9 ms·

Noticing You're Confused

206 points by Nyubis 7y ago

sumanthvepa 7y ago
Clearly there was fraud here. But I'm curious about the the interview process. If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process.
- oefrha 7y ago
  Yeah, I certainly Noticed I Was Confused while reading this story.
  - Tenoke 7y ago
    The interviewee passed the questions, was well liked and the only note of confusion he mentions was 'Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got too much recruiter spam'. For what is worth I also don't have a LinkedIn for the same reason any more..
    - mjevans 7y ago
      I've still never had an account on many social media sites, but that's because I avoid most forms of social media period. (Technically a couple niche discussion sites might count, this being one of them, but the closest thing I've got to an actual social media account is a Reddit account I mostly used in respect to one sub-forum on that site where content creators I liked had a sort of news aggregator for their content).
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process. There are many things people evaluate during the interview process. One of them is technical competence. Another is integrity. From the story, it doesn't appear OP's interview process is broken.
  - jiofih 7y ago
    How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?
    - nordsieck 7y ago
      > How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager? There are diminishing marginal returns on better screening. Most people are pretty honest, and of those people who aren't honest, most of those people will mess up their deception; this means that a pretty basic level of screening brings a lot of value while only letting through a few bad apples. One could intensify the screening to avoid more bad apples, but that costs money and increases the false positive rate. At some point, it's better to just hire people and fire them when it doesn't work out.
  - woodrowbarlow 7y ago
    you give two examples, and the interview process in the article failed spectacularly on both counts.
- downandout 7y ago
  Or maybe he had plenty of experience and technical expertise to competently answer all the interview questions, and even to perform the job in question extremely well. Perhaps he would have been a model hire. There are lots of reasons that people exaggerate their experience, and not all of them mean that the candidate is not well-suited for a given job. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to do what “Sam” did, but you can’t say that their interview process was broken based solely on the fact that the process identified him as a good candidate after he inflated his resume and did some simple LinkedIn manipulation to try to push himself to the top of the resume stack. Their interview process may in fact have identified and vetted the best man for the job, he was just one that happened to be insecure enough about his work experience to exaggerate it.
  - jiofih 7y ago
    “Inflated his resume” and “simple LinkedIn manipulation” are extremely mild ways of describing what he did. He lied about his entire work experience, role at previous job, and got someone else to pretend they were a VP and cover for them on the phone. This is fraud, not ‘inflating your CV’. That is, if this story is even real.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jerf 7y ago
      As I've often said about the DailyWTF stories, if this story isn't real, one just like it has happened hundreds or thousands of times. It's an outlier, yes, but not something I'd even blink at having had happen to someone, somewhere, at some point. I've only done several dozen interviews and I haven't seen anything that extreme, but I've seen enough stuff that I wouldn't find it that shocking. (Or, somebody did try to snow me to that extreme but failed to get to the point where we even cared about checking references. I don't mean this as any sort of triumphalism, but just by its nature, it's easier to BS your way through a a management interview than a technical interview. I'd say that's less about one necessarily being "harder" and certainly not about one being "better", but that there's a much larger set of distinct things we may talk about in a tech interview. If you really don't know anything technical, you have much greater odds of getting something asked that rats you out.)
- deleted 7y ago
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NiceWayToDoIT 7y ago
Yes I have that sense of "Confusion' just now about this article. So let me understand, "Sam" was best technical candidate ever, knowing all the answers and everything but somehow he lied about who he was?! Over time people build distrust toward recruiters, why: - they use cold calling, - as soon as you resign they call to find who are your references, not to offer you a job, but to find who is lead contact in previous company they can call and so they could someone just to get that 20+% fee... - in order for these to succeed they need to use social engineering techniques (they pretend they are friendly) - they post fake job ads to collect CV ... - have I mentioned huge fees for literally doing nothing .... and on and on and on .... Who ever was wrote this article he should just zip it ....
- NiceWayToDoIT 7y ago
  Honestly I think this article should be reported and banned from hacker news it is probably self-promotion for the purpose of gaining more attention and potential leads and candidates with pretense "we are honest recruiter company"
Tenoke 7y ago
You say he passed all your questions with flying colours, everyone liked him, etc. If he hadn't lied about his specific experience would you have hired him?
drewcoo 7y ago
So "the rationalist community" relies on gut feelings? Now I'm confused and it's only the first non-italic paragraph.
- Tenoke 7y ago
  Do you think there's absolutely nothing to be learned from 'gut feelings'? Of course they mean something, so taking them in the equation - at least for trying to recognize why you have that gut feeling, and whether it's relevant or not - is pretty sensible. Rationality isn't about being a cold calculating machine, it's about arriving at the best answers you can while using whatever actually works.
- pure-awesome 7y ago
  Yes. Taking into account gut feelings has been a part of the rationalist community's strategy for as long as I can recall. The rationalist community's "Rationality" is not about using cold calculation for everything. It's about not letting your human biases and motivated reasoning get in the way of finding the truth and being effective. (Whether or not the movement is successful is a bit of a debate, of course, but the core philosophy is sound). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hfbWhRrY2Pwwrgi/summary-of-the-straw-vulcan https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hfbWhRrY2Pwwrgi/summary-of... > System 1—the intuitive system—is the older of the two and allows us to make quick, automatic judgments using shortcuts (i.e. heuristics) that are usually good most of the time, all while requiring very little of your time and attention. > System 2—the deliberative system—is the newer of the two and allows us to do things like abstract hypothetical thinking and make models that explain unexpected events. System 2 tends to do better when you have more resources and more time and worse when there are many factors to consider and you have limited time. ... > The main thing to take away from this System 1 and 2 split is that both systems have strengths and weaknesses, and rationality is about finding the best path—using both systems at the right times—to epistemic and instrumental rationality. > Being “too rational” usually means you are using your System 2 brain intentionally but poorly. For example, teenagers were criticized in an article for being “too rational” because they could reason themselves into things like drugs and speeding. But this isn’t a problem with being too rational; it’s a problem with being very bad at System 2 reasoning!
