I was hired as the engineering lead earlier this year at a company. It was packed full of “senior” engineers who wrote nested loops, each screen was a monolithic program with no abstractions etc. as I let them go we hired two more (we have a consultant that hired me and has been interviewing them) who were the exact same. Senior engineer, 15 years experience, etc.
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
I had this happen to me at a former large employer. I insisted on removing the agency from our list of approved agencies and was told that if we did that to every agency that did that sort of fraud then we’d have no agencies in our budget range.
The damage an individual can do by being overemployed or fraudulent pales in comparison to what some of those agencies do, and they can be fucking over the candidate and company at the same time since they are middlemen. 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 thoug…
> The damage an individual can do by being overemployed....
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?
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 the…
So all these Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS (just like FAANG, they accronymize to WITCH) hog the American H1B immigration system by submitting an application for as many candidates as possible, and get a large number of H1Bs approved and send their employees to the US. The salary for these employees isn’t exactly great. If I’m not wrong they still work through these witch companies and get t…
I find it strange that there appears to be international networks within American universities. I have noticed a large number of people from the same countries, attending similar vague programs (like you mentioned), writing theses with advisors from their home country.
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 was hired as the engineering lead earlier this year at a company. It was packed full of “senior” engineers who wrote nested loops, each screen was a monolithic program with no abstractions etc. as I let them go we hired two more (we have a consultant that hired me and has been interviewing them) who were the exact same. Senior engineer, 15 years experience, etc. Yes all of them appear to work a couple hours of day…
I know. It was a joke. 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.
Holy cow, you can't get a job? What?! That makes me feel better about not being able to.
I don't feel better. What hope is there for me then!? Fuck-em and their stupid snobby jobs anyway.
Plenty of this in remote interviews, even if it's just people googling answers. I was slightly frustrated with one candidate and spelled the term I'd just used for him so he could search for it.
Part of me suspects that this is a major reason for the push on RTO. If you hire people remote who used any one of dozens of mechanisms to cheat.. it can be hard to correct. You could have a candidate who does great on your interview then fails to produce a single PR in 3 months on the job.
Speculation aside, this means you have a bad interview process.
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.
I know. It was a joke. 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.
a magazine cover from the 90s really stands out in my mind (I was a professional C++ coder at the time). It was about some latest-thing code team management and the cover illustration was hand-drawn, of seven gray-beard guys, looking somewhat sagacious with an aura of wisdom and insight, all gathered in a semi-circle around a single whiteboard (like an easle) solving some serious, high skill problem. Anyone with trai…
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 the…
So all these Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS (just like FAANG, they accronymize to WITCH) hog the American H1B immigration system by submitting an application for as many candidates as possible, and get a large number of H1Bs approved and send their employees to the US. The salary for these employees isn’t exactly great. If I’m not wrong they still work through these witch companies and get t…
Half a decade ago at a large energy company, there was a group that had ramped up hiring of a lot of contract developers for full stack greenfield app dev (not Salesforce or SAP, etc). Lots of us employees were pulled into interview candidates that staffing agencies were throwing us. Many turned out great, but 2 in particular were suspected of being different people from the interviewee. There was a month or more since the interviews and the people managing the teams often weren’t the same as the people who had participated in the interviews but after comparing notes, we realized that the people on the phone were certainly more astute than those who had come on-site (this was before video interviews had taken off). All of these teams were using IntelliJ and one of the team leads I managed expressed concern about how he noticed a contractor assigned to his team was using Windows Notepad to write Kotlin for his Spring Boot server controllers. He also heard of some other developers seeing this guy with his laptop on the far side of the large floor quietly talking on a cell phone for an hour or so. I think we let him hang out for almost a week before we told the staffing agency.
Not only have I seen this several times, I've also encountered multiple instances of "over-employed" software engineers, who are doing 2-3 full time salaried positions from home, at the same time. This is surprisingly easy to get away with unnoticed in the US tax system, as you get a separate W2 from each employer. It's genuinely a lot more difficult to do this in some other countries. There's even this service now o…
Although most "office worker" contracts disallow this, it's not illegal for an American to work two fulltime jobs, and many people do something similar out of necessity.