I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in learning.
We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And his communication was great!
After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, uncorrected typos... It got so bad that we had to have someone review all e-mails he sent to customers.
We had regular "improvement plan" meetings with him, but after a year of paying him, we had to let him go. As part of the exit interview we went back and looked at his interview e-mails, and compared them with his current e-mails. So we asked him:
"During the interview, all your e-mails were great! Why was that?"
I recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.
Dear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning, but corresponding with people — especially in formal settings — makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.
This is commonly referred to as Yerkes-Dodson Law [1]. This is typically where one's performance, whilst performing a task and being watched while doing said task, will result in decreased output compared to if the individual was not being watched at all.
Crafting a message well is important but more often, fast writing and decision making skills are more important. Why do you think so many professors and managers write extremely short, almost informal sounding replies. If you're an excellent writer who takes 20 minutes typing up a single email and then need another 20 minutes to destress because emails in formal settings make you anxious then you probably aren't a good fit for that type of job.
> Why do you think so many professors and managers write extremely short, almost informal sounding replies.
Because they're positioned with higher status in a hierarchy?
If a student makes a mistake, the professor merely points out the mistake.
If a professor makes a mistake, a student will at least be uncertain whether a mistake was made, and will have to go to much greater length to point out the mistake.
Exactly. I have a friend who was a directional drill operator, and then moved to white collar work, and was super slow with writing letters. I think it was a him problem more than a blue collar work problem though.
It might be the fact that people are monitoring how the sausage is made with the explicit purpose of judging that process.
But when working with people in the normal job, nobody is watching them type they just eat the sausage.
I can relate. I don’t have anxiety generally with work and have been praised on my interactions with customers. But I feel anxious during interviews because they are actively trying to judge me.
It's my opinion that interview anxiety is almost entirely unrelated to: how well someone works with a team; how well someone handles an emergency; and how well someone can related to and work with clients. Source: I've been repeatedly told, over decades, that I'm good or great at all those things—and I enjoy all of those things, for the most part, even when they're tough—but interviews make me anxious as fuck and I hate them (though I'm actually good at the talking parts—I just tend to lock up when someone is watching me work and judging me). It's a totally different thing.
In my experience that is a lot less true with customer facing jobs or jobs where there is an element of external facing presentation (like the note above). The candidate is going to get the same treatment from every crowd or customer.
If someone is doing an internal facing role, especially engineering, it may only come up during things like team stand ups, or certain types of design reviews, or not at all. So less of a problem.
I don't know about the GP, but if I interviewed you I would see that as a strong point in favour of you. It sounds like you proof read your emails and edit the things that aren't well composed. It's hard to find people who do that.
Then again, maybe I'm biased because I write the same sentence multiple times in quick succession. And I go back and re-write previous sentences if they don't flow well with what's coming next. But when people have watched me do it, they have only expressed wonder and admiration over it, never negative feelings.
What doesn't work is when someone starts verbally editing my first draft the instant I've typed it out. Yes, I know it's bad -- it's the first draft. I just needed to get something on the page to see where I should go next.
I would take the coding on a white board instead of answering fake mails to be honest. But the job doesn't sound too attractive if correspondence is mostly with customers. Internal mails are way more informal and quicker to write.
Yeah, it's a super relevant skill and something that doesn't go away (for me) in the interviewing environment (the way technical skills sometimes can).
My guess is that they're looking to see if you complete it in a reasonable time period, your initial draft is at least in the right ballpark (anyone experienced in tech support, team supervisorship, project management, etc can answer common emails almost by reflex) and it appears to be you, and not someone helping you.
I would imagine that, if anything, seeing you pause after an initial draft, adjust some grammar and tone, pause...even re-write a sentence or paragraph - and then say "done"...would impress, not detract.
Or to find a position in which such performance is not required.
Adaptation only goes so far. More training won't turn a dwarf into a basketball centre, or a heavyweight bodybuilder into a champion marathoner. Sometimes you've got to work with what you have, both in terms of abilities and limitations.
Intellectual and psychological limitations may be less manifestly visible but are no less real.
Performance anxiety goes away with repetition. I have plenty of personal experience with that and so do many others I know. This is not a special skill. You don't have to be a champion. You just get used to doing the performance and the anxiety goes away.
Just like if you're nervous about driving on the freeway, or flying in an airplane.
Heck, I remember buying my first phone answering machine. I froze up repeatedly trying to record the message. After a while, that problem went away.
Only if your anxiety is reasonable in the first place and your emotional regulation is normal.
I've been driving more than 20 years and almost none of the anxiety I experience because of it ever went away. If I know the roads already it's a little better, but every single day I have to power through the anxiety to get to where I need to be going. It doesn't get better.
Hotels give me anxiety even though I actually lived in a hotel for six months.
My husband developed anxiety later in life doing things he has done for years.
What you're talking about is just normal human emotions, when people refer to "performance anxiety" they are usually referring to an anxiety disorder. Crippling anxiety that doesn't spontaneously resolve.
If you're in your 20s and experiencing this, perhaps.
If you're in your 50s and it's still a constant problem, quite possibly not.
Again, people aren't infinitely malleable, and don't all fit in standard packages.
Even seasoned stage performers often face crippling anxiety before performances late in their careers. Others take their own lives, often at a young age. Dick Cavett is among those who've suffered crippling depression and taken extended leaves due to it.
Depends on how they’re grading. If they’re just grading on final output plus looking at the work process for authenticity you’d be fine. But a lot of people would probably needlessly grade on process.
Reminds me of my gripe with interviews and tests, they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome by each employee.
Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more holistically for an accurate signal?
they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and
evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome
by each employee
I've been in the industry for 20+ years and have done my fair share of live coding interviews.
Some of them were horrible. There was one where I had to code on a literal whiteboard while a pair of, uh, let's just call them "people with distinctly non-wonderful personalities" critiqued everything. I did horribly.
I've also had many that went well. There was a live coding environment, and they allowed for exactly what you said - correction and iteration. They also collaborated with me to an extent. I felt these sorts of interviews were excellent and I did well. They also gave me a great feeling of what it would be like to work with these folks.
It's perhaps also worth noting that I began a lot of these by saying, "These sorts of interviews make me nervous, but I'll give it my best!" or something similar. And you know what, a good interviewer knows and understands that. They know these kinds of interviews make 99% of the population nervous. So acknowledging that fact helped me to feel at ease.
> I've also had many that went well. There was a live coding environment, and they allowed for exactly what you said - correction and iteration. They also collaborated with me to an extent. I felt these sorts of interviews were excellent and I did well. They also gave me a great feeling of what it would be like to work with these folks.
My best interview experiences were like this. I thought I did well and left those interviews feeling great, positive reinforcement, great performance of code, plenty of time left over! Just for a faceless and ambiguous rejection letter :) I started getting an aggregate view that people just didn't want to pay me that much, or that there's some external factor on a search engine or within the industry about me that I'll never be aware of, but I landed on my feet on the entrepreneurial side.
Did all of your positive interviews result in rejections?
Some of mine did. That always hurt. But, I mean...
1. A lot of companies follow the "it's better to turn away 10 qualified hires than to make one bad hire" adage
2. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, that might be true for 10 other candidates as well so I expect a 90% rejection rate even when things go well.
3. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, some other candidate might have some specific domain knowledge (maybe it's fintech, and they've worked in fintech before and I haven't) and it might be a tiebreaker in their favor
4. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, some other candidate might have some specific tool/framework/language I don't. If I have experience with 50 tech buzzwords, and so does the other candidate, but 27 of mine overlap with the company's requirements and 29 of theirs do, then that might be a tiebreaker in their favor.
Anyway, being an entrepreneur is better anyway. I'm glad you found success. I miss running my own show. Every day.
Right I’m aware there were potentially other reasons like what the very first chapter in all the tech career handbooks say, as you wrote, and they all concluded that I was wasting my time on a broken process, while surrounded by people bragging about the multiple offers they are able to line up in the same time frame somehow. Well good for them.
I was getting the short straw so I unsubscribed, good for me that was an option at all.
I feel like the process is broken in a looooooooooot of ways, but I can't feel that a low % of job offers relative to the # of interviews is necessarily a sign of brokenness?
For most software development jobs, I feel that collaboration is important and those sorts of interviews, when done well, are probably one of the least-terrible ways to get a feel for it.
Of course, there are also plenty of cases when this sort of interview is not ideal. Not all development jobs require collaboration. And there are brilliant developers who just don't interview well. Etc.
In the end, though, you won. Entrepreneurship is tough but ultimately I love it more than working for others. It's your life, why work for others if you can help it?
Apparently my coworkers interviewed someone a while back who got pretty far into the onsite interview panel before they realized the candidate was not the same person typing out the code they were seeing on CodeBunk...
As far as I know, someone noticed something fishy and told the final interviewer their suspicion to be sure. Like the way the candidate would only explain stuff after it was written. If you're on a video call and observant, I think you could tell if the typing didn't sync up with what you saw. I imagine it might be hard to notice at first, but if someone suspects it I would think a skilled interviewer could throw a few wrenches in their plan to see how the respond.
This is why we can't have nice things. Or in other words, why we must usually do a coding test per company we apply for, and not just 'point them at the Github'.
This is ridiculous. It might be true that there are many great developers that have nothing on github but it is certinaly not true that "actual best developers have little or nothing to point to on github".
There are plenty of "actual best developers" who have prolific amounts of stuff on github, directly or indirectly.
>> The actual best developers mostly have little or nothing to point to on GitHub. You might find this shocking but many of them don't even know how to use Git at all.
It all goes in circles. As soon as Github (GIT in general) becomes adopted by the majority of enterprise (already happened probably) we are gonna see something else which is "cool". Something else, smaller, simpler, cooler gonna attract the next wave of programmers. I am sure there is a great space for innovation.
Game industry would be one source. At least for many teams and projects, Git isn't very useful (horrible for large binary files common in AAA games). So many companies still use Perforce or sometimes you'll see SVN still. That means a whole bunch of really qualified engineers who have never or rarely used git.
I'm sure there are other industries for which that is true too.
It's a good reminder how small a section of the tech industry comments on Hacker News.
I've encountered this myself as someone who maintains small open source games. Engineers with vastly more experience than I do have approached me with contributions, but needed me to walk them through installing and using git. You could tell they were good engineers because they were so eager and happy to learn it. I can't speak for how big of a demographic these types of engineers are but they certainly exist.
I started at the end of this era, working on a monitoring team that supported mainframes, network and data center systems. My second week on the job, my delivery of books arrived. About 30 linear feet of documentation. Iirc, it was part of our ELA.
I kept a couple of the references that I spent a lot of time in, along with my Perl books. Good times.
I am willing to wager in a broad sense, that the best COBOL, Fortran, and RPG, that "Old people who manage legacy systems" is probably a fair estimate, and there is probably narrow overlap between developers for those languages and git experience.
There are lots of younger folks who fall into supporting these platforms through experience, but I would also wager that the number of fresh, doe eyed engineers graduating from uni/college thinking "I am going to be the best COBOL programmer!" can probably be counted on one hand :P
I encountered such a person. Her parents were both mainframe nerds and she was a true believer. I think the shock of working as a 23 year old in a group of geezers that had been fighting each other since 1975 was traumatic.
We stole her and she was a pretty awesome DBA last I knew.
These "best developers" should really start learning to use Git (and these other newfangled technologies) or else in 10 years they'll be blaming age discrimination when they can't land their next job.
I can believe they don't have an extensive GitHub... but if they can't use Git they must have either only had a few jobs that all used something else(That's fine, just uncommon), or be in a specialist industry that doesn't use Git(Also not common), or they don't know VCS at all.
Plenty of companies use source control other than git. AAA gaming studios are famous for not using git due to git's poor handling of large binary assets w/o workarounds.
I've used other source control systems and they do have benefits over Git to be sure. Access control is a huge one, you can have a large repository and have fine grained access control over who can access what paths in the repository. Heck with some source control systems this access control may even integrate with Active Directory, so there is only 1 account to maintain!
The way to do that with git is to have a lot of tiny repos, with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings.
Don't get me wrong, git's ability to easily branch is huge. I am totally over working in source control systems that required an admin to approve creating a branch, or where merging branches was a huge deal that could take a very long time to do, but git isn't the end all be all of source control systems, and there are certainly features from other systems that I miss when using git.
Game dev always seemed like a highly specialized thing to me. Performance critical, uses real math, lots of local instead of just server work, art assets...
I'm not saying everyone uses git, but it seems like there's probably not many people who have never had to learn it.
Especially when "knowing git" often means memorizing about 8 commands total if you're not on really big team.
When I pushed for a transition from no VCS at all to git, we couldn't use branches at first for fear that someone would need to access something and not be able to, if someone who actually knew git wasn't around.
Maybe their idea of "Can't use git" means "Can't use it well?"
I mean, a lot (most?) of the largest companies in software don't use it primarily. That being said, I agree that "knowing" git enough to for daily use is picked up very quickly. Your day to day usage of git is I'd say, medium complexity for source control. I've used tools where even cloning the repo could be a hassle, and there were nearly as many footguns as git, without reflog to recover.
Regarding large binary assets, I literally Googled "git large binary assets" and had many hits with various solutions. GitHub started offering Git LFS (Large File Storage) in 2015 -- more than 6 years ago. That said, many places still use Perforce.
It's newish (yes, 6 years is newish for projects that don't have a lot more hours, direction, and dedicated drive behind them than git-lfs seems to) and janky or unintuitive in some cases and adds another obtuse nerdy thing for e.g. artists to figure out (or be supported through) and requires extra software and server config to self-host (most of which is, uh, not as complete as one might hope) and makes backups less dead-simple than plain git and has nothing like an official server-side implementation (last I checked GH's "don't use this for production" implementation was the closest thing) and can make any kind of automation or extra tooling used with git a real pain since much of it's not lfs-aware, including some built-in git commands in certain situations (git-archive against a bare repo, for instance, which can be a super handy command in many situations).
Overall, I like it and have promoted its use and stand by that, but not every place has the time or inclination to screw around with it when they can just pay for something that solves the problem (likely Perforce).
While we're at it, git in general would be one fuck of a lot easier to support for cross-platform users and in tooling for complex projects if libgit2 caught up and took over as the official implementation. The pile-of-binaries-and-shell-and-god-knows-what-else (all living on top of a hacky, huge bundle of junk, on Windows) official Git itself is a huge impediment to doing anything with git other than just executing "git [command]" in Unixy environments. It'd also make "build my own GitHub" type projects far more tractable, cutting out some of GitHub's (and GitLab, et c.) server-side moat.
LFS is a pain, right now, even 6 years in, if you don't tie yourself to a major commercial Git host or put in a lot more effort than traditional self-hosting git requires. To reiterate: I still like and advocate it, circumstances allowing, but it definitely is not a mature solution.
I also think a lot of people in this thread don't understand that large companies don't want everyone having even read access to the entire repo.
Using a system like perforce, artists can drop files in the assets part of the repo, translators can have access to script files, and coders can have access to the parts of the code that they are working on.
Source code licenses are still a thing, where after buying a license only a certain # of people in a company are even allowed to view the licensed source code.
The way this is worked around is a build server exists where some pre-built libraries are pulled from during a developer's local machine build.
While I'm happy to no longer be working in that environment, it is unfortunate that many of the commenters cannot imagine an ecosystem different than their day to day. :/
There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file.
Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors that her husband or someone in her home country was doing the work (would have been daytime over there). Nobody really complained. She wore a hijab and the company had just hired it’s first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why. Thankfully they stopped using that vendor not long after.
>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why
At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")
People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.
I don't believe there is any actual research about it. It doesn't even pass the smell test; why would a company of people who have a hard time relating to one another and socially meshing perform better? If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does), why are we trying to create the opposite situation in a company?
My guess is that is it possible to have great diversity of thought and experience while still having high social cohesion.
During the height of immigration in the US, there was high social cohesion within communities of people who came from the same country while still having great diversity of ideas across the nation as a whole.
My personal take on this is that it's the dark side of multiculturalism. The loss of the melting pot as a cultural meme was probably a sign of this. Social cohesion depends on a set of shared values. The "melting pot", for it's issues, provided the shared national myth to align and unify the disparate cultures.
Take that away, and you get the natural result of multiple cultures with drastically different moral codes, and no core to form around.
Interesting point on drastically different moral codes. I'm curious if, during the height of immigration to the US, the "melting pot" tended to consist of people immigrating from areas with mostly similar moral codes.
