Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 419 posts

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

#391

Post by bb88 »

dsr_ wrote: post #124
bb88 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be on a W2, but as soon as the contract ends, your employment ends since you're "at will" in the US. Usually the W2 is provided through an agency and you're getting a paycheck from them while the agency is billing the company for hours at a negotiated rate, often much higher than you're being paid.

Always ask your supervisor how much they're paying for you. You might not be allowed to work for that company soon (non-competes enforced at the agency side), but you can certainly get a better idea of your value.

Most likely they're going to be prohibited from telling you. The best way to do this is to take [person] out for a round of beers. Wait until 3 beers in and see what their number is.

My belief is that 20%-30% of what you're making is a fair number.

Though if it's somewhere where you could really get a foothold and make a lot of money as an employee, 50% might be acceptable.

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

#392

Post by brailsafe »

bb88 wrote: post #390
brailsafe wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. It depends on the requirement. If I've completed or don't have any real work, but am expected to be around, then that's work. It's only if the second contract breaches the first or creates a conflict, and that's not inherent in time. Edit: Misread your comment. If you're billing for specific and granular blocks of time, and doubling that up, then ya wage theft. But if you're doing that and also expec…

If you're a company and you see github commits through firewall, why take the chance unless he's really really good?

You wouldn't, I was saying that there could be situations where it wouldn't be a valid claim for wage theft. I would say that's also true of regular jobs where you're not necessarily even expected to be there all the time. I've made commits from my desk on side contracts, but if there's a conflict, I resolve it by sticking around longer. If my employer or client has a problem with me working on other shit, then they get to stop being my employer or client

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

#393

Post by victorclf »

2143 wrote: post #236
ericol wrote: post #62

Some time ago (~6 months) my company was looking to hire a programmer. We don't have a established process for this as it was some years since we hired a coder, but then we are in the industry (hiring) so published a couple of adverts here and there and we got the thing rolling. Most of the applicants were seriously under qualified, and my colleagues had to go through a lot of rubbish in the form of CVs in order to f…

Something you want to keep in mind is that stellar coders from India (I don't know if they're a huge majority or minority or whatever, but they do exist) already have stellar jobs and won't be up for hire. The random people who are up for hire from India — there's a good chance they're up for hire because they couldn't get anything else. You get what you pay for. And the best are probably not even in the market.

There must have been a time in the past when those stellar coders were unemployed and up for hire...

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

#394

Post by shitlord »

nomel wrote: post #226
shitlord wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coding portion is the easiest to cheat on. I know because I interviewed someone who did cheat. She shared her screen with someone else and had someone talking her through the interview. Somehow the audio feeds crossed, and I heard the guy speaking. The person on the other end is probably just googling keywords from whatever question you ask. You can throw them off by asking followup questions or adding new constr…

> You can throw them off by asking followup questions or adding new constraints. This only works if the helper couldn’t get the job. I just experienced one of these, and I don’t know what to do to protect us.

Yes, that's true. My company has made a number of questionable hires since the pandemic, when companies stopped doing in-person interviews. There will always be people who cheat but maybe requiring a few in-person interviews and imposing financial penalties will discourage this sort of behavior.

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

#395

Post by actually_a_dog »

biztos wrote: post #301
moritonal wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

FWIW I too thought it meant the opposite of underemployed. I didn’t realize the “fraudulent holding of two jobs simultaneously” had acquired this name. Apparently there are other definitions as well, used in economics. One being when workers want to work less (even for less money) but can’t… which is sort of the opposite of the two-jobs thing I guess: https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-soc...

What's fraudulent about it, assuming it's not violating any employment agreements?

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

#396

Post by actually_a_dog »

kube-system wrote: post #177
actually_a_dog wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

Given the other comments of the person I replied to on this story, I don't think that's it.

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

#397

Post by ImaCake »

ThePadawan wrote: post #315
ImaCake wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the feeling from this comment that tech interviewers would be very upset with how I write scripts in research. Part of the reason I will never shift to developer as a job is that the interview process is ridiculous. In universities, the uni hiring process is so imposing on the researcher's time that they just hire people they meet through informal processes outside the formal system. The informal system is usua…

> and the researcher checks your references to make sure you aren't lying scum. That sounds way more professional than any interviewing process I've gone through in the industry /hj.

Interesting! Maybe the stereotype of a tech interview is not the common experience of most developers? This would make more sense and leads me to think that HR is just justifying it's own existence with baroque processes that then make it even less relevant and useful.

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

#398

Post by xupybd »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #290
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 mys…

You have to look out for yourself but fraud is not the way to go

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

#399

Post by nprateem »

avg_dev wrote: post #378
nprateem wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand that your task which maxes out at one hour has some value. I have written such tests as a candidate and some have been good. I have iterated on the development of such tests as an interviewer. I feel that they can offer a candidate an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities without a big investment of time. But there still is the matter of that one hour. If I am applying to a job that has a hard limit…

A link to github or other coding sample is also accepted. It's a starting point for asking questions.

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

#400

Post by ThePadawan »

ImaCake wrote: post #397
ThePadawan wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the researcher checks your references to make sure you aren't lying scum. That sounds way more professional than any interviewing process I've gone through in the industry /hj.

Interesting! Maybe the stereotype of a tech interview is not the common experience of most developers? This would make more sense and leads me to think that HR is just justifying it's own existence with baroque processes that then make it even less relevant and useful.

FYI I went through a large phase in 2020-2021 where I responded to around 75 job offers and overall had 1-5 calls with ~35 companies each.

My cover letter contains a standard phrase about "references available on request".

No one requested them.

Post reply on HN