sun_n_surf 7y ago
And in other things that never happened...
NhanH 7y ago
Imagine if you read the autobiography of a big name and they told a story about how they hack the interviewing process of X company, getting they first big break which resulted in all the big successes afterward. How much admiration would he get for that, a #1 HN story even. I do get confused reading this story, at least I wish it continue on for a bit afterward (how was his reaction, other people's reaction. Did you end up hiring someone?)
- lilyball 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure "blatantly lying about your past experience and getting your wife to cover for you" isn't "hacking the interviewing process".
  - r1chard5mith 7y ago
    Why though? I can just imagine someone at the time saying something similar of Steve Wozniak and the other 'phreakers' who were stealing phone calls. If it had worked, and was retold as an old-timer story by a rich and successful man, it would be high-fives all round.
    - lilyball 7y ago
      Stealing phone calls is fighting back against large faceless corporations. Lying your way into a job at a startup is very much not.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  History is written by winners. If you fake your way into something and succeed you are a cool hustler. If you fail you are a fraud. If you run up credit card debt to keep your company going and succeed you show persistence. If you fail you are an irresponsible a...hole.
kstenerud 7y ago
Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got too much recruiter spam, which was entirely believable. He said he’d turn it back on and send me the link, but hadn’t followed up. It wasn’t much, but it was certainly a bit odd given how reliable he seemed in general. Why would someone who'd spent months, perhaps even years cultivating a network of fake LinkedIn profiles and confederates, not have a linkedin profile himself when not having one would immediately arouse suspicion? It's not like it's at all difficult to doctor your work links. Even his wife supposedly had a profile, faking as a VP at the company in question. Something doesn't add up here.
- jchw 7y ago
  My best guess is to avoid the folks that he has scammed in the past from blowing his cover. Those other seemingly legit profiles presumably have no obvious link to him.
- Pyxl101 7y ago
  It would be hard for the fake profile to get connections with people that he would have had to claimed to have managed or worked with (but was lying about). A fake profile for "Sam" might make it even easier to spot the fraud. Plus, other people who know him in real life might notice that his profile information is bogus and call him on it. (Why does your LinkedIn profile say you were a director?)
- lilyball 7y ago
  Perhaps because he didn't want any interviewers finding backchannel references but only consulting the references he provided. If he gave a LinkedIn profile for himself, he'd have to have plenty of connections that could be contacted as potential references.
- sdan 7y ago
  Probably didn't want coworkers to get recommended to connect with him on Linkedin (which would blow his cover). I remember when I said I worked at company X on Linkedin, the next day I was getting barraged with emails and notifications to connect with coworkers (which 1-2 months into the job, didn't really feel like doing) and I'm pretty sure they got those recommendations about me as well.
juanbyrge 7y ago
"Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him.""
juanbyrge 7y ago
What if you missed out on hiring the Steve Jobs of the catering industry? Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him."
- sdan 7y ago
  There's a difference between lying about one position and making entire linkedin profiles that you set up. One's mischievous and one's deception.
  - jaspax 7y ago
    No, they're both deception, and they're both strong negative signals. Think of it this way. Out of the 1000 people who will outright lie about having worked some place, 999 of them are sociopaths or grifters who will do serious harm to your company if you hire them. The last one is Steve Jobs. We only hear about the last one, usually, but if you're hiring someone and you know that they've lied about their experience, don't take that chance.
    - GFischer 7y ago
      And Jobs WAS a sociopath. He was also a ruthless genius.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > There's a difference between lying about one position and making entire linkedin profiles that you set up. One's mischievous and one's deception. As a human, you can only bring a few things to the table: inherited wealth, demand for your talents, and credibility. The first is a gamble, the second is impossible to control given the market, your credibility is the only thing you can really guide. Be honest, be trustworthy. It takes forever to build, but in the end, it's how people make judgment calls about everything else.
rusticpenn 7y ago
The idea I get from this is that, the quality of a management candidate cannot be detected from interviews?
- neilk 7y ago
  This is the correct answer
ChuckMcM 7y ago
That is a uniquely scary story. I have only had the displeasure of hiring one person who effectively lied their way into the position. It was really obvious after they started that they had grossly overstated their skills and experience. My point of 'confusion' was that their reference checks were people who had worked with them, liked them but not for very long because they were leaving when that person joined, Etc. I had asked about many short tenures in their resume but as an individual contributor they passed it off as "finding a challenge they could bite their teeth into" and basically working their way up the pay ladder. At Google people got "starter projects" I liked this idea to get an idea of what they could do, and its an opportunity to understand what they are good at. I gave the person an assignment that, given their experience, should have been well within their capabilities. They kept not delivering and kept up a steady patter of "knocking down the barriers" communications which, valid or not, got me wondering what was going on with this person. At the one month point I gave them a pretty clear deliverable and worked with them for a timeline for when it would be done. They were "almost" done at the agreed upon time two weeks later, so I asked them to present it one week from that date to the group. The presentation was an epic disaster in terms of not coming close to meeting the deliverable, not showing any development in understanding the problem, and generally being something a new hire could have come up with in less time. At our 1:1 that week we talked about the deliverable, my expectations given the experience they claimed to have, and what we got. I got a lot of "I just need x, y, and z and then it will be done." kind of discussion. Delving into those needs became "waiting on p, q, and r to deliver this part." kinds of discussions. At the end of our 1:1 that week I asked them if they were satisfied with their performance. They felt it was ok and would get better with time. I told them I didn't feel we could afford that time and that Friday would be their last day. I was bummed that we wasted nearly 2 months on this person. I don't think anyone in the organization was surprised to see them go.
- wink 7y ago
  I remember we also did this "starter project" thing and one our new hires (who had made a really good impression in the interviews) was told to create a simple web interface for something (one of those "we should really fix this papercut") together with another hire on the frontend. He was kinda furious that he was demoted to doing lowly web development in his first week (in order to get to know our infrastructure, in a small startup) and I don't even remember if he did a good job finishing the actual task...
