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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?

#271

Post by vceder »

__d wrote: post #114

Early 2010's, Wall St software tech vendor: I had a candidate show up for an interview, in person, go through the preliminaries and then sit down in a meeting room for the detailed questions. 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…

There was a cheating scandal in Sweden a few years ago with students using earpieces and someone feeding them answers from a leaked test during the equivalent of SATs

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

#272

Post by em-bee »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #213
em-bee wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you never had to work through some piece of code together with a team mate? to get help or to explain to them how something works?

That's not in any way comparable to live coding in an interview, for multiple reasons.

ok, you are right.

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.

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

#273

Post by i_like_robots »

Yes.

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.

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

#274

Post by Lio »

noodlenotes wrote: post #228
yardie wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A third contractor I knew was trying to do two jobs at the same time. 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.

At tech companies, "contractor" usually means someone contracted from a staffing company to work 40 hour weeks during normal business hours. They're not someone who is providing an end product with the freedom to set their own schedule, like you typically think of when you hear "contractor".

That very much depends on location.

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.

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

#275

Post by onion2k »

iaaan wrote: 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…

He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me.

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.

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

#276

Post by peacemaker »

iaaan wrote: 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…

My employer hired a guy from this company! I wasn't involved in the interview process but was tasked with mentoring him. His resume was covered with DevOps buzzwords and he obviously said the right things in the interview, but the guy could barely move a mouse around the screen...

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.

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

#277

Post by anonymousDan »

EddySchauHai wrote: post #193
csa wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me wonder if they are just getting into a completely different program with the "American university" name. 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 p…

I interviewed at Oxford for an MSc in Software Engineering with no bachelors degree lol. There are sneaky gateways into a lot of top universities.

No bachelors degree in any field or no cs bachelors?

I can imagine someone coming from a numerical field (e.g. EE, physics, maths) could gind such a programme very beneficial.

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

#278

Post by sigmoid10 »

onion2k wrote: post #275
iaaan wrote: 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…

He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me. 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…

This whole problem seems like it would go away with more sophisticated interview questions. Interviews should be precisely about stuff that you can't just google. Googling information is pretty much a required basic competency nowadays, right next to reading and writing.

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

#279

Post by Nextgrid »

lumost wrote: post #148
b800h wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If he fails to deliver on the job, put them on a PIP and get rid of them.

If he actually delivers good work, who cares if he cheats?

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

#280

Post by Nextgrid »

vintermann wrote: post #251
closeparen wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason an intelligence-gathering operation has to use someone who is totally incompetent at the job and comes across as suspicious.

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…

Why is money not a solution? A life-changing amount of money is peanuts to a government, and should convince the vast majority of people to take the job.
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