It appears that many immigrants retained much of their culture while still integrating in ways that let different cultures work together, but maybe that is because the moral foundation was similar enough to allow cohesion as a whole while retaining some sense of cultural identity.
Why would a company choose to do anything that didn't directly make money or cut cost? Companies often have to be compelled to do things where the ROI is measured in decades no?
There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity.
But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.
Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.
I've seen various "innovation" studies that show more diverse teams come up with more ideas and are more productive, but less diverse teams think they are more productive. A quick internet search turns up https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/09/09... for example.
For software, for example, there are plenty of characteristics that some engineers may think are constant that are definitely not. For example, the number of systems I've encountered that have baked in the idea that first/last name can not be changed (even though names are changed by not only trans people, but also any married woman in many cultures), or assumed people only had 2-3 names (some cultures as many as 4 last names are common), is long. When the name is used as part of a permanent key for all other data about an individual, fixing the issue can be a huge hassle.
Sure, a product focus group might eventually point these issues out, but no one's changing their name in a short-term focus group study.
Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc"
If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.
How would you measure it for software engineering? Number of bugs? Number of features requested after initial project launch? Time to completion? All of those things have too many variables involved for any given organization. We already have a hard time measuring ability/quality of software engineers as it is.
> Profitability is, of course, necessary to keep any business alive, and studies show that racial, ethnic, and gender diversity contribute to business success. A McKinsey & Company study of 366 companies revealed a statistically significant connection between diversity and financial performance. The companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have financial returns that were above their national industry median, and the companies in the top quartile for racial/ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their national industry median.
Are there any studies demonstrating causality? I can think of plenty of reasons diversity would correlate with success. For example, being based in a large city will have a lot of advantages for many businesses, along with having a more diverse hiring pool available that will naturally lead to a more diverse staff. But this doesn't suggest to me that adding a diversity quota or similar policy, all else being equal, will help a company succeed.
Confounded by the fact that succesful companies are located in growing areas (or move there), which is where immigrants also want to go. E.g. San Francisco.
I want to see this with some serious attempt to reduce the confounding.
Also it doesn't demonstrate cause and effect as stated in the quote. It's perfectly possible in this data that diversity makes companies less successful - but being successful in the first place is what creates the 'slack' that leads to a company pursuing diversity policies. They only go diversity when they can afford the cost incurred.
I can say this as someone with ADHD, neurodiversity specifically allows me to approach problems in radically different manners than my coworkers which sometimes makes things an absolute cake walk for me and sometimes makes them nearly insurmountable. This is a result of my approach to problem solving which has been trained on the problems I've experienced in the past and my natural disposition. I think an entirely homogeneous company would have issues with tunnel vision - they might be excellent at dealing with some issues and absolutely flabbergasted with others... having a more diverse team ensures that you've got more varied experiences to draw on when approaching problems.
Aside from all that, I think that diversity makes teams more healthy to work within - if everyone looks the same (straight white male) you're likely going to have cliquish social assumptions form in your team that will prevent you from hiring an excellent candidate that doesn't happen to fit the mold and might force out people who aren't what they appear: trans men, gay men and asians that appear white. As a company it's important to keep your workplace friendly to all potential employees and having a homogeneous company makes it more likely that a closed off social culture will form that makes life difficult for new employees.
I have never seen any studies to support this but thought I'd add at least a well reasoned opinion.
Anecdotally speaking, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to find examples of companies doing stupid things that could have been avoided with a more diverse decision-making team.
Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.
Or Google Photo that tagged Black people as gorilla. Clearly, developers must have tested with their own photos (on top of generic datasets) and if they had had more diversity within their dev team, they would have caught that sooner.
I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.
Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the first day that she had exactly one year to prove that she was worth the same salary as the other staff. Obviously she did, and was quickly elevated to on-screen talent, and her star just kept climbing.
But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder; that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain type of person.
Well they got a bargain. She's immensely talented. She hates my politics but damn can she write. Her first memoir is one of the funniest things I've ever read
It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse".
There has been this trend of diversity reporting to list Whites and Asians together in stats. Google has been notorious for this [0] and others are following the trend when it seems convenient [1].
> It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse".
Asians are current and historic targets of discrimination. This sometimes gets masked in outcome stats because lots of Asians in the US are themselves or first generation descendants of immigrants through programs which filter for the top end of the socioeconomic, and more particularly recently technical skills, spectrum.
Whatever problems the current system has, it isn't as if the system being replaced ever hired people primarily on "merit."
The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?
This conversation is referring to a specific phenomenon that has become strongly noticeable in the last 5 years or so.
That problems of nepotism, or cronyism have already existed to some extent, is another conversation.
I also don't know why "merit" is in quotes. Hiring based on merit is going to be the main goal for companies that are not corrupt.
Corruption should also be discouraged e.g. by stopping companies becoming "too big to fail", or by being anti-competitive, or by actually creating legislation that actually protects against discrimination, rather than by perpetuating it.
That corruption exists, is not an argument to ignore corruption in another form.
I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature.
"Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. In hiring, this means that "merit" almost always means something different or is a secondary consideration behind more personal factors. "Is diverse" doesn't really strike me as inherently more corrupt a trait than "went to the same school I did" or "is a member of the same country club I am," though why it gets a lot more attention is certainly not a mystery.
I don't think the majority of hires at large companies in the past were corrupt. Certainly that hasn't been my experience hiring people at large tech orgs in the present, and the process hasn't changed terribly much really. Given the scarcity of technical ability, we simply can't afford the corruption.
You seem to be discounting the meritocratic process by which people end up graduating from high-ranking schools. Prestigious law firms for instance will only consider graduates from specific institutions, specifically because they act as a filter for talent and ability.
You also seem to be conflating the hiring of people who are culturally similar to corruption. In fact there are many benefits in collaborating in a culturally homogenous environment. Maintaining such an environment in order to reap those benefits has merit too.
I guess it depends on your definition of "corrupt" and where you draw the line between corrupt and not corrupt. Would it be the tech recruiter's fault if there were, for instance, a pipeline problem that sharply limited the diversity of their candidate pool? I don't think so, but that wouldn't change the reality that the pool itself is a reflection of corruption elsewhere in the system. I don't know how you could possibly argue otherwise when black people and women were effectively excluded from many industries until relatively recently.
The "meritocratic process" is laughable. Legacy admissions have always been a critical component of those systems, especially once wealth was no longer an adequate filter; allowing a few newbies through the sieve in order to conceal the real purpose of the ivies—perpetuation of an elite caste—has been the game for a long time. As universities are pressured from the left (getting rid of standardized testing) and right (getting rid of any sort of racial consideration in admissions), legacy will only become more important as an attribute. That a few people beat the odds doesn't at all imply that the system is fair or that that solution is scalable.
"Culture fit" is realistically both important and historically has been a really problematic thing to conflate with or consider alongside "merit." It is a tough problem and I don't have a great answer to it.
I would define "corrupt" as hindering the profitability or stated objectives of the organization[1]. If a team hired to get the job done happens not to be diverse, that doesn't mean the hiring is corrupt. For instance, winning NBA teams don't tend to be very diverse, but I don't see anyone seriously suggesting the NBA draft is corrupt.
By that token, if your company tends to hire a certain sort of person, that is by no means an indication of corruption. I certainly don't see what's inherently corrupt about submitting a job application, going through interviews, and ultimately being hired, mostly by strangers.
When you say you want the solution to be "fair", what do you mean exactly? If a Chinese restaurant staffed entirely by Chinese people hires only additional Chinese people, with the intent of maintaining the efficiency of a culturally homogenous environment, is it fair? Does it matter? It certainly isn't corrupt. Doesn't this apply to every business and any culturally discriminatory hiring criteria?
Even granting that the current admissions truly are need-blind (which I think it is reasonable to dispute), the smallest Ivy endowment is still over $4 billion. We’re not talking about a state university using full freight foreign students to subsidize in-state students because they have no other choice.
There’s no reason sticker price tuition at Brown needs to be almost $60k a year, and it is scandalous that Harvard, Princeton, and Yale charge tuition at all.
> I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours
Please read some autobiographies of people from diverse backgrounds trying to break into atypical careers, the topic of imposter syndrome and anxieties about wanting to be taken on one's own merits regularly features.
I don't disagree, but my point was that they shouldn't. Clarence Thomas famously wrote about believing that his own success was tainted by affirmative action, and later he was indeed appointed to the Supreme Court primarily because he was a black conservative. That doesn't mean he was unqualified or less fit for the court than previous appointees, no matter what his own insecurities were, and it also doesn't mean that he or our society would have somehow been better served by Clarence Thomas not being given any of the opportunities affirmative action programs may have afforded him.
The deeper problem is that there isn't really a solution here. The old system wasn't neutral and instead actively discriminated against huge swathes of the population. That the beneficiaries of that system never doubted their worthiness doesn't make the old system better, and any change that impacts them will suffer from the same aspersions about a lack of "merit" that we are seeing now.
This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed.
If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions as decisions not being made by the people in the company. Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very strongly.
What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women.
Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability? But somehow, that isn't a problem for you?
> What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability?
Is it actually same ability though? IIRC the men vs women difference disappears once you control for hours worked, for example.
The only tangible benefit I've ever heard of was qualifying for contracts with diversity quotas.
Similar for setting up 49% subsidiaries where the wife (wives) of the owners collectively own 51%, to qualify for minority ownership for fed govt contracts.
Oddly enough, once a friend of mine was hired to work on a project which one of the selling points was that it was designed and implemented by women.
He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project. Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because they were well aware about what's happening?
Honestly, I'm mixed. On one hand that's basically false advertising. On the other, I despise external incentives that aim at gender, so anything that hacks this sounds good to me. I'll probably slant to the former though.
It sounds like, if that timely manner is at least a day long then she'd get it done reliably. I think the only issue you could possibly see here is one of labour exploitation if she was sending the work off to someone else - it might be that she specifically shouldn't be paid but you as a company would really like to get in touch with whoever is on the other side.
Or it might just be that some people are introverted and crack under pressure whenever the spotlight is on them but, once they have quiet time to themselves, they can really power through problems.
The description of the scenario isn't nearly enough for us to get any grip on what was going on without making some huge assumptions, but the facts that we have are that she tended to really struggle when coordinating with coworkers and that she completed the work expected of her - there could be numerous explanations and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate.
> and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate.
It's a story a friend told me a long time ago. I didn’t and couldn’t fact-check it. The husband’s theory came from the fact she apparently mentioned her husband was also a software consultant.
I had a friend who's wife worked in tech and even had a patent but she could barely code and could barely make her way through real world, on the job, tech problems. Her husband (my friend who worked in a major tech company) every night helped her do her work and she happily told us about it.
I have a relative who is severely dyslexic, whose spouse will revise/rewrite/advise on written communication extensively. But they know better than to take a job where written communication is a large, critical part of the work!
I do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done.
I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.
Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.
I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
We were a Linux System Administration consultancy. The product wasn't the e-mails, but nearly everything we did for our clients was designed/planned, scheduled, organized, and documented in e-mail. Yes, sometimes we would work on things with the client on the phone, those were usually followed up with an e-mail about what was done.
These e-mails were copied to our internal mailing lists so that they could be peer reviewed and someone else could be cross-trained on it in case the primary wasn't available. Also, every task we did had a one sentence description written up that would be shared with the team, again as a kind of peer review.
Product/Software support. Above the Tier 1 level, at the stage where you're talking with the Dev team directly.
Developers don't want to talk to customers. So you need someone who can understand either the code or the developer's comments, but can then put it in layman's terms.
I didn’t, but I suspect people were hoping for something more substantive. What about it don’t you like? Is there something specific to this thread that relates to your role and reminds you why you hate it?
Your comment did nothing to further the conversation or take it in an interesting direction.
I asked for examples. I replied to that response stating that I'm already DevSecOps. Not sure what else they would be looking for. If they had additional info, maybe they should chime in.
In my team, Duty Managers / Service Delivery Managers / Operations Managers. Communication in every which direction is #1 skillset I look for in the team (as well as being organized, disciplined, eager to learn, sense of ownership).
A lot of the job is talking to technical teams, talking to functional teams, talking to business teams, talking to management and executives; translate, summarize, liaison, co-ordinate, plan and inform. Customize medium, format, length, message for each group to enhance understanding. Develop spidey sense of paranoia against assumptions, misunderstandings.
Well, that disqualifies me. The way most organizations tie your hands means one is given all the responsibility without real authority. I'm completely unmotivated because of that.
Downvoting on HN is fickle; sometimes it's the point that's being made, sometimes it's how it's being made. I think asking "have I meaningfully contributed to conversation" is part of it... but a lot of downvotes comes as emotional response or simple disagreement. You can choose whether to take it seriously and grow/change to satisfy it, or be yourself and take votes in passing.
That being said - sad to hear you are not eager to learn and don't have sense of ownership; you are correct that disqualifies you from some roles (most, in a way, but recruitment process is all sort of obscure and counter-logical).
For what little it may be worth: it mostly comes back to the old proverb of "courage to change things you can, accept things you cannot, wisdom to know the difference, and zen to make peace with it". I try to coach my team members very early on "these are things that are part of organizational machine; satisfy them so you are done with them. These are the things where you can make a difference and where most of your value will be concentrated. Focus on those once you've fed the machine".
I think part of disillusionment, at least it was mine, is the feeling that somebody somewhere, and ideally ourselves, should have all the necessary power. In reality, we all operate within constraints, more or less visible or scrutable.
Ultimately, life is imperfect, professional life included; it's a life's pursuit for most of us on how to grow our own acceptance and peace with it. Sometimes we make that change within ourselves, sometimes we are able to make an external change that aligns more with our priorities.
To add to your point of treating company's money as your own -- "Tracking Money" will help understand a lot of corporate priorities and explain a lot of decisions. --I-- may want to update something because "it's the right thing to do / makes for cleaner code / etc". But the management probably has a reason (good bad or ugly) for their own priorities. Advice I read mid-way through my career is "understand your manager's goals and reasons", and it was so simple and yet so... shocking to so many of us techies. We always expected manager to understand our recommendations and priorities. Hubris! :)
(in Public Sector, "Tracking Money", interestingly, did not work as well; but "Tracking Personal Status/Blame/Credit" worked well. The two should be equivalent but in my limited experience there's differences)
I once was a team lead for an team of outsourced software developers. It was the worst part of my career. The whole outsourced team was awful. Wholly incompetent.
I had the responsibility of delivering a product, but I didn't have the authority to fire these folks who were a net negative on the project. I would have been happier with implementing the whole project myself, which I mostly did.
I too was unmotivated, but the stress of being responsible was unbearable.
Perhaps some people disagree that "most organizations" give responsibility without authority, but I've seen it happen a several times in my career.
Another strain of this is forcing some COTS application to work via a million hacks and integrations (usually via consulting resources) when a fundamental architecture or application change is needed. Responsibility coupled with the resource and authority to execute is stressful in its own way but it at least allows one to more easily own their failures.
That's been my experience. I believe That's a universal truth when it comes to working in groups. You can't do what you think is best. You have to do what the group decides, or what the person in the leadership structure above you says. I'd be very curious to hear about company structures that don't have a top-down leadership/authority scheme.
Edit: Thanks! Looking at internal data analyst roles in my HR dept (weird that they aren't under a technical job code, so I wasn't seeing them before). Maybe I'll apply to one.
I guess this is like when companies try to use correctness and formatting of a resume for proof of attention to detail or communication skills or something like that—but people just pay for professional proofreading and formatting instead.
(it's proof for a certain kind of social and professional awareness, rather, I'd say, which is true for quite a few hiring norms, really, but doesn't mean you can expect a new hire to compose really good documents on the job...)
I do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done.
I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.
Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.
I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
This why I've had to deal with very regressive HR on-boarding processes. I'm sick of companies treating new employees like their data doesn't matter and they can be required to sign up to any service no matter what the ToS is like.
That sounds to me like it would meet the legal definition of fraud. A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the business might even be worth looking into.
> A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the business might even be worth looking into.
No, probably not. Speak to any business owner who has been in a lawsuit and they'll likely tell you it's not worth the headache. A close relative told me that even if a customer straight up won't pay for a done job, he'd rather forgo the payment then deal with a lawsuit.
