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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 t

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.
      - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
        It has succeeded at making Bezos money. It has become the premier cloud provider. That wasn't the original goal, but it's good for them. As a marketplace it is degenerating into an absolute mess. The force that maintains Prime membership is about 70% inertia.
        tough 3y ago
        One can imagine AWS surviving longer than the marketplace in 10-20y
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      This same process can be applied on a community/country level. Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.
    - jatins 3y ago
      > ... because the company is toxic I mean one of the companies they mention is Amazon
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Everyone knows who committed which piece of code. It's much less clear the origin of ideas. Did my comments spark an idea in your head? Did you share that with someone else who made it slightly better? If so, what's the split among me, you, and the third person for that idea? If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.
    - pdpi 3y ago
      > Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example. As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that. At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        Seen the exact same personality at many employers, it's like they all come from the same factory. I can smell it a mile away now. OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.
        sota4077 3y ago
        Exactly. I commented to a different person, but I will repeat it here. Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.
    - icedchai 3y ago
      Many "upper management" types have no idea who actually did the work.
      - actionfromafar 3y ago
        They care more about “who made it happen”.
        icedchai 3y ago
        That PM who can barely open a spreadsheet made it happen, of course.
    - itronitron 3y ago
      >> everyone knows who did the work. Not the people deciding rankings and promotions. Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.) Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion. And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.
    - drewcoo 3y ago
      Or they're the "smartest guys in the room!" /s
    - sota4077 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. I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement. Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.
  - VectorLock 3y ago
    Depending on the corporate culture: feature, not a bug.
- pydry 3y ago
  It's a bit like their abysmal process for detecting product fakes and review fakes.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  In that case, the market should take them out, right?
  - WJW 3y ago
    Only if the other companies perform better, but since they also might have a corrupted culture that may not be the case. Also, relying on "the market" to fix things can take decades so it is not really a useful strategy for individuals.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      If the other companies don’t perform better, then this company has found a process that works (I mean not filtering to only select people who play leetcode is a pretty good idea, the only questionable thing is asking leetcode style questions in the first place if they don’t need that data). If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.
  - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
    A venal, decrepit empire can last for hundreds of years.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    Amazon is large enough to maintain market dominance via strategies other than technical excellence.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      So then why hire technically excellent people? They might expect excellent salaries or excellent working conditions.
      - scaramanga 3y ago
        That's like asking why do kings buy wonderful artworks when they could save their gold and hang mediocre artworks on their wall? Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  There is another, even more cynical, interpretation. They may have been discovered to be incompetent, and promoted into a role where they can do less damage.
  - scaramanga 3y ago
    And an interpretation more cynical than that: The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget. Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      People get kicked upstairs to sinecures all the time
- roenxi 3y ago
  It is more likely that the internal evaluations process is working fine. There are >$200k salaries on offer and the challenges Amazon et al. are dealing with aren't that demanding on an absolute scale. There are a lot of smart people out there. The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.
- shusaku 3y ago
  How about the lack of personal ethics correlating with success in what we know to be highly unethical companies…
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Possibly. But if that's the case, the best thing that can happen is for bullshiters to fill up all of the positions there and drive the company down fast as possible. I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.
giantg2 3y ago
It's also possible the company is setting themselves up for ethics/regulatory issues by selecting for individuals willing to cheat. I guess this should be no surprise since the culture at Amazon already sucks.
- belfalas 3y ago
  Sadly selecting for individuals who cheat might help the company navigate ethics/regulatory issues. I have seen many instances of people treating regulation as an annoying roadblock to work around, not something worth honoring.
  - fnimick 3y ago
    That's something this community celebrates. Look at how much Uber and AirBNB are touted as success stories when really they were illegal enterprises allowing individuals to violate the law (taxi licenses, rental laws) for profit.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      It's very easy to convince yourself that some laws are not worth respecting. (Ever drive 56 in a 55 zone?) Taxi laws are an instance of almost 100% public corruption, unnecessary bureaucracy, and regulatory capture, but at the same time they would have been almost impossible to dislodge except through widespread disobedience. What happened with Uber and Lyft was for the best. The market spoke.
nverno 3y ago
> 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. I think there is plenty of reason to think people who actually know the stuff instead of cheating would be better on average. It's a signal that they were smart enough and motivated enough to learn the material (basic algorithms/coding skills in this case)- both traits that would probably make them better on average at the job. Being a good cheater is a useful skill that probably also helps people on average- but I doubt it's nearly as useful an indicator of future success as being good at the skills necessary to do well on interview questions (w/o cheating).
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  If someone can just look it up, digest information in X minutes and come up with the same answer, then why does it matter that they didn't memorize it in the first place? Presumably I'm hiring an expensive problem-solver with good judgment here, accumulation of past knowledge beyond some basic level of competence is useful, but secondary. Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself. The best interview that I've encountered is the long interview. I hire you for four months as a co-op, see what you can do, and we go from there. Impractical in many/most settings, obviously.
