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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

#211

Post by reaperducer »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #194
intpx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.

Dear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning, but corresponding with people — especially in formal settings — makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.

Sounds a lot better to me than live coding on a white board.

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

#212

Post by datavirtue »

wccrawford wrote: post #157
wildzzz wrote: post #101

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…

I would find it suspicious as well, but consider this: People who are great at their job are hard to find and expensive. People who will eventually be great at their job are a lot, lot cheaper, though still hard to find. If you can hire someone before they realize how good they will be, you can save a lot of money and fill a position immediately. I haven't actually figured out how to find those people, though I have…

Constant stream of college grads brought in as interns. Just select the hungry ones with hustle and indoctrinate them. This is a typical MO for large established corporations.

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

#213

Post by baobabKoodaa »

klausjensen wrote: post #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.

That's not the same thing. The "completely unqualified staff" is not pretending to be the same persons as the "bright and very qualified people" who interviewed. There's no deception involved, just transparently bad business practices.

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

#214

Post by vmception »

intpx wrote: post #102
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 recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.

Reminds me of my gripe with interviews and tests, they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome by each employee.

Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more holistically for an accurate signal?

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

#215

Post by quickthrower2 »

paxys wrote: post #145
cercatrova wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That said, people doing under-hours, and taking a second job must happen quite a bit, especially post pandemic.

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

#216

Post by hlbjhblbljib »

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…

This why I've had to deal with very regressive HR on-boarding processes. I'm sick of companies treating new employees like their data doesn't matter and they can be required to sign up to any service no matter what the ToS is like.

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

#217

Post by baobabKoodaa »

tempnow987 wrote: post #119

Very common with overseas contractors. Often the person communicating has good English skills, but they swap in a friend etc for the actual work. In some cases fine (you'll actually get both of them to eventually show up on calls together with some random excuse). Other times less fine (basically a scam).

Sounds like the "fine" case is a scam as well. You're too lenient.

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

#218

Post by Rafuino »

notpachet wrote: post #202
Rafuino wrote: post #195

Whoa... the part about being able to trace if work is being done on another computer is alarming. How can they do that?

Welcome my son, to the machine: https://www.jamf.com/solutions/compliance/

I'm more concerned about a company being able to see what you do on your personal computer, which is what the comment seemed to allude to. I know there are many sketchy tracking mechanisms out there, but if they can extend to your personal network, that's scary

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

#219

Post by albroland »

mizzao wrote: post #73
rootusrootus wrote: post #56

We had this happen, but it did not get all the way to being hired thankfully. I got on a call to interview a candidate, and he didn't know anything . Like, hilariously unqualified, his knowledge level on software engineering was effectively zero. Fairly short call once we realized what the score was. Immediately the recruiter calls me back (she was on the call as well) and started apologizing profusely. She said the…

Haha, I really appreciate that kind of recruiter. Did his name happen to be John Keenan?

I worked with John for my last 2 job searches and I must say even from the candidate side he is excellent to work with.

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

#220

Post by Tarragon »

cestith wrote: post #204
Tarragon wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upvoted you because parts of that are absolutely always true. Some of it depends on the type of consulting contract, though. Some of them call for a dedicated team of X headcount for Y time, and if the consultancy subs people in and out of that team without sufficient cause that's a big red flag.

Good point. There's a whole bigger world of contracting that I never saw.

I should be absolutely clear that my experience has been in small contract engineering firms. All of them were less than 20 engineers total and large projects were 3 engineers at any one time.

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