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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)

#411

Post by pythonb3sss »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #401
pythonb3sss wrote: post #359

I dislike cheating. I've taken ~50 interviews and in 90% of them cheated: 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 inter…

> c) (the best one) memorize everything from leetcode style solutions and definitions to mathematics MCQs. Couldn't it be argued that memorizing leetcode solutions IS NOT cheating? Seems like it would be better to understand things at a fundamental level, but its still proof of ability to master the problem in and takes a lot of effort. Especially if the person was upfront about the fact they could solve the problem…

The problem was that he was terrible at problem solving. He failed at simple logical problems like flattening a nested json array, cleaning data before running operations on it, etc. And probing further on his memorized answers, he couldn't explain anything. He'd just repeat the same thing but change voice of the sentence (active/passive)

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

#412

Post by archagon »

raghudotcc wrote: post #372
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 am from India, and I just recently completed my Masters from a US university. I have never cheated in my life when it comes to interviews, exams, or assignments; not once. I am worried that calling us “low-trust” because of your experience with a few students might lead others to think that the entire country that is so diverse and large is comprised of just an incompetent set of cheaters. I agree that a lot of stu…

Not OP, but to be clear, "low trust society" has a specific sociological meaning relating to interpersonal trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...

It doesn't mean that individuals from that society are less trustworthy.

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

#413

Post by robertlagrant »

mchanson wrote: post #397
mensetmanusman wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things are different structurally. Eg about 50 years ago most kids grew up with both of their parents, today it’s about half. 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.

Actually its over 70% of kids in USA grow up with two parents still. 50 years ago it was 85%, but that would have been with a lot of unhappy and abusive marriages that now with no-fault divorce are able to be dissolved. Also child sexual and physical abuse has reduced during this same time frame. "According to David Finkelhor who tracked Child Maltreatment Report (NCANDS) data from 1990 to 2010, sexual abuse had decl…

What's the relationship between abusive marriages and no-fault divorce? Won't abusive people be the easiest to divorce with fault?

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

#414

Post by tristor »

raghudotcc wrote: post #372
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 am from India, and I just recently completed my Masters from a US university. I have never cheated in my life when it comes to interviews, exams, or assignments; not once. I am worried that calling us “low-trust” because of your experience with a few students might lead others to think that the entire country that is so diverse and large is comprised of just an incompetent set of cheaters. I agree that a lot of stu…

Like all observations, they are reflective only of the individuals observed, even if a pattern emerges. 17% of all people in the world are Indian, India alone has 1.4B people, and that doesn't even count the hundreds of millions of Indians in the diaspora around the world. Nothing you could possibly say about Indians is true for every person in that group, because the group is so large that it necessarily includes every possible facet of humanity, good, bad, or otherwise.

I say all that to say, that I stand by the truth of my observations, but I do not intend for those observations to in any way imply that it would be acceptable to discriminate against people from India, or anywhere else, on the basis of their origin or ethnicity. I do not discriminate in this manner, as it is just as ethically reprehensible, incorrect, and dishonorable as the behavior I was pointing out in my original comment. I have worked with many Indian colleagues throughout my career that were excellent engineers, managers, and otherwise decent people.

Just to clearly state it, I do not in any way think that any individual person I meet from India is any more likely to cheat or otherwise be dishonest than any individual person I meet from anywhere else. India is far from the only low-trust society in the world, and in general most of the countries in the world qualify as low-trust societies. These are academic terms, and it is entirely expected that there is a higher variance in behavior for individuals in low-trust societies versus high-trust societies, so if anything honestly referring to India as a low-trust society implies within it that there is a higher variance of individual behavior and it's even less accurate to generalize about the behavior of Indian people.

I would be happy to work with anyone who loves computer science and embraces the cool things that we can do with technology to reshape the world and improve the human condition, no matter where they originate from.

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

#415

Post by asimpletune »

bumby wrote: post #368
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…

> Like, there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA One nuance that may help explain how the change happened is how the status of CS has changed in the last 20 years. Maybe its just my age bias, but there seems to be a perceptible change of how CS majors are viewed by society and that changes the type of people attracted to that curriculum. It used to be that CS and engineering major…

I don't know the history of the bar exam, but I could imagine something like that one day being instituted to protect our repetitional interest.

Even though we're both talking about SWE, whereas CS is a different thing altogether.

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

#417

Post by randcraw »

yCombLinks wrote: post #216
scarface74 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder if Americans' history of seeing cheating as dishonorable grew from our roots in Puritanism, where principle always trumps pragmatism. If so, then perhaps our ongoing devaluation of principles (and our rising mistrust in others to act honorably) is caused by the erosion of those roots as the American middle class has fallen on harder times, concluding that "the rules of the game have changed" and the old mantra of guiding one's life by principle is now delivering diminishing returns. So when in Rome...

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

#418

Post by naijaboiler »

11101010001100 wrote: post #131

As a teacher, I 'work' with cheaters. Some learn their lesson, some don't. I try to explain that while you might be able to cheat in a school, you certainly won't be able to cheat on the job. I guess this is a naive perspective.

This is a very naive take that lets people feel good that cheaters will one day face their comeuppance. They don't. Learning to cheat itself is sometimes a useful skill. It means you have figured out what's important that's going to get assessed, and you have figured out a way to pass the assessment. That skill will help you in the workplace as well.

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

#419

Post by naasking »

byyyy wrote: post #275
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…

>As a passing thought I've noticed that there's also sort of like a fierce loyalty to defending LLM's in the forums, often by people who display a certain amount of ignorance as to how they work. I wonder if there's a similar dynamic there as to the people who are justifying the cheaters in the comments? No it's the other way around. Hinton, basically the father of "AI" and other real experts who are involved in the…

> Hinton even says the AI actually understands you. The fact that there's division among the real experts (ie not you or me) shows theirs legitimacy in the defense.

Exactly. Every time I push back on people who dismiss LLMs as not understanding, they but don't seem to realize how little we know about the brain and what "understanding" actually means, mechanistically. So even with perfect understanding of how LLMs function, that tells us nothing about whether they actually understand.

If defined operationally as being able to reliably and coherently converse about topics, make connections, solve problems and respond in novel or surprising ways, LLMs these days are at or slightly above the average human. Way above in some respects, but still below in others. It won't be long before their capabilities undeniably surpass the average.

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

#420

Post by solarmist »

dilawar wrote: post #343
runlaszlorun wrote: post #69

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…

In my country, India, cheating in university is rampant. But there were more than a few of my classmates, who didn't. On average, it sad to see all that cheating. Aren't you saying you are incompetent by cheating?

Yup. Pretty much.

Or you don’t believe this material/test will affect your future.

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