Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'.
Quoted post unavailable.
...source?
The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
231–240 of 623 posts
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#232I expected the "not the same person" to be more metaphorical than literal. Imagine my surprise.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#233I'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…
> 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 can't imagine it's much worse than it was in the before-times. Wally has always been able to skate along with a certain amount of meeting-attending.
I worked for a computer security company once, it was my first real programming job and I had no experience with the kind of crazy stuff that goes on with hiring, I was really naive and had no clue that certain kinds of people existed in the workforce.
So one day my boss (CTO) calls me up and says “Hey, we are hiring another Windows guy, can you do a quick interview and check him out?” (I was the only Windows dev at the time) So they send me the guy’s resume and he’s a PhD in Electrical Engineering. I feel really nervous about having to interview the guy because he had a PhD, but I figured other people had already checked him out so I meet with him and just have kind of a softball interview, not going into a technical deep dive or anything like that. He seems alright and has a ton of experience, so I figured what the hell.
Well about a month later my boss calls me again and he’s like “Hey, we’ve been having some concerns about John Doe, can you check in on him and see how he’s doing?”
So I go over to John Doe’s office and sit down with him and talk about what he’s been doing. He shows me that he’s having trouble with some things that are so basic that it’s almost like he’s never even seen a Windows machine, much less done any programming on one; and I’m not exaggerating, it was really that bad!
Long story short, they let him go. A few days after, I’m in the break room and one of the Unix guys walks in. He asks me how things are going and I’m like “Well, not so good, we’re back to just one Windows developer because they had to let the new guy go.” He says “Who was that?” So I tell him “this guy John Doe…” and before I can go any further he exclaims “Good God! Not THE John Doe?!?” Apparently this guy was a legend in the IT community in the city - he would fake resumes and get hired for as long as he could run the scam.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#234I'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…
> or maybe they're just trying to travel the world and do a "four hour workweek" thing where they answer e-mails once a day and phone in a couple hours of work at key times during the week.
I’ve seen it work exactly once.
The guy was absolutely brilliant, however. And a great communicator. But everything had to be done asynchronously for the most part, except a few slots where he was guaranteed to have good network and be able to hop on a conference call. He was also a performance advocate, since everything had to work great on his laptop with poor network and contributed several patches to make the dev experience better. He was a stellar communicator with emails and knew the codebase really well and since he responded in batch he gave a lot of context in his responses (because he wouldn’t often know what the response would be for another day or two).
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc"
If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#236Late ‘90s. Rapid growth, many interviews. Got used to taking CVs with a grain of salt. Had the best and worst interview experiences ever.
The best: really strong CV, older candidate, really poor English. Frustrating process, more for him than us, he is struggling so hard. Finally he stands up, grabs my pen and my colleague’s pad, and sketches DB schema. Uses the pen to point back and forth between the CV and the sketch. I’m more of a networking guy, I was lost pretty quick, but my colleague, one of my best hires, started leaning in, eyes widening, slow “wow” escaping his lips.
That guy ended up being another of my best hires. Communication was always a chore, results always through the roof. With the colleague from the interview and one other, he became one of my three developer archetypes in a much longer story.
Worst experience: different colleague (my test lead) and I interviewing another strong CV. We try and lead and shepherd, do everything we can to link the CV to what this person can do. Communication isn’t the issue, the CV is obviously doctored/bumpfed.
We’re running out of steam, trying to get the session to a minimum acceptable length, when I notice blood on my hands. I wonder how I cut myself and I am subtlety looking for the wound.
When I notice the open sore on their hand, the hand they shook. The hand attached to a body with some obvious hygiene issues (trust me).
I settle my hands, wind things up, have my colleague see them out, hop into the nearest coffee station, throw away my pen and notebook and basically scald my hands and mouth (I used to nibble my pen compulsively).
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
I don't believe there is any actual research about it. It doesn't even pass the smell test; why would a company of people who have a hard time relating to one another and socially meshing perform better? If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does), why are we trying to create the opposite situation in a company?
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
> Profitability is, of course, necessary to keep any business alive, and studies show that racial, ethnic, and gender diversity contribute to business success. A McKinsey & Company study of 366 companies revealed a statistically significant connection between diversity and financial performance. The companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have financial returns that were above their national industry median, and the companies in the top quartile for racial/ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their national industry median.
https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/july-2020/why-sho...
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#239Earlier 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 :)
My problem with big orgs is how inefficient they can be.
At IBM I worked 5 hours a week and still was in the top 20% of my team.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#240Practices like this are hilariously common in the industry. Right out of college I accepted a job offer at a small consulting company on the east coast. They promised they would give me free housing at their luxury apartment for the first few months and give me all the training I need to excel in areas of my interest. I flew across the country and found out the whole thing is not as advertised. Their luxury apartment…
> but not many complained given their visa status. Also, they were actually really grateful to get a developer job that pays ~$40k. They were just regular people.
That’s a typical bodyshop [0]. There’s a good chance some of your “colleagues” were using student visa extensions (that might be fraudulent as well, it’s a well known practice [1] [2]) to gain enough “experience” that they could pass as a specialty occupation and claim H1B status. Or just had this consulting shop file 3-4 applications per seat they planned to fill out so that they could game the quota (kicking out legitimate applicants that aren’t trying to game the system).
Thankfully, the previous administration started issuing more RFEs and catching fraudulent applicants [3].
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
[1] https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/former-ceo-bay-area-univer...
[2] https://thewalrus.ca/the-shadowy-business-of-international-e...
[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-h-1b_b_5890d86ce4b0522c...