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

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

#161

Post by commandlinefan »

pmarreck wrote: post #142
908B64B197 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 ca…

> tangible benefits to more diversity

People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.

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

#162

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

cercatrova wrote: post #141
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #40

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...

Thanks. I look at /r/random every so often to learn new subreddits, but this one I'd never seen before!

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

#163

Post by nicodjimenez »

linsomniac wrote: post #46

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…

> I guess we should have hired his wife!

Classic comment.

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

#164

Post by monkeybutton »

DrBoring wrote: post #78

Coming soon: a service that will have ringers do Zoom interviews on your behalf while using real-time deep fake tech to look and sound just like you. All the pieces of the technology required to do something like that may already exist today.

Supposedly this has already happened! Although in the alleged case, it was an existing employee masquerading as a candidate:

https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvicecanada/comments/kr924n/e...

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

#165

Post by NikolaNovak »

giantg2 wrote: post #96
NikolaNovak wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my team, Duty Managers / Service Delivery Managers / Operations Managers. Communication in every which direction is #1 skillset I look for in the team (as well as being organized, disciplined, eager to learn, sense of ownership). A lot of the job is talking to technical teams, talking to functional teams, talking to business teams, talking to management and executives; translate, summarize, liaison, co-ordinate, p…

"eager to learn, sense of ownership" Well, that disqualifies me. The way most organizations tie your hands means one is given all the responsibility without real authority. I'm completely unmotivated because of that. Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted.

Downvoting on HN is fickle; sometimes it's the point that's being made, sometimes it's how it's being made. I think asking "have I meaningfully contributed to conversation" is part of it... but a lot of downvotes comes as emotional response or simple disagreement. You can choose whether to take it seriously and grow/change to satisfy it, or be yourself and take votes in passing.

That being said - sad to hear you are not eager to learn and don't have sense of ownership; you are correct that disqualifies you from some roles (most, in a way, but recruitment process is all sort of obscure and counter-logical).

For what little it may be worth: it mostly comes back to the old proverb of "courage to change things you can, accept things you cannot, wisdom to know the difference, and zen to make peace with it". I try to coach my team members very early on "these are things that are part of organizational machine; satisfy them so you are done with them. These are the things where you can make a difference and where most of your value will be concentrated. Focus on those once you've fed the machine".

I think part of disillusionment, at least it was mine, is the feeling that somebody somewhere, and ideally ourselves, should have all the necessary power. In reality, we all operate within constraints, more or less visible or scrutable.

Ultimately, life is imperfect, professional life included; it's a life's pursuit for most of us on how to grow our own acceptance and peace with it. Sometimes we make that change within ourselves, sometimes we are able to make an external change that aligns more with our priorities.

Best of luck!

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

#166

Post by pphysch »

soared wrote: post #130
rootusrootus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue. I'll take a stab at it, and predict... all of them. Or nearly so. There seems to be an ever-present fraction of employees at any large corporation that are essentially worthless. Just along for the ride, raking in…

From my experience once you have ~1,000 employees AND a complicated org chart/raci/etc then it’s fairly easy for people to do little work and hide. In smaller orgs too many people see you, and in orgs that are running efficiently if you don’t do your job it causes issues. Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)

We had a remote freeloader find a position at Oracle before his short-term contract with us was done.

Onward and upward :)

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

#167

Post by wccrawford »

hui-zheng wrote: post #39

> HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud. Though at this point they all know John is committing fraud, they still decided only to approach this guy claiming a poor fit for his resignation. I don't know why they do that. They have discussed a lot and considered many things. I am sure there are many reasons to do so.…

The phrase "walk softly and carry a big stick" comes to mind.

There's no need to go into that interview guns-blazing. Soft-balling the questions at first is likely to do the job. If it doesn't, they can still bring in the heavy artillery later.

This approach has worked very well for me in all kinds of adverse situations. Being nice and asking politely has resolved a lot of situations, and I can still fall back to being nasty if I have to. (And I might even find I was wrong before that point, and I can back off without losing face.)

For instance, returning a defective product at a store. I can simply tell them it doesn't seem to work. They can attempt to show me it does, they could take it back, or they could refuse. If they try it and it doesn't work, and still refuse (or just refuse), I can start demanding my money back. If they refuse that, I can call corporate or my credit card company.

If I start with corporate or my CC, I might still get what I want, but it's a lot more stressful and IMO less likely to work, even if only slightly. And there's no chance to fix the situation with another resolution than the one I chose. Sometimes there's a better way, and you just don't know.

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

#168

Post by nmstoker »

smorgusofborg wrote: post #129
mavhc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't tell whether your employees are working, why do you even have employees? Imagine how much money you'll save.

Then you have to get out of all the work you were assigning them yourself. Much better to leave it to a specialist!

Yes, but remember in the scenario you're replying to, you cannot tell if they've done the work. So assigning to the specialist you mention might as well mean tossing the job requests into the bin.

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

#169

Post by amrrs »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #40

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…

I'll present an alternate case, mine. I'm in a senior IC role sitting in India making almost 1/4th of what my US Counterpart makes. I work as much as them if not more. We as Indians are always taught to be sincere and obedient and I try to show that in my work trying to stay up finish the work so that my sincerity is never questioned. I'm always on the side to prove my quality - even though I'm highly underpaid for the same work.

Overall, I'm someone who needs to prove everytime that I'm sincere and I'm intellectual while I'm known only for being a cheap resource.

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

#170

Post by jcranberry »

horsawlarway wrote: post #84
hui-zheng wrote: post #39

> HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud. Though at this point they all know John is committing fraud, they still decided only to approach this guy claiming a poor fit for his resignation. I don't know why they do that. They have discussed a lot and considered many things. I am sure there are many reasons to do so.…

The legal system is a bad fix for this, though. The most they could reasonably do here is attempt to sue for fraud for lost time and salary paid. It's unlikely that they can bring a criminal fraud case, so they have to prove damages. Damages in this case are probably - Lost time interviewing - Any salary paid If they caught this on day 1, they just don't have enough damages to make this worth pursuing (aka - they los…

Seems like they were worried about IP and equipment theft.
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