Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud? In the past month we've seen a dramatic, seemingly coordinated, increase in engineering applicants whose resumés and backgrounds appear qualified, but who refuse to use their cameras during Zoom interviews and who often can't answer specific questions about their backgrounds. We've wasted a significant amount of time on comms and interviews with over a dozen of these candidates. Anyone else experiencing anything similar? |
On the CV there were some companies with dubious consulting websites, super generic. I emailed them, no reply.
If I wouldn’t have given him a live coding test I wouldn’t have known.
a) Get hired, collect a paycheck or two while doing the absolute bare minimum (filling out onboarding forms, etc - no real work) and then move on to the next victim company.
or
b) Get hired with the goal of getting access to improperly secured company or user data.
I imagine a) is vastly more common than b).
a*) Get hired, collect paychecks until somebody notices, but then still stay employed because the KPI of a HR person in a fast-growing company is to fill seats, and firing people, no matter how terrible they are at their job, goes against that.
But why? I feel like we devalue true respect by repeating phrases like this. I'm not saying they deserve to be abused, but why do they deserve respect for solely existing?
EDIT: All the replies seem to be conflating dignity with respect. Your birth gave you the right to your dignity, and no should be able to take that from you. Respect must be earned, and can only be given to you by others.
A little about me: I've started doing remote work 15 years ago - long, long before the modern remote push. I've been coding for 30 years; I started with 8 bit micros; I can probably work with any technology and any deep problem you throw at me; I've led and launched projects worth billions of dollars. I prefer to work remotely because I hate commuting and open plan.
I've started denying camera interviews for a while now. I still do voice, but no camera, for the following reasons:
1. It impacts not just my earnings, but whether I'll be considered in the first place. There's a lot of sexism and racism happening in tech.
Sexism: if you're presenting as female, or presenting as male but don't look like Jim Halpert from the office, you can get looked at differently, which happened to me. This applies to people who are older, people who have visible tattoos or piercings, people who have blue hair, scars, etc.
Racism: you only need to look at other replies here with people talking about how bad eg Indian developers are. This extends to people of other skin color as well. In Europe there is a huge amount of racism against white Europeans from eastern Europe and from the Balkans and Europeans from Latin countries; in Asia there is racism against people ethnically from other Asian countries; in America there's racism against pretty much everyone; etc. This is endemic. One look at someone's face can be enough to disqualify them at a company that has this problem.
Ageism doesn't even need to be explained.
Based on the three points above, by demanding camera interviews you betray yourself as a company which doesn't have the issue of systemic bias against minorities figured out yet.
Incidental information leaks: The background - the location where you are - is important as well. Is the person located in their bedroom with a single bed? Probably a flat share, pay them less, they'll take it. Are they in their garden? Hmm, they are probably worth what they ask for. Is it dark outside whereas it's light where you are? Uh oh, remote work with someone who's not in your time zone! Better start worrying!
Especially the last one is egregious. Dev work is mostly solitary, asynchronous work; most of the time there's a lot of overlap even between eastern Europe and west coast US which is plenty of time for meetings and pair programming if necessary. People who insist on such things are usually inexperienced with remote work. Misconceptions like these destroy opportunities that can work out very well otherwise. I've had people make comments about "oh it's light out over there" many times in my career and it's always lead to a no-hire.
2. Issues that remote work solves can be brought to light in an ugly manner. For example, maybe the person feels they are not attractive, and are just generally shy around people in person - something that a lot of technical people share; their performance in front of a camera will be worse. Being shy when physically around other people perfectly fine for remote work. Maybe the person has special needs. Maybe they have to use an oxygen tank, or are missing an eye, or teeth, or a hand, or are sitting in a wheel chair, or are obese. Maybe the tapestry on their wall falling off and they haven't had money to fix it due to an economic downturn or because someone in the family had cancer so that's where the money went. None of this is stuff that the employer needs to know - but they are things that none the less can impact the recruitment and later career by a lot.
3. I experience fewer of the issues brought up in 1 and 2 than most others; however, I still deny camera interviews to see what will happen. Being this worried about job applicant fraud betrays that you likely can't afford it. Job applicant fraud is a little time off your hands and a little money as well. That fraudulent applicant wasted maybe 3 hours through interviews across people in your company, and maybe up to $10k wasted money. If you can't factor this into your business, it means to me - an experienced developer who has plenty of choice - that you can't afford me at all, and that working for you, should it happen, will be precarious. I'll probably skip over you. It is my experience that the most resilient companies - and ones that are well established already - absolutely don't care about seeing your face on camera.
Additional wasted time after the hire is mostly on your hands: either it's a complete bait and switch (smart person interviewed, substituted by someone unsuited) - and that's something you figure out on the first day - or it's someone who's never been good enough, and you weren't a good enough interviewer to figure this out in the several hours you've spent with them; at that point you'll probably take a few weeks to figure out that they're not great at their job, but that's on you.
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TLDR: a camera interview is purely a disadvantage to minorities and people who aren't well off by leaking things that are for good reason illegal to ask about; a job interview where this is demanded or implied betrays the company is standing on a shaky foundation.
I am convinced of it now.
One of the beautiful things about code and about tech is (used to be?) the leveling of the playing field down to simply ability. In my opinion, it should not matter whether a person is ugly, fat, skinny, fit, short, tall, old, young, gay, straight, nonbinary, trans, cis, what color their skin is from, etc., if they can get the work done and get along with their teammates.
I feel that we have lost something valuable in the remote working world when we demand that everyone turn on their video cameras at all time; we have lost the ability to appreciate people for solely for their ideas and their accomplishments and their aptitudes. We make it about the way they look, which has so many negative ramifications associated with it.
I'm not disabled beyond needing to wear glasses, but for more than a decade I had low self esteem and was unhappy with my appearance. I was ashamed of how I looked. I felt really bad about it. Today, I am quite happy to get on camera and as a tangent to whatever activity I'm doing show off my fitness. But I will never forget that I used to hate it, and it made me feel very uncomfortable. I believe that appearance and bias can reduce opportunity for those with the requisite ability.
