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…
“Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.” It’s not only remote people. I have seen multiple people at my company who are basically incompetent or lazy and produce nothing of value or even negative output. Some of them get let go after years and some of the…
The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
501–510 of 623 posts
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your criticism is fair. However "obedient" isn't always what an engineering organization needs. Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing or what, but it seems they are more hesitant to speak out. It has been my anecdotal observation that our US-born hires are way quicker to sa…
I've seen when an Indian team (doesn't matter though, could be from any other country) was hired with one reason - to shift the blame as the project was going to shits. Also if you are on a sponsored visa, you gonna stay quiet no matter what's happening - your interest is somewhat to stay afloat, not to seek truth or revenge.
For the right bill rate, it could be a pretty entertaining role to play.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#504It's not just a thing, for some crooter firms it's a business model. Gonna name and shame here, there was an outfit that was once called Unbounded Solutions, then BrighterBrain. God knows if they're still around or what they're called now. Anyhoo, their whole deal was this: they offered free IT training and job placement, but there was a catch! Oh, boy, was there ever a catch. They would put you through 2 weeks of iO…
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#505I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in learning. We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And his communication was great! After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, uncorr…
My (professional) written communication is a strong point for me. What kind of job has mostly sending emails as the work?
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had a remote freeloader find a position at Oracle before his short-term contract with us was done. Onward and upward :)
I'll do you one better. My friends from a team I used to be in had a guy who simply didn't know how to code. My friend would at times act as a ghostwriter(for free) so that the poor bastard wouldn't get fired. Eventually the guy was promoted . The Dilbert principle is real.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO, to the contrary: crafting one's message is a valid process for effective async communication.
Not if the job entails writing 50 of those per day and you can’t manage more than 5
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#508This 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…
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#509This is what the large Indian IT-outsourcing companies do at scale. When they need to win the contract, they bring in bright and very qualified people to win the client-org over. After the contract is won and the work begins, they replace them with completely unqualified staff, managed/whipped by moustache-wielding blue-shirts to read from support-scripts.
Anyway once the contract was signed they didn’t send anyone and we had to hire other contractors who were also not very good.
Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
#510I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in learning. We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And his communication was great! After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, uncorr…
> "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…