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

- Modern problems require modern solutions. This sounds creative and ballsy. I'd be intrigued to see more.

- If the answers are so basic and guessable that one can both find and then deal with a printer to commit it to slow-RAM physical legacy memory, then the problem is not with the candidate

- People with such little self awareness that fail to perceive this problem have demonstrated why you don't want to work with them. The problem is not the fact that they were hotfixing answers straight to prod

- This was just a reverse racial discrimination security test. By identifying the non-authenticated user, you both demonstrated exemplary awareness of identity phishing attacks as well as a base standard that 2 people aren't the same based on their protected identity criteria

Yup. We did a couple phone screens. Person we interviewed knocked it out of the park. Solid answers with historical background on it, we liked the way they solved problems. Most of the team was part of the interview process.

The new person started and we realized the person that came in had no more information on what/how we had talked about in the interviews than we did. What was done easily over a screen share was well outside of what this person was capable of. In the interview, solid yanking/putting in VIM - in person, unable to save/close, for example. He was present -- we did wonder if the recruiter we worked with had a paperwork mistake, so asked a few bits about our interview and while he could parrot bits of the answer and our discussion, he could not come close to actually hitting the why or next steps like he did in the interview.

That was the point where a camera was required for the interview, for us.

Because those fields are currently too limited and that would only work for researchers that are exactly in the field the company wants talent for.

Researchers' fields/interests are too narrow, by far, for companies to find enough candidates. Machine learning departments go from low thousands (FANG) to maybe a dozen individuals on the low end (small regional banks, ...). That adds up to let's say 40.000 jobs worldwide.

Plus there's the non-cheating cheating. The majority of conferences (including ICLR/NIPS/CVPR) are still presentations by companies about how they "innovated" by letting an intern use 10-year old techniques, in an established library (ie. not pytorch, but an "integrated" solution, sometimes going as far as an Oracle tool) to look at their own proprietary data (in medical, social sciences, sometimes chemistry). This then delivers them a "paper", goes into the conference proceedings, and they make sure this delivers dozens, sometimes hundreds of citations for all individuals involved.

Don't get me wrong. Delivering a major paper at those conferences is a major, incredible accomplishment that's beyond me, for example. But there's 20-30 people on a yearly basis that "really"/honestly do that and over 5000 total presentations at those conferences. And there's 10000 or more candidates needed to fill positions at companies.

And then the question is: who would you rather hire? A math phd, or frankly even a CS master with no relevant machine learning papers, or that intern?

I'm more impacted by the inverse: as someone who's done programming for decades, been hired many times, been promoted, survived multiple layoff rounds (and moved cities and states to stay loyal), started and ran my own computer game biz, had independent clients I've shipped for successfully, has technical writing artifacts online, and code in my public GitHub repos I should NOT have to be "tested" by now to check if I'm a real programmer or not, or whether I'm smart, or whether I solve and ship. I clearly have and do. Therefore its nauseating, insulting, seems insane and just plain gets old.

I sometimes wonder if experienced engineers should begin "testing" hiring companies by requiring them to send a typical paycheck deposit -- you know, just to be 100% sure they have the ability to do that, rather than blindly trusting them in good faith.

Perhaps we should start a guild?