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Yessing 7y ago
if the best candidate you interviewed is a fraud: - either the candidate was competent: then why did he need to lie to get the job? maybe you're over-filtering based on resume and years of experience. The variable your looking for is competence. Years of experience, is just a proxy. if the proxy is drying up your supply, maybe it's not an effective one. moreover, people are not born managers. why not give new talent a chance. - the candidate was not competent: The interview process is therefore broken and is not measuring competence. Maybe you're overvaluing confidence or the speed of answering. Maybe the questions are not Technical enough? I don't know. But notice that valuing anything that is irrelevant would lead to a lower expected value of candidate's competence. Using ineffective tools while searching for something rare is unsurprisingly hard. As a side comment, I'm kinda taken aback by the fact that interview results like "culture fit" are shared this way. I would've expected a higher standard of privacy. Is this commonly accepted? Another point, I've noticed that the hiring process involved a lot of "friend / wife of a friend". Wouldn't this if left unchecked cause some ethnic/age-based bias ( not necessarily in a legal sense)?
- palebluedot 7y ago
  I think that "competent/not-competent" is a false dichotomy. The candidate could be exceptionally qualified technically and competent, but have significant ethical / integrity issues that are difficult to notice in an interview, for instance. So a technical interview may not catch that, but past references may.
nodesocket 7y ago
Something about this story doesn’t add up to me. Maybe I am being cynical but it seems like this was fabricated for the exposure.
- hliyan 7y ago
  I sensed this too. So I looked at the author's profile. Now I'm even more confused: From https://arr.am https://arr.am: Stuff That’s Happened to Me I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history. I once came up with an idea with a friend that accidentally became a national TV ad featuring Nicki Minaj, Serena Williams, Usher, Kylie and Kendall Jenner. I once crashed a fashion show, pretended to be a model, and walked on-stage as dozens of photographers snapped pictures of me. I was paid in whiskey for a live harmonica performance at a jazz bar in Tokyo. I don’t play harmonica particularly well. I DJ’d for Chamillionaire. I don’t know how to DJ. I was yelled at for five minutes by the founder of Skye Vodka for taking his favorite table at a restaurant. I’ve discovered and excavated dinosaur bones in the Montana badlands.
  - rusticpenn 7y ago
    Sam should have written "I pretended leading a team of 70 instead of 3 to get an interview"
  - csomar 7y ago
    Looks like the person they thought is the best fit is the person closer to them in personality.
  - mLuby 7y ago
    It's not that confusing, just a bit needy† 1. How many memes are there? Still, this is the most unlikely brag which is probably why it's first. 2. I've had great ideas that turned into things too (causality not confirmed). Friend could have been in advertising. 3. This is… unlikely as stated but there may have been an audience participation part that could be generously reworded this way (and some people say "crashed" to mean "went spontaneously" rather than "snuck in"). 4. Easy to imagine a bored bartender on a dead night exchanging a shot for a moment of levity. #Anchorman 5. Could be an embellishment of "I added a song or skipped forward a track and there was someone famous in earshot." 6. I think the brag here is "I take desirable things from rich/famous people because I'm at their level" but it's much more likely just a maître d's mistake and the vodka guy was escalating to get his way. Also we don't know the result—who got the table? 7. Wouldn't surprise me if there are "experience archaeology" tours that contrive this kind of thing. #StartupIdea †Which, to be fair, aren't we all?
rainyMammoth 7y ago
> the demand for qualified engineering managers being far, far, greater than the supply. That's not really what it is. Let's rephrase it as "the demand for engineering managers that pass your completely subjective interview process which is completely unrelated to the job".
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  No, I think the original statement is fair. Good engineering managers, like good staff-level engineers, will generally receive multiple solicitations a week to please come work for some company or another. Notice how the author considered it "entirely believable" that the candidate would have disabled his Linkedin profile due to recruiter spam; people at the level he was claiming really can get recruited so much that they need specific strategies to deal with it.
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    > Good engineering managers, like good staff-level engineers, will generally receive multiple solicitations a week to please come work for some company or another. Right. And we rightfully know most of these offers are full of shit. Newsflash: No good job is offered cold or out of the blue. > Notice how the author considered it "entirely believable" that the candidate would have disabled his Linkedin profile due to recruiter spam; people at the level he was claiming really can get recruited so much that they need specific strategies to deal with it. You can disable this type of spam. Nuking/disabling your LinkedIN profile is very extreme. It will make me throw a red flag on you immediately. Want to indict me? I don't care - you're not my target hire.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  Also don't forget "... and at the salary we are prepared to pay". I have no idea what the salary was these people were offering but often companies seem to moan about there being "no talent" or a "skills shortage" when they're actually just offering unrealistically low salaries/total comp for a highly-skilled and in-demand job so either don't get much interest, or only get applications from chancers and charlatans trying their luck
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austincheney 7y ago
> It was at this point that I actually said out loud to myself “I notice I’m confused.” Strange how never this occurs when executing or designing web technologies, particularly the DOM. Instead people jump immediately to the largest prepackaged solutions currently available without question, everything plus the kitchen sink, as normal as breathing. Invented here syndrome is the default without even the most subtle hint of consideration. This is perhaps most clearly realized in that most developers have some irrational horrid fear of the DOM when they encounter it and yet simultaneously find the DOM to be some sort of savior to allowing Web Assembly to replace JavaScript. Never is the confusion or irrationality questioned in favor of something comforting. I also find it strange how eagerly people are willing to impose bias in hiring and candidate selection to ensure the most important selection criteria is conformance opposed to performance. It really is as though the thought I notice I’m confused is something fearful to be protected from instead of confronted when developers are tasked with hiring.
dnh44 7y ago
I felt the same sense of mild confusion as I read this, until I got to the end when I realised that I’ve read various versions of this same urban legend two or three times over the previous 20 years.
teilo 7y ago
TLDR: Con man writes a fake story about a con man, just for clicks.
rjkennedy98 7y ago
I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule. When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by people who did phone interviews well, and in the on site interviews were completely incapable of answering the same questions at all. They we sure they had been catfished by multiple recruits.
- mjevans 7y ago
  Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help. I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees. A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's normal role. This could be work towards a bug in something (open source) they use, a small utility project, or even just a 'toy' project of somekind (E.G. fizz buzz but with some constraints, maybe language or being a module something else can use, etc). There'd be a fixed size payment for either using up a maximum number of hours or completing the task (with documented work on what was done in both cases).
  - jonathlee 7y ago
    I have personal experience with this type of situation. Twice we had excellent phone interviews for an onsite contractor position. Then, when the supposed person we interviewed showed up, they turned out not to be able to do the work (not an onsite interview, the actual work). One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.
    - grawprog 7y ago
      >One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was. I'm curious as to how someone like that could even pass a phone interview. Even if they were cheating, they would have had to have been reading stuff verbatim to answer the interviewer's questions. How was this not at least picked up a little bit during the interview? How could someone with such a small amount of knowledge in the domain trick the interviewer enough that they raised no flags at all during the interview?
dpiers 7y ago
The interesting thing about white collar fraud is that it rarely goes reported, and there are little repercussions unless it does. Companies care less about protecting other companies from harm than the risk of exposing themselves to claims of libel or slander by the accused. It's also not great press if people find out you hired a con-artist or allowed someone to steal from you because of your poor internal controls. A study in Norway found that 96% of cases of corporate fraud were not reported to authorities.[1] The financial and reputational costs of a company pursuing prosecution outweigh the benefits, and it's usually better to keep things quiet: terminate the individual and recoup whatever losses you are able to without involving the legal system. Even in this scenario of blatant fraud, Arram stopped short of explicitly naming the individual. ZeroCater was saved a huge hiring mistake, but 'Sam' probably went on to another company that is clueless to his scam. This is why I always ask why someone is looking for a new opportunity/why they left their previous position. If the answer doesn't add up, I press for more info. Maybe they're just embarrassed because they were fired? People get fired all the time for reasons that don't necessarily preclude them from being valuable to me. But if they still can't come up with an answer that makes sense, I start "noticing I'm confused". [1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2016.1196993?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=udbh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2016.11...
rainyMammoth 7y ago
And yet the sad conclusion is that even though that hire lied on his resume he might very well be an excellent match for that job given he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him. If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the job if he was going to be good at it anyways? I'm getting mad at all of those artificial gatekeepers that like to also play victim because "there are not enough talents out there". Yes that guy lied on his resume and therefore should not be hired (and he should be shamed). But this CEO should also realize that his artificial gate-keeping is the reason why people feel the need to lie.
- Austhou 7y ago
  Because it's a VP position and not an entry level job?
  - rainyMammoth 7y ago
    It is a VP position for a small, medium startup. The equivalent of a middle manager anywhere else.
  - frenchyatwork 7y ago
    The problem is not that there are barriers, but that the barriers are artificial.
- zodiac 7y ago
  It's true that he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him, but would you hire someone who lied to the extent that he did?
  - rainyMammoth 7y ago
    Of course I would not hire him, but I left this comment because this artificial gate-keeping that pushed the hire to lie is a ridiculous trend. Let's say that this hire didn't lie on his resume, he would still successfully pass the interview but he would never get to that point anyways.
mikedilger 7y ago
I had an interviewee who was answering questions quite well but kind of shrugging me off when I dug deeper. Then I asked a question I hadn't asked before and he actually complained that the question wasn't fair because he didn't get a chance to study for that question. I recommended against. The hiring manager, to my suprise, let him go "study" and come back for more questions. The whole team being on to this, we asked very different questions the second time around and he failed miserably. We all recommended against. Again to my suprise, the hiring manager decided he liked him and hired him. After a re-org and under a new manager, it took about six months IIRC to legally get rid of the guy. Nice guy - wrong fit.
stevage 7y ago
I feel like the valuable lesson here is: references provided by candidates aren't worth very much.
sfink 7y ago
Reminds me of my similar experience, which I wrote up at https://www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-had-a-bad-gut-feeling-about-someone-and-it-was-right/answer/Steve-Fink https://www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-had-a-bad-gut-feeling-ab...
awesome_dude 7y ago
So, I have been giving this a bit of thought, when I interview badly (and I have a zillion times), it's mostly because I'm not used to vocalising my thoughts whilst I work. That is interviewer: Tell me what your next step is in solving this problem me: <radio silence> The problem is two things, I, as an engineer, barely ever talk to people as I am solving whatever it is I am doing, so the interview is a completely artificial environment that I am not equipped for (although, as I interview more I get back into the groove and by the third or fourth interview I am able to anticipate the questions and produce a mechanical answer that satisfies the interviewer) The second part of the problem is obvious, the interviewer has no clue why I cannot answer the question, so can only assume it's a lack of skills on my part. Interviews are an artificial environment, there's no way an interviewer can actually tell from the interview whether the person in front of them is a good engineer or not. When I have got a few interviews under my belt, I am fluent, and able to demonstrate my theory knowledge clearly. Have my skills changed? Not really, my interview skills for sure, but my engineering skills? Interviewers often try to counter this by searching for some obscure factoid within the technology and wondering why people being interviewed don't know it (curiously there's the other problem here where interviewers themselves have an erroneous understanding of the technology and this leads to false negatives).
Travisuetenik 7y ago
My wife has been accusing me on cheating on her so many times. But ever since i got married to my wife have not slept or have an affair with any woman out there. After some findings and all with the help of Jeajamhacker@gmail. com it happens to be that my wife has been the one cheating on me, with the help of Jeajamhacker@gmail. com i read a lot of deleted messages from my wife phone without having physical contact with her phone. My wife has been planing to leave me a long time ago since 2017 according to her chats with her so called lover that's why she has been finding fault in me trying to accuse me on cheating on her meanwhile my hands are clean. Thank God for hackers who will dig out the truth for you so that brings me to say a very big thank you to Jeajamhacker@gmail. com.