Lawsuits usually have:
1) monetary costs - those lawyers are very expensive
2) emotional costs - take a big mental toll to deal with
3) reputational costs - it goes in the public record. Next time a potential candidate googles your company, it might show up that you sued a former employee. Hopefully they read further to see if you were justified in doing so....
4) opportunity costs - you (hopefully) have better things to do with your time
If you are big enough, maybe you have a legal team to deal with this stuff. But even then, you have to choose your battles. A hired lawyer is still expensive and it's not worth going after small battles, even the ones you know you will win.
Also, as others have mentioned, it's not unreasonable to have a friend or relative look over your email communications during your interview process unless you were explicitly asked not to do so. In fact, it's a smart idea!
The Ford dealership quoted me wrong on a trade-in payoff and later tried to get me to pay it ($1000). Letter in the trash. Next one came on a law firm's letterhead quoting a bunch of stuff about a contract. In the trash.
More extreme one -- my auto loan provider accidentally double-charged my bank account for the amount of my car loan payoff (it didn't bounce, either). They instructed me to go through my bank to get the second charge refunded as fraudulent (which I was able to do and I was refunded and happy within 4 days), but then on their end they also sent me a refund check for some reason. When I received the check I gave my auto loan provider a call and they told me they were sorry there is nothing they could do and I would have to cash it, so I gladly got the remaining $6k of my car paid off for free by their own human error. I already had the certificate from them showing the car was paid off and the account was fully closed at this point. One year later and it's still fully paid off on my credit report. They gave me free money. The error on their part was their system had no way of handling "what if our charges are reported as fraud and get yanked back". Well, that and sending out a check after the fact.
It makes me wonder at what $ amount they would have begun to care about their error and tried to correct it.
I had a client once who refused to pay for one particular day of working. They paid everything else, but not that particular day, which was odd. (It may have been a day I worked from home and didn't push any commits, so maybe that was the reason.)
I think it was about € 600. I spoke to a lawyer, may have written a letter threatening a lawsuit even, but the lawyer explained that it just wasn't enough to actually start a lawsuit over. Even if you win, lawsuits take a lot of time and energy. I just dropped it. And them, obviously.
A different case from the opposite side:
I'm currently looking at a disagreement with my previous phone provider. They charged me too much over the past year. I called them about it, and they wanted me to prove we agreed on the monthly fees I claimed, and not the ones they claim. But they can't claim we agreed on their fees, so I just stopped paying and switched to a different (better and cheaper) phone provider (which I should have done a long time ago anyway). They're threatening to cut my phone which already isn't with them. They want money from me, but yesterday I wrote them a letter explaining they actually owe me money.
I expect this will go away. They may register me somewhere as a bad-payer, but there's an appeal process that I expect will side with me, because the phone company can't prove a thing.
There are laws against employer retaliation. If that employer never asked him prior and he never lied, what crime was committed? The employer failed to do their due diligence. As others have said, it's VERY common to request assistance in drafting resumes/emails/letters when pursuing employment.
Several kinds and several counts of felonious fraud, all prosecutable, just for starters. If they signed their employment contract, which they most certainly did, that's perjury. If it was mailed back to the employer, that's mail fraud, a felony; if emailed, that's wire fraud. Position was remote, but if they ever entered the office, then as many counts of trespassing, at least, unless they took lunch and returned, which would double the number of counts. If they logged into anything, such as VPN, or Office 365, etc., each instance a separate count of computer fraud. The felonies here stack up high and rapidly. I'm not sure why you'd believe any mistakes made by the employer could possibly have any affect on the prosecutability of this and other similar criminals committing similar crimes.
Writing your own emails or resume isn't required or expected. Some people have assistants that do a lot of work by proxy of you. Its just very awkward that it becomes noticeable in a negative manner in the workplace.
Resume preparation services are common and easy to find, and though I've never used such services I am sure many people do and I would not view it as unethical as long as the resume accurately summarized experience and qualifications.
I've been a hiring manager for remote positions for a long time. If your recruiting channels are good, most of your candidates are going to be honest and good intentioned.
But interview enough people, and you'll start encountering people trying to abuse remote work. They're not interested in contributing to your company. They're only interested in collecting paychecks while they do as little work as possible for as long as possible. They might already have a full-time job or other remote jobs, or maybe they're just trying to travel the world and do a "four hour workweek" thing where they answer e-mails once a day and phone in a couple hours of work at key times during the week.
The common theme is that they aren't really interested in fighting too hard for the position. As soon as the interview or job turns out to be something they can't just talk and smile their way through, they're out, just like this:
> I think my last update for a while: as soon as HR got on the call with him, before they could get through their first question, John said the words “I quit” and hung up the calls. He has since been unreachable!!
Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.
> Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.
I'll take a stab at it, and predict... all of them. Or nearly so. There seems to be an ever-present fraction of employees at any large corporation that are essentially worthless. Just along for the ride, raking in a paycheck while someone else does the meaningful work.
We've had stories here on HN about people exploiting it. There's a moment, I think, in many developers' careers where it occurs to them that there is almost never any reward for hard work. And when you're a wage slave for a large corporation, it's easy to blur the morality until it feels okay to take advantage of the situation.
When I find myself starting to think such thoughts, I know that it's time for me to move on to another opportunity. And a smaller company, even though it pays less, because it's better for your soul.
From my experience once you have ~1,000 employees AND a complicated org chart/raci/etc then it’s fairly easy for people to do little work and hide. In smaller orgs too many people see you, and in orgs that are running efficiently if you don’t do your job it causes issues.
Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)
I used to work for a government organisation and it was the same. Once I got disillusioned with what I was doing I would put in bare minimum effort which was, show up for standup every day, filibuster a bit then checkout. I was still one of the highest out-putters in the department.
I just quit a vaguely similar kind of environment because there's always a few internal wars and suddenly people invent shit about who is the reason nothing happens and spread lies to save their ass.
And then there's turnover. People might just never get to know those people. Some may proactively avoid contacts through various means so nobody steps into their office only to realize nothing happens.
I'll do you one better. My friends from a team I used to be in had a guy who simply didn't know how to code. My friend would at times act as a ghostwriter(for free) so that the poor bastard wouldn't get fired.
Management often spends so little time with you that the difference between them perceiving lots of work and little work comes down to what you say in your daily standup.
To me it’s about 4 hours a day. There’s no deceit in this. What I tell them I’m working on is what I’m working on, what I’ve declared as ‘finished’ is factually ‘finished’.
To the company, I’m still contributing the things I agreed to, responsive to the people who come to me for help (as a senior) and on track with the projects assigned to me.
When the wall comes and I just cannot will myself to stare at the same problem anymore, that’s it for the day. Sometimes that takes longer than others, sometimes it’s 5 hours instead of four. Sometimes it’s a whole 8 hour day.
So..matter of perspective, I guess. The agency and autonomy are nice, though. Some people want a shorter work day given. I’ve just decided to take it.
> To me it’s about 4 hours a day. There’s no deceit in this. What I tell them I’m working on is what I’m working on, what I’ve declared as ‘finished’ is factually ‘finished’.
I've come to realize this isn't always a mistake on management's part. I work at a company where developers use the full day to get tasks done because there is so much on our road map. There is absolutely no slack, when something new comes up, something else needs to drop.
We are hiring, but now I spend some of my time training them. I've seen friends work for companies that keep some % of their experienced developers time idle so those devs tackle issues that might pop up.
The fundamental problem is that the bar for "get hired" is higher than the bar for "get fired." Invariably, this means some people will sink to the minimum just shy of the latter.
People bitch about stack ranking, and it is terrible for moral and politics, but it solves exactly this problem.
Because there isn't enough manager gumption & attention time to address this systematically, manually.
Or sometime you gave up on the organization being able to provide a meaningful workflow.. that’s usually when I switch job because it depress me to fake it too much and fuck around all day on a computer while not being actually free to do whatever I want.
It’s fine for few months while looking for something else and trying to let management know that you have no backlog.
It's as if the Robin Hood mentality met with Jack Sparrow: take what you can and give nothing back. However, they aren't interested in the well-being of the company because they have more important places to put their effort and dime, such as hobbies or their family. It's an aversion to doing 50% more work for a 15% raise.
As long as it pays more to half-ass your current job and take on a second, then people will prefer doing that. 100% effort is rewarded correctly almost nowhere.
In the software industry it should be pretty easy to track tickets someone is working on and compare that to how long similar tickets are completed by coworkers.
With low level coding cogs that might be somewhat feasible, if you have enough of them. But there are a few things that I've seen which get in the way of that kind of metric.
1. Story pointing is not granular enough, i.e. one 2-point story is not necessarily the same as the next one. Freeloaders pick off the easy ones and pace themselves to keep their 'productivity' in the acceptable range.
2. I've seen a lot of teams, especially smaller ones, evolve into a situation where each member has an area they specialize in. Then stories start getting preassigned to them. Hard to compare two coders not pulling from the same pool of work.
3. As an IC becomes more senior, a larger fraction of their work happens outside of stories, and becomes more difficult to quantify. Some of the most effective freeloaders I've witnessed were mid/senior devs who could crank out a typical story very fast and craft plausible explanations for where the rest of their time went.
I'll present an alternate case, mine. I'm in a senior IC role sitting in India making almost 1/4th of what my US Counterpart makes. I work as much as them if not more. We as Indians are always taught to be sincere and obedient and I try to show that in my work trying to stay up finish the work so that my sincerity is never questioned. I'm always on the side to prove my quality - even though I'm highly underpaid for the same work.
Overall, I'm someone who needs to prove everytime that I'm sincere and I'm intellectual while I'm known only for being a cheap resource.
Your criticism is fair. However "obedient" isn't always what an engineering organization needs. Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing or what, but it seems they are more hesitant to speak out. It has been my anecdotal observation that our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to management if they feel something is wrong.
Absolutely. There's some cultural aspect that doesn't always work well in an engineering environment. Almost 3 years ago I had to hire 4 new team members, and two had to be from TCS. At some point in the process, I was happy to just find someone who was able to say "I don't know" to a question. Several tried to bullshit their way through by answering a completely different question than what I asked.
Eventually I found two. One of them was a really solid hire. Backbone of the team. Still not as vocal as any of the non-TCS devs (one of whom was also Indian, but very vocal about his opinion), but he got stuff done and did it well.
I've seen when an Indian team (doesn't matter though, could be from any other country) was hired with one reason - to shift the blame as the project was going to shits. Also if you are on a sponsored visa, you gonna stay quiet no matter what's happening - your interest is somewhat to stay afloat, not to seek truth or revenge.
Read "Speaking of India" by Storti. It really helped me understand a lot of the strangeness I also observed working with India-born coworkers and contractors.
> Apparently the obvious and easy solution here is to only get US-born hires. So why don't you?
This seems to be an unnecessarily aggressive take on it.
If I (an American) were working for an Indian company, I would plan to learn and understand what the culture is like in Indian companies, and then do my best to conform to that. If I didn't believe I'd feel comfortable in that environment, then I wouldn't take the job. I would expect an Indian working at an American company to do the same.
I get that it can be difficult, and that some of these cultural things aren't just company culture, but are deeply ingrained, real cultural differences between people of different backgrounds.
Having said all that, I do think a US manager who hires reports from India (or from any other country with a different culture than the US) should be aware of what cultural differences exist, and try to meet their employees in the middle as much as they can.
I do agree with the grandparent, though, that I don't want to work with people who are "obedient", at least in the way I'm guessing the great-grandparent meant (perhaps I'm inferring the meaning incorrectly, though). I agree that I want people who won't just do what management says, and will instead apply critical thinking to the work they get assigned, and question things that don't make sense.
I remember reading about a team (I think in Japan) which had a "brash foreigner." If someone noticed something, they'd mention it to the foreigner, who would bring it up with higher ups. Everybody won. Problems got fixed, the foreigner was safe because they "didn't know better," and their coworkers felt safe.
FYI, if you want that job and don't happen to be in Japan, this is exactly what consultants are hired for in many cases: To be a blunt voice of reason in an environment which isn't able to listen to itself.
I've many times been hired in companies to say things employees didn't have the political clout to say out loud. If anything goes wrong, or someone isn't happy, I'm the fall guy.
Maybe it is time to get a new job. These days there is a big shortage of tech talent and deserving candidates can get very good pay in India. The typical trick is to apply for and interview to as many companies as you can. Get a good offer and put in your papers. Given that most companies have a 2-3 month notice period, once you are on notice, you can continue applying for jobs and shop around.
The funded startups in India are paying very good money to their staff. Even somewhat junior resources with 4-5 years of experience can get in excess of 50l inr per anum, which is roughly 65k usd in cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore & Gurgaon.
To add - The 'notice' is a nicety. AFAIK, most employer-employee contracts in the US are at-will where either party can cancel the contract and part ways at any time for any reason.
In Germany, most contracts (and any regular job has a contract) say something like 1 month notice for the first six months on both the employer and employee’s side, and 3 months for the employee after that trial period, and possibly longer for the employer after you’ve been around for several years.
My colleagues were shocked when I confirmed that offering more than two weeks’ notice in the US is super nice to your employer, and two weeks is not considered unprofessional.
Typically 3 months these days in India. Used to be 1 month in past, but over the years, all the IT outsourcing firms have started using 3 months notice.
A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while still having a good quality of life.
So comparing your salary to American workers doesn't really say anything about whether or not you're "underpaid", but it's how your salary compares to others in your area. If you just want to earn more money, you could move to the USA, but there's a cost associated with that (even ignoring the difficulty in getting a work visa) and you may find that your "1/4 salary" is worth more at home that it is in the USA.|
There are certainly a lot of employees that have moved away from the SF Bay Area to take a job in an area with a lower cost of living and even though they make significiantly less money, they still have a better quality of life (in particular, they can afford a house)
I learned exactly thanks to this that the concept of "fairness" doesn't exist when discussing salaries, and it's all up to the market which is moral-less:
If two people are doing the same job and giving the company $X profit, it's only fair that they are being paid the same regardless of where they live. Think optimizing a marketing campaign that changes monthly revenue from $10M to $30M, both people should be compensated similarly since they are bringing the same profit to the company.
But also if two people are doing the same job, it's fair they are compensated the same amount of $, regardless of whether one produces $X and another $Y depending on the company situation or their cost of living. Think optimizing the same program to run in 0.1s instead of 1s, assuming everything is the same, for Google that's worth millions but for your neighbor it's worth hundreds of $, but both are gonna pay you 10h * your hourly rate.
Those two examples are vastly incompatible; companies will of course insist that they pay you based on your expenses, while workers based on how they help the company, but in the end there's a contradiction, and since they cannot both be right they must both be wrong. The "right" solution is that they'll pay you based on the market, how much they think you are worth, your experience, your negotiating abilities, etc.
> A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while still having a good quality of life.
Maybe a good quality of life compared to other people from the same area... but nowhere even close to that of an American worker.
No idea where you got that "1/4 salary is worth more at home" from, when in my experience I used to be able to feed myself with 10 GBP/week on average in UK, now I'm spending close to 15 GBP/week in Moldova. Tech/computers/phones are about twice as expensive here, used cars ~10 times more expensive at the lower-end, mid/high-end about the same (at least you don't have to spend crazy amounts of money on parts since getting the MOT equiv here is much easier, so you can fix your car with whatever hammer and lattice from your neighbor's garage..)
Utilites about the same. Rent is cheaper, since most people live with their families overcrowded in tiny appartments...
The cost of "living" is higher, most people just don't know how poor people live. Most people can't even imagine eating ten pounds a week...
Maybe a good quality of life compared to other people from the same area... but nowhere even close to that of an American worker.
If you want the same quality of life as an American worker, the best way to achieve it is to be an American worker since you can always pick and choose things that are objectively "worse" in any arbitrary country. For example, you cite the high cost of cars as an example of why a country has a worse quality of life, but others may point to American car dependence as worse for their quality of life.
No idea where you got that "1/4 salary is worth more at home" from
Probably because that's not what I said. I said "you may find that your "1/4 salary" is worth more at home that it is in the USA.", Obviously I didn't mean that to mean in all situations. I wouldn't expect that someone living on £10/week in the UK would be able to live comfortably on £2.50/week in any arbitrary country
I have a friend that took advantage of COVID work from home to move to Indonesia (where his wife is from) - he said they pay less for all costs of living than he did just on their apartment in the SF Bay Area. He's still drawing his Bay Area salary, but is not going back to the office, when return to office becomes mandatory, he'll just quit and retire where he is. He feels that he has a far superior quality of life there. It's not the same as Bay Area life, but far more relaxing.
