[HN Gopher] The new hire who showed up is not the same person we...
___________________________________________________________________
The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
Author : amadeuspzs
Score : 618 points
Date : 2022-01-31 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.askamanager.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.askamanager.org)
| afinlayson wrote:
| Ohh no ... I really hope this doesn't become a thing ... I don't
| want corporate espionage to become this insane.
| Rafuino wrote:
| Whoa... the part about being able to trace if work is being done
| on another computer is alarming. How can they do that?
| notpachet wrote:
| Welcome my son, to the machine:
| https://www.jamf.com/solutions/compliance/
| Rafuino wrote:
| I'm more concerned about a company being able to see what you
| do on your personal computer, which is what the comment
| seemed to allude to. I know there are many sketchy tracking
| mechanisms out there, but if they can extend to your personal
| network, that's scary
| kelnos wrote:
| In one of the updates, they mention that they hope they'll
| be able to get company equipment (presumably a
| computer/laptop) back from "John". So I'm sure the "spying"
| software (pretty standard fare for most corporate IT
| departments) was on company hardware, not personal
| hardware.
|
| If a company said I could bring my own laptop, but that I'd
| have to install their "security" software on it, I would
| definitely decline. Ditto for an MDM on my phone.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We had this happen, but it did not get all the way to being hired
| thankfully.
|
| I got on a call to interview a candidate, and he didn't know
| _anything_. Like, hilariously unqualified, his knowledge level on
| software engineering was effectively zero. Fairly short call once
| we realized what the score was.
|
| Immediately the recruiter calls me back (she was on the call as
| well) and started apologizing profusely. She said the guy on this
| call was definitely _not_ the guy she screened on an earlier
| phone call.
|
| Luckily we didn't get as far as hiring a fraud.
|
| But I have to say, also, that this kind of incident is why I
| really love a _good recruiter_ , and try to hold onto them if at
| all possible. We had one guy we worked with who had a nearly 100%
| success rate placing people with us. He didn't just phone screen
| randos, he had a pool of people that he cultivated, he
| interviewed them himself in depth. So when he made a
| recommendation, he knew it was a good fit, and he was right
| almost every time.
| mizzao wrote:
| Haha, I really appreciate that kind of recruiter. Did his name
| happen to be John Keenan?
| albroland wrote:
| I worked with John for my last 2 job searches and I must say
| even from the candidate side he is excellent to work with.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ha, no, that's not his name. I'd have to think about it for a
| bit to recall the name, it's been a few years now. He retired
| :(
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My son reports working with a person who had always worked at the
| same company as his sister. Soon after hiring (both of) them, the
| sister changed to another company.
|
| This guy's performance dropped to zero. He never finished another
| task. At lunch he often commented he had always enjoyed working
| with his sister, since he got lots of good ideas when they worked
| on the same projects.
|
| My son's take: this guy had never had an original idea in his
| life, his sister had always propped him up since high school. And
| she had finally cut the apron strings. But the guy was so
| clueless, he never realized how little he could do and how his
| sister had essentially done his job his whole life.
| greedo wrote:
| We "hired" a DBA after a really good remote interview (this was
| in 2017). Two weeks later, the DBA shows up for work, but wasn't
| working very closely with the hiring team. His coworkers seemed
| curious about some of his approaches to problems etc. Turns out
| he had someone fake his interview. Fired him two weeks later when
| we had all of our ducks in a row in terms of HR stuff.
| noisepunk wrote:
| Whoa. I am new to interviewing and hiring developers. We needed
| to hire quickly and i interviewed someone, they did great and
| they were hired. And when they showed up for there first day in
| our remote zoom call I was very confused and thought I had
| interviewed a different person. I was the only person who
| interviewed them directly as they are a contractor. I brushed it
| off and thought maybe I was mistaken but reading this has made me
| rethink this initial feeling as I never mentioned it to anyone.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Had this happen once. For an on-site job...with an on-site
| interview. And, yeah, from day 1 it was "this...is not the guy we
| interviewed".
|
| Plus of course the time we were hiring remote, and someone
| screenshared for something, and didn't end it, and then later
| questions we had that was broad ("can you tell me a little about
| (technology)") we got to watch him search for and answer from
| what he read, which was a unique experience.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| It's like the flip version of the guy that got let go and then
| re-recruited for his just vacated position.
|
| https://twitter.com/firr/status/1456324664628846599
| not1ofU wrote:
| This is GOLD!!
|
| Edit: I am laughing my balls off at this
|
| "I offered him a gummy bear. He politely declined."
| pojzon wrote:
| Its funny because thats how many devs here get promotion :^]
|
| Quit -> apply to the same company for higher grade job and
| often way better pay.
|
| Why companies dont value their current employees is beyond
| me.
| chasd00 wrote:
| this is a known short cut in consulting. Quit at your
| current firm, goto a competitor then come back 2 years
| later at a level up. Had you stayed at your current firm it
| may be 3-5 years to level up.
| k__ wrote:
| To be fair, you give both competitors inside knowledge
| that might be worth promoting you.
| raylad wrote:
| A long time ago, I was looking for a full time job and went to
| an interview. The guy picked his nose through the entire
| interview, which I thought was rather disrespectful, so when
| they offered the job I declined.
|
| After that, answered an ad from a consulting company. After I'd
| signed their paperwork they said "we already have a client for
| you". Yep, the same nose-picker. But this time I would be paid
| 3x what the full time job would have paid.
|
| I decided that was sufficient punishment for his rudeness and
| took the contract.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Tl;dr: when confronted, he quit and was subsequently unreachable.
| clueless123 wrote:
| In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of
| contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen
| where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you
| get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time
| you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go
| sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm
| already got 6 months worth of salary from the team. In short,
| they do it because it is profitable.
|
| PS.. To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will
| update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".
| jedberg wrote:
| I don't even understand how that happens. At one point I was a
| consulting pimp for my dad, and multiple parts of the contract
| required me to attest that he would be doing the work and if he
| had help he would be doing the majority of the work and if his
| time on the contract dropped below 50% of the total the
| contract would be cancelled and there would be penalties.
|
| There was no way I could have switched him with someone else
| without paying penalties.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Legally, yes - But remember that those provisions are there
| because someone tried that in the past and so they added
| legal provisions against it. And remember that those legal
| provisions are hard to prove; What is 50% of the work? How
| would they know if he'd had another developer submitting
| code?
| toyg wrote:
| Contracts have to be upheld by a court, to mean anything. I
| could write in a contract that you will be required to hand
| me your testicles if you miss the deadline, that doesn't mean
| I will actually go to court to get them. A lot of companies
| write aggressive contracts and never actually bother to
| enforce them, since it would be more costly than what they
| might actually gain.
| morelish wrote:
| Haha that PS note is great. "Not only did we abuse you, we're
| going to tell everyone you loved us"
| cestith wrote:
| And in the meantime if the consultancy kept the contract and
| delivered, it was on a successful project. The C- team had
| little or nothing to do with it being successful, barring
| maybe filling headcount until the A team finished another
| billable project. Bonus points if it's a publicly notable new
| initiative for the consulting client.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will
| update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company
| X"._
|
| And then when they apply to work at their next company, and
| that company wants to verify previous employment, the previous
| company that got screwed over is too worried about the
| possibility of getting sued to accuse the person of lying about
| who they were... so they'll just say "yes, Y worked here for 6
| months".
| Kranar wrote:
| I'll admit straight up when I fire someone I am usually so
| relieved if they leave peacefully that I don't just say they
| worked for me, I will usually even give a semi positive
| review of them. Not a glowing praise or anything of the sort,
| but usually a review saying how they're a good team player,
| they get along well with others, and other aspects
| highlighting mostly soft skills.
|
| As I've indicated many times on here... most incompetent
| people are genuinely good, nice people who get along well
| with others and it's devastating to have to fire them, so
| when I do fire them it can soften the blow for them to leave
| some good words, give some positive feedback which allows
| them to leave on good terms.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's good of you to do. I think it's pretty rare to be
| unable to say _anything_ good about someone, and it nice to
| focus on those things when their future employment might be
| on the line.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i've seen this first hand dealign with a team from Mexico. By
| the time we fired them it had been 6 months of paid invoices.
| Tarragon wrote:
| In the contract houses I've been in the vast majority of
| contracts were repeat business. A good contracting house won't
| pull this kind of thing because the company doesn't survive if
| they piss off clients. I'm out of that world now but can still
| talk about it.
|
| The non-scammy way this happens is senior engineers are part of
| the interviews and requirements gathering. They do the design
| and estimation. They develop task and proof of concept code for
| junior engineers.
|
| During the work the senior engineer almost never 100% on a
| single project. They are on three different projects in
| different stages: design/early development on one that just
| started, resource and mentor on a second that's been going a
| while, writing quote for a third, and initial sales contacts
| for multiple other.
|
| Based on availability it might not be the same senior person at
| any step of the process.
|
| It's hard to impossible to a give you the same person who was
| part of the initial contact because by the time you get teh PO
| approved they are already hip deep in something else.
| cestith wrote:
| I upvoted you because parts of that are absolutely always
| true. Some of it depends on the type of consulting contract,
| though. Some of them call for a dedicated team of X headcount
| for Y time, and if the consultancy subs people in and out of
| that team without sufficient cause that's a big red flag.
| Tarragon wrote:
| Good point. There's a whole bigger world of contracting
| that I never saw.
|
| I should be absolutely clear that my experience has been in
| small contract engineering firms. All of them were less
| than 20 engineers total and large projects were 3 engineers
| at any one time.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've been a hiring manager for remote positions for a long time.
| If your recruiting channels are good, most of your candidates are
| going to be honest and good intentioned.
|
| But interview enough people, and you'll start encountering people
| trying to abuse remote work. They're not interested in
| contributing to your company. They're only interested in
| collecting paychecks while they do as little work as possible for
| as long as possible. They might already have a full-time job or
| other remote jobs, or maybe they're just trying to travel the
| world and do a "four hour workweek" thing where they answer
| e-mails once a day and phone in a couple hours of work at key
| times during the week.
|
| The common theme is that they aren't really interested in
| fighting too hard for the position. As soon as the interview or
| job turns out to be something they can't just talk and smile
| their way through, they're out, just like this:
|
| > I think my last update for a while: as soon as HR got on the
| call with him, before they could get through their first
| question, John said the words "I quit" and hung up the calls. He
| has since been unreachable!!
|
| Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out
| there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do
| as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press
| the issue.
| cercatrova wrote:
| There is a whole community about this called Overemployed [0].
| Their reddit posts are quite entertaining, like this guy who
| works 5 jobs and is making 1.2 million a year [1].
|
| [0] https://overemployed.com/
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...
| bityard wrote:
| Man, I am kinda shocked not so much that this is a thing but
| seems to be a bona fide _movement_.
|
| It's highly interesting but my one job keeps me more than
| busy enough, thankyouverymuch.
|
| Edit: A few other thoughts I had since hitting submit:
|
| 1. It feels to me like the most challenging part of living a
| double working life is making sure your mandatory meetings at
| each job don't conflict. I wonder how people get around that?
|
| 2. Many (most?) employers already have a "no moonlighting"
| clause, I wonder how long before there will there be explicit
| legal language stating you cannot have this full time job
| plus another full time job?
|
| 3. I believe there are a few places in the tax code where
| there is a difference between having a full-time job and a
| part-time job, are there any areas where you would have to
| lie to the govt when you have multiple full-time jobs?
| paxys wrote:
| I'll caution people to take this (and the rest of Reddit)
| with a huge grain of salt. Subreddits like this one are
| almost always just creative writing.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I 'll caution people to take this (and the rest of
| Reddit) with a huge grain of salt. Subreddits like this one
| are almost always just creative writing._
|
| Time to get creative with our time and careers, as long as
| the skill is transferable, and health is manageable. That
| said, 5 jobs sound too much, but who knows...
| wil421 wrote:
| Former coworkers did this. One guy have 2 full time jobs
| and a project based contract job that didn't always have
| active work. A former intern of mine's coworker has 3 "full
| time"jobs.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That said, people doing under-hours, and taking a second
| job must happen quite a bit, especially post pandemic.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Thanks. I look at /r/random every so often to learn new
| subreddits, but this one I'd never seen before!
