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My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

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Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#81

Post by roenxi »

n4r9 wrote: post #9
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #2

Yes, it's fundamentally unfair to those interviewees who don't cheat. And the process is broken. However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one. Look at it from the point of view of the hiring company now, not the interviewer. They got a person who was good enough (based on the merits of their actual work, not interview pe…

Isn't there an alternative interpretation, that the internal evaluation process is just as broken as the hiring process?

It is more likely that the internal evaluations process is working fine. There are >$200k salaries on offer and the challenges Amazon et al. are dealing with aren't that demanding on an absolute scale. There are a lot of smart people out there.

The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#82

Post by hikawaii »

osigurdson wrote: post #51
heliostatic wrote: post #8

I'll make the obvious point that these interviews were not good predictors of success at the companies. In general, I've found in 15 years of interviews that interviews are not highly correlated with the work at any given company. I wish we would move beyond cargo cult interview styles and base interviews (and screening, for that matter) on the actual work and culture of each company.

It is funny. Let’s say you have an MIT PHD computer science grad with a 4.0 GPA. The 8 years of verifiable performance means nothing. The competitive coder would blow them away in an interview.

Yes, because the entire reason competition code was adopted in the first place is people graduating with prestigious titles that could not write code.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#83

Post by cmcconomy »

nequo wrote: post #65
preommr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic then that the real test was to see who has flexible thinking to adjust to a dynamic situation and who mindlessly follows misconstrued advice. If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because the…

Your comment reads as though you were saying that cheating on an assignment is “flexible thinking.” That’s quite a stretch.

he's thinking flexibly

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#84

Post by bee_rider »

mnky9800n wrote: post #28

when i took my quantum mechanics qualifier, i studied for a month, i was honest, i worked so hard. The exam was so tough (I passed), but as I was walking out I saw a student who had all the old exam questions with solutions printed out on his "table of integrals". Sure, maybe I "learned" some quantum mechanics more than that guy. But it's a topic I have never used (I do geophysics and machine learning) so I don't thi…

There’s something seemingly dysfunctional in academia that made you get the best degree in quantum physics and then not work in quantum physics.

I mean it is really common and not your fault, but people end up getting a PhD in these really advanced subjects all the time and then just leverage the ancillary coding and data analysis skills they happened to pick up on the way to get high paying tech jobs in unrelated fields. It seems like a massive waste of brain power that we could target more effectively.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#85

Post by pdpi »

brookst wrote: post #40
siggen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. You have unethical people now, you are probably “cheating” at work by taking credit for ideas not theirs.

But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.

> Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work.

Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example.

As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that.

At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#87

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

pydry wrote: post #18
mattgibson wrote: post #3

TBF I don't think this is bad. The "cheating" involved seems a closer match to the actual real world conditions of the doing the job than the artificial "no internet allowed" assessment. If the candidates can get stuff done but need the internet as a reference, that's still getting stuff done. Not surprising that they are now getting promoted given they can not only get stuff done, but were resourceful enough to find…

Technically, it would be better if everybody had internet access. BUT, it means that Amazon creating a selection pressure for people who cheat. Long term this will be corrosive to the organizational fiber of the corporation as idiotic unrealistic leetcode questions are to the technical fiber. Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their…

> Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.

People are just riding these organizations down as they crash, starting at the very top with the CEOs. The same feeling extends to the countries and societies where these things operate. Vultures upon a corpse.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#88

Post by AnimalMuppet »

giantg2 wrote: post #45

Seems more and more that the people who cut corners get ahead. Lie, cheat, and steal is the path to success these days. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that we are slipping in national rankings and the top desired jobs are performers and influencers.

"We laugh at honor, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." - C. S. Lewis

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#89

Post by sokoloff »

crop_rotation wrote: post #60

The thing is clearing the interviews is much harder than doing the day to day job in any of these companies. In all of big tech, most people are working on trivial crud apps or trivial services passing data around. The skills to succeed are similar to cheating in interviews. Most people I know in all of big tech have never used any data structure more complex than a resizable array. Very few people in big tech work o…

Your last point is an important one. There are a large number of incompetent applicants. Prior to the most recent round of tech layoffs, I would go so far as to say that the majority of applicants were incompetent. That's not to say the majority of programmers are incompetent, but because the interview filter processes tend to not select the incompetent, they accumulate in the applicant pool.

Any "fix" to the interview process has to accommodate the reality that the left half of the applicant pool distribution is of terribly low levels of ability.

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