6 ms·

> As US-based companies become more aware of the fake IT worker problem, the job seekers are increasingly targeting European employers, too. All the US compani

• aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > European employers on the other hand... Many European employers - don't or rarely offer remote jobs, so they often don't have this problem. - even if they do some video or phone interview for pre-screening, they nearly always expect the prospective employee to come to a live interview if they are not weeded out by this pre-screening. It is thus expected that you at least live in a country from where you can easily travel to the place where the employer is located. - often expect their employees to be able to speak the national language, or at least learn it fast. This also makes times hard for North Korean fake IT workers.
  • rcruzeiro 1y ago
    I’ve never had this experience. Never once was I flew in for an interview and, in two of the previous companies I’ve worked for, I did not speak the language.
    • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      This is at least the experience that I (and many people who I know) had. > I did not speak the language As I implied: if you are really talented, you don't have to speak the native language yet, but it is expected that you learn it fast.
      • rcruzeiro 1y ago
        Maybe I was lucky there (or unlucky depending on the point of view). I’ve even worked for years for a French company without learning French.
      • eythian 1y ago
        I wouldn't say that's generally true, at least in NL the work language in IT is often, probably almost always, English. I know people who have worked here for ~10 years who barely speak any Dutch.
  • stevekemp 1y ago
    I live in Finland, and while it is not universal it is extremely common for IT-companies to have a working-language of English. The country is small and hires both immigrants, and people who specifically relocate to start working at the English-only companies, as well as local candidates. Learning Finnish will obviously make your life easier, in many many ways, but companies themselves do not seem to expect or require it.
    • jjani 1y ago
      I've heard this before about Finland and found it really interesting as to my knowledge English isn't particularly more societally prevalent in Finland than in nearby countries such as Sweden, Denmark or the Netherlands. Any idea if it's as common in those countries as well? By the sounds of it in Finland there's more IT companies operating in English than in Finnish.
      • _delirium 1y ago
        It’s definitely common in Denmark, enough that it’s a perennial national debate. Maersk is a huge employer that officially made their corporate language English something like 20 years ago, which spawned discussions about whether you should need to speak a foreign language to get a job in your own country. In practice the answer is yes, for some sectors. I worked for years in an English-language work environment in Denmark (I am not Danish), and learned maybe a handful of phrases of spoken Danish the entire time. I was expected to be able to read the occasional email in Danish, but 1) written Danish is not hard in comparison, and 2) even years ago Google Translate was good enough. It would have been nice from a social perspective to have known more spoken Danish, but my employer didn’t really care, and it isn’t easy to learn if you don’t have strong local connections. Danes will just immediately switch to English by default, and even if you ask them to continue in Danish, you need a decent level of Danish pronunciation to make yourself understood, which is not trivial to get to.
      • AndyMcConachie 1y ago
        In The Netherlands I think it's pretty rare to require Dutch in IT related jobs. I know of one software company that recently initiated a policy of only hiring Dutch speakers and I suspect it will really hurt their hiring going forward. When they initiated the policy they also retroactively exempted all the great developers that already worked there who could not speak Dutch.
• nerdix 1y ago
  The background checks don't always work because they typically use stolen identities or use the identities of Americans that they've paid. They basically have to in order to pass I-9 verification. There are also different levels of background checks. For instance, previous employment verification can be time consuming so some companies skip it. Checking references aren't useful because they can be faked (you have to run background checks with employment verification on the references to make sure they are who they say they are).
  • cute_boi 1y ago
    Yes, it generally don't work. Thats why you will find many F1 student with 8 years of experience.....
• Spooky23 1y ago
  That’s only one of the scams. You pass background checks if you’re new to the US. It’s a fairly common grift to place contract programmers at big companies with fake degrees and experience, who then send the work back to Asia to be done overnight. It’s easier now with ChatGPT - you can send photos of screens and instantly extract the text. You also have people who outsource themselves. That’s one of the ways that the people who work multiple jobs pull it off.
  • chii 1y ago
    > You also have people who outsource themselves. That’s one of the ways that the people who work multiple jobs pull it off. that's not a scam - that's the new work smarter, not harder method of earning money.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  I’ve seen reports from people who were contacted by companies asking to use their identity for jobs. The deal was that the company used their likeness and identity to secure the job, but they would do all of the work and split the paycheck with them. There are a million reasons why this is a bad idea, but I’m sure they don’t have trouble finding people excited to collect free paychecks.
  • SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    We got catfished by an outsourcer on Upwork. Great interview, good questions, really solid candidate. His first day on the job, his English went to shit. Then he refused to pick up the phone or call me back. Lame excuses about how it’s loud there, then he lost his voice, then scheduled a call with the real “Jeff” the American who couldn’t answer anything about what we had discussed an hour earlier. Reported to Upwork but I sort of doubt they did much about it.
    • dawnerd 1y ago
      Video calls super important and asking questions that wouldn’t be a normal interview question. Helps to have candidates walk through and explain code they haven’t seen to reduce any prep work that may have happened. I’ve got a few questions I ask that no one is preparing for. I’ve interviewed a couple people that seemed kinda sus, maybe not working as someone else but definitely lied about their capabilities but somehow passing the coding test. This was before LLMs ruined everything too.
      • SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
        We had a video call. He did great. It was day1 on Slack that the issue was immediately apparent.
  • superb_dev 1y ago
    I was once contacted on LinkedIn by an individual asking to use my identity to work in the US
  • 1y ago
• const_cast 1y ago
  The thing I don't like is that US companies take it too far, to the point they're violating my privacy and making me uncomfortable. Why do you need to do a hard credit check before you give me an offer? Why do you need to know exactly how much I owe on my credit cards, car, house, how much I'm paying per month, and how much I've made at every job for the past 7 years? That feels... excessive. And weird. And kind of unfair. Now you know my paycheck, and the paycheck before that, and how desperate I am. Well, there goes negotiations.
  • asteroidburger 1y ago
    Who's doing a hard credit pull at all, especially before salary's negotiated and the offer's extended?
    • const_cast 1y ago
      It's a thing, but I'm not in the business of naming names. IMO we should just nip this in the bud and make it illegal.
  • red_admiral 1y ago
    It feels like you're going through some kind of security clearance. To be honest, getting insight and access to a major company's networks and maybe customer data is perhaps the same kind of risk to the company as it is for the government to give someone access to (top) secret files. It might not be so much a negotiating tactic as awareness that more sophisticated spies and criminals than the ones in the OP article are targeting your company.
  • AndyMcConachie 1y ago
    > That feels... excessive. And weird. And kind of unfair. Now you know my paycheck, and the paycheck before that, and how desperate I am. Well, there goes negotiations. I think that's partly the point.
• stef25 1y ago
  Where I am in Europe you couldn't even get a (legal!) job in a bar without showing proper ID, and having your identification (id card number) checked and be present in the contract. The fact that "fake people" can be employed for high level IT companies in the US is just unfathomable to me.