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Someone is pretending to be me

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Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#291

Post by 30minAdayHN »

The craziest thing I came across my recent travels to India is that people applying to jobs hire a shadow interviewee. They will sit in the same room controlling keyboard and mic. They will train you to do the fake lip movement. They will give interview while you face the camera. They charge you roughly 10% or so of what you would make if you land the job. I heard this from reliable sources where my friends came across such fake interviewers while interviewing and also friends who has seen some colleagues who hired these shadow interviewers to land a bigger / better paying job.

This goes even deeper. During pandemic, supposedly there are even shadow engineers who does the work for you. :-(

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#292

Post by SergeAx »

Reading this I was thinking about how desperate some companies are to hire anyone to get job done. And the definition of done in that case is just make the code working - no matter how low quality it would be and how hard it would be to read and update for the next John Doe from Upwork. It's a race to the bottom inside race to the bottom.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#293

Post by kthejoker2 »

yellowstuff wrote: post #101
darau1 wrote: post #81

Someone messaged me on reddit once, and straight up asked me to do exactly this. Below is the message, but I haven't included their name because I think they were at least trying to seem sincere. --- Hi, hope you're doing well. We are looking for a professional interviewee. I'm not sure if you've heard similar thing somewhere. We are a talented developer group specialized in web and mobile software development. We ha…

I've heard of large consulting companies that do a "bait and switch" where the client initially talks to a fantastic technical person prior to signing a contract, then never hears from them again.

Hello, it me! Or was anyway.

Every solution architect/ pre sales engineer you talk to before the ink is signed isn't there to do the work, they're there to build trust and confidence that the other folks who can't talk to a client are just as talented.

Also you definitely hear from us again as we bill 4 hours a week or what have you for "Quality Assurance."

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#294

Post by CobrastanJorji »

dont__panic wrote: post #107
mrandypratt37 wrote: post #86

I'm a US-based accountant who is currently interviewing for his first job in software and I was approached by someone on on LinkedIn about an opportunity. Seemed fishy, but figured I could risk 15 minutes. The person set up a meeting between me and a Taiwanese Developer for this exact thing. He said he had 7 years experience and had a contract drafted for he and I to become "business partner" where I would take the m…

If I can play devil's advocate for a moment... if the company gets decent work, the non-US participant gets better (and fairer, globally) pay compared to what they'd get locally, and the US participant takes care of the "soft" side of the operation... who's getting hurt? I can't deny that something smells skeevy about this and I don't think I could ever trust a random foreign developer who I haven't built up a solid…

There's a related scheme that I've seriously considered a time or two.

I'm a pretty good software engineer, and they pay me very well, but I've got absolute shit executive functioning skills. Task management, remembering to email people back, and the like are challenging to me. It has occurred to me that a full time personal assistant in my area typically makes about $50,000/year. I think there's a decent chance that, with such a support, my own salary could go up by $200k or more over the next couple of years. I've frequently entertained the notion of hiring someone to basically support me in my job without telling my employer, since there's zero chance they'd get me such an assistant and similarly zero chance they'd let me pay for my own.

I wouldn't ultimately do it because, y'know, all the dishonesty involved, but it'd probably be a good deal for everybody involved. My employer gets better work for the same money, my assistant gets stable work, and I get promoted.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#295

Post by shagie »

yardstick wrote: post #283
shagie wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you do it... the company pays you $100/h (making up a number to do math) and $70 of that goes to the person who does the job while you keep $30 of it. Guess how much gets reported to the IRS that you're making and how much taxes you'll owe on that $100/h. Next there's the fraudulent representation of who is doing the work to the client. Lastly, there's the "this is a form of money laundering" and you're taking a…

I’m not in the US, and playing devils advocate here: but don’t most employers withhold tax at source before paying to the employees? Ie your 30/70 cut would be net after tax. Or if it was a contracting scenario, wouldn’t the US person be able to claim the 70/hr as an expense against taxes? Since wages are a valid business expense if you are outsourcing. I use the term wages loosely here. The IRS does not consider wag…

If you are a contractor, you are likely doing your own taxes. If you are a FTE (Full Time Employee) the approach of "sub contract it out" gets you in much more trouble.