  - nverno 3y ago
    > If someone can just look it up, digest information in X minutes and come up with the same answer, then why does it matter that they didn't memorize it in the first place? But this is usually not possible- it's contingent on other people having already solved and posted solutions online for some question worded nearly the same. Much of the knowledge behind interview questions applies to all sorts of programming problems where the solution won't be available to copy. A knowledgeable programmer would know quickly that some problem is best approached by dfs or bfs, while the cheater may not. > Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself I agree, but this will always be a hard process. LC problems are like IQ test or SATs, they work fairly well most of the time, but probably better to weed out the particularly weak candidates than determine how good people truly are.
shswkna 3y ago
It seems those that have a fundamental problem with cheating are in the minority. Reading through the comments leaves me only sad. Based on how I believe the world works, and on larger patterns at play here, this general cultural trend (if this is in fact what it is) will backfire. If this is deemed culturally acceptable, and one extrapolates this pattern further, there is little deeper value that a culture has to offer.
- junofan 3y ago
  I think the cheaters tend to end up together over time without realizing it.
- whitemary 3y ago
  [flagged]
- scarface74 3y ago
  How do you think the world has always worked?
- alphabettsy 3y ago
  I’m not sure it’s a cultural trend, but I’d say users of Blind are not the typically developer. That’s not to dismiss it, but that a subset of a population will always have dishonest people.
- wanttocomment 3y ago
  Exactly. They are benefiting from a system built on generations of honesty of people before them. Everything becomes more expensive and dangerous when there isn't basic trust. You have to verify, surveil, and credential everything. Old people get scammed not because they are dumb, but because they grew up in a society insulated from dishonesty.
toss1 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. Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer. A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full libraries and reference sites open and ready to go. This is actually how they will be doing their work (we hope!). Then judge on efficient lookups AND insightful comments on how to build upon the found knowledge. Or, based on the above sample recognize that the process is really totally broken, that almost anyone coming in will work out well (the cheaters clearly lacked the skill or confidence of OP, yet did fine in the actual job), and either fix the criteria (obviously difficult based on the last decade of HN discussions on the hiring sh^tshows), or just cut wasting resources on extensive interviews and take the first N applicants and be done with it.
- scaramanga 3y ago
  Or how about, you know, stop pretending we can evaluate someone's "intelligence" or "skill level" as if it's a one-dimensional factor that you have superhuman insight into measuring. I'm satisfied, in an interview, if I feel the person is interested in the topic, is able to admit that they don't know something, and seems like they'd be pleasant (although i'd settle for "not difficult") to work with. The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary and it's always a gamble because people excel at putting up very convincing façades of whatever it is that they think they're being evaluated for. People have different things to offer, and you really don't find out until at least 6-12 months into their employment what they really excel at, you have no chance in 30-60 minute (or whatever) interview. The best you can hope for is to rule out the obvious sociopaths.
  - kspacewalk2 3y ago
    >The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary That's what the parent comment is saying. Open-book instead of closed-book, just have the candidate walk you through figuring out what they don't know, listen to them think aloud, and evaluate that.
asdfman123 3y ago
This is like saying my contractor put in a low quality roof, but it hasn’t collapsed yet. The problem is while you can’t control randomness, on average those roofs do fail much more. But more broadly it’s amazing how far developers on HN will go to defend things that will mildly inconvenience developers.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  No, it's not like that at all. It's like saying the roofer I hired doctored his references, but then proceeded to build a roof that's objectively good enough for me to hire him again to build another roof, on a bigger house for more money. Cheating to bypass a stupid gatekeeping system that's designed to ration 1 job per N perfectly qualified applicants is only a problem if it's a problem. If you claim that people who didn't cheat during that process are any less likely to do something unethical when hired, I'd say that's a claim in need of proof. My preferred solution is to come up with a less stupid gatekeeping system. But I only ever hire co-op students, and no one will let me try anything that involves more than a 30-minute chat. Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    You're confusing an individual for the whole. If an individual cheats but turns out to be competent, it's no loss for the company or anyone else, really. But on average, if cheating is common, more incompetent people will slip through and ultimately cause problems. I can bet my life savings on black and win, but that doesn't make it a good decision. > Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise. If you'd like to know about the research behind interviews, they've found that unstructured interviews aren't better than pulling people out of a hat, regardless of how effective they feel.
paulcole 3y ago
> However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one. It's not "right" or "wrong" - it's just a decision. There may be other choices and other decisions but to paint this one as flat wrong seems, well, wrong. > They may not have found the very best person for the job The vast majority of job searches do not have this as a goal! Most companies want to hire somebody who's good enough relatively quickly for a price they want to pay.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  Best person for the job given relevant constraints, obviously. When those are "relatively quickly" and "for the price we want to pay", you still want the very best person for the job.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    > you still want the very best person for the job. No you don't! Or else you'd never hire anybody because how can you be sure anyone is the best person for the job? You want to hire the person in front of you who is good enough to be likely enough to be able to do the job.
naasking 3y ago
> 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. The process did not fail in the same way my bear repelling crystal necklace has not yet failed me in repelling bears.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  This comparison only works if you routinely walk through crowds (groups? congregations? clowders?) of bears. Preferably polar bears.
  - naasking 3y ago
    It works in any case where the thing you're trying to prevent probably just isn't there.
classified 3y ago
IOW, crime pays.
BeetleB 3y ago
> 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. My process is that I hire only men. I have not yet had an underperformer. Hence, my process never failed. At some level, fairness is important. And no, it's not important only when there is a law behind it.

