201–210 of 623 posts
We once had a contractor who interviewed pretty well. After a while I noticed that it was impossible to have a technical discussion with him. He only took notes and never said much. I also noticed that he never delivered anything the same day. He took notes and then next morning it was done. I once told him to fix a simple bug NOW and had him sit next to me. He starred at the screen for several hours and did nothing.…
Whoa... the part about being able to trace if work is being done on another computer is alarming. How can they do that?
Seems pretty hard to successfully pull this off. The better your chances of being successful, the more likely you could have gotten the offer on your own. If you needed the stand in to get the offer, you're not likely going to be qualified and won't last. Perhaps it could be successful for people who are technically competent, but have a severe stage fright when interviewing. At the lease, you'd want the stand in to…
You don't need to last at all, you forget that in many parts of the world earning even a single US remote paycheck would be absolutely life changing.
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…
In the contract houses I've been in the vast majority of contracts were repeat business. A good contracting house won't pull this kind of thing because the company doesn't survive if they piss off clients. I'm out of that world now but can still talk about it. The non-scammy way this happens is senior engineers are part of the interviews and requirements gathering. They do the design and estimation. They develop task…
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 t…
I mean no disrespect, by this observation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you described can just as easily be done on-site. Remote work merely lets these people actually do something they might enjoy instead of sitting in a chair and pretending to work for 8 hours. I’ve met people likely this and they’d rather pretend to be busy than actually do something.
> What you described can just as easily be done on-site. You can't get two on-site jobs at the same time. One of them is going to notice that you're not there.
> Their security teams are trying to discover what all he downloaded, if they’ll be able to get their equipment back, is John really his real name, etc. !!
If they'll be able to get their equipment back? Incredible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had a remote freeloader find a position at Oracle before his short-term contract with us was done. Onward and upward :)
I'll do you one better. My friends from a team I used to be in had a guy who simply didn't know how to code. My friend would at times act as a ghostwriter(for free) so that the poor bastard wouldn't get fired. Eventually the guy was promoted . The Dilbert principle is real.
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…