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| There is no company out there that stays in business long
| paying their employees the full amount of the value they would
| generate if they were really working full+ time, so why should
| those employees do that unless they happen to enjoy it or it
| advances their own goals? That's just whipping yourself so
| massa doesn't have to
| skwirl wrote:
| >Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are
| out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks
| and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough
| to press the issue.
|
| Probably the vast majority of companies! If you ever get an
| employee like this as a direct report and try to do something
| about it, the process is incredibly draining and shitty. Easily
| the worst I've felt about work in my career (so far!). I see
| why people try to ignore the issue, but it also feels pretty
| bad having your other team members constantly pick up the slack
| around a non-performing team member.
| pojzon wrote:
| Its funny because I remember a talk here on ycombinator from
| ppl who do exactly what you described here.
|
| Often extremely smart and talented. Working on own
| projects/business idea.
|
| Their argument is that they can in 1h deliver often as much as
| you average Joe in a week.
|
| "Put as little effort as possible, but I have expenses"
|
| Can give example of such ppl in: - Samsung - TomTom - Oracle -
| Amazon
|
| Too many of them tbh. Slowly choking the business.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are
| out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks
| and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough
| to press the issue."
|
| It's not only remote people. I have seen multiple people at my
| company who are basically incompetent or lazy and produce
| nothing of value or even negative output. Some of them get let
| go after years and some of them get promoted into management.
|
| Having a pleasant demeanor can get you very far without doing
| any work.
| Osiris wrote:
| I know a guy who's actively interviewing to take on a second
| remote job while keeping his first. He has no plans to make
| either party aware that he has other employment.
|
| His argument is that at his current job he can get all of his
| assigned work done in 10-20 hours a week (though he doesn't
| share with them that he's basically only working part time) so
| he has plenty of time to take on a second job where he also
| expects to get his daily work done in just a few hours a day.
|
| I don't have an issue with it IF both parties are aware that
| he's only working a few hours a day but are happy with what
| he's getting done. It's the inevitable lies when there are
| conflicting meetings, etc. that bother me.
|
| I told him so and he was undeterred.
| kelnos wrote:
| I agree that the conflicting meetings bit could be tricky,
| but I don't think he has a moral obligation to inform either
| company of what's going on, assuming one company's work
| doesn't interfere with the assigned work from the other. Also
| I would hope that the two companies he ends up working at
| aren't even remotely in competition with each other, because
| _that_ would be unethical.
|
| If both companies are happy with the guy's work output, then
| he is fulfilling the terms of his employment, at least in
| spirit and morally/ethically.
|
| (I'm aware that some companies include in their employment
| papers a clause that states that employees won't take on
| other employment. I believe I've signed such a thing at my
| current job. But I personally consider such clauses to be
| unethical in the first place, and would feel no qualms
| violating that if I was in a position to want to do so.
| Unfortunately I'm pretty sure nearly all salaried jobs will
| stipulate something like that, so it's not like people can
| vote with their feet.)
|
| I would personally find this sort of arrangement to be pretty
| stressful, and wouldn't do it, but if someone wants to give
| it a go, more power to them.
| bityard wrote:
| > but I don't think he has a moral obligation to inform
| either company of what's going on, assuming one company's
| work doesn't interfere with the assigned work from the
| other.
|
| I strongly disagree. When you are hired as a full-time
| employee, the expectation is that you are giving your full
| 8 hours work day (or whatever) to the company in exchange
| for a paycheck. Otherwise, you are extracting full value
| from the company while they are getting half (or worse)
| value from you.
|
| There are lots of people with a "screw everyone else, I got
| mine" attitude who don't see anything wrong with lying to
| your employer about how you are spending your time. I lump
| these people in with people who justify various forms of
| stealing with the rationale that it doesn't _really_ hurt
| the victim since some insurance comapany pays for the loss
| anyway. It demonstrates a severe lack of integrity. I would
| never want to work with or associate anyone like that.
|
| I do however believe that "no moonlighting" clauses in
| employment contracts should be illegal. I ought to be able
| to use my skills to make extra money in my free time, as
| long is there is no apparent conflict of interest present
| (e.g. moonlighting for a competitor).
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Worked at a place hired one of those. He scheduled meetings,
| then cancelled them at the last minute. Never accomplished a
| single task. Demanded a good reference and he would go get
| another job elsewhere - essentially extorted the reference.
|
| I guess some folks are sociopaths, and do whatever it takes to
| live well.
| vultour wrote:
| What you described can just as easily be done on-site. Remote
| work merely lets these people actually do something they might
| enjoy instead of sitting in a chair and pretending to work for
| 8 hours. I've met people likely this and they'd rather pretend
| to be busy than actually do something.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > What you described can just as easily be done on-site.
|
| You can't get two on-site jobs at the same time. One of them
| is going to notice that you're not there.
| learc83 wrote:
| True but compared to the number of people who are just
| unproductive at their single job, there's no point in
| worrying about people working 2 jobs.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think the point was that many on-site employees get their
| work done just fine, but spend half of their in-office
| hours goofing off on Facebook or reading HN or whatever. So
| in principle that "wasted" time (assuming it is indeed a
| waste) could be put to use for a different company, with
| double the compensation. Obviously there are severe
| logistical issues if you're on-site!
| thrower123 wrote:
| > Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are
| out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks
| and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough
| to press the issue.
|
| I can't imagine it's much worse than it was in the before-
| times. Wally has always been able to skate along with a certain
| amount of meeting-attending.
| mavhc wrote:
| If you can't tell whether your employees are working, why do
| you even have employees? Imagine how much money you'll save.
| smorgusofborg wrote:
| Then you have to get out of all the work you were assigning
| them yourself. Much better to leave it to a specialist!
| nmstoker wrote:
| Yes, but remember in the scenario you're replying to, you
| cannot tell if they've done the work. So assigning to the
| specialist you mention might as well mean tossing the job
| requests into the bin.
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's like the adage about advertising: you don't know which
| ones are effective.
| gedy wrote:
| Most companies I've worked for use "I can see them at their
| desk" or meeting attendance as the primary measure of "your
| employees are working".
| rcurry wrote:
| I worked for a computer security company once, it was my
| first real programming job and I had no experience with the
| kind of crazy stuff that goes on with hiring, I was really
| naive and had no clue that certain kinds of people existed in
| the workforce.
|
| So one day my boss (CTO) calls me up and says "Hey, we are
| hiring another Windows guy, can you do a quick interview and
| check him out?" (I was the only Windows dev at the time) So
| they send me the guy's resume and he's a PhD in Electrical
| Engineering. I feel really nervous about having to interview
| the guy because he had a PhD, but I figured other people had
| already checked him out so I meet with him and just have kind
| of a softball interview, not going into a technical deep dive
| or anything like that. He seems alright and has a ton of
| experience, so I figured what the hell.
|
| Well about a month later my boss calls me again and he's like
| "Hey, we've been having some concerns about John Doe, can you
| check in on him and see how he's doing?"
|
| So I go over to John Doe's office and sit down with him and
| talk about what he's been doing. He shows me that he's having
| trouble with some things that are so basic that it's almost
| like he's never even seen a Windows machine, much less done
| any programming on one; and I'm not exaggerating, it was
| really that bad!
|
| Long story short, they let him go. A few days after, I'm in
| the break room and one of the Unix guys walks in. He asks me
| how things are going and I'm like "Well, not so good, we're
| back to just one Windows developer because they had to let
| the new guy go." He says "Who was that?" So I tell him "this
| guy John Doe..." and before I can go any further he exclaims
| "Good God! Not THE John Doe?!?" Apparently this guy was a
| legend in the IT community in the city - he would fake
| resumes and get hired for as long as he could run the scam.
| amrrs wrote:
| I'll present an alternate case, mine. I'm in a senior IC role
| sitting in India making almost 1/4th of what my US Counterpart
| makes. I work as much as them if not more. We as Indians are
| always taught to be sincere and obedient and I try to show that
| in my work trying to stay up finish the work so that my
| sincerity is never questioned. I'm always on the side to prove
| my quality - even though I'm highly underpaid for the same
| work.
|
| Overall, I'm someone who needs to prove everytime that I'm
| sincere and I'm intellectual while I'm known only for being a
| cheap resource.
| engineerthrwawy wrote:
| Your criticism is fair. However "obedient" isn't always what
| an engineering organization needs. Many times, I wish that
| our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see
| something wrong, about process, quality, or business
| requests. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing or what, but
| it seems they are more hesitant to speak out. It has been my
| anecdotal observation that our US-born hires are way quicker
| to say something to management if they feel something is
| wrong.
|
| I mean no disrespect, by this observation.
| sombremesa wrote:
| An example of what happens when you "speak out" (read: do
| anything but be servile) in India:
| https://twitter.com/Reashiee/status/1484811188844199936
|
| > Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers,
| would speak out when they see something wrong, about
| process, quality, or business requests.
|
| > our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to
| management if they feel something is wrong
|
| Apparently the obvious and easy solution here is to only
| get US-born hires. So why don't you?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Apparently the obvious and easy solution here is to
| only get US-born hires. So why don 't you?_
|
| This seems to be an unnecessarily aggressive take on it.
|
| If I (an American) were working for an Indian company, I
| would plan to learn and understand what the culture is
| like in Indian companies, and then do my best to conform
| to that. If I didn't believe I'd feel comfortable in that
| environment, then I wouldn't take the job. I would expect
| an Indian working at an American company to do the same.
|
| I get that it can be difficult, and that some of these
| cultural things aren't just _company_ culture, but are
| deeply ingrained, real cultural differences between
| people of different backgrounds.
|
| Having said all that, I do think a US manager who hires
| reports from India (or from any other country with a
| different culture than the US) should be aware of what
| cultural differences exist, and try to meet their
| employees in the middle as much as they can.
|
| I do agree with the grandparent, though, that I don't
| want to work with people who are "obedient", at least in
| the way I'm guessing the great-grandparent meant (perhaps
| I'm inferring the meaning incorrectly, though). I agree
| that I want people who won't just do what management
| says, and will instead apply critical thinking to the
| work they get assigned, and question things that don't
| make sense.
| Slaminerag wrote:
| I remember reading about a team (I think in Japan) which
| had a "brash foreigner." If someone noticed something,
| they'd mention it to the foreigner, who would bring it up
| with higher ups. Everybody won. Problems got fixed, the
| foreigner was safe because they "didn't know better," and
| their coworkers felt safe.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I was today years old when I discovered that the perfect
| job for me _does_ exist
| scrollaway wrote:
| FYI, if you want that job and don't happen to be in
| Japan, this is exactly what consultants are hired for in
| many cases: To be a blunt voice of reason in an
| environment which isn't able to listen to itself.
|
| I've many times been hired in companies to say things
| employees didn't have the political clout to say out
| loud. If anything goes wrong, or someone isn't happy, I'm
| the fall guy.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _I 'm highly underpaid for the same work._
|
| A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers
| is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than
| the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while
| still having a good quality of life.
|
| So comparing your salary to American workers doesn't really
| say anything about whether or not you're "underpaid", but
| it's how your salary compares to others in your area. If you
| just want to earn more money, you could move to the USA, but
| there's a cost associated with that (even ignoring the
| difficulty in getting a work visa) and you may find that your
| "1/4 salary" is worth more at home that it is in the USA.|
|
| There are certainly a lot of employees that have moved away
| from the SF Bay Area to take a job in an area with a lower
| cost of living and even though they make significiantly less
| money, they still have a better quality of life (in
| particular, they can afford a house)
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| I feel this personally, as a non-white person.
| angrais wrote:
| Are you paid a fair market rate for your geographical
| location in India?
|
| (i.e., are other local companies offering worse or better
| benefits?)
| manmal wrote:
| If they earn the equivalent of 30-50k (25% of a US senior
| IC), I imagine they can afford a decent standard of living,
| eg in Mumbai.
| no1lives4ever wrote:
| These days, equavalent salaries in india are between 1/4th
| to 1/2 of equavalent american or uk salary for the same
| job. Adjusting for cost of living is a bit tricky as there
| are many things which are cheaper in India, but many things
| that a sw developer may want to buy are not so. In general
| electronic items are a bit more expensive in India, but
| things like rent, cost of food, clothing, cost of a basic
| car are lesser here in India. OTOH, mostly it is not apples
| to apples comparison. e.g. you can get cars for 5-8000 usd
| here in India, but those cars would most likely be illegal
| to sell in the US. When the manufacturers sell the same
| exact model here in India, the prices are a lot higher.
|
| So if OP says that they get 1/4th of the salary that people
| from US get for same role, then I feel that he is most
| likely underpaid.
| scotty79 wrote:
| This isn't limited to remote employees.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are
| out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks
| and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough
| to press the issue.
|
| I'll take a stab at it, and predict... all of them. Or nearly
| so. There seems to be an ever-present fraction of employees at
| any large corporation that are essentially worthless. Just
| along for the ride, raking in a paycheck while someone else
| does the meaningful work.
|
| We've had stories here on HN about people exploiting it.
| There's a moment, I think, in many developers' careers where it
| occurs to them that there is almost never any reward for hard
| work. And when you're a wage slave for a large corporation,
| it's easy to blur the morality until it feels okay to take
| advantage of the situation.
|
| When I find myself starting to think such thoughts, I know that
| it's time for me to move on to another opportunity. And a
| smaller company, even though it pays less, because it's better
| for your soul.
| peter303 wrote:
| "Where's my red stapler?"
| soared wrote:
| From my experience once you have ~1,000 employees AND a
| complicated org chart/raci/etc then it's fairly easy for
| people to do little work and hide. In smaller orgs too many
| people see you, and in orgs that are running efficiently if
| you don't do your job it causes issues.
|
| Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)
| agumonkey wrote:
| And then there's turnover. People might just never get to
| know those people. Some may proactively avoid contacts
| through various means so nobody steps into their office
| only to realize nothing happens.
| pphysch wrote:
| We had a remote freeloader find a position at Oracle before
| his short-term contract with us was done.
|
| Onward and upward :)
| Tade0 wrote:
| I'll do you one better. My friends from a team I used to
| be in had a guy who simply didn't know how to code. My
| friend would at times act as a ghostwriter(for free) so
| that the poor bastard wouldn't get fired.
