23 ms·

That wild Ask a Manager story

• hoseja 5y ago
  >when we design a human system around uncommon cases, we do need to consider the ramifications on the majority Not a very popular viewpoint nowadays...
• jackblemming 5y ago
  It’s sad the author even had to write this article, but a lot of devs do act and think like this. It’s also one of the reasons bullshit bureaucracy seems to be ever growing.
  • throwawaysleep 5y ago
    A lot of that is just developer/general employee incentives. As an employee, it is far more important for me to avoid blame than to be efficient as I will get no credit for marginal improvements/no hit for marginal harms, but will get blamed if there is a very noticeable bad incident. I am far more likely to have an annoyed boss from the wrong person showing up to work than driving away 100 candidates as the interview seemed hostile.
  • doctor_eval 5y ago
    Not just developers - I think it’s endemic among certain types of manager. Every time there’s a fire, they want to build a new fire engine.
    • jaten 5y ago
      Apparently Netflix's CEO designed the processes in his company to avoid just this trap.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  > I’ve written code that handles the 0.000000001% change that an object disappears. It is not amazon that will lose the object, but someone else in your team. As such the probability of it ever happening might be 1%
  • robinson-wall 5y ago
    I've been a recipient of the "we're really sorry but object in bucket X at path Y has been irretrievably lost" email a couple of times. Once you're storing a few million objects at standard durability it's par for the course.
• midjji 5y ago
  I'm not sure someone who did this could be fired in sweden, not without rock solid proof that someone else impersonated them for the interview, and even then it would be a long long process.
  • hef19898 5y ago
    In Germany, during probation (the first 6 months) contracts can be terminated by either party without giving a reason with two weeks of notice. In that case I assume the employer would simply fire the employee on day 3 (assuming it takes a while to figure it out and come to the decision), pay two weeks of salary and move on.
  • newaccount74 5y ago
    If someone tells you that annulling a contract because of obvious fraud would be a long process, then they are probably a lawyer. You just cancel the contract and be done with it. The fraudster is probably not going to sue, because it would just put them at risk of being found out. If the fraudster does sue, it could turn into a lengthy process, but with multiple witnesses who can confirm there was someone else on the interview I doubt it would go very far.
    • midjji 5y ago
      Oh I expect the fraudster would quit if they are challenged about it, but people are insanely afraid of conflict around here. Hiring someone is pretty much a choice the section heads can make. Firing someone, pretty much no matter why, is a choice the top level boss, 4 layers up, has to make, and they(government) are required to inform the unions a month in advance.
• themodelplumber 5y ago
  Thanks for posting. I wonder if the author's conclusion would differ depending on the subject's relation to this type of incident? For example: - You provide a service in this domain and are aware from the news that this is getting more common - You provide a service in this domain and your customers tell you this is annoying them, and the story has amplified that issue, making things uncomfortable for you - You perceive that you can provide specific value in this kind of situation, as someone who can change the dynamics of the issue with an intervention- or diagnostic-type product or service - You see this news as a way to highlight the additional value of your offering, for example your industry group or union provides additional leverage by vetting or screening Just some thoughts & questions as to interest, scope, and leverage outside that particular office.
  • jrochkind1 5y ago
    you're talking about how it might be different from a recruiter's point of view, thats what you mean by "a service in this domain", "your offering", etc? I'm guessing, not entirely sure what you mean, why not just say so?
    • themodelplumber 5y ago
      See how quickly you tried to narrow it down? This is tricky because the scenario seems so easy to contain in a given example, the straw-example-man so to speak. But the point is not the job or intersection of job titles, it's the conversion of scenario into broader principle. The author has started this pathway for us in their post. Abstraction allows one to theorize and stay big-picture more effectively, so if a different but still relevant individual or position comes into play later, the rules aren't instantly outdated. I wouldn't limit a message or rule to a position like "recruiter" if I wasn't sure that's exactly who I wanted to speak to, because that just leaks leverage all over the place. And also, I'm thinking of many different positions, possibly hundreds, not just the poor recruiter... They do get a lot of flak :D
      • jrochkind1 5y ago
        I'm just trying to figure out what you're talking about ("leaks leverage" what? what even is a "services" in the "domain" of... interviewing?), but ok.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  > But this behavior – having someone else pretend to be you during a job interview – is so far outside anything that normal people would consider that it’s simply not measurable on the same axis as anything job-related. I am not so sure that it is rare enough that you don’t need to think about it. We do know that it also happened with the SAT and ACT college admission tests https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/us/college-admissions-scandal-testing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/us/college-admissions-sca... Where parents hired a person to take tests on behalf of their children. Now that word is out about this technique, if you don’t do anything to try to prevent it, it will happen more.
  • ketzo 5y ago
    Except that something was done to prevent it happening again - the person was almost immediately fired. The author is arguing that prevention in the interview process would do more harm than good, particularly because there are already processes in place to deal with this issue. I think the SAT/ACT example is different. With a new hire in a technical field, it would just be so obvious if someone interviewed with a fake.
  • paxys 5y ago
    I don't see how that is comparable. With SAT/ACT once the test taker steps out of the hall there is literally no way to face any consequences. In this case you have to actually show up to work and prove that you are fit for the job you interviewed for or you will quickly be fired.
• cwkoss 5y ago
  In my early 20s, I thought technology could solve all of our problems. In my late 20s, I thought people-processes were the real hard problem. Now, in my early 30s, I think leaders who build both of the above, but have the wisdom and flexibility to know when to make exceptions, are perhaps the most fundamental key to success. I wonder how my perspective will change as I complete this decade of my life.