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.
    - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
      It has succeeded at making Bezos money. It has become the premier cloud provider. That wasn't the original goal, but it's good for them. As a marketplace it is degenerating into an absolute mess. The force that maintains Prime membership is about 70% inertia.
      - tough 3y ago
        One can imagine AWS surviving longer than the marketplace in 10-20y
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    This same process can be applied on a community/country level. Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.
  - jatins 3y ago
    > ... because the company is toxic I mean one of the companies they mention is Amazon
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Everyone knows who committed which piece of code. It's much less clear the origin of ideas. Did my comments spark an idea in your head? Did you share that with someone else who made it slightly better? If so, what's the split among me, you, and the third person for that idea? If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.
  - pdpi 3y ago
    > Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example. As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that. At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Seen the exact same personality at many employers, it's like they all come from the same factory. I can smell it a mile away now. OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.
      - sota4077 3y ago
        Exactly. I commented to a different person, but I will repeat it here. Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Many "upper management" types have no idea who actually did the work.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      They care more about “who made it happen”.
      - icedchai 3y ago
        That PM who can barely open a spreadsheet made it happen, of course.
  - itronitron 3y ago
    >> everyone knows who did the work. Not the people deciding rankings and promotions. Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.) Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion. And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    Or they're the "smartest guys in the room!" /s
  - sota4077 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. I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement. Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.
- VectorLock 3y ago
  Depending on the corporate culture: feature, not a bug.
pydry 3y ago
It's a bit like their abysmal process for detecting product fakes and review fakes.
bee_rider 3y ago
In that case, the market should take them out, right?
- WJW 3y ago
  Only if the other companies perform better, but since they also might have a corrupted culture that may not be the case. Also, relying on "the market" to fix things can take decades so it is not really a useful strategy for individuals.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    If the other companies don’t perform better, then this company has found a process that works (I mean not filtering to only select people who play leetcode is a pretty good idea, the only questionable thing is asking leetcode style questions in the first place if they don’t need that data). If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  A venal, decrepit empire can last for hundreds of years.
- n4r9 3y ago
  Amazon is large enough to maintain market dominance via strategies other than technical excellence.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    So then why hire technically excellent people? They might expect excellent salaries or excellent working conditions.
    - scaramanga 3y ago
      That's like asking why do kings buy wonderful artworks when they could save their gold and hang mediocre artworks on their wall? Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
There is another, even more cynical, interpretation. They may have been discovered to be incompetent, and promoted into a role where they can do less damage.
- scaramanga 3y ago
  And an interpretation more cynical than that: The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget. Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    People get kicked upstairs to sinecures all the time
roenxi 3y ago
It is more likely that the internal evaluations process is working fine. There are >$200k salaries on offer and the challenges Amazon et al. are dealing with aren't that demanding on an absolute scale. There are a lot of smart people out there. The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.
shusaku 3y ago
How about the lack of personal ethics correlating with success in what we know to be highly unethical companies…
marcosdumay 3y ago
Possibly. But if that's the case, the best thing that can happen is for bullshiters to fill up all of the positions there and drive the company down fast as possible. I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.

