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.
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.