Rant - Most bizarre reason I've seen for a firing

Opening my Slack today was rough. 100% termination rate for our new senior hire.

Not going to dress this up - we're dying under proxy workers. The math is simple and brutal: 30L in salary, 5L paid to a proxy, 25L pocketed for doing absolutely nothing. Every line of code cost us premium rates for intern quality.

Been running this engineering pod for 2 years. Commits went from normal to completely erratic. No fancy analysis needed - people are just outsourcing their jobs, sleeping, and collecting checks. Today's standup included a random unfamiliar voice unmuting to ask for database credentials. His excuse? "Audio issues." Right.

The sequence tells the story:

• Standup starts: 10:00 AM
• Random proxy speaks: 10:05 AM
• Common pattern: Dev goes offline Friday, proxy codes weekend, merges Monday (note: May is also our major release season)

Red flags:

• Code quality drop: 32%
• Response times: 28% slower
• Meeting participation: 12%
• Camera usage: 0%
• Bandwidth excuses: 100%

At this level of outsourcing, we're underwater. Half these commits can't even go to production. Security penalties for exposing our codebase are another story entirely.

Honest truth: the remote tech market has a fundamentally broken relationship with accountability. We're stuck between devs who want premium salaries but want to put in zero hours - and then proxy it anyway. This isn't just a moonlighting problem. It's about a culture that hasn't figured out how to value actual engineering over hacking the system, where "async work" has become a way to game the system rather than a genuine workflow.

The bigger problem is that no tech org can "not offer" remote work - that's a definite recipe for death even before you start hiring.

Not sure how long small startups can survive this. To the devs who actually write what they commit - you're literally keeping us alive, thanks from the bottom of my heart!

That's it. It's Tuesday so back to reviewing compromised code.