Live data from Hacker News

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

teamblind.com

651–660 of 748 posts

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

#651
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably isn't good enough. But it's hard for the audience to tell. "Any questions?" "How are we going to scale the data storage?" "Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance." "Great." It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten th…

If all you need to answer that question is "we're confident that X" then that's still a problem with the asker. Why are they confident? Have we modeled the data needs over time? What data are we even storing? Basic probing questions should either uncover the lack of preparation or show that things will indeed be fine. Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the a…

This is only true in a low-trust society. In a high-trust society, it's absolutely on the presenter to make their claims not only true, but realistically true, and acceptable by the average person. When people defect from that norm, they are shamed, or worse.

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

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaters getting ahead of honest people is of course a problem and I don't understand how you could possibly say it isn't. Those cheaters are taking away jobs and promotions from people who deserve it more.

If by the cheaters you mean the executives and investors who personally capture all of the profit, then I couldn't agree more. The reason that we're suffering from "inflation" and see record high wealth inequality is because the people at the top are hoarding all of the capital and profit leaving little for the vast majority of people.

On a meta note, trying to engage with you seriously is annoying because every single one of your comments is whataboutism.

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

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you need to answer that question is "we're confident that X" then that's still a problem with the asker. Why are they confident? Have we modeled the data needs over time? What data are we even storing? Basic probing questions should either uncover the lack of preparation or show that things will indeed be fine. Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the a…

This is only true in a low-trust society. In a high-trust society, it's absolutely on the presenter to make their claims not only true, but realistically true, and acceptable by the average person. When people defect from that norm, they are shamed, or worse.

Aren't we talking about an environment where there are rampant cheaters? My perception was that this is by definition a low-trust company. Of course, it is always going to be easier to remove yourself from that situation and go to a company that has more rigorous interviews that would catch cheating in the first place.

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know for a fact that it is IQ that is driving SES and not the other way around.

What evidence do you have for this claim? You are suggesting SES is a meritocracy around IQ.

identical twins reared together vs apart, their IQs correlate more with their twin's than with the SES of the adoptive family.

high quality studies have found that the additive heritability of IQ is somewhere around 0.8-0.9, that's just totally incompatible with parental SES as the primary upstream cause. it's simply not debatable. and it wasn't debatable ten or twenty or fifty years ago either; it is one of the most well-established facts in human quantitative genetics.

ironically one of the things having a high IQ is bad for is having accurate beliefs about IQ; ask anyone who didn't go to college and odds are they'll correctly tell you that smartness runs in families.

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

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you absolutely are cheating yourself if you cheat on something you're supposed to be learning. On the other hand, I have a tendency to be brutally honest about my own knowledge and capabilities, and it has bitten me multiple times. I've gotten negative performance review feedback from management that was word for word from the 'things I think I can improve'. I've gotten passed over for jobs and promotions bec…

>brutally honest about my own knowledge and capabilities Is this a lack of confidence? > I've gotten passed over for jobs and promotions because I don't do a good enough job of 'selling' my experience. Selling your experience IS an important skill. Other factors may have played a part too. > successful software engineers I've met also have the ability to bullshit Is it their bullshit that gets them to be successful?…

> If someone is always talking about how bad they are at something, then I'll interpret that as the person being negative, lacking confidence, and pessimistic. That's not the kind of person I'd want to be around in general, let alone hire.

Enjoy the circle of yes men.

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

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by the cheaters you mean the executives and investors who personally capture all of the profit, then I couldn't agree more. The reason that we're suffering from "inflation" and see record high wealth inequality is because the people at the top are hoarding all of the capital and profit leaving little for the vast majority of people.

On a meta note, trying to engage with you seriously is annoying because every single one of your comments is whataboutism.

[deleted]

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

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mean didn't the greater European community as a whole benefit greatly by access to the materials found in the "new world" (and also Asia)? At the expense of killing millions? At the expense of killing and enslaving millions?

It would really help if you could identify a specific business to talk about. Columbus wasn't a business but if you take a look at why he got funding [1] you'll see its very clearly for the greater good (of the crown). Of course, the inhabitants of the land being colonized are not taken into consideration but they're also not the one giving Columbus his funding. I think you need to think a bit longer about this. If s…

It didn’t help the slaves or the people being colonized…

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

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mant…

It's not Puritanism, but Judaeo-Christianity. In the Bible, God is always described as telling the truth, so any form of misrepresentation is moving yourself towards the opposite of God's character. Cheating is basically a form of misrepresenting yourself; commandment #9 prohibits false testimony about your neighbor, which presumably also includes false testimony about yourself. The New Testament also prohibits lying…

It also says invade a country and kill all of the men, women and children and take their land…

https://www.bible.com/bible/1359/1SA.15.3-23.ICB

Even with David, when David sent one of his soldiers to die on the front line so he could have the soldier’s wife, God let David’s baby die.

The Old Testament God wasn’t exactly the loving and forgive your neighbor type.

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

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I combat this is by asking questions about their current jobs, then diving deep into the technical problems they faced. It requires a lot more preparation for each candidate, but it ensures it’s not a trivia test but a discussion. One of my favorite interviews (as an interviewer) was when a SDET candidate provided a link to their website. When I visited it there was an issue loading some page. So I asked him…

This. My other favorite is very open-ended questions. I mostly do ops-y interviews, and my favorite question is "what happens when you type 'curl https://google.com ' in a terminal and hit enter?" The question is so broad there isn't a "correct" answer to Google, and it crosses enough domains that any article they find is going to be too long to skim. Then I ask them to really zero in on some aspect of it they feel c…

That's what I do (instead of curl, with a browser).

MANY super cool convos spun out of this question (interviewed around 60 people). One of them never actually got to the network request part bc we went DEEP into event handlers in a GUI etc. Another candidate was all over the place with key exchange protocols and what and how can go wrong.

I usually don't ask further questions to "corner" them, let them go into any of the details they want.

Ah, I am so happy I am not the only one who invented this interview method :-)

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

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by the cheaters you mean the executives and investors who personally capture all of the profit, then I couldn't agree more. The reason that we're suffering from "inflation" and see record high wealth inequality is because the people at the top are hoarding all of the capital and profit leaving little for the vast majority of people.

Yes and that's bad but kevin over there cheating his way up the corporate ladder to be one of those execs is PART OF THAT PROBLEM

[deleted]
Post reply on HN