34 ms·

My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

• syngrog66 3y ago
  I'm more impacted by the inverse: as someone who's done programming for decades, been hired many times, been promoted, survived multiple layoff rounds (and moved cities and states to stay loyal), started and ran my own computer game biz, had independent clients I've shipped for successfully, has technical writing artifacts online, and code in my public GitHub repos I should NOT have to be "tested" by now to check if I'm a real programmer or not, or whether I'm smart, or whether I solve and ship. I clearly have and do. Therefore its nauseating, insulting, seems insane and just plain gets old. I sometimes wonder if experienced engineers should begin "testing" hiring companies by requiring them to send a typical paycheck deposit -- you know, just to be 100% sure they have the ability to do that, rather than blindly trusting them in good faith. Perhaps we should start a guild?
• gardenhedge 3y ago
  I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when presenting it. It's not "cheating" but it's skipping the effort and preparation in the same way.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • mach1ne 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but I disagree with the analogy. If you can spitball the presentation, your time is likely spent better elsewhere than preparing for the presentation.
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • gear54rus 3y ago
    "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" - No country for old men
  • fauxpause_ 3y ago
    What does spitball mean? I don’t prepare for presentations but I can’t tell how that would be cheating.
    • sk5t 3y ago
      It means to extemporize / ramble.
      • fauxpause_ 3y ago
        But that’s not cheating on presenting, that’s just doing a bad job, no? That is, just visible incompetence?
        • hgsgm 3y ago
          It leads to the modern world where "influencers" and "fake news" succeed while creators and contributors fail. It's hard to see this being the basis of a sustainable society.
          • fauxpause_ 3y ago
            I don’t agree that those things are at all related to not preparing for work presentations
          • scarface74 3y ago
            If you are a creator that can’t get your ideas across, you’re just like the literally dozen of people who have approached me with a “great idea” with no go to market strategy.
  • Spooky23 3y ago
    We live in an era of transition. Deals and speed are more important than rigor. When the easier money dries up, that will change.
    • tough 3y ago
      Hadn't easy money dried up already ?
  • praxulus 3y ago
    How is spitballing a presentation cheating? It's the equivalent of taking a test without studying, not presenting somebody else's work as your own.
    • hgsgm 3y ago
      It's a broken system where effort and performance isn't acknowledged and rewarded and the whole purpose of being there is undermined. At some point the whole enterprise is destructive and should be shut down.
      • deleted 3y ago
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      • scarface74 3y ago
        If the outcome is successful with less effort how is that bad? I was just in a joint presentation with a new grad. We both had our parts. They spent hours preparing their parts of a technical demonstration. I just walked through my part of the demo and had an “open discussion”. They put 4x more effort to achieve what I would say was a 20% better result. That’s not meant to be an insult to them, I have much more experience.
      • ausbah 3y ago
        if the end result is the same who cares
      • awesomeMilou 3y ago
        When has "having been there" ever been a measure for reward? In college no one gave a shit if you came to lectures, all that mattered was the exam at the end of the semester. If you learn better with books: great! I'm suprised that so many companies are unable to measure the performance of their employees in an effective manner. This entire discussion comes down to whether management actually wants to own the product and subsequently the product development lifecycle and is then also willing to investigate potential friction, or, as is much more often the case, doesn't really care and just wants to be told what they want to hear. You prioritize a metric (keep management happy) over actualy results. If I can improve that metric by improvising, how am I a cheater?
  • pavlov 3y ago
    You can’t really cheat your way to a better presentation. If the “spitballed” version is good enough for the situation, why expend a lot of effort on preparation? Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all these presentations?” instead of “why do you all put so little effort in your presentations.”
    • peteradio 3y ago
      If the presentation misrepresents a projects state through vagueness I might call that cheating.
    • twic 3y ago
      It probably isn't good enough. But it's hard for the audience to tell. "Any questions?" "How are we going to scale the data storage?" "Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance." "Great." It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten the presentation.
      • pfannkuchen 3y ago
        This is less spitballed presentation and more spitballed design. The latter is much much much worse.
      • deleted 3y ago
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      • somsak2 3y ago
        If all you need to answer that question is "we're confident that X" then that's still a problem with the asker. Why are they confident? Have we modeled the data needs over time? What data are we even storing? Basic probing questions should either uncover the lack of preparation or show that things will indeed be fine. Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the audience to solve.
  • preommr 3y ago
    Ironic then that the real test was to see who has flexible thinking to adjust to a dynamic situation and who mindlessly follows misconstrued advice. If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because they don't care about the cheating or you getting an education either. There's any number of situtations like this that happen in real life, from school, government, politics, work, etc. Not understanding these rules is much worse than being able to do some assignment in university.
    • nequo 3y ago
      Your comment reads as though you were saying that cheating on an assignment is “flexible thinking.” That’s quite a stretch.
      • cmcconomy 3y ago
        he's thinking flexibly
    • toss1 3y ago
      While it's unlikely these test results were deliberately leaked as a 'real-world' learning exercise, the principle definitely applies. I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...
      • 3y ago
  • throwawaysleep 3y ago
    What is the reward for putting in the presentation effort? If I get my salary if I spitball and I get my salary whether I put in effort, why bother? I don't bother prepare for client support calls, mostly because I don't want to do them and want to be considered incompetent at them so I am not asked to help in the future as much. So at least for me, presentations are nothing but more work.
  • scaramanga 3y ago
    > I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I am curious to know what conclusion you draw from the anecdote about the test? Is it that you aren't good enough because you tried your best and failed? Or is it that the test is a fallible instrument, designed by a human being who works within the constraints of an institution and has no choice but to treat education as if it is a magic juice that it's his job to squirt into the students heads and then administer tests to determine if the juice stuck there or leaked out, thereby identifying the defective and leaky craniums? Or is it that you seemed out of touch with what every else intuitively understood? ie. That they're being evaluated and that a negative evaluation can have profound consequences for the rest of their life, regardless of if the testing procedure is fair or not?
    • gardenhedge 3y ago
      It was a pretty tough assignment iirc. In my mind an assignments purpose is to learn - which I did from putting in the effort and then reviewing the solution after submitting. You seem to be getting my point though - I would have rather failed than cheat. I learned that people (even smart people - which my peers were) will cheat if its beneficial to them.
  • pfannkuchen 3y ago
    I’m curious how far you are into your career. It sounds a bit like you are treating presentations as a performance, which is natural to fall into but I think it is a bit of a trap time investment wise. If you practice improvising presentations you will eventually get good at improvising presentations which is a valuable skill to have IMO.
  • midoridensha 3y ago
    This is two totally different things. Not preparing for a presentation means you deliver a mediocre-to-bad presentation; you can't cheat by looking up the answer somewhere. So if delivering a lousy presentation is good enough for whoever wanted the presentation, why go to the effort of making a great presentation? Are the rewards for that effort worth the expenditure? Probably not, which is why people are "spitballing" it.
  • gofreddygo 3y ago
    Cheating is a slippery slope. This is the one thing that I always remind myself and my people, whenever the temptation arises. If my cheating works, I could never stop myself from doing it again, bigger, causing much worse damage to me and people around me when I get caught. If my cheating fails, I've lost more than what I could have gained anyway. To me its a lose-lose. I'd rather get up and leave, or find another way than cheat. And I hold that standard for people around me too. If I know they've cheated, even when I'm not involved or affected, that person or group and I are done. Its a hard non-negotiable thing. And I think I'm better for it.
• deleted 3y ago
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• duxup 3y ago
  I don’t disagree with the main points here. It is interesting that the form of cheating would be defeated with in person interviews / testing. I do wonder if you cheat your way into Amazon wouldn’t you get caught being bad on the job after you are hired? Or are we talking about people who are generally qualified but look better than others because they cheated?
  • giantg2 3y ago
    "Or are we talking about people who are generally qualified but look better than others because they cheated?" Bingo. The cheaters will get the job because they will look better than similarly qualified candidates.