> A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while still having a good quality of life.
It has nothing to do with CoL and everything to do with a company paying what they think is competitive with the other options you have.
I live somewhere with a higher CoL than the states. American companies open branches here, and pay much lower, local salaries.
Thinking it has anything to do with CoL is pure "Just World" fallacy.
> A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while still having a good quality of life
Nope, the justification is just “they can be paid less”. The rest is irrelevant.
This is a contentious point especially for software engineering jobs as the salary is supposed to be based on performance as there is no obvious benefit to being in the same geographic location.
This is happening now too, as many high paying jobs are coming on India and other parts of the world through remote work. Eventually I believe your cost of living will have no impact on the salary you get.
These days, equavalent salaries in india are between 1/4th to 1/2 of equavalent american or uk salary for the same job. Adjusting for cost of living is a bit tricky as there are many things which are cheaper in India, but many things that a sw developer may want to buy are not so. In general electronic items are a bit more expensive in India, but things like rent, cost of food, clothing, cost of a basic car are lesser here in India. OTOH, mostly it is not apples to apples comparison. e.g. you can get cars for 5-8000 usd here in India, but those cars would most likely be illegal to sell in the US. When the manufacturers sell the same exact model here in India, the prices are a lot higher.
So if OP says that they get 1/4th of the salary that people from US get for same role, then I feel that he is most likely underpaid.
Mostly will not pass safety or minimum equipment standards. Renault was known to sell cars in India with airbags that were inferior to what they supplied elsewhere. Indian emission laws are fairly strict but based on euro standards, so most cars should pass non ca emissions test.
30k usd maps to 2.2million inr. Which is the kind of pay a quality junior employee with 3-4 years of experience can get in a quality firm. There has been an explosion in tech salaries in the last 4-5 years and these days most companies are finding it tough to fill up their positions. Quality resources can easily get 50% of what a equavalent role would get them in the US.
I got paid 15% less to transfer from one city to another 100 miles away. You get paid based on where you live, unfortunately.
Although 1/4th sounds a bit extreme for India. My understanding is that FAANG is paying more than half - and considering the cost of living - I know a lot of people that willingly took gigantic pay cuts to transfer back to India.
I mean - for one - ~45% of your income goes straight to tax in CA - in India IIUC it's 20%.
If you are trying to prove anything to your managers - it's a waste of time. If your peers are happy with you - it's all that matters. Looks like it got professional work ethics and it's something to be proud of. Having worked onshore, offshore, remotely - I don't think there is any difference really.
There is a whole community about this called Overemployed [0]. Their reddit posts are quite entertaining, like this guy who works 5 jobs and is making 1.2 million a year [1].
I'm in their Discord and people actually do have multiple jobs, they're usually just not as high paying such that two jobs at random companies will equal big tech company compensation, so it's often not worth it when you can just join big tech.
Well, assuming you have the skills and time to grind Leetcode, the two jobs might also be easier than big tech jobs, and having multiple jobs gives some security if you're ever fired.
> I'll caution people to take this (and the rest of Reddit) with a huge grain of salt. Subreddits like this one are almost always just creative writing.
Time to get creative with our time and careers, as long as the skill is transferable, and health is manageable. That said, 5 jobs sound too much, but who knows...
Former coworkers did this. One guy have 2 full time jobs and a project based contract job that didn’t always have active work. A former intern of mine’s coworker has 3 “full time”jobs.
Man, I am kinda shocked not so much that this is a thing but seems to be a bona fide _movement_.
It's highly interesting but my one job keeps me more than busy enough, thankyouverymuch.
Edit: A few other thoughts I had since hitting submit:
1. It feels to me like the most challenging part of living a double working life is making sure your mandatory meetings at each job don't conflict. I wonder how people get around that?
2. Many (most?) employers already have a "no moonlighting" clause, I wonder how long before there will there be explicit legal language stating you cannot have this full time job plus another full time job?
3. I believe there are a few places in the tax code where there is a difference between having a full-time job and a part-time job, are there any areas where you would have to lie to the govt when you have multiple full-time jobs?
Gotta take the kid/spouse/mom to school/work/doctor? Schedule these essential appointments to best overlap with the other company's favorite meeting slot.
Additionally, I attend a number of meetings where I do not need to give any input. For many of those, who would know if I was simultaneously attending a similar meeting on a different laptop? You could even get fancy and have a pre-recorded version of yourself to play if you knew that you had to engage with company A but merely attend company B's meeting.
The only way I've seen this done in the real world requires the person to pick one primary job that always takes priority. The other job (or jobs) are targeted at companies that go out of their way to be super "nice" such that they won't question someone being constantly unavailable.
Without giving too many specifics away, the one case I discovered was with a person who claimed to be dealing with some personal/health related issues that required us to be flexible with their schedule. If I'm being honest, it worked on us for a while because we're sympathetic, but eventually the underperformance crosses the line into something that requires medical leave / short-term disability, at which point they gave up.
3. I believe there are a few places in the tax code where there is a difference between having a full-time job and a part-time job, are there any areas where you would have to lie to the govt when you have multiple full-time jobs?
Assuming US-centric. The one that comes to mind is your W-4 for each employer. If you fill it out correctly, it will be a big red flag to your employer. If you pretend like you only have the one job, it could potentially land you in trouble with the IRS as there will be nowhere near enough tax withheld. You might get away with it, anyway, as long as you paid taxes in full and on time, but you might have to pay taxes in installments. They don't like you to owe too much at the end of the year.
I don't think the W4 is really much of a red flag. Someone with two jobs won't look significantly different from someone who has a high-earning spouse. Both will need to add additional withholdings to avoid underpayment.
He thought he was pretty good at his job and took a second job. His coworkers (included me) felt like he was slimy and was not good at his job.
Everyone was suspicious of the dude and finally one day his boss’s boss called him for an emergency, and he said the company name while answering his phone… the other company he worked for.
Company fired him, told the other company, and threatened to sue him. He paid back a good chunk of his recent salary (they didn’t need the money I suspect wanted to make an example).
I thought your comment was familiar [0]. Yes, it seems there's always a risk involved. Better to simply be a contractor and work your own hours, and if a client gets mad, you can easily say you were working for another client during those hours.
Some companies will say no but it seems plausible someone could find a way to transition someone to a contract type situation if they really are valuable.
Yeah there is a lot of imaginary stories obviously. But at the same time as a contractor you could always work with multiple clients, not sure why it comes as a surprise in 2021. A full-time employee for 2 companies? Bullshit. Not a sustainable model.
“Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.”
It’s not only remote people. I have seen multiple people at my company who are basically incompetent or lazy and produce nothing of value or even negative output. Some of them get let go after years and some of them get promoted into management.
Having a pleasant demeanor can get you very far without doing any work.
My coworkers and I have a term for those that are providing no value, but seemingly impossible to remove. The "barnacles" are ever present and likely making more money than you. Such is life.
When I worked at an arcade, one the cleaning crew was well known to also be hired, for the same shift times, at the movie theater across the way. He would dash between the two (in the same all black uniform) just enough nobody noticed him missing.
I know a guy who's actively interviewing to take on a second remote job while keeping his first. He has no plans to make either party aware that he has other employment.
His argument is that at his current job he can get all of his assigned work done in 10-20 hours a week (though he doesn't share with them that he's basically only working part time) so he has plenty of time to take on a second job where he also expects to get his daily work done in just a few hours a day.
I don't have an issue with it IF both parties are aware that he's only working a few hours a day but are happy with what he's getting done. It's the inevitable lies when there are conflicting meetings, etc. that bother me.
I agree that the conflicting meetings bit could be tricky, but I don't think he has a moral obligation to inform either company of what's going on, assuming one company's work doesn't interfere with the assigned work from the other. Also I would hope that the two companies he ends up working at aren't even remotely in competition with each other, because that would be unethical.
If both companies are happy with the guy's work output, then he is fulfilling the terms of his employment, at least in spirit and morally/ethically.
(I'm aware that some companies include in their employment papers a clause that states that employees won't take on other employment. I believe I've signed such a thing at my current job. But I personally consider such clauses to be unethical in the first place, and would feel no qualms violating that if I was in a position to want to do so. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure nearly all salaried jobs will stipulate something like that, so it's not like people can vote with their feet.)
I would personally find this sort of arrangement to be pretty stressful, and wouldn't do it, but if someone wants to give it a go, more power to them.
> but I don't think he has a moral obligation to inform either company of what's going on, assuming one company's work doesn't interfere with the assigned work from the other.
I strongly disagree. When you are hired as a full-time employee, the expectation is that you are giving your full 8 hours work day (or whatever) to the company in exchange for a paycheck. Otherwise, you are extracting full value from the company while they are getting half (or worse) value from you.
There are lots of people with a "screw everyone else, I got mine" attitude who don't see anything wrong with lying to your employer about how you are spending your time. I lump these people in with people who justify various forms of stealing with the rationale that it doesn't _really_ hurt the victim since some insurance comapany pays for the loss anyway. It demonstrates a severe lack of integrity. I would never want to work with or associate anyone like that.
I do however believe that "no moonlighting" clauses in employment contracts should be illegal. I ought to be able to use my skills to make extra money in my free time, as long is there is no apparent conflict of interest present (e.g. moonlighting for a competitor).
When an HR manager boasts to you about how they used a downturn to screw your colleagues' hourly rate down by 10% without reducing their charge-out rate, your ethical stance re: dealing with your employer may change...
Exactly. I admire and agree with the ethical stances being defended in this thread, but people should know that it is very rare for those feelings to be reciprocated. As long as you know that, work in a manner that lets you live with yourself, and don’t expect to be rewarded.
> When you are hired as a full-time employee, the expectation is that you are giving your full 8 hours work day (or whatever) to the company in exchange for a paycheck.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Another interpretation of being hired as a salaried employee might be "they get the work done that they were assigned, in a satisfactory manner, and are able to respond during regular work hours when needed". If someone can hold two jobs and fulfill that, then why is that a problem?
> There are lots of people with a "screw everyone else, I got mine" attitude
But if they're getting their assigned work done, doing a good job, and delivering on time, how are they screwing anyone else?
> ... who don't see anything wrong with lying to your employer about how you are spending your time.
Why are employers naturally entitled to a complete picture of how employees spend their time? Again, as long as the work gets done, and done well, and on time.
The thing that bothers me is that there's the implication here that the employee should voluntarily take on more and more work to fill those 40 hours a week. And in some orgs, where "work" isn't very well defined, that makes sense. You might just have a grab-bag of tickets that will take years to complete, and, sure, only working on those for 4 hours a day instead of 8 would be cheating. But in places where they say "here are the 10 work items we need you to complete, and they need to be done in 4 weeks"... if you can finish them in 2 weeks, why should you be obligated to say "hey, give me more work"?
Ultimately you should make sure the company is happy with your work product, and the pace at which it is delivered. A contracting arrangement may fit this whole situation better, but because we live in a stupid world, contractors (in the US) usually don't get basic things like health insurance. And it's usually a policy not to give contractors equity. At some places contractors don't even get invited to things like the company holiday party. It's weird to create these two different classes of workers like that. There's no reason to "punsish" workers for doing something different than the standard 9-to-5.
> It demonstrates a severe lack of integrity. I would never want to work with or associate anyone like that.
I'm sympathetic to this point of view, and mostly agree with it. But I think there's an inherent problem here: the employer-employee relationship will always have a huge power imbalance that favors the employer. I'm very torn. But I just don't think I see it as an issue of integrity to show loyalty to an entity that will not show you loyalty in return. Unfortunately, real people (manager, teammates, etc.) become extensions of that entity. You can't deal with them both as people (where I agree you should deal with integrity) and as extensions of the employer (where I think the obligation is weaker) at the same time. That is, you can't tell your manager "hey, I'm telling you the human being I respect that I'm violating my employment agreement and am taking a second full-time job, but I want you as an agent of our employer to pretend you didn't hear that".
> I do however believe that "no moonlighting" clauses in employment contracts should be illegal. I ought to be able to use my skills to make extra money in my free time, as long is there is no apparent conflict of interest present (e.g. moonlighting for a competitor).
Completely agreed here. Though this does make me question where the line is between "moonlighting" and "doing something bad". I think it's obvious to say that taking a contract job where hours aren't specified, and work is done outside of normal work hours, is moonlighting. But I'm not so sure that taking another full-time job and mixing work hours between the two companies is inherently different. It's not exactly the same thing, to be sure.
From experience, if you can take on more work, you will do so until you can't anymore. 2 jobs was fine for me, 3 is too much and some clients felt the heat. I always prioritized the ones that were most burning, technically. Undeserved flak is easy to remove.
> I don't think that's necessarily true. Another interpretation of being hired as a salaried employee might be "they get the work done that they were assigned, in a satisfactory manner, and are able to respond during regular work hours when needed". If someone can hold two jobs and fulfill that, then why is that a problem?
If that's true, then there shouldn't be any concern about sharing with them that you're working another job at the same time.
Like I said, I don't have a problem with it if each employer is aware and is fine with the situation. IMO the ethical question is if you are lying to one or both parties.
>Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.
Probably the vast majority of companies! If you ever get an employee like this as a direct report and try to do something about it, the process is incredibly draining and shitty. Easily the worst I've felt about work in my career (so far!). I see why people try to ignore the issue, but it also feels pretty bad having your other team members constantly pick up the slack around a non-performing team member.
The irony of this is what does a business do. It tries to find a way to efficiently serve multiple customers, keeping them happy, giving them value etc. In order to make more money than you would make by serving a single customer. Look at is as more of a scrap on the blurred business/employee lines, as much as a moral outrage or failing. Often a job is "we want you to survive but not fly, .... so that we can".
> or maybe they're just trying to travel the world and do a "four hour workweek" thing where they answer e-mails once a day and phone in a couple hours of work at key times during the week.
I’ve seen it work exactly once.
The guy was absolutely brilliant, however. And a great communicator. But everything had to be done asynchronously for the most part, except a few slots where he was guaranteed to have good network and be able to hop on a conference call. He was also a performance advocate, since everything had to work great on his laptop with poor network and contributed several patches to make the dev experience better. He was a stellar communicator with emails and knew the codebase really well and since he responded in batch he gave a lot of context in his responses (because he wouldn’t often know what the response would be for another day or two).
I think the key thing here is that even though he was placing a burden on his employer and teammates, the arrangement was well understood by both parties, and the employer agreed to accept it.
If someone wants to do something non-traditional and not inform the company about it, then the onus is on the employee to make sure their "odd" work habits don't impact others negatively.
> Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.
I can't imagine it's much worse than it was in the before-times. Wally has always been able to skate along with a certain amount of meeting-attending.
I worked for a computer security company once, it was my first real programming job and I had no experience with the kind of crazy stuff that goes on with hiring, I was really naive and had no clue that certain kinds of people existed in the workforce.
So one day my boss (CTO) calls me up and says “Hey, we are hiring another Windows guy, can you do a quick interview and check him out?” (I was the only Windows dev at the time) So they send me the guy’s resume and he’s a PhD in Electrical Engineering. I feel really nervous about having to interview the guy because he had a PhD, but I figured other people had already checked him out so I meet with him and just have kind of a softball interview, not going into a technical deep dive or anything like that. He seems alright and has a ton of experience, so I figured what the hell.
Well about a month later my boss calls me again and he’s like “Hey, we’ve been having some concerns about John Doe, can you check in on him and see how he’s doing?”
So I go over to John Doe’s office and sit down with him and talk about what he’s been doing. He shows me that he’s having trouble with some things that are so basic that it’s almost like he’s never even seen a Windows machine, much less done any programming on one; and I’m not exaggerating, it was really that bad!
Long story short, they let him go. A few days after, I’m in the break room and one of the Unix guys walks in. He asks me how things are going and I’m like “Well, not so good, we’re back to just one Windows developer because they had to let the new guy go.” He says “Who was that?” So I tell him “this guy John Doe…” and before I can go any further he exclaims “Good God! Not THE John Doe?!?” Apparently this guy was a legend in the IT community in the city - he would fake resumes and get hired for as long as he could run the scam.
Yes, but remember in the scenario you're replying to, you cannot tell if they've done the work. So assigning to the specialist you mention might as well mean tossing the job requests into the bin.
> Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.
