The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed(askamanager.org) |
The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed(askamanager.org) |
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?"
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).
We politely refused.
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.
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.
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.
Fortunately, new hire was sending sexually explicit SMSes to the cute Filipino receptionist. Arab boss threw him out the next day.
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...
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.
HUH?
Apparently this is the state of corporate attitude toward employees now.
https://www.findlaw.com/employment/workplace-privacy/privacy...
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.
You may notice, however, that the question of legality wasn't my objection in the first place.
Sad as this stuff will just be a hassle for everyone else.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Wondering how many are managing to fool their companies undetected.
This is probably the same thing but remote instead of in person.
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.
Lastly, record all your interviews.
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.
Besides, he quit.
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).
Regardless, John quit. He wasn't not hired in the first place, and he wasn't fired.
... is not a protected class.
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.
You don't need to last at all, you forget that in many parts of the world earning even a single US remote paycheck would be absolutely life changing.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg
This is why remote exams have all of those strict requirements like "show us your room" and "don't leave sight of the webcam"
>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.
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.
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 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."
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.
They could also be doing it for cash on the side. A few hours of interviews a week for a significant chunk of change.
>how would they know
Maybe someone could get off with it if they're early in their careers. But if you're more senior, lots of people probably know you.
Not defending it. I think it sucks (and this happens for college admissions too).
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."
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."
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Their references should work for you.
Fraud hurts us all. Even (especially?) the people who think they are benefitting from it.
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).
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).
> 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.
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.
It's not that unusual.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more holistically for an accurate signal?
Here's some code I wrote back in 1987/88, for example.
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.
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")
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?
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).
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.
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.
Edit: DevOps, too.
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.
(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...)
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).
Of course.
You would never ever send an important email without getting it checked, or having someone write it, if it's not your thing.
I do like the way the replies to this seem like they are frankly, retarded.
I get you are single but if you don't understand how relationships work this might be a good start at retrospectively thinking about it.
Relationships are about teams of two putting the best of either forward.
This does not make you twice as good, it's somewhat exponential. It's even more powerful when you decide to do it for life.
(And single people use friends, this is exactly how you apply for jobs, with the help of others if available)
You're looking at this from the wrong angle. First that person needs to have basic competencies for their job, before involving someone else.
Classic comment.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 had a very good experience as a candidate as well.
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.
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……
(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?)
How reliable or accurate do you think those notes are?
How secure is having someone outside your company writing code that runs inside your servers?
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.
I was later contacted and asked to apply for my old position at the company who bought those parts.
I was probably one of maybe a hundred people with 10 years experience in X, most already were employed at that company and had referred me.
I didn’t make it through the HR screening because they upped the educational requirement to a masters degree.
I didn’t feel too bad about missing out considering how that played out.
Edit: I am laughing my balls off at this
"I offered him a gummy bear. He politely declined."
Quit -> apply to the same company for higher grade job and often way better pay.
Why companies dont value their current employees is beyond me.
Old Boss : Get out of here.
Comedy gold.
...though I remember it being its own site/domain, not a twitter account.
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).
Memory doesn’t always serve.
There needs to be a website that captures these types of war stories.
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.
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.
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)
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.
All the pieces of the technology required to do something like that may already exist today.
https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvicecanada/comments/kr924n/e...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyway once the contract was signed they didn’t send anyone and we had to hire other contractors who were also not very good.
My impression was that the good people they have are very good, but the bad people are barely competent enough to warm a chair.
* A candidate who was caught lip syncing to someone talking in the room behind them.
* A candidate who had air pods to listen to someone coaching them.
* Plenty of candidates who just wont turn on the video no matter what.
Remote interviewing has some bizarre drawbacks.
For those who haven't seen this before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg
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.
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.
All we had to do was go off script and we'd have a good idea about how genuine the candidate was being.
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.
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.
Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)
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.
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.
I mean no disrespect, by this observation.
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.
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.e., are other local companies offering worse or better benefits?)
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%.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...
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?
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).
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.
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 told him so and he was undeterred.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't get two on-site jobs at the same time. One of them is going to notice that you're not there.
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.
Often extremely smart and talented. Working on own projects/business idea.
Their argument is that they can in 1h deliver often as much as you average Joe in a week.
“Put as little effort as possible, but I have expenses”
Can give example of such ppl in: - Samsung - TomTom - Oracle - Amazon
Too many of them tbh. Slowly choking the business.
