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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?

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re referring to people who are incompetent and take roles in which they are not qualified to take. 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.

Just to be specific in case you didn't know, "overemployed" refers to the practice of having multiple jobs both secretly and simultaneously.

Yeah, I know, but in context I think it was clear what was meant.

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

#262
post #128

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…

>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

I see what you mean (https://mays.tamu.edu/ms-management-information-systems/>). Clear signaling toward foreign applicants.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who wrote nested loops What is this supposed to be the connotation here?

This suggests runtime complexity will be O(n^2), which is rarely an optimal solution to a problem.

Depending on n, oftentimes nested loops are more readable and maintainable than the optimal solution.

Of course too many levels of nesting is inherently a code smell that indicates other issues.

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

#264
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.

As a current job searcher, I literally tried to explain this to my mother a few hours ago. Basically, "I can't get anyone to hire me despite the fact that I interview very well because there's literally no trust that I've done the things I say I've done/worked on, and that are hard to substantiate because of the simple fact that I was making the products instead of making landing pages for the products."

>"I was making the products instead of making landing pages for the products"

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.

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

#265
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is a US rate? I get $120NZD per hr from local companies

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is. The reason is that they aren't superhuman, and aren't very popular anymore. 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 di…

Don't think I agree. You really just need 1 smart person per country to pass a meager interview process post learning the questions.

You need to identify him first, and remember, from the position of NOT being able to answer those questions yourself.

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.

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

#267
post #128

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…

I don't know how much I judge this candidate you're talking about. Somebody who can give you the right answer after 20 seconds despite apparently not knowing what he was talking about before seems like a pretty useful employee to me.

I think this is more a test of honesty.

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.

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

#268

I have been involved in hiring for years. I saw this happen for the first time a month ago. It makes me wonder if some Discord/Slack/Telegram group has recently been organized around this dubious "life hack" strategy.

reddit has had several over the last year

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

#269
post #242
post #112

Interesting that this has increased recently from the perspective of OP, but it has always been the case, and it's an annoying timesink. 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…

What was special about 2007?

the economy went tits up

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

#270
post #7

This is exactly why the technical interview process is what it is. No point wasting time asking about backgrounds and describing past projects (all of it can be easily faked). Make them write code in front of you live as part of the screening round.

> Make them write code in front of you live as part of the screening round.

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
That would solve the issue of person anxiety and time sensitivity - e.g. some people's nerves getting the best of them, even though it wouldn't solve the issue of someone else being able to do the task for them.

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.

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