Second of all, it's not like you "can vote with your feet". If you're being discriminated against, it's not going to be one place. It's endemic - it happens, for better or worse, "everywhere", especially if you have many characteristics which are targeted, like many people do.
Third of all, not having cameras on removes to a large extent the worry that you _have_ been discriminated against, which is a large part of the stress for a person who does get discriminated against with some frequency.
Some things you really do need the knowledge, experience and time spent on to navigate successfully, and you just can't fake that consistently as time goes on, especially around other people who do have that knowledge and experience.
I presume, after passing the gatekeepers, most of the people can hold and do the job required from them at bare minimum. The fakers who can not code at all will be found, but someone with an average amount of talent should be able to collect the fat paycheck for several years, as most of the jobs do not require much anyways.
Well, I guess this is really just a version of what I'm saying, about being feeling entitled but thwarted by forces outside one's control
"I'm a good coder, why do the expect me to 'grind on leetcode' and know how to invert a binary tree"
I agree largely, but if that's what they want and you don't want to do it, don't apply. Justifying cheating because of your perception isn't right
People are doing this, because probably, they think it does work. They probably passed some interviews like this before and landed on their job, which is just mundane configuration update tasks, or just making a new integration with a new data source, and realized that there isn't a connection on what is expected on the interviews and what is expected on their daily jobs.
Maybe we should be looking at the core cause instead, the interview processes being not aligned with the daily jobs.
I'd use the word humanity to describe that level of respect, to contrast it with something more or less universally regarded as the lack of humanity, things we might even consider crimes against humanity, where people are deprived of the respect towards their humanity, denying them food, inflicting pain, eradication of culture, systematic murder, etc.
Obviously there's a lot of gray room between the two where, for example, cruelty for the sake of cruelty, in most circumstances, could be considered a lack of respect that people deserve for solely existing. That's certainly not on the level of crimes against humanity, but I wouldn't say that's respectful, either.
From https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dignity/201304/what-...
"The most common response people offer is that dignity is about respect. To the contrary, dignity is not the same as respect. Dignity is our inherent value and worth as human beings; everyone is born with it. Respect, on the other hand, is earned through one’s actions."
Anyway, you still gota defend yourself like they are monsters. Tell your kids: they are masterful liers and manipulators, they look normal, they have a cover (they have jobs and all, they can go undetected for decades, their whole life even) and more importantly: pain is pleasure, even theirs, especially yours (not always physically but mentally as well). That last bit is the endgame but you and me dont have that so its very difficult to comprehend. They come in variations (think Joker and DoubleFace). Oh and one last thing: they are not rare (between 0.7% and 1% of the population afaik).
I'm generally polite to stangers I meet. Not because I respect them (how could I? I don't know them), but because it's morally good to behave decently.
By conflating respect with basic manners/decency, you really devalue what it means to deserve respect and to be respected.
Yes all of them appear to work a couple hours of day and I’d wager they get 3-4 jobs and work a few hours a day on each
What is this supposed to be the connotation here?
On his resume his name was Daniel, but when he joined the zoom call he introduced himself as Andrew. Moreover the photo on his LinkedIn was of Asian appearance but this guy had a very White American accent. I asked him to turn his video on and he fumbled around for a bit and then said his camera was broken, so giving him the benefit of the doubt I jumped into asking him about his experience with svelte. He asked asked me what svelte was, I thought that was weird given it was one of the buzzwords on his resume, but 20 seconds later he all of a sudden knew what svelte was.
I reminded him that in our email exchange he said he had worked with svelte for 3 years and I'd like to hear more about what he had built. He told me, and no joke, he had worked in the same office as some guys who had used svelte.
this is what happens when you filter people based on keywords. they game the system.
They just keep adding more keywords, hoping to narrow the search, but end up broadening it.
While not as bad as fake candidates, professional interviewers who interview really well but cannot deliver a lick on the job are also very problematic. Once hired someome who sounded perfect for the role (even in person) - relocated him - but months into the job they couldn't deliver.
That said, I just hired someone without meeting them in person (just Zoom call) and they're pretty good thus far! I guess you just have to be lucky.
Watch out, if she attends all those productivity sapping meetings, and turns in good code then she'll quickly be promoted to a position that requires no coding. Then that'll be the end of the fun coding :)
Prior to my current company I think I'd only met two candidates face-to-face who had sent misleading CVs (one of whom memorably tried to tell me MooTools was a new Linux based operating system.)
But so far this year I've cut short half a dozen interviews once it became clear the candidate was hopeless, despite having good CVs. In some cases they seemed to struggle to even to use their own computer.
And in the last 12 months we've also cut ties with somebody who joined during lockdown after it became clear that they'd falsified details of their background and experience.
I personally prefer asking the person to open the camera or reschedule to a later date if they can't.
When does this work?
I got 25 years of varied experience(network admin, server admin, cloud stuff, scripting, etl and actual development) and now feels like being a jack of all trades is screwing me :)
I don't know whether an AG's office would be interested in hearing about it, but you could try calling.
Of course too many levels of nesting is inherently a code smell that indicates other issues.
- working with grids (rows and columns)
- iterating over nested data structures (eg. all people in a group).
His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."
Wait... Intellectsoft isn't the name of this company. Did these "Data Service Group" people steal Intellectsoft's website?
Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Over+the+past+decade%2C+o...
I'm still not really sure what was going on with that as we politely rejected him and never heard from him again.
If you look up the company on LinkedIn, it appears to be made up of hundreds of immigrant DevOps engineers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-service-group/
> Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence
It looks like that text is part of the default template for a commercial WordPress theme named Engitech[1]. If you check the live preview and browse to the "Main Home" template, you'll find it there.
I wonder how many of these "companies" paid the $59 licensing fee? :^)
[1] https://themeforest.net/item/engitech-it-solutions-services-...
Their tactic seemingly consisted of running the website through a free tool like Lighthouse, picking one or two low hanging fruits and then presenting them as world-ending problems they can fix for cheap. I'm sure the follow-through would have left the site in a worse state and suspect they may actually have a backchannel income via SEO backlinks or malware as the price they would initially quote seemed low even for a country like Pakistan.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are actually layers of these Potemkin company websites used for various purposes.