  • twelvechairs 5y ago
    The other logical step in your line of thought is to query what is a problem and what is a success. Finding the right problem to solve to bring success most painlessly is another way to define great leadership.
  • WalterBright 5y ago
    I've found that designing a programming language is a veritable mountain of compromises and exceptions. A language that rigidly follows rules tends to be intractable for users.
  • s17n 5y ago
    Eventually you'll realize, most of our problems aren't gonna be solved.
    • throwawaylinux 5y ago
      At some point after that, you'll realize that "leaders" and people who are seen to have the authority and capability to solve problems have a vested interest in perpetuating problems and making them worse.
      • CountDrewku 5y ago
    • sgift 5y ago
      The idealism to cynicism pipeline. Unfortunately, it's often true, even if you try to do something against it.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• odux 5y ago
  This situation (interviewing for someone else) is not uncommon in the IT/Software contracting field. Even more common is someone sitting across the room from the interviewee and giving answers. Sometimes through headphones hidden under hair. And I am taking about pre covid times where even if the interview was remote the job was more likely than not in office. What does the manager do when this happens? I have been there. The answer is simple, I did exactly what I would do if the exact candidate I interviewed showed up but fell short of expectations (say used google extensively, or the questions were theoretical and they were good talkers - happens with QA and Project Manager jobs). If they are borderline, give them a task, see if they are able to complete it. A Manager should do it anyway, interviews are hard. Most companies have probation periods for this reason. Why does it happen/what’s in it for the candidate/contracting firm? For the candidate a few weeks or months of experience that they can add to their resume. Do it in 3 or 4 places and suddenly you are a mid level developer. Hopefully they also learn a bit of programming in the meantime. For the contracting firm any money is money. Sketchy IT contracting forms routinely do this and worse.
  • Spooky23 5y ago
    If you use sketchy IT contracting firms, you’re vulnerable to this grift. It’s pretty common. A contractor attends some degree mill back home and is basically a human terminal. They get some training on how to function and send most of their work to a smart guy who does the work of a dozen contractors. If you allow remote, it’s 10x worse - the folks are almost certainly working multiple contracts.
  • Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
    I've worked alongside some of the sketchiest of IT contracting firms and I've seen this kind of behavior. One firm just decided to replace the trained contractors working on my BI team with a bunch of junior devs overnight, no explanation, no warning. The fact that BI management kept employing them says more for the suspected "hello money" I think was paid to get them in first.
  • eternauta3k 5y ago
    > a few weeks or months of experience that they can add to their resume Don't such short employment stints speak against a candidate?
• benreesman 5y ago
  There’s one reaction to this, my initial reaction: “that’s just common sense”. But I think it’s a valuable post nonetheless: it’s succinct, it’s a punchy reminder of something we should all try to remember, and as a colleague of mine says: “common sense is not always common practice.” Trying to fortify some system against some failure mode overwhelmingly often makes it more vulnerable to some other one. This is what keeps terrorists in business. EV[failure] = P(failure) * cost-of-failure.
  • throwawaysleep 5y ago
    A lot of that is just developer/general employee incentives. As an employee, it is far more important for me to avoid blame than to be efficient as I will get no credit for marginal improvements/no hit for marginal harms, but will get blamed if there is a very noticeable bad incident. I am far more likely to have an annoyed boss from the wrong person showing up to work than driving away 100 candidates as the interview seemed hostile. So the calculation is heavily weighted towards fortification for me as an employee, as I benefit not from the enterprise value but do from the value of my boss not being annoyed with me.
  • yowlingcat 5y ago
    At the risk of asking a naive and perhaps dumb question, wouldn't this assertion invalidate the entire product class of P&C insurance, wherein that specific asymmetry is directly and entirely hedged against?
    • benreesman 5y ago
      Transacting financial instruments is for most entities a negative sum game. There are transaction costs in the general case. But we can get more conceptual clarity by modeling it as a zero-sum game: one actor wins, one loses. In general the actor with the asymmetrical relationship to forecasts about future price action wins. Sometimes the smart guy loses because he's undercapitalized. Watching PHDs in friggin "steering outcomes under low gravity conditions" running home to Gaussian assumptions, the Central Limit Theorem, Fourier math, and VAR would be amusing if it wasn't going to put actual hunger on people who no one ever sent the link to HN. In light of the outrageous concrete human suffering, I think I can stifle my amusement.
• rodgerd 5y ago
  What's very interesting to me is that the Byzantine, multi-day, "we can't afford to make a mistake" hiring practises are so normal in the US, most of which allows easy firing without cause. It's a truly bizarre combination.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    I work at Google, and I understand it here. Yes, Google can technically fire people very easily, but culturally Google doesn't want to do this. Google doesn't want to be quick to fire full-time employees, generally speaking. So in practice, policies are in place such that firing people is actually somewhat difficult or lengthy, even though yeah, legally Google could fire almost anyone instantly. So if they hire someone who sucks, getting rid of them would be somewhat challenging just because of those self-imposed policies.
• gundmc 5y ago
  This (designing processes for rare edge cases) is endemic not only in people processes, but in technology-enabled business processes. I've had numerous clients fall into the trap of trying to over-engineer their process flow with validations for every conceivable parameter and variation. This sort of implementation inevitably becomes a mountain of technical debt that overfits to the current process and reduces operational agility when the current process changes. At some point with business applications you have to trust your people to do the work and view the technology as something that enables that rather than necessarily constrains every dimension of it.