|
| Eventually the guy was _promoted_.
|
| The Dilbert principle is real.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Management often spends so little time with you that the
| difference between them perceiving lots of work and
| little work comes down to what you say in your daily
| standup.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| My problem with big orgs is how inefficient they can be.
|
| At IBM I worked 5 hours a week and still was in the top 20%
| of my team.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's as if the Robin Hood mentality met with Jack Sparrow:
| take what you can and give nothing back. However, they aren't
| interested in the well-being of the company because they have
| more important places to put their effort and dime, such as
| hobbies or their family. It's an aversion to doing 50% more
| work for a 15% raise.
| Osiris wrote:
| In the software industry it should be pretty easy to track
| tickets someone is working on and compare that to how long
| similar tickets are completed by coworkers.
| chefkoch wrote:
| That would need a boss who knows how much work each ticket
| really entails.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| With low level coding cogs that might be somewhat feasible,
| if you have enough of them. But there are a few things that
| I've seen which get in the way of that kind of metric.
|
| 1. Story pointing is not granular enough, i.e. one 2-point
| story is not necessarily the same as the next one.
| Freeloaders pick off the easy ones and pace themselves to
| keep their 'productivity' in the acceptable range.
|
| 2. I've seen a lot of teams, especially smaller ones,
| evolve into a situation where each member has an area they
| specialize in. Then stories start getting preassigned to
| them. Hard to compare two coders not pulling from the same
| pool of work.
|
| 3. As an IC becomes more senior, a larger fraction of their
| work happens outside of stories, and becomes more difficult
| to quantify. Some of the most effective freeloaders I've
| witnessed were mid/senior devs who could crank out a
| typical story very fast and craft plausible explanations
| for where the rest of their time went.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > or maybe they're just trying to travel the world and do a
| "four hour workweek" thing where they answer e-mails once a day
| and phone in a couple hours of work at key times during the
| week.
|
| I've seen it work exactly once.
|
| The guy was absolutely brilliant, however. And a great
| communicator. But everything had to be done asynchronously for
| the most part, except a few slots where he was guaranteed to
| have good network and be able to hop on a conference call. He
| was also a performance advocate, since everything had to work
| great on his laptop with poor network and contributed several
| patches to make the dev experience better. He was a stellar
| communicator with emails and knew the codebase really well and
| since he responded in batch he gave a lot of context in his
| responses (because he wouldn't often know what the response
| would be for another day or two).
| kelnos wrote:
| I think the key thing here is that even though he was placing
| a burden on his employer and teammates, the arrangement was
| well understood by both parties, and the employer agreed to
| accept it.
|
| If someone wants to do something non-traditional and not
| inform the company about it, then the onus is on the employee
| to make sure their "odd" work habits don't impact others
| negatively.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The irony of this is what does a business do. It tries to find
| a way to efficiently serve multiple customers, keeping them
| happy, giving them value etc. In order to make more money than
| you would make by serving a single customer. Look at is as more
| of a scrap on the blurred business/employee lines, as much as a
| moral outrage or failing. Often a job is "we want you to
| survive but not fly, .... so that we can".
| varispeed wrote:
| > Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are
| out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks
| and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough
| to press the issue.
|
| There are corporations that over-hire and often provide no work
| at all for weeks or months, but they require that worker is
| always on stand-by in case there is a surge. I know full-time
| workers who throughout an entire year maybe done one or two
| small PR-s, but when suddenly there is an issue needing solving
| and product teams have full capacity, these people save the
| day. They are sometimes also utilised for pairing, when given
| product team members have no spare capacity. From someone not
| knowing this, they indeed may seem like deadbeat employees, but
| the key is - they have to be always available during work hours
| even if no one contacts them for weeks.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| We once had a contractor who interviewed pretty well. After a
| while I noticed that it was impossible to have a technical
| discussion with him. He only took notes and never said much. I
| also noticed that he never delivered anything the same day. He
| took notes and then next morning it was done. I once told him to
| fix a simple bug NOW and had him sit next to me. He starred at
| the screen for several hours and did nothing. And not
| unsurprisingly it was done the next day. We came to the
| conclusion that he had a ghostwriter somewhere else who would do
| the actual work from the contractor's notes.
|
| Problem was that the ghostwriter was not a great dev either and
| wrote bad code. So we had to let him /them go. The contractor is
| now a principal developer/ team lead at another company......
| josefresco wrote:
| If the "ghostwriter" was good, would you have cared?
| teej wrote:
| It's typically a good idea to know the folks you've given
| code access to.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think the example parent gave was enough to answer that: if
| there was a critical issue that needed to be fixed in hours,
| this employee would have been unable to do it.
|
| (Also agree with the sibling about it being good to know who
| you're giving access to your company's resources and private
| information. If someone is willing to lie about their skills
| and have someone else do their work overnight, what other
| sketchy things might they be doing without your knowledge?)
| lormayna wrote:
| Couple of year ago, my team was hiring an employee in India
| through Teams interviews. Local HR warned us to mandatory ask to
| the candidates to switch on the camera, because person exchange
| after the interviews is quite common.
| wayanon wrote:
| Fascinating if one person is interviewing for many roles then
| sending in proxies to do the jobs in return for a kickback.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| It's quite possible the guy was running 3 or 4 jobs at once. It
| happens.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| The worst thing about this case, if its true, is that this kind
| of thing will poison the pool for others. for legit people.
|
| its already getting a little nauseating with the number of shops
| who insist on coding tests -- for people with tons of evidence
| already that they are legit programmers. This type of incident
| will be used to justify even more creepy and insulting behaviors
| on the employer's side. everybody loses
| ijustwanttovote wrote:
| This has happened to me before. The person I was interviewing and
| the person who was doing the coding during the interview were not
| the same.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Record the interviews. Problem solved.
| jonas21 wrote:
| And now you have a new problem that you've just signaled to all
| prospective employees that you don't trust them.
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| Recording without consent is illegal in some states (CA, for
| example)
| endisneigh wrote:
| _audio_ recording is. video is ok IIRC
| advisedwang wrote:
| I've seen legal depts fight against this. They're worried the
| recording will capture some question or comment that could be
| evidence of discrimination. (e.g. someone asks "Did you have a
| good Christmas?" and is later accused of discriminating against
| non-Christians)
| endisneigh wrote:
| it's unnecessary to record the audio to solve the problem
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Very common with overseas contractors. Often the person
| communicating has good English skills, but they swap in a friend
| etc for the actual work.
|
| In some cases fine (you'll actually get both of them to
| eventually show up on calls together with some random excuse).
| Other times less fine (basically a scam).
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Sounds like the "fine" case is a scam as well. You're too
| lenient.
| Tenoke wrote:
| If the work is getting done, whether by 2 or 1 person what
| are they scamming you of?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Software development work has more attributes to it than a
| binary "done" / "not done". The quality of what you get is
| going to be orders a magnitude worse when the work is being
| done by a team of cheaters compared to when it's done by an
| honest person who didn't cheat to score a job.
| wayanon wrote:
| This reminds me of the Trump 'Four Seasons' media event.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| This article (and all of the anecdotes surrounding it) has opened
| my eyes quite a bit. However, it actually reads to me more like a
| "How to get better at this kind of thing" than a cautionary tale.
| There are even comments acting as such here.
|
| Fraud hurts us all. Even (especially?) the people who think they
| are benefitting from it.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The other side happens too: my business partner, early on in his
| career, interviewed and was hired into a video-processing
| software company.
|
| He shows up, the building is empty but for a secretary and one
| guy on the third floor. A Japanese company had bought them for
| the customer list, and they were now just to support folks
| locally. He quit after a week or two, after finding a real job.
|
| Some time later he met the guy who had interviewed him, and asked
| about it. His response: "I lost my hiring referral bonus when you
| quit! I'll forgive you for quitting, if you forgive me for hiring
| you!" See, the guy was already half out the door when he hired my
| partner, knowing he would report to a nearly empty building.
|
| That was 20 years ago. Stuff like this has been happening
| forever. I guess now its on a production-line basis.
| savrajsingh wrote:
| This exact scenario played out at a friend's company a few months
| ago. Fortunately someone had a screenshot of the "you're hired!"
| Zoom call so they could quickly confirm their suspicions and take
| action.
| friendlydog wrote:
| If you interview at enough companies you can find one that allows
| a Gattaca to slip through. Of the subset of companies that allows
| that some companies let people float without doing any real work
| for a long time. The longer they coast the more likely they can
| find a corner to hide in. There is no penalty for them to try
| this approach. Even if you caught them in a lie the effort to
| make them pay for their actions means they likely will never be
| responsible.
|
| One company I worked with checked government issued ids at every
| stage of the interview process. I'm sure people will find a way
| around this. This also opens your company to discrimination
| lawsuits, "everything was going fine in the interview until I
| turned on the camera, then they didn't hire me."
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _...Cyrano de Bergerac'd their interview._
|
| That's a great phrase, though I don't get people who do this kind
| of thing. But then I was also the killjoy in some college class
| when other people were like "Yes! Let's just _skip_ more stuff
| and pass anyway! " and I went "Uh, no. What if you actually need
| to _know_ that stuff for a future class or a job?! "
|
| Everyone glared at me. They just wanted an easy A (or easy
| passing grade). Apparently no one but me was actually interested
| in _learning_ anything when they signed up for the class.
|
| (Smacks head on desk.)
|
| (Context: the professor had announced we were skipping something
| due to time constraints.)
| oneepic wrote:
| Most comments here are not mentioning TFA, but I wanted to point
| out this line:
|
| > Their security teams are trying to discover what all he
| downloaded, if they'll be able to get their equipment back, is
| John really his real name, etc. !!
|
| _If_ they 'll be able to get their equipment back? Incredible.
| not1ofU wrote:
| Equipment comes back with a rootkit installed, plot twist, he
| wanted to get caught :-D
| kelnos wrote:
| I mean, it's up to "John" to actually send it back to them. And
| if he doesn't, the cost to get it back via the courts is
| probably more than it's worth.
| david-cako wrote:
| just hire new people every year so you always have exactly who
| you want
| [deleted]
| klausjensen wrote:
| This is what the large Indian IT-outsourcing companies do at
| scale.
|
| When they need to win the contract, they bring in bright and very
| qualified people to win the client-org over.
|
| After the contract is won and the work begins, they replace them
| with completely unqualified staff, managed/whipped by moustache-
| wielding blue-shirts to read from support-scripts.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| That's not the same thing. The "completely unqualified staff"
| is not pretending to be the same persons as the "bright and
| very qualified people" who interviewed. There's no deception
| involved, just transparently bad business practices.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's not the same thing, to be sure, but this is certainly
| deception.
| klausjensen wrote:
| The IT outsourcing companies do this at scale, pretending to
| be something during interview - and then really being
| something completely different once the "job" is won. It is
| deception as a business model.
|
| It is not the fault of the "unqualified staff" at all.
|
| Anyway, that is my take on it. Feel free to have a different
| opinion.
| sudoaza wrote:
| Were the interviews online? Couldn't John study a recording of
| those to know who Holly is and bring up some story to explain
| some of the other odd stuff? I wonder how long you can pull this
| off without knowing your stuff.
| ljm wrote:
| I've been involved in more than a handful of interviews where it
| was clear that the candidate was wearing an earpiece or getting
| answers from someone else. Never hired an actual impostor like in
| TFA, but the signs of someone cheating the interview were pretty
| clear.
|
| All we had to do was go off script and we'd have a good idea
| about how genuine the candidate was being.
| jollybean wrote:
| This one might be a little bit different though.
|
| It's one thing to have outright fraud, or people who want to
| screw over your company for a free paycheck.
|
| Having someone early in their career, really nervous and
| wanting to succeed ... I can just see a college dorm buddy
| saying 'hey man, I'll get you the answers from Google!'.
|
| It might have a kind of 'immature prank' element to it as
| opposed to 'nefarious intentions'.
|
| If this happened to me with a kid just out of college, and they
| were visibly nervous, I'd actually ask them to take it out and
| have conversation with them about what that kind of behaviour
| implies, why it's wrong, that they are lacking in self
| awareness to think they are going to get away with it.
|
| I also feel that some people grow up in cultures and family /
| community situations which are just completely toxic. They have
| no faith, belief or understanding of how people get along in
| normal, productive societies. They've never remotely been
| exposed to a professional environment.
|
| In fact, professional behaviour is a hallmark of well organized
| civilizations and hiring people from any place that is not '1st
| world' you get these kinds of issue quite often. It happens
| everywhere obviously, just more often in places with zero
| exposure to certain kinds of social socialization.
|
| Finally, I believe that these kinds of problems are going to be
| more common with remote work as one of those issues for which
| we have yet to contend with. Anyone who's worked with offshore
| teams understand the struggle, now we're going to have those
| issues with greater preponderance in remote orgs.
| smallerfish wrote:
| I did an interview like that once where I could actually hear
| the colleague whispering answers to the candidate, during
| awkward pauses between when I asked a question and the
| candidate responded. I asked him "are you getting help from
| somebody" and he straight up denied it.
| mod_mouse wrote:
| If you have a common name, there are probably people on LinkedIn
| with much better CVs than yours.
|
| Their references should work for you.