He took extremely long to do anything and then when he presented the work, it was very wrong and obviously copied from a bunch of stack overflow answers.
To this day I'm astounded my employer hired him and even more so that it took 2 months to fire him. Just think, he was on a senior salary for a couple of months for doing nothing... not a bad scam if you can do that a few times a year.
In your case, sure he had a salary for two months, but that can not be the plan? Do people just expect that if they are hired, they'll sort of figure it out along the way? If that's the case, then maybe go for a more junior position and hope there is good on the job training.
Years ago, I worked as a test engineer. One issue that repeatedly turned up when trying to get information about one of the tools we used, was that forums, mailing-lists, you name it, would get swamped by Indians who just wanted the answers to some standard hiring quiz. They just wanted to memorize the 150 or so answers, so they could get a job. Knowing those answers wouldn't help me in my day to day work, or at least very little, so what did they expect would happen if they got hired? Sure you can scam your way though a job interview... Then what? Your new colleagues is going to notice your shortcomings rather quickly.
Why even try?
If he's just Googling everything then he sounds like a senior developer to me!
I'm half-joking. Obviously you want people who understand the problem you're asking, and who have a good knowledge of the domain, and who can answer based on their experience and knowledge, but if a few lines from the documentation answer your interview question then it's a bad interview question.
What if the candidate had an exceptional memory and had simply memorized the docs? Would that have been acceptable? Of course not. Your job as an interviewer is to ask questions that looking something up in the docs won't answer. After all, when you're in the job, Googling something is a perfectly acceptable strategy.
daily job: google answers to questions.
You could also do interview questions.
"4k+ ACTIVE CLIENTS, 35+ PROJECTS DONE...10 GLORIOUS YEARS"
I imagine then, there's at least 3965 clients that aren't super happy. At 3.5 projects completed per year, it's going to be a long road.
You see, they must have started with one client, in year one, and thereafter achieved an average growth rate of 151.33% per annum.
My Excel model:
Year Clients
1 1
2 3
3 6
4 16
5 40
6 100
7 252
8 633
9 1592
10 4001
The salary for these employees isn’t exactly great. If I’m not wrong they still work through these witch companies and get their wages garnished. So these employees generally try to jump ship once they come to the US.
A second pool is the metric ton of immigrant students who come study an MS in vaguely computer related degrees - typically CS MS degrees are a bit more discerning but one example is this MIS degree from a BUSINESS SCHOOL in TAMU that’s just an Indian immigrant degree mill churning out people without much coding abilities at all.
Both these groups now go to these “consultant firms” in the US which take their money, fill out their resume with fake experience and train them to pass your interviews. I have heard all manner of illegal crap including person A attending the interview (even in person) and person B actually turning up for work. How many times have you looked closely enough to confirm it’s the same dude anyway.
These people are shrewd. Doing all of this does take brains. They’re just shit at coding. Some do actually improve over time but some never do.
Source: Indian dude who had college roommates, relatives, friends, acquaintances, etc all do various versions of these shenanigans.
Only way to protect yourself is to have a culture fit interview component, confirm their LinkedIn history isn’t super shady and have at least an informal verification step post offer to ensure you don’t let a rat into the ship.
It makes me wonder if they are just getting into a completely different program with the "American university" name. Do you have any insight into this?
I see what you mean (<https://mays.tamu.edu/ms-management-information-systems/>). Clear signaling toward foreign applicants.
H-1B visas should be given out using an auction system. The minimum salary for the position should be some percentage of resulting price.
I think this would go a long way to ensuring that companies use the program for what it was intended for and stop the abuses.
If you have Python on your CV, and I ask you how the garbage collector works, I don't want you to read some stack overflow summary to me. I want to hear your own description, so I can make a judgement how deep your knowledge of Python internals goes.
Anybody can type specific questions into Google. But if it comes to producing performant code, you need to have that knowledge in the back of your mind, because nobody is going to tell you to google that.
It’s one thing to openly use web search as a tool and another to pretend you know something when you don’t.
It’s usually fine to say “I don’t know, I’d have to look that up”. That’s what you’d actually want on the job, honesty and professionalism.
People make mistakes all the time. What you want is a culture where they can admit those mistakes so that the team can engineer them away from happening again.
If a candidate is willing to lie over something so small as looking up an algorithm then that would be a big red flag to me.
800 419 2567
It only happened once ever. But I just keep on checking.
I've interviewed several candidates that were clearly googling questions. Some I thought were scammers, others not so much.
The funny thing is that they were all on camera. You can see the pause,you see the slight head turn and the eyes gaze away from the camera, you hear the click clack of typing and then the sudden recitation of a perfectly worded dictionary answer.
What was your reaction? Would you prefer they be more subtle of the poorly kept secret that most of this job is simply trying to figure out why the code isn't running and looking for specific error codes from other people's projects?
I'm being sincere, because I'm studying AI and ML and I kind of doubt most CS majors could describe 85% of the concepts we cover at the undergrad level let alone describe the use of the sigmoid function and soft max when building a gradient descent algorithm in a NN if put on the spot; I know this because when I went searching for this they often say that even their professor sucked at describing it so much that they had just glossed over it entirely and admitted they would look it up when working with TF in the future.
As we got into it, the candidate often asked me to repeat the question. I was happy to do so, but after a few times, I was already taking care to speak slowly and clearly, and it was still happening a lot.
Then I noticed a quiet murmuring sound after I'd asked a question. It was like .. a TV on in the next room or something. I ignored it at first, assuming it was someone else in the next room, but then it seemed like it was only happening after I'd asked a question, and before the candidate answered.
I was now pretty suspicious, but confused: what was going on? The candidate was flubbing the interview anyway -- their understanding was pretty shallow and they didn't appear at all confident in the material, so I wrapped up the interview, and showed them out.
