A few months ago, I wrote a short article detailing what I thought at the time was going to be the next step in my career: a position as an Android developer for Rave Business Systems. In this article, I'll explain exactly how wrong I was about this company.

If you read the previous article, you'll notice that I was excited to start a new career as a junior Android app developer. I emphasize junior for a reason. Keep that word in mind and we'll come back to it in a bit.

Rave recruits developers who may have some background in web development or some other area of software engineering, but are generally brand new to the specific area of Android app development. Their 6-8 week training program is advertised as a way for these new Android developers to learn the specifics of this particular niche within the larger field of software engineering. Out of the seven trainees in my cohort, none of us had any prior experience with Android development other than a few of us having looked through some online tutorials in the weeks leading up to the training program. The training program also happens to be paid, with the promise of a two-year contract at the end with a pretty nice paycheck. It's an enticing offer for a brand new junior developer struggling to break into the industry and getting turned down a lot due to lack of experience, and it almost sounds too good to be true. As it turns out, it was too good to be true.

As part of the onboarding process, every Rave recruit agrees to the company's "resume modification process" in order to allow the company to better market us to their clients after the training period. My fellow trainees and I understood this to mean that the Rave team would tailor our resumes to the needs of the company's clients, incorporating the projects we completed during training and presenting our skills in the best light possible to potential employers. The true nature of the "resume modification process" was certainly not openly disclosed to us, I would assume both for legal reasons and because no one with a shred of honor or ethical sense would agree to this kind of modification in advance if they really knew the true nature of it.

During the fifth week of the training program, we were shown the resumes that the HR team had been working on for us. I was stunned to discover that from 2015-17 I was actually not in naval flight school as I had previously thought, but working for Verizon Wireless as an Android developer! To my astonishment, this resume informed me that I actually have over 5 years' experience in Android development! That's right, Rave's "resume modification process" entails the complete and total fabrication of three entire jobs and five years' experience in the field. It turns out that these jobs are contracts that someone working for Rave has completed at some time in the past, but that person certainly wasn't me. Besides the fake resume itself, the implication was also that when asked about my work experience in an interview, I would be expected to lie to the interviewer to back up the lies on the fake resume.

I was disgusted by this, and immediately voiced my displeasure to the instructor who showed me the resume. His first reaction was to inform me that this is what I agreed to when I signed up, but I stuck to my guns and said that I agreed to have my resume worked on and improved, but certainly did not and would never agree to having work experience completely fabricated. The instructor referred me to the president of the company and said I should talk to him about it (it's a small startup, so you can do that kind of thing).

The president, Mohsin Khan, also told me that this was what I agreed to, and I again told him that this was definitely not my understanding of what was going to happen when I accepted the offer. His response to that was to tell me that I should have been able to tell exactly what the process was from the materials I was sent before joining. I know for sure that this is nonsense because after asking some of my fellow trainees about this, they said they had the same understanding as I did about what the process would entail, and it didn't include making up fake work experience. There was certainly nothing in the materials I was sent before joining stating that I would be expected to outright lie about my work experience, and it's clear to me that the materials we were sent were just as dishonest as the fake resumes.

The Grift

All of this may compel one to speculate. Based on what I've told you so far, you may ask, "But Jason, why does this company feel the need to put five years' fake experience on a resume for entry-level developer roles? Shouldn't those roles be achievable with just the background in web development that most of us already have combined with the training given to us by the company?" Yes indeed, but remember when I emphasized that word junior a while ago? My assumption was that I'd be contracting for junior developer roles, because Rave hired me as a junior developer. As it turns out, the roles Rave contracts their employees out to are actually mid to senior level roles that by all accounts do require 5+ years' experience in Android development specifically. This may be why they feel the need to fabricate qualifications for their contractors, because otherwise they wouldn't even get looked at for the jobs to which they're applying.

What we have here appears to be a company that preys on new developers, many (if not nearly all) fresh out of coding bootcamps, looking for their first jobs in the industry, and getting frustrated because their lack of experience is causing companies to pass them up time after time. Rave hires these developers with no experience, fabricates qualifications for them, and contracts them out to roles for which they are totally unqualified even after the training period, with promises of a support team to back them up when they inevitably find themselves out of their depth. These mid to senior level Android jobs can pay salaries in the low six figures. Rave pays the employee around $70,000 of this and (one would assume) pockets the rest, which amounts to a 30-40% cut depending on the role. To reiterate, this last part is some speculation, but it's the only explanation I can see that makes all the details add up. If anyone has a better explanation and wants to send me an email, I'd certainly be interested in hearing about it.