206 points by Nyubis 7y ago

Clearly there was fraud here. But I'm curious about the the interview process. If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process.

oefrha 7y ago
Yeah, I certainly Noticed I Was Confused while reading this story.
- Tenoke 7y ago
  The interviewee passed the questions, was well liked and the only note of confusion he mentions was 'Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got too much recruiter spam'. For what is worth I also don't have a LinkedIn for the same reason any more..
  - mjevans 7y ago
    I've still never had an account on many social media sites, but that's because I avoid most forms of social media period. (Technically a couple niche discussion sites might count, this being one of them, but the closest thing I've got to an actual social media account is a Reddit account I mostly used in respect to one sub-forum on that site where content creators I liked had a sort of news aggregator for their content).
nordsieck 7y ago
> If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process. There are many things people evaluate during the interview process. One of them is technical competence. Another is integrity. From the story, it doesn't appear OP's interview process is broken.
- jiofih 7y ago
  How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager? There are diminishing marginal returns on better screening. Most people are pretty honest, and of those people who aren't honest, most of those people will mess up their deception; this means that a pretty basic level of screening brings a lot of value while only letting through a few bad apples. One could intensify the screening to avoid more bad apples, but that costs money and increases the false positive rate. At some point, it's better to just hire people and fire them when it doesn't work out.
- woodrowbarlow 7y ago
  you give two examples, and the interview process in the article failed spectacularly on both counts.
downandout 7y ago
Or maybe he had plenty of experience and technical expertise to competently answer all the interview questions, and even to perform the job in question extremely well. Perhaps he would have been a model hire. There are lots of reasons that people exaggerate their experience, and not all of them mean that the candidate is not well-suited for a given job. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to do what “Sam” did, but you can’t say that their interview process was broken based solely on the fact that the process identified him as a good candidate after he inflated his resume and did some simple LinkedIn manipulation to try to push himself to the top of the resume stack. Their interview process may in fact have identified and vetted the best man for the job, he was just one that happened to be insecure enough about his work experience to exaggerate it.
- jiofih 7y ago
  “Inflated his resume” and “simple LinkedIn manipulation” are extremely mild ways of describing what he did. He lied about his entire work experience, role at previous job, and got someone else to pretend they were a VP and cover for them on the phone. This is fraud, not ‘inflating your CV’. That is, if this story is even real.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - jerf 7y ago
    As I've often said about the DailyWTF stories, if this story isn't real, one just like it has happened hundreds or thousands of times. It's an outlier, yes, but not something I'd even blink at having had happen to someone, somewhere, at some point. I've only done several dozen interviews and I haven't seen anything that extreme, but I've seen enough stuff that I wouldn't find it that shocking. (Or, somebody did try to snow me to that extreme but failed to get to the point where we even cared about checking references. I don't mean this as any sort of triumphalism, but just by its nature, it's easier to BS your way through a a management interview than a technical interview. I'd say that's less about one necessarily being "harder" and certainly not about one being "better", but that there's a much larger set of distinct things we may talk about in a tech interview. If you really don't know anything technical, you have much greater odds of getting something asked that rats you out.)
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NiceWayToDoIT 7y ago

Yes I have that sense of "Confusion' just now about this article. So let me understand, "Sam" was best technical candidate ever, knowing all the answers and everything but somehow he lied about who he was?! Over time people build distrust toward recruiters, why: - they use cold calling, - as soon as you resign they call to find who are your references, not to offer you a job, but to find who is lead contact in previous company they can call and so they could someone just to get that 20+% fee... - in order for these to succeed they need to use social engineering techniques (they pretend they are friendly) - they post fake job ads to collect CV ... - have I mentioned huge fees for literally doing nothing .... and on and on and on .... Who ever was wrote this article he should just zip it ....

NiceWayToDoIT 7y ago
Honestly I think this article should be reported and banned from hacker news it is probably self-promotion for the purpose of gaining more attention and potential leads and candidates with pretense "we are honest recruiter company"

Tenoke 7y ago

You say he passed all your questions with flying colours, everyone liked him, etc. If he hadn't lied about his specific experience would you have hired him?

drewcoo 7y ago

So "the rationalist community" relies on gut feelings? Now I'm confused and it's only the first non-italic paragraph.

Tenoke 7y ago
Do you think there's absolutely nothing to be learned from 'gut feelings'? Of course they mean something, so taking them in the equation - at least for trying to recognize why you have that gut feeling, and whether it's relevant or not - is pretty sensible. Rationality isn't about being a cold calculating machine, it's about arriving at the best answers you can while using whatever actually works.
pure-awesome 7y ago
Yes. Taking into account gut feelings has been a part of the rationalist community's strategy for as long as I can recall. The rationalist community's "Rationality" is not about using cold calculation for everything. It's about not letting your human biases and motivated reasoning get in the way of finding the truth and being effective. (Whether or not the movement is successful is a bit of a debate, of course, but the core philosophy is sound). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hfbWhRrY2Pwwrgi/summary-of-the-straw-vulcan https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hfbWhRrY2Pwwrgi/summary-of... > System 1—the intuitive system—is the older of the two and allows us to make quick, automatic judgments using shortcuts (i.e. heuristics) that are usually good most of the time, all while requiring very little of your time and attention. > System 2—the deliberative system—is the newer of the two and allows us to do things like abstract hypothetical thinking and make models that explain unexpected events. System 2 tends to do better when you have more resources and more time and worse when there are many factors to consider and you have limited time. ... > The main thing to take away from this System 1 and 2 split is that both systems have strengths and weaknesses, and rationality is about finding the best path—using both systems at the right times—to epistemic and instrumental rationality. > Being “too rational” usually means you are using your System 2 brain intentionally but poorly. For example, teenagers were criticized in an article for being “too rational” because they could reason themselves into things like drugs and speeding. But this isn’t a problem with being too rational; it’s a problem with being very bad at System 2 reasoning!

sun_n_surf 7y ago

And in other things that never happened...

