Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

askamanager.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 623 posts

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

#421

Post by csomar »

daggerdrone wrote: post #357
eric_b wrote: 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?

India is derived from "Hindu". It rhymes and in some languages, it is the same.

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

#422

Post by aasasd »

theamk wrote: post #403
aasasd wrote: 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,…

Ah, yes, ‘it's fine because it's technically legal’. The pinnacle of Western morality, wow.

You may notice, however, that the question of legality wasn't my objection in the first place.

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

#423

Post by austinjp »

simmanian wrote: post #5

Practices like this are hilariously common in the industry. Right out of college I accepted a job offer at a small consulting company on the east coast. They promised they would give me free housing at their luxury apartment for the first few months and give me all the training I need to excel in areas of my interest. I flew across the country and found out the whole thing is not as advertised. Their luxury apartment…

Have you written this full story in detail? Sounds genuinely fascinating.

I hope you're doing okay now?

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

#424

Post by rasfincher »

My company hired a senior developer for an Angular project we were working on. They did great in the interviews and on our take home coding challenge. When it got down to time to work, I was walking them through the codebase and it very quickly became apparent they not only didn't know Angular, they didn't even know much at all about web development in general. They were let go three days later. I'd heard of things like this happening but I couldn't believe it until I saw it in real life. I just can't imagine what someone like that is thinking. I get "fake it 'til you make it" but this was on a whole other level.

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

#425

Post by Maursault »

joecool1029 wrote: post #97
arbuge wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds to me like it would meet the legal definition of fraud. A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the business might even be worth looking into.

There are laws against employer retaliation. If that employer never asked him prior and he never lied, what crime was committed? The employer failed to do their due diligence. As others have said, it's VERY common to request assistance in drafting resumes/emails/letters when pursuing employment.

> what crime was committed?

Several kinds and several counts of felonious fraud, all prosecutable, just for starters. If they signed their employment contract, which they most certainly did, that's perjury. If it was mailed back to the employer, that's mail fraud, a felony; if emailed, that's wire fraud. Position was remote, but if they ever entered the office, then as many counts of trespassing, at least, unless they took lunch and returned, which would double the number of counts. If they logged into anything, such as VPN, or Office 365, etc., each instance a separate count of computer fraud. The felonies here stack up high and rapidly. I'm not sure why you'd believe any mistakes made by the employer could possibly have any affect on the prosecutability of this and other similar criminals committing similar crimes.

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

#426

Post by sci_prog »

rasfincher wrote: post #424

My company hired a senior developer for an Angular project we were working on. They did great in the interviews and on our take home coding challenge. When it got down to time to work, I was walking them through the codebase and it very quickly became apparent they not only didn't know Angular, they didn't even know much at all about web development in general. They were let go three days later. I'd heard of things l…

Were the interviews not technical in nature?

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

#427

Post by LilBytes »

scrollaway wrote: post #344
TehShrike wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was today years old when I discovered that the perfect job for me does exist

FYI, if you want that job and don't happen to be in Japan, this is exactly what consultants are hired for in many cases: To be a blunt voice of reason in an environment which isn't able to listen to itself. I've many times been hired in companies to say things employees didn't have the political clout to say out loud. If anything goes wrong, or someone isn't happy, I'm the fall guy.

If it's a fair comparison, I was the FTE equivalent and got promoted to a position where I couldn't piss anyone off any more.

I ended up quitting and they replaced me with a contractor who did the same at 4x the cost.

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

#428

Post by jeromegv »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #343
okeuro49 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.

On the other hand it must be nice getting paid above your abilities, which is (one of) the common outcomes of diversity hiring, isn't it?

What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability? But somehow, that isn't a problem for you?

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

#429

Post by jeromegv »

macintux wrote: post #406
munk-a wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or Google Photo that tagged Black people as gorilla. Clearly, developers must have tested with their own photos (on top of generic datasets) and if they had had more diversity within their dev team, they would have caught that sooner.

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

#430

Post by beerandt »

pmarreck wrote: post #142
908B64B197 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "My wife wrote all of those." There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file. Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors th…

>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…

The only tangible benefit I've ever heard of was qualifying for contracts with diversity quotas.

Similar for setting up 49% subsidiaries where the wife (wives) of the owners collectively own 51%, to qualify for minority ownership for fed govt contracts.

Post reply on HN