Gadgetopia

Developers stealing from developers: an App Store tale : Interesting story that details a situation every knows happens all the time.

A guy writes an iPhone app.  Then he gets a call from someone wanting to ask about his experience with the subcontractor who supposedly wrote the app for him…wait, a minute.  Someone had apparently claimed that they wrote the app and were using that claim to drum up work.

Curious as to just what was going on, Haddad decided to e-mail Trucid pretending to be interested in their services. In the e-mail, he requested information about the company and a list of examples of its work. It wasn’t long before Haddad received an e-mail back from Trucid’s Chief Marketing Officer explaining who the company was, what it did, and its experience on the iPhone platform. Sure enough, ConvertBot was on the list of the 14 apps the company had supposedly developed.

[…] Sadly, this kind of résumé boosting is becoming more common.

I have some experience with this.  In 2000, Joe and I were working at a company that built a Web site for the Minnesota Vikings, which was probably as high-profile a site as any Sioux Falls company had done back in 2000.  I was the lead developer, and there were 3-4 people on the team for it.

Some years later I sat down for a beer with my friendly arch-rival Aaron Mentele from Electric Pulp.  He informed me that lots and lots of people he had interviewed over the last few years had claimed to have written the Vikings Web site.  I thought that was pretty funny, I guess.  Maybe they wrote it and I was stealing their credibility?  I’m such a hack.