There are corporations that over-hire and often provide no work at all for weeks or months, but they require that worker is always on stand-by in case there is a surge. I know full-time workers who throughout an entire year maybe done one or two small PR-s, but when suddenly there is an issue needing solving and product teams have full capacity, these people save the day. They are sometimes also utilised for pairing, when given product team members have no spare capacity.
From someone not knowing this, they indeed may seem like deadbeat employees, but the key is - they have to be always available during work hours even if no one contacts them for weeks.
Hmmmmm, it's sort of like renting an apartment with one more room than you actually need so you have a place to put extra stuff, or you can have a guest over. Personally, I would go absolutely crazy if I did nothing at my job, even if it was remote, for weeks on end.
What you described can just as easily be done on-site. Remote work merely lets these people actually do something they might enjoy instead of sitting in a chair and pretending to work for 8 hours. I’ve met people likely this and they’d rather pretend to be busy than actually do something.
I think the point was that many on-site employees get their work done just fine, but spend half of their in-office hours goofing off on Facebook or reading HN or whatever. So in principle that "wasted" time (assuming it is indeed a waste) could be put to use for a different company, with double the compensation. Obviously there are severe logistical issues if you're on-site!
> They might already have a full-time job or other remote jobs
Bingo. That was my first thought in this. Especially given how quickly they gave the job up.
They paid someone to interview for them, collected wages for the period they were employed, and then went on to the next opportunity.
Sadly, there is nothing in the story to discourage the person from doing it again. And at most companies, there would be enough egg on HR's face for letting this happen that I'd imagine everyone would quietly sweep it under the rug.
There is no company out there that stays in business long paying their employees the full amount of the value they would generate if they were really working full+ time, so why should those employees do that unless they happen to enjoy it or it advances their own goals? That's just whipping yourself so massa doesn't have to
I expect the number of employees taking advantage of companies pales into insignificance when compared to the number of companies taking advantage of employees
So what should I do when I realize that a lot of my coworkers are HIGHLY inefficient? And I can do their work in a lower amount of time? And I have a ceiling on how much I can earn? I just go looking elsewhere in parallel.
OR - I build a startup. But I hate the buisiness ethos.
>> Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.
Nearly all of them. And it's why managers who get burned just a single time hate the idea of remote work. It's not about office rent or anything else that gets bandied about here; it's the fact that a very small but significant number of remote workers are grifters and create a ton of negative emotion (out of sight out of mind) for co-workers and managers.
A ton of remote work is obviously the future, but every single negative case like this with legacy managers sets it back orders of magnitude more than the successes it generates. So it goes with everything new.
Large corporations can have a lot of hysteresis. Once someone is hired, it can be quite difficult to fire them.
Even the "90-day probationary" periods are not really useful. I think the only thing that they do, is if the employee quits before the 90 days are up, then they have to pay the company back for all the expenses incurred by the company (I had this happen to someone we hired. They were not expecting that. Too bad. They were actually very good, and dumped us for a job in a location they preferred. I felt bad about that. I actually didn't hold any rancor towards them).
I suspect startups can be a lot more likely to be able to give someone the boot in an efficacious manner.
It's totally legal, in New York. I doubt that it covers interviewing expenses. I think it only covers stuff that happened after they signed the offer.
And I really don't appreciate being dinged for the actions of my corporation. I was not involved at all in that part of things, and only heard about it afterwards. I had many disagreements with our HR department, which could be rapacious. However, it was run by highly skilled and experienced lawyers, and everything they did was legal (if not always what I considered ethical; but I have high ethical standards).
Collecting paychecks: there is a story that I suspect is centuries old, but which I heard attached to John XXIII. Supposedly somebody asked him how many people worked at the Vatican, and he answered, Maybe one out of three.
Worked at a place hired one of those. He scheduled meetings, then cancelled them at the last minute. Never accomplished a single task. Demanded a good reference and he would go get another job elsewhere - essentially extorted the reference.
I guess some folks are sociopaths, and do whatever it takes to live well.
Practices like this are hilariously common in the industry.
Right out of college I accepted a job offer at a small consulting company on the east coast. They promised they would give me free housing at their luxury apartment for the first few months and give me all the training I need to excel in areas of my interest. I flew across the country and found out the whole thing is not as advertised. Their luxury apartment had piles of unwashed dishes and flies in the kitchen and piss on the bathroom floor. They had bunk beds in each room and I slept with three other dudes from wildly different backgrounds. My first night, this guy from Turkey assured me that everything is going to be fine, that he was shaking in fear for the first couple nights but he soon learned that if you work with them, they get you what you need. At the same time, another guy from Chicago was telling me how I need to look out for myself because the company likes to steal money from your paychecks.
The next day, I learned that "working with them" meant going through their "resume revision" process. Turns out, there was a network of consulting companies like this one, each creating fake experiences for one another. Fresh grads who clearly have never coded anything of significance became senior engineers with 5 years of experience. The resulting resumes looked real stacked, filled with keywords that recruiters love. Furthermore, during live interviews, they actually placed someone with actual technical knowledge behind the laptop camera to basically write out all the answers on the whiteboard while the candidates read out the answers.
Some of the people there loved talking about how so and so got placed at prestigious companies and became hugely successful in their career. Most of them knew what they were doing wasn't the most ethical thing to do, but not many complained given their visa status. Also, they were actually really grateful to get a developer job that pays ~$40k. They were just regular people.
I personally didn't need visa support, and I had the luxury of being able to fall back on my parents. So about a week after I flew over, I gathered my things and left. It was an interesting experience overall, one I'm glad I could experience.
My 2c for interviewing: always look up key phrases you see on resumes and see if identical copies show up. It's usually a giveaway sign.
> They promised they would give me free housing at their luxury apartment for the first few months and give me all the training I need to excel in areas of my interest
My training at a consultancy company, first job out of college, was like this but actually legit. Nice hotel with a free breakfast, transportation to their facility, and actual (paid) training on a few things, lasting a month. At the end I was put on a client to work for. Pretty good salary for a first job too.
So if a company offers this stuff, it's not necessarily a red flag, just do some research on them. It can be a great springboard if you don't have any better offers.
yeah that was what it was like with my first job. Subsidiary of Accenture. Got set up in a hotel, had some training (that was kind of useless but whatever).
But I got so many spam emails from companies that sounded like a nightmare. Crappy corporate housing, getting sent anywhere, probably shady
I work for a F100 company. We have some consulting companies working for us, who themselves sometimes subcontract contracts, to subcontracting companies who sometimes themselves subcontract contracts.
One consultant (US citizen) checked the boxes of your situation. Young, graduated college recently, a sub-contracting company presents him as senior even though he had little or negligible experience before. They had him in a hotel being billed to the F100, and then later at (crummy) corporate housing when the contract was not renewed.
Another consultant (also a US citizen) was in a similar boat, but never in corporate housing, for another sub-contractor sub-contractor. He was older, but also pretty junior - new to programming - although they presented him as senior. He had to sign all of these things about how much he would owe the sub-contractor under various circumstances. Technically he signed something that he would owe them a lot of money for "training" if the contract was not renewed, but when he was let go they did not pursue it - why sue to try to get blood from a stone? He also had mandatory meetings at all three companies and was on the phone all of the time with the consulting companies after the regular work.
Both contractors did one three month contract and were not renewed.
I also had to sign a document saying I would end up owing the company money if I left without completing their "training" and/or basically trying my best to get placed. FWIW, I told them it would be difficult as a fresh grad to cough up that much money, and that the arrangements were not exactly as advertised. They tried to add me on linkedin, but I did not accept the request for obvious reasons. They did not pursue.
An offer like that would seem incredibly suspicious to me. You want to pay all of this money to train me right out of school? Why not just hire someone with the right experience? Maybe it's my imposter syndrome speaking but it all feels off. I'm passively looking for new jobs but I always keep my eye out for things that sound too good to be true. If I'm not paying for training or education, then someone else is footing the bill and it's important to consider why. Is this new training making me more productive or is it just to solely make the company more money because they can now claim I'm an expert? I wouldn't want to be oversold to customers as an expert on something I just learned about just as much as I wouldn't want to be placed in a junior role for something I'm really good at.
I would find it suspicious as well, but consider this: People who are great at their job are hard to find and expensive. People who will eventually be great at their job are a lot, lot cheaper, though still hard to find. If you can hire someone before they realize how good they will be, you can save a lot of money and fill a position immediately.
I haven't actually figured out how to find those people, though I have hired at least 2 of them... And hired a few others that looked like they might be, but weren't. (A third coder comes to mind that ended up not working out, but I think we made mistakes and they got in their own head. I think they would have been great otherwise, hence 'at least 2'.)
Constant stream of college grads brought in as interns. Just select the hungry ones with hustle and indoctrinate them. This is a typical MO for large established corporations.
I work for a smaller company that typically only has 1 job opening at a time, and low turnover. I agree that big corps do what you said and hope for the best, but I don't think it's a valid strategy for a small company.
Especially since letting people go is emotionally damaging, even when they are incompetent. If they have barely enough skill to do the job, my ethics wouldn't let me condone firing them.
>You want to pay all of this money to train me right out of school?
Almost certainly less common today. But extended training for new hires did (and I assume in some places) does happen. I think IBM used to do it for sales and once upon a time I interviewed with an oilfield services firm that started out with some fairly lengthy training on their specialized equipment.
SAP has (or at least had, back in '98) a policy where the first 3 months after being hired, you'd be entering a full-time training program: during this time, you would get your full salary paid and receive a free set of training courses 9-5; people usually just checked emails before and after, so this wasn't really on top of another job. The process got you certified in SAP basis, ABAP, effective teamwork and other modules.
After that training, we would maintain monthly lunches with our training group and exchange anecdotes about our respective departments. The company benefitted enormously in the sense that employees that started at the same time, but would work for different departments, already got a wide network across different functions and departments from the beginning, something that normally takes decades to build, and employees already had valuable contacts and information that they could task about with their co-workers in their own departments.
Back in the late 60s/70s, when I was in university, I knew a bunch of IBMers (those were the days when your System/360-67 came with a flock of IBM staff). The standard for onboarding was that during the first 6 months, a new hire was flown here and there for courses. The goal was to make them feel valued as an IBMer, so that they'd want to stay forever.
That sort of thing probably made more sense when it wasn't at all uncommon for people to stay with the company for a decade or decades. I know a number of people at IBM with tenures in the 25 to 30 year range.
Union Pacific does this, at least as recently as a few years ago. Software developers are hired straight out of college and go through months of training before they get shown any actual work.
I don't think it's as much about expertise as "CS college graduates don't know how to make software"
TSMC recently tried to poach me & offered paid on-site training in Taiwan before heading back to the States for the actual position. I reckon it's the modern job-hop game that killed this phenomenon outside of "lifer" companies.
Plenty of more legit companies, including big tech, have training periods for new hires. It's not something to be worried about in and of itself, though it's always a good idea to do your research when your gut says something is off. I was naive and definitely in need of a job.
And people wonder why managers like hiring in person workers?
It's not that you can't fake some stuff like this in person, but it's both harder (more expensive) and a lot more obvious.
This is a pretty uncommon scenario, though. Making everyone work on-site on the off-chance that someone will fake an interview seems like a severe over-reaction.
A strategy I've seen is that you can make only the new hires work on-site for their first year or so. Once they've proven themselves in their first year, they can start working remotely.
I've seen this strategy adapted for remote. A friend of mine started using IntelliJ's Code With Me for remote pair programming sessions.
I guess it's possible that if the new hire isn't legit, they might send a better person, but since those sessions were quite regular, plus they were also doing "remote stand-ups", it would be tougher to always be able to send the same replacement and / or not get caught.
Or just require that the person interviewing holds their ID up to the camera, and then do the same on their first day of work. I mean, I assume HR requires some form of ID when setting things up anyway.
> but not many complained given their visa status. Also, they were actually really grateful to get a developer job that pays ~$40k. They were just regular people.
That’s a typical bodyshop [0]. There’s a good chance some of your “colleagues” were using student visa extensions (that might be fraudulent as well, it’s a well known practice [1] [2]) to gain enough “experience” that they could pass as a specialty occupation and claim H1B status. Or just had this consulting shop file 3-4 applications per seat they planned to fill out so that they could game the quota (kicking out legitimate applicants that aren’t trying to game the system).
Thankfully, the previous administration started issuing more RFEs and catching fraudulent applicants [3].
I was actually rather fascinated by it too, so once I figured out what was going on, I started meeting people in the company specifically to ask them about their experiences. I probably have my notes saved on some USB drive somewhere rotting away. There is one comment that I still remember pretty well: "The Chinese do it, the Indians do it, so why shouldn't I do it? The game is rigged."
To this day, that company was the most diverse environment I've been a part of. It had people of all races from all over the world, and I got the sense that these guys generally cared for each other.
I didn't bother writing about it in more detail because most of my friends didn't seem very interested and I wasn't sure where I could share the story. Maybe I will go ahead and do it though.
It's been many years since this happened and I'm doing rather well, thanks for asking.
Earlier this year, I was asked to interview a man who was procured through a remote-staffing firm. He was based in Southeast Asia, and on his resume it looked like he met all of the competencies we needed -- including English proficiency.
But on the call, I noticed that whenever I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the question, then turn his video back on.
Eventually, I cut the call short and messaged the guy from the remote-staffing firm who had set up the interview to ask about this bizarre behavior.
An investigation determined that the man was using a translator and really didn't speak any English whatsoever.
I have no idea how he expected to be able to do the job if he had been hired, but I guess he thought it was worth a shot.
Something like this happened to me years ago before video interviews. On phone interviews people would pause before every question, mute their line, then unmute and answer. This was odd because it happened on about 25% of the calls.
A few times they forgot to unmute and we heard multiple voices coaching them in English and the local language.
The offshore partner had someone sit in the interview to coach them with the proper answers.
Oddly we didn’t change the offshore partner but management figured out some way that the partner stopped doing this. Or at least had interviewers answer fast enough with no lag.
There are a lot of gullible rural bumpkins out there. It is entirely possible that some recruiter made this guy do this, under the condition that once he is accepted to the job, he will have to pay 1 / 2/ x months of salary to the recruiter.
The recruiter takes the money and disappears. The bumpkin will struggle for a bit in the job and then be let go or resign.
However, he will add this to his resume, have the salary and joining letter as proof and try to get other jobs.
Usually, these people do this so that their marriage prospects are better than their peers.
Reminds me of a senior tech lead candidate I interviewed a few months ago who was like "I don't know the answer, but can you give me a couple of minutes to sort on my thought?". Then very obviously started searching on internet (thinking he was hiding it well enough...).
The question was along the lines of "how do you typically protect your code against sql injections?" (in a language and framework agnostic context)
I had a similar experience early in the pandemic. I had to ask for the candidate to keep his video on.
The voice was much more enthusiastic than the person's demeanor and eventually it became obvious that he was trying to randomly mouth words in sync with the person talking (and presumably doing the coding) then blaming it on lag.
In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the team.
In short, they do it because it is profitable.
PS.. To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".
In the contract houses I've been in the vast majority of contracts were repeat business. A good contracting house won't pull this kind of thing because the company doesn't survive if they piss off clients. I'm out of that world now but can still talk about it.
The non-scammy way this happens is senior engineers are part of the interviews and requirements gathering. They do the design and estimation. They develop task and proof of concept code for junior engineers.
During the work the senior engineer almost never 100% on a single project. They are on three different projects in different stages: design/early development on one that just started, resource and mentor on a second that's been going a while, writing quote for a third, and initial sales contacts for multiple other.
Based on availability it might not be the same senior person at any step of the process.
It's hard to impossible to a give you the same person who was part of the initial contact because by the time you get teh PO approved they are already hip deep in something else.
I upvoted you because parts of that are absolutely always true. Some of it depends on the type of consulting contract, though. Some of them call for a dedicated team of X headcount for Y time, and if the consultancy subs people in and out of that team without sufficient cause that's a big red flag.
Good point. There's a whole bigger world of contracting that I never saw.
I should be absolutely clear that my experience has been in small contract engineering firms. All of them were less than 20 engineers total and large projects were 3 engineers at any one time.
I don't even understand how that happens. At one point I was a consulting pimp for my dad, and multiple parts of the contract required me to attest that he would be doing the work and if he had help he would be doing the majority of the work and if his time on the contract dropped below 50% of the total the contract would be cancelled and there would be penalties.
There was no way I could have switched him with someone else without paying penalties.
