Live data from Hacker News

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

askamanager.org

221–230 of 623 posts

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

#221

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…

The irony of this is what does a business do. It tries to find a way to efficiently serve multiple customers, keeping them happy, giving them value etc. In order to make more money than you would make by serving a single customer. Look at is as more of a scrap on the blurred business/employee lines, as much as a moral outrage or failing. Often a job is "we want you to survive but not fly, .... so that we can".

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

#222
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I once was a team lead for an team of outsourced software developers. It was the worst part of my career. The whole outsourced team was awful. Wholly incompetent. I had the responsibility of delivering a product, but I didn't have the authority to fire these folks who were a net negative on the project. I would have been happier with implementing the whole project myself, which I mostly did. I too was unmotivated, bu…

I’ve left positions for similar reasons.

Another strain of this is forcing some COTS application to work via a million hacks and integrations (usually via consulting resources) when a fundamental architecture or application change is needed. Responsibility coupled with the resource and authority to execute is stressful in its own way but it at least allows one to more easily own their failures.

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

#223
Whoa. I am new to interviewing and hiring developers. We needed to hire quickly and i interviewed someone, they did great and they were hired. And when they showed up for there first day in our remote zoom call I was very confused and thought I had interviewed a different person. I was the only person who interviewed them directly as they are a contractor. I brushed it off and thought maybe I was mistaken but reading this has made me rethink this initial feeling as I never mentioned it to anyone.

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

#224
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (professional) written communication is a strong point for me. What kind of job has mostly sending emails as the work?

Product/Software support. Above the Tier 1 level, at the stage where you're talking with the Dev team directly. Developers don't want to talk to customers. So you need someone who can understand either the code or the developer's comments, but can then put it in layman's terms. Edit: DevOps, too.

I'm in a DevSecOps role and hate it.

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

#225
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, but I guess they don't get paid well.

Its relative. I know plenty of data nerds making 6 figures in HR.

6 figures would be good

Edit: Thanks! Looking at internal data analyst roles in my HR dept (weird that they aren't under a technical job code, so I wasn't seeing them before). Maybe I'll apply to one.

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

#226

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…

I dunno - to get jobs some places you need to be really good at leetcode - and that's a niche skill that is increasingly hard to keep current at as you get older, busier in your role and family life.

I'm not confident that I could do a leetcode medium anymore, but I am super confident I could do a similar role to the one I currently do at a company that would only hire me for it if I could do a leetcode medium.

I would never actually use a service like this but I can't say I'm not tempted.

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

#227

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 is why we can't have nice things. Or in other words, why we must usually do a coding test per company we apply for, and not just 'point them at the Github'.

No post body was provided.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity. But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.

Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.

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

#229

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…

Its funny because I remember a talk here on ycombinator from ppl who do exactly what you described here.

Often extremely smart and talented. Working on own projects/business idea.

Their argument is that they can in 1h deliver often as much as you average Joe in a week.

“Put as little effort as possible, but I have expenses”

Can give example of such ppl in: - Samsung - TomTom - Oracle - Amazon

Too many of them tbh. Slowly choking the business.

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

#230
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your criticism is fair. However "obedient" isn't always what an engineering organization needs. Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing or what, but it seems they are more hesitant to speak out. It has been my anecdotal observation that our US-born hires are way quicker to sa…

An example of what happens when you "speak out" (read: do anything but be servile) in India: https://twitter.com/Reashiee/status/1484811188844199936

> Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests.

> our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to management if they feel something is wrong

Apparently the obvious and easy solution here is to only get US-born hires. So why don't you?

Post reply on HN