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Fake job interviews are securities fraud

• ioblomov 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/tkLtK https://archive.ph/tkLtK
• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  This is about Wells Fargo allegedly lying about pursuing diversity in its security filings. But I'm hearing more and more from friends on the tech interview circuit about processes requiring, in essence, free consulting to be done for a posting that remains listed and unfilled almost indefinitely after the interview (and subsequent ghosting). My hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty hiring pipeline to investors. But if that's being pursued wilfully, it seems to imply fraud.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • timomaxgalvin 2y ago
    "My hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty hiring pipeline to investors. " Sounds very plausible, but why bother interviewing anyone?
    • scrame 2y ago
      because funding wants to go somewhere and headcount is an easy earmark.
    • kevstev 2y ago
      Intelligence on what other firms are doing, even if you are just getting a very high level view. Around 2009, I was working at an algo trading startup, and long story short, after having a previous company call me up after their non-compete in a business ended, and in the process one of them slipping in that they made like 4x what I was making at the time, I decided to look around. I got lots of bites on my resume! And I was called in for lots of interviews. But they didn't really go anywhere, despite me often feeling like I did well in them. It took me a few months to realize that they were actually just hearing some murmurs about what my company was doing and wanted to learn more about it- we were approaching the problem in a unique way for the time. Even seemingly innocuous details can give away a lot about a company's strategy. If you are working on say AR at Amazon, and you mention that your group is about 200 people, that says that they are not only going into this space, but doing a reasonably big push on it as well, which might be news to say FB. (This is completely contrived, I have no idea if Amazon is doing AR stuff at all).
      • takinola 2y ago
        I guess anything is possible but this seems unlikely. The type of questions (and followups) you would ask in a job interview are quite different than for an inquiry. Also, there are more straightforward ways of getting this information so why take a more convoluted and less efficient path.
        • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
          > type of questions (and followups) you would ask in a job interview are quite different than for an inquiry Candidates will willingly disclose quite a bit, especially if they were stiffed by the last lot.
      • lallysingh 2y ago
        I think you can get more intel than this just by scouring LinkedIn. You might have to use some statistics to eyeball some numbers, but you can get technologies used, group sizes, levels of team members, etc. Especially if you snapshot and compare over time.
        • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
          In fact, I would be shocked if this kind of competitor-employee data mining was not a service already sold by Linked In.
          • Spooky23 2y ago
            Competitive intelligence has been around for a long time.
    • joe_the_user 2y ago
      The thing about "fake interviews", having gone to several myself, is that they are never completely fake, just very, very unlikely to produce a hire. I imagine the company internally can say something like "we'll hire if we find someone capable of solving all of department X,Y and Z's problems simultaneously and will do so for market rate. We probably won't find that but looking will make people happy." with the second part said with only winks.
      • NickC25 2y ago
        Except if I'm an investor, and someone tells me that they are looking for a specific role that will help the company reach financial goals, they are spending time and money trying to find that person(s) and they aren't actually looking (rather, just posturing) that is fraud-y in a roundabout way. They are spending time and money on something that they know won't pan out. That's a waste of money.
        • johnnyanmac 2y ago
          sadly, there can be a lot of inefficies and the number can still go up. That's ultimately all modern (western?) stakeholders care about these days. Not like they can't switch their stocks in days if they get worried.
        • joe_the_user 2y ago
          Except if I'm an investor, and someone tells me that they are looking for a specific role that will help the company reach financial goals, they are spending time and money trying to find that person(s) and they aren't actually looking (rather, just posturing) that is fraud-y in a roundabout way. Sure, if you're the investor that asks all those questions and has enough information to answer them, you won't be happy. But I think most investors aren't going to drill down to that level. Especially, anyone investing is going to know some money wasting has to happen, some posturing has to happen, just to be trendy and so attract "brilliant/energetic/etc" people as well as more investors. And a given start-up investor has to want more investors since the company runs on an accelerating flow of funds; your money is only being multiplied if other people are tossing in theirs and if your money isn't being multiplied, it's vanishing.