| dhosek wrote:
| I expected the "not the same person" to be more metaphorical than
| literal. Imagine my surprise.
| covermydonkey wrote:
| At my Big Corp (tm) we've had HCL and TCM send one candidate for
| interview and drop off different people entirely. HR caught on
| when HCL started dropping off men when we had specifically
| selected several women.
| propogandist wrote:
| what if they identified as female?
| octobus2021 wrote:
| Had similar experience in 2017. We interviewed many candidates
| (10+) for the position, narrowed down to about 5 in the second
| round and decided to hire one. All over the phone. Took maybe 2
| months. So when the guy shows up in the office my manager was
| like "Who are you? I never spoke with you.". We made some noise
| with HR and later Legal and he left right away, and the
| consulting company we went through had some conversations with
| the executives. From that point on we set some rules: require
| candidates to provide video feed, take screenshots, ideally
| record at least part of the interview, document every single
| question. Funny thing, had a very promising candidate for another
| position short time later but she kept refusing to turn on the
| camera, it was either broken, or connection was slow, or
| something else... So we rejected her because of that.
|
| I believe there are some unofficial services that provide well
| spoken/knowledgeable professionals that will help you get hired,
| it's either directly through headhunting company or they might
| suggest (wink-wink) one for you.
| chefkoch wrote:
| Just wait what happens when people start to deep fake virtual
| interviews.
| eric_b wrote:
| This used to happen to a company I was consulting at all the
| time. It was mostly in the context of hiring H1B workers from
| India. The company would interview "the ringer" in India - the
| guy was poised, articulate, knew the answers to all the questions
| etc. etc. But the guy who showed up didn't know anything, usually
| had difficulty with the language etc. This was pre-Zoom so it was
| all phone screens, making it much harder to be sure.
|
| However, years later I was telling this story to a Wipro
| recruiter who said casually:
|
| "Oh yeah, we call it the Hindu Switcheroo" (I kid you not)
| hourislate wrote:
| This is especially true with Indian H1B's. A company I was doing
| work for complained that they were burned at least 3 times. They
| got someone else who wasn't the person they interviewed. Wasn't a
| big deal since they would let them go immediately. What's funny
| is folks were asking are you sure? The manager would say yes I'm
| sure, I'm Indian and I know who I spoke to during the interview
| and it wasn't this guy.
| chillytoes wrote:
| This also happened to me. I interviewed someone from an IT
| staffing agency. Seemed perfect. A different person showed up for
| the job, and he knew next to nothing about IT.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good
| culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in
| learning.
|
| We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of
| the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And
| his communication was great!
|
| After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and
| to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling,
| uncorrected typos... It got so bad that we had to have someone
| review all e-mails he sent to customers.
|
| We had regular "improvement plan" meetings with him, but after a
| year of paying him, we had to let him go. As part of the exit
| interview we went back and looked at his interview e-mails, and
| compared them with his current e-mails. So we asked him:
|
| "During the interview, all your e-mails were great! Why was
| that?"
|
| "My wife wrote all of those."
|
| I guess we should have hired his wife!
| giantg2 wrote:
| My (professional) written communication is a strong point for
| me. What kind of job has mostly sending emails as the work?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| In my team, Duty Managers / Service Delivery Managers /
| Operations Managers. Communication in every which direction
| is #1 skillset I look for in the team (as well as being
| organized, disciplined, eager to learn, sense of ownership).
|
| A lot of the job is talking to technical teams, talking to
| functional teams, talking to business teams, talking to
| management and executives; translate, summarize, liaison, co-
| ordinate, plan and inform. Customize medium, format, length,
| message for each group to enhance understanding. Develop
| spidey sense of paranoia against assumptions,
| misunderstandings.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "eager to learn, sense of ownership"
|
| Well, that disqualifies me. The way most organizations tie
| your hands means one is given all the responsibility
| without real authority. I'm completely unmotivated because
| of that.
|
| Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Downvoting on HN is fickle; sometimes it's the point
| that's being made, sometimes it's how it's being made. I
| think asking "have I meaningfully contributed to
| conversation" is part of it... but a lot of downvotes
| comes as emotional response or simple disagreement. You
| can choose whether to take it seriously and grow/change
| to satisfy it, or be yourself and take votes in passing.
|
| That being said - sad to hear you are not eager to learn
| and don't have sense of ownership; you are correct that
| disqualifies you from some roles (most, in a way, but
| recruitment process is all sort of obscure and counter-
| logical).
|
| For what little it may be worth: it mostly comes back to
| the old proverb of "courage to change things you can,
| accept things you cannot, wisdom to know the difference,
| and zen to make peace with it". I try to coach my team
| members very early on "these are things that are part of
| organizational machine; satisfy them so you are done with
| them. These are the things where you can make a
| difference and where most of your value will be
| concentrated. Focus on those once you've fed the
| machine".
|
| I think part of disillusionment, at least it was mine, is
| the feeling that somebody somewhere, and ideally
| ourselves, should have all the necessary power. In
| reality, we all operate within constraints, more or less
| visible or scrutable.
|
| Ultimately, life is imperfect, professional life
| included; it's a life's pursuit for most of us on how to
| grow our own acceptance and peace with it. Sometimes we
| make that change within ourselves, sometimes we are able
| to make an external change that aligns more with our
| priorities.
|
| Best of luck!
| justin_oaks wrote:
| I once was a team lead for an team of outsourced software
| developers. It was the worst part of my career. The whole
| outsourced team was awful. Wholly incompetent.
|
| I had the responsibility of delivering a product, but I
| didn't have the authority to fire these folks who were a
| net negative on the project. I would have been happier
| with implementing the whole project myself, which I
| mostly did.
|
| I too was unmotivated, but the stress of being
| responsible was unbearable.
|
| Perhaps some people disagree that "most organizations"
| give responsibility without authority, but I've seen it
| happen a several times in my career.
| EsotericAlgo wrote:
| I've left positions for similar reasons.
|
| Another strain of this is forcing some COTS application
| to work via a million hacks and integrations (usually via
| consulting resources) when a fundamental architecture or
| application change is needed. Responsibility coupled with
| the resource and authority to execute is stressful in its
| own way but it at least allows one to more easily own
| their failures.
| throwaway6532 wrote:
| I have also been bitten by this and I also ascribe it as
| the worst part of my career.
|
| A warning to anyone who hasn't experienced this, if
| you're ever tasked with doing this the correct answer is
| "no" followed by "goodbye".
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| You know what they say, if you can't change your
| workplace .. change your workplace!
| linsomniac wrote:
| We were a Linux System Administration consultancy. The
| product wasn't the e-mails, but nearly everything we did for
| our clients was designed/planned, scheduled, organized, and
| documented in e-mail. Yes, sometimes we would work on things
| with the client on the phone, those were usually followed up
| with an e-mail about what was done.
|
| These e-mails were copied to our internal mailing lists so
| that they could be peer reviewed and someone else could be
| cross-trained on it in case the primary wasn't available.
| Also, every task we did had a one sentence description
| written up that would be shared with the team, again as a
| kind of peer review.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Ok, thanks. All my Linux skills (which weren't many to
| begin with) are basically gone since it's all cloud now.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| What's running in the cloud if not Linux?
| giantg2 wrote:
| If you run "serverless" It's all hidden from you.
| beamatronic wrote:
| Not to mention it's all deployed with Terraform now. You
| can stand up and configure thousands of servers without
| the command line
| cperciva wrote:
| FreeBSD!
| petesergeant wrote:
| Recruitment
| giantg2 wrote:
| Ok, thanks
| ct0 wrote:
| HR
| giantg2 wrote:
| Interesting, but I guess they don't get paid well.
| ct0 wrote:
| Its relative. I know plenty of data nerds making 6
| figures in HR.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 6 figures would be good
|
| Edit: Thanks! Looking at internal data analyst roles in
| my HR dept (weird that they aren't under a technical job
| code, so I wasn't seeing them before). Maybe I'll apply
| to one.
| [deleted]
| robofanatic wrote:
| any customer facing job I guess. like sales, marketing,
| support, PR?
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Product/Software support. Above the Tier 1 level, at the
| stage where you're talking with the Dev team directly.
|
| Developers don't want to talk to customers. So you need
| someone who can understand either the code or the developer's
| comments, but can then put it in layman's terms.
|
| Edit: DevOps, too.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm in a DevSecOps role and hate it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Why downvote my experiences?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > "My wife wrote all of those."
|
| There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a
| friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write
| code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments
| into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure
| already being in the file.
|
| Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she
| generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors
| that her husband or someone in her home country was doing the
| work (would have been daytime over there). Nobody really
| complained. She wore a hijab and the company had just hired
| it's first "diversity officer" so maybe that's why. Thankfully
| they stopped using that vendor not long after.
| pmarreck wrote:
| >She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first
| "diversity officer" so maybe that's why
|
| At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse
| incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with
| qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be
| a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that
| there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm
| wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try
| to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10%
| loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more
| than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that
| diversity provides us")
| heurisko wrote:
| I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether
| you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just
| hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring
| policy.
| knodi123 wrote:
| Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous
| diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a
| diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a
| white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if
| you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their
| salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff
| basically for free. The catch was the program only paid
| for one year, so she knew from the first day that she had
| exactly one year to prove that she was worth the same
| salary as the other staff. Obviously she did, and was
| quickly elevated to on-screen talent, and her star just
| kept climbing.
|
| But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder;
| that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain
| type of person.
| tomcam wrote:
| > basically for free
|
| Well they got a bargain. She's immensely talented. She
| hates my politics but damn can she write. Her first
| memoir is one of the funniest things I've ever read
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was
| considered "diverse".
|
| There has been this trend of diversity reporting to list
| Whites and Asians together in stats. Google has been
| notorious for this [0] and others are following the trend
| when it seems convenient [1].
|
| [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-
| recruiter-accu...
|
| [1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-
| asians-wi...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was
| considered "diverse".
|
| Asians are current and historic targets of
| discrimination. This sometimes gets masked in outcome
| stats because lots of Asians in the US are themselves or
| first generation descendants of immigrants through
| programs which filter for the top end of the
| socioeconomic, and more particularly recently technical
| skills, spectrum.
| hraedon wrote:
| Whatever problems the current system has, it isn't as if
| the system being replaced ever hired people primarily on
| "merit."
|
| The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if
| they were the best candidates for the job, so why should
| anyone today give it a second thought?
| heurisko wrote:
| This conversation is referring to a specific phenomenon
| that has become strongly noticeable in the last 5 years
| or so.
|
| That problems of nepotism, or cronyism have already
| existed to some extent, is another conversation.
|
| I also don't know why "merit" is in quotes. Hiring based
| on merit is going to be the main goal for companies that
| are not corrupt.
|
| Corruption should also be discouraged e.g. by stopping
| companies becoming "too big to fail", or by being anti-
| competitive, or by actually creating legislation that
| actually protects against discrimination, rather than by
| perpetuating it.
|
| That corruption exists, is not an argument to ignore
| corruption in another form.
| hraedon wrote:
| I know what the conversation is referring to, and my
| response is in regards to the naivete demonstrated by
| responses like yours. The problems of today are different
| only in particular application, not in motivation or
| nature.
|
| "Merit" as I understand it--who can best perform the job
| --has almost never been the primary hiring
| characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and
| those people are almost always the ones making the
| ultimate decisions. In hiring, this means that "merit"
| almost always means something different or is a secondary
| consideration behind more personal factors. "Is diverse"
| doesn't really strike me as inherently more corrupt a
| trait than "went to the same school I did" or "is a
| member of the same country club I am," though why it gets
| a lot more attention is certainly not a mystery.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I don't think the majority of hires at large companies in
| the past were corrupt. Certainly that hasn't been my
| experience hiring people at large tech orgs in the
| present, and the process hasn't changed terribly much
| really. Given the scarcity of technical ability, we
| simply can't afford the corruption.
|
| You seem to be discounting the meritocratic process by
| which people end up graduating from high-ranking schools.
| Prestigious law firms for instance will only consider
| graduates from specific institutions, specifically
| because they act as a filter for talent and ability.
|
| You also seem to be conflating the hiring of people who
| are culturally similar to corruption. In fact there are
| many benefits in collaborating in a culturally homogenous
| environment. Maintaining such an environment in order to
| reap those benefits has merit too.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > Companies are comprised of people and those people are
| almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions.
|
| What would be an example of a company where "those
| people" (who comprise the company) are not making "the
| ultimate decisions"?
| hraedon wrote:
| This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the
| fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these
| decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to
| filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed.
|
| If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque
| reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think
| it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions
| as decisions not being made by the people in the company.
| Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement
| and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very
| strongly.
| heurisko wrote:
| > I know what the conversation is referring to, and my
| response is in regards to the naivete demonstrated by
| responses like yours
|
| Please read some autobiographies of people from diverse
| backgrounds trying to break into atypical careers, the
| topic of imposter syndrome and anxieties about wanting to
| be taken on one's own merits regularly features.
| hraedon wrote:
| I don't disagree, but my point was that they shouldn't.
