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Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
In the past month we've seen a dramatic, seemingly coordinated, increase in engineering applicants whose resumés and backgrounds appear qualified, but who refuse to use their cameras during Zoom interviews and who often can't answer specific questions about their backgrounds. We've wasted a significant amount of time on comms and interviews with over a dozen of these candidates. Anyone else experiencing anything similar?
- donsupreme 4y agowhat exactly is the endgame?
- quadcore 4y agoGood question. As an educational note, please be careful and tell your kids some - unbalanced - people have no other endgame than to annoy you and play with your emotions. To destroy you mentally (sometimes physically as well). Thats their kick. Pretty sure this applies in this case as well. Dont get me wrong, they are humans and deserve respect.
- dexwiz 4y ago> Dont get me wrong, they are humans and deserve respect. But why? I feel like we devalue true respect by repeating phrases like this. I'm not saying they deserve to be abused, but why do they deserve respect for solely existing? EDIT: All the replies seem to be conflating dignity with respect. Your birth gave you the right to your dignity, and no should be able to take that from you. Respect must be earned, and can only be given to you by others.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoIf we don't have some base level of respect for people just because they're people ("for solely existing") then we can justify treating marginalized people even worse than we already are. Some of them already have it pretty bad! Seems evil!
- dahfizz 4y agoThis goes back to OPs point about devaluing the concept of respect. I'm generally polite to stangers I meet. Not because I respect them (how could I? I don't know them), but because it's morally good to behave decently. By conflating respect with basic manners/decency, you really devalue what it means to deserve respect and to be respected.
- dexwiz 4y agoYou treat others with dignity.
- LadyCailin 4y agoParadox of tolerance.
- bobkazamakis 4y agothis entirely relies on your own interpretation of respect. respecting nature sometimes means staying the fuck away
- quadcore 4y agoYou think you are not like them because of your choices when it's actually because of sheer luck. I respect them for carrying such a shitty poker hand their whole life. Anyway, you still gota defend yourself like they are monsters. Tell your kids: they are masterful liers and manipulators, they look normal, they have a cover (they have jobs and all, they can go undetected for decades, their whole life even) and more importantly: pain is pleasure, even theirs, especially yours (not always physically but mentally as well). That last bit is the endgame but you and me dont have that so its very difficult to comprehend. They come in variations (think Joker and DoubleFace). Oh and one last thing: they are not rare (between 0.7% and 1% of the population afaik).
- heavyset_go 4y agoThere's a baseline of respect people get for being human, they have wants, needs, beliefs, belong to cultures, they get hungry, feel pain, don't want to needlessly suffer or die, etc and those aspects are universal. I'd use the word humanity to describe that level of respect, to contrast it with something more or less universally regarded as the lack of humanity, things we might even consider crimes against humanity, where people are deprived of the respect towards their humanity, denying them food, inflicting pain, eradication of culture, systematic murder, etc. Obviously there's a lot of gray room between the two where, for example, cruelty for the sake of cruelty, in most circumstances, could be considered a lack of respect that people deserve for solely existing. That's certainly not on the level of crimes against humanity, but I wouldn't say that's respectful, either.
- dexwiz 4y agoWhat you are describing is dignity, not respect. From https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dignity/201304/what-is-the-real-meaning-dignity-0 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dignity/201304/what-... "The most common response people offer is that dignity is about respect. To the contrary, dignity is not the same as respect. Dignity is our inherent value and worth as human beings; everyone is born with it. Respect, on the other hand, is earned through one’s actions."
- heavyset_go 4y agoYou're right, thanks for the link.
- conductr 4y agoIronically, this is similar to how regular people think of "hackers"
- tschwimmer 4y agoI imagine either: a) Get hired, collect a paycheck or two while doing the absolute bare minimum (filling out onboarding forms, etc - no real work) and then move on to the next victim company. or b) Get hired with the goal of getting access to improperly secured company or user data. I imagine a) is vastly more common than b).
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoWith b), they are actually likely to be the real thing; just treacherous.
- ByersReason 4y agoIt seems based on the two times I saw it that it is mostly delusion. The idea appears to be that you can learn to do something complex on the job with a slight amount of experience and a lookup site, like stackoverflow or rose. I assume this would be sufficient if you assume really non-technical management, incapable of gauging progress.
- version_five 4y agoIt could also be to get the job. People often feel entitled but believe they are disadvantaged by some factor outside their control and use that to justify cheating, believing they will be able to do the job once they get there. Another version of this is people who apply for a job and actually are just posers who can't code at all. In both cases the employer failed to weed them out, even if the first version is a more overt kind of cheating, the outcome isn't much different than the second version
- csunbird 4y agoBut, the thing is, the companies are putting down very sophisticated hiring methods that are not relevant to the job itself at all (e.g. hiring someone that can write quicksort in 30 minutes). I presume, after passing the gatekeepers, most of the people can hold and do the job required from them at bare minimum. The fakers who can not code at all will be found, but someone with an average amount of talent should be able to collect the fat paycheck for several years, as most of the jobs do not require much anyways.
- heavyset_go 4y agoThere are a lot of people who believe they can fake it until they make it, and they also often think that everyone fakes it until they make it, as well. That's the end game, doing whatever it takes until they make it.
- Spooky23 4y agoOnce they make it into an organization, they often do very well.
- heavyset_go 4y agoPerhaps, but I've seen more than a handful of the hustle culture types crash and burn once they could no longer fake it sufficiently. Some things you really do need the knowledge, experience and time spent on to navigate successfully, and you just can't fake that consistently as time goes on, especially around other people who do have that knowledge and experience.
- mr_toad 4y agoPretty much every new grad is faking it until they make it.
- heavyset_go 4y agoI'd agree if, outside of nepotism, new grads were faking it into senior or higher level positions that necessitate knowledge and experience that they truly don't possess.
- throwaway787544 4y agoIf they get the person in the door (hired) a chunk of their paycheck goes to the referring agency. And a month employed might be a year's salary back home.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paxys 4y agoThis is exactly why the technical interview process is what it is. No point wasting time asking about backgrounds and describing past projects (all of it can be easily faked). Make them write code in front of you live as part of the screening round.
- throwaway787544 4y agoThey sometimes literally have a different person do the interview than shows up in person; no interview process catches that.
- slt2021 4y agohow about ID check? (if interview is conducted onsite in the office)
- kube-system 4y agoMy understanding is that the scams usually target hiring processes that are all remote, often the applicants are from far away.