    • from-nibly 2y ago
      Sometimes its double fraud. Sometimes they tell employees internally that they are hiring even though they arent.
    • svnt 2y ago
      >Sounds very plausible, but why bother interviewing anyone? Because then you don’t have to ask anyone else to lie for you, or count on them to do it well. There are other options here though, beyond just lying and pickiness, which include: a) some internal party sabotaging hiring to prevent someone getting in who will be a better fit for the role they want during growth b) startups often don’t actually know where they need to put bodies, especially in areas outside of the founders’ technical training
    • throwawayq3423 2y ago
      Every startup has a massive "Hiring" page for optics. Are they actually hiring for all those positions? Probably not.
  • commandlinefan 2y ago
    I could only read the first paragraph, but it seems like the article is about a specific type of fake job interview rather than "fake job interviews" in general.
    • teamspirit 2y ago
      https://archive.ph/KcjK6 https://archive.ph/KcjK6
  • Aurornis 2y ago
    > My hunch is these start-ups don't want to show an empty hiring pipeline to investors. This wouldn't make any sense. If a startup has headcount and budget, they're going to want to hire someone as quickly as possible. Investors don't care about the minutia of how many people are in your hiring pipeline. If portfolio company had board-approved budget and headcount and was failing to fill those roles in a timely manner, that would be a huge red flag that something is not right within the company. Investors care about result and efficiency. I don't think any startup is going to impress investors by wasting a bunch of time deliberately fake interviewing people and then failing to hire anyone. What's more like is the company wants to hire, has told the teams they can hire, but the board is reluctant to approve more headcount until the team starts showing results. Another possibility is that they're waiting for financials to improve enough to justify the hire.
  • giantg2 2y ago
    Even large corps leave postings up forever as a way to manipulate their stock price. Take down the postings and analysts see it as weakness. This has been going on for decades.
    • jedberg 2y ago
      That's not always true. Sometimes they have up a "Senior Engineer" listing that just always stays up because they are always hiring for that role.
      • giantg2 2y ago
        That's extremely rare, especially right now.
      • johnnyanmac 2y ago
        "always hiring" in the same way anyone would hire, say, Steve Wozniak if he knocked on your door. I think one regulation to resolve this is to outline a term on when you expect to fill the role, in order to delineate between "we need this role right now" (AKA, "urgent hire"), "we want to fill it in 1-3 months", and "nice to have but no rush" postings. It'd give a better signals to workers and make it easier to call fraud if they are "urgently hiring" but repost the same thing 5 months in a row.
        • kmoser 2y ago
          That's a nice theory but in reality many things could conspire to prevent you from hiring on schedule: lack of qualified applicants, changing business strategy, reduced budget, etc. It would be hard to tell from the outside whether lack of adherence to the schedule was due to malfeasance or "stuff happens."
          • johnnyanmac 2y ago
            >It would be hard to tell from the outside whether lack of adherence to the schedule was due to malfeasance or "stuff happens." Sure. That's why they get audited for their recruitment like anything else in business. I'm not saying to bring the hammer down, just to have a better excuse than "well we're always hiring!"
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• Suppafly 2y ago
  Fake Job Interviews Are Fraud Fraud -- ftfy we need to start prosecuting companies that do this shit, not just for financial fields.
  • Mountain_Skies 2y ago
    Make it a criminal felony for everyone involved with fake job posts. It's wage theft of people who aren't even the company's employees. In almost all other contexts this would be criminal theft. Make it criminal theft in this context too. Once you include the hundreds or thousands of people they've stolen labor from, it easily passes any threshold required for it to be a felony. Guarantee the ghost job nonsense will instantly stop once the first person is shown being shipped off to prison for a year and one day.
    • donor20 2y ago
      This might move hiring to friends / network type hiring. If you were in a good network awesome. If not could be tough
  • teractiveodular 2y ago
    As the friendly article explains, it is next to impossible to differentiate between "fake job interview" and "unsuccessful real interview".