giantg2 3y ago

It's also possible the company is setting themselves up for ethics/regulatory issues by selecting for individuals willing to cheat. I guess this should be no surprise since the culture at Amazon already sucks.

belfalas 3y ago
Sadly selecting for individuals who cheat might help the company navigate ethics/regulatory issues. I have seen many instances of people treating regulation as an annoying roadblock to work around, not something worth honoring.
- fnimick 3y ago
  That's something this community celebrates. Look at how much Uber and AirBNB are touted as success stories when really they were illegal enterprises allowing individuals to violate the law (taxi licenses, rental laws) for profit.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    It's very easy to convince yourself that some laws are not worth respecting. (Ever drive 56 in a 55 zone?) Taxi laws are an instance of almost 100% public corruption, unnecessary bureaucracy, and regulatory capture, but at the same time they would have been almost impossible to dislodge except through widespread disobedience. What happened with Uber and Lyft was for the best. The market spoke.

nverno 3y ago

> 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. I think there is plenty of reason to think people who actually know the stuff instead of cheating would be better on average. It's a signal that they were smart enough and motivated enough to learn the material (basic algorithms/coding skills in this case)- both traits that would probably make them better on average at the job. Being a good cheater is a useful skill that probably also helps people on average- but I doubt it's nearly as useful an indicator of future success as being good at the skills necessary to do well on interview questions (w/o cheating).

kspacewalk2 3y ago
If someone can just look it up, digest information in X minutes and come up with the same answer, then why does it matter that they didn't memorize it in the first place? Presumably I'm hiring an expensive problem-solver with good judgment here, accumulation of past knowledge beyond some basic level of competence is useful, but secondary. Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself. The best interview that I've encountered is the long interview. I hire you for four months as a co-op, see what you can do, and we go from there. Impractical in many/most settings, obviously.
- nverno 3y ago
  > If someone can just look it up, digest information in X minutes and come up with the same answer, then why does it matter that they didn't memorize it in the first place? But this is usually not possible- it's contingent on other people having already solved and posted solutions online for some question worded nearly the same. Much of the knowledge behind interview questions applies to all sorts of programming problems where the solution won't be available to copy. A knowledgeable programmer would know quickly that some problem is best approached by dfs or bfs, while the cheater may not. > Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself I agree, but this will always be a hard process. LC problems are like IQ test or SATs, they work fairly well most of the time, but probably better to weed out the particularly weak candidates than determine how good people truly are.

shswkna 3y ago

It seems those that have a fundamental problem with cheating are in the minority. Reading through the comments leaves me only sad. Based on how I believe the world works, and on larger patterns at play here, this general cultural trend (if this is in fact what it is) will backfire. If this is deemed culturally acceptable, and one extrapolates this pattern further, there is little deeper value that a culture has to offer.

junofan 3y ago
I think the cheaters tend to end up together over time without realizing it.
whitemary 3y ago
[flagged]
scarface74 3y ago
How do you think the world has always worked?
alphabettsy 3y ago
I’m not sure it’s a cultural trend, but I’d say users of Blind are not the typically developer. That’s not to dismiss it, but that a subset of a population will always have dishonest people.
wanttocomment 3y ago
Exactly. They are benefiting from a system built on generations of honesty of people before them. Everything becomes more expensive and dangerous when there isn't basic trust. You have to verify, surveil, and credential everything. Old people get scammed not because they are dumb, but because they grew up in a society insulated from dishonesty.