  • glanzwulf 3y ago
    I think the issue is the interview process, because clearly the difficulty of the interview does not match the difficulty of the job. Sure, they cheated to get in, but then once in they found out it wasn't that hard to stay and get promoted.
    • WJW 3y ago
      It's also possible that they kept cheating in order to get promoted, of course.
      • passion__desire 3y ago
        It's also possible they can understand solutions provided to them and even implement but not be able to come up with solutions under strict time pressure.
      • glanzwulf 3y ago
        I dunno, I think it's pretty hard to keep cheating as a developer. How would a developer even cheat to get promoted? I mean, a PM I can see survive for longer, but a SDE? I actually had this issue at my current job where we hired someone who seemed great and who did really well on his interview exercises but then once he started working... well, it was pretty obvious he did not know what he was doing at all. So he was let go straight away. There was no way he could cheat his way to stick it out for longer than a month.
• heliostatic 3y ago
  I'll make the obvious point that these interviews were not good predictors of success at the companies. In general, I've found in 15 years of interviews that interviews are not highly correlated with the work at any given company. I wish we would move beyond cargo cult interview styles and base interviews (and screening, for that matter) on the actual work and culture of each company.
  • eckesicle 3y ago
    I ran a largish statistical analysis where I was working on all interviews and employee ratings for the following year (16000 data points). My conclusion was that: * some interview problems carried zero signal * some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal (<0.25. Correlation) * geographic location is a medium signal (0.2) * a relevant degree is a strong signal (0.4) * choice of programming language is the strongest signal (>0.8 correlation (or anti-) for some languages, and some. There is some selection bias though since candidates who were rejected did not get a chance at the job so we didn’t have a rating for them.
    • hermannj314 3y ago
      The choice of language being a signal is interesting. That goes against my intuition. Can you elaborate?
      • yw3410 3y ago
        My intuition would expect the two to be correlated. All anecdotal evidence I've seen points to the language mattering a great deal since only those people who are enthusiastic about niche languages, tend to put more time in learning/practicing programming and all other things being equal, spending more time on a skill correlates to being better at said skill.
      • callahad 3y ago
        Could rhyme with PG's "Python Paradox" essay from 20 years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html > It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know. > Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job. I wonder correlations eckesicle found, and what languages would fit that profile today.
• voidfunc 3y ago
  There is no such thing as "cheating" once you're out of school and the sooner new grads realize that the better off they will be. The real world is very much "fake it till you make it", "do whatever is necessary" because we're all just trying to make money to live and retire.
  • throwawaysleep 3y ago
    Even within the school system. I intend to teach my kids the only problem with cheating is the punishment that might result. Cheating has a price along with a weighted chance of that price applying. Is what you might gain worth the expected price? The greatest regret of my life is not lying blatantly to get admissions and scholarships to university.
    • allenrb 3y ago
      I’m a pretty firm believer in first learning the rules and only then, learning when it’s “OK” to break them. You’re probably not doing your kids any favors by skipping the first step.
  • badpun 3y ago
    And even school is arguably step 1 in the process of making money so that we can live and retire.
• kspacewalk2 3y ago
  Yes, it's fundamentally unfair to those interviewees who don't cheat. And the process is broken. However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one. Look at it from the point of view of the hiring company now, not the interviewer. They got a person who was good enough (based on the merits of their actual work, not interview performance) to subsequently get promoted. So, hiring mission accomplished, end of story. They may not have found the very best person for the job (very subjective and unknowable anyway), but if the process didn't result in an under-performer taking the job, the process did not fail. And, importantly, there's no reason whatsoever to think that if no cheating was allowed and a different person took the job, that they would on average be any better.
  • n4r9 3y ago
    Isn't there an alternative interpretation, that the internal evaluation process is just as broken as the hiring process?
    • siggen 3y ago
      Correct. You have unethical people now, you are probably “cheating” at work by taking credit for ideas not theirs.
      • brookst 3y ago
        But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.
        • hgsgm 3y ago
          Amazon might be unethical or immoral or unpleasant, but it is extremely successful at its founder's goal.
• mattgibson 3y ago
  TBF I don't think this is bad. The "cheating" involved seems a closer match to the actual real world conditions of the doing the job than the artificial "no internet allowed" assessment. If the candidates can get stuff done but need the internet as a reference, that's still getting stuff done. Not surprising that they are now getting promoted given they can not only get stuff done, but were resourceful enough to find a method to "cheat" and also pull it off successfully whilst being monitored.
  • pydry 3y ago
    Technically, it would be better if everybody had internet access. BUT, it means that Amazon creating a selection pressure for people who cheat. Long term this will be corrosive to the organizational fiber of the corporation as idiotic unrealistic leetcode questions are to the technical fiber. Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.
    • wahnfrieden 3y ago
      I wouldn’t blame the devs for their quality issues. Try ownership.
      • brookst 3y ago
        Finger pointing isn’t a great signal.
        • wahnfrieden 3y ago
          Quality isn’t a skill issue. It’s prioritization. Ownership decides how devs spend their time.
          • JohnFen 3y ago
            I get your point, but skill also plays into quality.
• lisasays 3y ago
  This being of course exactly the mindset the current mainstream interview process was designed to create. As a feature, not a bug.
• twistedcheeslet 3y ago
  Your friends did whatever was needed to pass the interview. You did not. How is it surprising that they're the ones getting raises? Clearly they're willing to risk more than you are for the reward. Only getting caught cheating guarantees loss. Playing fair does not guarantee winning.
  • emddudley 3y ago
    What a corrupt way to view the world.
    • scarface74 3y ago
      Is it not a true representation?
    • Invictus0 3y ago
      Wait till you see how the business people you're working for see the world!
    • randomopining 3y ago
      If the companies wanted a fair interview they would ask questions and have a discussion that only a skilled engineer with real world experience could have.
  • davemp 3y ago
    Person adept at exploiting one human process (interviews) is good at exploiting another human process (performance reviews / promotions). Calling it “risk taking” seems overly reductive.
  • Miner49er 3y ago
    How is cheating risky? You get caught, you don't get the job. End of story. On the other hand, not cheating means it will be harder to get the job. This seems to be the riskier strategy (but, I'd argue, has the greater reward.)
• dsm4ck 3y ago
  A disappointing part of adult life is how often "just lie" is the best advice.
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    I don't think it's the "best advice". The problem with lies is that one lie begets another, and you end up trying to defend a whole bunch of lies that don't necessarily weave together coherently. I guess I have low appetite for risk. "Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive."
    • antisthenes 3y ago
      The lie only has to last long enough for people to forget about it.
• MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  I do think this is an even bigger indictment of the interview process. If they're actually more competent in the role and not getting PIP'd and getting promotions, it means the interview was worthless to start, it would filter out a good candidate and pass a candidate who may only know how to do toy problems without any engineering skill.
  • algorithmmonkey 3y ago
    Maybe a good candidate in this organization is one that will leverage every edge they have to produce a desired result. Resourcefulness and risk tolerance are a potent pair.
  • davemp 3y ago
    This assumes internal performance evaluation is functional/unexploitable in these orgs.
• heelix 3y ago
  I've done a lot of screening interviews and cheating does happen. Some of my favorites: * developer attempts to pass something off as video lag, as he attempts to lip sync someone else's answer. * developer had printed all the 'common' answers on the wall behind his computer, and would look up to them for reference as we were talking. Then the tape came off and covered him in a a paper stack overflow. * the glorious mechanical keyboard, as they google for an answer. * interviewed one person and had a different one show up.
  • BlueTemplar 3y ago
    What I don't understand is... these are pre-screening interviews at companies that get tons of applicants, right? What happens during the actual in-person interview that follows ??
    • rahimnathwani 3y ago
      A lot of 'on sites' were remote during the pandemic, and a lot of roles now are remote, so may not have an 'on site' at all.
      • sgerenser 3y ago
        All the big tech companies I’ve spoke with over the past several months were still doing virtual “on site” interview loops.
      • BlueTemplar 3y ago
        Not even at the local branches ??