    • Flop7331 2y ago
      In the absence of proper documentation and genuine feedback, assume it was a fake. E.g. I had a CodeSignal assessment recently that resulted in the end of my "consideration". If it had been a genuine opening, they'd be able to tell me what the expected score was and how tenured peers at the company are scoring in recent assessments.
      • teractiveodular 2y ago
        Most companies refuse to provide applicants any feedback other than yes/no, because it opens them up to lawsuits.
• say_it_as_it_is 2y ago
  I heard that Discord is a notorious offender of fake job interviews.
  • geoffpado 2y ago
    I had a very strange interview experience with Discord myself. They sent me a rejection letter, saying that after much consideration, they'd decided to go with a different candidate. Thing is… I'd never even applied with them, and certainly hadn't done any interviews.
    • jimbob45 2y ago
      There are people going around filching resumes and impersonating people when applying for jobs. It's worth reaching out to see how they got your name and resume to see if you're the victim of fraud.
• glasss 2y ago
  > Wells Fargo did a bad thing. But the badness of the thing is uncertain, amorphous, hard to quantify: People were harmed, but not in ways that the legal system can easily reduce to money. > But the financial system can: The bad thing that Wells Fargo did caused its stock to drop, which is a good rough measure of how bad it was. The shareholders perform the socially useful service of measuring the badness [...] I think this is a really interesting point - assuming the actors in the market who are buying and selling stocks share the same general morals of the rest of the population, they can penalize companies that do bad things. But that would mean market forces would need to act on moral grounds and not on profit motives.
  • blastro 2y ago
    The idea that retail buying/selling pressure has any effect on market price is a very old fashioned idea.
    • exolymph 2y ago
      "actors in the market who are buying and selling stocks" does not necessarily mean retail, no?
      • blastro 2y ago
        > share the same general morals of the rest of the population funds don't share those morals
      • benreesman 2y ago
        People who have the stake or dry powder to move the share price of a bank (or megacap tech company while we’re at it) are in no way interested in socially useful pricing around dickhead behavior.
        • lazide 2y ago
          Well, except to make sure it doesn’t apply to them, hah.
• kderbyma 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • teraflop 2y ago
    Please read a bit more carefully and put on your thinking cap before writing inflammatory comments. Matt Levine is accurately summarizing what Wells Fargo is alleged to have done in 2022. He is not "making anything racial", just describing a situation.
    • rexpop 2y ago
      "Talking about race" in plain terms on public forums is punishable by white supremacists (many of whom have moved their communications out-of-band, eg into dog whistles). This way, they pursue a monopoly on the discourse surrounding these concepts. Edit: If downvoters could proffer a counter-theory, I might be corrected and save you and your ilk future clicks.
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    > because only racial fake jobs....are securities fraud The securities fraud is telling investors you're doing something - in this very specific case, attempting to hire diverse candidates - but not actually meaningfully doing it.
• masterkiller 2y ago
  This happened to me at a very large publicly traded tech company. After being offered a position, they had to consider more diverse candidates. After a month of "searching" they hired me.
  • ljsprague 2y ago
    Did they hire you in the end because they were biased/racist/sexist or because you were the best candidate?
  • nanidin 2y ago
    I always decline to answer race/sexuality/gender/veteran status/disabled status applications when applying.
    • epicureanideal 2y ago
      If you decline to answer someone in their internal team manually inserts the answers for you based on your appearance.
      • John_Cena 2y ago
        I feel astonished at this. Really?
        • yodon 2y ago
          I've been told by HR folks they are required by law to do so in some contexts in the US. I can't speak to the truth of that assertion but they definitely believed it was the case.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
      I sure can identify myself as whatever sexuality and gender, right? Can I do the same with race? Or do they perform DNA tests/skull measurements?
      • 2y ago
• 0898 2y ago
  It’s interesting that Matt Levine capitalises “white”, as well as capitalising “black”. I haven’t seen this style choice before.
  • playingalong 2y ago
    Is it his style or Bloomberg's?
