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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)

#91

There is no such thing as "cheating" once you're out of school and the sooner new grads realize that the better off they will be. The real world is very much "fake it till you make it", "do whatever is necessary" because we're all just trying to make money to live and retire.

And even school is arguably step 1 in the process of making money so that we can live and retire.

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

#92

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

How is spitballing a presentation cheating? It's the equivalent of taking a test without studying, not presenting somebody else's work as your own.

It's a broken system where effort and performance isn't acknowledged and rewarded and the whole purpose of being there is undermined. At some point the whole enterprise is destructive and should be shut down.

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

#94
post #40
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.

Many "upper management" types have no idea who actually did the work.

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

#95

I’m going to go out on a limb here and be “that guy”. But in my experience, there’s a big difference between perspectives on cheating in the US vs perspectives in… let’s just say broadly… “some other nations”. I say this as an American who has lived overseas much of my life and, lest you think I’m just a flag waving parrot for the US, prob prefer living overseas and am more than willing to criticize the heck out of t…

> there’s a big difference between perspectives

Here's my take...

The difference between the United States and other countries is how we internalize things. We're very much guilt or shame driven because of the heavy influences of puritanical, fundamentalist, and catholic religions.

It's not that Americans don't cheat/indulge/whatever, it's that they feel bad about doing it. And that doesn't stop Americans from doing things, they just try to hide or repent for what they've done.

* Thinking about it a little more, there are also people here with a strong sense of entitlement and bewildering moral fortitude. They'll break down in tears or want to start a fight if you cuss in their presence but have no qualms about "moving" to Florida to dodge paying taxes or vehicle registration fees.

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

#96

I’m going to go out on a limb here and be “that guy”. But in my experience, there’s a big difference between perspectives on cheating in the US vs perspectives in… let’s just say broadly… “some other nations”. I say this as an American who has lived overseas much of my life and, lest you think I’m just a flag waving parrot for the US, prob prefer living overseas and am more than willing to criticize the heck out of t…

It's the elephant in the room and it has small ears.

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

#97
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t blame the devs for their quality issues. Try ownership.

Finger pointing isn’t a great signal.

Quality isn’t a skill issue. It’s prioritization. Ownership decides how devs spend their time.

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

#98
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means to extemporize / ramble.

But that’s not cheating on presenting, that’s just doing a bad job, no? That is, just visible incompetence?

It leads to the modern world where "influencers" and "fake news" succeed while creators and contributors fail. It's hard to see this being the basis of a sustainable society.

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

#99
post #50

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

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…

While it's unlikely these test results were deliberately leaked as a 'real-world' learning exercise, the principle definitely applies.

I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...

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

#100
post #50

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

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…

Yeah, it's sadly predictable that OP is seeing this play out in the workplace. People who cheat to get hired are also likely to scheme and manipulate their way up the corporate ladder. This happens at almost every company, every day.

Interestingly it doesn't have to be this way. This is mostly due to the fact that nearly all companies use a command-and-control management structure where people are promoted by the people above them. Stealing credit from your co-workers and/or convincing your manager that you're going to support them is a surefire way to climb the ladder.

The solution is simple: promote from below.

Basically, teams should be lead by people they have democratically chosen, and that process should continue all the way to the top. I've always found it curious that most of the world recognizes democracy as the most effective way to structure a government, but the corporate world is obsessed with dictatorial command-and-control structure - with predictable results.

Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of a co-op dev studio that was based on 18th century pirate charters (https://www.fountstudio.com/blog/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1...).

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