My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022) • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by selimthegrim » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

scaramanga wrote: post #269

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another, even more cynical, interpretation. They may have been discovered to be incompetent, and promoted into a role where they can do less damage.

And an interpretation more cynical than that: The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget. Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.

People get kicked upstairs to sinecures all the time

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

#512

Post by PsylentKnight » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #371

psychphysic wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically "do unto others" but phrased needlessly complexly?

The Golden Rule operates at the small scale of an iterated prisoner's dilemma where two parties are directly interacting. Kant's wording scales up to include the emergent properties of a society which operated according to that rule. The Golden Rule doesn't cover cases like, "Should I throw this trash in a lake." because there's no concrete person being "done unto". Kant's rule does: Would you want to live in a world…

Ok, then "be the change you wish to see in the world" but needlessly complex.

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

#513

Post by crop_rotation » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:11 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #499

gedy wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any "fix" to the interview process has to accommodate the reality that the left half of the applicant pool distribution is of terribly low levels of ability. I would like to see some distinction between people who apply cold, and people who have been reached out to by a company. I'm an experienced, employed engineer, and if a company reaches out to me, I expect to not be treated in an interview like "gotta see if y…

I think there are three categories rather than just two. Cold application, reached out to by a recruiter, or referred by a former colleague. Seeing how internal recruiting or "sourcing" works, I don't see it as being vastly different from a cold application. Someone dredged up your profile on LinkedIn and reached out to you based on a keyword search (in all likelihood). Once you responded, they passed you off to the…

Referral too at this point is gamed too much. People think of referrals more as a favour that gives them brownie points than anything else.

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

#514

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #502

bumby wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I maybe unfairly characterized both "dishonesty" and "nepotism" as a display of lack of integrity (by the Western definition, which tends to bias toward meritocratic values). “Dishonest” from the standpoint of deviating from the social contract of unbiased and meritocratic hiring.

I don't see nepotism as being dishonest. It may be unseemly or unfair (or not, depending on culture), but it's not dishonest.

[deleted]

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

#515

Post by lytefm » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #222

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 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…

> I read these comments not as a defense of cheating, but as resignation that "This is just how the world is."

I'm also sympathetic with the cheaters. Everyone knows that these leetcode interviews are pretty dumb. Most people probably pass by memorizing everything and forgetting the stuff right afterwards. It's testing willingness to grind rather than ad hoc problem solving capabilities. If someone is capable of doing the job and just figuring out a way to get through the gatekeeping, I don't care. I know many people that cheated on exams at some point but are pretty legit otherwise.

> Look at this "personality type" as you call it: People who bullshit their way through life, self-promote, swindle, grift, fake it til they make it, hustle, exploit people's good intentions, take credit for the work of others, and so on.

There are a lot of psychological and societal mechanism that tend to punish this behavior. I'd rather be financially well enough off but honest rather than a super rich asshole.

> I'm one of those naive suckers who thinks hard work in the trenches should be rewarded. At work I often sit there doing the dirty gritty work that needs to get done, while peers write bullshit presentations and get face-time with the execs, and schmooze their way to promotion after promotion, and it sucks.

For myself, I decided that the best way is to be competent and do the hard work, but also to set boundaries, to ensure that my work is visible, to communicate ideas and feedback with execs and to fight against the fakers. You won't get anything if you don't ask for it. Taking down obvious fakes can take a while if the execs are too gullible, but it's worth doing.

If your execs are idiot assholes rather than competent people with some integrity, you should probably look for a job elsewhere.

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

#516

Post by throw9away6 » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #169

hermannj314 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather my doctor look up an answer in a medical textbook rather than "not cheat" and allow me to die in adherence to the noble idea that only the ideas we can keep in our long-term memory are worthy.

a cheating doctor would prescribe / perform unnecessary drugs / procedures / surgeries for personal gain or out of carelessness.

So just your rental urgent care doc?

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

#517

Post by PartiallyTyped » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

doctorh wrote: post #317

mattgibson wrote: post #3

TBF I don't think this is bad. The "cheating" involved seems a closer match to the actual real world conditions of the doing the job than the artificial "no internet allowed" assessment. If the candidates can get stuff done but need the internet as a reference, that's still getting stuff done. Not surprising that they are now getting promoted given they can not only get stuff done, but were resourceful enough to find…

If you're willing to go to such lengths in order to be deceptive, it reflects very badly on your moral character. I wouldn't want to work with people like that and we should not reward that kind of behavior.

I am not particularly fond of this kind of moral flexibility. It's lying and the person found ways to justify themselves. This isn't the kind of person I can trust to be honest with me, they don't seem reliable either. Thanks, but no thanks.

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

#518

Post by kspacewalk2 » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

asdfman123 wrote: post #363

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #2

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…

This is like saying my contractor put in a low quality roof, but it hasn’t collapsed yet. The problem is while you can’t control randomness, on average those roofs do fail much more. But more broadly it’s amazing how far developers on HN will go to defend things that will mildly inconvenience developers.

No, it's not like that at all. It's like saying the roofer I hired doctored his references, but then proceeded to build a roof that's objectively good enough for me to hire him again to build another roof, on a bigger house for more money.

Cheating to bypass a stupid gatekeeping system that's designed to ration 1 job per N perfectly qualified applicants is only a problem if it's a problem. If you claim that people who didn't cheat during that process are any less likely to do something unethical when hired, I'd say that's a claim in need of proof.

My preferred solution is to come up with a less stupid gatekeeping system. But I only ever hire co-op students, and no one will let me try anything that involves more than a 30-minute chat. Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.

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

#519

Post by hedora » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

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 companies grow, they have to have a promotion process. I've never encountered a company where that promotion process accurately assessed contribution to the business or technical competence. At best, the two are weakly correlated.

So, what happens when a company succeeds is that the competent people eventually either get tenured, or they get forced out by bozos (I'm using this as a term of art. Look up the bozo effect.) Eventually, the bozos win, and the company becomes unable to do anything other than extract monopoly rent. Then, some technology or regulatory shift arrives, and the incumbent gets forced out by a startup, or they somehow shed their bozos for a while.

So, if you are competent and honest, you have three choices:

- Learn how to be productive despite the promotion criteria. This is the path to tears and burn out, because most of your colleagues will only be good at gaming interviews / promotions, and your attention will be split between that and doing your job (and probably their jobs), placing you at a significant disadvantage.

- Somehow become the tenured engineer on top of this mess, and try to create pockets of competence in the organization. Ruthlessly detect + fire the bozos. This isn't fun either.

- Leave for a startup that's targeting a weak and foolish incumbent, and then leave when the startup grows up and becomes the weak and foolish incumbent (a good sign that this is happening is that the founding engineering team is leaving, or that your boss's boss is incompetent.)

Note that the last option is the lowest stress one for technically strong engineers. It is very hard to fake your way through knowing what you are doing when the entire company has direct visibility into your work.

If you can somehow solve the above problem then you can build a company larger than any of the FAANGs.

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

#520

Post by siftrics » Wed, May 10, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

laratied wrote: post #339

hirvi74 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically how western medicine operates in the US to begin with.

That is simply not true. What you are ascribing to personal gain is just protecting against personal loss. Ordering an extra test or an extra drug is mostly a doctor covering themselves from potential lawsuit.

You're delusional if you think physicians maliciously over-prescribing in the US is not a problem.

People are tremendously impacted, for good or ill, when prescribed pain medications, ADHD medications, anti-depressants, etc. Many of these people are harmed. Many of the doctors who caused them harm simply do not care.