Contracts have to be upheld by a court, to mean anything. I could write in a contract that you will be required to hand me your testicles if you miss the deadline, that doesn't mean I will actually go to court to get them. A lot of companies write aggressive contracts and never actually bother to enforce them, since it would be more costly than what they might actually gain.
Legally, yes - But remember that those provisions are there because someone tried that in the past and so they added legal provisions against it. And remember that those legal provisions are hard to prove; What is 50% of the work? How would they know if he'd had another developer submitting code?
> To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".
And then when they apply to work at their next company, and that company wants to verify previous employment, the previous company that got screwed over is too worried about the possibility of getting sued to accuse the person of lying about who they were... so they'll just say "yes, Y worked here for 6 months".
I'll admit straight up when I fire someone I am usually so relieved if they leave peacefully that I don't just say they worked for me, I will usually even give a semi positive review of them. Not a glowing praise or anything of the sort, but usually a review saying how they're a good team player, they get along well with others, and other aspects highlighting mostly soft skills.
As I've indicated many times on here... most incompetent people are genuinely good, nice people who get along well with others and it's devastating to have to fire them, so when I do fire them it can soften the blow for them to leave some good words, give some positive feedback which allows them to leave on good terms.
That's good of you to do. I think it's pretty rare to be unable to say anything good about someone, and it nice to focus on those things when their future employment might be on the line.
And in the meantime if the consultancy kept the contract and delivered, it was on a successful project. The C- team had little or nothing to do with it being successful, barring maybe filling headcount until the A team finished another billable project. Bonus points if it's a publicly notable new initiative for the consulting client.
We had this happen, but it did not get all the way to being hired thankfully.
I got on a call to interview a candidate, and he didn't know anything. Like, hilariously unqualified, his knowledge level on software engineering was effectively zero. Fairly short call once we realized what the score was.
Immediately the recruiter calls me back (she was on the call as well) and started apologizing profusely. She said the guy on this call was definitely not the guy she screened on an earlier phone call.
Luckily we didn't get as far as hiring a fraud.
But I have to say, also, that this kind of incident is why I really love a good recruiter, and try to hold onto them if at all possible. We had one guy we worked with who had a nearly 100% success rate placing people with us. He didn't just phone screen randos, he had a pool of people that he cultivated, he interviewed them himself in depth. So when he made a recommendation, he knew it was a good fit, and he was right almost every time.
I once interviewed a person who couldn't answer a single question, not even the easiest ones. He would just say "I don't know, ask me the next question". A few weeks later I realized it was probably a plant that another candidate sent to collect the interview questions. And I think I even know who it was. We hired her, she wasn't very good writing code. But she answered all our questions perfectly, which only happened once before.
We interviewed a guy who had a great resume, seemed like a perfect fit on paper. I was pretty genuinely excited to interview him.
Start by asking him softball questions about his experience, can’t give a straight answer to any of it. Start asking some technical questions and everything we ask he knows little to nothing about. Finally I am getting fed up and I ask him “Why did you put all these things on your resume you know nothing about?”
The guy just deadpan replies “The recruiter told me to”. I don’t know if we worked with that recruiter again, but my boss who was also in the interview was none too pleased.
I tend to ask way too personal questions for that. I want to know their favourite project they worked on, and then I ask questions about that project. That's far more interesting than "test" questions, it gives me insight in what they like and how they work, and it's not as easily faked.
We once had a contractor who interviewed pretty well. After a while I noticed that it was impossible to have a technical discussion with him. He only took notes and never said much. I also noticed that he never delivered anything the same day. He took notes and then next morning it was done. I once told him to fix a simple bug NOW and had him sit next to me. He starred at the screen for several hours and did nothing. And not unsurprisingly it was done the next day. We came to the conclusion that he had a ghostwriter somewhere else who would do the actual work from the contractor’s notes.
Problem was that the ghostwriter was not a great dev either and wrote bad code. So we had to let him /them go. The contractor is now a principal developer/ team lead at another company……
I would have cut out the middleman and hired the ghostwriter. The guy that sat in our office was useless and probably made the majority of the money. I don't think he deserved to be paid.
I think the example parent gave was enough to answer that: if there was a critical issue that needed to be fixed in hours, this employee would have been unable to do it.
(Also agree with the sibling about it being good to know who you're giving access to your company's resources and private information. If someone is willing to lie about their skills and have someone else do their work overnight, what other sketchy things might they be doing without your knowledge?)
A long time ago, I was looking for a full time job and went to an interview. The guy picked his nose through the entire interview, which I thought was rather disrespectful, so when they offered the job I declined.
After that, answered an ad from a consulting company. After I'd signed their paperwork they said "we already have a client for you". Yep, the same nose-picker. But this time I would be paid 3x what the full time job would have paid.
I decided that was sufficient punishment for his rudeness and took the contract.
>Why companies dont value their current employees is beyond me.
It's because they take advantage of their current employees and get away with it. They could promote you regularly, or they could take the gamble that they'd save money and you'd stay put rather than uproot yourself and spend effort job searching (which is like taking on an additional part time job itself), and if you did uproot they'd just offer the same salary to someone else. They don't value institutional knowledge because they feel they've compartmentalized the jobs enough. Going from the mailroom to the C level sounds a lot more like a bad movie rather than something even remotely possible today.
this is a known short cut in consulting. Quit at your current firm, goto a competitor then come back 2 years later at a level up. Had you stayed at your current firm it may be 3-5 years to level up.
Former clerks are so valuable to firms not because they've gained some experience in their role as a clerk, but because they were that specific clerk for that judge and being a member of their staff they know how that person speaks and opines behind closed doors better than anyone.
Late ‘90s. Rapid growth, many interviews. Got used to taking CVs with a grain of salt. Had the best and worst interview experiences ever.
The best: really strong CV, older candidate, really poor English. Frustrating process, more for him than us, he is struggling so hard. Finally he stands up, grabs my pen and my colleague’s pad, and sketches DB schema. Uses the pen to point back and forth between the CV and the sketch. I’m more of a networking guy, I was lost pretty quick, but my colleague, one of my best hires, started leaning in, eyes widening, slow “wow” escaping his lips.
That guy ended up being another of my best hires. Communication was always a chore, results always through the roof. With the colleague from the interview and one other, he became one of my three developer archetypes in a much longer story.
Worst experience: different colleague (my test lead) and I interviewing another strong CV. We try and lead and shepherd, do everything we can to link the CV to what this person can do. Communication isn’t the issue, the CV is obviously doctored/bumpfed.
We’re running out of steam, trying to get the session to a minimum acceptable length, when I notice blood on my hands. I wonder how I cut myself and I am subtlety looking for the wound.
When I notice the open sore on their hand, the hand they shook. The hand attached to a body with some obvious hygiene issues (trust me).
I settle my hands, wind things up, have my colleague see them out, hop into the nearest coffee station, throw away my pen and notebook and basically scald my hands and mouth (I used to nibble my pen compulsively).
> That guy ended up being another of my best hires. Communication was always a chore, results always through the roof. With the colleague from the interview and one other, he became one of my three developer archetypes in a much longer story.
There needs to be a website that captures these types of war stories.
Had similar experience in 2017. We interviewed many candidates (10+) for the position, narrowed down to about 5 in the second round and decided to hire one. All over the phone. Took maybe 2 months. So when the guy shows up in the office my manager was like "Who are you? I never spoke with you.". We made some noise with HR and later Legal and he left right away, and the consulting company we went through had some conversations with the executives. From that point on we set some rules: require candidates to provide video feed, take screenshots, ideally record at least part of the interview, document every single question. Funny thing, had a very promising candidate for another position short time later but she kept refusing to turn on the camera, it was either broken, or connection was slow, or something else... So we rejected her because of that.
I believe there are some unofficial services that provide well spoken/knowledgeable professionals that will help you get hired, it's either directly through headhunting company or they might suggest (wink-wink) one for you.
> HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud.
Though at this point they all know John is committing fraud, they still decided only to approach this guy claiming a poor fit for his resignation.
I don't know why they do that. They have discussed a lot and considered many things. I am sure there are many reasons to do so. but do they just want John to go away and then try that same thing with another company?
It might be too strong to say this, but a failure to confront evil is a evil.
The phrase "walk softly and carry a big stick" comes to mind.
There's no need to go into that interview guns-blazing. Soft-balling the questions at first is likely to do the job. If it doesn't, they can still bring in the heavy artillery later.
This approach has worked very well for me in all kinds of adverse situations. Being nice and asking politely has resolved a lot of situations, and I can still fall back to being nasty if I have to. (And I might even find I was wrong before that point, and I can back off without losing face.)
For instance, returning a defective product at a store. I can simply tell them it doesn't seem to work. They can attempt to show me it does, they could take it back, or they could refuse. If they try it and it doesn't work, and still refuse (or just refuse), I can start demanding my money back. If they refuse that, I can call corporate or my credit card company.
If I start with corporate or my CC, I might still get what I want, but it's a lot more stressful and IMO less likely to work, even if only slightly. And there's no chance to fix the situation with another resolution than the one I chose. Sometimes there's a better way, and you just don't know.
The most they could reasonably do here is attempt to sue for fraud for lost time and salary paid. It's unlikely that they can bring a criminal fraud case, so they have to prove damages.
Damages in this case are probably
- Lost time interviewing
- Any salary paid
If they caught this on day 1, they just don't have enough damages to make this worth pursuing (aka - they lose far more money trying to actually bring a case than they would be just firing him immediately and eating the lost time).
Basically - why waste time on a small claims verdict against this guy for trivial amounts of money?
The courts aren't going to lock him up for this, and even if they win, he can still go right to the next company and try again.
This is the kind of thing that other professions attempt to solve with extra-legal associations and certifications (ex: a lawyer might be disbarred for this - an action taken by the bar association that revokes his attorney's license, making it impossible for him to practice in areas that require such a license).
But software really has no such guardrails in current society (both a blessing and a curse).
I don't really know what it is you'd prefer this company have done in this case.
Legal knows what they’re doing. Their entire purpose is ensuring the business is free from undue risk. Confronting this man as a liar could unravel a nice little bag of legal hurdles that end up with the company paying this person to settle X or Y claim.
Also, they confronted the evil, but the company had no reason to show their hand and they way they did it keeps them a bit safer from litigation.
If they terminate for fraud, they might be asked to prove it in some kind of wrongful termination claim, or risk being charged with libel or slander. Though the possibility might be remote, and the employer likely would prevail, the legal team and HR will not want to take any chance of having to spend time on that. They will want to take the lowest risk approach.
And don't overlook the possiblity of some kind of scam being attempted. Get a foot in the door, get fired, sue. Happens all the time with injury claims. Probably less likely since "at will" is the employment law in most places, but it's still safer to terminate without alleging any wrongdoing.
Same reason most former employers will only confirm dates of employment on a reference check. They typically won't comment on performance or reasons for termination, just to avoid any potential backwash.
It’s true, but if the incentive for the employer is just to terminate, and there is no other consequence, then there is no dis-incentive for the fraudulent employee to keep trying until they find someplace their deception is unnoticed.
Large organizations are generally risk adverse, and extremely process oriented. If they approach "John" wrong, there might create additional problems for the company.
You either believe there is objectively defined evil (good luck with getting everyone to agree to that) or you are effectively saying "failure to do what i want makes you evil" if you hold that evil is subjective.
Evil is a very strong term and implies you view at minimum the person as lesser than you and also infers you think they should be punished in some way.
They're running a business, not a police department/department of justice. How much do you think it would cost to ensure that John faced real consequences?
This used to happen to a company I was consulting at all the time. It was mostly in the context of hiring H1B workers from India. The company would interview "the ringer" in India - the guy was poised, articulate, knew the answers to all the questions etc. etc. But the guy who showed up didn't know anything, usually had difficulty with the language etc. This was pre-Zoom so it was all phone screens, making it much harder to be sure.
However, years later I was telling this story to a Wipro recruiter who said casually:
"Oh yeah, we call it the Hindu Switcheroo" (I kid you not)
India is derived from the river Indus. As in the land around and beyond the Indus. Hindus came later as a way to describe the people and religion of the people in the region. Now it refers to the religion alone and not the people.
My son reports working with a person who had always worked at the same company as his sister. Soon after hiring (both of) them, the sister changed to another company.
This guy's performance dropped to zero. He never finished another task. At lunch he often commented he had always enjoyed working with his sister, since he got lots of good ideas when they worked on the same projects.
My son's take: this guy had never had an original idea in his life, his sister had always propped him up since high school. And she had finally cut the apron strings. But the guy was so clueless, he never realized how little he could do and how his sister had essentially done his job his whole life.
It is simpler than that. Have someone sit opposite you with a mirrored screen and the audio feed going onto his headphones. He can then write the answers that appear on your screen or get shown on another screen around your camera so that you dont look like you are looking away. Spend a bit of time to act about trying to think up a solution, and you have a winning combo. Have seen many people pass online video proctored certification exams using this trick ;-)
Yes that would be simpler, but less fun in regards to the deception at hand.
I suppose a simpler-than-deep-fake method which would achieve the same level of deceptive-fun would be to have your identical twin do the interview for you.
It's not just a thing, for some crooter firms it's a business model.
Gonna name and shame here, there was an outfit that was once called Unbounded Solutions, then BrighterBrain. God knows if they're still around or what they're called now. Anyhoo, their whole deal was this: they offered free IT training and job placement, but there was a catch! Oh, boy, was there ever a catch. They would put you through 2 weeks of iOS programming training, and then have you sign a 2-year contract to be at their disposal to go to client sites. As part of this, they would make up a fake CV for you with fake experience and -- crucially -- a fake telephone number. When companies called to interview you, they would be directed to a call center in India where one of the call center drones would do the interview in your place. Only once they had passed the phone screen for you could you show up at the client site. They may have sent a fake you to the client site for the in-person bit as well, I'm not sure.
As part of the contract you sign, you had to agree to all of this. If you refused to sign, or tried to skip your contract before 2 years was up, you had to pay for the training they gave you which they valued at $20,000.
One of the scummiest things I'd ever seen or heard of in this industry.
Legally, probably not; effectively, yes! You need a good attorney to defend yourself against an entity like that, and as a (likely) kid fresh out of college who's hard up for cash (else why would you be singing with Unbounded/BrighterBrain/Enhance IT to begin with?) that's an attorney you can't afford. Your ass is gonna get creamed in court and you may end up paying their legal fees in addition to the original $20,000.
This is what the large Indian IT-outsourcing companies do at scale.
When they need to win the contract, they bring in bright and very qualified people to win the client-org over.
After the contract is won and the work begins, they replace them with completely unqualified staff, managed/whipped by moustache-wielding blue-shirts to read from support-scripts.
FWIW, this is not limited to Indian or IT companies. Many if not most consulting/banking/law companies have an "A-team" that gets trotted out to woo the customer, and as soon as the deal is sealed, the actual implementation is handed over to the Z-team of fresh grads.
That's not the same thing. The "completely unqualified staff" is not pretending to be the same persons as the "bright and very qualified people" who interviewed. There's no deception involved, just transparently bad business practices.
The IT outsourcing companies do this at scale, pretending to be something during interview - and then really being something completely different once the "job" is won. It is deception as a business model.
It is not the fault of the "unqualified staff" at all.
Anyway, that is my take on it. Feel free to have a different opinion.
I share your frustration at this horrible business practice. I disagree with your assessment that this practice is a secret. I don't think it's a secret. The largest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, actually published a long-form story on this exact subject after your comment was written: https://www.hs.fi/visio/art-2000008571439.html
Edit: to clarify, if the practice is not a secret, then it's not deceptive. If the client knows that the CVs on paper are not going to represent the workers who will be actually doing the work, then it's not deception. In order for it to be deception, the practice would have to be secret, surprising once revealed.
If the position is learnable from where their skillset is within a reasonable amount of time, they should learn up! I've been given plenty of positions that were above my abilities but that I could learn within a couple months.
There are a lot of types of people in the world, and one type is people who don't mind being bad at their jobs.
I remember when our company signed a contract with TCS. Our execs were very excited to get access to their “Center of Excellence” experts on some vendor products we were struggling with: LifeRay, AEM etc.
Anyway once the contract was signed they didn’t send anyone and we had to hire other contractors who were also not very good.
16 years ago I worked on a project with some people from TCS. The 3 on site were very good, and for a long time, I thought they were all the TCSers. Later I discovered there was also an entire off-shore team, and I only really found out because one of them somehow checked their "My Documents" folder into SVN.