As a contractor, the company tells the government "we paid John $200,000 for work at $100/hour and 2000 hours" and then the government comes to you and says "You were paid $200,000 and the federal tax on that is $40,811" (and the state comes and says that their rate will be another $15,000).

If you are acting as a contracting company rather than an individual, then the company wouldn't have said "we paid John" but rather "we paid JohnCorp" as the business to business invoicing is different than working as a contractor.

You sent the money out of the country - the IRS doesn't care too much about that. You got paid $100/hour, that's the end of the story from the IRS's perspective as an individual filing.

In the examples given in this thread it is about an individual farming off some (or all) of the work to another person and presenting the work as their own to the company. This is a different arrangement than a "I am the liaison / representative for a team of people who work cheaply for me."

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#296

Post by nicky0 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #187
nonrandomstring wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope Andrew [0] — the college junior with morals who blew the whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author — gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently was having a hard time with that. Excellent point. I've been wondering about ways to test students on "trust/morals" and decided its one of the most valuable yet least well understood qualities. Employers generally rank skills, knowl…

I'm big on personal Integrity. It doesn't seem to win me any points. In fact, it seems to actually count against me, as I'm sometimes accused of being "snobby." Ah, well... STORY TIME: A few months after I had been promoted (the first time) to a manager, one of my new employees was hired by my boss' boss, while I was out on medical leave. When I got back, I found out that he had made a promise to the new (now hired)…

I once had a job where my manager asked me to fake some results to deceive a customer. I refused. Later the manager apologised to me and upon reflection agreed it was wrong, and the matter was never brought up again. But I had a better relationship with that manager after that.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#297

Post by renewiltord »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #195
dvykhopen wrote: post #169

I run a job platform. This scam is pervasive, especially with contract work. We've had to get really good at recognizing patterns because their covers are really good (even faking passports and work history). Many of the big contract platforms are dealing with this too. Hiring managers are getting tired of it and are 1) not hiring as many contract workers and 2) not using platforms to hire those workers. Unfortunatel…

> We've had to get really good at recognizing patterns because their covers are really good (even faking passports and work history). I'm pretty sure that can get you into super duper extra trouble with the State Department.

Who's going to report it? It would take forever and use op even more of your time. Better to get good at filtering.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#298

Post by devwastaken »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #37

This story is much more fun when you come at it from the interviewer's position. You've been doing interviews every week. They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation. You're about to repeat the experience for the 18th time and you're 100% on autopilot. But suddenly you're in a spy thriller. This is the greatest thing that's ever happened. Is it a good legal/corporate decis…

An interviewer whom asks all the same questions is better suited in HR or hiring accountants. That's called a quiz, not an interview.

When interviewing, you do an actual interview, which is where you research whom you're interviewing to gain good questions to ask so you get good answers back.

The staleness and bore of interviewing is entirely the fault of the individual. Especially when they think whiteboarding compsci topics is meaningful.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#299

Post by Thorrez »

travisjungroth wrote: post #106
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it a good legal/corporate decision to hide the person who claims to be the original and let him listen to the interview with the other candidate? Consider the situation from the perspective of the interviewer: They don't have all of the background we did while reading this blog. They haven't even had time to process what Connor #1 said by the time that Connor #2 arrives. The decision to hear them both out for a…

Letting them both in the same room at the same time was probably the safer thing. Maybe there’s an argument, or maybe one bounces, clearing it up. But having one person hide is riskier. It means a random person could eaves drop on my interview by just pretending to me and telling this story. I mean, super cool though. I imagine my adrenaline would be going as the interviewer. I’d probably chill out when I realized th…

>It means a random person could eaves drop on my interview by just pretending to me and telling this story.

Only if the random person somehow found out the meeting code.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#300

Post by Thorrez »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #69
fatjokes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, when you put it like that, I can totally see why the interviewer was "awesome" and let the guy stay on. He was totally there for the drama.

Now that I think about it, I bet you could put together a pretty successful YouTube series of messing with zoom interviews in ways just like this. Get someone's identical twin to join the call and make them fight over who's the real one. Bring time travel into it. Make outlandish demands of the interviewer to prove that they're not a Zorblaxian spy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSqexFg74F8
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