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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)

#671

Post by gardenhedge »

scaramanga wrote: post #306
gardenhedge wrote: post #4

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

> I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I am curious to know what conclusion you draw from the anecdote about the test? Is it that you aren't good enough because you tried your best and failed? Or is it that the test is a fallible instrument, designed by a human being who works within the constraints of an institution and…

It was a pretty tough assignment iirc. In my mind an assignments purpose is to learn - which I did from putting in the effort and then reviewing the solution after submitting.

You seem to be getting my point though - I would have rather failed than cheat.

I learned that people (even smart people - which my peers were) will cheat if its beneficial to them.

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

#672

Post by scarface74 »

asimpletune wrote: post #223
scarface74 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who is being harmed by someone not reversing a binary tree by memory for an interview?

Just out of curiosity: do you think there's nothing wrong with cheating on an interview, and if so would you do it?

From a practical standpoint, who is hurt? In my day to day job, I would have Google, StackOverflow, ChatGPT (as long as I didn’t paste proprietary code or business logic), prior code samples from my previous job[1], etc.

But this is theoretical, I haven’t had a coding interview in over a decade and then only once and not for the prior decade before that. Even though I’ve always been a hands on keyboard coder.

I can’t imagine subjecting myself to a coding interview at almost 50 years old with the types of jobs I would be looking for if I left my current job (enterprise/cloud architecture + leading application development/cloud )

All of my prior jobs have come from just talking to people in charge of hiring (usually director/CxOs) and using my network.

My current job in cloud consulting (cloud app dev/“DevOps”) at $BigTech was all behavioral even though I have developed in 4 languages in the last three years.

[1] Future me: my company has a very straightforward open source process where we can get approved to put our code on our open source GitHub organization with an MIT license as long as we write it from scratch and doesn’t have any customer identifying information or business processes.

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

#673

Post by btilly »

_7tgr wrote: post #626
dang wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll stick up for btilly here - I don't think you've read his comment fairly, and instead are criticizing something he didn't say. He didn't say, or imply, that people shouldn't be asked to reconsider their prejudices. Of course they (or we, rather) should. This is covered by the HN guidelines, which ask: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier t…

Sure, I agree that I could have been nicer. On the other hand, I have very few spoons for responding politely to people who retort to others’ requests to not be judged on the basis of their race with, effectively, “suck it up”. It’s difficult for me to consider that an attempt at helpfulness, though it’s possible that someone without personal exposure to these issues could mistakenly think otherwise. It causes a lot…

...though it’s possible that someone without personal exposure to these issues could mistakenly think otherwise.

Please do not mistake differing opinions for ignorance.

My father grew up in a time and place where they were persecuted by the KKK for being Irish. I have a half-brother on that side who lives on a native reservation. My half-sisters on the other side were half-Chinese at a time when public opinion absolutely condemned interracial marriage. I have close friends from many different cultures, who have arrived in a wide variety of difference circumstances. Including my wife, who was a refugee from the Soviet Union.

All this has taught me that the more real the problems that you face, the MORE important it becomes to focus on that which remains within your control, while trying to shrug off that which isn't. You'd absolutely be in the right to go around being upset at the world for being unfair to you. But your justified outrage amplifies your problems, and makes your life worse.

The positions that you put down as "suck it up" are therefore the best advice that I know of to improve things. To the extent that individuals and groups do that, they make their lives better. Both in the short term, and the long term. I have seen the truth of this, both for my family and for my friends.

I hold this position based on experience, not ignorance.

If it still sounds crazy, I highly recommend reading https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving-Counterintuitiv.... In particular for its "backwards law". Which says that trying to hold on to a good thing is a bad experience, and accepting a bad thing is a good one. Nobody wants the bad thing to be true. But if the bad thing is true, the act of consciously recognizing and accepting it is far better than the alternative. (The rest of the book is full of other good advice that flies in the face of common preconceptions.)

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

#674

Post by wanttocomment »

shswkna wrote: post #79
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…

It seems those that have a fundamental problem with cheating are in the minority. Reading through the comments leaves me only sad. Based on how I believe the world works, and on larger patterns at play here, this general cultural trend (if this is in fact what it is) will backfire. If this is deemed culturally acceptable, and one extrapolates this pattern further, there is little deeper value that a culture has to of…

Exactly. They are benefiting from a system built on generations of honesty of people before them.

Everything becomes more expensive and dangerous when there isn't basic trust. You have to verify, surveil, and credential everything.

Old people get scammed not because they are dumb, but because they grew up in a society insulated from dishonesty.

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

#675

Post by wanttocomment »

toss1 wrote: post #114
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…

>>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. Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer. A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full librari…

Alternatively, spend two months and learn the skill they are going to test you on.

I hate jumping through hoops too, but have you seen other industries (LSAT, mcat, etc)?

If you've never done it before leetcode style problems are bound to teach you something useful to your work.

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

#676

Post by wanttocomment »

bradlys wrote: post #555
bumby wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you want people to take on jobs purely for non-socioeconomic reasons then you might need to fix the underlying socioeconomic problems. (e.g. cost of housing) I don't see any real movement from older generations to do anything about that. They just keep complaining about the youth chasing money instead of some "passion." (Which ignores that the material conditions have completely changed in the last 20 years)

I think the shift we have seen is from high status/upper classes suddenly taking an interest in CS.

Not lower class people moving into middle class.

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

#677

Post by naasking »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #510
naasking wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They may not have found the very best person for the job (very subjective and unknowable anyway), but if the process didn't result in an under-performer taking the job, the process did not fail. The process did not fail in the same way my bear repelling crystal necklace has not yet failed me in repelling bears.

This comparison only works if you routinely walk through crowds (groups? congregations? clowders?) of bears. Preferably polar bears.

It works in any case where the thing you're trying to prevent probably just isn't there.

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

#678

Post by wanttocomment »

2devnull wrote: post #280
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…

Sadly it seems tech hiring wants to optimize for cheating by putting a lot of importance on tests and credentials. Deemphasize these, and assess candidates more holistically, and cheating is no longer a factor. It’s easy to cheat on a test, or get a credential you don’t deserve, but these are amazingly treated as the solution rather than the cause of cheating.

It's the opposite. Credentials and testing are a substitute for trust since people will lie about experience and competence.

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

#679

Post by wanttocomment »

scarface74 wrote: post #162
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…

If people can do there job well enough to get promoted, that does tell you that the interview process is broken and not indicative of how well someone can perform on the job.

No. In every testing or selection system there will be people who could have made it, but didn't make the cut.

Either we can accept some amount of arbitrariness, and that there are plenty of opportunities (try again next year?), or everyone who didn't make it can decide to cheat (they're probably good enough right?)

Which of these responses makes sense to you?

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

#680

Post by selcuka »

AaronM wrote: post #479
selcuka wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you think the promotion of an engineer would have any effect on the CEOs pay. Someone was going to be promoted anyway, the CEO couldn't care less about who. The problem here is that it should have been supposedly someone else who actually earned it.

Is there any evidence, other than these people using unethical methods to get hired on initiall at companies, that they didn't earn the raises they received?

I don't have any evidence, but that's the premise of the article. Whether it is evidence based or not was not the topic of my comment.

But to answer your question subjectively, yes, in my experience cheaters will cheat. If they used unethical methods to get hired that's a strong indicator that they will also cheat their way to raises and promotions.

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