As we were walking to the door, I stood beside them for the first time. And that's when I saw the earpiece: the candidate had a hearing aid-like earpiece in, with a wire running into their collar.
I was basically too surprised to do anything, and by this point we were at the elevator, so I just let them leave.
The way I figured it, afterwards, was that they had someone on a radio who they thought would help them with the interview. But either the radio was noisy or they just needed more time for the answer, so asking me to repeat the question was for the benefit of their remote assistant. If they'd been better at it, even had I seen the earpiece, I'd have assumed it was just a hearing aid. Fortunately, even with the remote assistance, they didn't pass.
Never happened again, but I can tell you I casually check everyone I've interviewed since for earpieces.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-crypto-job-cand...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/fbi_korea_freelancers...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/
We had one person we hired as a contractor, but then her voice changed on the phone, and started calling people by their last names in chat. It looked like it was someone that subcontracted another who then quit, and the first was trying to hold onto the contract as long as possible.
Another answered complex questions during the interview, but after the start they knew nothing.
A third contractor I knew was trying to do two jobs at the same time. Unfortunately while he was supposed to be working for one company he was making public github commits for the second. He was shown the door that day.
Tangentially, another contractor "lost" two macbooks assigned to him. Apparently right after travelling to Colorado after they legalized weed.
We don't have a established process for this as it was some years since we hired a coder, but then we are in the industry (hiring) so published a couple of adverts here and there and we got the thing rolling.
Most of the applicants were seriously under qualified, and my colleagues had to go through a lot of rubbish in the form of CVs in order to find suitable candidates.
But a few of them were good enough to at least make it to the interview step, and off the invitations went.
One of'em candidates - Let's call him "Rajeed" - promptly accepted the meeting, and due to the small amount of people that made it that far - let me remind you, first interview - my colleagues were slightly excited, but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders from India is far from stellar.
You can imagine my colleagues surprise when they opened the Zoom session and Rajeed was nowhere to be found. Instead, there were two person of whom we knew nothing about - apparently they were running some sort of coding shop - and when my colleagues asked for Rajeed they just said "Oh, it's OK, it's OK. You can talk to us."
For obvious reasons the meeting didn't last long.
We ended up hiring a coder from Poland that, even thought he was decent, was miles ahead of the rest of the candidates.
But only a few weeks later he was back, in the same building, but using a different name on a different floor working as a Senior Software Architect.
He got caught because someone in the DB department recognized him, called him by his old name and they pretended they never new him.
I haven't seen it recently, but I am now in a position where we have good recruiters who filter people before I ever see them.
Tons of calls for technical tests of individuals to prevent fraud/bad hires. No one does a technical interview for talent agency recruiters to make sure their company can filter candidates well though.
Well you get what you pay for.
Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.
The company didn't want to disqualify those candidates, since we couldn't prove cheating, but it was pretty fascinating to witness.
(I do hate code interviews)
Turns out though, I don’t live that far away from there. I can see his window was full of heavy, dark clouds. However, there was a heat wave going on and there wasn’t a cloud for hundreds of miles.
“Huh. Odd that we’re so close, it’s almost 90 down here and it look like it’s about to pour rain up where you are…” I said.
My favourite example of this was a interviewee for a post working on Oracle data warehouses. A colleague ran the guy's CV under my nose before the interview - it was strange - it kept on changing tense, and contained a bit too much random technical information about Oracle's tooling.
I Googled a random phrase, and discovered that 50% of the CV was directly lifted from the Oracle manual for their ETL and DW product.
The point is that despite being comically bad, he'll have interviewed somewhere else, got the job thanks to a clueless hiring manager, and have spent three months learning the product before getting canned (optimistically).
The last time I saw a boom in this behaviour was in 2007.
The job market is a market. Nobody owes you anything. In most job fields the buyer has the leverage over the seller so the buyers will go out of their way to press that leverage (low pay, low benefits, impossible demands etc). It just happens that in a few fields the seller has the advantage so they're doing the same thing to you. My point is you have to accept it and move on, because things like this happen all the time and won't ever stop.
Months later, after the summer, I got a frenzied email from HR asking me to apply again. Apparently the posting ruled out all the candidates, someone high-up thought for-sure "someone" was qualified.
Also, I very clearly lay out in my resume and with the initial phone interview that I have 6 years Python experience and 1 year in C++. I've had recruiters reach out to me about positions requiring 5+ years of C++ experience when I am currently looking for Python jobs
Usually you’d get weird looking resumes from someone based out of New Jersey or Arizona. In most cases the employees were Indian and would phone screen well. When the person landed, usually they were green staff who would basically send their work back to a more senior person or team who would do the work elsewhere overnight.
With remote, there’s definitely more fraud in this space, from people lying about where they are, stealing information and just grifting.
On a particular week, we received a lot of CVs for a DevOps position. They shared a few common characteristics: were sent through Indeed, allegedly from Indians who emigrated to the USA, talked about skills and duties but not achievements, and were longer than one would normally write. Additionally, they used too-low-level phrases that one would never use in the CVs, like, e.g. when describing their experience with Ansible, "use the 'file' module to copy files to and from remote systems". I.e. phrases that would appear in a course curriculum, but not in a proper CV.
The final red flag for me was a phrase repeated word for word in two CVs allegedly from different people.
I don't really know how to react properly to this, in order to avoid lawsuits for rejecting candidates based on nationality and other kinds of discrimination (ans I was specifically instructed about discrimination-based lawsuits as a very real risk, something that happened before). So I just told about the problem to the head of HR, marked all CVs received through Indeed on that week as highly suspect (even those that a casual reader would mark as OK), and let him deal with it. I don't know what exactly he did.
Other red flags:
Resume says they live somewhere without large immigrant populations like some random town in the Midwest. Places that aren't really tech hubs so you wouldn't expect to find many immigrant tech workers there.
When you phone/video screen them. They are barely able to speak English to the point where you wonder how it's possible for them to survive in the area they claim to live in (again not areas known for large non-hispanic immigrant populations so you'd expect that a certain level of English competency is a required to function).