- kube-system 4y agoI don't like making people write code live. Some really good coders just don't work well with people looking over their shoulder. I prefer giving people a take-home with an original problem to solve. Then, follow that up with a live call where you ask them some questions about it.
- rabuse 4y agoYep, that's me. I feel like an experiment when people are watching what I'm doing, even if it's something as mundane as browsing the web.
- actually_a_dog 4y agoI used to do a lot of work in an electronics lab that had a whole bunch of windows on one wall that looked out onto a hallway. That hallway was more or less the main passage through the building, so it was fairly high traffic. I used to tell people I felt like I was working in the engineer exhibit at the zoo.
- kube-system 4y agoAbout 5 years ago at a previous company we had someone who interviewed well, and then the person who showed up was totally not the same quality person we had talked to previously. I guess the placement strategy at some low quality placement agencies is to just put someone good on the interview and hope the hiring company doesn't notice. I haven't seen it recently, but I am now in a position where we have good recruiters who filter people before I ever see them.
- pridkett 4y agoI had this happen to me at a former large employer. I insisted on removing the agency from our list of approved agencies and was told that if we did that to every agency that did that sort of fraud then we’d have no agencies in our budget range.
- vsareto 4y agoThe damage an individual can do by being overemployed or fraudulent pales in comparison to what some of those agencies do, and they can be fucking over the candidate and company at the same time since they are middlemen. Tons of calls for technical tests of individuals to prevent fraud/bad hires. No one does a technical interview for talent agency recruiters to make sure their company can filter candidates well though.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago> The damage an individual can do by being overemployed.... What "damage" does being "overemployed" do in and of itself? If the person is meeting expectations, as long as they're not moonlighting for a competitor, who cares what other things they do to make money?
- kube-system 4y agoThey’re referring to people who are incompetent and take roles in which they are not qualified to take. In the case I was referring to, the developer who showed up for the job couldn’t even write a single line of code. We caught this quickly, but not immediately. There were certainly monetary damages from onboarding costs and time wasted, and non monetary damages from reputation with our customers.
- askafriend 4y agoSimple - just auto-reject anyone who refuses to use a camera or answer specifics.
- discodave 4y agoThat still costs you (the employer) money. It's like a DoS attack for your hiring system. E.g. a nefarious actor could harm a competitor by overwhelming them with fake applicants that it takes time to sift through.
- Aperocky 4y agoThis is the reason why employee recommendation have far higher success rate.
- ThePadawan 4y agoNow someone just needs to tell companies that the way to reward those is with significant cash in hand. I've had companies offer $500 for a referral, if that person took the job and stayed with the company for at least 6 months (this was for a position with a salary of ~50$ per hour).
- askafriend 4y agoI've never seen less than $5k, and for much needed roles it's usually at least $10k. I think it just comes down to the quality of company.
- giobox 4y agoIn my experience, most halfway respectable companies already do? 500 bucks is IMO on the low side for an employee referral in the US if it's for software engineering... the amount of money you save the hiring team alone in recruiting efforts is often in the thousands of dollars, and they often stay longer and are often the best hires - not surprising if former colleagues they like are already there... For roles I've worked, I've never seen less than $2k offered for a successfully recommended technical hire, both at startups and BigCos. Most places I've worked have offered around $5k.
- macksd 4y agoCurious where the candidates are being sourced from - my hunch is that whatever source they're coming from is suddenly being exploited by such people for some reason. I've seen a general increase over the last 1-2 years (so, post-COVID) of candidates who exhibit similar behavior, but it hasn't been the majority of the candidates. I've just chalked it up to remote work being more normal and some people actually being able to get away with this for some time: Googling their way into a few months of employment before being found out for good.
- syngrog66 4y ago
- robertlagrant 4y agoSo don't do it at scale. Just to jobs you're applying to.
- syngrog66 4y agoyou hint at the nuance involved. I did say by general rule. and there are many cases where one does not apply but rather a remote actor reaches out, ostensibly a hiring company.
- robertlagrant 4y agoWhat does "a remote actor reaches out" mean? As in "a recruiter contacts the candidate", or "Daniel Day-Lewis extends an arm"?
- janoc 4y agoYou do realize that at some point you will actually need to go to the company your are interviewing with in person and to provide a lot more personal information than just a blurry mugshot from a Zoom call in order to be able to be employed and collect a salary?? Nobody collects "critical PII" using job interviews, no company has time for such nonsense. The companies that do collect such information don't do it using job interviews, there are much easier and less time and resource consuming ways of doing that. And re deep fake/blackmail - why would a company you are applying to hoping to score a job and hiding your face from want to blackmail you? Sorry but that's utter paranoia and bullshit.
- syngrog66 4y ago
- inetknght 4y ago> You do realize that at some point you will actually need to go to the company your are interviewing with in person and to provide a lot more personal information than just a blurry mugshot from a Zoom call in order to be able to be employed and collect a salary? HR these days can be done online -- sign the forms and post a picture of your identification to website that HR controls. 100% remote is a thing these days.
- throwaway787544 4y agoBeen happening for a decade, it ebbs and flows.
- t_mann 4y agoI've always wondered how those recruiting studies where they send out a lot of fake resumes that differ only on one attribute play out for the other side. That was my first thought, but your experience might also be something different.
- xupybd 4y agoUg... as someone that one day would like to work remote this is infuriating. Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago> Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us. Sadly, they don't care. This is why we can't have nice things.
- xupybd 4y agoYeah, I know. I'm just venting really.
- xwdv 4y agoUm we can still have nice things if people stop being naive. It’s not hard to verify someone actually exists… there are ways.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI know. It was a joke. I'm old, and have seen plenty of rejection, even though I'm "the real deal." But that kind of behavior has been used as an excuse for ignoring me. The icing on the cake, was when I was told that "I probably faked" my portfolio. At that point, I realized that I am radioactive, and might as well just give up.
- strongpigeon 4y agoSlightly tangential, but I wonder how long before you have people using deepfakes to look and sound like someone else on camera to perpetrate this kind of fraud. It seems like all of the pieces are mostly there.
- xwdv 4y agoIn theory the only thing that matters is the results, not if they actually exist.
- drdec 4y agoThe point of the deep fake is to let one person interview while another shows up for the job and the employer is none the wiser. Presumably the person who does up is significantly less qualified.
- rabuse 4y agoJust ask them to turn their heads all the way around. Should defeat any of that, lol.
- thrill 4y agoI'm calling Father Damien if that happens.
