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!
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.
(it's proof for a certain kind of social and professional awareness, rather, I'd say, which is true for quite a few hiring norms, really, but doesn't mean you can expect a new hire to compose really good documents on the job...)
Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.
I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
Of course.
You would never ever send an important email without getting it checked, or having someone write it, if it's not your thing.
I do like the way the replies to this seem like they are frankly, retarded.
I get you are single but if you don't understand how relationships work this might be a good start at retrospectively thinking about it.
Relationships are about teams of two putting the best of either forward.
This does not make you twice as good, it's somewhat exponential. It's even more powerful when you decide to do it for life.
(And single people use friends, this is exactly how you apply for jobs, with the help of others if available)
Classic comment.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Bingo. That was my first thought in this. Especially given how quickly they gave the job up.
They paid someone to interview for them, collected wages for the period they were employed, and then went on to the next opportunity.
Sadly, there is nothing in the story to discourage the person from doing it again. And at most companies, there would be enough egg on HR's face for letting this happen that I'd imagine everyone would quietly sweep it under the rug.
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.
Nearly all of them. And it's why managers who get burned just a single time hate the idea of remote work. It's not about office rent or anything else that gets bandied about here; it's the fact that a very small but significant number of remote workers are grifters and create a ton of negative emotion (out of sight out of mind) for co-workers and managers.
A ton of remote work is obviously the future, but every single negative case like this with legacy managers sets it back orders of magnitude more than the successes it generates. So it goes with everything new.
Even the "90-day probationary" periods are not really useful. I think the only thing that they do, is if the employee quits before the 90 days are up, then they have to pay the company back for all the expenses incurred by the company (I had this happen to someone we hired. They were not expecting that. Too bad. They were actually very good, and dumped us for a job in a location they preferred. I felt bad about that. I actually didn't hold any rancor towards them).
I suspect startups can be a lot more likely to be able to give someone the boot in an efficacious manner.
I guess some folks are sociopaths, and do whatever it takes to live well.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I hope you're doing okay now?
Huge red flag. Nobody provides training, especially not for one's own interests.
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.
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.
There are a lot of gullible rural bumpkins out there. It is entirely possible that some recruiter made this guy do this, under the condition that once he is accepted to the job, he will have to pay 1 / 2/ x months of salary to the recruiter.
The recruiter takes the money and disappears. The bumpkin will struggle for a bit in the job and then be let go or resign.
However, he will add this to his resume, have the salary and joining letter as proof and try to get other jobs.
Usually, these people do this so that their marriage prospects are better than their peers.
The lengths people go to.
The question was along the lines of "how do you typically protect your code against sql injections?" (in a language and framework agnostic context)
The voice was much more enthusiastic than the person's demeanor and eventually it became obvious that he was trying to randomly mouth words in sync with the person talking (and presumably doing the coding) then blaming it on lag.
Yikes.
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".
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.
There was no way I could have switched him with someone else without paying penalties.
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".
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.
Start by asking him softball questions about his experience, can’t give a straight answer to any of it. Start asking some technical questions and everything we ask he knows little to nothing about. Finally I am getting fed up and I ask him “Why did you put all these things on your resume you know nothing about?”
The guy just deadpan replies “The recruiter told me to”. I don’t know if we worked with that recruiter again, but my boss who was also in the interview was none too pleased.
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……
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.
I was later contacted and asked to apply for my old position at the company who bought those parts.
I was probably one of maybe a hundred people with 10 years experience in X, most already were employed at that company and had referred me.
I didn’t make it through the HR screening because they upped the educational requirement to a masters degree.
I didn’t feel too bad about missing out considering how that played out.
Edit: I am laughing my balls off at this
"I offered him a gummy bear. He politely declined."
Old Boss : Get out of here.
Comedy gold.
...though I remember it being its own site/domain, not a twitter account.
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).
There needs to be a website that captures these types of war stories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If not why would you be obliged to?
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)
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.
All the pieces of the technology required to do something like that may already exist today.
https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvicecanada/comments/kr924n/e...
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.
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.
Anyway once the contract was signed they didn’t send anyone and we had to hire other contractors who were also not very good.
* 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.