NhanH 7y ago

Imagine if you read the autobiography of a big name and they told a story about how they hack the interviewing process of X company, getting they first big break which resulted in all the big successes afterward. How much admiration would he get for that, a #1 HN story even. I do get confused reading this story, at least I wish it continue on for a bit afterward (how was his reaction, other people's reaction. Did you end up hiring someone?)

lilyball 7y ago
I'm pretty sure "blatantly lying about your past experience and getting your wife to cover for you" isn't "hacking the interviewing process".
- r1chard5mith 7y ago
  Why though? I can just imagine someone at the time saying something similar of Steve Wozniak and the other 'phreakers' who were stealing phone calls. If it had worked, and was retold as an old-timer story by a rich and successful man, it would be high-fives all round.
  - lilyball 7y ago
    Stealing phone calls is fighting back against large faceless corporations. Lying your way into a job at a startup is very much not.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
History is written by winners. If you fake your way into something and succeed you are a cool hustler. If you fail you are a fraud. If you run up credit card debt to keep your company going and succeed you show persistence. If you fail you are an irresponsible a...hole.

kstenerud 7y ago

Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got too much recruiter spam, which was entirely believable. He said he’d turn it back on and send me the link, but hadn’t followed up. It wasn’t much, but it was certainly a bit odd given how reliable he seemed in general. Why would someone who'd spent months, perhaps even years cultivating a network of fake LinkedIn profiles and confederates, not have a linkedin profile himself when not having one would immediately arouse suspicion? It's not like it's at all difficult to doctor your work links. Even his wife supposedly had a profile, faking as a VP at the company in question. Something doesn't add up here.

jchw 7y ago
My best guess is to avoid the folks that he has scammed in the past from blowing his cover. Those other seemingly legit profiles presumably have no obvious link to him.
Pyxl101 7y ago
It would be hard for the fake profile to get connections with people that he would have had to claimed to have managed or worked with (but was lying about). A fake profile for "Sam" might make it even easier to spot the fraud. Plus, other people who know him in real life might notice that his profile information is bogus and call him on it. (Why does your LinkedIn profile say you were a director?)
lilyball 7y ago
Perhaps because he didn't want any interviewers finding backchannel references but only consulting the references he provided. If he gave a LinkedIn profile for himself, he'd have to have plenty of connections that could be contacted as potential references.
sdan 7y ago
Probably didn't want coworkers to get recommended to connect with him on Linkedin (which would blow his cover). I remember when I said I worked at company X on Linkedin, the next day I was getting barraged with emails and notifications to connect with coworkers (which 1-2 months into the job, didn't really feel like doing) and I'm pretty sure they got those recommendations about me as well.

juanbyrge 7y ago

"Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him.""

juanbyrge 7y ago

What if you missed out on hiring the Steve Jobs of the catering industry? Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him."

sdan 7y ago
There's a difference between lying about one position and making entire linkedin profiles that you set up. One's mischievous and one's deception.
- jaspax 7y ago
  No, they're both deception, and they're both strong negative signals. Think of it this way. Out of the 1000 people who will outright lie about having worked some place, 999 of them are sociopaths or grifters who will do serious harm to your company if you hire them. The last one is Steve Jobs. We only hear about the last one, usually, but if you're hiring someone and you know that they've lied about their experience, don't take that chance.
  - GFischer 7y ago
    And Jobs WAS a sociopath. He was also a ruthless genius.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > There's a difference between lying about one position and making entire linkedin profiles that you set up. One's mischievous and one's deception. As a human, you can only bring a few things to the table: inherited wealth, demand for your talents, and credibility. The first is a gamble, the second is impossible to control given the market, your credibility is the only thing you can really guide. Be honest, be trustworthy. It takes forever to build, but in the end, it's how people make judgment calls about everything else.

rusticpenn 7y ago

The idea I get from this is that, the quality of a management candidate cannot be detected from interviews?

neilk 7y ago
This is the correct answer

ChuckMcM 7y ago

That is a uniquely scary story. I have only had the displeasure of hiring one person who effectively lied their way into the position. It was really obvious after they started that they had grossly overstated their skills and experience. My point of 'confusion' was that their reference checks were people who had worked with them, liked them but not for very long because they were leaving when that person joined, Etc. I had asked about many short tenures in their resume but as an individual contributor they passed it off as "finding a challenge they could bite their teeth into" and basically working their way up the pay ladder. At Google people got "starter projects" I liked this idea to get an idea of what they could do, and its an opportunity to understand what they are good at. I gave the person an assignment that, given their experience, should have been well within their capabilities. They kept not delivering and kept up a steady patter of "knocking down the barriers" communications which, valid or not, got me wondering what was going on with this person. At the one month point I gave them a pretty clear deliverable and worked with them for a timeline for when it would be done. They were "almost" done at the agreed upon time two weeks later, so I asked them to present it one week from that date to the group. The presentation was an epic disaster in terms of not coming close to meeting the deliverable, not showing any development in understanding the problem, and generally being something a new hire could have come up with in less time. At our 1:1 that week we talked about the deliverable, my expectations given the experience they claimed to have, and what we got. I got a lot of "I just need x, y, and z and then it will be done." kind of discussion. Delving into those needs became "waiting on p, q, and r to deliver this part." kinds of discussions. At the end of our 1:1 that week I asked them if they were satisfied with their performance. They felt it was ok and would get better with time. I told them I didn't feel we could afford that time and that Friday would be their last day. I was bummed that we wasted nearly 2 months on this person. I don't think anyone in the organization was surprised to see them go.

wink 7y ago
I remember we also did this "starter project" thing and one our new hires (who had made a really good impression in the interviews) was told to create a simple web interface for something (one of those "we should really fix this papercut") together with another hire on the frontend. He was kinda furious that he was demoted to doing lowly web development in his first week (in order to get to know our infrastructure, in a small startup) and I don't even remember if he did a good job finishing the actual task...