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    This reminds me of “The Computer Won’t Let Me” problem with many companies’ customer support lines. You call about some edge case problem, like your modem’s MAC addressed was entered wrong by the installer tech (not a real example but whatever). The support agent would like to help you, but your problem is sufficiently off the normal rails that the agent can’t manually correct it. The field is not editable on his screen, and that’s that. The process won’t allow them to fix it. This happens a lot with billing errors. An exceptional outage happens and the agent wants to help but they can’t because the Holy Computer was programmed to not trust customer support to adjust people’s bills. I’m sorry, Dave, but I’m afraid I cannot do that.
    • technofiend 5y ago
      True story. Happened over the last couple of weeks. Me: Kraken, I'd like to recover my old account I created years ago. Kraken support: Sure, just login from the same computer and IP. Me: I can't, I no longer have either of those things. Kraken: How did our customer service go? Me: It didn't. Kraken: We can fix it, just login to zoom from the same computer and IP... Ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
      • bee_rider 5y ago
        On the bright side, you no longer have an account with a wildly incompetent company. Same IP? Unless you are on a campus with statically allocated addresses or something...
• 01100011 5y ago
  Agree with the overall message but I don't understand what is odd about asking for ID before an interview. If it is not customary then it should be.
  • tptacek 5y ago
    The article addresses this question directly. In my entire career I've never been asked for an ID at any interview.
  • bastawhiz 5y ago
    What does that actually get you, beyond cursory verification of your TIN and the customary background check? I look nothing like my valid photo ID, which was taken just over nine years ago. I now have a nose ring and a shaved head, I've lost my facial hair,and I carry forty pounds more muscle than I did in 2013. Lots of folks with nothing to hide don't identify as their gender in their photo ID. How can you tell over Zoom that the ID is real and undoctored?
  • Sebb767 5y ago
    Other than added effort, it's also highly sensitive data. My barrier to showing an ID is far higher than jumping on a zoom call - even more so since it's so rare, the question would immediately raise suspicions.
  • wglb 5y ago
    In all my years of employment I have never heard of this.
• octopus27 5y ago
  It makes me also think of the poorest in our populations. Governments that have support systems for struggling families have put in hurdles to accessing those funds. It has the benefit of preventing abuse of the system but we need to be careful how it may prevent access to those who need it.
  • aaronbrethorst 5y ago
    Recent case in point: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-manchin-build-back-better-child-tax-credit-drugs_n_61bf8f6be4b061afe394006d https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-manchin-build-back-better...
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    Thomas Sowell's theory was that the primary reason most of those systems were put in place is not so much to prevent abuse but to guarantee a level of security/power/income for the bureaucrats.
    • HarryHirsch 5y ago
      Hence most of these systems are so shitty, like that both sides of the aisle benefit. Bus shows up only every 120 minutes? One side says "we told you it wouldn't work", and the other side says "at least we tried".
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      Every stupid process in social services is driven by the NY Post and similar outlets. Q: “Why did nobody notice the baby is sick?” A: Babies are weighed in every interaction, which is humiliating to parents. Q: “Why didn’t you stop Sally from enrolling for benefits in 2 counties?” A: Fingerprint indigent beneficiaries, at their expense. Q: “Why should people on drugs get welfare?” A: A family loses crucial benefits because mom smoked weed. Bureaucracy builds walls out of process to remove individual agency. But politicians design programs to meet different goals, and social services law was no different.
      • Chris2048 5y ago
• madrox 5y ago
  While I agree with the author in principle about human processes, as someone who has done a lot of virtual interviewing lately, I think it's worth rethinking the virtual interview and hiring process from first principles. Much of the virtual interview experience is built on the traditional interview (so much so it's always being referred to as a "virtual on-site"). You think asking for an ID is hostile? I'd argue virtual interviews are already hostile in many ways. I believe the "Ask for ID" is a strawman that wouldn't be helpful, but there are likely non-invasive steps we can take if we spend more time thinking about it. If nothing else, it may result in a less hostile experience for all involved.
• duxup 5y ago
  Long ago I worked tech support for a company that supported some mainframe equipment. Eventually after some incidents they introduced “special instructions” for customers who we had to gather extra troubleshooting data for because of some complex issues they had. Then a few more customers had special instructions… and a few more. Eventually these involved things like “Send the account manager an email for each call, this customer is very sensitive.” After just a year EVERY account had special instructions. Many people oriented instructions were impossible to follow “Page Jim.” Jim didn’t carry a pager anymore and when he did he would never respond so you couldn’t do step 2. Some involved gathering loads of memory dumps for issues long solved. Others would have you follow program pointers to memory that didn’t exist so you would start over and over until you gave up and decided failing to do your job was preferable to losing your mind at 4am…. Some instructions were multi page word documents expected to be read every time the customer called. After reading it a dozen times a week it almost became impossible to notice if it had a slight change or not. One clever account manager trying to make sure tech support “noticed” his special instructions tried using a <blink> tag… entirely ignoring the issue that upon noticing the instructions they would be hard to read. Thankfully the tag failed to work. As you can imagine eventually there were exasperated executive meetings about how nobody follows the special instructions. This is the world of protecting against corner cases.
  • Carioca 5y ago
    Human systems are not computer systems. In computer systems, edge cases are usually worthy of investigation and rethinking. In human systems, edge cases are to be dealt with when they appear
    • dredmorbius 5y ago
      Those disagreeing with your comment might want to consider that it's very close in spirit and meaning to what JKM wrote in TFA: Computers don’t have emotions; I don’t need to worry insulting the vast majority of S3 objects when I defensively check integrity every time. But humans are different; when we design a human system around uncommon cases, we do need to consider the ramifications on the majority.
• ekanes 5y ago
  I remember learning that the reason school busses don’t have seat belts is that as a transportation method, busses have such ridiculously low mortality rate that you don’t want to change anything. Almost anything you might do could only make things worse.