toss1 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. Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer. A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full libraries and reference sites open and ready to go. This is actually how they will be doing their work (we hope!). Then judge on efficient lookups AND insightful comments on how to build upon the found knowledge. Or, based on the above sample recognize that the process is really totally broken, that almost anyone coming in will work out well (the cheaters clearly lacked the skill or confidence of OP, yet did fine in the actual job), and either fix the criteria (obviously difficult based on the last decade of HN discussions on the hiring sh^tshows), or just cut wasting resources on extensive interviews and take the first N applicants and be done with it.

scaramanga 3y ago
Or how about, you know, stop pretending we can evaluate someone's "intelligence" or "skill level" as if it's a one-dimensional factor that you have superhuman insight into measuring. I'm satisfied, in an interview, if I feel the person is interested in the topic, is able to admit that they don't know something, and seems like they'd be pleasant (although i'd settle for "not difficult") to work with. The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary and it's always a gamble because people excel at putting up very convincing façades of whatever it is that they think they're being evaluated for. People have different things to offer, and you really don't find out until at least 6-12 months into their employment what they really excel at, you have no chance in 30-60 minute (or whatever) interview. The best you can hope for is to rule out the obvious sociopaths.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  >The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary That's what the parent comment is saying. Open-book instead of closed-book, just have the candidate walk you through figuring out what they don't know, listen to them think aloud, and evaluate that.

asdfman123 3y ago

This is like saying my contractor put in a low quality roof, but it hasn’t collapsed yet. The problem is while you can’t control randomness, on average those roofs do fail much more. But more broadly it’s amazing how far developers on HN will go to defend things that will mildly inconvenience developers.

kspacewalk2 3y ago
No, it's not like that at all. It's like saying the roofer I hired doctored his references, but then proceeded to build a roof that's objectively good enough for me to hire him again to build another roof, on a bigger house for more money. Cheating to bypass a stupid gatekeeping system that's designed to ration 1 job per N perfectly qualified applicants is only a problem if it's a problem. If you claim that people who didn't cheat during that process are any less likely to do something unethical when hired, I'd say that's a claim in need of proof. My preferred solution is to come up with a less stupid gatekeeping system. But I only ever hire co-op students, and no one will let me try anything that involves more than a 30-minute chat. Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  You're confusing an individual for the whole. If an individual cheats but turns out to be competent, it's no loss for the company or anyone else, really. But on average, if cheating is common, more incompetent people will slip through and ultimately cause problems. I can bet my life savings on black and win, but that doesn't make it a good decision. > Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise. If you'd like to know about the research behind interviews, they've found that unstructured interviews aren't better than pulling people out of a hat, regardless of how effective they feel.

paulcole 3y ago

> However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one. It's not "right" or "wrong" - it's just a decision. There may be other choices and other decisions but to paint this one as flat wrong seems, well, wrong. > They may not have found the very best person for the job The vast majority of job searches do not have this as a goal! Most companies want to hire somebody who's good enough relatively quickly for a price they want to pay.

kspacewalk2 3y ago
Best person for the job given relevant constraints, obviously. When those are "relatively quickly" and "for the price we want to pay", you still want the very best person for the job.
- paulcole 3y ago
  > you still want the very best person for the job. No you don't! Or else you'd never hire anybody because how can you be sure anyone is the best person for the job? You want to hire the person in front of you who is good enough to be likely enough to be able to do the job.

naasking 3y ago

> 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. The process did not fail in the same way my bear repelling crystal necklace has not yet failed me in repelling bears.

kspacewalk2 3y ago
This comparison only works if you routinely walk through crowds (groups? congregations? clowders?) of bears. Preferably polar bears.
- naasking 3y ago
  It works in any case where the thing you're trying to prevent probably just isn't there.

classified 3y ago

IOW, crime pays.

BeetleB 3y ago

> 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. My process is that I hire only men. I have not yet had an underperformer. Hence, my process never failed. At some level, fairness is important. And no, it's not important only when there is a law behind it.