- ge96 4y agoHappens with Elon Musk deep fake crypto schemes
- jamestimmins 4y agoOnce worked at a 3rd party coding interview company as an interviewer, and we had a bunch of grad students from a college who were all clearly cheating. They solved the problem from the top of the page down (rather than organically, as someone would when doing actual programming) in a very specific way. The company didn't want to disqualify those candidates, since we couldn't prove cheating, but it was pretty fascinating to witness.
- treeman79 4y agoWhat happens to the ones who don’t cheat? If there is a curve of some sort they can be screwed even if they are well qualified.
- jamestimmins 4y agoProbably, but small instances of cheating aren't going to push the curve all that much. We were mostly functioning as a first layer as well, so if the likely cheaters couldn't perform, they'd still get filtered out during the companies' onsites. At least that was the rationale.
- guhcampos 4y agoI feel that most avid readers of the green book would behave like that. If you consider that cheating its probably better to find another interview method. (I do hate code interviews)
- LeafItAlone 4y agoWhat’s the green book?
- philipkglass 4y agoI have been involved in hiring for years. I saw this happen for the first time a month ago. It makes me wonder if some Discord/Slack/Telegram group has recently been organized around this dubious "life hack" strategy.
- sys_64738 4y agoOnce had a Ph.D. who wasn't until somebody checked up and referred the issue to HR who did the background check. This was using an old-school in person interviewing method.
- chrisdhoover 4y agoOnce I had a love and it was a gas Soon turned out had a heart of glass Seemed like the real thing, only to find Mucho mistrust, love's gone behind
- bb88 4y agoIt's a problem here too. Even if they use their camera, it doesn't mean they don't have someone feeding them answers to questions. Phone interviews are even more sketchy since the person who may be answering the questions is a completely different person who shows up on day 1. We had one person we hired as a contractor, but then her voice changed on the phone, and started calling people by their last names in chat. It looked like it was someone that subcontracted another who then quit, and the first was trying to hold onto the contract as long as possible. Another answered complex questions during the interview, but after the start they knew nothing. A third contractor I knew was trying to do two jobs at the same time. Unfortunately while he was supposed to be working for one company he was making public github commits for the second. He was shown the door that day. Tangentially, another contractor "lost" two macbooks assigned to him. Apparently right after travelling to Colorado after they legalized weed.
- claytonjy 4y ago> while he was supposed to be working for one company he was making public github commits for the second If you're setting their hours, doesn't that make them an employee rather than a contractor, legally speaking?
- vsareto 4y agoMay have billed a specific time span, but also had commits during that span. Dunno how they proved the github account belonged to the contractor though unless they just admitted to it or used the company email to register.
- Aperocky 4y agoYou guys conduct interviews without even seeing the face of candidates?
- ByersReason 4y agoYes, I had a candidate turn up for a physical interview who clearly was not the person on the phone screen.
- atrettel 4y agoThe FBI and other US federal agencies have attributed similar tactics to North Koreans looking to infiltrate particular industries [1-3]. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-crypto-job-candidates-scammers-recruiters-2022-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-crypto-job-cand... [2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/fbi_korea_freelancers/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/fbi_korea_freelancers... [3] https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/ https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/
- bb88 4y agoThis shit has been going on for the last 5 years or more. I've seen it with non-asian candidates.
- fsckboy 4y agoChina employs non-Chinese to track and interfere with dissidents and critics of China in the US https://news.artnet.com/art-world/us-blames-china-operatives-sculpture-burning-2166879 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/us-blames-china-operatives... and of course, plenty of Russians and Iranians are non-Asian (in appearance, Persia is in Asia of course)
- aliqot 4y agoRussia is partly asia as well.
- incompatible 4y agoGiven the diversity and size of Asia, and the fact that it has the majority of the world's population, describing somebody as "Asian" is rather vague.
- samcheng 4y agoIt's just shorthand in an old-fashioned slightly racist/ignorant way - they can't say "Yellow" or "Oriental" any more, and want a word to parallel "White" and "Black." I look forward to a post-racial future...
- 752963e64 4y ago
- s1k3s 4y agoI'm not saying this isn't happening, but I want to mention that I often refuse to do stuff that my interviewers ask me to. Reasons being any of: I consider it useless for the evaluation, I consider it doesn't correctly asses my expertise, I consider it would put me in a bad situation etc. Of course, I can do all this because the market allows me to do it.
- thefourthchime 4y agoHas that worked? Have you got any offers doing that?
- s1k3s 4y agoNone. I'm not using it to get more offers, I'm using it to save my time by skipping stuff I don't want to do.
- aliqot 4y agoWorked for me with a polite "I appreciate it but no thank you". I just said I don't take photos or appear on camera. It didn't stop me from being interviewed or hired.
- saddist0 4y agoIsn't facial expression and your communication skills considered a part of your "expertise"? I personally prefer asking the person to open the camera or reschedule to a later date if they can't.
- s1k3s 4y agoI personally agree which is why I also join every interview with my camera on. Objectively though you have to consider that the job market is a MARKET, and if the seller (candidate) considers they can do just fine without the camera (or anything else really) then you have to accept that fact and move on to another candidate if you can or just go forward with them without camera. Nobody owes anything to anyone here.
- Spooky23 4y agoIt used to happen alot with contract bodyshops, even in person. Usually you’d get weird looking resumes from someone based out of New Jersey or Arizona. In most cases the employees were Indian and would phone screen well. When the person landed, usually they were green staff who would basically send their work back to a more senior person or team who would do the work elsewhere overnight. With remote, there’s definitely more fraud in this space, from people lying about where they are, stealing information and just grifting.
- berkserbet 4y ago[dead]
- EddySchauHai 4y agoI’ve had fun in the Web3 space working with devs who I only know from a GitHub handle and an avatar. Paid in crypto, work well, but no need to know who they are. Pretty funky environment to be around!
- dijondreams 4y agoYup am seeing this weekly now when hiring. Pretty sure these are just companies who are employing cheap foreign labor and acquiring higher paying American jobs. Wage arbitrage?
