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My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

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Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#41

Post by throwawaysleep »

gardenhedge wrote: post #4

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

What is the reward for putting in the presentation effort? If I get my salary if I spitball and I get my salary whether I put in effort, why bother?

I don't bother prepare for client support calls, mostly because I don't want to do them and want to be considered incompetent at them so I am not asked to help in the future as much. So at least for me, presentations are nothing but more work.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#42

Post by [deleted] »

mach1ne wrote: post #25
gardenhedge wrote: post #4

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

I'm sorry, but I disagree with the analogy. If you can spitball the presentation, your time is likely spent better elsewhere than preparing for the presentation.

[deleted]

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#44

Post by hgsgm »

brookst wrote: post #40
siggen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. You have unethical people now, you are probably “cheating” at work by taking credit for ideas not theirs.

But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.

Amazon might be unethical or immoral or unpleasant, but it is extremely successful at its founder's goal.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#45

Post by giantg2 »

Seems more and more that the people who cut corners get ahead. Lie, cheat, and steal is the path to success these days. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that we are slipping in national rankings and the top desired jobs are performers and influencers.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#46

Post by fauxpause_ »

mnky9800n wrote: post #28

when i took my quantum mechanics qualifier, i studied for a month, i was honest, i worked so hard. The exam was so tough (I passed), but as I was walking out I saw a student who had all the old exam questions with solutions printed out on his "table of integrals". Sure, maybe I "learned" some quantum mechanics more than that guy. But it's a topic I have never used (I do geophysics and machine learning) so I don't thi…

Don’t do things that are not useful, enjoyable, or rewarding.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#47

Post by pavlov »

gardenhedge wrote: post #4

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

You can’t really cheat your way to a better presentation. If the “spitballed” version is good enough for the situation, why expend a lot of effort on preparation?

Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all these presentations?” instead of “why do you all put so little effort in your presentations.”

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#48

Post by lotsofpulp »

brookst wrote: post #40
siggen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. You have unethical people now, you are probably “cheating” at work by taking credit for ideas not theirs.

But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work. At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.

This same process can be applied on a community/country level.

Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#49

Post by eckesicle »

heliostatic wrote: post #8

I'll make the obvious point that these interviews were not good predictors of success at the companies. In general, I've found in 15 years of interviews that interviews are not highly correlated with the work at any given company. I wish we would move beyond cargo cult interview styles and base interviews (and screening, for that matter) on the actual work and culture of each company.

I ran a largish statistical analysis where I was working on all interviews and employee ratings for the following year (16000 data points).

My conclusion was that:

* some interview problems carried zero signal

* some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal (* geographic location is a medium signal (0.2)

* a relevant degree is a strong signal (0.4)

* choice of programming language is the strongest signal (>0.8 correlation (or anti-) for some languages, and some.

There is some selection bias though since candidates who were rejected did not get a chance at the job so we didn’t have a rating for them.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#50

Post by preommr »

gardenhedge wrote: post #4

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

Ironic then that the real test was to see who has flexible thinking to adjust to a dynamic situation and who mindlessly follows misconstrued advice.

If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because they don't care about the cheating or you getting an education either.

There's any number of situtations like this that happen in real life, from school, government, politics, work, etc. Not understanding these rules is much worse than being able to do some assignment in university.

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