| Clarence Thomas famously wrote about believing that his
| own success was tainted by affirmative action, and later
| he was indeed appointed to the Supreme Court primarily
| because he was a black conservative. That doesn't mean he
| was unqualified or less fit for the court than previous
| appointees, no matter what his own insecurities were, and
| it also doesn't mean that he or our society would have
| somehow been better served by Clarence Thomas not being
| given any of the opportunities affirmative action
| programs may have afforded him.
|
| The deeper problem is that there isn't really a solution
| here. The old system wasn't neutral and instead actively
| discriminated against huge swathes of the population.
| That the beneficiaries of that system never doubted their
| worthiness doesn't make the old system better, and any
| change that impacts them will suffer from the same
| aspersions about a lack of "merit" that we are seeing
| now.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| On the other hand it must be nice getting paid above your
| abilities, which is (one of) the common outcomes of
| diversity hiring, isn't it?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > tangible benefits to more diversity
|
| People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched,
| but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the
| actually research that supports that claim.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| There are real world examples that support that claim.
| Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to
| everyone." Having internal people from different
| demographic groups helped with things like cultural
| sensitivity.
|
| But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and
| probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of
| X type demographic is not it.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example.
| I've never seen any research that supports this claim for
| engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR
| itself.
| bradlys wrote:
| Probably hard to research.
|
| How would you measure it for software engineering? Number
| of bugs? Number of features requested after initial
| project launch? Time to completion? All of those things
| have too many variables involved for any given
| organization. We already have a hard time measuring
| ability/quality of software engineers as it is.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal
| one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful
| criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone
| instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish
| criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else,
| the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with
| anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc"
|
| If you optimize for hiring _the best_ rather than _the
| best of X demographic_ you should see a higher bar being
| met. And this is where excluding other demographics
| potentially harm 's outcomes but it's also the same
| reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve
| performance.
| djhn wrote:
| Which one was that?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| IIRC: Al Capone.
| tomcam wrote:
| The US government
| blindmute wrote:
| I don't believe there is any actual research about it. It
| doesn't even pass the smell test; why would a company of
| people who have a hard time relating to one another and
| socially meshing perform better? If homogeneity in a
| country increases social trust and other positive factors
| (it does), why are we trying to create the opposite
| situation in a company?
| RankingMember wrote:
| > Profitability is, of course, necessary to keep any
| business alive, and studies show that racial, ethnic, and
| gender diversity contribute to business success. A
| McKinsey & Company study of 366 companies revealed a
| statistically significant connection between diversity
| and financial performance. The companies in the top
| quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to
| have financial returns that were above their national
| industry median, and the companies in the top quartile
| for racial/ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have
| financial returns above their national industry median.
|
| https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/july-2020/why-
| sho...
| rurp wrote:
| Are there any studies demonstrating causality? I can
| think of plenty of reasons diversity would correlate with
| success. For example, being based in a large city will
| have a lot of advantages for many businesses, along with
| having a more diverse hiring pool available that will
| naturally lead to a more diverse staff. But this doesn't
| suggest to me that adding a diversity quota or similar
| policy, all else being equal, will help a company
| succeed.
| jlawson wrote:
| Confounded by the fact that succesful companies are
| located in growing areas (or move there), which is where
| immigrants also want to go. E.g. San Francisco.
|
| I want to see this with some serious attempt to reduce
| the confounding.
|
| Also it doesn't demonstrate cause and effect as stated in
| the quote. It's perfectly possible in this data that
| diversity makes companies less successful - but being
| successful in the first place is what creates the 'slack'
| that leads to a company pursuing diversity policies. They
| only go diversity when they can afford the cost incurred.
| t-3 wrote:
| Cynically, couldn't these results be due to lower average
| wages offered to women and minorities?
| [deleted]
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| Oddly enough, once a friend of mine was hired to work on a
| project which one of the selling points was that it was
| designed and implemented by women.
|
| He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project.
| Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care
| about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because
| they were well aware about what's happening?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Sounds like she got all her work done on time.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Well, someone definitely got all her work done.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Goodluck getting her to help solve an issue in her code in
| a timely manner
| nicodjimenez wrote:
| > I guess we should have hired his wife!
|
| Classic comment.
| intpx wrote:
| I recently went through a round of interviews for a job where
| strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just
| me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the
| interviewer could see me work through the responses. In
| addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also
| had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the
| product was my actual work effort.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Dear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning,
| but corresponding with people -- especially in formal
| settings -- makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-
| composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my
| messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being
| watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.
| gzer0 wrote:
| This is commonly referred to as Yerkes-Dodson Law [1]. This
| is typically where one's performance, whilst performing a
| task and being watched while doing said task, will result
| in decreased output compared to if the individual was not
| being watched at all.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law
| dahfizz wrote:
| Sounds like the interview would effectively filter out
| candidates that would not be a good fit for a job that is
| mostly corresponding with people.
| WalterSear wrote:
| IMHO, to the contrary: crafting one's message is a valid
| process for effective async communication.
| Swizec wrote:
| Not if the job entails writing 50 of those per day and
| you can't manage more than 5
| lazide wrote:
| Sounds like that type of job might not be a good fit for
| you? You'd always be anxious!
| emerged wrote:
| It might be the fact that people are monitoring how the
| sausage is made with the explicit purpose of judging that
| process.
|
| But when working with people in the normal job, nobody is
| watching them type they just eat the sausage.
|
| I can relate. I don't have anxiety generally with work
| and have been praised on my interactions with customers.
| But I feel anxious during interviews because they are
| actively trying to judge me.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Sounds a lot better to me than live coding on a white
| board.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Yeah, it's a super relevant skill and something that
| doesn't go away (for me) in the interviewing environment
| (the way technical skills sometimes can).
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| My guess is that they're looking to see if you complete it
| in a reasonable time period, your initial draft is at least
| in the right ballpark (anyone experienced in tech support,
| team supervisorship, project management, etc can answer
| common emails almost by reflex) and it appears to be you,
| and not someone helping you.
|
| I would imagine that, if anything, seeing you pause after
| an initial draft, adjust some grammar and tone,
| pause...even re-write a sentence or paragraph - and then
| say "done"...would impress, not detract.
| vmception wrote:
| Reminds me of my gripe with interviews and tests, they
| neglect the reality of rapid corrective and evolutionary
| iteration towards the desired outcome by each employee.
|
| Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more
| holistically for an accurate signal?
| thex10 wrote:
| I have a relative who is severely dyslexic, whose spouse will
| revise/rewrite/advise on written communication extensively. But
| they know better than to take a job where written communication
| is a large, critical part of the work!
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| This is why we can't have nice things. Or in other words, why
| we must usually do a coding test per company we apply for, and
| not just 'point them at the Github'.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Or stuff that's so old, it predates Git, let along Github
|
| Here's some code I wrote back in 1987/88, for example.
|
| http://www.retroarchive.org/swag/MISC/0153.PAS.html
| nradov wrote:
| The actual best developers mostly have little or nothing to
| point to on GitHub. You might find this shocking but many of
| them don't even know how to use Git at all.
| ryeights wrote:
| ...source?
| jaaron wrote:
| Game industry would be one source. At least for many
| teams and projects, Git isn't very useful (horrible for
| large binary files common in AAA games). So many
| companies still use Perforce or sometimes you'll see SVN
| still. That means a whole bunch of really qualified
| engineers who have never or rarely used git.
|
| I'm sure there are other industries for which that is
| true too.
|
| It's a good reminder how small a section of the tech
| industry comments on Hacker News.
| skeaker wrote:
| I've encountered this myself as someone who maintains
| small open source games. Engineers with vastly more
| experience than I do have approached me with
| contributions, but needed me to walk them through
| installing and using git. You could tell they were good
| engineers because they were so eager and happy to learn
| it. I can't speak for how big of a demographic these
| types of engineers are but they certainly exist.
| reidrac wrote:
| > as someone who maintains small open source games
|
| Are those public? Very intriguing, would you mind sharing
| a link?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Not in GitHub, that's for sure.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Old people who manage legacy systems, like that one guy
| duct-taping a bank's online operations.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Are they really the "best" developers? It just sounds
| like a different skillset and mindset, not necessarily
| better or worse.
| ygjb wrote:
| I am willing to wager in a broad sense, that the best
| COBOL, Fortran, and RPG, that "Old people who manage
| legacy systems" is probably a fair estimate, and there is
| probably narrow overlap between developers for those
| languages and git experience.
|
| There are lots of younger folks who fall into supporting
| these platforms through experience, but I would also
| wager that the number of fresh, doe eyed engineers
| graduating from uni/college thinking "I am going to be
| the best COBOL programmer!" can probably be counted on
| one hand :P
| arbuge wrote:
| That sounds to me like it would meet the legal definition of
| fraud. A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the
| business might even be worth looking into.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Writing your own emails or resume isn't required or expected.
| Some people have assistants that do a lot of work by proxy of
| you. Its just very awkward that it becomes noticeable in a
| negative manner in the workplace.
| Unklejoe wrote:
| > or expected
|
| That's news to me. I have always assumed the resumes I have
| been reading were written by the applicants themselves. I
| guess I was wrong.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Resume preparation services are common and easy to find,
| and though I've never used such services I am sure many
| people do and I would not view it as unethical as long as
| the resume accurately summarized experience and
| qualifications.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Unless they were making like $500k a year, it will probably
| cost more in legal fees than you would get back
| joecool1029 wrote:
| There are laws against employer retaliation. If that employer
| never asked him prior and he never lied, what crime was
| committed? The employer failed to do their due diligence. As
| others have said, it's VERY common to request assistance in
| drafting resumes/emails/letters when pursuing employment.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| The only people who win in a lawsuit are the lawyers.
| [deleted]
| chadash wrote:
| > A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the
| business might even be worth looking into.
|
| No, probably not. Speak to any business owner who has been in
| a lawsuit and they'll likely tell you it's not worth the
| headache. A close relative told me that even if a customer
| straight up won't pay for a done job, he'd rather forgo the
| payment then deal with a lawsuit.
|
| Lawsuits usually have:
|
| 1) monetary costs - those lawyers are very expensive
|
| 2) emotional costs - take a big mental toll to deal with
|
| 3) reputational costs - it goes in the public record. Next
| time a potential candidate googles your company, it might
| show up that you sued a former employee. Hopefully they read
| further to see if you were justified in doing so....
|
| 4) opportunity costs - you (hopefully) have better things to
| do with your time
|
| If you are big enough, maybe you have a legal team to deal
| with this stuff. But even then, you have to choose your
| battles. A hired lawyer is still expensive and it's not worth
| going after small battles, even the ones you know you will
| win.
|
| Also, as others have mentioned, it's not unreasonable to have
| a friend or relative look over your email communications
| during your interview process unless you were explicitly
| asked not to do so. In fact, it's a smart idea!
| datavirtue wrote:
| The Ford dealership quoted me wrong on a trade-in payoff
| and later tried to get me to pay it ($1000). Letter in the
| trash. Next one came on a law firm's letterhead quoting a
| bunch of stuff about a contract. In the trash.
|
| Never heard from them again.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| More extreme one -- my auto loan provider accidentally
| double-charged my bank account for the amount of my car
| loan payoff (it didn't bounce, either). They instructed
| me to go through my bank to get the second charge
| refunded as fraudulent (which I was able to do and I was
| refunded and happy within 4 days), but then on their end
| they also sent me a refund check for some reason. When I
| received the check I gave my auto loan provider a call
| and they told me they were sorry there is nothing they
| could do and I would have to cash it, so I gladly got the
| remaining $6k of my car paid off for free by their own
| human error. I already had the certificate from them
| showing the car was paid off and the account was fully
| closed at this point. One year later and it's still fully
| paid off on my credit report. They gave me free money.
| The error on their part was their system had no way of
| handling "what if our charges are reported as fraud and
| get yanked back". Well, that and sending out a check
| after the fact.
|
| It makes me wonder at what $ amount they would have begun
| to care about their error and tried to correct it.
| gus_massa wrote:
| If it's an important email, my wife will review and fix it
| before I send it. If you need good writing skill, you should
| definitively hire my wife!
| hlbjhblbljib wrote:
| This why I've had to deal with very regressive HR on-boarding
| processes. I'm sick of companies treating new employees like
| their data doesn't matter and they can be required to sign up
| to any service no matter what the ToS is like.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I guess you need to remember your lies? Or don't say you are
| single when you have wife and three kids. Which just makes it
| sound like a mixup rather than fraud.
|
| Maybe the recruiter called the wrong person. I mean you only say
| your name once during a call. The person that got the job just
| made the initial screening interview, and answered the recruiters
| mail, while they talked to another guy. He then thinks they are
| scammers , hire to fire or something and bails.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I guess you need to remember your lies? Or don 't say you
| are single when you have wife and three kids._
|
| Yeah, that's the odd thing. You'd think that the guy who
| handled the interviews would have gotten some background on the
| guy who would actually join the company and adjusted his small-
| talk story to match. Then again, the low-effort approach
| "worked", at least to get the guy hired. If the interviewed guy
| was getting paid just for getting an offer letter, he doesn't
| care if the worker guy gets found out later.
|
| > _Which just makes it sound like a mixup rather than fraud._
|
| I dunno, the mixup scenario sounds pretty farfetched too,
| perhaps even more so.