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    There's some debate over this. https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-ethnicity-us-news-ap-top-news-7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e... > In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too. > CNN, Fox News and The San Diego Union-Tribune said they will give white the uppercase, noting it was consistent with Black, Asian, Latino and other ethnic groups. Fox cited NABJ’s advice. > CBS News said it would capitalize white, although not when referring to white supremacists, white nationalists or white privilege.
    • falcor84 2y ago
      > CBS News said it would capitalize white, although not when referring to white supremacists, white nationalists or white privilege. Oh, interesting - so would I be correct in saying that "white supremacists" are people thinking that White people are superior to others, whereas a "White supremacist" is a White person who is a supremacist of some group, e.g. "A White male supremacist"?
      • OJFord 2y ago
        Probably more likely to be a typo (as in off-style guide) than a deliberate distinction!
    • klik99 2y ago
      Assuming this is about ethnic groups in the context of America, saying "White" doesn't have a "shared culture and history in the way Black does" is arguably true, but "Asian" and "Latino" also both don't have a shared culture and history in the way "Black" does. Also "White" is the only ethnic group name that doesn't refer to a place, even though it's clearly a stand-in for "European", which kind of implies everyone else came from somewhere else.
• anon1358 2y ago
  [dead]
• jmpman 2y ago
  What if the hiring manager had a stack of 10 applicants, and of those 10 applicants, only 2 had a resume which appeared qualified. Let’s assume those 2 candidates were not “diverse”. But out of the remaining 8 non-qualified resumes, 1 was “diverse”. Could they interview the 2 qualified candidates, and the 1 “diverse” candidate in order to meet the requirement of interviewing at least one diverse candidate? Would this be considered the scenario the lawsuit is talking about? Or do they need to wait until they have one diverse candidate with a competitive resume?
  • takinola 2y ago
    I think the issue was closer to one where the interviewer (all but) hires the "non-diverse" candidate and then as an afterthought interviews the "diverse" candidate. This clearly defeats the spirit of the plan. As for your specific hypothetical, it still seems to be contrary to the stated goals. My guess is you'd want to cast your net wide to get a cross-section of qualified candidates and maybe not just hire from the same sources that produce homogenous candidates
    • jmpman 2y ago
      I’ve had job opening where I’ve had maybe 5 applicants. They were all subject to the same screening questions, all well documented and interviewed by multiple people. Usually within the first 2 questions you could tell if the person had even the slightest chance of being a good fit. Yet, we would have to continue the interview in order to be fair to all candidates. With our company’s salary (low), hiring in a competitive field, we were lucky to get any applicants. Yet we had to wait for a diverse candidate to apply. We had already interviewed the previous 5, already has them stack ranked, and as soon as a diverse candidate applied, and was dutifully interviewed, the job was offered to the most qualified. I don’t see how this is any different than what is being raised as a concern.
  • conception 2y ago
    There are various methodologies for increasing diversity in your hiring pool that don’t require “token” efforts. Eg https://hbr.org/2023/06/when-blind-hiring-advances-dei-and-when-it-doesnt https://hbr.org/2023/06/when-blind-hiring-advances-dei-and-w...
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  [flagged]
• matwood 2y ago
  Matt Levine has an ongoing meme/thread that everything ends up being securities fraud if you look hard enough :)
  • magxnta 2y ago
    The "everything is securities fraud"-theory honestly deserves a Wikipedia article by now.
    • m463 2y ago
      Watch out, wikimedia foundation might not want to disclose forward-looking information like this on their websites.
    • ldayley 2y ago
      They could start by citing Matt Levine’s own 2021 introduction to the idea published during the halcyon days of r/wallstreetbets and pandemic markets, titled “Is Everything Securities Fraud”[0] ;-) [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-03/goldman-sachs-goes-to-supreme-court-hedge-funds-won-on-gamestop-kkpoe6ws https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-03/goldma...
  • NickC25 2y ago
    Well....he's kinda right. There is a staggering amount of fraud in the world these days, and some of the more nefarious propagators of said fraud don't even bother hiding it.
  • maeil 2y ago
    This is simply because it has become second (or rather, first) nature for companies to lie about everything. Stop lying, and there's no more securities fraud. Be honest.