Sometimes they take the interview in what sounds like a noisy environment. Sounds a bit like a call center. You start to wonder if there are other "candidates" doing interviews for other companies in the same vicinity.
It's definitely been a time waster but I obviously will not filter resumes based on nationality which I think is morally reprehensible (not to mention the legalities that you mentioned).
Makes me wonder what % of the time this actually works and no one is willing to fire them, or if it's just worth the salary of collecting a month of pay before you're found out.
Conversely, anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can learn most tech topics. With the right amount of self study, personal project work and focus, you can acquire the skills needed to land an entry level job and then work your way up.
Maybe it just boils down to the fact that there are always people who try to short cut the path to senior dev salaries.
Some humans have limiting factors beyond a lack of education and/or work ethic. For example, someone who lacks the cognitive ability for abstract thought, or the working memory to chain multiple mental constructs together is probably never going to understand pointers, no matter how hard they try or how long they study them.
They may eventually be able to replicate examples they were shown with enough repetition, but purely as a function of memory recall, not a function of understanding what's actually going on.
These kinds of assertions can come across as very disempowering and dismissive to such people, just a heads up.
Happy to share more info with founders over email or IM; I don’t want to publicly draw the ire of those who attempted this.
No thanks.
I've had people use IDEs to auto create empty test cases, hard code file paths etc. No point wasting time on an interview and anyone competent will smash it.
E.g. a nefarious actor could harm a competitor by overwhelming them with fake applicants that it takes time to sift through.
- Multiple candidates with the same resume
- Resume doesn’t include full name, location or LinkedIn
- Candidate blatantly lies during interview
- Candidate is observed copying answers from the web, unable to explain how it works
- Language barrier issues
- Candidate applying for a senior role can’t solve simple problem
- Job hopping every 6 months or 1 year
Just throwing this out there. I've been interviewing lately and on more than one occasion now I've had the recruiter/screener pull the "oh, haha, my camera's not working" gag. Mistakes happen, but I wasn't born yesterday. So now I don't switch on my camera until I see the interviewer first. Needs to be a level playing field. I'm not interviewing through a one-way mirror.
You need to be clear when sending out the Zoom/Teams/WebEx invite that there will be video.
I had one screener kind of act annoyed that I didn't have video and I'm thinking to myself, "This is a phone call pal, your camera is off too." More than likely the WFH screener is just chilling in his or her bath robe or footy pajamas.
We enable companies to asynchronously collect a short series of video responses from an applicant either at application time or later in the process.
I’m curious how many people feel the same way.
One of the offshore folks was amazing so we offered him an on-shore position and moved him here. He told us insane horror stories about how the offshore team worked. Basically 1-2 people did all the work for everyone to turn in. The managers were in on it and sometimes were one of the few competent people who did the work. As he described it, it was corruption from top to bottom. We were paying for 10-15 workers but really getting 1-3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaSUOFleNRU
It's nearly 40 years old and it still makes me laugh every time.
Although that did happen, but I think that was the recruitment agencies: they'd debrief their candidates after their interviews, and the next time they sent someone in, they'd be prepped for the whiteboard design exercises we'd used previously. I ended up with a dozen different questions that I rotated, which seemed to be enough.
General interview questions were often prepped too. Our phone screen question list had to grow quite long before it seemed like the effort to cram/prep was too much trouble.
This is something I've argued before: In the 40s, the US intelligence services could call up famous, brilliant people like Claude Shannon, ask him to fix some problem and never talk about the problem or his solution to it.
If they tried that today, most would tell them to go fuck themselves.
Now you may think things would be different in North Korea. In some ways they might be, but they obviously have a lot less top talent to commandeer in the first place, with their lack of modern technology and childhood nutrition. And even then, there are less confrontational ways to say no where open defiance is out of the picture. In North Korea, if you're very competent at anything, you might be quite careful in who you reveal that to in the first place.
and of course, plenty of Russians and Iranians are non-Asian (in appearance, Persia is in Asia of course)
I mean this literally how contractors work. Unless they were taking your IP and using it for another company I don’t see the issue.
It's just like a lawyer's billable hours.
If you're setting their hours, doesn't that make them an employee rather than a contractor, legally speaking?
Happened at a company I worked at many years ago. Working from home was new, one dude who we all thought was suspect anyway got a call from his bosses boss and answered the phone with the wrong company name and it was over.
To make an example of him they made him pay back some of his salary (his contract had him on call and available 24/7). Ran into him a while later and he confirmed he paid them back.
Not a fake candidate but a slimy guy.
/r/overemployed is a sub full of people sharing strategies about how to maintain multiple jobs at once. Some of those folks have 3 or more jobs. Industries of focus seem to be tech and sales.
The random people who are up for hire from India — there's a good chance they're up for hire because they couldn't get anything else.
You get what you pay for. And the best are probably not even in the market.
Precisely, and they know what they're worth, so they won't be cheaper anyway.
I'm not "writing off" a billion people. But. It's like finding a needle in a haystack.
I did some research when this happened, and they even have a name for this [1]
Coincidentally, our experience with people from Easter Europe is quite the opposite: Of all the people we hired from there, all except one were stellar (And the "one" was also good, just that he had some greys ethically: Had a disagreement with our boss, and disappeared over a weekend after siphoning large amounts of data from our system)
[1] https://thepolicytimes.com/chalta-hai-attitude-holding-india...
And guess what, when I decided to be an asshole, think only of myself and not give a fuck about the companies, voila, my renumeration started to go up and up and up (making 10x more now than when I was a 'company man').
Stop being an idiot (not parent, in general) and start looking for yourself only, in a few years you will see the rewards.
Designing and making products is what I do for living as my own business. Never really had people's distrust when explaining them what / how I've done things. Of course I also have list of clients and reference letters from them along with phone numbers so if someone is in doubt they can check.
As a senior remote US employee I don't see how any of the companies I interviewed with would even allow past screening not turning on camera or other tricks like this.
If a job offer results in 20 genuine applicants, the company might set up 20 calls.