        • slondr 3y ago
          Many companies aren’t ginormous with branches everywhere. Google Meet is cheaper than a flight & hotel room.
          • 3y ago
• destitude 3y ago
  Basically they have no integrity.
• mnky9800n 3y ago
  when i took my quantum mechanics qualifier, i studied for a month, i was honest, i worked so hard. The exam was so tough (I passed), but as I was walking out I saw a student who had all the old exam questions with solutions printed out on his "table of integrals". Sure, maybe I "learned" some quantum mechanics more than that guy. But it's a topic I have never used (I do geophysics and machine learning) so I don't think I remember much of anything about quantum mechanics. So what was the lesson learned there? "Work smart, not hard"? "Do whatever the minimum is because that is all that gets assessed"? "The goal is all that matters"? "The ends justify the means"? "Worry about yourself"?
  • fauxpause_ 3y ago
    Don’t do things that are not useful, enjoyable, or rewarding.
    • mnky9800n 3y ago
      yes i think you hit the nail on the head. that is what i do now. but that took time to arrive to even though it seems so easy when you say it now.
  • throwawaysleep 3y ago
    Ruthlessly focus on your goals and don't get distracted by side quests.
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    There’s something seemingly dysfunctional in academia that made you get the best degree in quantum physics and then not work in quantum physics. I mean it is really common and not your fault, but people end up getting a PhD in these really advanced subjects all the time and then just leverage the ancillary coding and data analysis skills they happened to pick up on the way to get high paying tech jobs in unrelated fields. It seems like a massive waste of brain power that we could target more effectively.
    • passion__desire 3y ago
• osigurdson 3y ago
  The most interesting example that I read about was a Facebook employee trying to get a new job. They hadn’t done any Leetcode in many years and struggled with it as it was so unrelated to their work. I’m surprised that companies don’t re evaluate people on Leetcode on a regular basis given the amount of weight placed on this.
• JodieBenitez 3y ago
  And this is how you realize real life is not a board game. And this is how you're left with an impostor syndrome after a career based on google-fu and stackoverflow copy pasta.
• xtiansimon 3y ago
  Fake it until you make it. YMMV
  • passion__desire 3y ago
    “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!” ― Richard Branson
• giantg2 3y ago
  Seems more and more that the people who cut corners get ahead. Lie, cheat, and steal is the path to success these days. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that we are slipping in national rankings and the top desired jobs are performers and influencers.
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    "We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." - C. S. Lewis
• explorer83 3y ago
  Nobody seems to care anymore. I am reminded about this constantly at my work where I travel to lots of different offices and meet lots of managers. Nobody cares this author worked hard to be honest. Nobody cares that the other interviewees cheated. There's not much accountability. All anybody who has a say in anything seems to care is if they don't caught in a scandal. As long as it doesn't cause a scandal, mediocre work, dishonesty and/or neglect is widely acceptable in today's workforce.
• endisneigh 3y ago
  one way to get around this is to effectively say someone's work belongs to them, and to take it is to infringe on that. however many techies do not find that acceptable. another way solution is to install what is effectively malware on candidates' computer to ensure honesty. however techies complain about privacy. yet another is to make it so interviews are in person, and to begin to end remote work, as it is obviously easier to cheat and do things like be overemployed when you're remote. again, not acceptable. so of course this kind of things happens. it is what it is
• clnq 3y ago
  We all know that interviews can focus on knowledge not applicable to the job, leading to candidates excelling in interviews but failing at their job, or vice versa. I don't hold a firm ethical view on whether this justifies cheating in interviews. However, as noted on Blind, people do succeed in their roles after cheating. Some could even make the argument that those who deliver business value fulfil the primary expectation an employer has of them, and whatever happens at the interview might be almost irrelevant. From my experience leading teams, people with gumption, perseverance, and great learning skills almost always outperform others long-term, making entry-level skills a worse indicator of future performance in comparison. I've never regretted hiring someone with these values. When entering tech, I performed poorly on some technical interviews, which I'm ashamed of. Still, I received competitive offers based on potential. Some companies even skip technical panels/whiteboards for candidates with poor initial performance in technical tests but good growth potential. While unconventional and you should not expect that a company will do this for you, this approach seems more sensible than crazy to me.
  • euix 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • clnq 3y ago
      Somehow I've not yet heard of FAGMAN. Very humorous, just like the idea that they hold everyone to the same bar! But to speak seriously for a moment, some will do it with exceptional candidates. Probably not FAANG, the attitude and level of competition is different there.
• crop_rotation 3y ago
  The thing is clearing the interviews is much harder than doing the day to day job in any of these companies. In all of big tech, most people are working on trivial crud apps or trivial services passing data around. The skills to succeed are similar to cheating in interviews. Most people I know in all of big tech have never used any data structure more complex than a resizable array. Very few people in big tech work on the real hard problems. The interview process difficulty and the day to day job difficulty are just not related, not to mention that in day to day job being able to get solutions from others is a very important skill for you to succeed. One thing the interview process does is to weed out totally incompetent candidates. Even one such candidate, once inside, can be extremely harmful to the morale of a team.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    Your last point is an important one. There are a large number of incompetent applicants. Prior to the most recent round of tech layoffs, I would go so far as to say that the majority of applicants were incompetent. That's not to say the majority of programmers are incompetent, but because the interview filter processes tend to not select the incompetent, they accumulate in the applicant pool. Any "fix" to the interview process has to accommodate the reality that the left half of the applicant pool distribution is of terribly low levels of ability.
    • gedy 3y ago
      > Any "fix" to the interview process has to accommodate the reality that the left half of the applicant pool distribution is of terribly low levels of ability. I would like to see some distinction between people who apply cold, and people who have been reached out to by a company. I'm an experienced, employed engineer, and if a company reaches out to me, I expect to not be treated in an interview like "gotta see if you are a faker! You could be coasting for 15 years! We get soooo many applicants." That's the (in-house) recruiter's job, or hiring manager's. Don't waste my damn time like this.
      • sokoloff 3y ago
• mihaaly 3y ago
  I am not sure if any self respecting person wants to work in such places among such people with such culture. But it is good to know what kind of people are in charge in those organizations, thanks for the info.
• runlaszlorun 3y ago
  I’m going to go out on a limb here and be “that guy”. But in my experience, there’s a big difference between perspectives on cheating in the US vs perspectives in… let’s just say broadly… “some other nations”. I say this as an American who has lived overseas much of my life and, lest you think I’m just a flag waving parrot for the US, prob prefer living overseas and am more than willing to criticize the heck out of the US on a range of topics when relevant. I prob shouldn’t be afraid of listing out these specific cultures where cheating is not just ok but encouraged- as these are things that come from multiple occasions of direct experience- but I’d rather not make this look like a racist judgement on certain cultures. I’m not saying here that there aren’t Americans who cheat and I’d be lying if I said I had never cheated on an exam in undergrad. And there are certainly cultures outside of the US that on average are at least as intolerant of cheating or more so. But I think the big difference between that and a lot of the opinions I’ve seen in comments here and in the article is that- at least in my case- these were slipups done in moments of desperation and I damn sure wouldn’t be bragging about it on a message board and am overall somewhat ashamed at having done it. Feel free to downvote me or call me a moron…
  • berjin 3y ago
    It's the elephant in the room and it has small ears.
  • cptskippy 3y ago
    > there’s a big difference between perspectives Here's my take... The difference between the United States and other countries is how we internalize things. We're very much guilt or shame driven because of the heavy influences of puritanical, fundamentalist, and catholic religions. It's not that Americans don't cheat/indulge/whatever, it's that they feel bad about doing it. And that doesn't stop Americans from doing things, they just try to hide or repent for what they've done. * Thinking about it a little more, there are also people here with a strong sense of entitlement and bewildering moral fortitude. They'll break down in tears or want to start a fight if you cuss in their presence but have no qualms about "moving" to Florida to dodge paying taxes or vehicle registration fees.