  • viridian 2y ago
    Everything is securities fraud is just a subset of the general idea that everything is fraud. By which we mean, "every company is lying about things, all the time". Turns out this is trivially true, because the game theory for rational corporations (and its executive decision makers) clearly suggests that on net, lying all the time is very, very profitable.
• DangitBobby 2y ago
  I find it interesting that investors don't really have to prove they were ever mislead, just that misleading statements were made about something bad that happened. For example if you didn't actually read Wells Fargo's diversity statement, you would have been incapable of making any financial decisions based on them, thus you were never actually lied to or defrauded. Can investors demonstrate that they changed their investing patterns based on diversity statements? If a lie is whispered in the forest and no one is around to hear it, is it securities fraud?
  • Muromec 2y ago
    it's about an intent of the person doing lies.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    You were still harmed by their actions if the stock price fell. At least on paper.
  • lilyball 2y ago
    Matt addressed this in a footnote, this is the "fraud on the market theory". > The fraud on the market theory is based on the hypothesis that, in an open and developed securities market, the price of a company’s stock is determined by the available material information regarding the company and its business. Misleading statements will therefore defraud purchasers of stock even if the purchasers do not directly rely on the misstatements. The causal connection between the defendants’ fraud and the plaintiffs’ purchase of stock in such a case is no less significant than in a case of direct reliance on misrepresentations.
    • DangitBobby 2y ago
      Thanks for sharing! I still don't understand why the law works this way though.
      • felixfbecker 2y ago
        Any public information eventually is priced into the stock price by the market. Say you buy the stock even though you didn't read the DEI statement, but other people bought the stock before you having read it. Their purchases drove up the stock price, so you had to pay more for the stock. You got defrauded of the delta. Especially if now it comes out, the price goes down, and you make losses.
• infotainment 2y ago
  The company I worked at had a diversity interview rule like this, but it’s not really clear to me how it’s legal. Isn’t it literally making hiring decisions based on protected attributes?
  • iamdbtoo 2y ago
    The goal of those policies is to achieve equity, not equality.
    • throwaway984393 2y ago
      [dead]
  • sva_ 2y ago
    The final decision should be based on merit, otherwise it would be discriminatory and also self-sabotaging. If unqualified people get their time wasted by being invited because they fulfill some diversity quality, but no skill quality; I'll put the blame on the system that imposes the rule.
    • infotainment 2y ago
      I see what you mean, but even the act of choosing to interview a candidate (or not) based on a protected attribute seems like it would be illegal, since whether or not someone interviews at all is generally a function of the "merit" seen in their resume (or lack thereof). For example, if someone selling a house chose which prospective buyers were allowed to tour the house based on race, I assume that would definitely be illegal, even if the "final decision" on who to sell to was ostensibly not based on it.
  • avidiax 2y ago
    This is essentially the Rooney Rule. It's not saying that the candidate must have protected attribute X, but that the candidate pool must have variants of X. I think the courts would take a dim view of claiming that a procedure to partly mitigate bias regarding attribute X is somehow illegal discrimination along the same attribute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
• grobbyy 2y ago
  Explain it like I'm five: I'm a shareholder. I get defrauded. There's a shareholder suit. Where does the money come from? It feels like we'd be suing ourselves. Wells Fargo defrauded us and if we win, we'll get money back from an entity we own The might be a little bit of a shuffle with money going from people who bought one year to those who bought another, but for buy and hold, that's pretty moot. It seems like the lawyers are making money at my own expense? What an I missing?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • nickff 2y ago
    You’re not missing anything, that’s exactly what happens with shareholder class-action lawsuits, and one of the reasons why they’re controversial.
  • arder 2y ago
    I'm a shareholder. The company does something I don't like. I file a lawsuit. The lawsuit costs the company time and money and possibly forces them to change their policy. Is this good for my immediate financial interest in the company? Probably not, but does it fulfil other purposes I may have? Sure! If you want to send a message to companies that they better not fuck about with this DEI stuff for example, this might send that message.