If the same job offer results in 20 genuine applications and 480 fraudsters, the seconds spent on a CV need to drop drastically for a HR person to make the decision to interview a candidate. And if the fraudsters do well faking a CV, and HR only has time for 20 calls, there are going to be a lot of false negatives (genuine candidates not getting a call back).
Sadly, they don't care.
This is why we can't have nice things.
"You really should have used the enhanced for loop for that .." or "You really should have used a Lambda there" etc.
After years of tech screens like this over the course of my coding career I can't say Im not enjoying a little schadenfreude over this.
I used to make people write code in front of me. I've missed out on some excellent candidates that don't perform at their best with that kind of pressure.
What I do now is ask people to share some code with me that they're proud of. Before the interview I look through it. Then on the call we'll have a quick talk through anything good or weird I've spotted. That helps me know if they've actually written it, and understand it.
Secondly I ask them to talk me through an interesting (to them) project they've worked. Then I dig into the how/why on project specifics to see how deep their understanding is. I tend to navigate to specifics that'll be important in the work I'm offering.
I also give candidates a heads up that that's what I'll be doing so they're not caught off guard. It's hard for them to know exactly the path of our conversation, but if they know what they've done and why they perform well.
With those tactics I've been able to hire some excellent engineers - several of which get quite anxious at the prospect of writing code in front of strangers.
What if they dont have code to share?
I prefer giving people a take-home with an original problem to solve. Then, follow that up with a live call where you ask them some questions about it.
If they are busy interviewing, putting aside 2-3 hours (which is not much really) per interview, limits how many they are willing to do per week. As its still a candidate driven market.
Keep in mind, people have to find the spare time while doing their jobs and living life. If they have a family - good luck finding spare time :-)
The best win/win I've found is to pair with someone for about 30 minutes. You help each other, just like you do in real life.
I like to ask a very easy problem to start (some candidates spend the full 45 minutes on it) and then ask a similar problem after to build on it. If you work for a company there is some expectation of being able to work while people watch you. I don't like asking crazy dynamic programming problems, etc, but something simple and something slightly harder should be fine for someone who's good at their job.
I think there's always lots of arguing over what's the correct way to do this.
Ideally, I think you'd basically have any number of options, from which you (the candidate) could pick whatever feels the most suitable:
[ ] - solve an algorithmic problem in person, show code, discuss now
[ ] - solve an algorithmic problem later, share Git repo, discuss later
[ ] - solve a real world problem in person, show code, discuss now
[ ] - solve a real world problem later, share Git repo, discuss later
Then again, many companies/countries out there have a sort of grace period, for example, in Latvia that is 3 months - during which an employee's suitability for the work environment is assessed.
So, give them low priority issues to solve in non-core products, or even additional code tests to work on or prototypes to build, which should very quickly show whether they're suited or not.
More so, in some companies your salary during this period can be lower and the laws around quitting (or being fired) can also be more streamlined.
Of course, one could argue that some would exploit this to just rotate people after 3 months for low salaries, but I would at least hope that such attempts would be glaringly obvious and not much would get done in just 3 months of work.
As a candidate you should be able to detect easily during the interview that it would a bad place to work for.
The person on the other end is probably just googling keywords from whatever question you ask. You can throw them off by asking followup questions or adding new constraints.
This only works if the helper couldn’t get the job. I just experienced one of these, and I don’t know what to do to protect us.
Glad someone said this. Also most programmers and developers knows how tech works, they just don't want to be profiled by some AI algorithm. And why use Zoom, or any of close source, when you have jitsi to use for a video/voice chat?
Live-coding in an interview be it in a text editor (shitty or otherwise - those web based platforms can be really painful and slow to use when sharing a screen with zoom, e.g.) or on a whiteboard is a skill, and I’m not sure it is one that is worth optimizing for because I’m not sure that this particular skill really has much to do with day-to-day software development. I am sure it doesn’t hurt to be able to perform in a foreign environment with someone judging you over your shoulder but I hope dev work in general possesses as little of this type of work as possible.
But you can simplify the problem considerably and ask someone to solve a fairly easy problem in just about any live coding fashion. To wit: I learned Java in school, spent some time at a job using other languages, then interviewed for an intermediate software developer position. The hiring manager asked me to write fizzbuzz in Java. I had never heard of the fizz buzz problem and I hadn’t written Java in some time. Still, I was able to successfully solve the problem with a minimum of difficulty (though admittedly a maximum of nerves). He asked me a few questions about how to improve the solution, and I mumbled some stuff about combining string concatenation statements instead of simply appending to the string, something which made him nod his head sagely and that I still consider to be a largely useless micro-optimization, but the main thing, the important part, is that I demonstrated some coding ability in a matter of minutes, right in front of his eyes.
It’s something that sticks with me and I think it’s a valuable type of interview question.
I got the job.
I agree about live coding which is why we send that test to them pre-interview - it's to screen potential candidates.
If they get to an interview, a reasonable amount of it is to ask what they've done and why, e.g.
* Did they write a CLI parser?
* If so, did they add sensible options (e.g. to force overwriting files that exist on the destination or not), or aren't they bothering to check whether files already exist on the destination
* Did they add/stub out tests? If so, to test what?
* What does error handling look like? Boto performs retries by default. Is this their justification or didn't they think about it?
* How else could they have done it (e.g. use a library vs shelling out to the aws cli binary).
It's complicated enough that it helps show their proactiveness. The instructions include 'making it good', and also say they can just stub out/write comments for what they would do if they were doing it for real.
It's saved loads of time in the past by filtering out people who don't even have the basics, and it's relevant to the work.
Blame the automated candidate selection process that these very tech companies helped create and standardize in order to be 'ultra efficient in on-boarding qualified' candidates; this is the problem with just slapping AI to something as a branding exercise without considering the underlying mechanics and unintended consequences.
I guess be glad you got to even speak with a Human at this point because so many are just getting binned for not having the right buzzwords in their resume to pass the first screening.
You might ask "why spend your time walking through code for a candidate that won't make it through?" Well, it's important for me that if people aren't a good fit for the role, they would be happy recommend us to people that they think are a good fit. Interviewing with that mindset ensures I (and my team) treat candidates like people, instead of like numbers.
