Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

askamanager.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 623 posts

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

#581

Post by NikolaNovak »

sharken wrote: post #470
NikolaNovak wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That proverb holds a lot of truth. I would add that treating the company's money as if it is your own also works quite well. Never get too attached to a user story/task is another important lesson. Sometimes a task has to go, even though you disagree. To OP I'd say that you should really try to rediscover the desire to learn. That and being able to quickly locate related information for a task are two of my most impo…

To add to your point of treating company's money as your own -- "Tracking Money" will help understand a lot of corporate priorities and explain a lot of decisions. --I-- may want to update something because "it's the right thing to do / makes for cleaner code / etc". But the management probably has a reason (good bad or ugly) for their own priorities. Advice I read mid-way through my career is "understand your manager's goals and reasons", and it was so simple and yet so... shocking to so many of us techies. We always expected manager to understand our recommendations and priorities. Hubris! :)

(in Public Sector, "Tracking Money", interestingly, did not work as well; but "Tracking Personal Status/Blame/Credit" worked well. The two should be equivalent but in my limited experience there's differences)

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

#582

Post by phreack »

I've had a reverse situation an interviewee where emails were written very enthusiastically and apparently technically competent, and then when the time for the interview call came, whoever picked up the phone was definitely not the same person. They would just shut up after any technical questions - after a while we simply asked if he was nervous and he said yeah that's it. When asked for any previous experience he'd just copy and paste links to websites which didn't work and couldn't elaborate on what those websites even were. At one point he just read the description written on one of them. We asked him for his GitHub account or anything similar and he said 'oh I know that one' (he sent a 404 link) and we just had to end the call right there as it was getting surrealistically hilarious.

The next day we got an email from the apparently competent one, claiming that this time the email was being written by a 'friend' of the candidate we talked to (same address every time), and that if we gave them a chance he'd be the 'perfect candidate with 100% qulaity' (sic).

We politely refused.

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

#583

Post by PeterWhittaker »

kumarvvr wrote: post #471
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…

What kind of a Database Schema elicits a "wow" !

Like I said, not a DB guy, and it was years ago, so fuzzy memory but the wow had something to do with how fast and robust the system would be.

Memory doesn’t always serve.

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

#584

Post by rgoulter »

xmprt wrote: post #538
WalterSear wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, to the contrary: crafting one's message is a valid process for effective async communication.

Crafting a message well is important but more often, fast writing and decision making skills are more important. Why do you think so many professors and managers write extremely short, almost informal sounding replies. If you're an excellent writer who takes 20 minutes typing up a single email and then need another 20 minutes to destress because emails in formal settings make you anxious then you probably aren't a go…

> Why do you think so many professors and managers write extremely short, almost informal sounding replies.

Because they're positioned with higher status in a hierarchy?

If a student makes a mistake, the professor merely points out the mistake.

If a professor makes a mistake, a student will at least be uncertain whether a mistake was made, and will have to go to much greater length to point out the mistake.

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

#585

Post by sersi »

simmanian wrote: post #462
austinjp wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you written this full story in detail? Sounds genuinely fascinating. I hope you're doing okay now?

I was actually rather fascinated by it too, so once I figured out what was going on, I started meeting people in the company specifically to ask them about their experiences. I probably have my notes saved on some USB drive somewhere rotting away. There is one comment that I still remember pretty well: "The Chinese do it, the Indians do it, so why shouldn't I do it? The game is rigged." To this day, that company was…

Would definitely love reading a write up of this with more details. Super fascinating

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

#586

Post by cafard »

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…

Collecting paychecks: there is a story that I suspect is centuries old, but which I heard attached to John XXIII. Supposedly somebody asked him how many people worked at the Vatican, and he answered, Maybe one out of three.

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

#587

Post by astura »

WalterBright wrote: post #557
dredmorbius wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Performance anxiety goes away with repetition. I have plenty of personal experience with that and so do many others I know. This is not a special skill. You don't have to be a champion. You just get used to doing the performance and the anxiety goes away. Just like if you're nervous about driving on the freeway, or flying in an airplane. Heck, I remember buying my first phone answering machine. I froze up repeatedly…

Only if your anxiety is reasonable in the first place and your emotional regulation is normal.

I've been driving more than 20 years and almost none of the anxiety I experience because of it ever went away. If I know the roads already it's a little better, but every single day I have to power through the anxiety to get to where I need to be going. It doesn't get better.

Hotels give me anxiety even though I actually lived in a hotel for six months.

My husband developed anxiety later in life doing things he has done for years.

What you're talking about is just normal human emotions, when people refer to "performance anxiety" they are usually referring to an anxiety disorder. Crippling anxiety that doesn't spontaneously resolve.

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

#588

Post by troupe »

esyir wrote: post #546
troupe wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Interesting point on drastically different moral codes. I'm curious if, during the height of immigration to the US, the "melting pot" tended to consist of people immigrating from areas with mostly similar moral codes.

It appears that many immigrants retained much of their culture while still integrating in ways that let different cultures work together, but maybe that is because the moral foundation was similar enough to allow cohesion as a whole while retaining some sense of cultural identity.

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

#589

Post by astura »

macksd wrote: post #416
intpx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.

Apparently my coworkers interviewed someone a while back who got pretty far into the onsite interview panel before they realized the candidate was not the same person typing out the code they were seeing on CodeBunk...

How'd they find out?

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

#590

Post by macksd »

astura wrote: post #589
macksd wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently my coworkers interviewed someone a while back who got pretty far into the onsite interview panel before they realized the candidate was not the same person typing out the code they were seeing on CodeBunk...

How'd they find out?

As far as I know, someone noticed something fishy and told the final interviewer their suspicion to be sure. Like the way the candidate would only explain stuff after it was written. If you're on a video call and observant, I think you could tell if the typing didn't sync up with what you saw. I imagine it might be hard to notice at first, but if someone suspects it I would think a skilled interviewer could throw a few wrenches in their plan to see how the respond.
Post reply on HN