    • 3y ago
• jzig 3y ago
  And here I am refusing to do whiteboarding, stuck doing menial API plumbing because all of the SMBs think they should interview like FAANG without the respective compensation. Maybe I should start cheating.
• brudgers 3y ago
  One person's cheating-in-an-interview is another person's giving-the-gatekeeper-the-answer-they-want. Your manager wants you to have a second laptop open when they ask you for information. The goal of interviews is to determine if the candidate has useful skills. Integrity is determined by a background check and the bar is typically low and subject to removal for-the-right-candidate. In the end, people fetishizing integrity to their own detriment are a risk to people further up the org-chart who approach the business more pragmatically. Business ethics are utilitarian not deontological and using a laptop to pass an interview is not contrary to a categorical imperative. It's just business. People at the top of the org chart want to work with people like them. People who treat passing the interview as the job at hand and are able to succeed.
  • precompute 3y ago
    TL;DR : Cheaters like others who cheat, don't beat yourself up if you aren't accepted.
• badpun 3y ago
  These guys took the "fake it till you make it" startup hustler "ethos" to heart.
• gdsdfe 3y ago
  I found this laughable at best, this not school anymore kid welcome to the real world, people will do what they need to do to get what they want but I do agree hiring process is broken for many other reasons.
• hoseja 3y ago
  Cheating is only wrong if you get caught. Sincerely cooperating with the system is a losing strategy for you nowadays but of course the system will promote it.
• politelemon 3y ago
  Just thinking what the 'contemporary' equivalent of this would be, they could use ChatGPT instead and get a well fleshed out answer they can read out pretty much word for word.
• liminal 3y ago
  Honesty matters more than technical merit -- at least when I'm hiring.
  • boondoggle16 3y ago
    How do you identify liars who are technically skilled at lying? It seems like an intractable problem. The best option I can see is to refuse to hire "obvious" dishonest people, aka unintelligent dishonest people. But intelligent dishonest people are able to pass without us knowing they are dishonest, and cannot be identified until their low performance becomes apparent. And we wouldn't hire unintelligent people to begin with. And, evaluating performance in software is notoriously difficult, dare I say impossible? A skilled and intelligent dishonest person can come up with many plausible-sounding excuses for why things are taking so long. So do you just fire anyone that takes longer than normal? In that case, you scare the actual good engineers, they will just go somewhere safer. In the end, I don't think there's a way to evaluate honesty, without ruining your business. So I think bad actors are always rewarded.
• asimpletune 3y ago
  Reading some of the comments in this thread I'm surprised. It seems that a substantial number of people think one of the following: a.) cheating on interviews is ok, because interviews don't reflect the actual job b.) this is acceptable because the promotion process is distinct from the interview process or c.) that the cheaters clearly are skilled after all because of all their success, as evidenced by being promoted, so it's ok. I think that's more or less how I would summarize the sympathetic comments in here, but if I missed something or if I'm being unfair then let me know. I for one think this kind of stuff is pretty shameful, and I don't see how the world can function if everyone were to think and act like that. The scariest thing for me is how all that's really changed since university, which was full of cheaters, is how much easier it's become, and I don't just mean in engineering. I mean in every facet of life we're basically awash in never before seen capacity to benefit from dishonesty. I guess the silver lining is there will probably be incredible opportunity down the road to combat this, but nonetheless it's a little sad that it isn't inherent to the discipline of technology itself anymore. Like, there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA, but Computer Science and Engineering were considered too hard to really be worth the effort. Obviously I don't mean to say that there were zero grifters, but on the whole the only people who pursued these disciplines were true, dyed in the wool nerds who simply thought making stuff was cool. As a passing thought I've noticed that there's also sort of like a fierce loyalty to defending LLM's in the forums, often by people who display a certain amount of ignorance as to how they work. I wonder if there's a similar dynamic there as to the people who are justifying the cheaters in the comments?
  • wootland 3y ago
    I'd add d) when all of the gains are captured by execs and investors, if you don't do everything you can to maximize your return and minimize your input, you're being exploited. It's strange to me that anyone would care about people cheating at job interviews and not say CEO pay that's 1,000X the average employee. More power to those who can balance things in their favor against those who have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
    • selcuka 3y ago
• ciroduran 3y ago
  I remember some guy on Twitter (a prominent programmer) openly admitting that he and other folks cheated on interviews by simply going to them (or paying someone), and then share the questions around. I think it highlighted the incredible privilege that some people have when looking for a job.
• maeln 3y ago
  It is tangentially related to cheating and interview, but if my first internship in the field told me anything, it's that your ability to sell yourself is often more important than your actual ability. My internship manager was a dev with a lot of experience and he was the one doing 90% of the job, but he was not very good when it came to communication toward the higher ups. His co-worker on the other hand was the exact opposite: Not a very good dev, but a very skillful sweet talker. Guess who got raised more ? Anecdotally, I have seen this with my friends and co-worker from school. The one who were good at marketing themselves often went further faster in hierarchy than the skillful ones who had trouble marketing themselves.
• knicholes 3y ago
  If one considers Kant's categorical imperative, "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law," then also considers how they'd feel if they were go to visit a doctor who had cheated or is cheating, one certainly must draw the conclusion that cheating is indeed immoral and undesirable.
  • psychphysic 3y ago
    So basically "do unto others" but phrased needlessly complexly?
    • CamelCaseName 3y ago
      Kant was notorious for writing in needlessly complex German
    • FredPret 3y ago
      The golden rule with gilded edges
    • smugma 3y ago
      Kind of, but no. This explains the “needless” complexity well, but it is complex: https://philosophynow.org/issues/125/The_Golden_Rule_Revisited#:~:text=Kant%20argued%20that%20the%20Golden,51 https://philosophynow.org/issues/125/The_Golden_Rule_Revisit...).
    • andybak 3y ago
      Whether the two statements are equivalent is a topic of some debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Differences_in_situations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Differences_in_sit... > Immanuel Kant famously criticized the golden rule for not being sensitive to differences of situation, noting that a prisoner duly convicted of a crime could appeal to the golden rule while asking the judge to release him, pointing out that the judge would not want anyone else to send him to prison, so he should not do so to others. On the other hand, in a critique of the consistency of Kant's writings, several authors have noted the "similarity" between the Golden Rule and Kant's Categorical Imperative, introduced in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (See discussion at this link).
• 11101010001100 3y ago
  As a teacher, I 'work' with cheaters. Some learn their lesson, some don't. I try to explain that while you might be able to cheat in a school, you certainly won't be able to cheat on the job. I guess this is a naive perspective.
  • naijaboiler 3y ago
    This is a very naive take that lets people feel good that cheaters will one day face their comeuppance. They don't. Learning to cheat itself is sometimes a useful skill. It means you have figured out what's important that's going to get assessed, and you have figured out a way to pass the assessment. That skill will help you in the workplace as well.
  • faeriechangling 3y ago
    You can go a long way in work without doing anything of value by getting credit for any success and dodging blame for any failure. Cheating goes a long way here. Don’t even get me started on cheating metrics.
• psychphysic 3y ago
  I sat in an interview at one point and thought. Gee I wish I'd cheated because it would have been so easy. That said I have not needed to cheat at an interview I do wonder how many failed applications or financial worries I'd need to have before I would try anything. We all have our moral breaking point, it's on you to build your life to be resilient to that. Once you reach that point all bets are off. If it means keeping food on the table and shelter over head I don't expect it off people. It's impossible to stop cheating it is easier to make it useless.
