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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

#401
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is GOLD!! Edit: I am laughing my balls off at this "I offered him a gummy bear. He politely declined."

Its funny because thats how many devs here get promotion :^] Quit -> apply to the same company for higher grade job and often way better pay. Why companies dont value their current employees is beyond me.

>Why companies dont value their current employees is beyond me.

It's because they take advantage of their current employees and get away with it. They could promote you regularly, or they could take the gamble that they'd save money and you'd stay put rather than uproot yourself and spend effort job searching (which is like taking on an additional part time job itself), and if you did uproot they'd just offer the same salary to someone else. They don't value institutional knowledge because they feel they've compartmentalized the jobs enough. Going from the mailroom to the C level sounds a lot more like a bad movie rather than something even remotely possible today.

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

#402

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.

[deleted]

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

#403
post #387

What I'm seeing in the article: the legal dept forbid HR from saying “you aren't the guy that we interviewed”, but meanwhile permitted the security dept to put a ‘trace’—presumably spyware—on the guy's machine. HUH? Apparently this is the state of corporate attitude toward employees now.

Legally, the computer is company property and thus company can do whatever they do with it (sometimes there are exceptions, like "stop looking if this looks like personal documents"). Even if there is no one manually looking at the specific computer, there is often antivirus/antimalware which reports to IT department. This makes sense -- if an employee went to a shady site on a work PC and got infected with malware, central IT should know ASAP about this to stop the spread / block stolen credentials. Even if the employee is unwilling to report it.

https://www.findlaw.com/employment/workplace-privacy/privacy...

The situation is different if the employee's personal computer is used -- then it can be expected to be full of personal stuff. This is why a lot of bigger places prohibit placing company code/credentials onto a personal device.

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

#404

But... is the interviewee proxy doing this as a side gig? If they are good enough to get paid (presumably) for taking interviews, how can that be more valuable than just taking one of the jobs they successfully interview for?

I think the interviewee proxy is probably located in a non-US country where they wouldn't be able to work for a well-paying tech company. They could also be doing it for cash on the side. A few hours of interviews a week for a significant chunk of change.

Yes, they are such services available. You can find them on ethnic forums online.

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

#405
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I don't think he has a moral obligation to inform either company of what's going on, assuming one company's work doesn't interfere with the assigned work from the other. I strongly disagree. When you are hired as a full-time employee, the expectation is that you are giving your full 8 hours work day (or whatever) to the company in exchange for a paycheck. Otherwise, you are extracting full value from the compan…

> When you are hired as a full-time employee, the expectation is that you are giving your full 8 hours work day (or whatever) to the company in exchange for a paycheck. I don't think that's necessarily true. Another interpretation of being hired as a salaried employee might be "they get the work done that they were assigned, in a satisfactory manner, and are able to respond during regular work hours when needed". If…

From experience, if you can take on more work, you will do so until you can't anymore. 2 jobs was fine for me, 3 is too much and some clients felt the heat. I always prioritized the ones that were most burning, technically. Undeserved flak is easy to remove.

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

#406
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some ca…

I can say this as someone with ADHD, neurodiversity specifically allows me to approach problems in radically different manners than my coworkers which sometimes makes things an absolute cake walk for me and sometimes makes them nearly insurmountable. This is a result of my approach to problem solving which has been trained on the problems I've experienced in the past and my natural disposition. I think an entirely ho…

Anecdotally speaking, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to find examples of companies doing stupid things that could have been avoided with a more diverse decision-making team.

Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity. But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.

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.

I've seen various "innovation" studies that show more diverse teams come up with more ideas and are more productive, but less diverse teams think they are more productive. A quick internet search turns up https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/09/09... for example.

For software, for example, there are plenty of characteristics that some engineers may think are constant that are definitely not. For example, the number of systems I've encountered that have baked in the idea that first/last name can not be changed (even though names are changed by not only trans people, but also any married woman in many cultures), or assumed people only had 2-3 names (some cultures as many as 4 last names are common), is long. When the name is used as part of a permanent key for all other data about an individual, fixing the issue can be a huge hassle.

Sure, a product focus group might eventually point these issues out, but no one's changing their name in a short-term focus group study.

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature. "Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones mak…

I don't think the majority of hires at large companies in the past were corrupt. Certainly that hasn't been my experience hiring people at large tech orgs in the present, and the process hasn't changed terribly much really. Given the scarcity of technical ability, we simply can't afford the corruption. You seem to be discounting the meritocratic process by which people end up graduating from high-ranking schools. Pre…

I guess it depends on your definition of "corrupt" and where you draw the line between corrupt and not corrupt. Would it be the tech recruiter's fault if there were, for instance, a pipeline problem that sharply limited the diversity of their candidate pool? I don't think so, but that wouldn't change the reality that the pool itself is a reflection of corruption elsewhere in the system. I don't know how you could possibly argue otherwise when black people and women were effectively excluded from many industries until relatively recently.

The "meritocratic process" is laughable. Legacy admissions have always been a critical component of those systems, especially once wealth was no longer an adequate filter; allowing a few newbies through the sieve in order to conceal the real purpose of the ivies—perpetuation of an elite caste—has been the game for a long time. As universities are pressured from the left (getting rid of standardized testing) and right (getting rid of any sort of racial consideration in admissions), legacy will only become more important as an attribute. That a few people beat the odds doesn't at all imply that the system is fair or that that solution is scalable.

"Culture fit" is realistically both important and historically has been a really problematic thing to conflate with or consider alongside "merit." It is a tough problem and I don't have a great answer to it.

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

#409
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I don't think he has a moral obligation to inform either company of what's going on, assuming one company's work doesn't interfere with the assigned work from the other. I strongly disagree. When you are hired as a full-time employee, the expectation is that you are giving your full 8 hours work day (or whatever) to the company in exchange for a paycheck. Otherwise, you are extracting full value from the compan…

When an HR manager boasts to you about how they used a downturn to screw your colleagues' hourly rate down by 10% without reducing their charge-out rate, your ethical stance re: dealing with your employer may change...

Exactly. I admire and agree with the ethical stances being defended in this thread, but people should know that it is very rare for those feelings to be reciprocated. As long as you know that, work in a manner that lets you live with yourself, and don’t expect to be rewarded.

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

#410
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?

Because it rhymes :)
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