I hesitate to call Rave's business model an outright scam, because by all appearances they do seem to be providing a real service; they're just doing it in an extremely dishonest and unethical way by lying to their clients about their contractors' qualifications. One of the arguments offered to me by my fellow trainees for staying and going along with the dishonesty was to ask if the work gets done for the client, why does it matter whether it's done by us personally or by a support team backing us up? The answer is that it doesn't matter if the client knows whether you're lying or not; it's just as wrong either way, but for our purposes here suffice it to say that it seems to me that Rave really is able to deliver a service to its clients one way or another. So instead of a scam, let's call it a grift.

Of all the reasons to walk away from Rave, the most obvious and immediately compelling one on the basis of self-interest was the fact that they have clearly shown themselves to be untrustworthy. If a company lies to their clients as a standard business practice, why would I trust them to deal honestly and forthrightly with me? In fact, it became clear to me in retrospect that Rave had been dealing with me and other trainees in a manipulative manner from the very beginning. Here's a simple principle of dealing with people: if you notice someone clearly lying to other people, assume they will lie to you as well. The best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior, and failure to acknowledge wrongdoing is as good as a promise to do it again in the future.

The Manipulation

I said that Rave deals with its recruits in a manipulative manner from the very beginning, so let's go over how they do that. I can't necessarily speak to how they treat all of their recruits because I was only one member of one training cohort in the spring of 2021, but I would assume that my experience wasn't too far out of the ordinary for the company.

It all starts with Rave's recruitment process, and the types of people they recruit and hire. Take as an example one of my fellow trainees Steve (not his real name). Steve is a New Yorker in his late 20s and was formerly an Amazon warehouse employee. At the time we started training, he had been out of work for over a year and was suffering from crippling depression and a general feeling of worthlessness after having applied for God-knows-how-many software development jobs and being rejected time after time due to lack of experience in the field. In other words, Steve needed this job, or at least perceived that he did, and was willing to do just about anything necessary to keep it. He told me as much during the conversation several of us had about the situation before I made my final decision to leave. Another trainee, Jack (also not his real name), also in his late 20s, had also been unemployed for over a year, was carrying an overwhelming amount of student debt, and was planning to get married soon. Jack fully agreed with me that the company's practices were scummy and unethical, but said he couldn't financially afford to walk away from the position.

I think Rave is fully aware of the type of people they are recruiting, namely those who need a job and are already overwhelmingly frustrated at not being able to find one. I'm not completely familiar with the situations of all of my fellow trainees, but from what I can tell they tend to fit a general profile: all millennials, mostly coastal city dwellers, mostly coming off extended periods of unemployment, many with overwhelming amounts of debt, and all desperately trying to get a start in the software development industry. I was an exception to several of these points, namely not being a coastal city dweller, having a shorter period of unemployment than most leading up to the start of training, and not having overwhelming debt.

So right away, Rave recruits from among those most likely to be willing to compromise principles for the sake of a job, or even better, those most likely to lack any solid principles to begin with. Having something that people need gives the company power over those people and makes them less likely to object to anything they are asked to do. But it gets worse than that.

Rave's 6-8 week training program is done in-person and entails a trip to either Philadelphia or Atlanta depending on the training cohort and platform (Android or iOS). All travel expenses, along with lodging during training, are paid for by the company, and trainees receive an additional $300 per week plus benefits for the duration of training. During my first week in Philadelphia, Mohsin treated the whole training cohort to dinner at a Mediterranean grill on the company's dime. Everyone was very friendly and accommodating. Before a person becomes aware of the dishonesty at the core of the business, this all could easily be interpreted as a good company making a good effort to treat its employees well. But knowing what I know now, it all looks like manipulation to me, and it's the reason I say the whole thing was manipulative from the start. I wouldn't be surprised if all this was done on purpose, with the conscious intent of throwing up more psychological barriers to objections when the lying and fabrication finally becomes impossible to ignore. Whether consciously intended or not, it certainly has that effect. I'm sure the physical fact of being away from home in an unfamiliar city plays a role as well, which may be why the training isn't done remotely. One member of my training cohort was a Philadelphia native, but the rest were away from home: several from New York City, one from elsewhere in Pennsylvania, me from Kansas, and one from as far away as Los Angeles.