  • Spooky23 5y ago
    Actually they had them in the 90s. They were great weapons that probably caused more injury than anything I can imagine.
• blurker 5y ago
  I feel like I've experienced similar situations with post mortem and sprint retrospective processes. Sometimes shit goes wrong in a sort of unique way and people go too far with wanting to have the outcome always be "we will do X to make sure Y never happens again", even though X is more costly than Y in terms of engineering effort and business value. So I think this is also applicable to software design.
  • paxys 5y ago
    This is so common in software jobs. Weird edge case escalation happens, engineering team spends a couple days handling it. In sprint planning/retro – "we have to make sure we never waste time over this again". Team spends weeks coming up with an optimal solution to address this very specific case. Original problem was rare enough that it doesn't happen again. A different edge case happens. Rinse and repeat.
• lostlogin 5y ago
  > Computers don’t have emotions They don’t. But some days they are complete arseholes and you do begin to wonder.
• newscracker 5y ago
  I agree with the main points of the article. > We could ask candidates on video (or in person) to see a photo ID and match the ID against the resume. But this would seem very weird. It starts an interview off in a hostile manner, and send the a strong message of distrust. Honest candidates – which are, remember, the vast majority – will wonder why the heck this company is acting so weird, and will rightly see this as a red flag about the company culture. There will be negative consequences for your hiring practices. This sort of verification is already being used for some KYC processes by financial institutions (i.e., take a live video of yourself holding your ID that’s uploaded for verification). It’s probably a matter of time until this is so normalized with virtual KYC that people wouldn’t care much when asked to do the same by a potential employer. The process already excludes certain people (like the transphobic process mentioned in the article). There is always a cost to the company for an incorrect hire, regardless of the underlying reason. So I would expect company HR teams to read that (widely shared) post and formulate strict identity checking and recording mechanisms so that they can absolve themselves from what may seem like an oversight or error. It also fits well with the typical HR style that’s more about controlling employees than about enabling/helping them (apologies to any good HR folks who are out there who struggle against the weight of the systems).
  • zhte415 5y ago
    Did that KYC for financial institutions not already exist, but had to be done in branch? Now can be done online.
  • Johnny555 5y ago
    It’s probably a matter of time until this is so normalized with virtual KYC that people wouldn’t care much when asked to do the same by a potential employer. Though as it becomes more common, it's probably also a matter of time before software is available that lets someone hold up a green card and it's replaced with the document of their choice on the video feed.
    • eternauta3k 5y ago
      Of course it's an arms race, but they already have countermeasures in place: asking you to partially obscure the ID with your hand, asking you to show how the holograms change as you tilt the ID, etc.
• paxys 5y ago
  When I read the original article, my first thought was – there are so many companies that don't mandate the hiring team interview their own candidates. Applicants are interviewed by random engineers from anywhere in the company, get accepted, and are then matched with a team. How do they even detect this case? And I'm talking the likes of Facebook and Google, not random small companies.
• zhte415 5y ago
  It's a very easily spotted fraud. What if this was based on telephone interview? What if remote, and one would be none the wiser? As long as results happen, things move forward, are we not all happy? What if the remote role was ostensibly being done by one person, but in fact they delegated to a team of people? A team of people that themselves come and go but all get managed into the same bodyshop? Does that matter as long as the work's getting done? What if, to mitigate potential loss of IP, a third-party information security policy needed to be agreed? Is it then turtles all the way down?
  • topkai22 5y ago
    Trust matters in relationships. Finding out that a working relationship started off with a lie is going to poison that relationship. I’d forever be wondering what other as shortcuts and risks they are taking. Are they taking shortcuts like incorporating code we don’t have rights to into the product? Will they some insecure shortcut and leave me vulnerable? More importantly, what would my customers think of they knew that the company they entrust their valuable data with was willing to continue to employ a person with such ethics? Honesty and integrity do matter. Trust matters.
• sayrer 5y ago
  The article makes some good points, but it also shows that the author doesn't have a lot of hiring experience on the closing end (after the candidate has passed interviews). "For example, anyone who goes by a name that doesn’t match their government ID could be forced into an uncomfortable explanation" I've seen this happen more than a few times, and the explanations are seldom anything you'd have sympathy for when discovered during a background check. People with good reasons will tell you up front.
• stickfigure 5y ago
  Offering the contrarian view: Why not just take a picture? If you're interviewing so many people that there's a genuine risk of forgetting who is who, a picture seems useful. I'm sure I'm not the only person who will forget your name in 3.5 seconds but never forgets a face. Maybe this is my time at Pivotal speaking, but your first day on any team you get your picture taken with a polaroid. It goes on the pairing board. It's not weird. "Thank you for interviewing with us! Mind if we take a picture so we can keep our who's who straight when the team is making the decision?" All that jazz with IDs sounds unfriendly, sure. A snap isn't. Hell, make it a selfie with a team member.
  • jakelazaroff 5y ago
    That’ll work… until they have the actual candidate take the interview with someone coaching them offscreen. Edge cases!
    • evilduck 5y ago
      That seems like it would be incredibly hard to perform convincingly and if you could, you've found your true calling in hosting/announcing/commentating live events not sucking at software gigs.
      • Huffers2 5y ago
        My wife interviewed someone who tried it (she noticed), so people at least do attempt this.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Photo-ID cards are reasonably common at many organisations, and are part of the on-boarding process. Less so in smaller start-ups, but part of the process. If you don't have ID cards, they could be part of, say, a company directory, wiki, or other system. This isn't inherently adversarial and can be integrated into proceedures reasonably smoothly.