- erdos4d 4y agoThis sounds like what I wanted to do once I realized how insanely easy remote work was. I do my wife's code for her dev job and it honestly works out to like 2 hours a week for me. She spends maybe 10 hours in meetings, so it totally makes sense to put 3 or 4 front people in positions to handle the meetings and just funnel the work back to me. Sounds like they are doing a bait and switch strategy though. You should just give them a coding test and see if they actually have a senior dev behind these guys. If so, quit pestering the front person who takes your order and be happy with the finished product.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- another_another 4y ago> I do my wife's code for her dev job and it honestly works out to like 2 hours a week for me. >She spends maybe 10 hours in meetings Watch out, if she attends all those productivity sapping meetings, and turns in good code then she'll quickly be promoted to a position that requires no coding. Then that'll be the end of the fun coding :)
- ericol 4y agoSome time ago (~6 months) my company was looking to hire a programmer. We don't have a established process for this as it was some years since we hired a coder, but then we are in the industry (hiring) so published a couple of adverts here and there and we got the thing rolling. Most of the applicants were seriously under qualified, and my colleagues had to go through a lot of rubbish in the form of CVs in order to find suitable candidates. But a few of them were good enough to at least make it to the interview step, and off the invitations went. One of'em candidates - Let's call him "Rajeed" - promptly accepted the meeting, and due to the small amount of people that made it that far - let me remind you, first interview - my colleagues were slightly excited, but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders from India is far from stellar. You can imagine my colleagues surprise when they opened the Zoom session and Rajeed was nowhere to be found. Instead, there were two person of whom we knew nothing about - apparently they were running some sort of coding shop - and when my colleagues asked for Rajeed they just said "Oh, it's OK, it's OK. You can talk to us." For obvious reasons the meeting didn't last long. We ended up hiring a coder from Poland that, even thought he was decent, was miles ahead of the rest of the candidates.
- dkarp 4y agoJust want to say that I work with and have worked with many stellar coders from India. I'd suggest not writing off over a billion people.
- replwoacause 4y agoYou’ve missed the point entirely
- dang 4y agoPlease don't post swipes to HN. It would be fine to explain what the point was, in a neutral way. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ericol 4y agoWell, lucky you! ;) I'm not "writing off" a billion people. But. It's like finding a needle in a haystack. I did some research when this happened, and they even have a name for this [1] Coincidentally, our experience with people from Easter Europe is quite the opposite: Of all the people we hired from there, all except one were stellar (And the "one" was also good, just that he had some greys ethically: Had a disagreement with our boss, and disappeared over a weekend after siphoning large amounts of data from our system) [1] https://thepolicytimes.com/chalta-hai-attitude-holding-indias-great-potential/ https://thepolicytimes.com/chalta-hai-attitude-holding-india...
- Kinnard 4y agoDon't hire remotely. Fly them out. Like a pre-COVID YC Interview.
- yuppie_scum 4y agoDo you still have a Pre-Covid budget, and pre-Covid funding from vc’s?
- atdrummond 4y agoWe had an issue with a candidate who was attempting to use our access to processing networks to facilitate financial crime. It was a coordinated state actor tactic. Happy to share more info with founders over email or IM; I don’t want to publicly draw the ire of those who attempted this.
- alphabettsy 4y agoI’m certainly curious. In a role that deals with large money movement.
- atdrummond 4y agoFeel free to email the address in my profile.
- slt2021 4y agoEastern european cc fraud rings do that, there is black market for these type services like merchant and bank accounts to run stolen cc through
- fsckboy 4y agoIt seems like good interview questions (for all candidates) could be "how should we stop interview and employment fraud, what are your ideas?" You want candidates who are clever at analyzing a new problem, and it puts the issue on the table in a cooperative way.
- comex 4y agoI don’t know. If someone was interviewing me and asked how they should stop interview fraud, I’m pretty sure I’d wonder if they were passive-aggressively accusing me of it. At the least I’d feel self-conscious. Which would probably not be conducive to a good interview for either side.
- Nextgrid 4y agoIf you approach the question transparently it would work - just explain the problem that you've had a lot of candidates trying to abuse the system and would like to get their thoughts on the issue.
- dom96 4y agoYou hear these stories so much but what I don't get is how these people get past the HireRight checks, do the companies this happens to just not use HireRight?
- samstave 4y agoI may have just experienced identity theft by an indian company claming to hire me. I am convinced of it now.
- erdos4d 4y agoI bet this happens a lot actually. Its far easier to just post a bullshit job on a board and collect the CVs than dream them up yourself.
- jmcgough 4y agoSomeone I know hired an experienced programmer from Indian who interviewed well. When his first day started, he seemed extremely junior - needed basic things explained to him like command line usage. One of the people who interviewed him saw him on camera and told the EM he was pretty sure it was a different guy. The EM confronted him and he admitted it, so they let him go. Makes me wonder what % of the time this actually works and no one is willing to fire them, or if it's just worth the salary of collecting a month of pay before you're found out.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- plebianRube 4y agoYes. In a fairly large public company I worked at, I remember a DBA on contract got fired because he knew absolutely nothing. But only a few weeks later he was back, in the same building, but using a different name on a different floor working as a Senior Software Architect. He got caught because someone in the DB department recognized him, called him by his old name and they pretended they never new him.
- EddySchauHai 4y agoI can’t imagine the stress of trying that. Work can be hard enough, why add the complexity of lying about your name in a company people know you
- mistrial9 4y agoit may be that the contractor is not at all in control of this, but is instead used as a pawn by others; perhaps harsh life circumstances or maladapted psychology sink the lockin.
- givemeethekeys 4y agoI knew someone who learned on the job until they got fired. They faired much better on the next job. Hard times call for hard people.
- actually_a_dog 4y agoNot terribly surprising, since companies have more or less refused to actually train anybody since the 80s or so.
- JCharante 4y agoWhat’s the point of training people when there’s at will employment
- actually_a_dog 4y agoWhat's your alternative to at will employment? You know employment has always been at will in the US, and companies used to train people, right?
- neilv 4y agoThis sounds like fraud, and possibly organized crime. I don't know whether an AG's office would be interested in hearing about it, but you could try calling.
- s1k3s 4y agoAsk HN: Anyone having issues with job description fraud? The job market is a market. Nobody owes you anything. In most job fields the buyer has the leverage over the seller so the buyers will go out of their way to press that leverage (low pay, low benefits, impossible demands etc). It just happens that in a few fields the seller has the advantage so they're doing the same thing to you. My point is you have to accept it and move on, because things like this happen all the time and won't ever stop.
- carom 4y agoI keep getting hired for programming roles then they have me do everything except program. Jira, terraform, code reviews, design docs, meetings, deploys, on calls... I get that this is the job, but I'm a really good programmer and it hardly gets used.
