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

teamblind.com

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

#241

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…

Absolutely. Values such as "it's wrong even if nobody gets hurt or finds out" are not universally held. Besides differences in culture, there is almost no liberal arts education in places like India.

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

#242
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Interview should be a real world test of my abilities." "OK, take two weeks and create a feature." "No, not like that."

Who said that (not me)

Might not be you, but I've seen tons of people on this board bemoan take-home interview tests.

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

#243

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…

I had a fantastic thermodynamics instructor in undergrad school. He was from a rough part of a city in Iran. At the beginning of the course, he told us his policy on cheating, which was zero tolerance. He added that he had seen every kind of cheating and dishonesty in his neighborhood growing up and there was no way anyone in that class would get away with anything because he had seen it all. It was a great course.

At any rate, being from a "low trust society" can also motivate someone to go in the other direction because they have seen the injustice that is a consequence of cheating and dishonesty.

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

#244

Reading some of the comments in this thread I'm surprised. It seems that a substantial number of people think one of the following: a.) cheating on interviews is ok, because interviews don't reflect the actual job b.) this is acceptable because the promotion process is distinct from the interview process or c.) that the cheaters clearly are skilled after all because of all their success, as evidenced by being promote…

I read these comments not as a defense of cheating, but as resignation that "This is just how the world is." Your view is right at home in a Star Trek The Next Generation world where everyone's needs are met and people act ethically, with good intentions and are in return treated fairly. A civilized, meritocratic world that doesn't exist. Like it or not, we live in a zero-sum dog-eat-dog world that pits neighbors aga…

Thanks for sharing this. All I want to respond with is to say though that I don't know if the "personality type" that we mentioned is really all that better off. I'm skeptical at least.

I think it's more than likely that they've spent their whole lives trying to accumulate power without ever having cultivated the sense of how to use it. Sort of how in so many places all around the world people of less means seem to be so happy. Obviously there are exceptions abound and I'm not trying to present a quantitative argument one way or another.

Just that the people who live well aren't always the ones who are living "well", if you take my meaning.

I obviously can't be the judge of them and say "all the people I know that are like _that_ are fundamentally unfulfilled", but I can say about myself that the times where I had acted in that way didn't make me any happier, if I were to be honest with myself.

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

#246
post #92

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 end result is the same who cares

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

#247
post #118
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t really cheat your way to a better presentation. If the “spitballed” version is good enough for the situation, why expend a lot of effort on preparation? Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all thes…

It probably isn't good enough. But it's hard for the audience to tell. "Any questions?" "How are we going to scale the data storage?" "Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance." "Great." It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten th…

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

#248

Reading some of the comments in this thread I'm surprised. It seems that a substantial number of people think one of the following: a.) cheating on interviews is ok, because interviews don't reflect the actual job b.) this is acceptable because the promotion process is distinct from the interview process or c.) that the cheaters clearly are skilled after all because of all their success, as evidenced by being promote…

Maybe the commenters had a different take, but I the OP's post as, "The system is broken and this is proof." Not necessarily condoning cheating itself.

I certainly agree though that cheating is a sad thing to build your life on, regardless of whether the system is broken or not. Obviously there are exceptions to this as things get more extreme, but a strong desire to work at amazon is not what I would call extreme lol.

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

#249
post #85
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Seen the exact same personality at many employers, it's like they all come from the same factory. I can smell it a mile away now.

OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm gonna have to go with scarface on this one. While your statements could very well be true, it is dangerous to make cultural generalizations without the data to back it.

What kind of "data" would you accept for this? Crime data by demographic?

Scarface just said "can't generalize to everyone" which is true and not the original point made.

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