• tristor 3y ago
  I'm probably going to get roasted for saying this, but this is completely unsurprising to me. When I was in college, folks from India and other low trust societies would mercilessly cheat on their projects and exams, blatantly helping one another on individual works, and the college knew about it and didn't care. When I had brought this up at one point, I was told by a professor that it was a cultural difference that had to be respected and that it wouldn't matter anyway because in the workforce I'd excel and they would not, so why did I care? After entering the workforce I encountered many many resumes, especially from contract houses / body shops, that were obviously lies, and have interviewed thousands of candidates across my career that clearly lied on their resume. My basic take is that low trust societies encourage cheating and dishonesty and think if you're honest and honorable that you're a naive rube asking to be taken advantage of. For my part, I've never cheated in any interview, in anything at school, and never lied on my resume, yet being in tech which is dominated by people who originate in low trust societies, I see how it becomes something insidious that creates extremely negative behavioral norms in corporate politics, where it's now acceptable for people to bald-face lie about project status, receipt of information, or the severity of an issue if it gets them ahead or makes someone else look bad and deflects the blame. Luckily, my professor was right though, despite exposure to a lot of negative behaviors I don't like, don't respect, and don't endorse, I did excel and I continue to excel above my peers, especially those who cheated. Cheating ultimately cheats oneself, but it's very galling that it's now becoming accepted as okay behavior in American society due to cultural shifts aligned to low trust societies we do business with. The Blind app demographics make it unsurprising to see this there or that it's essentially universally supported in the comments there. I am honestly unsurprised that most of the comments on HN support it. There's absolutely an attitude of "lie now, and figure out how to make it not a lie before investors or customers notice" in the startup world as well. Frankly, it disappoints me deeply that so much our society has become one big grift, especially as someone who entered the tech industry when it was still dominated by honest nerds doing cool stuff.
  • scarface74 3y ago
    Yes because Americans never cheat to get ahead and we are all morally superior…
• tehlike 3y ago
  US society is based on merit, but not just merit, also on trust. Once this behavior is normalized, the trust aspect will start eroding.
  • DogTweezers 3y ago
    [dead]
• readyplayernull 3y ago
  > Oh well she isn't dumb. She did solve 75-100 problems during the course of her master's degree of 2 years. She just can't solve any question on her own This is exactly my problem, I have solved very difficult problems at big companies, but I need time and research to understand and solve anything. I need to sleep on the problem. I need to get comfortable and release the stress when the seemingly complex problem is presented to me, otherwise I'll drown in a glass of words. Recently tried interviewing with HackerRank and the whole experience is horrible: weird multilevel scrolling, single character variables, answers must be equal character by character including blanks. I just quit those interviews.
• sampo 3y ago
  What is "LC question" short for?
  • _corvo_ 3y ago
    LeetCode Question.
• euix 3y ago
  I remember failing a Facebook SWE interview a couple years back after a few months of studying "Cracking the Code" and some other textbooks - I blanked out on a rather basic question in retrospect ("reverse a linked list in place). It never really occurred to me to cheat, at the time I just figured Facebook had a high precision and low acceptance method of hiring - I could probably do the job pretty well but I didn't show high enough "precision" in the interview so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I can tell an anecdote - when I took my qualifying exams in graduate school, every year there would be a different exam committee drawn from the faculty staff and their job was to come up with new questions. When I studied I looked at past exams going back 20 years and there was only a single question that was somewhat similar to a prior one - so cheating was quite impossible in the situation. People also underestimate the time and effort it takes to setup and design testing that is difficult to cheat. It's effort on the part of the testers and very hard to scale. I used to design and interview for DS positions at my old job and I only had a question bank of 2-3 long form problems, in a case study style that I would use on all the candidates. The interviews are exhausting and it's a lot work because I have to personally "escort" each candidate through the problem and assess them qualitatively.
• punkbit 3y ago
  Wow! People are paid 230k, 2 years after uni? No wonder my generation can't afford to rent a decent house or even dream about buying a house...
• 2-718-281-828 3y ago
  some cheaters are actually good at what they cheat about and simply cheat to obtain additional advantage. the post seems pretty whiny to me. morally he's right but we happen to live in a "doggy-dog" world and moral codes are promoted by successful cheaters to keep the plebs under control. I don't want to justify cheating but it's game theoretic conclusion that you either play the game by the by the rules and most likely you will lose or you cheat a little and get a chance at winning. I hate that our society is like that but I can't change it.
  • GavinMcG 3y ago
    The term is "dog-eat-dog" by the way.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • 2-718-281-828 3y ago
      ;)
• TheCapn 3y ago
  My friend who got me my current job once told me about how he got into the Games industry. Back in the university days of applying to Coop positions he had a day with 2 interviews back to back. While he bombed the first interview, he had some excellent interviewers who were happy to show him where he did poorly and guide him through the problems to the correct answers. On the second interview, they used the same questions and he got the job. Now? He runs his own studio. After spending ~10 years in various positions at AAA and Indie studios he's out doing it on his own, and best as I can tell he's doing a damn good job of it. I won't doxx him, but he's got his name under several highly regarded releases. Am I conflicted with the idea of cheating interviews? Perhaps a bit. But knowing a brilliant mind like him just needed the guidance to get through a terrible practice to show his true talent? I'm happy he was fortunate to be able to ""cheat"" in the way he did. I wish him all the best.
  • rocmcd 3y ago
    That's not cheating? That sounds like the interviewers could see his potential and guided/corrected him through the process. His willingness to take feedback and keep going in itself would be something to be commended, especially for a new grad. What's discussed in the post is clear deception of the interviewers by the interviewee (using a second laptop to google answers), which is a very different thing.
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Or, is it just another version of Fake it Till You Make it. Lot of programmers that can pass the interview questions might not survive a large organization, and vice versa, they can't pass but would be good at surviving. Generally the larger the organization, the less 'individual performance'/'merit' is a factor, and it becomes more about being 'personable'. Technical skills decline in importance. Of course, there is inertia. Some of these big organizations, that have lost the ability to 'create' highly complex applications, are riding on their size and inertia and tend towards eventual collapse. Not an iron rule, I've been surprised that it is Microsoft that seems to be able to re-invent and keep high tech skills focused on actual tech.
• michaelteter 3y ago
  Interviews are indeed broken and largely pointless. For so many reasons, interviews often have no real relationship to the work or skills required. It's no surprise that interview cheaters can still be successful at roles. Of course it's also possible that they aren't really accomplishing much at work due to any other number of company failures. I refuse to do rounds of interviews any more. I will have the initial recruiter call and then one solo or team online call to talk, but no tests and no projects. I've burned far too many hours on this in the past; and when I get the role, I walk in and find they actually need about 1/10th of my skills and mental capacity. Put the candidate on a 1-month trial contract. If that goes well, then extend the contract or convert it to employment.
  • starky 3y ago
    Agreed that interviewing is largely broken and pointless. Often due to companies trying to standardize their process. I once went to interview at a company where a few former colleagues work and they had standardized their interview process. I was really put out as a lot of the interview was answering questions that they already knew my skill level in and even acknowledging it. The situation where the job you accept is below your skill set may be a failing on your side of the interview process. When interviewing I'm as concerned about finding out what I can about the job and what it entails as I am about making a good impression to the interviewer. I'm not going to accept a job where I'm not confident that I'm going to enjoy it. On the other side of the table I'm constantly surprised at how few candidates actually take an interest in what they are going to be doing, even when given very explicit opportunities to engage in that way. I don't want to hire someone that is going to turn around and leave because it wasn't what they expected.
• welder 3y ago
  I'm curious do they get promoted from cheating or really doing the work. There are those people who get stuff done by getting others to help them do it. Not sure how the manager would find out though, without the peers who help telling. Nice to see UT Dallas represented here, even if it's in this context.
  • AdrianB1 3y ago
    I noticed during the years that the people that cheat in the interviews are not afraid to lie on results or steal colleagues' work and pretend it is theirs. When enough managers are fine with that, it becomes an internal open secret on how promotions work. When you also have targets for promotions and you have to bend the rules (pretty bad) to meet these targets, the entire evaluation and promotion system becomes a joke.
