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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?

#121

Post by LAC-Tech »

xupybd wrote: post #93
gedy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's just "remote" or also aiming for cheap overseas contractors. 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.

As a New Zealander, unfortunately, I fall into the category of cheap overseas contractor. With our weak dollar working for a US company is a good way to earn above average. We're still much more expensive than some of the cheaper countries. In fact we're currently working with a Vietnamese contractor. He is very good and much cheaper than a local hire.

Please don't go into remote work with this attitude.

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.

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

#122

Post by incompatible »

aliqot wrote: post #92
fsckboy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China employs non-Chinese to track and interfere with dissidents and critics of China in the US https://news.artnet.com/art-world/us-blames-china-operatives... and of course, plenty of Russians and Iranians are non-Asian (in appearance, Persia is in Asia of course)

Russia is partly asia as well.

Given the diversity and size of Asia, and the fact that it has the majority of the world's population, describing somebody as "Asian" is rather vague.

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

#123

Post by xupybd »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #121
xupybd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a New Zealander, unfortunately, I fall into the category of cheap overseas contractor. With our weak dollar working for a US company is a good way to earn above average. We're still much more expensive than some of the cheaper countries. In fact we're currently working with a Vietnamese contractor. He is very good and much cheaper than a local hire.

Please don't go into remote work with this attitude. 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.

If I were to get a job with a US company I'd be expecting US rates. That would be the point.

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.

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

#124

Post by dsr_ »

bb88 wrote: post #100
tayo42 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's not a real contractor. I had one job where I was a "contractor", I had set hours, got paid hourly, received a w2. It seemed like just an excuse to be cheap and not provide benefits.

You can be on a W2, but as soon as the contract ends, your employment ends since you're "at will" in the US. 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.

Always ask your supervisor how much they're paying for you. You might not be allowed to work for that company soon (non-competes enforced at the agency side), but you can certainly get a better idea of your value.

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

#125

Post by atdrummond »

alphabettsy wrote: post #88
atdrummond wrote: post #70

We had an issue with a candidate who was attempting to use our access to processing networks to facilitate financial crime. It was a coordinated state actor tactic. 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.

I’m certainly curious. In a role that deals with large money movement.

Feel free to email the address in my profile.

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

#126

Post by slt2021 »

wildrhythms wrote: post #105
itg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 candidate…

Real discussion between two programmers, sounds actually like real interview. Unlike robotic leetcode type: “problem prompt-memorized solution from LC.com-memorized BigO answer” type interview

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

#127

Post by csunbird »

version_five wrote: post #115
csunbird wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> companies are putting down very sophisticated hiring methods that are not relevant to the job itself 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…

I am pointing out the warped process of hiring within our industry, I am not justifying anything here.

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.

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

#128

Post by iaaan »

Earlier this year, I interviewed this guy who gave me really strange vibes. He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. I google'd some specific, peculiar phrases I remembered him saying after the interview and found that the phrases came straight out of places like the Kubernetes documentation, word for word. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me.

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/

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

#129

Post by slt2021 »

atdrummond wrote: post #70

We had an issue with a candidate who was attempting to use our access to processing networks to facilitate financial crime. It was a coordinated state actor tactic. 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.

Eastern european cc fraud rings do that, there is black market for these type services like merchant and bank accounts to run stolen cc through

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

#130

Post by mistrial9 »

plebianRube wrote: post #86

Yes. In a fairly large public company I worked at, I remember a DBA on contract got fired because he knew absolutely nothing. 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.

it may be that the contractor is not at all in control of this, but is instead used as a pawn by others; perhaps harsh life circumstances or maladapted psychology sink the lockin.
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