My impression was that the good people they have are very good, but the bad people are barely competent enough to warm a chair.
I worked at the company where as a first filter we had a remote coding task (roughly 2- hours of implementing some simple data structure plus unit tests).
A candidate sent us a prefect solution indicating very good knowledge of Java, testing framework, clear thinking, good problem solving etc.
When the candidate came for the live interview she was absolutely shocked that we asked her coding questions again. "But I have already did the coding task!". It was very clear that she didn't know how to write a line of code if her life depended on it. I wonder what was her plan if she got hired by mistake.
We "hired" a DBA after a really good remote interview (this was in 2017). Two weeks later, the DBA shows up for work, but wasn't working very closely with the hiring team. His coworkers seemed curious about some of his approaches to problems etc. Turns out he had someone fake his interview. Fired him two weeks later when we had all of our ducks in a row in terms of HR stuff.
I've been there once, but the funny thing is that I got my next job based on the not-hired-for work I'd done. And that next job worked out ridiculously well.
Funny story: I was interviewing a candidate who was lip syncing. They used internet lag as an excuse for the de-sync between audio and video. Anyway, we got into some questions about how they manage branches and features etc and the candidate started to fall asleep! But we could still hear the other person answer questions lol
That's a great phrase, though I don't get people who do this kind of thing. But then I was also the killjoy in some college class when other people were like "Yes! Let's just skip more stuff and pass anyway!" and I went "Uh, no. What if you actually need to know that stuff for a future class or a job?!"
Everyone glared at me. They just wanted an easy A (or easy passing grade). Apparently no one but me was actually interested in learning anything when they signed up for the class.
(Smacks head on desk.)
(Context: the professor had announced we were skipping something due to time constraints.)
For us it's always been unpredictable and I wouldn't go as far to say intentional fraud.
But there is a trend that the people who put the most experience, list best tech skills, have good buzzword filled interviews often don't live up to it.
Often it's the fresh person with less experience, or the person coming from something different that doesn't even have the baseline skills, that becomes the super talented value adder.
I think a big part of their success is ability to teach themselves. Google it success.
I wish we had a better way to make choices. Still though it's not like it's horrible. out of like 10 we usually only get one we need to let go of or move to a less intense role.
We tried doing some basic tests of like paying people to do 2 hours of work, proof reading, etc. But didn't go well.
Last week, I was recruited for an ongoing project where I would serve as the face of a website development service conducting client interviews, several each day. Most of the actual devs apparently don't have good English skills, so I was to be the contact. But the kicker was, I was supposed to actually pretend to be the developer — to adopt their name, skills, and experiences — in my conversations with the client.
This seemed to me both unethical and absurdly difficult to do well (how am I supposed to fake dev-level knowledge about systems I didn't create?) so of course I turned it down.
The difference with this article is who is being deceived — in the offer I got it was the external client, while in the article it's the employer. The commonality is that they're both using false identities over remote communication.
Such deceptions are probably more difficult to pull off using video chat as opposed to audio only, but easier in comparison to in-person meetings. I wonder whether they're actually increasing or not.
I've been involved in more than a handful of interviews where it was clear that the candidate was wearing an earpiece or getting answers from someone else. Never hired an actual impostor like in TFA, but the signs of someone cheating the interview were pretty clear.
All we had to do was go off script and we'd have a good idea about how genuine the candidate was being.
I did an interview like that once where I could actually hear the colleague whispering answers to the candidate, during awkward pauses between when I asked a question and the candidate responded. I asked him "are you getting help from somebody" and he straight up denied it.
It's one thing to have outright fraud, or people who want to screw over your company for a free paycheck.
Having someone early in their career, really nervous and wanting to succeed ... I can just see a college dorm buddy saying 'hey man, I'll get you the answers from Google!'.
It might have a kind of 'immature prank' element to it as opposed to 'nefarious intentions'.
If this happened to me with a kid just out of college, and they were visibly nervous, I'd actually ask them to take it out and have conversation with them about what that kind of behaviour implies, why it's wrong, that they are lacking in self awareness to think they are going to get away with it.
I also feel that some people grow up in cultures and family / community situations which are just completely toxic. They have no faith, belief or understanding of how people get along in normal, productive societies. They've never remotely been exposed to a professional environment.
In fact, professional behaviour is a hallmark of well organized civilizations and hiring people from any place that is not '1st world' you get these kinds of issue quite often. It happens everywhere obviously, just more often in places with zero exposure to certain kinds of social socialization.
Finally, I believe that these kinds of problems are going to be more common with remote work as one of those issues for which we have yet to contend with. Anyone who's worked with offshore teams understand the struggle, now we're going to have those issues with greater preponderance in remote orgs.
Seems pretty hard to successfully pull this off. The better your chances of being successful, the more likely you could have gotten the offer on your own. If you needed the stand in to get the offer, you're not likely going to be qualified and won't last.
Perhaps it could be successful for people who are technically competent, but have a severe stage fright when interviewing. At the lease, you'd want the stand in to record the interviews so you could watch and learn who's who and get the context of the job before starting.
I dunno - to get jobs some places you need to be really good at leetcode - and that's a niche skill that is increasingly hard to keep current at as you get older, busier in your role and family life.
I'm not confident that I could do a leetcode medium anymore, but I am super confident I could do a similar role to the one I currently do at a company that would only hire me for it if I could do a leetcode medium.
I would never actually use a service like this but I can't say I'm not tempted.
Had this happen once. For an on-site job...with an on-site interview. And, yeah, from day 1 it was "this...is not the guy we interviewed".
Plus of course the time we were hiring remote, and someone screenshared for something, and didn't end it, and then later questions we had that was broad ("can you tell me a little about (technology)") we got to watch him search for and answer from what he read, which was a unique experience.
This is why that ML/AI realtime deepfake software is so scary. Imagine if the person speaking is just mapping their facial expressions onto the face of the person you're actually getting.
>This is why remote exams have all of those strict requirements like "show us your room" and "don't leave sight of the webcam"
I'd imagine this could be defeated with a prerecorded video of the "interviewee" showing their room.
The other side happens too: my business partner, early on in his career, interviewed and was hired into a video-processing software company.
He shows up, the building is empty but for a secretary and one guy on the third floor. A Japanese company had bought them for the customer list, and they were now just to support folks locally. He quit after a week or two, after finding a real job.
Some time later he met the guy who had interviewed him, and asked about it. His response: "I lost my hiring referral bonus when you quit! I'll forgive you for quitting, if you forgive me for hiring you!" See, the guy was already half out the door when he hired my partner, knowing he would report to a nearly empty building.
That was 20 years ago. Stuff like this has been happening forever. I guess now its on a production-line basis.
Whoa. I am new to interviewing and hiring developers. We needed to hire quickly and i interviewed someone, they did great and they were hired. And when they showed up for there first day in our remote zoom call I was very confused and thought I had interviewed a different person. I was the only person who interviewed them directly as they are a contractor. I brushed it off and thought maybe I was mistaken but reading this has made me rethink this initial feeling as I never mentioned it to anyone.
I’ve always wondered how companies that do mass interviewing like Google and Facebook determine if the person who interviews is the same person who shows up to work? I imagine especially with completely remote work, if you delay joining by a few months, who is going to remember what you look like?
I’m sure this happens and I’ve seen people trying to hilariously cheat on virtual interviews but the fact that people are probably successfully interviewing at FAANGs and getting away with it intrigues me.
I think this especially could be a problem at companies where you don't interview for a specific team, and instead get matched with a team after you start. So the new hire might not work with or even see anyone who interviewed them after joining. Their eventual teammates and manager might have no idea that someone else interviewed in their stead.
At my Big Corp (tm) we've had HCL and TCM send one candidate for interview and drop off different people entirely. HR caught on when HCL started dropping off men when we had specifically selected several women.
I worked at a financial company as a web developer. A co-developer sat at the desk opposite, with the wall behind him. He would sit there playing games on his phone all day. ALL DAY. Yet, his work got done, but it was the barest minimum and really poor code.
So, one day I say "Tomas, I never see you write any code. Yet, your work is always done."
"Oh!", he says with a grin, "I've outsourced my entire job to my friend back in the Czech Republic. I pay him about 30% of what I earn and he writes all my code and sends it back."
>I worked at a financial company as a web developer. [...]
"Oh!", he says with a grin, "I've outsourced my entire job to my friend back in the Czech Republic.
That sounds like a huge breach of the NDA or employment contract. Pretty sure you're not allowed to expose internal company code or requirements to third party outsiders without approval in any sane company with half decent lawyers who can draft an employment contract, let alone a financial company.
Here in EU they do background checks for devs working in most financial companies.
This was the UK. No background checks, though it wouldn't have turned up anything. There was no NDA that I remember, and honestly, I don't think the execs would have given a fuck even if they had known, as long as the work got done. I never ratted him out as our manager was fine with his work, and we didn't have a huge overlap of code that we were working on.
Wow, can anyone just do what they want in the UK finance/sw scene? This wouldn't have flied in Germany/Austria. You have to sign extensive NDA's before they let you anywhere near their code/IP.
But... is the interviewee proxy doing this as a side gig? If they are good enough to get paid (presumably) for taking interviews, how can that be more valuable than just taking one of the jobs they successfully interview for?
Who wouldn’t pay $10,000-50,000 for a guaranteed FAANG job? There are some people out there that can absolutely pass every single interview. And if they look like you, especially over zoom, then how would they know?
Sure. OTOH lots of good coders don't do well in interviews; some good interviewers aren't really dependable employees long term. So here we have a case of specialization. Someone making good money doing what they are good at: technical interviews.
Not defending it. I think it sucks (and this happens for college admissions too).
I worked somewhere that was mostly remote. We hired an SRE, who was decent at their job, but there was always something off about them. Things like not being available when you would expect, but then would have reasonable explanations, but just a lot of coincidences to be happening to one person.
Early in their tenure, they said they had to go to Australia (from the US) due to a death in the family. However, someone saw that he tweeted from a bar in airport somewhere in the US, when he purported to be in Australia.
HR asked him to provide a death certificate "just for our records" and he provided a badly forged certificate, the inauthenticity of which was confirmed by a quick call to the agency that supposedly provided it.
It was all very strange and funny. Of course he was let go, and he just kind of said, "ok."
If you interview at enough companies you can find one that allows a Gattaca to slip through. Of the subset of companies that allows that some companies let people float without doing any real work for a long time. The longer they coast the more likely they can find a corner to hide in. There is no penalty for them to try this approach. Even if you caught them in a lie the effort to make them pay for their actions means they likely will never be responsible.
One company I worked with checked government issued ids at every stage of the interview process. I'm sure people will find a way around this. This also opens your company to discrimination lawsuits, "everything was going fine in the interview until I turned on the camera, then they didn't hire me."
While I don't doubt this sort of thing happens, the following line leads me to believe that this is an exercise in creative writing by someone:
> In the meantime, legal approved security to put a trace on John’s computer to review if there have been outside messages or if his work is being completed with outside help or on a different computer altogether.
If you have a corporate laptop of ours I can log into the security dashboard and see the 15th command you issued in the terminal on December 12th, which processes it spawned, which files it accessed, which servers it reached out to... and this is with standard AV software. We're not even set up for worker monitoring (nor do we have interest, our mandate is on the security side not the HR side) but I could probably piece together a decently solid idea if he was pulling up outside messages or pulling in completed work from an outside system even without such additional worker monitoring tools.
I worked at an audit+consulting firm, and our laptops had at least 5 different "security" applications, most of them spyware. Then 2 anti-viruses (eew).
They actively MITM TLS traffic, getting some Java applications like IntelliJ to work was a mission.
___
I once interned at a defence company where it was common to hear folks saying "if your PC keeps on freezing, it's IT taking screenshots". This was in 2007-2009, so a while ago.
___
My colleague's spouse got sabotaged by their former employer, to make them break their non-compete. The employer spied on their laptop (not a work one, as they'd left). One day the cursor started moving, files getting copied, kind of vibe.
They also sent "customers" to their business, legit and otherwise, to make them err and break their non-compete. Then with some legal muscle, they enforced the non-compete, forcing them out of business. This is a recent thing of 2020.
Most management software on a company laptop (or endpoint in jargon-speak) will be set up to allow this and your company's policy will allow them to activate monitoring software if an investigation is required. It probably won't be used unless you're already in deep shit, which the person in TFA pretty much was.
Could be, or they could be referring to some of the heavy-handed remote monitoring software that gets installed on a lot of corporate laptops.
It's common for companies to lock down corporate laptops and have records of communication from the approved software. These companies also, wisely, don't let just anyone pull up those records on employee computers. You have to engage with HR and/or legal at minimum.
Why is that strange? That seems pretty normal for a company IT department to be able to do. My employer can read all my email and chat history, and can remotely install arbitrary software on my work laptop without my knowledge.
Also consider that the person writing to this blog might be non-technical, so even though "putting a trace" on something sounds like bad movie dialogue, it's more or less reasonable to say.
right - that's weird language. That said, machines are often under GPO / Mdm type control, and it is trivial if needed to monitor a machine if there is an OK (ie, not used to harass / flirt / spy) on someone.
Normally best practice is that someone outside of workgroup reviews results for a predefined concern (ie, slacking off, running a side business on company time, etc). This is just because you can end up with tons of personal details (ie, bank balances - wow they are rich / poor etc). With remote work I think this is less common / would be less acceptable. I have some light govt exposure and this was sometimes done to see if folks were browsing porn (ie, new firewall or something would start reporting adult site use and then they'd do something on the actual computer to see what was up) or slacking - partly because govt work didn't always have good productivity metrics to work against. More recently they just seem to block things like porn at work by default.
I think it's weird wording from legal. My guess is that the work laptop has security software preinstalled that routes traffic through a proxy that they can see, even encrypted traffic. So they're just collecting John's traffic for analysis
Couple of year ago, my team was hiring an employee in India through Teams interviews. Local HR warned us to mandatory ask to the candidates to switch on the camera, because person exchange after the interviews is quite common.
Except there's tons of plausible deniability when it comes to getting interviewed and/or hired for the wrong position.
At a former startup I interviewed someone for what was supposed to be a plain old individual contributor developer role, and the suit seated across from me was clearly interested in the newly opened VP of Eng. role.
I never bothered chasing down if it was a scheduling mixup on our chaotic startup side, or if he was just trying to get his foot in the door after somehow hearing about the newly opened executive vacancy. Either way the technical interview went so badly he stormed out of the office in a rage.
Point being, mixups happen all the time. It's not hard to imagine scenarios where it still results in a hire, and seems difficult to place 100% blame without a recorded confession or something. It's clearly the potential employer in the driver's seat, caveat emptor of sorts applies.
I was hired on e for a position at a 35% pay raise; while this isn't particularly unusual in tech, on the first day, I couldn't figure out what they were talking about with most things. They couldn't figure out why I couldn't figure out their setup requirements. After almost 8 hours passed, they said they switched resumes on accident... so I'd quit my last job for this job, worked there a day for no reason, and was back on the street. The previous employer wouldn't take me back, and I had to start over.
I was wondering about this after running across a couple of people who I have no shadow of a doubt could not code a fizzbuzz solution that all our screens use. They did end up on PIPs and let go but I always wondered how they got in to begin with. (This was before Covid, too, but still unless you did biometrics and had in-person friends who could recognize a person I could see a stand-in coming in to help with the on-site interviews).
The worst thing about this case, if its true, is that this kind of thing will poison the pool for others. for legit people.
its already getting a little nauseating with the number of shops who insist on coding tests -- for people with tons of evidence already that they are legit programmers. This type of incident will be used to justify even more creepy and insulting behaviors on the employer's side. everybody loses
Were the interviews online? Couldn't John study a recording of those to know who Holly is and bring up some story to explain some of the other odd stuff? I wonder how long you can pull this off without knowing your stuff.
I knew a hiring manager about a decade ago at a company that used a very intense interview practice. The sort of multi-day, tests, whiteboard coding, several rounds of panels interview. The worst employee they ever hired somehow made it through that entire gauntlet then showed up to work and it was like somebody had lobotomized him. He was no longer able to write code, simple SQL SELECT statements, anything. It was utterly bizarre and unlike anything I've ever seen. For months my friend vented about this employee's utter ineptitude and every conversation ended with "how the hell did he get through the interview process?"
They never did figure out what was going on, but did eventually have to terminate the employee.
edit I just asked me friend if they had any ideas what happened. They said they believe that a "recon" person interviewed before them and just recorded the interview questions so they could study and regurgitate answers. But that's the best theory that doesn't involve identical twins, clones or time travel.
