Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Masters degrees not requiring a prior degree in the field seem to be common, at least as far as I saw when I looked into it circa 2014
Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
371–380 of 419 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#372Yes. I just had an odd Interview a couple of weeks ago. We were looking for a contractor and interviewed someone. The location he gave was the middle of nowhere, British Columbia. Turns out though, I don’t live that far away from there. I can see his window was full of heavy, dark clouds. However, there was a heat wave going on and there wasn’t a cloud for hundreds of miles. “Huh. Odd that we’re so close, it’s almost…
Could he have been traveling during the interview? I very legitimately once took a virtual interview while on a trip.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#373Let me give you a perspective of why people might legitimately not want to do camera during interviews. A little about me: I've started doing remote work 15 years ago - long, long before the modern remote push. I've been coding for 30 years; I started with 8 bit micros; I can probably work with any technology and any deep problem you throw at me; I've led and launched projects worth billions of dollars. I prefer to w…
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
One would hope so, but as someone who has a support aspect to their role I can guarantee you that this competency is lacking in an astonishing proportion of people. From the lowliest admin to the most senior dev with a PhD in computer science there are people who are entirely incapable of googling for information (or reading the effing manual). Don't even get me started on C suites
From my own perspective (on the other side of support) I can add that often I delegate things merely because I don't have time, not because I can't resolve issues myself. For example, I could always go ahead and spend hours reading a tool's documentation to fix a particular issue that would seem obvious to someone more versed in it, but why not just give it to the guy who can do it in one minute because that's his ma…
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#375Every part of this rings true. We interviewed a guy for a front-end position, on his resume he mentioned react and svelte with 3 years of experience with both and was open for contact work. We exchanged a few emails and set up a call. Then it got weird. On his resume his name was Daniel, but when he joined the zoom call he introduced himself as Andrew. Moreover the photo on his LinkedIn was of Asian appearance but th…
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#376Quoted post unavailable.
You do realize that at some point you will actually need to go to the company your are interviewing with in person and to provide a lot more personal information than just a blurry mugshot from a Zoom call in order to be able to be employed and collect a salary?? Nobody collects "critical PII" using job interviews, no company has time for such nonsense. The companies that do collect such information don't do it using…
This hasn't been a requirement in any remote position I've had since ~2016.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe this is reasonable advice but I believe it can be simplified even further. Live-coding in an interview be it in a text editor (shitty or otherwise - those web based platforms can be really painful and slow to use when sharing a screen with zoom, e.g.) or on a whiteboard is a skill, and I’m not sure it is one that is worth optimizing for because I’m not sure that this particular skill really has much to do w…
Writing fizz buzz is practically a meme, but worse, what can you really talk about? I agree about live coding which is why we send that test to them pre-interview - it's to screen potential candidates. If they get to an interview, a reasonable amount of it is to ask what they've done and why, e.g. * Did they write a CLI parser? * If so, did they add sensible options (e.g. to force overwriting files that exist on the…
But there still is the matter of that one hour. If I am applying to a job that has a hard limit on the amount of time that I can spend on that task, and I really want that job, you can bet that if I can figure out how to arrange my schedule so that I can spend more than an hour, and if I can figure out how to make it look like I spent no more than one hour, I will. And I believe there are those candidates who may not have the time to spend on unpaid work. It may be harder than it appears on the surface: There are quite likely other commitments in the candidate's life. There may be other interviews that the candidate is facing, each with its own technical requirements, some of which may requiring learning, study, or refreshing (as may your own). There may be other job application processes that the candidate is dealing with that also have one-hour pre-interview coding tasks.
There is also the fact that the candidate has to trust that you will evaluate them fairly. I believe that a published rubric can go a long way to alleviate this particular concern.
I'm not saying I have all the answers, as I know that I do not. But I believe that asking a candidate to take "one hour" of their lives for a simple coding task, unpaid, can sometimes cost more than is obvious.
If I can ask someone to solve a question (fizzbuzz, the find method in a binary search tree, ...) in real-time, I feel it is sometimes more respectful of the candidate's time. If the candidate has the time and the inclination to code a pre-interview task, by all means, it is a great method of assessment.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my own perspective (on the other side of support) I can add that often I delegate things merely because I don't have time, not because I can't resolve issues myself. For example, I could always go ahead and spend hours reading a tool's documentation to fix a particular issue that would seem obvious to someone more versed in it, but why not just give it to the guy who can do it in one minute because that's his ma…
I have no issue with that type of support request, that's the job of support. It is when the question is something that can be answered by typing the question into Google, clicking on the first link, and following the steps. We're talking about things like amending a time sheet in a particular system, changing a customer or supplier address, resetting their password etc. Non technical questions. I genuinely don't und…
Re: Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the reason why employee recommendation have far higher success rate.
Now someone just needs to tell companies that the way to reward those is with significant cash in hand. I've had companies offer $500 for a referral, if that person took the job and stayed with the company for at least 6 months (this was for a position with a salary of ~50$ per hour).
500 bucks is IMO on the low side for an employee referral in the US if it's for software engineering... the amount of money you save the hiring team alone in recruiting efforts is often in the thousands of dollars, and they often stay longer and are often the best hires - not surprising if former colleagues they like are already there...
For roles I've worked, I've never seen less than $2k offered for a successfully recommended technical hire, both at startups and BigCos. Most places I've worked have offered around $5k.