• jrm4 3y ago
  So, I teach IT at a university, and of course part of me has concerns. But honestly, at heart, I respect the hacker ethos more than I do the majority of "big (or little) tech" business hiring processes. They accomplished the job. When I deal with cheating, I see it as my job to be "ahead of it" or I'm not worthy to teach? (And also, I don't much see it my job to be a cheating cop as much as it is my job to teach.) PERFECT case in point; all the Chat AI things that came out recently. I have a few multiple choice tests that I used to be able to recycle pretty easily. But ChatGPT comes out, and can get 100% with explanations on them. What that meant to me was "time to rewrite at least some of the questions." And so today, I tell my students exactly this. Most of the time it'll probably be correct, but I've deliberately put like 5 or 6 in there that the Chat things confidently answer completely incorrectly. Good luck. (note: Yes, they're open-internet / take home. They weren't until the pandemic, and to my complete surprise, my averages came out exactly the same whether or not they were closed-book one hour in class or open-internet, take a whole weekend)
• ctvo 3y ago
  The person's friends all went to large corporations. Someone who was willing to cheat so aggressively (keyboard with another laptop behind the current one?!) won't take credit for someone else's work? Play politics relentless? Lie about their contributions? Etc.. And all of these things help you get promoted in large corporations. And this was from entry level to mid level. It does get a little harder if you're a complete fraud for senior and staff levels.
• ausbah 3y ago
  in a system where the company takes a large majority of the value I provide for a company, is incentived in many cases to underpay & overwork, who can fire me at any point for any reason, and takes a majority of the time in my life - I would label cheating as evening the playing field in my favor a little bit
• halbritt 3y ago
  To say nothing of the ethics of cheating, I think this behavior speaks to the value of the interview process. If it can be gamed so easily, it's likely not a great measure of the quality of the candidate and the companies that have implemented deserve the hires they make. It'd doubtful the folks at the company actually mind that the interviews are being cheated. If the candidates appear to be qualified and appear to be fill the role for which they were hired and appear to be competent in that role, that's sufficient for most corporations and one of the problems working in "tech". That is to say, there are plenty of people in it that appear to be doing a thing, but aren't actually capable. Somewhere in this thread a poster mentioned woodworking, which is a nice contrast. If you hire a carpenter, it becomes obvious pretty quickly if the carpenter is competent.
  • vanjajaja1 3y ago
    the problem is that its a zero-sum game, you can only compare performance across a cohort. if the majority of your cohort cheats, and cheating hurts performance, then they'll all be low performance and you'll still end up promoting some of them (because thats just what happens)
    • halbritt 3y ago
      > you can only compare performance across a cohort I can't accept this premise. Optimally the persons responsible for managing engineering staff should be able to independently determine whether the work being produced was of sufficient quality or not regardless of the cohort. At issue here, I believe is that this is a difficult thing to cultivate consistently in many corporations and so there's some desire to create standardized metrics for performance against which a cohort is measured. Regardless, most large tech firms have some kind of well defined rubric against which the engineers are measured.
      • vanjajaja1 3y ago
        what do you mean sufficient? I think the premise is that all these people can get the job done, but some of them can do it better and faster. In the big tech scene its not about being sufficient, its about being the fastest (faster than the competitor)
• jtwebman 3y ago
  This isn't cheating in my mind. They use tools available to them just like they will have on their job. I would ask clarifying questions and if they understand what they are saying then why does it matter that the memorized the answer vs memorized how to find the answer
• rhyme-boss 3y ago
  The standard process at tech companies for interviewing and assessing candidates is completely ludicrous. I like writing software but I've given up on the industry because of attitudes around hiring and advancement within companies. It just sucks dick everywhere I've worked.
• maerF0x0 3y ago
  we need to face the reality that in capitalism, anything you can get someone else to do* for cheaper than your own price should be outsourced. Hiring cheaters does select for someone who can take other's work and apply it for their own situation, whilst capturing the value difference (essentially capitalism). Love it or hate it, it's actually a selected for skill perhaps immorally applied. Additionally companies create their promotable skill set (both explicitly and implicitly), if their system is selecting for something, its not incumbent on you to break yourself against that system, play the game the way it's set up and allow the Executive class to reap the pros/cons of their setup. Edit: One more thought is that when you look at an evolutionary style thought system, there's no "playing fair" in nature. Yes relationships and such have value, but being hired vs not being hired is a sort of reproductive event where whatever gets you hired means you get the experience/resume item and your competitors do not. * do at a sufficient substitution equivalence
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway9133 3y ago
  Another way to look at it is that modern capitalist societies require you to have a job to participate in said society and the benefits it incurs. It's a work to live system. And these companies care only about profits, not people, and they will fire anyone at the drop of a hat if it means dividends for investors or protecting executive bonuses. There is absolutely no benefit to loyalty nor honesty because the companies themselves do not have these virtues. There's also the fact that despite efforts in recent years to control biases in the hiring process and promotions; it still creeps in. The odds are stacked against people from minority demographics from getting work at all let alone a decent paying job. It often doesn't matter how well they do or whether they play by the rules. It seems a bit cynical if you believe the world should be mostly meritocratic but unfortunately it's not. In some ways cheating is the morally correct course of action.
• 1101010010 3y ago
  People who use multiple "angry face" emojis to express themselves are generally moody, petulant and emotionally unfit to work among highly compensated engineers. Instead of whining, adapt and overcome the circumstances you recognize in your professional life.
• cies 3y ago
  Say they cheated to get into FB, Google, Amazon -- these companies all have a track record of cheating! Basically big biz is all about bending the rules: trade influence, use over seas letterbox companies to evade tax back home, run illegal anti-union teams, plausible deniability, etc. etc.
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  don't hate the player, hate the game. orange version: show me the incentives, i'll show you the outcome
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  Cheating is one of valuable soft skills that square nerds are often unable to master. Marketing, sales, people management, internal politics, raising capital all require some degree of cheating.
• SadWebDeveloper 3y ago
  ChatGPT et al has run online coding exercises/trivia/exams pointless imho, leetcode problems are cool solution to the problem if you want someone with lots of "raw abstract knowledge" but zero real world experience. Promotion in USA seems to be more like a thing that most happen every one or two years at work rather than for work well done, last time i had a friend that was working for a faang (pre-layoffs) and show me he was like a third level manager for several projects because he had 3+ years at company, he still does the same job as when he got in just that now has to manage or mostly deal with upper management request for estimated time to finish every day.
• pythonb3sss 3y ago
  I dislike cheating. I've taken ~50 interviews and in 90% of them cheated: a) I could hear their keyboard clacking when they googled the answer b) they'd stall with "umm" and "ooo" while their friend googles the answer and shows it to them c) (the best one) they'd memorize everything from leetcode style solutions and definitions to mathematics MCQs. In my country, you're the odd one out if you have an exam or an interview and you don't prepare for cheating. It's a cultural expectation among peers to cheat to get ahead. To work around this, I follow the advice I've read here on HN: 1) Ask them about their programming experience. Bugs they ran into, solutions they thought of, implementation of those solutions etc. 2) take a problem I faced in my work and present it to them and observe how they navigate the problem to reach a solution. They don't have to solve it, I just see their approach 3) just talk to them while asking basic language syntax and definitions. Again, the goal here is to check if they've memorized the answers or are they speaking from experience. If the answer is a regurgitation of some interview prep website, probe deeper to see if they know what they're saying. The downside of this approach is, of course, time. It takes 40 minutes to an hour for each of these interviews. Time that sometimes I don't have and I have to move some stuff around to accommodate, work late to cover up or delegate. This approach has worked for me so far. I've hired 5 people in my team and all of them have been good hires. EDIT: formatting and grammar
  • ghostbrainalpha 3y ago
    > c) (the best one) memorize everything from leetcode style solutions and definitions to mathematics MCQs. Couldn't it be argued that memorizing leetcode solutions IS NOT cheating? Seems like it would be better to understand things at a fundamental level, but its still proof of ability to master the problem in and takes a lot of effort. Especially if the person was upfront about the fact they could solve the problem but still didn't understand everything about it.
