Someone is pretending to be me

Everybody wins until the tax man comes knocking for all of the dollars owed, or when "Connor Tumbleson" gets flagged as a terrible employee when all those copy-pasted qualifications don't line up with reality and the work is mediocre. As reported elsewhere in these threads, the credentials and interview process are all worked out upfront, the interview no long becomes a valid test of qualifications for the position.

This entire scam can be done entirely legally by subcontracting the work to your foreign friend, if your clients allow for that; if the end result is of decent enough quality then I don't see why they wouldn't. You'd be on the hook if they mess up, but the same is true when you lie to your friend's employers.

However, these people choose not to go the legal route, instead relying on lies and fraud. They go as far as to hire others to do part of their lying just to get into a company.

Personally, I'd call the authorities the moment I'd find out an employee of mine has been lying about their qualifications and experience from the very first day to fake it through the interview. You cannot trust someone whose entire career is built on top of lies, or someone who actively enables such behaviour.

I'm not sure if these people are a small step up from the call center scammers because at least they deliver something or a small step down because they're supposedly capable enough to do better. I'm sympathetic to the third world programmers that have the capabilities to earn some of the absolutely insane wages American programmers get paid, but I completely oppose the large-scale fraud these lying-as-a-service middlemen employ to make money.

Best to be sure. Shoot them both.

Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange site.

This story is also more fun from my position. I've been applying to internships and interviewing every week. They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation (sorry to top comment for "impersonating" your comment style). My days are deteriorating from a colorful sphere down to two points. In fact, down to two pointers, left and right, iterating over a list of heights to find how much rain water it can trap.

I'm about to repeat the experience for the 10th time and I'm 100% on autopilot. But suddenly, a man reaches out to me on email and offers me up to $80/hr to be his senior engineer. This feels sketchy, my girlfriend tells me, "you're good but let's be honest here...". Anyways, I proceed, it might just be the start of a beautiful thing. I'm asked to interview as one of our developers because English is not their best language. I'm a little bothered, but I was fine with it. But then I see the developer name: Connor Tumbleson. My laughter bursts and so does my suspicion: With a name like that, no way the guy doesn't speak good English. I look up Connor Tumbleson on linkedin, and my suspicions were proved correct. I detail everything to Connor, and now this is on the top of HN. I lost a opprotunity but gained a story of the lifetime.

> Sounds like they’re stealing that salary, not earning it.

On the contrary – if someone has been at a company for 9 months & had terrible early reviews, the company had about ~6 months to deal with them. In my experience, truly bad hires get lukewarm 30 day feedback, negative 3 month feedback, and are on a PIP soon after.

If you're there after 9 months, it suggests you've demonstrated some level of value to your employer.

The guy organising it appears to be living in a lower middle income country with technical skills limited to badly installing WordPress plugins and doubts about his spoken English.

Even if he actually has the capability to become a really good programmer, I'm not sure he's going to beat getting half of potentially dozens of US-based developers' contract incomes for less effort than spamming job boards and running a Slack channel