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Yessing 7y ago

if the best candidate you interviewed is a fraud: - either the candidate was competent: then why did he need to lie to get the job? maybe you're over-filtering based on resume and years of experience. The variable your looking for is competence. Years of experience, is just a proxy. if the proxy is drying up your supply, maybe it's not an effective one. moreover, people are not born managers. why not give new talent a chance. - the candidate was not competent: The interview process is therefore broken and is not measuring competence. Maybe you're overvaluing confidence or the speed of answering. Maybe the questions are not Technical enough? I don't know. But notice that valuing anything that is irrelevant would lead to a lower expected value of candidate's competence. Using ineffective tools while searching for something rare is unsurprisingly hard. As a side comment, I'm kinda taken aback by the fact that interview results like "culture fit" are shared this way. I would've expected a higher standard of privacy. Is this commonly accepted? Another point, I've noticed that the hiring process involved a lot of "friend / wife of a friend". Wouldn't this if left unchecked cause some ethnic/age-based bias ( not necessarily in a legal sense)?

palebluedot 7y ago
I think that "competent/not-competent" is a false dichotomy. The candidate could be exceptionally qualified technically and competent, but have significant ethical / integrity issues that are difficult to notice in an interview, for instance. So a technical interview may not catch that, but past references may.

nodesocket 7y ago

Something about this story doesn’t add up to me. Maybe I am being cynical but it seems like this was fabricated for the exposure.

hliyan 7y ago
I sensed this too. So I looked at the author's profile. Now I'm even more confused: From https://arr.am https://arr.am: Stuff That’s Happened to Me I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history. I once came up with an idea with a friend that accidentally became a national TV ad featuring Nicki Minaj, Serena Williams, Usher, Kylie and Kendall Jenner. I once crashed a fashion show, pretended to be a model, and walked on-stage as dozens of photographers snapped pictures of me. I was paid in whiskey for a live harmonica performance at a jazz bar in Tokyo. I don’t play harmonica particularly well. I DJ’d for Chamillionaire. I don’t know how to DJ. I was yelled at for five minutes by the founder of Skye Vodka for taking his favorite table at a restaurant. I’ve discovered and excavated dinosaur bones in the Montana badlands.
- rusticpenn 7y ago
  Sam should have written "I pretended leading a team of 70 instead of 3 to get an interview"
- csomar 7y ago
  Looks like the person they thought is the best fit is the person closer to them in personality.
- mLuby 7y ago
  It's not that confusing, just a bit needy† 1. How many memes are there? Still, this is the most unlikely brag which is probably why it's first. 2. I've had great ideas that turned into things too (causality not confirmed). Friend could have been in advertising. 3. This is… unlikely as stated but there may have been an audience participation part that could be generously reworded this way (and some people say "crashed" to mean "went spontaneously" rather than "snuck in"). 4. Easy to imagine a bored bartender on a dead night exchanging a shot for a moment of levity. #Anchorman 5. Could be an embellishment of "I added a song or skipped forward a track and there was someone famous in earshot." 6. I think the brag here is "I take desirable things from rich/famous people because I'm at their level" but it's much more likely just a maître d's mistake and the vodka guy was escalating to get his way. Also we don't know the result—who got the table? 7. Wouldn't surprise me if there are "experience archaeology" tours that contrive this kind of thing. #StartupIdea †Which, to be fair, aren't we all?

rainyMammoth 7y ago

> the demand for qualified engineering managers being far, far, greater than the supply. That's not really what it is. Let's rephrase it as "the demand for engineering managers that pass your completely subjective interview process which is completely unrelated to the job".

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
No, I think the original statement is fair. Good engineering managers, like good staff-level engineers, will generally receive multiple solicitations a week to please come work for some company or another. Notice how the author considered it "entirely believable" that the candidate would have disabled his Linkedin profile due to recruiter spam; people at the level he was claiming really can get recruited so much that they need specific strategies to deal with it.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  > Good engineering managers, like good staff-level engineers, will generally receive multiple solicitations a week to please come work for some company or another. Right. And we rightfully know most of these offers are full of shit. Newsflash: No good job is offered cold or out of the blue. > Notice how the author considered it "entirely believable" that the candidate would have disabled his Linkedin profile due to recruiter spam; people at the level he was claiming really can get recruited so much that they need specific strategies to deal with it. You can disable this type of spam. Nuking/disabling your LinkedIN profile is very extreme. It will make me throw a red flag on you immediately. Want to indict me? I don't care - you're not my target hire.
mattlondon 7y ago
Also don't forget "... and at the salary we are prepared to pay". I have no idea what the salary was these people were offering but often companies seem to moan about there being "no talent" or a "skills shortage" when they're actually just offering unrealistically low salaries/total comp for a highly-skilled and in-demand job so either don't get much interest, or only get applications from chancers and charlatans trying their luck

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austincheney 7y ago

> It was at this point that I actually said out loud to myself “I notice I’m confused.” Strange how never this occurs when executing or designing web technologies, particularly the DOM. Instead people jump immediately to the largest prepackaged solutions currently available without question, everything plus the kitchen sink, as normal as breathing. Invented here syndrome is the default without even the most subtle hint of consideration. This is perhaps most clearly realized in that most developers have some irrational horrid fear of the DOM when they encounter it and yet simultaneously find the DOM to be some sort of savior to allowing Web Assembly to replace JavaScript. Never is the confusion or irrationality questioned in favor of something comforting. I also find it strange how eagerly people are willing to impose bias in hiring and candidate selection to ensure the most important selection criteria is conformance opposed to performance. It really is as though the thought I notice I’m confused is something fearful to be protected from instead of confronted when developers are tasked with hiring.