- meltyness 4y agoI had an instance where I applied to a Fortune 500 company. The minimums were broken out as a survey, and you were automatically (and explicitly) disqualified if you answered "wrong". One of the minimums contradicted the posting, and being honest, I was disqualified. Months later, after the summer, I got a frenzied email from HR asking me to apply again. Apparently the posting ruled out all the candidates, someone high-up thought for-sure "someone" was qualified.
- FactualActuals 4y agoI'm currently looking for a job and I can't tell you the amount of times the job description or the experience required doesn't match what the team is actually looking for. Also, I very clearly lay out in my resume and with the initial phone interview that I have 6 years Python experience and 1 year in C++. I've had recruiters reach out to me about positions requiring 5+ years of C++ experience when I am currently looking for Python jobs
- giobox 4y agoNot only have I seen this several times, I've also encountered multiple instances of "over-employed" software engineers, who are doing 2-3 full time salaried positions from home, at the same time. This is surprisingly easy to get away with unnoticed in the US tax system, as you get a separate W2 from each employer. It's genuinely a lot more difficult to do this in some other countries. There's even this service now offered to let employers try to catch this: > https://theworknumber.com/ https://theworknumber.com/
- sicp-enjoyer 4y agoAlthough most "office worker" contracts disallow this, it's not illegal for an American to work two fulltime jobs, and many people do something similar out of necessity.
- kilroy123 4y agoYeah but that doesn't look fun. My roommate is doing this now. I think it's insane, they sit at their desk with three computers working all day long. They're stressed out and burning out rapidly. No thanks.
- sumedh 4y agoMaybe they want to do this for a couple of years and save money for a house deposit, once you get the house, just stick to one job.
- giantg2 4y agoWe had third party recruiters sit/listen in on interviews with their clients. Those recruiters would then use that knowledge to feed answers to the next candidate, usually during the interview.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y agoThose who don't sit in ask the candidates what they were asked for anyway.
- snapetom 4y agoYes. I just had an odd Interview a couple of weeks ago. We were looking for a contractor and interviewed someone. The location he gave was the middle of nowhere, British Columbia. Turns out though, I don’t live that far away from there. I can see his window was full of heavy, dark clouds. However, there was a heat wave going on and there wasn’t a cloud for hundreds of miles. “Huh. Odd that we’re so close, it’s almost 90 down here and it look like it’s about to pour rain up where you are…” I said.
- jimmywetnips 4y agoOh you know that bc weather can get crazy
- fortylove 4y agoCould he have been traveling during the interview? I very legitimately once took a virtual interview while on a trip.
- snapetom 4y agoThen say so. It's basic communication skills. He just blinked when I said that.
- clcaev 4y agoI had an unsolicited email offer to pay $5k upfront cash to use my github profile to solicit and perform work, plus monthly percentage of their earnings. I presumed it was spam, but they had done significant research as they knew the projects I participated in, and so on.
- b800h 4y agoInteresting that this has increased recently from the perspective of OP, but it has always been the case, and it's an annoying timesink. My favourite example of this was a interviewee for a post working on Oracle data warehouses. A colleague ran the guy's CV under my nose before the interview - it was strange - it kept on changing tense, and contained a bit too much random technical information about Oracle's tooling. I Googled a random phrase, and discovered that 50% of the CV was directly lifted from the Oracle manual for their ETL and DW product. The point is that despite being comically bad, he'll have interviewed somewhere else, got the job thanks to a clueless hiring manager, and have spent three months learning the product before getting canned (optimistically). The last time I saw a boom in this behaviour was in 2007.
- __d 4y agoEarly 2010's, Wall St software tech vendor: I had a candidate show up for an interview, in person, go through the preliminaries and then sit down in a meeting room for the detailed questions. As we got into it, the candidate often asked me to repeat the question. I was happy to do so, but after a few times, I was already taking care to speak slowly and clearly, and it was still happening a lot. Then I noticed a quiet murmuring sound after I'd asked a question. It was like .. a TV on in the next room or something. I ignored it at first, assuming it was someone else in the next room, but then it seemed like it was only happening after I'd asked a question, and before the candidate answered. I was now pretty suspicious, but confused: what was going on? The candidate was flubbing the interview anyway -- their understanding was pretty shallow and they didn't appear at all confident in the material, so I wrapped up the interview, and showed them out. As we were walking to the door, I stood beside them for the first time. And that's when I saw the earpiece: the candidate had a hearing aid-like earpiece in, with a wire running into their collar. I was basically too surprised to do anything, and by this point we were at the elevator, so I just let them leave. The way I figured it, afterwards, was that they had someone on a radio who they thought would help them with the interview. But either the radio was noisy or they just needed more time for the answer, so asking me to repeat the question was for the benefit of their remote assistant. If they'd been better at it, even had I seen the earpiece, I'd have assumed it was just a hearing aid. Fortunately, even with the remote assistance, they didn't pass. Never happened again, but I can tell you I casually check everyone I've interviewed since for earpieces.
- b800h 4y agoPlenty of this in remote interviews, even if it's just people googling answers. I was slightly frustrated with one candidate and spelled the term I'd just used for him so he could search for it.
- lumost 4y agoPart of me suspects that this is a major reason for the push on RTO. If you hire people remote who used any one of dozens of mechanisms to cheat.. it can be hard to correct. You could have a candidate who does great on your interview then fails to produce a single PR in 3 months on the job.
- iaaan 4y agoEarlier this year, I interviewed this guy who gave me really strange vibes. He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. I google'd some specific, peculiar phrases I remembered him saying after the interview and found that the phrases came straight out of places like the Kubernetes documentation, word for word. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me. His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/ https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating." Wait... Intellectsoft isn't the name of this company. Did these "Data Service Group" people steal Intellectsoft's website? Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Over+the+past+decade%2C+our+customers+succeeded+by+leveraging+Intellectsoft%27s+process+of+building%2C+motivating.%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Over+the+past+decade%2C+o... I'm still not really sure what was going on with that as we politely rejected him and never heard from him again. If you look up the company on LinkedIn, it appears to be made up of hundreds of immigrant DevOps engineers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-service-group/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-service-group/
- tyingq 4y agoMy favorite bit is this: "4k+ ACTIVE CLIENTS, 35+ PROJECTS DONE...10 GLORIOUS YEARS" I imagine then, there's at least 3965 clients that aren't super happy. At 3.5 projects completed per year, it's going to be a long road.
