

Ask HN: What to do about a fake cofounder/employee? - lined9292

We hired an independent contractor a few months back and fired him. In his contract it clearly stipulates he wasn&#x27;t an employee, owner, etc. He has no equity interest in the company. He is now claiming on Linkedin he was a cofounder. I fear that this might be a negative signal to future investors by associating us with him.<p>Thinking about talking to a lawyer on this.  Before I do was wondering if anyone had suggestions&#x2F;similar stories? Any way I can get Linkedin to remove his &#x27;title&#x27;?<p>I am realizing anyone can claim anything on Linkedin.
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JSeymourATL
This may be a simple case of resume embellishment.

Before you lawyer-up; know that even a simple cease & desist letter written by
an attorney can run $500. And the helpful attorney, would gladly pursue
further legal action for an additional modest fee.

You can of course, write your own demand letter. But I suggest you phone this
guy first. He needs to hear the tone of your voice.

Keep the conversation buttoned-up and professional. As an opener, seek to
understand-- ask him what's the deal with the Founders title on Linkedin? Let
him know your position and request he remove it today. No need to threaten
him, threats are often counter-productive.

In most cases, the call should be enough. And you saved $500.

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jurymatic
Yeah I've had fake "employees" as well. When I read up on it, it seemed the
general consensus was that you could ask LinkedIn to remove them but they
didn't particularly care. Over time, you'll likely end up playing whack-a-mole
with fake profiles.

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tokenadult
I have written to LinkedIn before about a claimed "employee" (a person who has
never been in my state, ever) and LinkedIn appears to have removed the fake
information. Some fakers just try to see what they can get away with.

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alphanumeric0
Putting a clause in the contract stipulating that he isn't an employee doesn't
mean anything, at least in the state of New York [1].

I should know, my previous employer got me to sign such a contract, but the
state determined I was indeed an employee after I was unjustly fired, and now
I can legally collect unemployment.

1\.
[https://labor.ny.gov/ui/claimantinfo/ui%20and%20independent%...](https://labor.ny.gov/ui/claimantinfo/ui%20and%20independent%20contractors.shtm)

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andersthue
As with competition the less mind space you are using on him the better.

I am pretty sure a future investor has seen this before and will understand
that he is a fake.

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liquidcool
I have many false employees on LinkedIn, but I can't completely divorce myself
from blame after naming my company "Made Up Name." :-)

And I also recommend a phone call. I understand it will be uncomfortable for
you after firing him, but be polite and if he doesn't comply, try LinkedIn,
and then finally the legal route.

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jfrisby
I had a coworker recently whose behavior became problematic, leading me to
discover a similar situation.

For example: I introduced a style / complexity checking tool into various
repos, including his. When I ran it, it flagged a couple methods as too
complex. We got into an argument over whether this was a fair assessment or
not. The end result was that I left things where they were and moved on to
something else until I could coordinate with the CTO on how to achieve my
objectives in this context. (My role involves security...)

It's worth noting that at that point the tool was optional and out-of-band. It
wasn't failing CI, it wasn't required as part of any other workflow, etc. At
that point it existed solely for my own use and he could have ignored it for
the time being.

At the end of the very next day, he brags to me about how he's "fixed" the
complexity issues in the code. Based on my previous interactions with him, I
decided to check this out. His "fix" was to put meta-comments in that disabled
the relevant rules for the code violating them. Except he put the meta-comment
to disable each rule several statements earlier than needed, and didn't
include any meta-comments to re-enable the rules after the relevant code. And
he had changed the config file comments I had made, reflecting that the
exceptions from the company standard configuration were done to accommodate
his needs (I felt it was important to have that context present for future
maintenance efforts).

His bragging to me about "fixing" the complexity issues (and yes, he used the
word "fix") struck me as being either deeply dishonest, or representative of a
truly breathtaking lack of understanding.

Between this and several other incidents (most of them I merely observed, some
I was entangled in), I decided to dig into his background a bit.

I found a few things that I could chalk up to simply not understanding the
very domain-specific meaning of some general-sounding terms in particular
contexts. For example: On his FounderDating profile he listed himself as
having been a "mentor" to TogetherSoft / Borland. That just seemed... _beyond_
implausible to me. So I read deeper and it seems his role at TogetherSoft
(acquired by Borland turing his tenure) involved _mentoring coworkers_.

Ok, I'll chalk that up to an innocent mistake.

Then I get to the startup he co-founded. Except... wait. The dates here don't
fit with those on his resume? Hrm. Start-date was some 6 months after the
company was founded.

I tracked down the main founder's email and sent him a brief inquiry, with a
fairly vague wording, asking about the time discrepancy, and asking if perhaps
this was some unusual situation and that he was in fact a founder. I got an
initial response asking for clarification, to which I responded. No response
to that. So the founder didn't even want to say "yeah, he was a (co-)founder."

At my employer, he had taken a truly _beautiful_ codebase written by
ThoughtBot and absolutely wrecked it in the space of 2 months: He refused to
gain any significant understanding of Ruby, Rails, or Angular. He ripped out
Angular in favor of his own templating library. He reinvented ActiveRecord
associations, incorrectly because he didn't like that the column name had to
have `_id` at the end. And all the while he would rail in front of the entire
company during demos about how "stupid" various tools were. "HighCharts is
such a broken library -- you can't even remove a series from a chart once
you've added it!" / "Wait, that seems ridiculous. Are you sure?" / "Yeah, I
scoured the docs and found nothing. Googled it and found loads of other people
having the same issue. I'm gonna have to blow away the whole chart and
recreate it whenever there's a change!" / "... I just found the method right
here while you were talking about it, and here's a jsFiddle showing that it
works as expected."

I also found out he'd introduced his templating library without clarifying
that it was created by him (he just announced it as a good tool he'd "found"),
and had done so at at _least_ one other company.

Given the damage done, here and apparently elsewhere, I'm seriously inclined
to blog about it publicly -- name him, so that any potential employers who
google him will have access to some very relevant information.

Perhaps you could write a blog post that makes a point of outlining who the
founding team is? A "founders" page doesn't help because one expects that a
departed cofounder would be scrubbed from it, but a blog post may raise alarm
flags for more people. You wouldn't even have to name him explicitly -- just
_not include_ him, or mention him indirectly ("we hired a contractor to do
X").