| robofanatic wrote:
| something similar happened to me but way more hilarious. I had
| interviewed at a big brand name place in India and thought I did
| good because of positive feedback from everybody. But then there
| was complete silence for 2 weeks. Finally when I called them the
| recruiter was surprised and said "didn't you reject the offer?"
| apparently there was another candidate with similar name who
| rejected the offer. A month later I finally ended up joining
| there but worked in a totally different team. Later one day I
| bumped into the manager who had interviewed me and he was
| surprised to see me because he thought I had rejected the offer.
| simmanian wrote:
| Practices like this are hilariously common in the industry.
|
| Right out of college I accepted a job offer at a small consulting
| company on the east coast. They promised they would give me free
| housing at their luxury apartment for the first few months and
| give me all the training I need to excel in areas of my interest.
| I flew across the country and found out the whole thing is not as
| advertised. Their luxury apartment had piles of unwashed dishes
| and flies in the kitchen and piss on the bathroom floor. They had
| bunk beds in each room and I slept with three other dudes from
| wildly different backgrounds. My first night, this guy from
| Turkey assured me that everything is going to be fine, that he
| was shaking in fear for the first couple nights but he soon
| learned that if you work with them, they get you what you need.
| At the same time, another guy from Chicago was telling me how I
| need to look out for myself because the company likes to steal
| money from your paychecks.
|
| The next day, I learned that "working with them" meant going
| through their "resume revision" process. Turns out, there was a
| network of consulting companies like this one, each creating fake
| experiences for one another. Fresh grads who clearly have never
| coded anything of significance became senior engineers with 5
| years of experience. The resulting resumes looked real stacked,
| filled with keywords that recruiters love. Furthermore, during
| live interviews, they actually placed someone with actual
| technical knowledge behind the laptop camera to basically write
| out all the answers on the whiteboard while the candidates read
| out the answers.
|
| Some of the people there loved talking about how so and so got
| placed at prestigious companies and became hugely successful in
| their career. Most of them knew what they were doing wasn't the
| most ethical thing to do, but not many complained given their
| visa status. Also, they were actually really grateful to get a
| developer job that pays ~$40k. They were just regular people.
|
| I personally didn't need visa support, and I had the luxury of
| being able to fall back on my parents. So about a week after I
| flew over, I gathered my things and left. It was an interesting
| experience overall, one I'm glad I could experience.
|
| My 2c for interviewing: always look up key phrases you see on
| resumes and see if identical copies show up. It's usually a
| giveaway sign.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > but not many complained given their visa status. Also, they
| were actually really grateful to get a developer job that pays
| ~$40k. They were just regular people.
|
| That's a typical bodyshop [0]. There's a good chance some of
| your "colleagues" were using student visa extensions (that
| might be fraudulent as well, it's a well known practice [1]
| [2]) to gain enough "experience" that they could pass as a
| specialty occupation and claim H1B status. Or just had this
| consulting shop file 3-4 applications per seat they planned to
| fill out so that they could game the quota (kicking out
| legitimate applicants that aren't trying to game the system).
|
| Thankfully, the previous administration started issuing more
| RFEs and catching fraudulent applicants [3].
|
| [0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-
| body-s...
|
| [1] https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/former-ceo-bay-area-
| univer...
|
| [2] https://thewalrus.ca/the-shadowy-business-of-
| international-e...
|
| [3]
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-h-1b_b_5890d86ce4b0522c...
| giantg2 wrote:
| "housing at their luxury apartment for the first few months and
| give me all the training I need to excel in areas of my
| interest."
|
| Huge red flag. Nobody provides training, especially not for
| one's own interests.
| kurthr wrote:
| And people wonder why managers like hiring in person workers?
| It's not that you can't fake some stuff like this in person,
| but it's both harder (more expensive) and a lot more obvious.
| bink wrote:
| This is a pretty uncommon scenario, though. Making everyone
| work on-site on the off-chance that someone will fake an
| interview seems like a severe over-reaction.
| kccqzy wrote:
| A strategy I've seen is that you can make only the new
| hires work on-site for their first year or so. Once they've
| proven themselves in their first year, they can start
| working remotely.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I've seen this strategy adapted for remote. A friend of
| mine started using IntelliJ's Code With Me for remote
| pair programming sessions.
|
| I guess it's possible that if the new hire isn't legit,
| they might send a better person, but since those sessions
| were quite regular, plus they were also doing "remote
| stand-ups", it would be tougher to always be able to send
| the same replacement and / or not get caught.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Perhaps the most secure way forward is to make working
| remotely a "senior perk" that you earn after 6 months or a
| year of working in person.
| kelnos wrote:
| Or just require that the person interviewing holds their ID
| up to the camera, and then do the same on their first day
| of work. I mean, I assume HR requires some form of ID when
| setting things up anyway.
| wildzzz wrote:
| An offer like that would seem incredibly suspicious to me. You
| want to pay all of this money to train me right out of school?
| Why not just hire someone with the right experience? Maybe it's
| my imposter syndrome speaking but it all feels off. I'm
| passively looking for new jobs but I always keep my eye out for
| things that sound too good to be true. If I'm not paying for
| training or education, then someone else is footing the bill
| and it's important to consider why. Is this new training making
| me more productive or is it just to solely make the company
| more money because they can now claim I'm an expert? I wouldn't
| want to be oversold to customers as an expert on something I
| just learned about just as much as I wouldn't want to be placed
| in a junior role for something I'm really good at.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| >You want to pay all of this money to train me right out of
| school?
|
| Almost certainly less common today. But extended training for
| new hires did (and I assume in some places) does happen. I
| think IBM used to do it for sales and once upon a time I
| interviewed with an oilfield services firm that started out
| with some fairly lengthy training on their specialized
| equipment.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| Back in the late 60s/70s, when I was in university, I knew
| a bunch of IBMers (those were the days when your
| System/360-67 came with a flock of IBM staff). The standard
| for onboarding was that during the first 6 months, a new
| hire was flown here and there for courses. The goal was to
| make them feel valued as an IBMer, so that they'd want to
| stay forever.
| ghaff wrote:
| That sort of thing probably made more sense when it
| wasn't at all uncommon for people to stay with the
| company for a decade or decades. I know a number of
| people at IBM with tenures in the 25 to 30 year range.
| jll29 wrote:
| SAP has (or at least had, back in '98) a policy where the
| first 3 months after being hired, you'd be entering a full-
| time training program: during this time, you would get your
| full salary paid and receive a free set of training courses
| 9-5; people usually just checked emails before and after,
| so this wasn't really on top of another job. The process
| got you certified in SAP basis, ABAP, effective teamwork
| and other modules.
|
| After that training, we would maintain monthly lunches with
| our training group and exchange anecdotes about our
| respective departments. The company benefitted enormously
| in the sense that employees that started at the same time,
| but would work for different departments, already got a
| wide network across different functions and departments
| from the beginning, something that normally takes decades
| to build, and employees already had valuable contacts and
| information that they could task about with their co-
| workers in their own departments.
| TehShrike wrote:
| Union Pacific does this, at least as recently as a few years
| ago. Software developers are hired straight out of college
| and go through months of training before they get shown any
| actual work.
|
| I don't think it's as much about expertise as "CS college
| graduates don't know how to make software"
| simmanian wrote:
| Plenty of more legit companies, including big tech, have
| training periods for new hires. It's not something to be
| worried about in and of itself, though it's always a good
| idea to do your research when your gut says something is off.
| I was naive and definitely in need of a job.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I would find it suspicious as well, but consider this: People
| who are _great_ at their job are hard to find and expensive.
| People who will _eventually_ be great at their job are a lot,
| lot cheaper, though still hard to find. If you can hire
| someone before they realize how good they will be, you can
| save a lot of money and fill a position immediately.
|
| I haven't actually figured out how to find those people,
| though I have hired at least 2 of them... And hired a few
| others that looked like they might be, but weren't. (A third
| coder comes to mind that ended up not working out, but I
| think we made mistakes and they got in their own head. I
| think they would have been great otherwise, hence 'at least
| 2'.)
| datavirtue wrote:
| Constant stream of college grads brought in as interns.
| Just select the hungry ones with hustle and indoctrinate
| them. This is a typical MO for large established
| corporations.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > They promised they would give me free housing at their luxury
| apartment for the first few months and give me all the training
| I need to excel in areas of my interest
|
| My training at a consultancy company, first job out of college,
| was like this but actually legit. Nice hotel with a free
| breakfast, transportation to their facility, and actual (paid)
| training on a few things, lasting a month. At the end I was put
| on a client to work for. Pretty good salary for a first job
| too.
|
| So if a company offers this stuff, it's not necessarily a red
| flag, just do some research on them. It can be a great
| springboard if you don't have any better offers.
| starwind wrote:
| yeah that was what it was like with my first job. Subsidiary
| of Accenture. Got set up in a hotel, had some training (that
| was kind of useless but whatever).
|
| But I got so many spam emails from companies that sounded
| like a nightmare. Crappy corporate housing, getting sent
| anywhere, probably shady
| Mc91 wrote:
| I work for a F100 company. We have some consulting companies
| working for us, who themselves sometimes subcontract contracts,
| to subcontracting companies who sometimes themselves
| subcontract contracts.
|
| One consultant (US citizen) checked the boxes of your
| situation. Young, graduated college recently, a sub-contracting
| company presents him as senior even though he had little or
| negligible experience before. They had him in a hotel being
| billed to the F100, and then later at (crummy) corporate
| housing when the contract was not renewed.
|
| Another consultant (also a US citizen) was in a similar boat,
| but never in corporate housing, for another sub-contractor sub-
| contractor. He was older, but also pretty junior - new to
| programming - although they presented him as senior. He had to
| sign all of these things about how much he would owe the sub-
| contractor under various circumstances. Technically he signed
| something that he would owe them a lot of money for "training"
| if the contract was not renewed, but when he was let go they
| did not pursue it - why sue to try to get blood from a stone?
| He also had mandatory meetings at all three companies and was
| on the phone all of the time with the consulting companies
| after the regular work.
|
| Both contractors did one three month contract and were not
| renewed.
| simmanian wrote:
| I also had to sign a document saying I would end up owing the
| company money if I left without completing their "training"
| and/or basically trying my best to get placed. FWIW, I told
| them it would be difficult as a fresh grad to cough up that
| much money, and that the arrangements were not exactly as
| advertised. They tried to add me on linkedin, but I did not
| accept the request for obvious reasons. They did not pursue.
| nikcub wrote:
| Reminds me of the lip syncing interview candidate that went viral
| a little while ago:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg
|
| This is why remote exams have all of those strict requirements
| like "show us your room" and "don't leave sight of the webcam"
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| This is why that ML/AI realtime deepfake software is so scary.
| Imagine if the person speaking is just mapping their facial
| expressions onto the face of the person you're actually
| getting.
|
| >This is why remote exams have all of those strict requirements
| like "show us your room" and "don't leave sight of the webcam"
|
| I'd imagine this could be defeated with a prerecorded video of
| the "interviewee" showing their room.
| donretag wrote:
| The new job that I was hired for is not the same one I
| interviewed for.
| icedchai wrote:
| Coincidentally, this has happened to me a few times!
| kelnos wrote:
| I've been there once, but the funny thing is that I got my
| _next_ job based on the not-hired-for work I 'd done. And that
| next job worked out ridiculously well.
| theshowmustgo wrote:
| Yes, this is a thing. And even more frequently, online
| assessments done by someone else. Somehow Java developers got
| hired who don't know the difference between Java and JavaScript.
| kabes wrote:
| How can something like this ever work out? If you're an okay-ish
| candidate and you hire someone better to do the interview, you
| might get away with it. But if you don't even know the basics of
| the job as the post claims...
| icedchai wrote:
| If you're "interviewing" at an extremely large and likely
| dysfunctional organization, it can probably work out. You might
| get placed on a random team completely divorced from those you
| interviewed with. I've known guys who've taken jobs and done
| nothing for months and months. It's sad. I've also seen people
| quit after two days!
| kelnos wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking the same. In a big enough company, you
| can spend 3-6 months "onboarding" while drawing a paycheck
| and not having to do enough to get found out as a fraud. Even
| after the onboarding period, a skilled fraudster might find a
| way to blend in and hide if the circumstances are right. Or
| the company might have a policy (from legal) not to just fire
| people on the spot, but instead put them on a PIP and/or
| collect months of documentation of poor performance before
| doing letting them go.
|
| Even if they fail to last, they've still been drawing a
| paycheck for maybe 3-6 months (or more?), and that might be
| an acceptable "win".
| markstos wrote:
| The person who showed up for work was described as "timid".
| Perhaps he hired a confident extrovert to do the interview,
| believing he'd be fine at the job once that stressful part was
| out of the way.
| geodel wrote:
| I have seen these things closely. It kinda works out fine in
| big companies with large/slow IT departments. It takes ~3-6
| months to figure out that person hired is not really up to task
| assigned. But still works in candidates favor because usually
| low level IT consultants are hired for 3/6 months + extension
| up to year or so. This means there is no point to proceed with
| firing that person as by then contract is about to be over.
|
| Also I do not have latest info on this. The stories I have are
| from 2006-2016 period. So maybe with agile and all it is no
| longer possible.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I once had a company internal recruiter refuse to look at my
| portfolio[0], because "I probably faked it."
