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Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#101

Post by quadcore »

dexwiz wrote: post #6
quadcore wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. As an educational note, please be careful and tell your kids some - unbalanced - people have no other endgame than to annoy you and play with your emotions. To destroy you mentally (sometimes physically as well). Thats their kick. Pretty sure this applies in this case as well. Dont get me wrong, they are humans and deserve respect.

> Dont get me wrong, they are humans and deserve respect. 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…

You think you are not like them because of your choices when it's actually because of sheer luck. I respect them for carrying such a shitty poker hand their whole life.

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).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#102

Post by aliqot »

thefourthchime wrote: post #50
s1k3s wrote: post #47

I'm not saying this isn't happening, but I want to mention that I often refuse to do stuff that my interviewers ask me to. Reasons being any of: I consider it useless for the evaluation, I consider it doesn't correctly asses my expertise, I consider it would put me in a bad situation etc. Of course, I can do all this because the market allows me to do it.

Has that worked? Have you got any offers doing that?

Worked for me with a polite "I appreciate it but no thank you". I just said I don't take photos or appear on camera. It didn't stop me from being interviewed or hired.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#103

Post by bb88 »

gabereiser wrote: post #99
bb88 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you're charging hourly, it's not. Then it's time fraud. It's just like a lawyer's billable hours.

only if you charge hourly to two companies at the same time. Contractors can work multiple contracts, thats the name of the game.

That's exactly what he did -- charge two companies for 1 hour worked.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#104

Post by csunbird »

version_five wrote: post #41
tschwimmer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine either: 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).

It could also be to get the job. People often feel entitled but believe they are disadvantaged by some factor outside their control and use that to justify cheating, believing they will be able to do the job once they get there. Another version of this is people who apply for a job and actually are just posers who can't code at all. In both cases the employer failed to weed them out, even if the first version is a mo…

But, the thing is, the companies are putting down very sophisticated hiring methods that are not relevant to the job itself at all (e.g. hiring someone that can write quicksort in 30 minutes).

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.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#105

Post by wildrhythms »

itg wrote: post #74
jamestimmins wrote: post #25

Once worked at a 3rd party coding interview company as an interviewer, and we had a bunch of grad students from a college who were all clearly cheating. They solved the problem from the top of the page down (rather than organically, as someone would when doing actual programming) in a very specific way. The company didn't want to disqualify those candidates, since we couldn't prove cheating, but it was pretty fascina…

Fortunately our company gives us the option to reject a candidate if we feel they are cheating and can provide an explanation. Once had a candidate solve a problem extremely quickly but they could not explain how they solved it all. I then made a small modification to the problem which wouldn't have changed the solution much and they were completely lost.

This is the way. I believe a simple 45-minute exercise one-on-one between a programmer and a candidate is all you need to gather the necessary information to hire. Simple followup questions like, "Before you start coding, talk me through your thought process and let's discuss a few implementations", "What's another way to solve this problem?" will weed out any bullshitters, and even find hidden strengths in candidates that would never be discovered in an automated Leetcode type interview.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#107

Post by snapetom »

Yes. I just had an odd Interview a couple of weeks ago. We were looking for a contractor and interviewed someone. The location he gave was the middle of nowhere, British Columbia.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#108

Post by clcaev »

I had an unsolicited email offer to pay $5k upfront cash to use my github profile to solicit and perform work, plus monthly percentage of their earnings. I presumed it was spam, but they had done significant research as they knew the projects I participated in, and so on.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#109

Post by jimmywetnips »

snapetom wrote: post #107

Yes. I just had an odd Interview a couple of weeks ago. We were looking for a contractor and interviewed someone. The location he gave was the middle of nowhere, British Columbia. 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…

Oh you know that bc weather can get crazy

Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

#110

Post by SavageBeast »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #29
xupybd wrote: post #20

Ug... as someone that one day would like to work remote this is infuriating. Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.

> Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us. Sadly, they don't care. This is why we can't have nice things.

On the other hand, next time I'm on a 30 minute screening and end up getting left with 10 minutes to show them I can write a functional program they will be too worn out to ding me for silly stuff like concatenating Strings instead of properly using StringBuilder.

"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.

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