Picture this. You're a brand new developer struggling to break into the industry and you're desperate for employment. A company offers to fly you out to Philadelphia, put you up in a nice apartment, train you up in a new field while paying you $300 a week plus benefits, and then help you land a well-paying contract with the promise of even better pay just a year down the line. Everyone is super friendly, and the president of the company even takes you out to dinner when you get there. Of course it's a tempting offer, and you might make the same mistake I made: not asking the right questions up front to find out what was really going on and what the "resume modification process" actually entailed (I'll come back to that later). You might even want to ignore the slight feeling of scamminess you get from this company and its president. Later, when their dishonesty becomes so in-your-face that you can't possibly ignore it anymore, you already feel obligated to this company that has done so much for you.

To top all of that off, there's another psychological barrier to walking away in the necessity of admitting that you've made a mistake. As a quote often attributed to Mark Twain says, "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." If you've been fooled, admitting it and changing course is the best thing to do, but is psychologically very difficult.

Having spoken with Rave's president both before and after the dishonesty became clear to me, I believe that he's fully aware of all these factors and makes every effort to use them to his advantage. And that brings me to my next big point.

The Gaslighting

Let's talk a bit about how exactly everything happened. First of all, the "resume modification process" was presented during the recruitment process as a before-and-after pair of example resumes. Nothing was explicitly stated as to how exactly the trainee's resume would be modified, and a quick glance over the example resumes could easily lead a potential recruit to believe that all that would be done is some refinement and adding of some projects completed during training. The main mistake that led to my being fooled was a failure on my part to ask for explicit clarification as to exactly what this process entailed. I took this agreement as a mere formality and didn't investigate, because I needed a job and wanted to believe it was a good deal. I paid for this in the form of a month and a half of wasted time that I could have been using to apply to legitimate companies.

After I made my final decision to walk away from the company, I hopped on a Teams call with Mohsin to inform him of my decision. His first attempt at manipulation during this call was based on a hope that I was ignorant of the specifics of my contract and hadn't done my homework. He said something along the lines of, "Now Jason, you signed a contract and agreed to go through this training with us. You can't just back out now." Of course, the contract was at-will like most employment contracts these days, meaning either the employer or employee is allowed to terminate the contract at any time with or without cause. I had read the contract in full before the call, so I knew this for certain and was not about to be fooled by this ploy.

Mohsin's next attempt at manipulation was simple gaslighting. I told him that my reason for quitting was that I was not comfortable fabricating my credentials for a job, and he tried to convince me that this was what I agreed to when I signed the contract and wondered why I was changing my mind now. There was of course nothing in the contract about even the "resume modification process" generally, let alone the specifics of it (I have to imagine that expecting employees to lie on resumes would be a tough thing to legally defend in an employment contract). There was nothing he could legally threaten me with since I didn't even need a reason to quit according to the at-will status of the contract, so the threat was only psychological.

I asked Mohsin if his conscience was satisfied that the materials provided were clear enough for anyone to determine the true nature of the "resume modification process", and he said yes. I told him that just confirmed my decision to leave, because I knew that the materials were not in fact clear enough (confirmed in my mind by my fellow trainees being as caught off-guard by this as I was) and that he had lied by omission through these materials. His statement that his conscience was clear meant either that he was still lying to me now or that his moral compass was so broken as to allow him to genuinely believe he had done nothing wrong. Either way, he and his company were clearly untrustworthy, and I didn't want to work for them.

His final attempt to manipulate me was to inform me that his "legal team" would be in touch. Knowing that the contract was at-will, I knew that he had nothing real to threaten me with and that this was a last-ditch attempt at manipulation by a scumbag who didn't like being told he was a scumbag. It's been over three months now since I left, and there's been no further word from Rave's "legal team".

There's one aspect of this that escaped me at the time, but that a friend of mine brought up when we were talking about the situation after the fact. My friend asked why Mohsin would even think it was a good idea to try to manipulate me into changing my mind about leaving. Paraphrasing, my friend said, "If you're this president, your business is based on dishonest practices and you know it, because you're not stupid. Your business model kind of depends on your employees participating in the dishonesty. Now you're faced with an employee who is clearly not comfortable with your dishonest practices, and you're trying to manipulate him into staying with the company anyway. The best case scenario for you is that the manipulation works and he stays, but then you have an employee who has already made clear that he doesn't like your company's practices and he's likely to be thorn in your side the whole time he's there. How is that good? Wouldn't you just want to write it off as a loss and move on to the next sucker?"