|
| That was sort of "the straw that broke the camel's back."
|
| I realized that this entire industry, that I fell in love with,
| as an enthusiastic, idealistic, young man, had turned into a
| miasma.
|
| At that point, I just gave up, looking.
|
| That company folded, not long after. I feel as if there's a
| better-than-even chance that I could have made a real difference
| (but there's also a better-than-even chance that I'm mistaken,
| and I just dodged a bullet. Having their internal recruiter
| deliver such a stunning insult does not speak well for their
| corporate culture).
|
| [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
| throwaway9191aa wrote:
| But... is the interviewee proxy doing this as a side gig? If they
| are good enough to get paid (presumably) for taking interviews,
| how can that be more valuable than just taking one of the jobs
| they successfully interview for?
| farmerstan wrote:
| Who wouldn't pay $10,000-50,000 for a guaranteed FAANG job?
| There are some people out there that can absolutely pass every
| single interview. And if they look like you, especially over
| zoom, then how would they know?
| ghaff wrote:
| I would hope plenty of people won't commit fraud to get a
| tech job.
|
| >how would they know
|
| Maybe someone could get off with it if they're early in their
| careers. But if you're more senior, lots of people probably
| know you.
| omegadeep10 wrote:
| I think the interviewee proxy is probably located in a non-US
| country where they wouldn't be able to work for a well-paying
| tech company.
|
| They could also be doing it for cash on the side. A few hours
| of interviews a week for a significant chunk of change.
| rightbyte wrote:
| My experience with hustlers is that they do alot of work to not
| work.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Sure. OTOH lots of good coders don't do well in interviews;
| some good interviewers aren't really dependable employees long
| term. So here we have a case of specialization. Someone making
| good money doing what they are good at: technical interviews.
|
| Not defending it. I think it sucks (and this happens for
| college admissions too).
| drooby wrote:
| Fake it til' you - have to quit out of fear of legal
| repercussions.
| pengaru wrote:
| Except there's tons of plausible deniability when it comes to
| getting interviewed and/or hired for the wrong position.
|
| At a former startup I interviewed someone for what was supposed
| to be a plain old individual contributor developer role, and
| the suit seated across from me was clearly interested in the
| newly opened VP of Eng. role.
|
| I never bothered chasing down if it was a scheduling mixup on
| our chaotic startup side, or if he was just trying to get his
| foot in the door after somehow hearing about the newly opened
| executive vacancy. Either way the technical interview went so
| badly he stormed out of the office in a rage.
|
| Point being, mixups happen all the time. It's not hard to
| imagine scenarios where it still results in a hire, and seems
| difficult to place 100% blame without a recorded confession or
| something. It's clearly the potential employer in the driver's
| seat, caveat emptor of sorts applies.
| DrBoring wrote:
| Coming soon: a service that will have ringers do Zoom interviews
| on your behalf while using real-time deep fake tech to look and
| sound just like you.
|
| All the pieces of the technology required to do something like
| that may already exist today.
| notpachet wrote:
| You just described the plot of Gattaca.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Supposedly this has already happened! Although in the alleged
| case, it was an existing employee masquerading as a candidate:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvicecanada/comments/kr924n/e...
| rectang wrote:
| Last week, I was recruited for an ongoing project where I would
| serve as the face of a website development service conducting
| client interviews, several each day. Most of the actual devs
| apparently don't have good English skills, so I was to be the
| contact. But the kicker was, I was supposed to actually pretend
| to _be_ the developer -- to adopt their name, skills, and
| experiences -- in my conversations with the client.
|
| This seemed to me both unethical and absurdly difficult to do
| well (how am I supposed to fake dev-level knowledge about systems
| I didn't create?) so of course I turned it down.
|
| The difference with this article is who is being deceived -- in
| the offer I got it was the external client, while in the article
| it's the employer. The commonality is that they're both using
| false identities over remote communication.
|
| Such deceptions are probably _more_ difficult to pull off using
| video chat as opposed to audio only, but easier in comparison to
| in-person meetings. I wonder whether they 're actually increasing
| or not.
| tflinton wrote:
| I've experienced the following hiring remotely:
|
| * A candidate who was caught lip syncing to someone talking in
| the room behind them.
|
| * A candidate who had air pods to listen to someone coaching
| them.
|
| * Plenty of candidates who just wont turn on the video no matter
| what.
|
| Remote interviewing has some bizarre drawbacks.
| heywintermute wrote:
| >A candidate who was caught lip syncing to someone talking in
| the room behind them
|
| For those who haven't seen this before:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg
| bitwize wrote:
| It's not just a thing, for some crooter firms it's a business
| model.
|
| Gonna name and shame here, there was an outfit that was once
| called Unbounded Solutions, then BrighterBrain. God knows if
| they're still around or what they're called now. Anyhoo, their
| whole deal was this: they offered free IT training and job
| placement, but there was a catch! Oh, boy, was there ever a
| catch. They would put you through 2 weeks of iOS programming
| training, and then have you sign a 2-year contract to be at their
| disposal to go to client sites. As part of this, they would make
| up a fake CV for you with fake experience and -- crucially -- a
| fake telephone number. When companies called to interview you,
| they would be directed to a call center in India where one of the
| call center drones would do the interview in your place. Only
| once they had passed the phone screen for you could you show up
| at the client site. They may have sent a fake you to the client
| site for the in-person bit as well, I'm not sure.
|
| As part of the contract you sign, you had to agree to all of
| this. If you refused to sign, or tried to skip your contract
| before 2 years was up, you had to pay for the training they gave
| you which they valued at $20,000.
|
| One of the scummiest things I'd ever seen or heard of in this
| industry.
| bitwize wrote:
| I just found them again! They're now known as Enhance IT. Same
| city, too, Atlanta, GA.
| bambax wrote:
| Relevant interview of Rami Malek telling a story where he
| interviewed instead of his twin brother:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvBwJrc_-ns
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Late '90s. Rapid growth, many interviews. Got used to taking CVs
| with a grain of salt. Had the best and worst interview
| experiences ever.
|
| The best: really strong CV, older candidate, really poor English.
| Frustrating process, more for him than us, he is struggling so
| hard. Finally he stands up, grabs my pen and my colleague's pad,
| and sketches DB schema. Uses the pen to point back and forth
| between the CV and the sketch. I'm more of a networking guy, I
| was lost pretty quick, but my colleague, one of my best hires,
| started leaning in, eyes widening, slow "wow" escaping his lips.
|
| That guy ended up being another of my best hires. Communication
| was always a chore, results always through the roof. With the
| colleague from the interview and one other, he became one of my
| three developer archetypes in a much longer story.
|
| Worst experience: different colleague (my test lead) and I
| interviewing another strong CV. We try and lead and shepherd, do
| everything we can to link the CV to what this person can do.
| Communication isn't the issue, the CV is obviously
| doctored/bumpfed.
|
| We're running out of steam, trying to get the session to a
| minimum acceptable length, when I notice blood on my hands. I
| wonder how I cut myself and I am subtlety looking for the wound.
|
| When I notice the open sore on their hand, the hand they shook.
| The hand attached to a body with some obvious hygiene issues
| (trust me).
|
| I settle my hands, wind things up, have my colleague see them
| out, hop into the nearest coffee station, throw away my pen and
| notebook and basically scald my hands and mouth (I used to nibble
| my pen compulsively).
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > That guy ended up being another of my best hires.
| Communication was always a chore, results always through the
| roof. With the colleague from the interview and one other, he
| became one of my three developer archetypes in a much longer
| story.
|
| There needs to be a website that captures these types of war
| stories.
| foobarian wrote:
| I was wondering about this after running across a couple of
| people who I have no shadow of a doubt could not code a fizzbuzz
| solution that all our screens use. They did end up on PIPs and
| let go but I always wondered how they got in to begin with. (This
| was before Covid, too, but still unless you did biometrics and
| had in-person friends who could recognize a person I could see a
| stand-in coming in to help with the on-site interviews).
| LanceH wrote:
| One place I worked, we hired someone into a senior developer
| position. A whole section of the interview is about what is
| expected of a senior (making juniors better, talking to clients,
| etc...)
|
| He gets there day one and says he will only write code. Everyone
| in the interview process had good notes and positive recollection
| of him.
|
| The two working theories were that either someone else
| interviewed for him, or that he expected to show up and export
| his work to someone else (all remote).
| VLM wrote:
| I've been sent to interviews by HR with a folder holding another
| dude's resume before.
|
| This is probably the same thing but remote instead of in person.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Here's a funny one:
|
| I worked at a financial company as a web developer. A co-
| developer sat at the desk opposite, with the wall behind him. He
| would sit there playing games on his phone all day. ALL DAY. Yet,
| his work got done, but it was the barest minimum and really poor
| code.
|
| So, one day I say "Tomas, I never see you write any code. Yet,
| your work is always done."
|
| "Oh!", he says with a grin, "I've outsourced my entire job to my
| friend back in the Czech Republic. I pay him about 30% of what I
| earn and he writes all my code and sends it back."
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I worked at a financial company as a web developer. [...]
| "Oh!", he says with a grin, "I've outsourced my entire job to
| my friend back in the Czech Republic._
|
| That sounds like a huge breach of the NDA or employment
| contract. Pretty sure you're not allowed to expose internal
| company code or requirements to third party outsiders without
| approval in any sane company with half decent lawyers who can
| draft an employment contract, let alone a financial company.
|
| Here in EU they do background checks for devs working in most
| financial companies.
| kingcharles wrote:
| This was the UK. No background checks, though it wouldn't
| have turned up anything. There was no NDA that I remember,
| and honestly, I don't think the execs would have given a fuck
| even if they had known, as long as the work got done. I never
| ratted him out as our manager was fine with his work, and we
| didn't have a huge overlap of code that we were working on.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Wow, can anyone just do what they want in the UK finance/sw
| scene? This wouldn't have flied in Germany/Austria. You
| have to sign extensive NDA's before they let you anywhere
| near their code/IP.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Seems pretty hard to successfully pull this off. The better your
| chances of being successful, the more likely you could have
| gotten the offer on your own. If you needed the stand in to get
| the offer, you're not likely going to be qualified and won't
| last.
|
| Perhaps it could be successful for people who are technically
| competent, but have a severe stage fright when interviewing. At
| the lease, you'd want the stand in to record the interviews so
| you could watch and learn who's who and get the context of the
| job before starting.
| shubb wrote:
| I dunno - to get jobs some places you need to be really good at
| leetcode - and that's a niche skill that is increasingly hard
| to keep current at as you get older, busier in your role and
| family life.
|
| I'm not confident that I could do a leetcode medium anymore,
| but I am super confident I could do a similar role to the one I
| currently do at a company that would only hire me for it if I
| could do a leetcode medium.
|
| I would never actually use a service like this but I can't say
| I'm not tempted.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > If you needed the stand in to get the offer, you're not
| likely going to be qualified and won't last.
|
| You don't need to last at all, you forget that in many parts of
| the world earning even a single US remote paycheck would be
| absolutely life changing.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| We only have 10 ish staff during election season.
|
| For us it's always been unpredictable and I wouldn't go as far to
| say intentional fraud.
|
| But there is a trend that the people who put the most experience,
| list best tech skills, have good buzzword filled interviews often
| don't live up to it.
|
| Often it's the fresh person with less experience, or the person
| coming from something different that doesn't even have the
| baseline skills, that becomes the super talented value adder.
|
| I think a big part of their success is ability to teach
| themselves. Google it success.
|
| I wish we had a better way to make choices. Still though it's not
| like it's horrible. out of like 10 we usually only get one we
| need to let go of or move to a less intense role.
|
| We tried doing some basic tests of like paying people to do 2
| hours of work, proof reading, etc. But didn't go well.
| hui-zheng wrote:
| > HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to
| resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or
| admitting fraud.
|
| Though at this point they all know John is committing fraud, they
| still decided only to approach this guy claiming a poor fit for
| his resignation. I don't know why they do that. They have
| discussed a lot and considered many things. I am sure there are
| many reasons to do so. but do they just want John to go away and
| then try that same thing with another company?
|
| It might be too strong to say this, but a failure to confront
| evil is a evil.
| wccrawford wrote:
| The phrase "walk softly and carry a big stick" comes to mind.
|
| There's no need to go into that interview guns-blazing. Soft-
| balling the questions at first is likely to do the job. If it
| doesn't, they can still bring in the heavy artillery later.
|
| This approach has worked very well for me in all kinds of
| adverse situations. Being nice and asking politely has resolved
| a lot of situations, and I can still fall back to being nasty
| if I have to. (And I might even find I was wrong before that
| point, and I can back off without losing face.)
|
| For instance, returning a defective product at a store. I can
| simply tell them it doesn't seem to work. They can attempt to
| show me it does, they could take it back, or they could refuse.
| If they try it and it doesn't work, and still refuse (or just
| refuse), I can start demanding my money back. If they refuse
| that, I can call corporate or my credit card company.
|
| If I start with corporate or my CC, I might still get what I
| want, but it's a lot more stressful and IMO less likely to
| work, even if only slightly. And there's no chance to fix the
| situation with another resolution than the one I chose.
| Sometimes there's a better way, and you just don't know.
