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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?

#281

Post by hnbad »

hackish wrote: post #243
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…

> 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." > Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence It…

I noticed something similar when I looked into a "website optimization agency" offering their services to one of my customers. Their website was a nearly 1-to-1 clone of the content of another website whose company name they accidentally left in the footer. That company's website however in turn used a slightly different design and after digging a bit I found that it was a vanilla copy of a themeforest template down to the stockphotes and everything. So it was a copy of a copy of a template.

Their tactic seemingly consisted of running the website through a free tool like Lighthouse, picking one or two low hanging fruits and then presenting them as world-ending problems they can fix for cheap. I'm sure the follow-through would have left the site in a worse state and suspect they may actually have a backchannel income via SEO backlinks or malware as the price they would initially quote seemed low even for a country like Pakistan.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are actually layers of these Potemkin company websites used for various purposes.

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

#282

Post by Nextgrid »

pridkett wrote: post #71
kube-system wrote: post #3

About 5 years ago at a previous company we had someone who interviewed well, and then the person who showed up was totally not the same quality person we had talked to previously. I guess the placement strategy at some low quality placement agencies is to just put someone good on the interview and hope the hiring company doesn't notice. I haven't seen it recently, but I am now in a position where we have good recruit…

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.

> we’d have no agencies in our budget range

Well you get what you pay for.

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

#283

Post by hnbad »

badpun wrote: post #254
tyingq wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite bit is this: "4k+ ACTIVE CLIENTS, 35+ PROJECTS DONE...10 GLORIOUS YEARS" I imagine then, there's at least 3965 clients that aren't super happy. At 3.5 projects completed per year, it's going to be a long road.

Clearly, they forgot the "k" in the "35+ PROJECTS DONE". Would be even funnier if they misplaced it, and instead said "10k+ GLORIOUS YEARS".

The Warhammer 40k jokes for this just write themselves, don't they?

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

#284

Post by xupybd »

godmode2019 wrote: post #265
xupybd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is that for a salaried position? If so well done!

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

#285

Post by vintermann »

Nextgrid wrote: post #280
vintermann wrote: post #251

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…

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.

If money was what Shannon was primarily interested in, he wouldn't be in academia. This is true of almost all types of narrow domain experts. There are more parties than government that can offer them money, too.

For most academics (and more, the better they are), not being allowed to talk about what you're working on to the vast majority your peers, would be too high a price for money to make up for.

NSA circumvented this for many years by employing an obscene number of math graduates, effectively creating their own parallel academia. We can only imagine how expensive that was. Still, they were surpassed by the "open" world even in the narrow fields they were interested in, such as cryptography, by the late 90s at the latest. It's not just sad being cut off from the free world, it stunts you.

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

#286

Post by carom »

Nextgrid wrote: post #280
vintermann wrote: post #251

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…

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.

It is not for North Korea. Their APT groups switch between intelligence gathering and PayPal / crypto scams. They also have prominent ransomware groups. Crime pays for the hermit kingdom and they do need cash.

Now, to OPs point, on getting someone competent. Say, they want to infiltrate a crypto trading firm. Maybe the guy who knows crypto doesn't know English. So you end up with a team of guys playing telephone and hoping for the best.

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

#287

Post by carom »

s1k3s wrote: post #95

Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job description fraud? The job market is a market. Nobody owes you anything. In most job fields the buyer has the leverage over the seller so the buyers will go out of their way to press that leverage (low pay, low benefits, impossible demands etc). It just happens that in a few fields the seller has the advantage so they're doing the same thing to you. My point is you have to accept…

I keep getting hired for programming roles then they have me do everything except program. Jira, terraform, code reviews, design docs, meetings, deploys, on calls... I get that this is the job, but I'm a really good programmer and it hardly gets used.

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

#289

Post by Beltiras »

newaccount74 wrote: post #249
faeriechangling wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many interview questions aren't about the right answer -- they are just questions that are designed to show how much the applicant knows about whatever is on the CV. If you have Python on your CV, and I ask you how the garbage collector works, I don't want you to read some stack overflow summary to me. I want to hear your own description, so I can make a judgement how deep your knowledge of Python internals goes. Any…

I'm a 10 year Python veteran and I've never had to think about garbage collection. Back in the day I did find out that del didn't actually free up memory (memory footprint could only ever increase for a process, only way to "free" memory would be to restart it). Don't know if it's still the case.

If asked today my very terse but immediate answer would be: "Rather poorly when I last checked. Haven't had to check for roughly 8 years."

Would that qualify as a "knowledgeable individual" in your books? (just curious)

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

#290

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

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.

Maybe if companies haven't been fucking over people, colluding to keep wages low, offshoring, unpaid overtime, layoffs to protect investors and not employees, etc etc, maybe, just maybe I would feel like I should be honest/hard working. But since in 20+ years the amount of shit I've seen companies do to their employees, I seriously don't care anymore.

And guess what, when I decided to be an asshole, think only of myself and not give a fuck about the companies, voila, my renumeration started to go up and up and up (making 10x more now than when I was a 'company man').

Stop being an idiot (not parent, in general) and start looking for yourself only, in a few years you will see the rewards.

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