Live data from Hacker News

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

teamblind.com

451–460 of 748 posts

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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's theory. In reality abused women may choose not to attempt to divorce (or even leave) their abusive husband since they fear retaliation.

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

#452
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

With the advent of AI and wearable IoT gadgets, the only way for schools to test out their students will be one one one filmed interviews that the students can give to future employers.

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

#453

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…

In many respects the world functions as it does because not everyone thinks and acts like that. Anytime there is significant power / resource asymmetry for any period of time, it seems it will eventually be captured by sociopaths / psychopaths.

>it seems it will eventually be captured by sociopaths / psychopaths.

This Is unfortunately generally true. It generally happens because well intentioned functioning people, allow the sociopaths to take over (because it's unpleasant to confront them) , even in tiny groups. I think this can be stalled by an ever vigilant group. People who are willing to take on the job of constant vigilance in addition to their regular tasks are few and far be in between. Consequently such groups are very few and probably are never even public, hence we never hear of them.

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

#454

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 for one think this kind of stuff is pretty shameful, and I don't see how the world can function if everyone were to think and act like that.

It functions because the premise, that interviews actually work as filters to choose the best candidates, is false.

It also works because finding the answers for a question is a skill, likely more valuable at work than memorizing a dozen of algorithm implementations.

The current interview culture is a joke.

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

#455
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I expect my interviewees to use Google and am disappointed if they don't. It's more important to me that they know how to find the right answer than it is that they just know it off the top of their head. 90% of their time is going to be spent figuring out how to solve all the known-unknowns they're going to come across.

Ditto, 20 years on and I research and read articles when I start any new project because in one year there can be entire paradigm shifts in tooling and best practices.

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

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Abusers are at their most dangerous when you try to leave them. They will be even more dangerous if you have to damage their public reputation with the ugly truth to try to escape.

No fault divorce makes it vastly easier to divorce for a lot of reasons and making it unnecessarily hard to leave can foster situations where it becomes abusive because they don't get along that well and can't just up and leave because they want to.

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

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

[flagged]

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

#458
post #9

Yes, it's fundamentally unfair to those interviewees who don't cheat. And the process is broken. However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one. Look at it from the point of view of the hiring company now, not the interviewer. They got a person who was good enough (based on the merits of their actual work, not interview pe…

Isn't there an alternative interpretation, that the internal evaluation process is just as broken as the hiring process?

Possibly. But if that's the case, the best thing that can happen is for bullshiters to fill up all of the positions there and drive the company down fast as possible.

I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

[flagged]

> It doesn't invalidate the easily observable phenomenon of widespread cheating in low trust society like India.

Agreed. I am very carefully saying that I stand by my own observations as well. The point is that, while these behaviors may be commonplace in a particular society, it does not mean any given individual person from that society engages in these behaviors. We should always be careful of the heuristics we apply to people and work to treat every individual as an individual.

Not being careful here can actually create a form of category error. It's similar to the expectations of visitors to the US that everyone is walking around openly carrying guns and shooting each other constantly due to what's in the news or the statistical probability of a shooting occurring compared to other countries in the world. If you have a 4x higher chance of being involved in a shooting per capita in the US vs a random Western European country, both numbers could be minuscule chances (and are). Just because this type of dishonest behavior is more commonplace in low trust societies, and in this case in India in particular, the population is so large that it still represents a small fraction of the total number of people and you have to be careful not to indict everyone within the society on the basis of the behavior of a few. 15% of the Indian population would be the same as half or more of the US population, but there's a very big difference in categorization between something that is the behavior of a minority of a population vs half or more of the population.

That's all I'm saying. Treat individuals as individuals.

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

#460

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…

> [cheating] was a cultural difference that had to be respected

What he meant to say was "they pay sticker price"

Post reply on HN