- vba616 4y agoNot at all, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation if you fit an exponential growth model to the numbers given. You see, they must have started with one client, in year one, and thereafter achieved an average growth rate of 151.33% per annum. My Excel model: Year Clients 1 1 2 3 3 6 4 16 5 40 6 100 7 252 8 633 9 1592 10 4001 In the tenth year, they would have 4001 clients. However, they would have passed 35 clients about five years prior, and therefore the implication is simply that that is the cohort that is completing now and projects last on the order of five years.
- somehnacct3757 4y agoI had someone interview for a job and then a different person showed up to orientation. Locked their accounts immediately and nobody show up the next day. Fired. When does this work?
- edgyquant 4y agoI was hired as the engineering lead earlier this year at a company. It was packed full of “senior” engineers who wrote nested loops, each screen was a monolithic program with no abstractions etc. as I let them go we hired two more (we have a consultant that hired me and has been interviewing them) who were the exact same. Senior engineer, 15 years experience, etc. Yes all of them appear to work a couple hours of day and I’d wager they get 3-4 jobs and work a few hours a day on each
- sicp-enjoyer 4y ago> who wrote nested loops What is this supposed to be the connotation here?
- SauciestGNU 4y agoThis suggests runtime complexity will be O(n^2), which is rarely an optimal solution to a problem.
- comex 4y agoPerhaps, but “nested loops” by itself is an odd way to describe that.
- jackblemming 4y agoUnless they verify the source code of every library they use and verify the entire call stack; it probably has a nested for loop somewhere. Good thing computers are fast!
- silvertaza 4y agoDepending on n, oftentimes nested loops are more readable and maintainable than the optimal solution. Of course too many levels of nesting is inherently a code smell that indicates other issues.
- strikelaserclaw 4y agothat says nothing if you don't know the size of the input and the problem at hand. Sometimes the best you can do is N^2.
- tillcarlos 4y agoI had a candidate like this. 7 years of Ruby, but didn’t know keyword parameters. On the CV there were some companies with dubious consulting websites, super generic. I emailed them, no reply. If I wouldn’t have given him a live coding test I wouldn’t have known.
- pkrotich 4y agoPerhaps in-person interview requirement would help eliminate such fake candidates? But I know it's not very practical in the remote work age and maybe it explains why you're seeing drastic increase. While not as bad as fake candidates, professional interviewers who interview really well but cannot deliver a lick on the job are also very problematic. Once hired someome who sounded perfect for the role (even in person) - relocated him - but months into the job they couldn't deliver. That said, I just hired someone without meeting them in person (just Zoom call) and they're pretty good thus far! I guess you just have to be lucky.
- _8j50 4y agoFor engineering, screen them with a verbal technical questionaire over zoom with camera before the actual interview. This would replace the "phone screen".
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y agoIt's disrespectful to the candidates, you will lose valuable ones just because of that.
- _8j50 4y agoI don't get it, why? Screening questions and zoom interviews are very common.
- pmccarren 4y agoShameless plug - I've been building the startup Wedge[0]. In addition to helping prevent application fraud, I deeply believe applicants are _people_ and have more to share beyond a resume. We enable companies to asynchronously collect a short series of video responses from an applicant either at application time or later in the process. [0]https://www.wedgehr.com/product https://www.wedgehr.com/product
- brokenodo 4y agoUnder no circumstance would I apply to any job that required me to record videos of myself as part of the application process. I’m curious how many people feel the same way.
- geoffbp 4y agoYes we’re having problems along those lines. We don’t proceed with interviews unless video is available - Multiple candidates with the same resume - Resume doesn’t include full name, location or LinkedIn - Candidate blatantly lies during interview - Candidate is observed copying answers from the web, unable to explain how it works - Language barrier issues - Candidate applying for a senior role can’t solve simple problem - Job hopping every 6 months or 1 year
- kramerica_ind 4y ago> We don’t proceed with interviews unless video is available Just throwing this out there. I've been interviewing lately and on more than one occasion now I've had the recruiter/screener pull the "oh, haha, my camera's not working" gag. Mistakes happen, but I wasn't born yesterday. So now I don't switch on my camera until I see the interviewer first. Needs to be a level playing field. I'm not interviewing through a one-way mirror. You need to be clear when sending out the Zoom/Teams/WebEx invite that there will be video. I had one screener kind of act annoyed that I didn't have video and I'm thinking to myself, "This is a phone call pal, your camera is off too." More than likely the WFH screener is just chilling in his or her bath robe or footy pajamas.
- hankchinaski 4y agoI have also experienced the same with recruiters and companies. Who should I be appealing to?
- bubblethink 4y agoThere was a darknet diaries episode about something like this. Can't remember what the conclusion was (something about NK espionage ?).
- b20000 4y agoi thought leetcode interviews was all you needed, and, screw senior people with actual experience?
- primeblue 4y ago
- remote_phone 4y agoMy friend has personally interviewed 3 people in the last 2 months who were lip synching answers. One was a woman who was trying to lip sync to a man’s voice. It’s really insane what’s going on right now.
- jabbu12 4y ago[flagged]
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago> We've wasted a significant amount of time on comms and interviews with over a dozen of these candidates. this is what happens when you filter people based on keywords. they game the system.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y agoAnd they never learn... They just keep adding more keywords, hoping to narrow the search, but end up broadening it.
- i_like_robots 4y agoYes. Prior to my current company I think I'd only met two candidates face-to-face who had sent misleading CVs (one of whom memorably tried to tell me MooTools was a new Linux based operating system.) But so far this year I've cut short half a dozen interviews once it became clear the candidate was hopeless, despite having good CVs. In some cases they seemed to struggle to even to use their own computer. And in the last 12 months we've also cut ties with somebody who joined during lockdown after it became clear that they'd falsified details of their background and experience.
- patrakov 4y agoOne of my clients (where screening CVs was one of my duties) had a different kind of fraud. On a particular week, we received a lot of CVs for a DevOps position. They shared a few common characteristics: were sent through Indeed, allegedly from Indians who emigrated to the USA, talked about skills and duties but not achievements, and were longer than one would normally write. Additionally, they used too-low-level phrases that one would never use in the CVs, like, e.g. when describing their experience with Ansible, "use the 'file' module to copy files to and from remote systems". I.e. phrases that would appear in a course curriculum, but not in a proper CV. The final red flag for me was a phrase repeated word for word in two CVs allegedly from different people. I don't really know how to react properly to this, in order to avoid lawsuits for rejecting candidates based on nationality and other kinds of discrimination (ans I was specifically instructed about discrimination-based lawsuits as a very real risk, something that happened before). So I just told about the problem to the head of HR, marked all CVs received through Indeed on that week as highly suspect (even those that a casual reader would mark as OK), and let him deal with it. I don't know what exactly he did.