    • 5y ago
• Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  > designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological. I really, really wish this writer had been the guy in charge of the TSA back when the “shoe bomber” incident had gone down.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    While I sort of agree, the potential impact of someone smuggling in a bomb in their shoe onto a plane is obviously overwhelmingly larger than the impact of hiring a fake cheater guy for your corporation. Part of why the answer for hiring fakes is 'do nothing' is because the downside there just isn't that bad, it's several orders of magnitude less destructive than "plane with dozens of people on board explodes".
    • Eric_WVGG 5y ago
      So why stop at airplanes? Why not subway trains, elevators, Starbucks? Is it because someone tried in an airplane once? Tried and failed? Would you change your mind about Starbucks if someone tried and succeeded? The whole point of that article is that you can’t design around extreme edge cases. If we used shoe bomb security theater logic around all aspects of flying, there would be no airline industry.
      • TulliusCicero 5y ago
        I'm not saying I agree with the security theater in this case, just that the comparisons between that and hiring the wrong person aren't very good.
      • NackerHughes 5y ago
        Sadly, for some people out there, any part of the process not swaddled in shoe bomb security theater is an opportunity to kill dozens of innocent people just waiting to be taken.
    • mellavora 5y ago
      Shoes aren't that big; the damage which could be done by a shoe bomb is pretty small, even one built by a highly trained demolitions expert. Likewise the "no liquids" thing because of a risk of "binary explosives". Now weight the potential impact of the downside by the cost to society/taxpayers.
• giaour 5y ago
  I've interviewed at places where the hiring manager would give your name to the front desk, and the front desk would ask for ID when you showed up and signed in. This never struck me as weird, maybe because the front desk checking your ID was standard practice in NYC by that point.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    It's part of standard building security in numerous large cities. There were a number of incidents in which attackers gained access to office towers with deadly effect. One that comes to mind is the 101 California shooting in San Francisco in 1993. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/10-YEARS-AFTER-101-California-massacre-victims-2567142.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/10-YEARS-AFTER-101-Calif...
  • stormbrew 5y ago
    That's likely a building security practice, and the hiring manager never sees your id. That's a bit different from the hiring manager themselves asking for it before even being willing to talk to you. And building security is likely to let you through with a convincing story if you know what name they're looking for, after noting the name on your id for reference in case there's a problem. At any rate, the article is right, this probably causes problems for some candidates (especially, but not exclusively, trans people). But if it's common practice in NYC it's likely most local candidates are used to navigating it. That's less likely elsewhere.
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  The advice here seems to correspond fairly strongly with those of statistical process control, the method championed by Walter Shewart and W. Edwards Demming. Processes are modeled as having "normal" and "special" causes of variance. In managing processes, there are risks involved in overmanagement of either, though the Wikipedia article linked below doesn't seem to mention these. For special causes, building too many special-case checks can create an ossified process. For normal causes, a problem may arise that in attempting to manage what is essentially normal random variation, additional variance is added to the system, or management processes themselves inject further variation or failure modes. For an example I only just ran across, the Fermi 1 nuclear reactor meltdown incident near Detroit in 1966, and event which gave rise to a book We Almost Lost Detroit, and a Gil Scott-Heron song of the same title. The cause of the meltdown was determined to be "zirconium metal plate that was installed in the reactor as a safety measure", according to a Detroit Free Press article on the incident. Not the first or last time safety equipment has contributed to an accident --- think of the 737 Max and its MCAS system failures, or the thermal insulation cladding of the Grenfall Tower which precipitated a disasterous fire. I may be mis-recalling or mis-understanding Demming's points on process control, and if anyone could help nudge this the right way I'd appreciate it. I'm pretty certain there is a connection however. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_process_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_process_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi_Nuclear_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi_Nuclear_Generatin... https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/10/09/detroit-fermi-accident-nuclear-plant/91434816/ https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/10/09/d...
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  > designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological. A-fricking-men. Is their a variant of this that I could use on product managers who make knee jerk demands for feature/changes based on bizarro interactions with high profile customers?
  • giraffe_lady 5y ago
    Following this too rigidly will also get you in trouble. As we've seen recently with tech enabling things like stalking and harassment which while pathological are harmful and widespread so do need to be accounted for by process. It's a good consideration but you're still stuck back where you started with your own judgement.
    • travisgriggs 5y ago
      I kinda agree, I think. We’d have to get down to use cases for me to see if we’re on the same page. For me, a certain aspect of the pathological process here is one that ties to correct the pathalogical symptom. I don’t think any process that plays whack-a-mole at symptoms will ever have much success. The quote that springs to mind is Henry David Thoreau “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” So I’m ok with the assertion that well founded process can/should guide behavior, but if we just throw exceptional process corrections at exceptional behavior as mentioned in the article, we get gridlock and the classic story of “why we can’t have nice things.”
      • giraffe_lady 5y ago
        > a certain aspect of the pathological process here is one that ties to correct the pathalogical symptom That's not how I had been thinking about it but rings true for me. I have approached it more from "the mitigation should be proportional to the potential harm" angle. But I like your model, it gives a little more guidance on what sort of changes will be successful. Anyway yes I believe we are aligned.
  • evilduck 5y ago
• Alan_Dillman 5y ago
  When I was younger, I worked for my cousin, a labour job, and he hired some of the local natives. One guy didn't show up after a few days, but his brother did. He was put to work. Then a few days later, a cousin. Now oddly, they each could have had a job, but nope. So I asked my cousin how he handled it, and he said he hired the one guy, and the cheque would be made out to the first guy, income taxes filed in his name, and he could square up with his relatives, or not.