    • pythonb3sss 3y ago
      The problem was that he was terrible at problem solving. He failed at simple logical problems like flattening a nested json array, cleaning data before running operations on it, etc. And probing further on his memorized answers, he couldn't explain anything. He'd just repeat the same thing but change voice of the sentence (active/passive)
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  Fraud is pretty rampant across the corporate / academic world, and I imagine relatively few people actually pay any price for cheating, falsifying data, etc. I'd guess over 95% of academic fraudsters get away with it at some level, as long as they're not incredibly blatant about it. The few cases you see in the media are generally so flagrant that it's hard to understand how they got away with it for as long as they did. It's probably safe to assume that any research group (or business outfit), public or private, that doesn't have active fraud-detection and fraud-prevention policies in place is engaging in fraudulent activity of some sort.
• hluska 3y ago
  This is a personal anecdote about something orthogonal to the article. A few months ago, I wrote an exam to get an AWS certification. Before the test, I had to take the adjudicator on a virtual tour of my exam space. My space was small so I had to do near gymnastics to give the supervisor the sight lines that she needed. Solutions to this already exist and I find it somewhat heard to believe that a company like Pearson knows so much more than Amazon. I wonder if this is a situation where companies know there is cheating, perhaps even have ways to identify it but cheating just isn’t treated as a strong enough negative signal in the hiring process to be worth fighting.
  • munificent 3y ago
    Software engineer interviews are hard because simultaneously: 1. They are adversarial where the interviewer is trying to tell if the interviewee is cheating and evaluate their performance. 2. They are trying to, as much as possible, emulate the team-oriented work environnment where the relationships are cooperative. So the interviewer is trying to be on the interviewee's "side" as much as possible to see what it would be like to work with them. These two goals are in opposition, which is one of the reasons why SE interviewing is so hard to do well. If you make the interview more explicitly adversarial like examinations are, you do a better job of weeding out cheaters. But you also bias towards candidates that are comfortable with adversarial interactions and you lose vital signal about their cooperation ability.
• Dowwie 3y ago
  I don't think that the response should be to lock down the interview process further but rather interview candidates for what the role entails rather than asking arbitrary leetcode questions. The screening process is broken. Make cheating irrelevant.
• KETpXDDzR 3y ago
  This sounds like a business idea to me. Rent small rooms in highly populated areas, make sure cell phone signals are blocked, let interviewed do their virtual interviews in this room on a provided computer. Sell it as "certified interview" to big tech.
  • sakopov 3y ago
    Befor COVID, my AWS certification exam was in such a setting. It was an office space with a row of cubicles each containing a monitor, keyboard and mouse. You drop your belongings at the receptionist and walk in to take the test.
• jwmoz 3y ago
  My gf used chatgpt for her cv and interview process, using it generate a presentation task they gave her (she is doing project management type stuff). They offered her the job the next day.
• realjohng 3y ago
  There should be standardized, monitored tests for Eng jobs. No point in every company repeating essentially the same test with a lot of variance in how the test is conducted.
• hardwaregeek 3y ago
  It's not surprising to me that people cheat or don't see cheating as bad. Cheaters literally do prosper. Like in college applications, you can absolutely write lies. Nobody's going to check if you were captain of the track team. Nobody's going to fact check your essay about how you came out as gay[1]. Even the people who don't cheat understand how to stretch and bend the truth. You take a minor event and turn it into a whole college essay. You take a side project and turn it into a supposed startup. Hackathons are competitions for who can lie the best and claim their flashy front end will change the world. There was a period where the same project won hackathon after hackathon. And sure, hackathons are not exactly a big deal. But if you're cheating at a hackathon, why not cheat at a job interview? So much of what we teach in school these days is how to play the game, how to appear more impressive than you are, how to trick people into believing you're smarter than other people. [1]: Both of these are first-hand experiences, i.e. I knew the people who did them
  • strikelaserclaw 3y ago
    it will get worse due to social media. Humans being herd animals, if we feel like cheaters are prospering our us, we will also start cheating, which will essentially destroy trust in society and make it a third world country.
• prirun 3y ago
  In my long computer career, I've only had a couple of times where someone got ahead of me by lying or misrepresenting their skills. When working with such people, it's pretty obvious to most that they don't know what they're doing. While I have also been a very helpful person, I have a rule: I refuse to help someone who has misrepresented their skills. This type of person has no problem lying to get ahead then expecting everyone to help them out when they get in trouble. And that occurs frequently of course, because they are in over their head. First example was when I was the tech lead on a huge Ford project. I was only 20, doing great, Ford loved me, but the computer company I worked for (Prime) was uneasy about relying so much on a 20 y/o in his 2nd year of college for this huge project. So they hired a new guy, a Pakistani with a degree who wore a suit everyday and had a glowing resume (apparently). First, the guy was nearly impossible to understand. Second, he didn't know shit. Third, instead of spending his time reading through manuals to figure things out, he'd just ask me since his cube was next to mine. My standard answer was "I don't know". He could have asked me what color grass is and that would have been my answer. They kept him a few months, fired him when it became obvious he couldn't do shit on his own, and put me back on the account. The other time was when a contract project manager at IBM decided he wanted to work on a project that was supposed to be for me. I was still busy with a previous IBM project (he was my project manager on that) and couldn't start for a couple of months, and since IBM was in a hurry, the project manager told them he could do it. He was a great project manager, but not even a good programmer. His previous technical experience was more with hardware. After a few months, I got called in to review his work because he kept saying he would be done in a week. I met with him, found out he didn't even have this thing compiling without errors (it was a platform conversion of a large CAD program), and he asked me if I'd help him. I said no, even though it was very hard for me to do that. I met with IBM, they asked me if I could take it over and finish it. I told them I could do it but would not be able to use any of his work, especially since he hadn't made much progress. They fired him, gave me the contract, and it was finished in a couple of months. So if you run into people who have cheated to get where they are, don't help them, no matter how nice you are or how bad it might make you feel. They don't deserve your help and will have to qualms about taking a promotion over you, even though they couldn't have done it without your help.
  • precompute 3y ago
• sota4077 3y ago
  As children many of us were always lead to believe that doing the right thing will always be the right thing to do. That doing the right thing will get you to where you want to be in life. As we grow older we quickly realize that is just not the case. Is it right to be dishonest? Of course not. But it does make it hard to compete in a society when a not insignificant percentage of that society are willing to lie, deceive or commit a fraud to get a leg up. I still choose to be honest about my education, qualifications and experience in my professional life. But I personally know people around me who have lied. They never admit it outright, but by being perceptive and just listening to people I can hear them give different facts to different people depending on the situation. It happens, a lot.
• greybox 3y ago
  I confess myself completely unsurprised that amazon interview performance has no bearing on actual job performance. I would bet money that most companies have this problem.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• moomoo11 3y ago
  Serious question: why do you care so much? Its just a job. You are drone #23423 who will be sacrificed at any moment for the actual shareholders of the company (ie. not you with your 200k stock bonus). They don't give a shit about you, and you shouldn't care so much when you have no equity. Get the money, enjoy YOUR life, and move on. If you really care so much, go start your own company and make 100x more money than those clowns. And no offense but software engineering is probably one of the easiest jobs in the world, all things considered. Literally the only investment you need to get started is a working computer of any kind. I don't like this kind of shitty behavior either, but that's the world we live in. I'm not going to go out of my way to make any changes when I have literally no upside/equity, I'd rather go do my own thing.
  • ketralnis 3y ago
    I'm not swayed by cat-is-out-of-the-bag arguments. Bad things can still be bad even while lots of people do the bad thing.
  • phendrenad2 3y ago
    Nice morality shaming. The truth is as humans we are capable of abstract thought, and wishing for a world where we don't have to choose between compromise our principles or being judged by society, even sometimes friends & family, as a "loser".
    • moomoo11 3y ago
      Ok but you’re not going to ever make any changes when you don’t understand or choose not to accept the terms/reality of the game itself.
      • phendrenad2 3y ago
        Not everyone can "just be amoral bro". People often have serious hinderances to that (be it religion, personal philosophy, a conscience, whatever).
        • 3y ago
• WFHRenaissance 3y ago
  There is a very simple way to stop this behavior: ship a 360º camera to every applicant and dictate where it should be placed, or stop doing remote interviews. There are even simpler ways to stop this behavior, but I won't speak about that here.