In the spirit of the actual Ask HN though, I have had a small number of candidates that were deceptive, or difficult. In those cases it's just a polite but firm "I'm going to have to draw this call to close because <xyz /> and I don't want to string you along." Fortunately I've not had a person different to the interview show up on day 1 though... that'd be a little more awkward.
https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming...
If asked today my very terse but immediate answer would be: "Rather poorly when I last checked. Haven't had to check for roughly 8 years."
Would that qualify as a "knowledgeable individual" in your books? (just curious)
Google to get to documentation... Sure. Reading documentation.. Sure. Ability to understanding it and how it is used, that's what would be missing, and what is suggested the interview question failed to pick up on.
But you have to cram to make it seem otherwise... seriously one of the most interesting things I have ever seen was a HR person say that they had a stack of CVs but self-selected for those who were able to use 'know how to google when stuck' remarks on their applications.
I think we should just be honest and come clean and state that it is impossible to gatekeep like this while at the same time then expect people to be 'efficient and self-starters' and know how to use stack overflow at the same time. We have built these immense, entirely contradictory, ways of virtue signalling in this Industry that this is the outcome you get and can come to expect from optimizing for this vetting process--in-person interviews only partially elongated the farce of it being a good way to parse through applicants.
Because the truth is you know they are doing this for 2-5 other potential employers and have to do the same there and this is the most 'efficient use' of their time to solve a problem: googling it.
I've had companies offer $500 for a referral, if that person took the job and stayed with the company for at least 6 months (this was for a position with a salary of ~50$ per hour).
500 bucks is IMO on the low side for an employee referral in the US if it's for software engineering... the amount of money you save the hiring team alone in recruiting efforts is often in the thousands of dollars, and they often stay longer and are often the best hires - not surprising if former colleagues they like are already there...
For roles I've worked, I've never seen less than $2k offered for a successfully recommended technical hire, both at startups and BigCos. Most places I've worked have offered around $5k.
I think it just comes down to the quality of company.
people who no longer trust you and don't want to work with you any more generally don't have to prove it.
Firstly, all agencies prep their candidates to some extent. They know your stack, they know what skills and experience you're looking for, so they make sure the people they send in match the profile, and you know, just bone up on the important things a bit before the interview.
It's not a stretch to go from that to saying "and they'll ask about X and Y, so make sure you refresh your memory on that".
And then it's not far to outright "here's the list of stuff we know they've asked recently -- do your best!"
The worst offenders would get a grumpy phone call and sit out the next few rounds of recruitment, but ultimately you want the candidates, so ...
In the UK a contractor could be someone from an outsourcing company as you suggest or they could be an independent service provider working on their own. This is very common in software dev here when you require someone with specific skills.
If you’re the latter kind then you’d be wise to bill on deliverables rather than time.
If you don’t you could run into a well known tax reg called HMRC IR35. It bars independent contractors from acting like “disguised” employees. It’s a world of pain if that happens.
The US allows companies to fire long-term employees without cause and replace them with indentured servants.
We're the ones who actually hosted the cotton fields full of slaves, after all.
To the DeepFakeMobile!!
The other attempts just got me either something looking like a regular startup meeting or WH40k figurines with a regular meeting happening in the background.
But there still is the matter of that one hour. If I am applying to a job that has a hard limit on the amount of time that I can spend on that task, and I really want that job, you can bet that if I can figure out how to arrange my schedule so that I can spend more than an hour, and if I can figure out how to make it look like I spent no more than one hour, I will. And I believe there are those candidates who may not have the time to spend on unpaid work. It may be harder than it appears on the surface: There are quite likely other commitments in the candidate's life. There may be other interviews that the candidate is facing, each with its own technical requirements, some of which may requiring learning, study, or refreshing (as may your own). There may be other job application processes that the candidate is dealing with that also have one-hour pre-interview coding tasks.
There is also the fact that the candidate has to trust that you will evaluate them fairly. I believe that a published rubric can go a long way to alleviate this particular concern.
I'm not saying I have all the answers, as I know that I do not. But I believe that asking a candidate to take "one hour" of their lives for a simple coding task, unpaid, can sometimes cost more than is obvious.
If I can ask someone to solve a question (fizzbuzz, the find method in a binary search tree, ...) in real-time, I feel it is sometimes more respectful of the candidate's time. If the candidate has the time and the inclination to code a pre-interview task, by all means, it is a great method of assessment.
Usually the W2 is provided through an agency and you're getting a paycheck from them while the agency is billing the company for hours at a negotiated rate, often much higher than you're being paid.
My belief is that 20%-30% of what you're making is a fair number.
Though if it's somewhere where you could really get a foothold and make a lot of money as an employee, 50% might be acceptable.
Not op, but I can answer this.
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer:
Most non-terminal Masters degree programs are degree mills, even at well known universities. These are almost always pay-to-play with few opportunities for scholarships, TAships, or whatever.
Most “real” students will enter a doctoral program and take a masters if they decide a doctorate is not for them.
Note that there are exceptions, especially for folks who are changing their career/degree path from undergrad, but these are relatively rare in my experience (at least at good schools).
A few simple examples from Harvard:
- the LLM law degree is a cash cow for the law school. It is only open to foreigners, and it is almost always funded by a company or the government. Ostensibly this program exists because other countries have undergrad law degrees, but the reality imho is that it’s a juicy cash cow that also generates a strong network.
- Harvard EdM degrees are a 9-month program with no thesis — coursework only. There is nothing wrong with this, but it’s a very weak academic program imho. It might be a good practitioner degree, but that doesn’t seem very Harvard-esque.
- The MA degrees in the yard (esp arts and humanities) and the div school are pay-to-play ways for Ivy/Harvard wannabes to get the Harvard stamp of approval. You have to be a decent student to get in, but nothing exceptional (e.g., compared to doctoral students). The key point is that the student is willing to pay. These degrees don’t really say much about the program or the student other than they were an above-average college student who was willing to pay to get the Harvard badge.
