351–360 of 748 posts
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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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Tangentially related… Life insurance companies (in the USA 20 years ago when I sold it) would require a medical exam for every life insurance application. If the applicant commits fraud by having someone else take the examination (usually a blood draw, height and weight measurement, and maybe a heart EKG for bigger policies), the policy is considered valid after two years. Even if the insurance company finds out frau…
Sounds similar to how (most? all?) life insurance policies will pay out for suicide after a two-year waiting period - the idea being that those who are dedicated enough to plan out that far in advance don't actually end up going through with it, or it's a rounding error. So perhaps the medical exam stuff should be swapped around; everyone can get life insurance, but if you want payout for certain things to kick in be…
Also, there are some policies that do have limited benefits the first two years. This is especially common for any type of insurance that doesn’t require a medical exam. They tend to be very expensive for the amount of insurance they provide, but maybe have a manageable monthly payment because the amount of coverage is relatively low. This type of insurance is usually “I can’t qualify for anything else” coverage, or it’s for a very specific purpose, like paying for funeral expenses when for some reason the person didn’t have the desire to just save that money in the bank.
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.
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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.
Been remote since 2015 and not gonna lie, thought about finding contractors on Fiverr or e-Lance (or whatever e-Lance is called these days) to do just that. Basically become a PM for a team of four Vietenamese kids and pull in pay from 3 gigs. I later did some contracting on the side of a full-time job in 2018 and it was hard -- confusion and burnout set in quickly. But still think about the offshoring approach somet…
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> Cheating ultimately cheats oneself, but it's very galling that it's now becoming accepted as okay behavior in American society Man, you crushed it here, so true.
"Fake it till you make it" has been a thing for a long time -- hence the catchy phrase. When did this wonderful meritocracy exist? Where? I think back to Jobs and Woz, and how he got him to hack a project to win a contest, and then didn't tell Woz and kept the money. It's been here since day 1.
Less adult time per child means a generation with far less formation.
It has to collapse before it gets better, but it will take centuries to get back to Rome levels of violence and back stabbing.
It's probably safe to assume that any research group (or business outfit), public or private, that doesn't have active fraud-detection and fraud-prevention policies in place is engaging in fraudulent activity of some sort.
Promotion in USA seems to be more like a thing that most happen every one or two years at work rather than for work well done, last time i had a friend that was working for a faang (pre-layoffs) and show me he was like a third level manager for several projects because he had 3+ years at company, he still does the same job as when he got in just that now has to manage or mostly deal with upper management request for estimated time to finish every day.
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 let any of my interviewees know that it is ok to use google, I just want to know what they searched for. I'm not running a trivia contest, so if they forgot the name of something or need a little refresh, that's fine.
Interviewing is a bit different, since there's no book, but when we looked for a junior dev, the applicants got a laptop with VS Code, the common browsers, internet access and an empty (macOS guest) account, and a few (short!) tasks to show if they understood the questions and were able to start formulating an answer. We also looked for a personality match (we're a small company) and signs of general intelligence. Worked out reasonably well.
I really dislike the more extreme approaches to interviewing that one sometimes comes across, like leet code scores. That's just too disconnected from the actual work. Unless you need your employee to grind leet code questions, of course.
a) I could hear their keyboard clacking when they googled the answer
b) they'd stall with "umm" and "ooo" while their friend googles the answer and shows it to them
c) (the best one) they'd memorize everything from leetcode style solutions and definitions to mathematics MCQs.
In my country, you're the odd one out if you have an exam or an interview and you don't prepare for cheating. It's a cultural expectation among peers to cheat to get ahead.
To work around this, I follow the advice I've read here on HN:
1) Ask them about their programming experience. Bugs they ran into, solutions they thought of, implementation of those solutions etc.
2) take a problem I faced in my work and present it to them and observe how they navigate the problem to reach a solution. They don't have to solve it, I just see their approach
3) just talk to them while asking basic language syntax and definitions. Again, the goal here is to check if they've memorized the answers or are they speaking from experience. If the answer is a regurgitation of some interview prep website, probe deeper to see if they know what they're saying.
The downside of this approach is, of course, time. It takes 40 minutes to an hour for each of these interviews. Time that sometimes I don't have and I have to move some stuff around to accommodate, work late to cover up or delegate. This approach has worked for me so far. I've hired 5 people in my team and all of them have been good hires.
EDIT: formatting and grammar
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…
the problem is that its a zero-sum game, you can only compare performance across a cohort. if the majority of your cohort cheats, and cheating hurts performance, then they'll all be low performance and you'll still end up promoting some of them (because thats just what happens)
I can't accept this premise. Optimally the persons responsible for managing engineering staff should be able to independently determine whether the work being produced was of sufficient quality or not regardless of the cohort.
At issue here, I believe is that this is a difficult thing to cultivate consistently in many corporations and so there's some desire to create standardized metrics for performance against which a cohort is measured. Regardless, most large tech firms have some kind of well defined rubric against which the engineers are measured.