• idopmstuff 2y ago
  I'll never truly understand what the practical value of suing companies as a shareholder of those companies, when if they lose, they have to pay it out of cash, which is neutral for you as a shareholder. You're incurring the cost of litigation either way, so it's always a negative proposition. That's obviously only true if you remain a shareholder, but given the majority of stock generally doesn't change hands it seems like most people who are being represented as the victims in these lawsuits are worse off. Shouldn't the people who remain shareholders be able to exclude themselves from the suit, thus shrinking the size and maybe making it cheaper to settle? (It is possible this is a thing you can do, I've just never heard of it.)
  • lazide 2y ago
    Not necessarily, depending on how many shares you own. Typically shareholder lawsuits are brought by minority shareholders (or, as you say it’s pointless) seeking to get paid to compensate for some malfeasance they feel was being perpetrated against them by the majority shareholders (and management, as their agents).
    • idopmstuff 2y ago
      > Typically shareholder lawsuits are brought by minority shareholders I don't know if this is true - I just asked Claude and it said the type of lawsuits I described are significantly more common, at least among suits against public companies. But regardless of relative frequency, you say it's pointless, so why does it happen? (The answer seems clearly to be because the lawyers want it to happen, but still seems like it's a very inefficient process for most shareholders.)
      • doe_eyes 2y ago
        I think that's basically the answer. In many cases, the process is initiated by lawyers looking for litigants. It's a big payday for the law firm and peanuts-out-of-your-own-pocket for actual shareholders.
      • nequo 2y ago
• superb-owl 2y ago
  The pattern here with Wells Fargo is interesting (you may recall they got into a ton of trouble by setting aggressive sales targets, causing employees to defraud customers). There’s clearly a huge disconnect between the numeric targets they set and the resulting behavior of employees. That’s always a hazard, but I wonder why it’s such a pattern at WF See also: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/beware-the-variable-maximizers https://superbowl.substack.com/p/beware-the-variable-maximiz...
  • throwaway984393 2y ago
    [dead]
• apwell23 2y ago
  Almost all tech companies post fake job ads for sponsering Perm green card application for employees who are already working for them. Never understood how that shit is legal.
  • recursive 2y ago
    It's probably difficult to write a law that would make it illegal without affecting large swathes of legitimate activities.
    • extraduder_ire 2y ago
      Or to pass a law that bans it, carving out those legitimate activities, without it being too politically risky.
• JoeCortopassi 2y ago
  Hey HN, want a side project idea that's easy, and would be a huge hit? Make a web crawler that hits publicly traded tech companies careers page, once a day, and tracks how often their job listings change. Make a big line chart at the top of a landing page that compares the different companies job openings (by count), over time. Penalize listings that list/delete/re-list job openings to always make it seem like they are hiring. Maybe have a max time a job post can be open before it's no longer part of their count (3 months?) What you'll end up showing is similar to this article: A lot of company's stock is evaluated on growth, and part of the growth estimation is based on how much they are hiring in this down market. Some companies know this, and are trying to game the system Anyways, I bet a decent amount of people would watch that like a hawk, and the honest companies would love it because it would show how great they really are doing
  • sva_ 2y ago
    Companies will sometimes post job ads even if they're not looking for someone, I suspect
    • bluGill 2y ago
      That happens because they want to look like growth opprtunities even if they are not growing.
      • jlarocco 2y ago
        Maybe, but not always. My company keeps a req open on the off chance somebody in the domain (CAD data translation) will see it and apply. It's a small enough niche that if somebody with the right skillset comes along we'd like a chance to hire them, even if we're not in dire need of people at that particular moment. I guess technically we're passively looking.
        • bluGill 2y ago
          You are hiring. The companies I'm talking about are not looking at any resumes they get in.
• Uptrenda 2y ago
  > Also there is something good about workplace diversity Because? All workplaces should be based on merit. The whole reason why companies are doing this clown show is because of woke laws that don't take reality into account. Like the reality that maybe there just isn't enough women or minorities that are qualified.
