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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)

#281

Post by asimpletune »

passion__desire wrote: post #255
scarface74 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Americans cheat at earth-scale by bringing about into existence of intricate systems that benefit them immensely.

Yeah, I mean one thing that's interesting about the world is that every country cheats, but we all cheat in our own ways. I don't think there's anyway to get around it.

That said, I don't really want American culture to continue down this "if the ends justify the means" trend that we've been on. We're not cut out for it! We'll get our lunch eaten.

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

#282

Post by tristor »

spamizbad wrote: post #262
asimpletune wrote: post #115

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 would say the pro-cheating attitude is pretty widespread among young adults tracking into white collar careers, and computer science is no different. It usually starts in school - and these interview quizzes track this behavior pretty closely. Even without the cheating, you can pass an interview "honestly" by putting in the time to cram for it. That does not justify cheating in any way, though. The fact that people…

> they also need to fix their process to actually test skills.

If we're being honest, LC style interviews aren't even about testing skills, it's trying to proxy for testing raw intelligence (or at least the ability to remember and regurgitate lots of facts). If companies could just IQ test people and hire by IQ, there'd be a lot less weirdness in interviews, but that's illegal (and probably rightly so).

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

#283

Post by bombcar »

danielvaughn wrote: post #135
heelix wrote: post #27

I've done a lot of screening interviews and cheating does happen. Some of my favorites: * developer attempts to pass something off as video lag, as he attempts to lip sync someone else's answer. * developer had printed all the 'common' answers on the wall behind his computer, and would look up to them for reference as we were talking. Then the tape came off and covered him in a a paper stack overflow. * the glorious…

I'm so curious about that last one. You interviewed and accepted one person, but a different person showed up to actually work? If so, that's incredibly bizarre.

Apparently this is moderately common especially during remote Covid work; there were some discussions of it on HN, even to where the person interviewed and accepted was not the person working, and apparently the work was being done by an entire group of people.

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

#284

Post by camel_gopher »

p0pcult wrote: post #163
spicyusername wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I relate heavily to the spirit of your comments. Wouldn't we all be better off if we lived in a society that is built on trust and honesty. However, I think you're being a little naive if you think the days of "yesteryear" were somehow different in man's capacity and willingness to do what he needs to do to survive. I mean in every facet of life we're basically awash in never before seen capacity to benefit from dish…

>what he needs to do to survive Robbing a loaf of bread so your children can eat is very different from cheating on a test/interview for a job with a kingly salary. One is doing what one needs to do to survive, and morally justifiable. The other is pathetic and craven.

Sure; but which is which will vary from person to person.

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

#285

Post by ctvo »

The person's friends all went to large corporations.

Someone who was willing to cheat so aggressively (keyboard with another laptop behind the current one?!) won't take credit for someone else's work? Play politics relentless? Lie about their contributions? Etc.. And all of these things help you get promoted in large corporations. And this was from entry level to mid level. It does get a little harder if you're a complete fraud for senior and staff levels.

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

#286

Post by glanzwulf »

WJW wrote: post #39
glanzwulf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is the interview process, because clearly the difficulty of the interview does not match the difficulty of the job. Sure, they cheated to get in, but then once in they found out it wasn't that hard to stay and get promoted.

It's also possible that they kept cheating in order to get promoted, of course.

I dunno, I think it's pretty hard to keep cheating as a developer. How would a developer even cheat to get promoted? I mean, a PM I can see survive for longer, but a SDE?

I actually had this issue at my current job where we hired someone who seemed great and who did really well on his interview exercises but then once he started working... well, it was pretty obvious he did not know what he was doing at all. So he was let go straight away. There was no way he could cheat his way to stick it out for longer than a month.

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

#287

Post by ausbah »

in a system where the company takes a large majority of the value I provide for a company, is incentived in many cases to underpay & overwork, who can fire me at any point for any reason, and takes a majority of the time in my life - I would label cheating as evening the playing field in my favor a little bit

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

#288

Post by wavefunction »

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…

I'd only roast you for misunderstanding the "problem" to be solved. It's not that the societies are "low-trust" but that the cost of being caught for cheating is that you continue with the life already available to you or you win a golden ticket if you're not caught. It's a no-brainer.

There's no reason to not-cheat unless you absolutely don't have to and what's the maxim about good programmers, they're so lazy they'll figure out a work-around to save themselves some time? Even if it's stuff they know already? Once you're into the system there are mutual shared interests and political efforts that can support such a career.

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

#289

Post by halbritt »

To say nothing of the ethics of cheating, I think this behavior speaks to the value of the interview process. If it can be gamed so easily, it's likely not a great measure of the quality of the candidate and the companies that have implemented deserve the hires they make.

It'd doubtful the folks at the company actually mind that the interviews are being cheated. If the candidates appear to be qualified and appear to be fill the role for which they were hired and appear to be competent in that role, that's sufficient for most corporations and one of the problems working in "tech". That is to say, there are plenty of people in it that appear to be doing a thing, but aren't actually capable.

Somewhere in this thread a poster mentioned woodworking, which is a nice contrast. If you hire a carpenter, it becomes obvious pretty quickly if the carpenter is competent.

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

#290

Post by kelipso »

gs17 wrote: post #257
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…

> 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 had to be respected . The reality (speaking from experience) may be that international stud…

Yep, I know for a fact the higher ups tell (heavily imply to) the professors/lecturers to go easy on the undergrad international students with cheating and other behaviors at least in the smaller US colleges.
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