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The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

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141–150 of 623 posts

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#141

I've been a hiring manager for remote positions for a long time. If your recruiting channels are good, most of your candidates are going to be honest and good intentioned. But interview enough people, and you'll start encountering people trying to abuse remote work. They're not interested in contributing to your company. They're only interested in collecting paychecks while they do as little work as possible for as l…

There is a whole community about this called Overemployed [0]. Their reddit posts are quite entertaining, like this guy who works 5 jobs and is making 1.2 million a year [1].

[0] https://overemployed.com/

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#142

I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in learning. We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And his communication was great! After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, uncorr…

> "My wife wrote all of those." There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file. Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors th…

>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why

At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in that diversity provides us")

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#143

In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the…

I don't even understand how that happens. At one point I was a consulting pimp for my dad, and multiple parts of the contract required me to attest that he would be doing the work and if he had help he would be doing the majority of the work and if his time on the contract dropped below 50% of the total the contract would be cancelled and there would be penalties.

There was no way I could have switched him with someone else without paying penalties.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#145

I've been a hiring manager for remote positions for a long time. If your recruiting channels are good, most of your candidates are going to be honest and good intentioned. But interview enough people, and you'll start encountering people trying to abuse remote work. They're not interested in contributing to your company. They're only interested in collecting paychecks while they do as little work as possible for as l…

There is a whole community about this called Overemployed [0]. Their reddit posts are quite entertaining, like this guy who works 5 jobs and is making 1.2 million a year [1]. [0] https://overemployed.com/ [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...

I'll caution people to take this (and the rest of Reddit) with a huge grain of salt. Subreddits like this one are almost always just creative writing.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#146
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do wrongful termination cases like this ever come up when obvious fraud is involved from the get-go for a remote position? Resume fraud happens all the time with fudged degrees and job titles and positions. Usually when corporate HR finds out termination is immediate.

Crazy people who commit fraud are the same people who continue the fraud and make things weird. Get away from the crazy.

And don't overlook the possiblity of some kind of scam being attempted. Get a foot in the door, get fired, sue. Happens all the time with injury claims. Probably less likely since "at will" is the employment law in most places, but it's still safer to terminate without alleging any wrongdoing.

Same reason most former employers will only confirm dates of employment on a reference check. They typically won't comment on performance or reasons for termination, just to avoid any potential backwash.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#147
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An offer like that would seem incredibly suspicious to me. You want to pay all of this money to train me right out of school? Why not just hire someone with the right experience? Maybe it's my imposter syndrome speaking but it all feels off. I'm passively looking for new jobs but I always keep my eye out for things that sound too good to be true. If I'm not paying for training or education, then someone else is footi…

>You want to pay all of this money to train me right out of school? Almost certainly less common today. But extended training for new hires did (and I assume in some places) does happen. I think IBM used to do it for sales and once upon a time I interviewed with an oilfield services firm that started out with some fairly lengthy training on their specialized equipment.

Back in the late 60s/70s, when I was in university, I knew a bunch of IBMers (those were the days when your System/360-67 came with a flock of IBM staff). The standard for onboarding was that during the first 6 months, a new hire was flown here and there for courses. The goal was to make them feel valued as an IBMer, so that they'd want to stay forever.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#148
If you interview at enough companies you can find one that allows a Gattaca to slip through. Of the subset of companies that allows that some companies let people float without doing any real work for a long time. The longer they coast the more likely they can find a corner to hide in. There is no penalty for them to try this approach. Even if you caught them in a lie the effort to make them pay for their actions means they likely will never be responsible.

One company I worked with checked government issued ids at every stage of the interview process. I'm sure people will find a way around this. This also opens your company to discrimination lawsuits, "everything was going fine in the interview until I turned on the camera, then they didn't hire me."

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's running in the cloud if not Linux?

If you run "serverless" It's all hidden from you.

Not to mention it's all deployed with Terraform now. You can stand up and configure thousands of servers without the command line

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#150
This is what the large Indian IT-outsourcing companies do at scale.

When they need to win the contract, they bring in bright and very qualified people to win the client-org over.

After the contract is won and the work begins, they replace them with completely unqualified staff, managed/whipped by moustache-wielding blue-shirts to read from support-scripts.

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