| toyg wrote:
| _> walk softly and carry a big stick_
|
| s/walk/talk
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stick_ideology
| throwawayboise wrote:
| If they terminate for fraud, they might be asked to prove it in
| some kind of wrongful termination claim, or risk being charged
| with libel or slander. Though the possibility might be remote,
| and the employer likely would prevail, the legal team and HR
| will not want to take any chance of having to spend time on
| that. They will want to take the lowest risk approach.
| ilamont wrote:
| Do wrongful termination cases like this ever come up when
| obvious fraud is involved from the get-go for a remote
| position?
|
| Resume fraud happens all the time with fudged degrees and job
| titles and positions. Usually when corporate HR finds out
| termination is immediate.
| flybrand wrote:
| Crazy people who commit fraud are the same people who
| continue the fraud and make things weird. Get away from the
| crazy.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| And don't overlook the possiblity of some kind of scam
| being attempted. Get a foot in the door, get fired, sue.
| Happens all the time with injury claims. Probably less
| likely since "at will" is the employment law in most
| places, but it's still safer to terminate without
| alleging any wrongdoing.
|
| Same reason most former employers will only confirm dates
| of employment on a reference check. They typically won't
| comment on performance or reasons for termination, just
| to avoid any potential backwash.
| smadge wrote:
| It's true, but if the incentive for the employer is just to
| terminate, and there is no other consequence, then there is
| no dis-incentive for the fraudulent employee to keep trying
| until they find someplace their deception is unnoticed.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| If you give your incompetent and fraudulent former
| employees soft landings, it means that your company can
| saddle its competitors with deadweight.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I don't know... Do you sign any agreement saying that you
| personally will attend the recruitment process?
|
| If not why would you be obliged to?
| [deleted]
| eh9 wrote:
| Legal knows what they're doing. Their entire purpose is
| ensuring the business is free from undue risk. Confronting this
| man as a liar could unravel a nice little bag of legal hurdles
| that end up with the company paying this person to settle X or
| Y claim.
|
| Also, they confronted the evil, but the company had no reason
| to show their hand and they way they did it keeps them a bit
| safer from litigation.
| boznz wrote:
| "failure to confront evil is a evil."
|
| - A motto all people should live by.
| icedchai wrote:
| Large organizations are generally risk adverse, and extremely
| process oriented. If they approach "John" wrong, there might
| create additional problems for the company.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| The legal system is a bad fix for this, though.
|
| The most they could reasonably do here is attempt to sue for
| fraud for lost time and salary paid. It's unlikely that they
| can bring a criminal fraud case, so they have to prove damages.
|
| Damages in this case are probably
|
| - Lost time interviewing
|
| - Any salary paid
|
| If they caught this on day 1, they just don't have enough
| damages to make this worth pursuing (aka - they lose far more
| money trying to actually bring a case than they would be just
| firing him immediately and eating the lost time).
|
| Basically - why waste time on a small claims verdict against
| this guy for trivial amounts of money?
|
| The courts aren't going to lock him up for this, and even if
| they win, he can still go right to the next company and try
| again.
|
| This is the kind of thing that other professions attempt to
| solve with extra-legal associations and certifications (ex: a
| lawyer might be disbarred for this - an action taken by the bar
| association that revokes his attorney's license, making it
| impossible for him to practice in areas that require such a
| license).
|
| But software really has no such guardrails in current society
| (both a blessing and a curse).
|
| I don't really know what it is you'd prefer this company have
| done in this case.
| jcranberry wrote:
| Seems like they were worried about IP and equipment theft.
| farmerstan wrote:
| I've always wondered how companies that do mass interviewing like
| Google and Facebook determine if the person who interviews is the
| same person who shows up to work? I imagine especially with
| completely remote work, if you delay joining by a few months, who
| is going to remember what you look like?
|
| I'm sure this happens and I've seen people trying to hilariously
| cheat on virtual interviews but the fact that people are probably
| successfully interviewing at FAANGs and getting away with it
| intrigues me.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think this especially could be a problem at companies where
| you don't interview for a specific team, and instead get
| matched with a team after you start. So the new hire might not
| work with or even see anyone who interviewed them after
| joining. Their eventual teammates and manager might have no
| idea that someone else interviewed in their stead.
| [deleted]
| jzellis wrote:
| I didn't realize they were making a sequel to The Internship
| miked85 wrote:
| I don't think this is rare when dealing with large contracting
| companies, and especially remote. I've seen it happen multiple
| times, luckily we terminated the contracts when it was painfully
| obvious what happened after a couple of weeks.
| jawns wrote:
| Earlier this year, I was asked to interview a man who was
| procured through a remote-staffing firm. He was based in
| Southeast Asia, and on his resume it looked like he met all of
| the competencies we needed -- including English proficiency.
|
| But on the call, I noticed that whenever I asked him a question,
| he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the
| question, then turn his video back on.
|
| Eventually, I cut the call short and messaged the guy from the
| remote-staffing firm who had set up the interview to ask about
| this bizarre behavior.
|
| An investigation determined that the man was using a translator
| and really didn't speak any English whatsoever.
|
| I have no idea how he expected to be able to do the job if he had
| been hired, but I guess he thought it was worth a shot.
| bananarchist wrote:
| Maybe the prospective salary made hiring a full-time
| interpreter a reasonable expense.
| prepend wrote:
| Something like this happened to me years ago before video
| interviews. On phone interviews people would pause before every
| question, mute their line, then unmute and answer. This was odd
| because it happened on about 25% of the calls.
|
| A few times they forgot to unmute and we heard multiple voices
| coaching them in English and the local language.
|
| The offshore partner had someone sit in the interview to coach
| them with the proper answers.
|
| Oddly we didn't change the offshore partner but management
| figured out some way that the partner stopped doing this. Or at
| least had interviewers answer fast enough with no lag.
| defen wrote:
| While I don't doubt this sort of thing happens, the following
| line leads me to believe that this is an exercise in creative
| writing by someone:
|
| > In the meantime, legal approved security to put a trace on
| John's computer to review if there have been outside messages or
| if his work is being completed with outside help or on a
| different computer altogether.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you have a corporate laptop of ours I can log into the
| security dashboard and see the 15th command you issued in the
| terminal on December 12th, which processes it spawned, which
| files it accessed, which servers it reached out to... and this
| is with standard AV software. We're not even set up for worker
| monitoring (nor do we have interest, our mandate is on the
| security side not the HR side) but I could probably piece
| together a decently solid idea if he was pulling up outside
| messages or pulling in completed work from an outside system
| even without such additional worker monitoring tools.
| nevi-me wrote:
| I worked at an audit+consulting firm, and our laptops had at
| least 5 different "security" applications, most of them
| spyware. Then 2 anti-viruses (eew).
|
| They actively MITM TLS traffic, getting some Java applications
| like IntelliJ to work was a mission.
|
| ___
|
| I once interned at a defence company where it was common to
| hear folks saying "if your PC keeps on freezing, it's IT taking
| screenshots". This was in 2007-2009, so a while ago.
|
| ___
|
| My colleague's spouse got sabotaged by their former employer,
| to make them break their non-compete. The employer spied on
| their laptop (not a work one, as they'd left). One day the
| cursor started moving, files getting copied, kind of vibe.
|
| They also sent "customers" to their business, legit and
| otherwise, to make them err and break their non-compete. Then
| with some legal muscle, they enforced the non-compete, forcing
| them out of business. This is a recent thing of 2020.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Could be, or they could be referring to some of the heavy-
| handed remote monitoring software that gets installed on a lot
| of corporate laptops.
|
| It's common for companies to lock down corporate laptops and
| have records of communication from the approved software. These
| companies also, wisely, don't let just anyone pull up those
| records on employee computers. You have to engage with HR
| and/or legal at minimum.
| kelnos wrote:
| Why is that strange? That seems pretty normal for a company IT
| department to be able to do. My employer can read all my email
| and chat history, and can remotely install arbitrary software
| on my work laptop without my knowledge.
|
| Also consider that the person writing to this blog might be
| non-technical, so even though "putting a trace" on something
| sounds like bad movie dialogue, it's more or less reasonable to
| say.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| right - that's weird language. That said, machines are often
| under GPO / Mdm type control, and it is trivial if needed to
| monitor a machine if there is an OK (ie, not used to harass /
| flirt / spy) on someone.
|
| Normally best practice is that someone outside of workgroup
| reviews results for a predefined concern (ie, slacking off,
| running a side business on company time, etc). This is just
| because you can end up with tons of personal details (ie, bank
| balances - wow they are rich / poor etc). With remote work I
| think this is less common / would be less acceptable. I have
| some light govt exposure and this was sometimes done to see if
| folks were browsing porn (ie, new firewall or something would
| start reporting adult site use and then they'd do something on
| the actual computer to see what was up) or slacking - partly
| because govt work didn't always have good productivity metrics
| to work against. More recently they just seem to block things
| like porn at work by default.
| probablyexists wrote:
| Agreed. This reads like those memes about men writing female
| characters..
| andylynch wrote:
| We used to do this in the 90s for suspected fraud/ misuse of
| office. I'm sure it's way easier now.
| mig39 wrote:
| If it's a company computer, they might have been able to
| screenshot or record the screen.
| alx__ wrote:
| I think it's weird wording from legal. My guess is that the
| work laptop has security software preinstalled that routes
| traffic through a proxy that they can see, even encrypted
| traffic. So they're just collecting John's traffic for analysis
| ljm wrote:
| Most management software on a company laptop (or endpoint in
| jargon-speak) will be set up to allow this and your company's
| policy will allow them to activate monitoring software if an
| investigation is required. It probably won't be used unless
| you're already in deep shit, which the person in TFA pretty
| much was.
|
| It's not that unusual.
| misnome wrote:
| And, it explicitly mentions concerns about getting the
| equipment back. So it's a company owned computer.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "John is talking extensively about working in a garage because
| his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made
| references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk
| area."
|
| If John is reading, you now have documentation that marital
| status has played a part in the decision process (even if not the
| sole issue) should they decide to let you go.
| kelnos wrote:
| Ehhhh, I mean, sure, John could sue about this and cost the
| company some money (because you can sue about anything), but
| marital status did not at all play a part in the decision
| process. It was, however, a signal that the employee was lying
| about _material_ things.
|
| Regardless, John quit. He wasn't not hired in the first place,
| and he wasn't fired.
| giantg2 wrote:
| True. I suppose I hate my job and the lying company that I
| fantasize about someone catching companies (or the
| government) doing bad things and being compensated for it.
| ds_store2387 wrote:
| No... they have documented evidence that the company noted
| discrepancies between his interview and subsequent comments.
| Nothing there states that this was a problem; it's a diff.
|
| Besides, he quit.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Missed the quiting part.
|
| It doesn't really matter if it's a diff. It matters that it
| was a diff that the husband apparently thought pertinent
| enough to mention. If it plays any part in the decision, or
| can show that they preferred single people in the interview,
| then it could be basis for a law suit (whether it would win
| or go to settlement is a different issue).
| ds_store2387 wrote:
| Nothing in the letters even hints that it played a part of
| the decision-making process for hiring or firing. The
| husband also mentioned his hair was different and he now
| wears glasses. Does that mean corrective vision also played
| a part in the process?
| giantg2 wrote:
| If the manager mentioned it, then it very well could
| have. Even if just on a subconscious level. I don't see
| anything that shows an audit of their thought processes,
| so you can't rule that out.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| If John is reading this, remember you quit.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Oops, missed that part.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > marital status
|
| ... is not a protected class.
| giantg2 wrote:
| https://www.eeoc.gov/pre-employment-inquiries-and-marital-
| st...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Still not a protected class, which means the bar for
| proving discrimination is going to be pretty high.
| Especially if it happens after you've been hired.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If your martial status is documented as being considered
| in the thought process leading to firing (I know now,
| they quit in this case), then it can show that the hiring
| process was discriminating. It's a possible court case,
| although the outcome would be anyone's guess (if they
| they don't settle).
| iafiaf wrote:
| My first job out of college was at a J2ME mobile startup (circa
| ~2005). Startup was the baby of a rich Arab, and I was the first
| actual technical hire in the team (the prototype was outsourced).
| I hired 3 engineers within the first month. A couple weeks into
| the project, I realised that one of the juniors was a bozo at
| programming and I had made a severe hiring mistake. The guy spent
| time re-writing Java classes as objects, making superfluous
| inheritance hierarchies, installing and re-installed the J2ME
| emulator, etc. I would have to fire the guy soon and explain it
| to my Arab boss ...
|
| Fortunately, new hire was sending sexually explicit SMSes to the
| cute Filipino receptionist. Arab boss threw him out the next day.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| So you made a bad hire, what does this have to do with a bait
| and switch?
| kuboble wrote:
| I worked at the company where as a first filter we had a remote
| coding task (roughly 2- hours of implementing some simple data
| structure plus unit tests). A candidate sent us a prefect
| solution indicating very good knowledge of Java, testing
| framework, clear thinking, good problem solving etc. When the
| candidate came for the live interview she was absolutely shocked
| that we asked her coding questions again. "But I have already did
| the coding task!". It was very clear that she didn't know how to
| write a line of code if her life depended on it. I wonder what
| was her plan if she got hired by mistake.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-31 23:00 UTC)