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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)

#211

Post by scarface74 »

hgsgm wrote: post #92
praxulus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the outcome is successful with less effort how is that bad? I was just in a joint presentation with a new grad. We both had our parts. They spent hours preparing their parts of a technical demonstration. I just walked through my part of the demo and had an “open discussion”.

They put 4x more effort to achieve what I would say was a 20% better result. That’s not meant to be an insult to them, I have much more experience.

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

#212

Post by zephrx1111 »

eckesicle wrote: post #49
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.

I ran a largish statistical analysis where I was working on all interviews and employee ratings for the following year (16000 data points). My conclusion was that: * some interview problems carried zero signal * some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal ( * geographic location is a medium signal (0.2) * a releva…

Didn’t know the language can be a factor. I was always told any language is fine.

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

#213

Post by tough »

callahad wrote: post #123
hermannj314 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The choice of language being a signal is interesting. That goes against my intuition. Can you elaborate?

Could rhyme with PG's "Python Paradox" essay from 20 years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html > It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know. > Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Hence…

So like Erlang nowadays? Or Rust?

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

#214

Post by scarface74 »

hgsgm wrote: post #98
fauxpause_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are a creator that can’t get your ideas across, you’re just like the literally dozen of people who have approached me with a “great idea” with no go to market strategy.

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

#215

Post by timthelion »

scarface74 wrote: post #166
tristor wrote: post #160

I'm probably going to get roasted for saying this, but this is completely unsurprising to me. When I was in college, folks from India and other low trust societies would mercilessly cheat on their projects and exams, blatantly helping one another on individual works, and the college knew about it and didn't care. When I had brought this up at one point, I was told by a professor that it was a cultural difference that…

Yes because Americans never cheat to get ahead and we are all morally superior…

Having grown up in America and moved to Czechia for college I have to say that I was absolutely shocked by the level of cheating both by Czechs as well as those from "farther east" like Ukraine and Russia. Just brazen obvious sheeting like taking notes into exams and hiding them. Cooperating during exams. Even collaboration to distract the teacher during exams. When I was at college in the US getting caught cheating once meant an instant fail for the course. Twice meant you were kicked out of school and you'd have a cheating mark added to your credit transfer paper so you couldn't move your college credits elsewhere. In Czechia, getting caught cheating meant having to re-take the test. Nothing bad happened to cheaters and they cheated rampantly.

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

#216

Post by yCombLinks »

scarface74 wrote: post #166
tristor wrote: post #160

I'm probably going to get roasted for saying this, but this is completely unsurprising to me. When I was in college, folks from India and other low trust societies would mercilessly cheat on their projects and exams, blatantly helping one another on individual works, and the college knew about it and didn't care. When I had brought this up at one point, I was told by a professor that it was a cultural difference that…

Yes because Americans never cheat to get ahead and we are all morally superior…

There's a very well studied decline in trust in America over time. Despite your snark no one claimed we never cheated etc. It's just getting much worse

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

#217

Post by hirvi74 »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #169
hermannj314 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather my doctor look up an answer in a medical textbook rather than "not cheat" and allow me to die in adherence to the noble idea that only the ideas we can keep in our long-term memory are worthy.

a cheating doctor would prescribe / perform unnecessary drugs / procedures / surgeries for personal gain or out of carelessness.

This is basically how western medicine operates in the US to begin with.

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

#218

Post by scarface74 »

hgsgm wrote: post #101
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…

When the rules of civilization change to the rules of the jungle, society collapses. Many societies have collapsed, even in modern times. It's not fun.

So when was the golden age of “society” where it was morally better?

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

#219

Post by passion__desire »

bee_rider wrote: post #84
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 fi…

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

The following article is the best example of the above quote.

https://nautil.us/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-with-phys... What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics? Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out.

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

#220

Post by dylan604 »

hermannj314 wrote: post #153
knicholes wrote: post #129

If one considers Kant's categorical imperative, "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law," then also considers how they'd feel if they were go to visit a doctor who had cheated or is cheating, one certainly must draw the conclusion that cheating is indeed immoral and undesirable.

I'd rather my doctor look up an answer in a medical textbook rather than "not cheat" and allow me to die in adherence to the noble idea that only the ideas we can keep in our long-term memory are worthy.

Rarely in real life will the situations not be open book exams. While coding, we have access to interactive/searchable docs, demos, tutorials, and of course SO and the likes. At work, we can chat with co-workers when we're stuck or have an idea but really feel like there's probably something better if more than one head was working on it.
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