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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

#301

Post by rootusrootus »

Osiris wrote: post #246
rootusrootus wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

In the software industry it should be pretty easy to track tickets someone is working on and compare that to how long similar tickets are completed by coworkers.

With low level coding cogs that might be somewhat feasible, if you have enough of them. But there are a few things that I've seen which get in the way of that kind of metric.

1. Story pointing is not granular enough, i.e. one 2-point story is not necessarily the same as the next one. Freeloaders pick off the easy ones and pace themselves to keep their 'productivity' in the acceptable range.

2. I've seen a lot of teams, especially smaller ones, evolve into a situation where each member has an area they specialize in. Then stories start getting preassigned to them. Hard to compare two coders not pulling from the same pool of work.

3. As an IC becomes more senior, a larger fraction of their work happens outside of stories, and becomes more difficult to quantify. Some of the most effective freeloaders I've witnessed were mid/senior devs who could crank out a typical story very fast and craft plausible explanations for where the rest of their time went.

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

#302

Post by Kranar »

kelnos wrote: post #288
clueless123 wrote: post #33

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…

> To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X". And then when they apply to work at their next company, and that company wants to verify previous employment, the previous company that got screwed over is too worried about the possibility of getting sued to accuse the person of lying about who they were... so they'll just say "yes, Y worked h…

I'll admit straight up when I fire someone I am usually so relieved if they leave peacefully that I don't just say they worked for me, I will usually even give a semi positive review of them. Not a glowing praise or anything of the sort, but usually a review saying how they're a good team player, they get along well with others, and other aspects highlighting mostly soft skills.

As I've indicated many times on here... most incompetent people are genuinely good, nice people who get along well with others and it's devastating to have to fire them, so when I do fire them it can soften the blow for them to leave some good words, give some positive feedback which allows them to leave on good terms.

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

#303

Post by JoeAltmaier »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #40

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…

Worked at a place hired one of those. He scheduled meetings, then cancelled them at the last minute. Never accomplished a single task. Demanded a good reference and he would go get another job elsewhere - essentially extorted the reference.

I guess some folks are sociopaths, and do whatever it takes to live well.

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

#304

Post by scotty79 »

hui-zheng wrote: post #39

> HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud. Though at this point they all know John is committing fraud, they still decided only to approach this guy claiming a poor fit for his resignation. I don't know why they do that. They have discussed a lot and considered many things. I am sure there are many reasons to do so.…

I don't know... Do you sign any agreement saying that you personally will attend the recruitment process?

If not why would you be obliged to?

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

#305

Post by BeFlatXIII »

rootusrootus wrote: post #74
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #40

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…

> 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…

It's as if the Robin Hood mentality met with Jack Sparrow: take what you can and give nothing back. However, they aren't interested in the well-being of the company because they have more important places to put their effort and dime, such as hobbies or their family. It's an aversion to doing 50% more work for a 15% raise.

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

#306

Post by jaaron »

ryeights wrote: post #231
nradov wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

...source?

Game industry would be one source. At least for many teams and projects, Git isn't very useful (horrible for large binary files common in AAA games). So many companies still use Perforce or sometimes you'll see SVN still. That means a whole bunch of really qualified engineers who have never or rarely used git.

I'm sure there are other industries for which that is true too.

It's a good reminder how small a section of the tech industry comments on Hacker News.

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

#308

Post by djhn »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #235
commandlinefan wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bes…

Which one was that?

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

#309

Post by KennyBlanken »

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.

My guess is that they're looking to see if you complete it in a reasonable time period, your initial draft is at least in the right ballpark (anyone experienced in tech support, team supervisorship, project management, etc can answer common emails almost by reflex) and it appears to be you, and not someone helping you.

I would imagine that, if anything, seeing you pause after an initial draft, adjust some grammar and tone, pause...even re-write a sentence or paragraph - and then say "done"...would impress, not detract.

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

#310

Post by 908B64B197 »

knodi123 wrote: post #285
okeuro49 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.

Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the fi…

It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse".

There has been this trend of diversity reporting to list Whites and Asians together in stats. Google has been notorious for this [0] and others are following the trend when it seems convenient [1].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accu...

[1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-wi...

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