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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

#451
post #273
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they really the "best" developers? It just sounds like a different skillset and mindset, not necessarily better or worse.

I am willing to wager in a broad sense, that the best COBOL, Fortran, and RPG, that "Old people who manage legacy systems" is probably a fair estimate, and there is probably narrow overlap between developers for those languages and git experience. There are lots of younger folks who fall into supporting these platforms through experience, but I would also wager that the number of fresh, doe eyed engineers graduating…

I encountered such a person. Her parents were both mainframe nerds and she was a true believer. I think the shock of working as a 23 year old in a group of geezers that had been fighting each other since 1975 was traumatic.

We stole her and she was a pretty awesome DBA last I knew.

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

#452
I was hired on e for a position at a 35% pay raise; while this isn't particularly unusual in tech, on the first day, I couldn't figure out what they were talking about with most things. They couldn't figure out why I couldn't figure out their setup requirements. After almost 8 hours passed, they said they switched resumes on accident... so I'd quit my last job for this job, worked there a day for no reason, and was back on the street. The previous employer wouldn't take me back, and I had to start over.

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

#453
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we can't have nice things. Or in other words, why we must usually do a coding test per company we apply for, and not just 'point them at the Github'.

Quoted post unavailable.

These "best developers" should really start learning to use Git (and these other newfangled technologies) or else in 10 years they'll be blaming age discrimination when they can't land their next job.

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

#454
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a whole community about this called Overemployed [0]. Their reddit posts are quite entertaining, like this guy who works 5 jobs and is making 1.2 million a year [1]. [0] https://overemployed.com/ [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...

I'll caution people to take this (and the rest of Reddit) with a huge grain of salt. Subreddits like this one are almost always just creative writing.

I'm in their Discord and people actually do have multiple jobs, they're usually just not as high paying such that two jobs at random companies will equal big tech company compensation, so it's often not worth it when you can just join big tech.

Well, assuming you have the skills and time to grind Leetcode, the two jobs might also be easier than big tech jobs, and having multiple jobs gives some security if you're ever fired.

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

#455
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience once you have ~1,000 employees AND a complicated org chart/raci/etc then it’s fairly easy for people to do little work and hide. In smaller orgs too many people see you, and in orgs that are running efficiently if you don’t do your job it causes issues. Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)

My problem with big orgs is how inefficient they can be. At IBM I worked 5 hours a week and still was in the top 20% of my team.

I used to work for a government organisation and it was the same. Once I got disillusioned with what I was doing I would put in bare minimum effort which was, show up for standup every day, filibuster a bit then checkout. I was still one of the highest out-putters in the department.

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

#457
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"eager to learn, sense of ownership" Well, that disqualifies me. The way most organizations tie your hands means one is given all the responsibility without real authority. I'm completely unmotivated because of that. Edit: Sucks that my feelings are being downvoted.

Downvoting on HN is fickle; sometimes it's the point that's being made, sometimes it's how it's being made. I think asking "have I meaningfully contributed to conversation" is part of it... but a lot of downvotes comes as emotional response or simple disagreement. You can choose whether to take it seriously and grow/change to satisfy it, or be yourself and take votes in passing. That being said - sad to hear you are…

Sometimes downvoting is purely to move a comment down when there's another comment right below it that's being pushed up (with an upvote).

In a sense, it's almost like a comment got 2 upvotes.

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the same thing. The "completely unqualified staff" is not pretending to be the same persons as the "bright and very qualified people" who interviewed. There's no deception involved, just transparently bad business practices.

The IT outsourcing companies do this at scale, pretending to be something during interview - and then really being something completely different once the "job" is won. It is deception as a business model. It is not the fault of the "unqualified staff" at all. Anyway, that is my take on it. Feel free to have a different opinion.

If the position is learnable from where their skillset is within a reasonable amount of time, they should learn up! I've been given plenty of positions that were above my abilities but that I could learn within a couple months.

There are a lot of types of people in the world, and one type is people who don't mind being bad at their jobs.

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

#459
post #54

Earlier this year, I was asked to interview a man who was procured through a remote-staffing firm. He was based in Southeast Asia, and on his resume it looked like he met all of the competencies we needed -- including English proficiency. But on the call, I noticed that whenever I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the question, then turn his video back on. Eventually,…

As an Indian, this absolutely amuses me.

There are a lot of gullible rural bumpkins out there. It is entirely possible that some recruiter made this guy do this, under the condition that once he is accepted to the job, he will have to pay 1 / 2/ x months of salary to the recruiter.

The recruiter takes the money and disappears. The bumpkin will struggle for a bit in the job and then be let go or resign.

However, he will add this to his resume, have the salary and joining letter as proof and try to get other jobs.

Usually, these people do this so that their marriage prospects are better than their peers.

The lengths people go to.

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

#460
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?

I guess it was a bit of a rhyming play.
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