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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

#541

Post by baobabKoodaa »

klausjensen wrote: post #296
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #213

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.

I share your frustration at this horrible business practice. I disagree with your assessment that this practice is a secret. I don't think it's a secret. The largest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, actually published a long-form story on this exact subject after your comment was written: https://www.hs.fi/visio/art-2000008571439.html

Edit: to clarify, if the practice is not a secret, then it's not deceptive. If the client knows that the CVs on paper are not going to represent the workers who will be actually doing the work, then it's not deception. In order for it to be deception, the practice would have to be secret, surprising once revealed.

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

#542

Post by JetAlone »

varispeed wrote: post #270
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #40

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. There are corporations that over-hire and often provide no work at all for weeks or months, but they require that worker is always on stand-by in case there is a surge. I know full-time workers who throughout an en…

Hmmmmm, it's sort of like renting an apartment with one more room than you actually need so you have a place to put extra stuff, or you can have a guest over. Personally, I would go absolutely crazy if I did nothing at my job, even if it was remote, for weeks on end.

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

#543

Post by esyir »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #340
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…

Oddly enough, once a friend of mine was hired to work on a project which one of the selling points was that it was designed and implemented by women. He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project. Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because they were well aware about what's happening?

Honestly, I'm mixed. On one hand that's basically false advertising. On the other, I despise external incentives that aim at gender, so anything that hacks this sounds good to me. I'll probably slant to the former though.

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

#544

Post by divbzero »

giaour wrote: post #513
user123456780 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way you phrased that, I'm not sure if you were a programmer or a senator.

Showing up for standup every day might be more than what’s required for senators.

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

#545

Post by sumedh »

tomcam wrote: post #333
knodi123 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the fi…

> basically for free Well they got a bargain. She's immensely talented. She hates my politics but damn can she write. Her first memoir is one of the funniest things I've ever read

> She hates my politics

What does that mean?

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

#546

Post by esyir »

troupe wrote: post #420
blindmute wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe there is any actual research about it. It doesn't even pass the smell test; why would a company of people who have a hard time relating to one another and socially meshing perform better? If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does), why are we trying to create the opposite situation in a company?

My guess is that is it possible to have great diversity of thought and experience while still having high social cohesion. During the height of immigration in the US, there was high social cohesion within communities of people who came from the same country while still having great diversity of ideas across the nation as a whole.

My personal take on this is that it's the dark side of multiculturalism. The loss of the melting pot as a cultural meme was probably a sign of this. Social cohesion depends on a set of shared values. The "melting pot", for it's issues, provided the shared national myth to align and unify the disparate cultures.

Take that away, and you get the natural result of multiple cultures with drastically different moral codes, and no core to form around.

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

#547

Post by sumedh »

knodi123 wrote: post #285
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.

Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the fi…

> Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire.

Ironically, Mindy's brother pretended to be a black man to get into Med school.

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

#548

Post by mariusor »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #300
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #236

Late ‘90s. Rapid growth, many interviews. Got used to taking CVs with a grain of salt. Had the best and worst interview experiences ever. The best: really strong CV, older candidate, really poor English. Frustrating process, more for him than us, he is struggling so hard. Finally he stands up, grabs my pen and my colleague’s pad, and sketches DB schema. Uses the pen to point back and forth between the CV and the sket…

> That guy ended up being another of my best hires. Communication was always a chore, results always through the roof. With the colleague from the interview and one other, he became one of my three developer archetypes in a much longer story. There needs to be a website that captures these types of war stories.

I recently saw that the Daily WTF is still up.

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

#549

Post by raxxorrax »

reaperducer wrote: post #211
jakelazaroff wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning, but corresponding with people — especially in formal settings — makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.

Sounds a lot better to me than live coding on a white board.

I would take the coding on a white board instead of answering fake mails to be honest. But the job doesn't sound too attractive if correspondence is mostly with customers. Internal mails are way more informal and quicker to write.

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

#550

Post by dredmorbius »

WalterBright wrote: post #536
jakelazaroff wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning, but corresponding with people — especially in formal settings — makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.

The cure for performance anxiety is to do more performing until it goes away.

Or to find a position in which such performance is not required.

Adaptation only goes so far. More training won't turn a dwarf into a basketball centre, or a heavyweight bodybuilder into a champion marathoner. Sometimes you've got to work with what you have, both in terms of abilities and limitations.

Intellectual and psychological limitations may be less manifestly visible but are no less real.

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