dnh44 7y ago

I felt the same sense of mild confusion as I read this, until I got to the end when I realised that I’ve read various versions of this same urban legend two or three times over the previous 20 years.

teilo 7y ago

TLDR: Con man writes a fake story about a con man, just for clicks.

rjkennedy98 7y ago

I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule. When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by people who did phone interviews well, and in the on site interviews were completely incapable of answering the same questions at all. They we sure they had been catfished by multiple recruits.

mjevans 7y ago
Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help. I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees. A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's normal role. This could be work towards a bug in something (open source) they use, a small utility project, or even just a 'toy' project of somekind (E.G. fizz buzz but with some constraints, maybe language or being a module something else can use, etc). There'd be a fixed size payment for either using up a maximum number of hours or completing the task (with documented work on what was done in both cases).
- jonathlee 7y ago
  I have personal experience with this type of situation. Twice we had excellent phone interviews for an onsite contractor position. Then, when the supposed person we interviewed showed up, they turned out not to be able to do the work (not an onsite interview, the actual work). One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    >One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was. I'm curious as to how someone like that could even pass a phone interview. Even if they were cheating, they would have had to have been reading stuff verbatim to answer the interviewer's questions. How was this not at least picked up a little bit during the interview? How could someone with such a small amount of knowledge in the domain trick the interviewer enough that they raised no flags at all during the interview?

dpiers 7y ago

The interesting thing about white collar fraud is that it rarely goes reported, and there are little repercussions unless it does. Companies care less about protecting other companies from harm than the risk of exposing themselves to claims of libel or slander by the accused. It's also not great press if people find out you hired a con-artist or allowed someone to steal from you because of your poor internal controls. A study in Norway found that 96% of cases of corporate fraud were not reported to authorities.[1] The financial and reputational costs of a company pursuing prosecution outweigh the benefits, and it's usually better to keep things quiet: terminate the individual and recoup whatever losses you are able to without involving the legal system. Even in this scenario of blatant fraud, Arram stopped short of explicitly naming the individual. ZeroCater was saved a huge hiring mistake, but 'Sam' probably went on to another company that is clueless to his scam. This is why I always ask why someone is looking for a new opportunity/why they left their previous position. If the answer doesn't add up, I press for more info. Maybe they're just embarrassed because they were fired? People get fired all the time for reasons that don't necessarily preclude them from being valuable to me. But if they still can't come up with an answer that makes sense, I start "noticing I'm confused". [1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2016.1196993?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=udbh20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2016.11...

rainyMammoth 7y ago

And yet the sad conclusion is that even though that hire lied on his resume he might very well be an excellent match for that job given he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him. If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the job if he was going to be good at it anyways? I'm getting mad at all of those artificial gatekeepers that like to also play victim because "there are not enough talents out there". Yes that guy lied on his resume and therefore should not be hired (and he should be shamed). But this CEO should also realize that his artificial gate-keeping is the reason why people feel the need to lie.

Austhou 7y ago
Because it's a VP position and not an entry level job?
- rainyMammoth 7y ago
  It is a VP position for a small, medium startup. The equivalent of a middle manager anywhere else.
- frenchyatwork 7y ago
  The problem is not that there are barriers, but that the barriers are artificial.
zodiac 7y ago
It's true that he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him, but would you hire someone who lied to the extent that he did?
- rainyMammoth 7y ago
  Of course I would not hire him, but I left this comment because this artificial gate-keeping that pushed the hire to lie is a ridiculous trend. Let's say that this hire didn't lie on his resume, he would still successfully pass the interview but he would never get to that point anyways.

mikedilger 7y ago

I had an interviewee who was answering questions quite well but kind of shrugging me off when I dug deeper. Then I asked a question I hadn't asked before and he actually complained that the question wasn't fair because he didn't get a chance to study for that question. I recommended against. The hiring manager, to my suprise, let him go "study" and come back for more questions. The whole team being on to this, we asked very different questions the second time around and he failed miserably. We all recommended against. Again to my suprise, the hiring manager decided he liked him and hired him. After a re-org and under a new manager, it took about six months IIRC to legally get rid of the guy. Nice guy - wrong fit.

stevage 7y ago

I feel like the valuable lesson here is: references provided by candidates aren't worth very much.

sfink 7y ago

Reminds me of my similar experience, which I wrote up at https://www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-had-a-bad-gut-feeling-about-someone-and-it-was-right/answer/Steve-Fink https://www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-had-a-bad-gut-feeling-ab...

awesome_dude 7y ago

So, I have been giving this a bit of thought, when I interview badly (and I have a zillion times), it's mostly because I'm not used to vocalising my thoughts whilst I work. That is interviewer: Tell me what your next step is in solving this problem me: <radio silence> The problem is two things, I, as an engineer, barely ever talk to people as I am solving whatever it is I am doing, so the interview is a completely artificial environment that I am not equipped for (although, as I interview more I get back into the groove and by the third or fourth interview I am able to anticipate the questions and produce a mechanical answer that satisfies the interviewer) The second part of the problem is obvious, the interviewer has no clue why I cannot answer the question, so can only assume it's a lack of skills on my part. Interviews are an artificial environment, there's no way an interviewer can actually tell from the interview whether the person in front of them is a good engineer or not. When I have got a few interviews under my belt, I am fluent, and able to demonstrate my theory knowledge clearly. Have my skills changed? Not really, my interview skills for sure, but my engineering skills? Interviewers often try to counter this by searching for some obscure factoid within the technology and wondering why people being interviewed don't know it (curiously there's the other problem here where interviewers themselves have an erroneous understanding of the technology and this leads to false negatives).

Travisuetenik 7y ago

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