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Someone is pretending to be me

connortumbleson.com

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Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#351

Post by AdrianEGraphene »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #294
dont__panic wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You could get a full time assistant for less than $12k/year.[1] Not sure if they work with individuals, but I've used them for my startup.

I'm sure you'd be able to use this.

Not sure if it's dishonesty rather than just wise resource planning?

[1] https://wingassistant.com/

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#352

Post by specialist »

At some point people will start to figure out that having authenticated online personas would be useful.

Just like in the real world.

Authenticated and anonymous are not mutually exclusive. We need a mix.

Just like in the real world.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#353

Post by atleta »

While it's not at all surprising, it was a fun read. Having used Elance/Upwork in the past, I was pretty sure quite a lot of off-shore (Indian, Eastern European) companies do a similar scheme. At least some of them definitely pretend to be a single developer and/or let one developer with better skills (communication and programming-wise) do the interview and then throw cheaper "resources" at the actual project.

The surprising part was that Maris/PND seems to have a pretty good command of English himself, so he could have easily done this without involving other people and thus mostly avoid being caught. Though maybe he runs a larger operation and he simply needs more people to do this.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#354

Post by atleta »

I've been approached several times online by different people who wanted to buy my CodeMentor (now arc.dev) profile. It's a pretty strong profile with a lot of good feedbacks, but I haven't done any work (mentoring) in the past few years.

I see how this could be valuable as it can be really hard to build credibility from 0. (Though it definitely depends on the particular platform rules/dynamics.) E.g. I used to have an Elance profile for 15 years or so, which got transitioned to Upwork, but it mostly got reset to zero. When I last checked about 5 years ago I was presented as someone who has never worked there and never had any feedback which would have made it very hard to win projects. (Not that it seemed worthwhile anyway.) So while it's 100% unethical, there is probably a pretty strong motivation for these kind of trickeries.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#355

Post by cdkmoose »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #227
blastwind wrote: post #125

Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange site. This story is also more fun from my position. I've been applying to internships and interviewing every week. They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation (sorry to top comment for "impersonating" your comment style). My days are deteriorating from a colorful sphere down to two points. In fact, down to two po…

BTW, why are you applying just for internships? I checked out your (non-forked) github repos and you're definitely better than I was as an intern. It's not senior engineer level, but you could definitely go for at least a junior eng position for sure. God knows we hire much worse junior FE engineers than that. Or are you interviewing for FAANG(-like) positions only? edit: small tip though, I would rename the App2.js…

regex is overrated, real programmers parse XML with bash.

#sarcasm #seenitinthewild

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#356

Post by tg9000 »

jjslocum3 wrote: post #175
tg9000 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a small world! Unless you are also making up that story (which I would get a huge laugh out of) I'm 99% positive I was in the room with you when this happened. :)

I wasn't in the room, but my manager was. Is that you, Preserved Killick?

This is TG. I was the one who had to go on-site with this app in Atlanta for five weeks. I messaged you on Linked In. :)

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#357

Post by chasd00 »

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.

i work for a consulting company and prefer to cradle-to-grave my projects but it makes it hard to move up the corporate ladder. I'm working on a proposal now for a large project that will span at least 3 years. If I ask to get staffed on it then i know it will get delivered as sold and I may get promoted at the end but definitely won't get promoted during the project. On the other hand, if i'm an author on three or four wins for large projects over a year then i'm much more likely to get promoted regardless of how those turnout at the end of their schedules.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#358

Post by celdon25 »

bqe wrote: post #160
dmoy wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, down to two pointers, left and right, iterating over a list of heights to find how much rain water it can trap. Ah haha I hate that question It should be banned everywhere, oh well. I once saw a physicist (not even a coder) give a really cool answer to it though, I wish I could remember it.

I remember being asked this during my interview at Google. It was the first time I heard it and I gave an answer that iterated over the list twice. The interviewer said that it wasn't good enough and I am only allowed to iterate over it once. He didn't let me write my O(2n) solution down so he returned a strong no as feedback.

They had me do the same problem at Amazon too.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#359

Post by chasd00 »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #166
bad416f1f5a2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like they’re stealing that salary, not earning it. On the contrary – if someone has been at a company for 9 months & had terrible early reviews, the company had about ~6 months to deal with them. In my experience, truly bad hires get lukewarm 30 day feedback, negative 3 month feedback, and are on a PIP soon after. If you're there after 9 months, it suggests you've demonstrated some level of value to your emp…

I can assure you there are plenty of underperforming, incompetent and even flat out absent employees cozied up in hidden little niches at all kinds of companies that don’t let them go for a variety of reasons.

this happens all the time in big companies, you find people who are basically just a potted plant in the corner soaking up a salary and benefits.
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