Live data from Hacker News

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

askamanager.org

361–370 of 623 posts

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

#361
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you paid a fair market rate for your geographical location in India? (i.e., are other local companies offering worse or better benefits?)

If they earn the equivalent of 30-50k (25% of a US senior IC), I imagine they can afford a decent standard of living, eg in Mumbai.

30k usd maps to 2.2million inr. Which is the kind of pay a quality junior employee with 3-4 years of experience can get in a quality firm. There has been an explosion in tech salaries in the last 4-5 years and these days most companies are finding it tough to fill up their positions. Quality resources can easily get 50% of what a equavalent role would get them in the US.

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

#362
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…

Read "Speaking of India" by Storti. It really helped me understand a lot of the strangeness I also observed working with India-born coworkers and contractors.

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

#364
Seems made up, though I don’t doubt that it’s a thing. If someone is getting someone else to interview for them, the least they would ensure is that no aspect of personal life is discussed during the interview. This is also something that no hiring manager would inquire about since there are possible legal repercussions to doing so. Finally, I think it’s alarming that the spouse has this level of detail about the happenings at her husband’s office - if this were true, this is a mini-scandal by itself

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

#365

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…

If it's an important email, my wife will review and fix it before I send it. If you need good writing skill, you should definitively hire my wife!

I do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done.

I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.

Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.

I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).

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

#366

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…

I do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done. I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.

Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.

I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).

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

#367
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like she got all her work done on time.

Goodluck getting her to help solve an issue in her code in a timely manner

It sounds like, if that timely manner is at least a day long then she'd get it done reliably. I think the only issue you could possibly see here is one of labour exploitation if she was sending the work off to someone else - it might be that she specifically shouldn't be paid but you as a company would really like to get in touch with whoever is on the other side.

Or it might just be that some people are introverted and crack under pressure whenever the spotlight is on them but, once they have quiet time to themselves, they can really power through problems.

The description of the scenario isn't nearly enough for us to get any grip on what was going on without making some huge assumptions, but the facts that we have are that she tended to really struggle when coordinating with coworkers and that she completed the work expected of her - there could be numerous explanations and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate.

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

#368

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…

The fundamental problem is that the bar for "get hired" is higher than the bar for "get fired." Invariably, this means some people will sink to the minimum just shy of the latter.

People bitch about stack ranking, and it is terrible for moral and politics, but it solves exactly this problem.

Because there isn't enough manager gumption & attention time to address this systematically, manually.

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

#369
post #297

This used to happen to a company I was consulting at all the time. It was mostly in the context of hiring H1B workers from India. The company would interview "the ringer" in India - the guy was poised, articulate, knew the answers to all the questions etc. etc. But the guy who showed up didn't know anything, usually had difficulty with the language etc. This was pre-Zoom so it was all phone screens, making it much ha…

I wonder why they didn't just call it the "Indian Switcheroo". Why would it be named after a religion?

It rhymes.

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

#370
post #297

This used to happen to a company I was consulting at all the time. It was mostly in the context of hiring H1B workers from India. The company would interview "the ringer" in India - the guy was poised, articulate, knew the answers to all the questions etc. etc. But the guy who showed up didn't know anything, usually had difficulty with the language etc. This was pre-Zoom so it was all phone screens, making it much ha…

I wonder why they didn't just call it the "Indian Switcheroo". Why would it be named after a religion?

Probably because "Hindu Switcheroo" rhymes
Post reply on HN