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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)

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nobody claimed that americans never cheated, yet the blame of things getting worse is put on GP on those coming from “low trust” societies. It’s a xenophobic lie, like if Americans don’t celebrate lying on positive euphemisms like “fake it till you make it” or “being a good salesman”

Similar experiences have been reported by people who came from these places

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

#562

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…

I'm glad you've never cheated, and hope this becomes more common in the future.

But you're fighting an uphill battle to expect people not to possess prejudices based on what is statistically likely. People will believe the evidence of their eyes.

The most you can hope is that people not act on their prejudices before getting to know you. And, as unfair as it is that you can't change it, you'll have to find ways to live with the reality that there are people who will act on their prejudices before they get to know you and know that you're really different.

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

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that don’t cheat much think that cheating is easy. Often times I see cheaters put in almost the same amount of effort as non cheaters the cheaters just get a higher probability of success.

But the long term success for cheating is actually much lower, those who actually learned things will do better in the long term even if they have a lower probability of short term success Many humans seem to be incredibly short sighted

I disagree, I don’t believe Trump and Elon musk are ethical and they are very successful in terms of power and money.

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

#564
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're getting colonized, I don't know if it really matters whether the colonizers honor their promises more or less. Consider the Maori, the gold standard for a colonized people who managed to get a full treaty with the British very early on, even securing representation in government in the mid-1800s. Are they meaningfully any better off as a result of these agreements, relative to other indigenous groups? Not…

I think you'd be surprised by just how possible it would be to enter into a successful and good faith agreement with a warring tribe which has enslaved or massacred your people. Spanish colonists in New Mexico did so with the Comanche despite the Comanche holding hundreds of captive New Mexicans who they had kidnapped. How did this work? The New Mexicans honored their treaty, and the Comanche established a degree of…

Why did they honor treaties rather than just continuing with open conflict? The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. In general you only fight a war when a) you're being attacked or b) there is something to be gained by doing so that, in expectation, is more valuable than the cost of the war. If there'd had been mountains of gold in Canada to be won, or if the indigenous peoples had put up less of a fight (imposed less of a cost), you can bet the British would not have signed any treaties. Same with New Zealand.

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then why hire technically excellent people? They might expect excellent salaries or excellent working conditions.

That's like asking why do kings buy wonderful artworks when they could save their gold and hang mediocre artworks on their wall? Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...

I would think technical employees would have an analogy closer to useful things like tools, rather than aesthetic stuff like art. But I’m not sure what the analogy is getting us here, anyway.

Anyway, a king that hoards priceless art seems worse? The good stuff belongs in a museum visible to the public, not a private collection or walled off throne room. And lots of the art (jewelry for example) produced for royals was just expensive gaudy crap anyway, a waste of gold.

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

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

100% agreed! That's why I specified "from an actual ex-colleague" rather than "from someone they once got a LinkedIn request from but knows nothing about and couldn't pick out of a police lineup".

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

#567

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…

It sounds like you find cheating shameful for vague moralistic reasons that you have not disclosed. Software is full of cheating. I am really convinced that maybe 85% (that's actually being generous) of developers have no idea what they are doing. They know enough to complete some tiny agile tasks and push a few lines into a pull request. These people are either suffering from imposter syndrome, deliberately cheating…

"Developers are not taught to write. Although many of these people have bachelor's degrees so many cannot put their thoughts into even a simple bullet list." This is 100% true and it's frustrating. I think it applies to almost everybody though, not just developers.

I think an alternative to higher standards would be lower pay. I am convinced that would weed out many of the people who don't actually care about software engineering. IMO, the majority of software development is not that difficult and lots of companies are overpaying for people who are just plumbing data from point A to point B and using libraries they didn't develop and have a weak understanding of.

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

#568

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…

IOW, crime pays.

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

#569

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…

I graduated with my Bachelors about a decade ago and recently went back to school for my Masters. I work full time and attend school part-time.

I was shocked when I went back and started to work alongside many of the students in group projects. About 3/4 of the class were from India or Nepal. When I would meet up for group projects on Comp Sci security labs, I was shocked that everyone's instinct when we would start was to immediately google or use Chegg to find the lab done by other students and essentially copy it. I got frustrated because many of the times, my group would resort to cheating before even understanding what the lab wanted us to do, it was instinctual.

I didn't see this in the few groups I had with other American-born citizens. I feel guilty to even suggest a difference like this and I am conscious of cultural bias, but it was impossible to ignore the dichotomy between these groups.

Up to this point i have chalked the difference to an age gap. Many of my classmates are young and have zero work experience yet. They want their degree as a piece of paper to get a job. By contrast I already have a high-ranking and high-paying position and extensive resume. I am not looking to use my Masters as a rite of passage, but I truly want to go back to school to deepen my knowledge academically at some scientific concepts that you won't find in YouTube videos or through personal study. I am there to learn, not just pass a class. So when given these labs, I see them as opportunities to learn something to apply in my current career and my teammates just want to get it done so they can get a job. But this doesn't explain why the American-born teammates who were also young were willing to learn and not resort instantly to cheating, so it likely is deeply cultural.

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

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think any insurance company would have a lifelong suicide exclusion if they could. I’m pretty sure they are legally obligated to pay after two years, as it’s be too easy for nearly any insurance company to claim most deaths were possibly a suicide. The main point being that you can’t pay the mortgage on your house, which may be the sole reason you got life insurance, if the benefits aren’t being paid out. Also, the…

> I think any insurance company would have a lifelong suicide exclusion if they could

I suspect you're right.

There certainly are desperate people who go to Vegas, lose their entire savings, and choose to end their life because they're not willing to put in the work to continue trying to survive for another, say, 40 years, starting with zero assets.

There are also people with severe mental illness (poor/no executive function, prone to psychotic episodes, imbalances in their brain chemistry) who make poor choices or don't even consciously make choices but their body is nonetheless doing things, who end up also choosing to end their lives.

There is overlap between these two groups. How could an insurance company decide which is which? If cancer can kill you and they pay out for that, why would they not pay out for deaths due to mental illness? Because they can. We're becoming more willing to talk about mental health, but there's still a ways to go.

There's a ton of stuff that can go wrong with the mind and I couldn't hazard a guess at what proportion of people are 100% okay.

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