6 ms·

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 attempt

• 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.
        • BlueTemplar 3y ago
          And yet all the examples so far have been of "ginormous" companies, haven't they ?
          • bumby 3y ago
            I hired on during the pandemic for what would be considered a ‘ginormous’ organization. I never went on-site for about 2 years. I believe my employer tried to mitigate it through more extensive reference checks and a very long probationary period.
• devoutsalsa 3y ago
  Tangentially related… Life insurance companies (in the USA 20 years ago when I sold it) would require a medical exam for every life insurance application. If the applicant commits fraud by having someone else take the examination (usually a blood draw, height and weight measurement, and maybe a heart EKG for bigger policies), the policy is considered valid after two years. Even if the insurance company finds out fraud was committed, the benefit payout is guaranteed after two years.
  • Null-Set 3y ago
    The implication being that after 2 years the immediate risk of death the insurance company wants to protect itself against did not come to pass, so the policy holder should not have the risk of losing their policy to a post mortem determination of fraud from the insurer despite believing they were insured. Taken back to the fraud in interviews, you could make the same argument that after some time working on the job and not gettimg fired, the risk of getting someone not actually qualified did not come to pass, so its more useful to look at the employees current performance than their original fraudulent interview.
    • rahimnathwani 3y ago
      But the bar for firing is below the bar for hiring. This is true not only because of status quo bias, sunk cost etc., but also because employers will often try really hard and be very patient, in the hope that an employee's performance will improve.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Sounds similar to how (most? all?) life insurance policies will pay out for suicide after a two-year waiting period - the idea being that those who are dedicated enough to plan out that far in advance don't actually end up going through with it, or it's a rounding error. So perhaps the medical exam stuff should be swapped around; everyone can get life insurance, but if you want payout for certain things to kick in before two years, you get a medical and pass.
    • 3y ago
• dariusj18 3y ago
  I let any of my interviewees know that it is ok to use google, I just want to know what they searched for. I'm not running a trivia contest, so if they forgot the name of something or need a little refresh, that's fine.
  • mirkules 3y ago
    The way I combat this is by asking questions about their current jobs, then diving deep into the technical problems they faced. It requires a lot more preparation for each candidate, but it ensures it’s not a trivia test but a discussion. One of my favorite interviews (as an interviewer) was when a SDET candidate provided a link to their website. When I visited it there was an issue loading some page. So I asked him about it and how he would troubleshoot, then asked him to come back on Monday with a solution. On Monday, the site was fixed, and he explained to me what happened in AWS, how he figured it out, etc. So he was hired, going on 2 years now and doing very well. I don’t need robots who can recite what a b-tree is (ChatGPT can do that). I need people who will work hard, can understand the big picture and how to approach problems, while being a good personality on the team.
    • TheCapn 3y ago
      I've only ever had to hire one person to work beneath me, but that sounds like how I ran the interview. We were hiring students for a temp position. We're a Controls Engineering company, but my department is dealing with more traditional languages for supporting applications and needed extra help for a bigger project. I know the tech we use isn't standard in the university so the interview was asking students about how they approached their major projects and their methodology for learning new tools/languages. The first guy who straight up said "I already know enough of C++ and Java, I suppose I'd just google how to do x in c# and branch from there" got the job. Because...yeah, that's about it. We talked about a 4th year project and what his responsibilities in the team where, problems faced, solutions found, etc.
    • everforward 3y ago
      This. My other favorite is very open-ended questions. I mostly do ops-y interviews, and my favorite question is "what happens when you type 'curl https://google.com https://google.com' in a terminal and hit enter?" The question is so broad there isn't a "correct" answer to Google, and it crosses enough domains that any article they find is going to be too long to skim. Then I ask them to really zero in on some aspect of it they feel comfortable with and give detail. What syscalls happen to start up curl? How does the OS know how to communicate with the local router? What's the entire flow to translate "google.com" to an IP? It's also just fascinating to see which parts candidates latch on to. I had one person spend like 30 minutes just talking about TLS and PKI. Another person delved into kernel packet handling for a while.
