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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

#501

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…

When I worked at an arcade, one the cleaning crew was well known to also be hired, for the same shift times, at the movie theater across the way. He would dash between the two (in the same all black uniform) just enough nobody noticed him missing.

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

#502

Earlier 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.

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e134NoLyTug

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

#503

Earlier 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.

I just quit a vaguely similar kind of environment because there's always a few internal wars and suddenly people invent shit about who is the reason nothing happens and spread lies to save their ass.

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

#504
post #26

It'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…

Is a contract requiring you to participate in a blatant fraud enforceable?

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

#505
post #59

I 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?

Technical Account Management.

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

#506
post #182

Earlier 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.

I want to know how this happens :)

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

#507
post #353

Earlier 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

Exactly. I have a friend who was a directional drill operator, and then moved to white collar work, and was super slow with writing letters. I think it was a him problem more than a blue collar work problem though.

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

#508
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…

Stuff like this happens on IELTS exams which is why they started asking for ID, taking photographs and fingerprints in some cases.

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

#509

This 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.

I remember when our company signed a contract with TCS. Our execs were very excited to get access to their “Center of Excellence” experts on some vendor products we were struggling with: LifeRay, AEM etc.

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

#510

I 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…

I had a friend who's wife worked in tech and even had a patent but she could barely code and could barely make her way through real world, on the job, tech problems. Her husband (my friend who worked in a major tech company) every night helped her do her work and she happily told us about it.
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