• justin_oaks 3y ago
  I saw someone who was recently hired as a coworker get fired as soon as it was found out that he lied on his resume. For those who try to be honest, it's good to occasionally see justice in this world.
• msie 3y ago
  It looks like a lot of the cheating can be curbed with in-person interviews. As for rapid promotion, I guess the cheaters had some skill, otherwise I blame the management for being idiots and they deserve what they got. It's surprising to find cases where there was no due diligence done.
• sarkhan 3y ago
  Let's not forget the "Fake it until you make it". It's driving force of any software related project.
• recursv_thnkng 3y ago
  "and she is now SMTS in 2 years" implies this person got a promotion every year.. At Salesforce's development pace I somehow doubt this person made such an impact to go straight to a senior position. Especially during a period of hiring freezes, promotion freezes, and squeezing profit margins.
• Balgair 3y ago
  I'll share my perspective on cheating here too, as it may be a bit unique. My HS had a huge cheating scandal erupt near the end of my senior year. The short of it was that many of our parents worked in tech and those skills were taught to my classmates. A wiki was formed as a homework helping site. Kids would get feedback from each other on their homework and tests and whatnot. A genuine good idea. Well, until the next year rolled over. It turned out that all but two of the teachers reused the exact same homework assignments and tests from year to year. My compatriots discovered, to their great joy, that they had built an answer key for the whole school. This went on, unbeknownst to me, for ~3 years of my time at the school. I can remember sitting in classes and being totally flummoxed at how these people were doing so much better than I was. I was putting in long hours to try to stay with the cheaters. Honestly, I still have to catch myself when I think that it takes my longer to learn things than other people. I don't, I was just raised competing against the answer key. It's a journey I'm still on and affects me to this day. Everything was going great until one of the kids was dumb and used the wiki in a class. A teacher saw it, blew the whistle, and things got messy. It made the front page of the paper, there was a Dr. Phil episode, etc. However, no college admissions were rescinded. Outside of some light wrist slapping, the cheaters were rewarded for their cheating, and the teachers who failed up went back to doing nothing again (I had friends in lower grades that I could verify with). Essentially, the cheating worked. That, at least, was the lesson I told myself all those years ago. However, Facebook is a magical thing in this case. I can follow up and see, decades later, what happened to all the cheaters. It's not been pretty. Not to bore, but their lives aren't the best. A few got dishonorable discharges, one went to Harvard law and after the 4th divorce is now a yoga teacher outside Austin, another is in the slammer for SEC violations, a fair few are in prison for drug dealing, you get the gist here right? To my jaded eyes, not a single one is living what I would call a good life. Their flowers are not in bloom. The failures of our teachers, parents, and my classmates' own honor during their formative years have lead, without any exceptions, to unfulfilled lives at best, and shambles for most. Yes, cheating did work. In the short term. But especially in those formative years, it ultimately lead to catastrophe and ruin for my classmates. Now, taking my view here of cheating to what OP has said: Don't worry about the cheater making more than you do. If they cheat on things like a job interview, then they cheat on things much more and less important as well. They cheat on their taxes, they cheat on their SOs, they cheat in card games with their nephews at Thanksgiving. They, generally, are cheating jerks. And yeah, maybe they get a better car, or a better house. You know, short terms things. But, due to my own experiences, those cheaters have lives you don't want to live. I know this is super Socratic/Platonic of me, but I have seen it happen with my very own two eyes and with my very own two ears. I have lived this, I am still living this. Not cheating, not being with people too dumb to see the blatant cheaters, not being around enablers of cheaters, that is a reward far greater than the short term gifts that cheating enables.
• nawgz 3y ago
  Oh, you mean capitalist society cares more about results than morals, and often being able to bend and sacrifice morals actually makes you a better capitalist (pawn)? What an unexpected result.
• throwaway678975 3y ago
  Well... yeah! When I was in undergrad [1] there was a student whose average after first year was a D, ie he had to repeat first year of engineering. Instead, he got into the ECE program (our university has first year engineering as a common year) that has a B+ entrance requirement. Only about 10-15% of students had >B+. He failed out of ECE with another D average. The university rules were clear. Two straight D averages and you are kicked out of Eng. (or the school?). Instead he was put into the nuclear program, an unpopular program with only a C requirement. That's where I dealt with him (I chose nuke despite my B+/A- average. Big mistake). There he kept a C minus average largely from cheating but also thanks to professor largesse. When he graduated he got a coveted job at the state controlled energy company at one of their nuclear sites. Typical candidates needed a B+ to get in if they were a disadvantaged group. White men like our protagonist needed a solid A. His average? A C His secret? Why so much largesse from the professors? His dad was the vice president of said government company. He went on to be president and the best paid public employee. Most people in tech in SV dont make the money this man was making. I used to hate this kid. In private he was one of the most racist, misogynist people I've ever met. He gladly told anti-Semitic holocaust jokes. He'd bully anyone weaker than he, and cajole and act saintly to anyone above him. Im past my anger now. Because, in fairness, he is where he belongs. He was quickly promoted to a position where his technical incompetence could not harm the public and now enjoys a management position. He's too politically savvy in too woke an environment to harm women, (or Jews) but his ability to navigate and exploit corruption, frankly, benefits the public corporation. Maybe even the public. [1] in a progressive northern country where nothing bad is supposed to happen
• askin4it 3y ago
  What's the point of school if it can't do the basic job of collating learners by actual ability? That's the job of school. You personally learning something is a side effect.
• rdtsc 3y ago
  Corruption is like cancer. It spreads and metastasizes through society quickly. If students see other students cheat and get ahead and not get punished they'll be incentivized to cheat. If instructors see a large number of students getting 100%, obviously the material is too easy, they'll make the problems harder. Pretty soon it is impossible to operate or do anything without either bribing or cheating. Dishonesty and a cavalier attitude towards cheating is something taught at home early on. Poverty, institutional disfunction play a role but at some point they become part of the societal mores. If you don't cheat you just look stupid and naive and people make fun of you.
• flappyeagle 3y ago
  seems fine. it's a competency test and they've passed.
• mightymosquito 3y ago
  I actively avoid companies that ask random leet-code problems, but the sad reality of the situation is I can't avoid it completely. While I think being unscrupulous in any shape or form is incorrect, I do feel some sense of revenge in fooling people who whole heartedly give in to this unfair process. Being unfair to an unfair process, seems pretty fair to me(i know extreme opinion, but I am trying to find a job, its frustrating how people don't care what you are actually going to do at a job, and just ask you random questions that might be related to what you do in a distant way). I've tried searching for solutions in the past in interview situations, but am not smart enough to cheat like that, always end up fumbling. Hence has resorted to going back to grinding on LeetCode.
• diebeforei485 3y ago
  The interview system is ridiculous. Test people's knowledge, not their leetcode skills.
• friend_and_foe 3y ago
  What sort of person hopes their friends get fired. Someone should tell them they associate with a person with no integrity or character.
• bmo333 3y ago
  I’ve learned that not the best engineers or the smartest engineers get promoted. I’ve given up on trying to get a promotion and just self promote or self raises by moving companies.
• redhale 3y ago
  Cheating is bad, full stop. These kinds of unethical people likely contribute to a toxic team culture, back-stabbing and acting in bad faith to get ahead. But if you've designed your interview process in a way that can be easily beaten by in-the-moment googling, then you're getting the candidates you deserve. And since these people were promoted, then I guess the system worked. Miss me with these companies/teams.
  • Benjammer 3y ago
    It's driven purely by jealousy and an intrinsic sense of "fairness" that isn't very logical when you step back and think for a second. I've met plenty of people like this. They aren't thinking about how it's weird to want a terrible team at a terrible company to have a perfectly fair hiring process, and also imply that _they_ should be hired for this awful job as well. It's entirely looking at the price tag and being jealous. In other words, typical Blind culture.
• ftxbro 3y ago
  It's called having soft skills.
• lizardking 3y ago
  Then the interviews weren't good for screening what the company actually needed.