• prox 3y ago
  I lol’ed at the Paper Stack Overflow error.
• danielvaughn 3y ago
  I'm so curious about that last one. You interviewed and accepted one person, but a different person showed up to actually work? If so, that's incredibly bizarre.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Apparently this is moderately common especially during remote Covid work; there were some discussions of it on HN, even to where the person interviewed and accepted was not the person working, and apparently the work was being done by an entire group of people.
    • red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Been remote since 2015 and not gonna lie, thought about finding contractors on Fiverr or e-Lance (or whatever e-Lance is called these days) to do just that. Basically become a PM for a team of four Vietenamese kids and pull in pay from 3 gigs. I later did some contracting on the side of a full-time job in 2018 and it was hard -- confusion and burnout set in quickly. But still think about the offshoring approach sometimes...
      • bombcar 3y ago
        There's any number of stories about it being done, but anyone who has tried working this way realizes that you either need very skilled underlings or you spend most of the time managing it anyway and could have done it yourself quicker.
      • brabarossa 3y ago
        Hey, I'm looking for remote work. Lets talk? Email in the profile.
      • bumby 3y ago
        How does this impact taxes and other liability overhead on your part?
  • sgerenser 3y ago
• lbrito 3y ago
  >interviewed one person and had a different one show up I'm always amazed at the extent people go to to cheat. It gets to the point that you're putting in more effort than you would have to be successful without cheating. I sometimes feel some people simply enjoy cheating too much. Its not about accomplishing a goal by any means necessary, its something about doing something wrong that certain people seem to enjoy.
  • isanjay 3y ago
    In the pandemic when hiring was remote this was very prevalent in my country. This became kind of a business where a person sells his services to help you cheat by appearing instead of you in the video interview and also helps you with the work after you got the job.
• harshalizee 3y ago
  I don't understand how #2 and #3 would be considered cheating? If they can still answer the question and show evidence that they understand it, what's wrong with reference materials and googling?
  • ketralnis 3y ago
    There are different issues of "is this an honest interviewee?" and "is this a good interview?" and you're welcome to argue the latter all you like but the solution to a bad interviewer isn't just to cheat because you don't like it. Context matters. If you're looking to see "have you really done security stuff?" by mentioning some OWASP Top 10 vulns and asking for a quick description, for somebody that has indeed done any security at all that will be trivially easy and anybody else will need to google it. Can they skim google and get you an intelligeable answer? Maybe but that's not what you're looking for, the question itself is a proxy for something else. For most of my interviews I tell folk up front to google whatever they need to. But at the very very earliest stage of the interview loop we do a quick "programmer is a big field, what kind are you?" round so we know how to place people and the questions we use for it are all trivially easy for somebody even remotely familiar with the fields we're looking at and also trivially googleable for anybody else. The goal with that piece isn't to challenge people it's just to round their skillset to the nearest role that we have. I've caught people retyping code, pretending to be inventing it, from what's clearly the first article they found when they googled the keywords. It was never intended to be a hard problem, just something to quickly tell an infrastructure from a frontend engineer. It was more or less bitwise identical to the article they were retyping from and they couldn't explain the code or modify it. That doesn't even accomplish what they want, even if it worked we'd then go on to interview them for a job they couldn't do. Again you can argue about whether that's a good practise or not but it's still not licence to simply cheat on it. You're conflating these and and I think it's not the right thing to do.
• bgro 3y ago
  - Modern problems require modern solutions. This sounds creative and ballsy. I'd be intrigued to see more. - If the answers are so basic and guessable that one can both find and then deal with a printer to commit it to slow-RAM physical legacy memory, then the problem is not with the candidate - People with such little self awareness that fail to perceive this problem have demonstrated why you don't want to work with them. The problem is not the fact that they were hotfixing answers straight to prod - This was just a reverse racial discrimination security test. By identifying the non-authenticated user, you both demonstrated exemplary awareness of identity phishing attacks as well as a base standard that 2 people aren't the same based on their protected identity criteria