  • mcv 5y ago
    I guess for a lot of jobs it's not actually that relevant who does it, as long as someone does. In fact, as a freelance contractor, I have the legal right to send a replacement software developer if I'm not available. Of course I won't, because I know very well that in software development this is never going to work, but technically I'm a company with a contract to send someone to do the job, which means my responsibility is to send someone capable of doing it, not to do it myself. In practice of course it's always me, but contracts often specify explicitly that I could send a replacement, in order to make very clear to the tax service that I'm not an employee but a contractor.
• chrisdbanks 5y ago
  I completely agree with the do nothing approach. I live in Spain and it feels like they've taken the opposite approach. All the systems are designed to catch the 0.01% of people who abuse the system which makes it impossible for the 99.99% of other people. This means people just don't do things because there's too much paperwork. The result is a non-functioning economy and massive unemployment.
  • avs733 5y ago
    I don't think that is a Spain only problem. As an American, that speaks to me of how most government and corporate systems operate. They are actively detrimental to helping people in need and do a terrible job of preventing fraud. Here they are more likely to result in punishing the already poor or underprivileged and at times seem to be the way we prop our economy up.
• dusted 5y ago
  I don't exactly understand what happened here? Person A shows up for interviews, is offered job. Person A shows up, signs contract. Person B shows up, claims they're hired? Person B didn't sign anything, person A is guilty of fraud, so I don't think there's anything to design around here, "you didn't sign the contract, you don't work here, good day."
  • perlgeek 5y ago
    Probably more like: Person B hires person A to the interview for him Person A shows up for interviews, claiming to be Person B, including B's postal address. Business sends contract to Person B. Person B signs, returns contract.
    • dusted 5y ago
      Ah, I've not considered that, I've always signed contracts on premise.
      • mcv 5y ago
        Even then, just send person B to the contract signing. As long as the process is sufficiently impersonal, they might not notice.
  • axiomsEnd 5y ago
    Original story : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343
• yob22 5y ago
• kochikame 5y ago
  I have this reaction every time some mentally ill person murders some people or sets fire to a building or something. In general, people react with "The laws need to change! We need to ramp up surveillance/social care/police capability etc etc" or even the "What shall we do? Something needs to be done!" type response. But I think that usually the answer is "Do nothing". It was just one edge-case disturbed individual. This is not a common event, and will not be a common event. We cannot generalize any learnings from this tragic event. We just keep on keeping on, and know that one time in a thousand a bad thing will happen but for the other 999 times everything is fine and will be worse with more rules and restrictions.
  • mcv 5y ago
    What needs to be done in such a case is to improve mental health care. Make sure disturbed people aren't left to their own devices, but have access to people who can help them.
• mcv 5y ago
  In this particular case, the fraudster was detected because the person handling the interview was also involved with the person on their actual work day. But how many large corporations have an impersonal interview process handled by HR, while during their regular work they become a cog in a machine that nobody notices? The best defense against this sort of fraud is clearly to have a human, humanised work environment where people are seen and appreciated, where candidates are interviewed by their team mates, etc. I've been in an interview process where we played a game with my future team mates: everybody tells 2 truths and 1 lie about themselves, and the others have to guess which is which. It's fun, you get to know each other, it's memorable, and any fraudster like this will be immediately spotted on their first day.
  • novok 5y ago
    Well that is why for many reasons the hiring manager should be in an interview loop, and many big corps manage to do that just fine.
    • CSMastermind 5y ago
      Google being a notable exception. I wonder if anyone has tried that there.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  > designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological. The Leetcode interview is surely one of these? Designed to catch out that guy who can't reverse a linked list, the kind of thing that pretty much never comes up as a real job requirement?
  • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Most processes are designed around shifting blame. It doesn't really matter if the person is good at the job or not, what matters is that no one can blame you specificallly when it happens. If you want your process to be effective, you need to account for this e.g. the famous 'stop the production line button' that people can't be blamed for pressing.
  • Grustaf 5y ago
    Not sure what you are referring to, but when interviewing at e.g. Apple the whiteboard is not meant to suss out impostors, it’s to get a better understanding of the person’s thought processes, to separate the smart from the brilliant.
• rbrbr 5y ago
• RangerScience 5y ago
  > The premise here is simple: designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological. All principles have operating zones, from Bernoulli's to Godwin's.
• jamescodesthing 5y ago
  In the UK all of my final stage interviews had me bring in an ID and National Insurance Number for a photocopy for their records. Has been for over a decade. Seems a simple enough solution, it’s expected and it’s something the company needs in order to pay me. It’s not a start of interview hostile question, it’s usually something we sort out in the formalities, along with what equipment I’ll need or be using, sorting out ID photos.
  • swiftcoder 5y ago
    The ID system is a lot more fraught in the US - most folks don't have a national ID, and the national insurance (social security) number is just printed on a bit of cardboard. The processes to obtain photo ID vary from state to state within the US, and may be extremely difficult in some cases (lost birth records, born to undocumented immigrant parents, etc). It's also a hot-button political issue in any number of directions (i.e. requiring photo IDs to vote, or allowing trans folks to change their name/gender on government-issued IDs).
    • ACS_Solver 5y ago
      This is something I find fascinating about the US, there's people functioning in society without photo ID. Official documentation, or things you can use as proof of something, are often trivial to fake. A social security card is a 1950s looking piece of cardboard. More recently, the CDC covid vaccination card is a simple piece of paper that not only lacks vertification features but doesn't even have a routinely used unique identifier for the patient. Before learning this, I used to associate lack of robust ID systems with developing countries. I know there's a segment of society in the US that associates robust IDs with government overreach and dictatorship, but I see it as fallacious. Yes, communist dictatorships did have a "papers please" system, and you can still easily encounter an ID check in Russia for instance. As somebody who lives in a free and well-functioning country though, I consider a robust ID system to be both a boost to my freedoms and a great convenience. It's essentially an authentication and signing system. It allows me to positively authenticate myself in any interaction with the government, and thus protects me from impersonation by others. It allows me to sign documents in a way that establishes a chain of trust between the document and my ID, which protects me from fraud. And since interactions with the government are relatively rare, the best part of the system is that it acts as a trust authority between me and third parties. If I want to enter into a contract with some other private entity, the government ID system provides us both with authentication mechanisms that we trust.
