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Noticing You're Confused

arr.am

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Re: Noticing You're Confused

#51

Post by gield »

gield wrote: post #35
arram wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Your guess is as good as mine, but probably for the reasons other people have mentioned here. It would be making the lie in public, attached to his own name. The fake profiles aren't attached to anyone real.

What is up with you taking one of the most reproduced images in history [1], but not even linking or showing it? [1] https://arr.am >I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.

8 hours later and the author has changed the description on their website. Still no answer to my question though, I'm getting very curious.

>I took a photo that may technically be one of the most reproduced images in history.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#52

Post by arram »

gield wrote: post #35
arram wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Your guess is as good as mine, but probably for the reasons other people have mentioned here. It would be making the lie in public, attached to his own name. The fake profiles aren't attached to anyone real.

What is up with you taking one of the most reproduced images in history [1], but not even linking or showing it? [1] https://arr.am >I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.

Not really on topic, but it's a meme on Justin.tv where I used to work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jocqSL3m-3U

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#54

Post by GauntletWizard »

arram wrote: post #52
gield wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is up with you taking one of the most reproduced images in history [1], but not even linking or showing it? [1] https://arr.am >I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.

Not really on topic, but it's a meme on Justin.tv where I used to work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jocqSL3m-3U

TL;DW: Kappa

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#55

Post by jerf »

jiofih wrote: post #37
downandout wrote: post #11

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.

As I've often said about the DailyWTF stories, if this story isn't real, one just like it has happened hundreds or thousands of times. It's an outlier, yes, but not something I'd even blink at having had happen to someone, somewhere, at some point. I've only done several dozen interviews and I haven't seen anything that extreme, but I've seen enough stuff that I wouldn't find it that shocking.

(Or, somebody did try to snow me to that extreme but failed to get to the point where we even cared about checking references. I don't mean this as any sort of triumphalism, but just by its nature, it's easier to BS your way through a a management interview than a technical interview. I'd say that's less about one necessarily being "harder" and certainly not about one being "better", but that there's a much larger set of distinct things we may talk about in a tech interview. If you really don't know anything technical, you have much greater odds of getting something asked that rats you out.)

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#56

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #30

> the demand for qualified engineering managers being far, far, greater than the supply. That's not really what it is. Let's rephrase it as "the demand for engineering managers that pass your completely subjective interview process which is completely unrelated to the job".

No, I think the original statement is fair. Good engineering managers, like good staff-level engineers, will generally receive multiple solicitations a week to please come work for some company or another. Notice how the author considered it "entirely believable" that the candidate would have disabled his Linkedin profile due to recruiter spam; people at the level he was claiming really can get recruited so much that they need specific strategies to deal with it.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#57

Post by lilyball »

r1chard5mith wrote: post #48
lilyball wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stealing phone calls is fighting back against large faceless corporations. Lying your way into a job at a startup is very much not.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#58

Post by pacman128 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

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.…

The most infamous hire I was involved in was a guy with a long resume who had an ok technical interview on phone with me. I didn't ask him any real technical questions on the on-site visit (big mistake!). We hired him and literally knew we had made a big mistake hours into his first day. He couldn't do the simplest things (e.g., he didn't seem to grasp the difference between relative and absolute file paths, didn't know what ping was). I still don't know how he gamed the phone interview. The worst part is that management hired him as a senior developer. I could have told them he wasn't at that level, but they just looked at his years of experience on his resume. He really pissed off the junior developers as he bugged them for help on his projects.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#59

Post by mattlondon »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #30

> the demand for qualified engineering managers being far, far, greater than the supply. That's not really what it is. Let's rephrase it as "the demand for engineering managers that pass your completely subjective interview process which is completely unrelated to the job".

Also don't forget "... and at the salary we are prepared to pay".

I have no idea what the salary was these people were offering but often companies seem to moan about there being "no talent" or a "skills shortage" when they're actually just offering unrealistically low salaries/total comp for a highly-skilled and in-demand job so either don't get much interest, or only get applications from chancers and charlatans trying their luck

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#60

Post by woodrowbarlow »

nordsieck wrote: post #8
sumanthvepa wrote: post #2

Clearly there was fraud here. But I'm curious about the the interview process. 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…

> 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…

you give two examples, and the interview process in the article failed spectacularly on both counts.
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