Sometimes I've been able to fix in an afternoon, what someone has been trying to fix for days.
From and outsiders' perspective it may seem that I am working less
OR - I build a startup. But I hate the buisiness ethos.
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.
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.
I guess some folks are sociopaths, and do whatever it takes to live well.
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.
But I got so many spam emails from companies that sounded like a nightmare. Crappy corporate housing, getting sent anywhere, probably shady
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 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'.)
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.
I don't think it's as much about expertise as "CS college graduates don't know how to make software"
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].
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
[1] https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/former-ceo-bay-area-univer...
[2] https://thewalrus.ca/the-shadowy-business-of-international-e...
[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-h-1b_b_5890d86ce4b0522c...
I hope you're doing okay now?
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.
Huge red flag. Nobody provides training, especially not for one's own interests.
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.
The lengths people go to.
The question was along the lines of "how do you typically protect your code against sql injections?" (in a language and framework agnostic context)
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.
Yikes.
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.
There was no way I could have switched him with someone else without paying penalties.
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".
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.
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.
s/walk/talk
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.
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.
Resume fraud happens all the time with fudged degrees and job titles and positions. Usually when corporate HR finds out termination is immediate.
If not why would you be obliged to?
- A motto all people should live by.
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.
(Someone who has jumped on airplanes to both keep and lose clients)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
Thanks!
Never heard from them again.
It makes me wonder at what $ amount they would have begun to care about their error and tried to correct it.
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.
That's news to me. I have always assumed the resumes I have been reading were written by the applicants themselves. I guess I was wrong.
Also, friends and family.
Why wouldn't you get the single most important document in the application process reviewed and rewritten?
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.
In the US, it's univerally 2 weeks.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Nope, the justification is just “they can be paid less”. The rest is irrelevant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> This procedure allows the programmer to insure
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.
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.
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.
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.
they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and
evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome
by each employee
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.
So, done well, I think they can be great.
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.
So guess I'll never know!
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.
Your comment did nothing to further the conversation or take it in an interesting direction.
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.
For the right bill rate, it could be a pretty entertaining role to play.
> Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests.
> our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to management if they feel something is wrong
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.
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.
Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted.
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.
Best of luck!
I would add that treating the company's money as if it is your own also works quite well.
Never get too attached to a user story/task is another important lesson. Sometimes a task has to go, even though you disagree.
To OP I'd say that you should really try to rediscover the desire to learn.
That and being able to quickly locate related information for a task are two of my most important skills.
In a sense, it's almost like a comment got 2 upvotes.
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.
A warning to anyone who hasn't experienced this, if you're ever tasked with doing this the correct answer is "no" followed by "goodbye".
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.
There was more there than feelings. Saying you know how most organisations work is probably it.
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.
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.
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.
Ironically, the hardest point would probably be post-detection cleanup.
I guess the company would sue the individual for back wages on the basis of breach of contract?
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.
At IBM I worked 5 hours a week and still was in the top 20% of my team.
Onward and upward :)
Eventually the guy was promoted.
The Dilbert principle is real.
I was getting the short straw so I unsubscribed, good for me that was an option at all.
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?
(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)
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.
I'm curious what you mean by illegal. Do you mean they won't pass emissions or safety?
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).
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.
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.
To my managers the work I do is a lot.
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.
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.
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.
I ended up quitting and they replaced me with a contractor who did the same at 4x the cost.
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.
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 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.
As far as your technique, drafting then editing down is a totally legit way to write. I wish more people did that!
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.
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.
A few templates, a couple of text expanders, and a brief mentoring in soft skills, active listening, and written comms would resolve any major issues.
Granted, Gaussian distribution guarantees that the above wouldn't cover all cases.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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.
Strong claim requires strong evidence, please.
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.
https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/july-2020/why-sho...
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.
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.
Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.
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.
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.
Ironically, Mindy's brother pretended to be a black man to get into Med school.
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
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].
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accu...
[1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-wi...
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?
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.
What does that mean?
Is it actually same ability though? IIRC the men vs women difference disappears once you control for hours worked, for example.
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.
Take that away, and you get the natural result of multiple cultures with drastically different moral codes, and no core to form around.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't have a source, you can simply say so.
At this point, I'll simply presume as much and move on.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What would be an example of a company where “those people” (who comprise the company) are not making “the ultimate decisions”?
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.
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?
1. This does a pretty good job of describing cronyism https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
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.