This article (and all of the anecdotes surrounding it) has opened my eyes quite a bit. However, it actually reads to me more like a “How to get better at this kind of thing” than a cautionary tale. There are even comments acting as such here.
Fraud hurts us all. Even (especially?) the people who think they are benefitting from it.
Very common with overseas contractors. Often the person communicating has good English skills, but they swap in a friend etc for the actual work.
In some cases fine (you'll actually get both of them to eventually show up on calls together with some random excuse). Other times less fine (basically a scam).
Software development work has more attributes to it than a binary "done" / "not done". The quality of what you get is going to be orders a magnitude worse when the work is being done by a team of cheaters compared to when it's done by an honest person who didn't cheat to score a job.
I once had a company internal recruiter refuse to look at my portfolio[0], because “I probably faked it.”
That was sort of “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
I realized that this entire industry, that I fell in love with, as an enthusiastic, idealistic, young man, had turned into a miasma.
At that point, I just gave up, looking.
That company folded, not long after. I feel as if there's a better-than-even chance that I could have made a real difference (but there’s also a better-than-even chance that I’m mistaken, and I just dodged a bullet. Having their internal recruiter deliver such a stunning insult does not speak well for their corporate culture).
Most comments here are not mentioning TFA, but I wanted to point out this line:
> Their security teams are trying to discover what all he downloaded, if they’ll be able to get their equipment back, is John really his real name, etc. !!
If they'll be able to get their equipment back? Incredible.
I mean, it's up to "John" to actually send it back to them. And if he doesn't, the cost to get it back via the courts is probably more than it's worth.
My company hired a senior developer for an Angular project we were working on. They did great in the interviews and on our take home coding challenge. When it got down to time to work, I was walking them through the codebase and it very quickly became apparent they not only didn't know Angular, they didn't even know much at all about web development in general. They were let go three days later. I'd heard of things like this happening but I couldn't believe it until I saw it in real life. I just can't imagine what someone like that is thinking. I get "fake it 'til you make it" but this was on a whole other level.
I wasn’t a part of the interview process, but I was told some of the details. The interview was remote and they did well on the video interview and on the take home challenge. My best guess is they were being given help.
something similar happened to me but way more hilarious. I had interviewed at a big brand name place in India and thought I did good because of positive feedback from everybody. But then there was complete silence for 2 weeks. Finally when I called them the recruiter was surprised and said "didn't you reject the offer?" apparently there was another candidate with similar name who rejected the offer. A month later I finally ended up joining there but worked in a totally different team. Later one day I bumped into the manager who had interviewed me and he was surprised to see me because he thought I had rejected the offer.
This exact scenario played out at a friend’s company a few months ago. Fortunately someone had a screenshot of the “you’re hired!” Zoom call so they could quickly confirm their suspicions and take action.
I can't help but wonder: isn't this basically just fraud? Shouldn't the people involved in this go to prison, or at least have some more consequences than losing the job? Are they even entitled to pay for a job that thought it hired someone else?
Then again, there's also the reverse of this: employee gets hired for a job that turns out to be different from the one they interviewed for. I'm pretty sure companies are never going to be held accountable for that one.
One place I worked, we hired someone into a senior developer position. A whole section of the interview is about what is expected of a senior (making juniors better, talking to clients, etc...)
He gets there day one and says he will only write code. Everyone in the interview process had good notes and positive recollection of him.
The two working theories were that either someone else interviewed for him, or that he expected to show up and export his work to someone else (all remote).
I guess you need to remember your lies? Or don't say you are single when you have wife and three kids. Which just makes it sound like a mixup rather than fraud.
Maybe the recruiter called the wrong person. I mean you only say your name once during a call. The person that got the job just made the initial screening interview, and answered the recruiters mail, while they talked to another guy. He then thinks they are scammers , hire to fire or something and bails.
> I guess you need to remember your lies? Or don't say you are single when you have wife and three kids.
Yeah, that's the odd thing. You'd think that the guy who handled the interviews would have gotten some background on the guy who would actually join the company and adjusted his small-talk story to match. Then again, the low-effort approach "worked", at least to get the guy hired. If the interviewed guy was getting paid just for getting an offer letter, he doesn't care if the worker guy gets found out later.
> Which just makes it sound like a mixup rather than fraud.
I dunno, the mixup scenario sounds pretty farfetched too, perhaps even more so.
Sure. But he had the wrong hair and glasses etc. It feels like one of these things a scammer would think about, assuming the scammers are not incompetent.
Imagine the opposing side write up of this. Note that HR did not confront him with allegations of fraud.
"My boss is staring at me with a confused look. My smalltalk about my family made him leave the room hastely. Lawers are lurking around in the hallway. They starts to question my competence after just one week. Is this place a joke? Did they hire me to fill a fire quota?"
> But he had the wrong hair and glasses etc. It feels like one of these things a scammer would think about, assuming the scammers are not incompetent.
If the scam was just a dude hiring someone off the internet to attend his interview, the guy who interviewed may not have cared about what happened after the interview (or after an offer was given), as he already got paid. So he might not have expended the effort to make himself more like the "real" potential employee.
I've had a reverse situation an interviewee where emails were written very enthusiastically and apparently technically competent, and then when the time for the interview call came, whoever picked up the phone was definitely not the same person. They would just shut up after any technical questions - after a while we simply asked if he was nervous and he said yeah that's it. When asked for any previous experience he'd just copy and paste links to websites which didn't work and couldn't elaborate on what those websites even were. At one point he just read the description written on one of them. We asked him for his GitHub account or anything similar and he said 'oh I know that one' (he sent a 404 link) and we just had to end the call right there as it was getting surrealistically hilarious.
The next day we got an email from the apparently competent one, claiming that this time the email was being written by a 'friend' of the candidate we talked to (same address every time), and that if we gave them a chance he'd be the 'perfect candidate with 100% qulaity' (sic).
In 2014, Indian voters voted for a candidate who claimed he will remove corruption, end poverty and make India better than Japan, South Korea and Europe.
Turned out in 2022, Narendra Modi was a fraud, uneducated and full of ego. He did not know how to do the job at all. He just got the gig by enciting violence in local constituency.
If top posts can be rigged, corporate jobs resume fraud is a child's play.
Tangential, but it’s the first time I’m hearing of MuleSoft. I wonder what kind of companies use it?
There’s a side of “enterprise” software that’s so foreign to me.
I still don’t know what Salesforce is. Or SAP (I see their name in a lot of shitty software though). I wonder how the developers in those companies are like, what their processes and code reviews and technical discussions look like.
I can't imagine this isn't common in all facets of life. I always thought this would have been so easy for college exams to hire a ringer to take it for you, or submit assignments. Usually for the big lecture hall classes everyone would sit down, then just pass their student IDs to the end of the row, then a TA would walk up and down the aisles and collect them and take them back to sign in. It would have been so easy to just have someone else pass up your ID. Plus these would be critical classes, like your big core classes sophomore year where you want to have good grades for summer internships or maybe med school. When I took my GRE they also asked for ID at the testing center but just looked at it, they didn't scan it and verify it was legit. I could have just as easily been a ringer handing them a fakeid, something very easy to get at a college campus. I wonder how many people have done stuff like this and have gone on to reap the benefits.
I’ve had the experience (at a FAANG) where I showed up for an site and all the interviews had info on a completely different person. So my initial thought was there 2 Johns and somewhere between interview and offer they got switched. New John is going to graciously accept the offer, old John got ghosted.
This happened to me once. We hired remotely, the guy sounded fantastic, but the guy who showed up didn't even speak English. We fired him within two weeks.
Another time we hired a guy who seemed enthusiastic and had a portfolio of things he had done, but he turned out to be completely unenthusiastic.
My first job out of college was at a J2ME mobile startup (circa ~2005). Startup was the baby of a rich Arab, and I was the first actual technical hire in the team (the prototype was outsourced). I hired 3 engineers within the first month. A couple weeks into the project, I realised that one of the juniors was a bozo at programming and I had made a severe hiring mistake. The guy spent time re-writing Java classes as objects, making superfluous inheritance hierarchies, installing and re-installed the J2ME emulator, etc. I would have to fire the guy soon and explain it to my Arab boss ...
Fortunately, new hire was sending sexually explicit SMSes to the cute Filipino receptionist. Arab boss threw him out the next day.
The nice thing, of course, for fake-John, is that they just get to try again. I'll bet that fake-John has a 50% chance of lasting at least 6 months in a role by getting in this way. And so much the better if they live actually live in an area with a much lower cost of living than their pay-scale was intended for.
And I wonder what "real" John gets out of this. I bet he makes a lot of money. Maybe he gets lots of people jobs this way, he provides all of his own payment information, and then forwards 90% to the people who actually have to "show up" (such as it is) for work.
Man, I want to franchise this! Actually now that I'm at the end of my post I think I just described the consulting industry...
At my last gig, we tried hiring contractors and got bit by this twice.
We’d interview a candidate over the phone or Skype and he’d be extremely knowledgeable, answering all our questions flawlessly. Then when he arrives to the office, he can barely speak English, has trouble turning the computer on, and can’t answer any of the questions he answered over the phone.
We learned to detect this very promptly and escort them out of the office immediately. They often demanded to be paid for their time and traveling expenses, despite attempting fraud.
Seems made up, though I don’t doubt that it’s a thing. If someone is getting someone else to interview for them, the least they would ensure is that no aspect of personal life is discussed during the interview. This is also something that no hiring manager would inquire about since there are possible legal repercussions to doing so. Finally, I think it’s alarming that the spouse has this level of detail about the happenings at her husband’s office - if this were true, this is a mini-scandal by itself
Yes, this is a thing. And even more frequently, online assessments done by someone else. Somehow Java developers got hired who don't know the difference between Java and JavaScript.
Has anyone else started to take screenshots of the video interviews (as I have, since I have a very bad facial memory anyway) to document who was being interviewed?
I'm more concerned about a company being able to see what you do on your personal computer, which is what the comment seemed to allude to. I know there are many sketchy tracking mechanisms out there, but if they can extend to your personal network, that's scary
In one of the updates, they mention that they hope they'll be able to get company equipment (presumably a computer/laptop) back from "John". So I'm sure the "spying" software (pretty standard fare for most corporate IT departments) was on company hardware, not personal hardware.
If a company said I could bring my own laptop, but that I'd have to install their "security" software on it, I would definitely decline. Ditto for an MDM on my phone.
What I'm seeing in the article: the legal dept forbid HR from saying “you aren't the guy that we interviewed”, but meanwhile permitted the security dept to put a ‘trace’—presumably spyware—on the guy's machine.
HUH?
Apparently this is the state of corporate attitude toward employees now.
Legally, the computer is company property and thus company can do whatever they do with it (sometimes there are exceptions, like "stop looking if this looks like personal documents"). Even if there is no one manually looking at the specific computer, there is often antivirus/antimalware which reports to IT department. This makes sense -- if an employee went to a shady site on a work PC and got infected with malware, central IT should know ASAP about this to stop the spread / block stolen credentials. Even if the employee is unwilling to report it.
The situation is different if the employee's personal computer is used -- then it can be expected to be full of personal stuff. This is why a lot of bigger places prohibit placing company code/credentials onto a personal device.
I don't think this is rare when dealing with large contracting companies, and especially remote. I've seen it happen multiple times, luckily we terminated the contracts when it was painfully obvious what happened after a couple of weeks.
Bizarre! Possibly related phenomenon, recently noticed that a bunch of students who dropped out or never finished our program are working as engineers (non-software) in big multinational firms. Does nobody check a transcript anymore?
How can something like this ever work out? If you're an okay-ish candidate and you hire someone better to do the interview, you might get away with it. But if you don't even know the basics of the job as the post claims...
If you're "interviewing" at an extremely large and likely dysfunctional organization, it can probably work out. You might get placed on a random team completely divorced from those you interviewed with. I've known guys who've taken jobs and done nothing for months and months. It's sad. I've also seen people quit after two days!
Yeah, I was thinking the same. In a big enough company, you can spend 3-6 months "onboarding" while drawing a paycheck and not having to do enough to get found out as a fraud. Even after the onboarding period, a skilled fraudster might find a way to blend in and hide if the circumstances are right. Or the company might have a policy (from legal) not to just fire people on the spot, but instead put them on a PIP and/or collect months of documentation of poor performance before doing letting them go.
Even if they fail to last, they've still been drawing a paycheck for maybe 3-6 months (or more?), and that might be an acceptable "win".
The person who showed up for work was described as "timid". Perhaps he hired a confident extrovert to do the interview, believing he'd be fine at the job once that stressful part was out of the way.
I have seen these things closely. It kinda works out fine in big companies with large/slow IT departments. It takes ~3-6 months to figure out that person hired is not really up to task assigned. But still works in candidates favor because usually low level IT consultants are hired for 3/6 months + extension up to year or so. This means there is no point to proceed with firing that person as by then contract is about to be over.
Also I do not have latest info on this. The stories I have are from 2006-2016 period. So maybe with agile and all it is no longer possible.
This also happened to me. I interviewed someone from an IT staffing agency. Seemed perfect. A different person showed up for the job, and he knew next to nothing about IT.
This is especially true with Indian H1B's. A company I was doing work for complained that they were burned at least 3 times. They got someone else who wasn't the person they interviewed. Wasn't a big deal since they would let them go immediately. What's funny is folks were asking are you sure? The manager would say yes I'm sure, I'm Indian and I know who I spoke to during the interview and it wasn't this guy.
This is why I require on camera, screen shared, live coding sessions or discussion as part of my technical interview process for remote developers. If they're junior, the problems are not hard, literally foundational CS things.
If it's for a more advanced role, I give them a coding challenge after a non-technical, on camera interview. Then if it's worthy of a technical follow up interview, they must build, execute, and walk me through the code live on camera. I also ask them to make slight alterations or extensions live.
This may sound like a lot but the total time invested by a candidate, including the interviews themselves, should be no more than 4 hours. The challenges are experience and role appropriate and I'm not asking them to build an MVP or anything close. They're also allowed to search and use resources in the live interviews, as they would on the job. I'm not interested in testing your memory-recall abilities, I'm interested in seeing how you approach problem solving using CS.
I've seen legal depts fight against this. They're worried the recording will capture some question or comment that could be evidence of discrimination. (e.g. someone asks "Did you have a good Christmas?" and is later accused of discriminating against non-Christians)
"John is talking extensively about working in a garage because his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk area."
If John is reading, you now have documentation that marital status has played a part in the decision process (even if not the sole issue) should they decide to let you go.
No… they have documented evidence that the company noted discrepancies between his interview and subsequent comments. Nothing there states that this was a problem; it’s a diff.
It doesn't really matter if it's a diff. It matters that it was a diff that the husband apparently thought pertinent enough to mention. If it plays any part in the decision, or can show that they preferred single people in the interview, then it could be basis for a law suit (whether it would win or go to settlement is a different issue).
Nothing in the letters even hints that it played a part of the decision-making process for hiring or firing. The husband also mentioned his hair was different and he now wears glasses. Does that mean corrective vision also played a part in the process?
If the manager mentioned it, then it very well could have. Even if just on a subconscious level. I don't see anything that shows an audit of their thought processes, so you can't rule that out.
Ehhhh, I mean, sure, John could sue about this and cost the company some money (because you can sue about anything), but marital status did not at all play a part in the decision process. It was, however, a signal that the employee was lying about material things.
Regardless, John quit. He wasn't not hired in the first place, and he wasn't fired.
True. I suppose I hate my job and the lying company that I fantasize about someone catching companies (or the government) doing bad things and being compensated for it.
Still not a protected class, which means the bar for proving discrimination is going to be pretty high. Especially if it happens after you've been hired.
If your martial status is documented as being considered in the thought process leading to firing (I know now, they quit in this case), then it can show that the hiring process was discriminating. It's a possible court case, although the outcome would be anyone's guess (if they they don't settle).
We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And his communication was great!
After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, uncorrected typos... It got so bad that we had to have someone review all e-mails he sent to customers.
We had regular "improvement plan" meetings with him, but after a year of paying him, we had to let him go. As part of the exit interview we went back and looked at his interview e-mails, and compared them with his current e-mails. So we asked him:
"During the interview, all your e-mails were great! Why was that?"
"My wife wrote all of those."
I guess we should have hired his wife!