• thanatos519 5y ago
  > designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological Case in point: The Constitution of the United States of America.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological. Very true. I remember, back when I was still interested in helping companies succeed, one “interview” I had. I mentioned that I had this ginormous portfolio, packed with dozens of highly relevant, finished, tested, well-documented, well-designed open-source projects, a decade of checkin history, of tens of thousands of lines of code, hundreds of pages of documentation, dozens of articles on various sites, where I walk through my design philosophies and processes, in detail, teaching modules, etc. The “interviewer” told me that they were not going to look at it, because “I could have faked it.” My jaw dropped. If I could fake that, then you should hire me immediately, at three times your offered salary. I’m pretty sure that the decision had already been made, not to consider me (because eld), and this was their way of chasing me off. They weren’t going to waste the half hour or so, that it would take to do a quick review of my work. It worked a treat. I couldn’t hang up, fast enough. I won’t go where I’m not wanted. The other explanation, is that they actually believed what they said, which would mean they were completely insane.
  • mhaberl 5y ago
    What is "eld"?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      An archaism for “old” (as in “elder”).
      • rvba 5y ago
        Maybe they didnt hire you since you sound very eccentric (as in euphenism for strange) with those big words. Hopefully I dont break the site rules for pointing this out, but interviews are a game to weed out people who are difficult to manage. And people who show any unusual flair are considered difficult to manage by lots of managers. And yes, some eccentric people with whom I worked were awesome, but there were also lots of eccentric people who were not (combination of "exceptionalists" and "insufferable").
• thomaslangston 5y ago
  Asking for a photo ID during or after an interview to ensure the interviewee was who they said they are doesn't seem pathological to me. I've had multiple interviews do so in the past with no issue. And with sensitive or valuable data, a week is a long time to let an unqualified or unidentified person have access to your system.
• angarg12 5y ago
  > designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological. Very interesting insight! However I'm not fully behind some of the points. Saying that fixing a bad hire is easy is a very USA-centric view of the world. In some European countries it would be very hard to get rid of such people, so the cost is hire. I think the S3 analogy is not apt either. Sure, the probability of an error for each individual object is negligible, but if you store billions or trillions of objects, it becomes certain. A better tech analogy is this: imagine a service that creates a bunch of resources every time you create an entry. When you delete the entry, you want to get rid of each resource. Now you have to defensively program around the myriads of errors and possible inconsistencies that can arise from this. And of course everything can just go wrong anyway. Instead you could do nothing, or an optimistic delete. Then have a cron job that periodically cleans up orphaned resources. This is a much simpler and resilient approach. The right answer to this question can probably be semi-formalized by account for the volume of transactions (interviews), errors (cheating candidates), cost of error (bad hire), price of increased complexity (more cumbersome interview experience for all), and how effective it is at preventing errors (are we getting all the cheaters?). EDIT: On an extra note, this reminds me of those anti-piracy measures that don't stop piracy but are a royal pain in the ass for legit buyers.
  • mingusrude 5y ago
    > Saying that fixing a bad hire is easy is a very USA-centric view of the world. In some European countries it would be very hard to get rid of such people, so the cost is hire. Most EU countries have laws around probationary periods at the beginning of an employment that can extend up to six months. Once that period has passed it can be difficult to get rid of an employee but until then it's easy.
    • blitzar 5y ago
      tbh its not even that hard in the most employee protecting jurisdiciton, which tend to also have the highest indrect cost for an employee as well. The laws typically align with the values and sensibilities in the societies, but its a tiny bit easier in practice (if you really want to) to make happen. In the USA people think it is easy, especially at will states - even easier than they think. The UK people think it is moderately difficult; its actually pretty easy. France people think it is impossible, its moderately difficult at best, expsensive (like a couple of months salary) at worst, and within probations and first couple of years, pretty easy. Culturally however, a) people dont like firing people and b) they want to believe that they are unfirable as well. So rather than pay an employee 3 months severance they linger on for years.
• throwawayHN378 5y ago
  Doing this for an on-site position is ballsy but for remote jobs this is more common than you think. This has happened to me at least 3 times
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I mean the tl;dr is "it was an uncommon outlier", which is fair enough - no changes needed. But if this becomes a fad, ID verification will become a thing - and I don't think it's too much to ask given you're engaging someone in a contract worth hundreds of thousands over the years.
• bambax 5y ago
  > If we start to imagine adding steps to the interview process to protect against an imposter job candidate, the “solutions” we come up with are quite aggressive. We could ask candidates on video (or in person) to see a photo ID and match the ID against the resume. But this would seem very weird. It starts an interview off in a hostile manner, and send the a strong message of distrust. > Computers don’t have emotions; I don’t need to worry insulting the vast majority of S3 objects when I defensively check integrity every time. But humans are different; when we design a human system around uncommon cases, we do need to consider the ramifications on the majority. That's very true. It could be called "the tragedy of security": annoying and insulting everyone just to ward off a few bad actors. For example, in Europe, online payments are becoming annoying to a degree that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. To use a VISA card online includes typing its 16-digits number, expiration date, "security code" (which is printed on the card), then receiving a code in a text message and typing it back, and now typing yet another personal code (or in some cases, the access code to one's online account!!) And after all that, it may still fail. It's insane. I'm sure there are good reasons from the banks or regulators POV to act like this, but the consequences are incredibly painful for the vast majority of people, and probably economically detrimental as well (I sometimes give up from buying something online when the system doesn't accept a simpler payment method than VISA). There has to be a better way.