He makes a good point. I can only speculate as to Mohsin's state of mind during this conversation, but I would venture a guess that he was caught off guard by the direct confrontation. Judging by the opinions of the rest of my training cohort, and the type of people the company typically recruits as discussed above, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first time anyone has actually called him on his dishonesty. He might have been a little flustered and not in a state of mind to try to evaluate the actual pros and cons of keeping me around, and he just didn't like being confronted and wanted to defend himself.

The Case for Leaving and the Philosophy of the Soul

If you're just here for the news about a scummy business in the tech industry and don't care about philosophy, this would be a good time to dip out. The point up to here is if you ever get an offer from Rave Business Systems, you may want to stop and think about the ethical implications of all this before accepting. For the rest, feel free to read on...

Before the final boss battle with Mohsin, I suggested a meeting of the whole training cohort so we could get together and talk about this. Out of six other members of the cohort besides me, one of them was out of town that weekend and one didn't respond to the message. Four of them agreed to meet, and of those only two actually showed up, the ones referred to as Steve and Jack above. A third came by my apartment later that night to talk about it. By the time we met, I had already decided that I was going to leave the company, and I intended to make the case to the rest as to why they might want to consider leaving too.

During this meeting I found myself wishing that my powers of persuasion and argument were sharper. I felt sort of like a blunt instrument, like I was trying to do heart surgery with a sledgehammer. Be that as it may, I made the case as best I could. I don't know whether or not I could have said anything to convince any of them to leave, but in the end everyone else stayed as far as I know. The main points as best I remember them were as follows:

• Mohsin has already lied to all of us by omission at the very least, and we know the company makes a standard practice of lying to its clients. Therefore they are not trustworthy and we should assume they will lie to us in the future if it suits them.
• The company and its president appear to depend on a lack of moral fortitude in their employees. The only way they make money is if we agree to participate in their dishonest business practices. They've taken us for suckers, and taken for granted our lack of a spine.
• I for one am personally insulted by the previous point. I'm pissed off that someone would try to make money on the assumption that I lack a spine, and I certainly wouldn't want to prove them right. You should be pissed off too if you have any self respect.
• I don't know the legality of what's going on here, but I wouldn't want to get caught in the crossfire if it turns out that some part of this is illegal, and that I knew it was wrong and went along with it anyway.
• I also wouldn't want my name associated with this company in any way if word of their scummy business practices got out to the rest of the industry, especially to their clients.
• If you decide to stay, you will not get away with it. That decision will come back to bite you in one way or another.

Neither Steve nor Jack offered any real objections to any of the above points except one, but their reasons for staying basically boiled down to their perceived inability to afford quitting. I say "perceived" for reasons I'll discuss in a moment. They agreed that the president was scummy and dishonest, that the business practices were shady, and that fabricating work experience on a resume was wrong. But Jack had student loans and a wedding to pay off, and Steve couldn't possibly go back to the miserable and depressed life he'd been living for the previous year or so.

One point I only thought of after the fact had to do with Steve's depression. Since he had already agreed with me that it was wrong to lie to potential employers, the question is simple: "Do you think that doing something you know is wrong is going to help or hurt your depression?" I would have been interested to hear his answer. If he ever happens to read this, he'll likely know who he is despite the fact that I'm not using his real name, and if he wants to send me an email or a LinkedIn message about it I'd still be interested to hear his answer.

That brings me to my last point, which is the reason I doubt I could have changed anyone's mind during this conversation even if my wit had been sharper. In response to the question about moral decisions affecting depression, one might argue that depression is a clinical condition caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, not by our own decisions. There's one point in the above bullet list that you, Dear Reader, may have objected to as well, and it happens to be the one that Steve especially disagreed with: the last point about getting away with dishonesty. These things are all related, and the reason I may have been bound from the start to not come to any agreement with Steve and Jack is that we have fundamentally different philosophical views of human beings, specifically on the philosophy of the soul.

I'll say up front that I may well have made a different decision here had I not read a fair bit of Plato by this time. At the very least, I wouldn't have been as confident in my decision as I was. The Republic actually addresses almost exactly the question at hand in this situation (whether it is better to act justly or unjustly in life), but I actually hadn't read it yet at that time and the view I was forming of the soul came from other works of Plato. In the Republic, Socrates makes a compelling case that it is better to be just, and reading it after the fact confirmed my decision for me, among other things. To see my feeble summary of Plato's concept of the soul, check out my previous article on The Lord of the Rings and the Republic, or better yet, just go read the Republic for yourself.