  • okwhateverdude 2y ago
    > All workplaces should be based on merit. Because? There are many different kinds of organizations that do work, including families where merit isn't as important. The whole reason why laws were written to enforce diversity is because narrow-minded, little white men weren't willing to accept reality. The reality being that in an equal opportunity society they can't bin the CVs because they don't like the color of their skin or their expressed gender.
  • CyberDildonics 2y ago
    is because of woke laws Can you point me to the 'woke laws' ?
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  I really like Matt Levine's quote from his previous article (https://archive.ph/eKH6k https://archive.ph/eKH6k) on this topic: > To some extent you have to manage a big organization with simple, crude, legible metrics. In a big enough organization, somebody will game those metrics. Ideally you create a culture that minimizes that gamesmanship, one where employees understand and buy into the organization's real goals rather than just trying to maximize the dumb metrics. Wells Fargo seems to be having some trouble creating that culture. It's really just a fantastic example of Peter Drucker's famous adage "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." And it's why I get very wary of any large organizations that focus too much on data-driven goal setting (OKRs and the like) without having some way of stepping back and doing a reality check. To be clear, I actually like OKRs if they are used correctly to help prioritize and focus, but too often I've seen them become a weird, gameable time sink.
  • blitzar 2y ago
    > Ideally you create a culture that minimizes that gamesmanship ... having some trouble creating that culture This ideal culture is like unicorns and rainbows - some of it exists under very specific atmospheric conditions and some of it, when you look closely, is really just a horse with a toilet roll on its forehead sprinkled with glitter.
  • creer 2y ago
    It's truly shocking how organizations do not bring the hammer on managers who outright try to game the metrics. At least never (?) make the claim that gaming the metrics will get you booted. There is a feeling that, within rather lax limits, gaming the metrics is seen as good sports. Because yes, in the US I rather suspect that this comes from high school and college sports worship. Winning is what it's about and someone who bends the rules to win can probably be put to good use and should be promoted to where they can do the most damage?, bending?
• jarsin 2y ago
  Metaverse can solve all this. Have interviewer change avatar color/gender/etc to whatever they need.
  • derwiki 2y ago
    On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog
• zippyman55 2y ago
  My contract company was attempting to hire one data scientist. The slot was temporarily suspended, position tweaked, then read advertised. Then the title changed. Multiple recruiters posted the position. I think there were five different ads for the one slot.
• maeil 2y ago
  Not to get all too political on HN, but the increasing number of cases like this over the last few years is the most positive thing I've seen happen in the US in a long time. And one of my biggest worries for the next administration is that they will put an immediate stop to this. These cases all come down to a very simple thing: "Don't lie if you're a publicly listed company". Which is an enormous boon to society if enforced, like it is indirectly through these lawsuits. Fake job interviews aren't securities fraud - as long as you don't lie about them. Bad passwords aren't securities fraud - as long as you don't lie about them. It has become entirely second nature for companies to lie about everything; there's a whole industry around it (usually known as "PR"). These lawsuits can disrupt this status quo. Stop saying A and doing B. All these cases are very clear in that the company said A without even doing A at the time. It's not like they were forced into either saying A or doing B. Both Wells Fargo and Solarwinds could very easily just not have made false claims wrt diversity and security. They willingly, knowingly did so.
  • SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    A company could have bad passwords without lying about them, just don't comment on passwords at all. But it's hard to see how to have a "Fake job interview" without lying, as the publicly listed job would itself be a lie. Or in the example given, the "diversity" candidates interviewed without any real intent to consider them for the job, were lied to. yes, I see that this is covered better in the article.
    • creer 2y ago
      Yes, this does not fight bad passwords, it fights bullshit PR. An excellent thing.
  • gizmo686 2y ago
    Publicly traded companies are still allowed to lie. It only becomes securities fraud if they lie to investors.
    • maeil 2y ago
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  I think I was hired once as a diversity candidate. When I was about to quit, my manager begged me not to, explaining that otherwise, his team (~20 people) would be 100% Indian. (Best team I ever worked in, BTW).