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Noticing You're Confused

arr.am

41–50 of 104 posts

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#41
> It was at this point that I actually said out loud to myself “I notice I’m confused.”

Strange how never this occurs when executing or designing web technologies, particularly the DOM. Instead people jump immediately to the largest prepackaged solutions currently available without question, everything plus the kitchen sink, as normal as breathing. Invented here syndrome is the default without even the most subtle hint of consideration.

This is perhaps most clearly realized in that most developers have some irrational horrid fear of the DOM when they encounter it and yet simultaneously find the DOM to be some sort of savior to allowing Web Assembly to replace JavaScript. Never is the confusion or irrationality questioned in favor of something comforting.

I also find it strange how eagerly people are willing to impose bias in hiring and candidate selection to ensure the most important selection criteria is conformance opposed to performance. It really is as though the thought I notice I’m confused is something fearful to be protected from instead of confronted when developers are tasked with hiring.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process. There are many things people evaluate dur…

How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?

> How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?

There are diminishing marginal returns on better screening. Most people are pretty honest, and of those people who aren't honest, most of those people will mess up their deception; this means that a pretty basic level of screening brings a lot of value while only letting through a few bad apples.

One could intensify the screening to avoid more bad apples, but that costs money and increases the false positive rate. At some point, it's better to just hire people and fire them when it doesn't work out.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#43
I felt the same sense of mild confusion as I read this, until I got to the end when I realised that I’ve read various versions of this same urban legend two or three times over the previous 20 years.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a Linkedin profile. What's suspicious about that? Or do you mean just in the context of cultivating that network? If so, how would you know given that there is no nexus to that network?

Some people get confused and think LinkedIn is where the best networks are grown. They are wrong. It's by picking up the phone.

Depends on what you're looking for. Many of the best don't have their number in public, and they are not going to answer random calls from unknown callers because they're busy doing important or interesting stuff. But yeah, you probably can't approach them on LinkedIn either.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#45

Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got t…

I don’t think this is a totally original story, I’ve read this on slashdot a few times in various incarnations. I think the purpose of this retelling is to make an illustrated point about his theme of feeling confused.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#46
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe he had plenty of experience and technical expertise to competently answer all the interview questions, and even to perform the job in question extremely well. Perhaps he would have been a model hire. There are lots of reasons that people exaggerate their experience, and not all of them mean that the candidate is not well-suited for a given job. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to do what “Sam” did, but you ca…

“Inflated his resume” and “simple LinkedIn manipulation” are extremely mild ways of describing what he did. He lied about his entire work experience, role at previous job, and got someone else to pretend they were a VP and cover for them on the phone . This is fraud, not ‘inflating your CV’. That is, if this story is even real.

[deleted]

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#47
post #39

Something about this story doesn’t add up to me. Maybe I am being cynical but it seems like this was fabricated for the exposure.

I sensed this too. So I looked at the author's profile. Now I'm even more confused: From https://arr.am : Stuff That’s Happened to Me I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history. I once came up with an idea with a friend that accidentally became a national TV ad featuring Nicki Minaj, Serena Williams, Usher, Kylie and Kendall Jenner. I once crashed a fashion show, pretended to be a mod…

Sam should have written "I pretended leading a team of 70 instead of 3 to get an interview"

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#48
post #12

Imagine if you read the autobiography of a big name and they told a story about how they hack the interviewing process of X company, getting they first big break which resulted in all the big successes afterward. How much admiration would he get for that, a #1 HN story even. I do get confused reading this story, at least I wish it continue on for a bit afterward (how was his reaction, other people's reaction. Did you…

I'm pretty sure "blatantly lying about your past experience and getting your wife to cover for you" isn't "hacking the interviewing process".

Why though? I can just imagine someone at the time saying something similar of Steve Wozniak and the other 'phreakers' who were stealing phone calls. If it had worked, and was retold as an old-timer story by a rich and successful man, it would be high-fives all round.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#49

That is a uniquely scary story. I have only had the displeasure of hiring one person who effectively lied their way into the position. It was really obvious after they started that they had grossly overstated their skills and experience. My point of 'confusion' was that their reference checks were people who had worked with them, liked them but not for very long because they were leaving when that person joined, Etc.…

I remember we also did this "starter project" thing and one our new hires (who had made a really good impression in the interviews) was told to create a simple web interface for something (one of those "we should really fix this papercut") together with another hire on the frontend.

He was kinda furious that he was demoted to doing lowly web development in his first week (in order to get to know our infrastructure, in a small startup) and I don't even remember if he did a good job finishing the actual task...

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#50
post #45

Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got t…

I don’t think this is a totally original story, I’ve read this on slashdot a few times in various incarnations. I think the purpose of this retelling is to make an illustrated point about his theme of feeling confused.

Is it a story about a liar by... a liar?
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