On the surface, an obvious difference between my fellow trainees and I is the difference in the cultures in which we were raised. I don't know a lot of details about any of their backgrounds, but I do know they grew up in coastal cities for the most part and were likely raised in fairly progressive and probably not very religious environments, whereas I grew up in a very conservative and very religious household in a medium-sized conservative town in flyover country. A past version of me would certainly have tooted the horn of my upbringing, saying something like, "Harumph, well of course I made the right decision. I had Christian values instilled in me from a young age. These silly coastal elites don't have the same moral compass."

Many of the sorts of people I grew up around probably would chalk it up to that and be satisfied, but I don't think it accounts for the difference in philosophies. There's a pretty major difference between the way I was taught about morals and right behavior as a child and the way I understand it these days after learning from Socrates. The character of the brand of Christian teaching I was raised with was that you ought to do the right thing even at your own expense, even if it costs you something or goes against your self-interest. Socrates argues that actually, acting justly is your best possible self-interest. It is never to one's own advantage to commit injustice. Any perceived advantage to committing injustice, or cost to acting justly, is just that: merely a perceived advantage or cost, or at best a relatively short-term advantage or cost that will reverse itself in the long run.

With the view of morality and the soul that I was raised with, the decision would have been one of seeing the benefit of a paycheck and a start in the software development industry and deciding to forgo that benefit for the sake of doing what I knew was right. The Socratic view says no, the benefit of doing wrong is an illusion. It will cost you more in the long run than it gains you now, and will be a net negative to your soul and your life. The "correct" decision doesn't change between the two views, but the incentive structure around choosing one path over the other changes completely. In the Socratic view, it wasn't necessarily even a noble act to walk away from the job. I was simply acting in my own long-term best interest. This is why I referred to Steve and Jack's inability to afford quitting as a mere perception earlier; my belief based on Socrates' arguments is that the benefit to the person in the long run of acting rightly in this situation would outweigh any short-term cost incurred by the loss of a job, but they failed to perceive this and only perceived the short-term cost.

When I mentioned not being able to get away with wrongdoing in the above bullet point, I wasn't talking about some kind of abstract karmic justice of the universe. I was talking about the impact of decisions on one's soul. There may never be any externally imposed retribution for a decision like lying on a resume. It's completely possible that Steve and Jack will never get caught, and that they will continue on with their careers without anyone ever finding out what they did. The real cost of a decision like that is the impact on the soul. In fact, Socrates would argue that it would actually be better for them if they did get caught and had to face some sort of punishment, to remove the injustice from the soul.

This is the real crux of the matter, and the reason I was likely bound to not reach agreement with Jack and Steve on this. They lack any coherent philosophy of the soul sufficiently strong to counter the manipulations of the company. In order for any of this Socratic stuff to be applicable, one must first believe that there is even such a thing as a soul, however it may be defined, and that one's decisions affect its quality. In the Republic, Socrates speaks of the idea of harmony and order between the parts of the soul and says that unjust actions are actions which destroy that harmony and order. I would interpret depression in many cases as a symptom of disharmony or disorder in the soul, and suggest that consciously committing injustice can only make depression worse. (I'm not a clinician, this isn't medical advice, I could be wrong, blah blah blah. I'm just a guy who thinks about philosophy a lot. Go read Plato.)

I think that in order to convince Jack and Steve, or anyone else for that matter, to walk away from this job, we would have first had to come to agreement on a philosophy of the soul. I would have actually had to demonstrate the truth of the claim that lying on a resume was actually not in their own interest and that it would inevitably have negative long-term effects. Beating them over the head with sledgehammer-heart-surgery philosophy was never going to cut it. With a strictly materialistic view of the world such as they seemed to have, the value of each decision is reduced to the immediate costs and benefits a man can directly see in front of himself. If concepts like morality or justice enter the picture at all, it's in sort of a far-off and abstract way as more of an academic exercise than an actual guide to decision-making. With the Christian ideal of nobly sacrificing one's own self-interest for the sake of what's right, at least there's some substantial weight on the moral side of the decision-making scale; here, morality is a fleeting and ephemeral thing that can't hope to compete with an incentive like money for rule of the soul.

In conclusion, I'm confident that I made the right decision in leaving, but I didn't come away completely unscathed. I overlooked some warning signs on the way into this that became pretty obvious in retrospect. The consequence in this case was a month and a half of wasted time, but I know it would have been far worse if I had followed through and participated in Rave's practices.

The reason I said "in conclusion" is that I never really know how to conclude these things. Go read the Republic.

Note: I do not condone harassment of any current, former, or future employees of Rave, whether they are named in this article or not. Please don't harass Mohsin, the company itself, or anyone else mentioned here.