to the customer and say "we messed up, we're sorry, but we'll rebuild the whole thing and everything will be fine", but that's their business. Again, nothing inherently wrong with this particular assignment either.

However:

1. The whole aim of your work is to take a project that the customer is not satisfied with, and fix the customer's complaints. Yet you are not allowed to talk to the customer. Fine, c'est la vie. But this will slow you down, therefore the project will take longer than usual, and perhaps the work will be harder (more $$$/hour). So you should discuss pricing again, because assumptions behind your original quote likely no longer hold.

2. With all this secrecy, what proof will even exist of your employment? When you get paid at the end, your tax authority will need to know where your money came from, because large sums out of the blue are often connected to criminal activity. You also need enough legally admissible proof that yes, you are hired by them and yes, you do expect to be paid so much money for rebuilding this app. Their customer needn't see these documents, but they must be prepared between the two of you. Otherwise, they could just not pay you after the work is done, and you couldn't prove in court that you even worked there at all. Or they could pay you, and then the government audits your taxes, and you have endless headaches explaining to them that it was a "secret project".

3. Secrecy costs money. Bluntly, not all developers have the tact to do such work without blowing their cover, therefore those that can (like you) should be paid more. It's supply and demand. So this is a valuable additional thing that they need to compensate you for, on top of what I mentioned in #1.

4. Last but not least, the payoff of your work is not only the money, but also being able to show future clients your past work to show that you're a capable developer. If they intend to keep it completely secret, they are essentially taking that away from you, so they should give something else in return - like money. Meaning if this will be a secret not only during work, but even long after the app is rebuilt and the customer is happy, then that will cost extra too, on top of #1 and #3.

tl;dr: Ask yourself, is there an amount of money that would make you feel comfortable doing this? If yes, explain your position to them and say, "sorry guys, the initial agreement was for a normal project - if you want this super secret stuff we can do that too but you're paying extra". Either way, be prepared to walk away. Money is nice but this is a lot more risky than your usual job. Ghost writing costs more than normal writing, so if you agree to being paid the same, you're being underpaid.

Answer 10

If you want to establish yourself as an authority in your field, you need to look for the best ways to create value for your clients. This will most often include subjects outside your domain. There are obvious problems with this company, and It is probably more valuable to address the problems with their knowledge sharing and processes than to waste money on the fix or rebuild a shit application.

I would discuss this with your client. If they decide not to deal with the problem I will move on. And to gain more respectable customers, I would write a blog post or do a podcast with someone in the knowledge management field or an executive on how this lack of visibility will cause signal distortion in the effective management of the firm . You would actually lose the firm money in the long run. While taking the high will earn you credibility and trust-worth clients.

Answer 11

The other answers have considered the ethics and the resources/practical side already. My opinion focuses more on the opportunity which this may be.

The clients management is betting on the following things: - The customer does not realize that he has paid for developing the first version without a good outcome - You will provide the skills to give them a turnkey-ready-project - And now come the tricky point: They obviously want to be ready to remove you - or the other team. If it's you it's ok if you know it, but the other team should not be aware of their possible doom.

You could bet that the team does not manage to replace you after you give them the initial version for the upgrades, and then it may be that they have to come back to you. The other bet would be that as soon as they have your working version of the app, they chop the other team (which would be the only reason why they want to hide it from their team) and fetch you onboard more firmly.

I am not saying you should, but certainly could hope for such developments.

Answer 12

Sorry for the late answer. I am surprised about the surprisingly non-cooperative answer of the others.

First: what is asked from you, is not against any contract you subscribed, and it is not against the workplace ethics. It is a special working mode, tuned to protect the face of your employer in the eyes of his customer. But you shouldn't bother even with it, because you are paid by your employer and his relation with the customer is not your task.

On the ethics side: your employer gives you a job, and a lot of money. The customer doesn't. Actually, the reason of the customer to get his software done by your employer, that he won't do software micromanagement tasks.

The only one what you can lose here, is that the customer won't know your name. But the customer won't employ you later, his business model uses your employer (and similar companies) for tasks like this.

Your employer is in trouble, he sees in you the saver of his project, and he is capable and is willing to pay you its extra costs (if not now, then in the next project. Or in the next project of his friend having a similar problem). This is why can you work here as freelancer.

I can't see any rationality, for example, why should you ask everything in paper and similar. It should be needed only if there would be the possibility of some judicial problems here, but there isn't. What you want to do, it not against any law.

By showing your employer, that you are capable and willing to be a "Mr. Wolf", it would highly elevate your worth in his eyes, and you can probably count that it won't be your last "save everything, doesn't matter what is the cost" scenario.

Instead of thinking it would be a "trap", what I see very clearly, it is a possibility for you to be some more as a "we buy x manmonth freelance for y $", interchangeable raw flesh. You could be a "special task force" from that point.