  • rvba 5y ago
    payU, BLIK and other processors mostly solve this but they seem to be popular only in some european countries. They also beat paypal easily.
  • ginja 5y ago
    > then receiving a code in a text message and typing it back, and now typing yet another personal code Really? In my experience aside from typing the card numbers, all I have to do is approve the transaction with 3D secure which is one tap in my bank's app. It has never failed in my experience. Maybe you need to switch banks? :)
    • jraph 5y ago
• marcus_holmes 5y ago
  This reminds me of the "how do we stop people watching pron on the internet?" thing back in the 90's when we first starting giving people internet-connected computers. The answer, of course, was: "the same way you stop them reading a pron magazine at their desk". But because it was all new, and there was technology involved, there were lots of people who felt there should be some technological answer to this. So, yeah, I agree with the article: Adding process to solve a management problem from a pathological minority case is never the right answer. How would you solve this situation if the interview process wasn't remote? Being remote changes almost nothing about the situation, after all.
• dang 5y ago
  The original story was discussed here: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343 - Jan 2022 (600 comments)
• whoomp12342 5y ago
  > In fact, the system basically worked: this person showed up on his first day, was immediately recognized as someone else, and quit within the week. You only know the process worked when the person was caught. How do you know this isn't more rampant?
  • stormbrew 5y ago
    This is a bit of a "tree falls in a forest" situation honestly. If an employee does this and then succeeds at the job, is there actually a problem? If they turn out to suck and need to be let go because they're unqualified, or because they lied and are unqualified, what's the practical difference? Like, certainly there's a gut level "but that's wrong!" reaction but is there actual, meaningful, unique harm caused that is not addressed the same way as all new-hire harm is: via a probationary period.
• iJohnDoe 5y ago
  Isn’t it usually assumed by most people that the majority of the Ask a Manager stuff is fake to solicit these type of responses from everyone online? Hook, line, and sinker.
• tetsusaiga 5y ago
  This actually happened at my first software job. We were expanding fast by hiring bunches of contractors, which was already giving pretty polar results. After a while, my team got one too. They didn't have a computer ready for him yet, so my lead pairs me up with him to babysit basically. We go chill in a conference room and I basically just try to get to know him and explain what we do here. I can tell he's nervous, and since this was my first dev job I remembered that feeling all too well, and wanted to be nice to him. Immediately, he barely speaks english. Weird, but okay. Then I try to just talk shop with him, and find that I can't get any answers about recent stuff he's built, what he's interested in, frameworks he's used, or even what his favorite language is. They guy clearly knew nothing about software. I laughed to myself in a "not my problem" kind of way. After a while I finally hand him off and explain the situation to my lead. Turns out, he had a totally different person do the interview and coding test. And he didn't know anything about software. When confronted with this reality, he simply repeated, "I can do the work, I'll get the work done, I promise." Presumably the plan was to either just try and collect the first paycheck or two, or maybe he even wanted to outsource the work to someone else. So, maybe don't rework your whole hiring process around this possibility, but at least do a video chat. (This was well before covid.)
  • ralphc 5y ago
    This happened at place that I worked as well. Phone interview, went well, guy shows up and can barely speak English. We pretty quickly figured out what happened, escorted him out on day one.
• helmsb 5y ago
  This exact situation happened to another manager I work with. Interviewed a candidate remotely (with camera), everything was great, super nice guy, very knowledgeable, extremely technical. He got the job. First day, he refused to turn on his camera during any of the meetings, wouldn't speak up, when he did it was clear the voice wasn't the same, seemed very dodgy. Aside from that, he didn't know how to use Git or setup his dev environment. One of the devs setup a pair-programming session to help get him acclimated. He couldn't write a single line of code. In the interview the candidate was clearly very senior and had significant experience. Manager called him up and said they needed to speak on camera, he kept making excuses but finally turned it on. Not even close to the same guy, interview candidate was clean-shave. This guy had a six-month beard. HR took over from there, he never would admit to it and held firm that he was the same person who interviewed and stopped responding once we let him know he was being terminated. Afterward we did some research and found it's becoming very common these days. You have one guy who basically gets paid to do interviews for others, the person gets hired and basically collects paychecks as long as they can. This is why we now require photoId as part of interviews and first day. I also now have a habit of taking a screenshot during interviews. The author of this article mentions the cost was low to the mishire was low. I think that is fundamentally false. We shipped equipment (we got it back but they could have kept it), we turned down other candidates (which we may not get another chance to hire), we removed postings, we had to get multiple HR members involved, legal had to get involved, he had access to our repos, all of that had to be audited. There is SIGNIFICANT cost to things like this.
  • higeorge13 5y ago
    It makes sense to take screenshots and such. However, I wonder how the newly introduced DEI-oriented features in the various ATS will contribute to more similar cases or will make companies not use them at all.
• alasdair_ 5y ago
  At a minimum, many companies will check ID before letting you enter the building. This seems like a security risk not to do this, and NDAs are hard to enforce if the person that signed them is not the person they claimed to be, so the approach in the article of "do nothing" may not really be a good one. Checking ID at a minimum seems fine. That being said, Facebook was (as expected) particularly creepy since you need to use your real FB account for a lot of their tooling. Just by entering their (busy) lobby and without ever telling anyone who I was, they already knew my name and what I was doing.