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Noticing You're Confused

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Re: Noticing You're Confused

#11

Post by downandout »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #2

Clearly there was fraud here. But I'm curious about the the interview process. If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with…

Or maybe he had plenty of experience and technical expertise to competently answer all the interview questions, and even to perform the job in question extremely well. Perhaps he would have been a model hire. There are lots of reasons that people exaggerate their experience, and not all of them mean that the candidate is not well-suited for a given job.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea to do what “Sam” did, but you can’t say that their interview process was broken based solely on the fact that the process identified him as a good candidate after he inflated his resume and did some simple LinkedIn manipulation to try to push himself to the top of the resume stack. Their interview process may in fact have identified and vetted the best man for the job, he was just one that happened to be insecure enough about his work experience to exaggerate it.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#12

Post by NhanH »

Imagine if you read the autobiography of a big name and they told a story about how they hack the interviewing process of X company, getting they first big break which resulted in all the big successes afterward. How much admiration would he get for that, a #1 HN story even.

I do get confused reading this story, at least I wish it continue on for a bit afterward (how was his reaction, other people's reaction. Did you end up hiring someone?)

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#13

Post by kstenerud »

Hang on... I'm confused here:

> Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone.

> I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got too much recruiter spam, which was entirely believable. He said he’d turn it back on and send me the link, but hadn’t followed up. It wasn’t much, but it was certainly a bit odd given how reliable he seemed in general.

Why would someone who'd spent months, perhaps even years cultivating a network of fake LinkedIn profiles and confederates, not have a linkedin profile himself when not having one would immediately arouse suspicion? It's not like it's at all difficult to doctor your work links. Even his wife supposedly had a profile, faking as a VP at the company in question.

Something doesn't add up here.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#14

Post by juanbyrge »

"Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard.

"I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him.""

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#15

Post by juanbyrge »

What if you missed out on hiring the Steve Jobs of the catering industry?

  Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. 
  He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was
  in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early.
  But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology,
  and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard.

  "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't
  have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him."

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#16

Post by jchw »

kstenerud wrote: post #13

Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got t…

My best guess is to avoid the folks that he has scammed in the past from blowing his cover. Those other seemingly legit profiles presumably have no obvious link to him.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#17

Post by Tenoke »

drewcoo wrote: post #7

So "the rationalist community" relies on gut feelings? Now I'm confused and it's only the first non-italic paragraph.

Do you think there's absolutely nothing to be learned from 'gut feelings'?

Of course they mean something, so taking them in the equation - at least for trying to recognize why you have that gut feeling, and whether it's relevant or not - is pretty sensible.

Rationality isn't about being a cold calculating machine, it's about arriving at the best answers you can while using whatever actually works.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#18

Post by Pyxl101 »

kstenerud wrote: post #13

Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got t…

It would be hard for the fake profile to get connections with people that he would have had to claimed to have managed or worked with (but was lying about). A fake profile for "Sam" might make it even easier to spot the fraud.

Plus, other people who know him in real life might notice that his profile information is bogus and call him on it. (Why does your LinkedIn profile say you were a director?)

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#20

Post by ChuckMcM »

That is a uniquely scary story. I have only had the displeasure of hiring one person who effectively lied their way into the position. It was really obvious after they started that they had grossly overstated their skills and experience. My point of 'confusion' was that their reference checks were people who had worked with them, liked them but not for very long because they were leaving when that person joined, Etc. I had asked about many short tenures in their resume but as an individual contributor they passed it off as "finding a challenge they could bite their teeth into" and basically working their way up the pay ladder.

At Google people got "starter projects" I liked this idea to get an idea of what they could do, and its an opportunity to understand what they are good at. I gave the person an assignment that, given their experience, should have been well within their capabilities. They kept not delivering and kept up a steady patter of "knocking down the barriers" communications which, valid or not, got me wondering what was going on with this person. At the one month point I gave them a pretty clear deliverable and worked with them for a timeline for when it would be done. They were "almost" done at the agreed upon time two weeks later, so I asked them to present it one week from that date to the group. The presentation was an epic disaster in terms of not coming close to meeting the deliverable, not showing any development in understanding the problem, and generally being something a new hire could have come up with in less time.

At our 1:1 that week we talked about the deliverable, my expectations given the experience they claimed to have, and what we got. I got a lot of "I just need x, y, and z and then it will be done." kind of discussion. Delving into those needs became "waiting on p, q, and r to deliver this part." kinds of discussions.

At the end of our 1:1 that week I asked them if they were satisfied with their performance. They felt it was ok and would get better with time. I told them I didn't feel we could afford that time and that Friday would be their last day. I was bummed that we wasted nearly 2 months on this person. I don't think anyone in the organization was surprised to see them go.

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