I’ve seen similar programs at very good state schools, with the standards lowered a bit. You see a lot of foreign nationals (looking for h1b jobs after graduation) and vets on the gi bill (often coasting on the government dime with no academic skills or ambition) in these state school programs.
If a professor is from a foreign country and/or has a relationship with schools/businesses in foreign countries, it is very easy to use masters degrees as a gateway to employment and residence in the US, and the school largely doesn’t care as long as the student pays and (in some fields) is able to get a job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Engineering#United_K...
> MSc in Software Engineering
I think "Software engineering" degrees tend to be a strong signal: didn't study CS.
I can imagine someone coming from a numerical field (e.g. EE, physics, maths) could gind such a programme very beneficial.
What "damage" does being "overemployed" do in and of itself? If the person is meeting expectations, as long as they're not moonlighting for a competitor, who cares what other things they do to make money?
In the case I was referring to, the developer who showed up for the job couldn’t even write a single line of code. We caught this quickly, but not immediately. There were certainly monetary damages from onboarding costs and time wasted, and non monetary damages from reputation with our customers.
Even if he wasn't, he was a contractor, and checking code while being on site for another company was sus. Employment is "at will" in the US for the most part -- particularly contractors.
We speak fluent English and if we get up early we have a great timezone overlap with the US. There's no reason to settle for NZ rates with a US company.
That was kind of my point that while getting US rates is still and advantage for us here in NZ we can't compete based on price.
That sounds way more professional than any interviewing process I've gone through in the industry /hj.
I don't know what kind of company you work for, but, in spite of the fact that every single technical interview I've ever had involved live coding, I've literally never had to write code in front of anyone at work. By "write code" I mean "write code that's expected to compile and run." I've done plenty of whiteboarding at work, but never anything like what happens in a technical interview.
Of course. Anyone who lacks the ability to complete the assignment can submit a solution written by someone else and be told how it works. Where they’ll fail in follow-up questioning is when you dive into their decision making process.
I have only found one person to have cheated in an interview, and they were exceedingly easy to identify as a fraud when questioned in person.
If your interview isn't screening for the work you want somebody to do then it's not a good metric for finding successful employees.
This asymmetry exists regardless of how representative of real work the interview process is, short of a full-time engagement.
If he actually delivers good work, who cares if he cheats?
He already lied once. Why not lie more?
Basically, if you have smaller eyes, then you are Asian. Otherwise, you are Russian or Indian .. etc, sort of like how some people consider people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as "brown".
Continental unity doesn't mean much for Asia as much as it does for Europe or Africa.
Good luck correcting the millions. Just roll with it. Concentrate on whats most important to you.
I look forward to a post-racial future...
I imagine these shell-game interview tricks work really well at large companies where the HR screen is considered to be perfect and thus managers rejecting numerous candidates at the interview layer will be penalized in some manner. "Look, Polly on the Cloud-X-AI team accepted 80% of applicants that reached the interview phase - why is your team accepting just 20%? Is this a culture fit issue that we'll need to intervene on?"
Ended up not continuing the interview, as giving out very sensitive information like candies to companies on the first interviews is not a good idea at all.
I'm old, and have seen plenty of rejection, even though I'm "the real deal." But that kind of behavior has been used as an excuse for ignoring me. The icing on the cake, was when I was told that "I probably faked" my portfolio.
At that point, I realized that I am radioactive, and might as well just give up.
I followed up with a letter to the CEO with description of the event and proof of my credentials. No idea what happened to the interviewer, nor do I care.
That makes me feel better about not being able to.
It's just the way things are. Shrug it off. Don't take it personally. Move on.
i brushed over this bit, which makes the critical difference:
write code that's expected to compile and run
for what it's worth, i never had an interview where this was required (except in a coding test, but that was without being watched while i worked on it) and to me it totally does not make sense especially for a whiteboard. making sure every semicolon or brace is in the right place would just be a colossal waste of time.
My cover letter contains a standard phrase about "references available on request".
No one requested them.
For most academics (and more, the better they are), not being allowed to talk about what you're working on to the vast majority your peers, would be too high a price for money to make up for.
NSA circumvented this for many years by employing an obscene number of math graduates, effectively creating their own parallel academia. We can only imagine how expensive that was. Still, they were surpassed by the "open" world even in the narrow fields they were interested in, such as cryptography, by the late 90s at the latest. It's not just sad being cut off from the free world, it stunts you.
Now, to OPs point, on getting someone competent. Say, they want to infiltrate a crypto trading firm. Maybe the guy who knows crypto doesn't know English. So you end up with a team of guys playing telephone and hoping for the best.
It is very hard to identify someone as smarter than you, if they try to avoid being identified as such. Even if we're talking about smartness in a very narrow technical sense.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with SE degrees, they can be as rigorous on CS topics while swapping later maths modules for engineering modules. I ended up taking an MSc in CS fwiw.
Salary seems to be around 150k +- 50k
I didn’t realize the “fraudulent holding of two jobs simultaneously” had acquired this name.
Apparently there are other definitions as well, used in economics. One being when workers want to work less (even for less money) but can’t… which is sort of the opposite of the two-jobs thing I guess:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-soc...
Good luck finding an employer who agrees to that.
Edit: Misread your comment. If you're billing for specific and granular blocks of time, and doubling that up, then ya wage theft. But if you're doing that and also expected to be onsite anyway, then no not wage theft imo.
Just look for the phrase "results only work environment."
For what it's worth, I think Chris Marshall looks like a great developer and a professional I aspire to emulate. However, a lot of companies do make decisions based on metrics, keyword searches, and standardized tests like leetcode (aka stuff that misses out on the human element), so it makes sense to try and balance both if one hasn't done so already.
There's no hope for me either; I'm not a "good cultural fit" most of the time.
I agree with your last sentence, although I would word it a little differently. :)
In fact, my last job was at a place where the salesman told me to not fix a bug I found until a customer ran into that bug so that "they'll remember why they need us." I was appalled.
I'm glad there are more programmers like me out there though. Thank you. :)