- nerdix 4y agoI've seen this a lot this year. Other red flags: Resume says they live somewhere without large immigrant populations like some random town in the Midwest. Places that aren't really tech hubs so you wouldn't expect to find many immigrant tech workers there. When you phone/video screen them. They are barely able to speak English to the point where you wonder how it's possible for them to survive in the area they claim to live in (again not areas known for large non-hispanic immigrant populations so you'd expect that a certain level of English competency is a required to function). Sometimes they take the interview in what sounds like a noisy environment. Sounds a bit like a call center. You start to wonder if there are other "candidates" doing interviews for other companies in the same vicinity. It's definitely been a time waster but I obviously will not filter resumes based on nationality which I think is morally reprehensible (not to mention the legalities that you mentioned).
- exnot 4y agoI've had plenty of issues with job ad fraud. My last three jobs have been completely oversold and misdescribed in the ads and interviews. I think it's only fair that applicants retaliate with the same ammunition.
- durnygbur 4y agoYou look for a fraud in every real human professional directly applying, so that now all you're left with are real frauds. Sorry, not sorry.
- levi_n 4y agoAnecdotal datapoint to add to the heap: a friend had someone show up to their first day of 100% remote work who was decidedly NOT the person that they interviewed. Obviously that was also their last day.
- softwareoiu 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- boltzmann-brain 4y agoLet me give you a perspective of why people might legitimately not want to do camera during interviews. A little about me: I've started doing remote work 15 years ago - long, long before the modern remote push. I've been coding for 30 years; I started with 8 bit micros; I can probably work with any technology and any deep problem you throw at me; I've led and launched projects worth billions of dollars. I prefer to work remotely because I hate commuting and open plan. I've started denying camera interviews for a while now. I still do voice, but no camera, for the following reasons: 1. It impacts not just my earnings, but whether I'll be considered in the first place. There's a lot of sexism and racism happening in tech. Sexism: if you're presenting as female, or presenting as male but don't look like Jim Halpert from the office, you can get looked at differently, which happened to me. This applies to people who are older, people who have visible tattoos or piercings, people who have blue hair, scars, etc. Racism: you only need to look at other replies here with people talking about how bad eg Indian developers are. This extends to people of other skin color as well. In Europe there is a huge amount of racism against white Europeans from eastern Europe and from the Balkans and Europeans from Latin countries; in Asia there is racism against people ethnically from other Asian countries; in America there's racism against pretty much everyone; etc. This is endemic. One look at someone's face can be enough to disqualify them at a company that has this problem. Ageism doesn't even need to be explained. Based on the three points above, by demanding camera interviews you betray yourself as a company which doesn't have the issue of systemic bias against minorities figured out yet. Incidental information leaks: The background - the location where you are - is important as well. Is the person located in their bedroom with a single bed? Probably a flat share, pay them less, they'll take it. Are they in their garden? Hmm, they are probably worth what they ask for. Is it dark outside whereas it's light where you are? Uh oh, remote work with someone who's not in your time zone! Better start worrying! Especially the last one is egregious. Dev work is mostly solitary, asynchronous work; most of the time there's a lot of overlap even between eastern Europe and west coast US which is plenty of time for meetings and pair programming if necessary. People who insist on such things are usually inexperienced with remote work. Misconceptions like these destroy opportunities that can work out very well otherwise. I've had people make comments about "oh it's light out over there" many times in my career and it's always lead to a no-hire. 2. Issues that remote work solves can be brought to light in an ugly manner. For example, maybe the person feels they are not attractive, and are just generally shy around people in person - something that a lot of technical people share; their performance in front of a camera will be worse. Being shy when physically around other people perfectly fine for remote work. Maybe the person has special needs. Maybe they have to use an oxygen tank, or are missing an eye, or teeth, or a hand, or are sitting in a wheel chair, or are obese. Maybe the tapestry on their wall falling off and they haven't had money to fix it due to an economic downturn or because someone in the family had cancer so that's where the money went. None of this is stuff that the employer needs to know - but they are things that none the less can impact the recruitment and later career by a lot. 3. I experience fewer of the issues brought up in 1 and 2 than most others; however, I still deny camera interviews to see what will happen. Being this worried about job applicant fraud betrays that you likely can't afford it. Job applicant fraud is a little time off your hands and a little money as well. That fraudulent applicant wasted maybe 3 hours through interviews across people in your company, and maybe up to $10k wasted money. If you can't factor this into your business, it means to me - an experienced developer who has plenty of choice - that you can't afford me at all, and that working for you, should it happen, will be precarious. I'll probably skip over you. It is my experience that the most resilient companies - and ones that are well established already - absolutely don't care about seeing your face on camera. Additional wasted time after the hire is mostly on your hands: either it's a complete bait and switch (smart person interviewed, substituted by someone unsuited) - and that's something you figure out on the first day - or it's someone who's never been good enough, and you weren't a good enough interviewer to figure this out in the several hours you've spent with them; at that point you'll probably take a few weeks to figure out that they're not great at their job, but that's on you. -------- TLDR: a camera interview is purely a disadvantage to minorities and people who aren't well off by leaking things that are for good reason illegal to ask about; a job interview where this is demanded or implied betrays the company is standing on a shaky foundation.
- Madmallard 4y agoHow many of these are candidates trying to game the interview into a remote dev position to sell the work to high experience cheap remote labor options in 3rd world countries?
- mv4 4y agoI screened a candidate last month who insisted on keeping the camera off. Gave perfectly worded answers. Several things were off, e.g. not knowing certain industry acronyms etc.
- nprateem 4y agoJust give them a simple screening coding challenge like copying a file to s3, then if their code looks OK ask them to justify their decisions, eg error handling, testing, etc. Tell them not to spend more than 1 hour on it. Google won't help much. I've had people use IDEs to auto create empty test cases, hard code file paths etc. No point wasting time on an interview and anyone competent will smash it.