For those who haven't seen this before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg
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.)
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.
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.
All we had to do was go off script and we'd have a good idea about how genuine the candidate was being.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
>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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
They could also be doing it for cash on the side. A few hours of interviews a week for a significant chunk of change.
Not defending it. I think it sucks (and this happens for college admissions too).
Early in their tenure, they said they had to go to Australia (from the US) due to a death in the family. However, someone saw that he tweeted from a bar in airport somewhere in the US, when he purported to be in Australia.
HR asked him to provide a death certificate "just for our records" and he provided a badly forged certificate, the inauthenticity of which was confirmed by a quick call to the agency that supposedly provided it.
It was all very strange and funny. Of course he was let go, and he just kind of said, "ok."
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."
> 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.
They actively MITM TLS traffic, getting some Java applications like IntelliJ to work was a mission.
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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.
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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.
It's not that unusual.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
They never did figure out what was going on, but did eventually have to terminate the employee.
edit I just asked me friend if they had any ideas what happened. They said they believe that a "recon" person interviewed before them and just recorded the interview questions so they could study and regurgitate answers. But that's the best theory that doesn't involve identical twins, clones or time travel.
Their references should work for you.
Fraud hurts us all. Even (especially?) the people who think they are benefitting from it.
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).
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).
> 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.
Then again, there's also the reverse of this: employee gets hired for a job that turns out to be different from the one they interviewed for. I'm pretty sure companies are never going to be held accountable for that one.
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).
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.
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.
The next day we got an email from the apparently competent one, claiming that this time the email was being written by a 'friend' of the candidate we talked to (same address every time), and that if we gave them a chance he'd be the 'perfect candidate with 100% qulaity' (sic).
We politely refused.
Turned out in 2022, Narendra Modi was a fraud, uneducated and full of ego. He did not know how to do the job at all. He just got the gig by enciting violence in local constituency.
If top posts can be rigged, corporate jobs resume fraud is a child's play.
There’s a side of “enterprise” software that’s so foreign to me.
I still don’t know what Salesforce is. Or SAP (I see their name in a lot of shitty software though). I wonder how the developers in those companies are like, what their processes and code reviews and technical discussions look like.
Another time we hired a guy who seemed enthusiastic and had a portfolio of things he had done, but he turned out to be completely unenthusiastic.
Fortunately, new hire was sending sexually explicit SMSes to the cute Filipino receptionist. Arab boss threw him out the next day.
And I wonder what "real" John gets out of this. I bet he makes a lot of money. Maybe he gets lots of people jobs this way, he provides all of his own payment information, and then forwards 90% to the people who actually have to "show up" (such as it is) for work.
Man, I want to franchise this! Actually now that I'm at the end of my post I think I just described the consulting industry...
We’d interview a candidate over the phone or Skype and he’d be extremely knowledgeable, answering all our questions flawlessly. Then when he arrives to the office, he can barely speak English, has trouble turning the computer on, and can’t answer any of the questions he answered over the phone.
We learned to detect this very promptly and escort them out of the office immediately. They often demanded to be paid for their time and traveling expenses, despite attempting fraud.
HUH?
Apparently this is the state of corporate attitude toward employees now.
https://www.findlaw.com/employment/workplace-privacy/privacy...
The situation is different if the employee's personal computer is used -- then it can be expected to be full of personal stuff. This is why a lot of bigger places prohibit placing company code/credentials onto a personal device.
Sad as this stuff will just be a hassle for everyone else.
Wondering how many are managing to fool their companies undetected.
This is probably the same thing but remote instead of in person.
If it's for a more advanced role, I give them a coding challenge after a non-technical, on camera interview. Then if it's worthy of a technical follow up interview, they must build, execute, and walk me through the code live on camera. I also ask them to make slight alterations or extensions live.
This may sound like a lot but the total time invested by a candidate, including the interviews themselves, should be no more than 4 hours. The challenges are experience and role appropriate and I'm not asking them to build an MVP or anything close. They're also allowed to search and use resources in the live interviews, as they would on the job. I'm not interested in testing your memory-recall abilities, I'm interested in seeing how you approach problem solving using CS.
Lastly, record all your interviews.
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.