- avg_dev 4y agoI believe this is reasonable advice but I believe it can be simplified even further. Live-coding in an interview be it in a text editor (shitty or otherwise - those web based platforms can be really painful and slow to use when sharing a screen with zoom, e.g.) or on a whiteboard is a skill, and I’m not sure it is one that is worth optimizing for because I’m not sure that this particular skill really has much to do with day-to-day software development. I am sure it doesn’t hurt to be able to perform in a foreign environment with someone judging you over your shoulder but I hope dev work in general possesses as little of this type of work as possible. But you can simplify the problem considerably and ask someone to solve a fairly easy problem in just about any live coding fashion. To wit: I learned Java in school, spent some time at a job using other languages, then interviewed for an intermediate software developer position. The hiring manager asked me to write fizzbuzz in Java. I had never heard of the fizz buzz problem and I hadn’t written Java in some time. Still, I was able to successfully solve the problem with a minimum of difficulty (though admittedly a maximum of nerves). He asked me a few questions about how to improve the solution, and I mumbled some stuff about combining string concatenation statements instead of simply appending to the string, something which made him nod his head sagely and that I still consider to be a largely useless micro-optimization, but the main thing, the important part, is that I demonstrated some coding ability in a matter of minutes, right in front of his eyes. It’s something that sticks with me and I think it’s a valuable type of interview question. I got the job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz
- nprateem 4y agoWriting fizz buzz is practically a meme, but worse, what can you really talk about? I agree about live coding which is why we send that test to them pre-interview - it's to screen potential candidates. If they get to an interview, a reasonable amount of it is to ask what they've done and why, e.g. * Did they write a CLI parser? * If so, did they add sensible options (e.g. to force overwriting files that exist on the destination or not), or aren't they bothering to check whether files already exist on the destination * Did they add/stub out tests? If so, to test what? * What does error handling look like? Boto performs retries by default. Is this their justification or didn't they think about it? * How else could they have done it (e.g. use a library vs shelling out to the aws cli binary). It's complicated enough that it helps show their proactiveness. The instructions include 'making it good', and also say they can just stub out/write comments for what they would do if they were doing it for real. It's saved loads of time in the past by filtering out people who don't even have the basics, and it's relevant to the work.
- rexreed 4y agoThe increase in remote jobs, remote interviewing, automated interviewing, and use of AI systems for interviewing is directly correlated with people gaming the system. There really is very little good substitute for in-person interviewing. Or at least if you are committed to a fully remote experience, then you'll have to accept a greater likelihood of fraud, deception, and misbehavior as part of the tradeoff between in-person and remote and manage those expectations.
- Consultant32452 4y agoI worked at a BigCo for 5 years. 3/4 of our department was offshore and we generally did not interview them. It was more like our offshore vendor filled seats when they were empty and we would occasionally fire them. One of the offshore folks was amazing so we offered him an on-shore position and moved him here. He told us insane horror stories about how the offshore team worked. Basically 1-2 people did all the work for everyone to turn in. The managers were in on it and sometimes were one of the few competent people who did the work. As he described it, it was corruption from top to bottom. We were paying for 10-15 workers but really getting 1-3.
- SkipperCat 4y agoOne thing that is really fascinating after reading many of the comments here is how hard people try to leap over the fence into the job-world of tech. Sure, if you have the experience or education, it's not that hard. But if you never had the opportunity to learn it or work it, a tech job may as far away as Elysium. Conversely, anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can learn most tech topics. With the right amount of self study, personal project work and focus, you can acquire the skills needed to land an entry level job and then work your way up. Maybe it just boils down to the fact that there are always people who try to short cut the path to senior dev salaries.
- anonym29 4y agoAsserting that "anyone can learn moderately complex subject X if they just study enough" differs very little from conservatives saying "anyone can get a good job if they work hard enough". Some humans have limiting factors beyond a lack of education and/or work ethic. For example, someone who lacks the cognitive ability for abstract thought, or the working memory to chain multiple mental constructs together is probably never going to understand pointers, no matter how hard they try or how long they study them. They may eventually be able to replicate examples they were shown with enough repetition, but purely as a function of memory recall, not a function of understanding what's actually going on. These kinds of assertions can come across as very disempowering and dismissive to such people, just a heads up.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoI think they were just getting at the fact most people see programming as a black box, or were scared off from the math requirements to ever consider it in school. Whereas we all know if you can write an email, you can write a script.
- ivanvanderbyl 4y agoEvery part of this rings true. We interviewed a guy for a front-end position, on his resume he mentioned react and svelte with 3 years of experience with both and was open for contact work. We exchanged a few emails and set up a call. Then it got weird. On his resume his name was Daniel, but when he joined the zoom call he introduced himself as Andrew. Moreover the photo on his LinkedIn was of Asian appearance but this guy had a very White American accent. I asked him to turn his video on and he fumbled around for a bit and then said his camera was broken, so giving him the benefit of the doubt I jumped into asking him about his experience with svelte. He asked asked me what svelte was, I thought that was weird given it was one of the buzzwords on his resume, but 20 seconds later he all of a sudden knew what svelte was. I reminded him that in our email exchange he said he had worked with svelte for 3 years and I'd like to hear more about what he had built. He told me, and no joke, he had worked in the same office as some guys who had used svelte.
- antifa 4y ago> asking him about his experience with svelte. He asked asked me what svelte was https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/3287 https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/3287
- dcarr178 4y agoI run software engineering for a 100% remote company with ~35 developers on 5 continents. In April 2022 I interviewed a senior Python developer from Austin Texas - camera on, full pair-programming exercise, etc. 3 interviews, the guy was awesome. We hired him and assigned him to a development team. A month later I hear from the team that the guy sucks, doesn't know how to program, thick accent, and says his camera is broken even though we just shipped him a brand new machine. We set up a sting operation, forced him to present/share his screen over zoom, and recorded the call. It was some random person in India connecting via a VPN in Dallas to mask the origin of his network calls. In the screenshare recording you could see him quickly switch to a chat window and ask someone else how to answer the question. We fired him and only lost 1 month of salary + a very nice laptop we'll never see again. I learned a valuable management lesson from that one. I bet at a larger company this guy could have flown under the radar for a lot longer than 1 month.
- tomt00001 4y agoI'm in the situation of apply for jobs and feels like I'm screened out of everything because my resume doesn't have exact matches for every buzzword. I don't really want to buzzword pad but kind of feels like I need to do that. I got 25 years of varied experience(network admin, server admin, cloud stuff, scripting, etl and actual development) and now feels like being a jack of all trades is screwing me :)
- Amy_W 4y ago[dead]
- robtani 4y agoI know this is going to be controversial comment and I'm sad to say it... But quite frankly, I can safely say that just about every Indian developer that applied to my jobs and made it passed the initial filters STILL turned out to be a scammer of sorts. Either fake skills background listed; they must be getting away with it at least to some degree if I'm coming across it at this scale!!