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Noticing You're Confused

arr.am

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Re: Noticing You're Confused

#91

Post by csomar »

hliyan wrote: post #39
nodesocket wrote: post #29

Something about this story doesn’t add up to me. Maybe I am being cynical but it seems like this was fabricated for the exposure.

I sensed this too. So I looked at the author's profile. Now I'm even more confused: From https://arr.am : Stuff That’s Happened to Me I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history. I once came up with an idea with a friend that accidentally became a national TV ad featuring Nicki Minaj, Serena Williams, Usher, Kylie and Kendall Jenner. I once crashed a fashion show, pretended to be a mod…

Looks like the person they thought is the best fit is the person closer to them in personality.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#92

Post by awesome_dude »

celticmusic wrote: post #88
mjevans wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help. I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees. A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's n…

> Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? I once had an interview where I sent in a solution to a small program they asked me to write (had to do with golfing). During the interview they sat me down in front of a computer and asked me to re-implement a part of it, which I did so gladly. I realized later that my re-implementation wa…

Single Job Syndrome:

Engineers/Managers have only ever worked for the same people for the last 5 or 10 years, and have no idea what engineers look like in the wild.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#94

Post by vsareto »

binarytox1n wrote: post #83
rjkennedy98 wrote: post #61

I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule. When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by p…

This has happened to us many times and we now do the same for remote interviews. No video? No interview. And even then, if you do great in the video we fly you in for an in person interview just to be sure. There's clearly a market for stand-in phone interviewers. I can't imagine that jobs acquired this way ever last, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

>I can't imagine that jobs acquired this way ever last, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

Probably because there's a real slice of the job market that gets paid six figures to do nothing much more than browse the internet all day.

2 of the 5 tech jobs I've had have had this. I kid you not, I spent 6 months opening my PC, watching email, and doing whatever I wanted from home. My current job is like this as well but I actually get to help others, so it's not as bad. Believe me, I don't want it -- it gets very boring, very quickly, but legal agreements mean you can't really work on anything else.

And it's not hard to imagine someone trying to cover up a blunder of making a bad hire by giving them no work or busy work because the company is just awash in so much cash that it doesn't actually affect much to just let them leech compared to the reputation damage of admitting that mistake.

Every time someone cannot believe this is possible, I have no empathy for them. It has happened over and over and over and over again. If you don't believe this happens, you are being willfully ignorant! Don't be ignorant!

Sadly there just isn't a good solution for it. A more complex interview doesn't fix it.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#96

Post by jaclaz »

arram wrote: post #27
kstenerud wrote: post #13

Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got t…

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.

Out of curiosity, are you sure that these numbers are correct?

>In my nine years at ZeroCater I probably interviewed around three thousand people.

That would be roughly 1.30 people per working day or 6-7 people per week.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#97

Post by wink »

bsder wrote: post #67
wink wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember we also did this "starter project" thing and one our new hires (who had made a really good impression in the interviews) was told to create a simple web interface for something (one of those "we should really fix this papercut") together with another hire on the frontend. He was kinda furious that he was demoted to doing lowly web development in his first week (in order to get to know our infrastructure, i…

> He was kinda furious that he was demoted to doing lowly web development in his first week My reaction to this depends upon what you told him when you hired him. If you hired him to do front end development, then, yeah, he's over the line. If you tell someone that they're going to be working with the chief architect on figuring out the networking substructure and then throw him in with the web monkeys with no advanc…

Writing a Flask backend API is not front end development. No JavaScript involved. But I guess the first sentence could've used a comma. " together with another hire, with the other person on the frontend".

No, the position to be filled was supposed to be mostly Java, but it was expected and communicated everyone needs to work in the whole stack, with explicit mention of Python and Flask, just not with a heavy focus.

Also, as I said this was a task to get to know stuff, as this was kind of a dashboard thingy which would be using ~10 internal APIs. It was scoped to be a few days and explicitly mentioned that this is not the new permanent role.

And yes, we were <10 developers in the whole company.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#98

Post by EdwardDiego »

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.…

Our worst hire ever had a glowing reference from his current supervisor. (the candidate stated he wanted to move from the larger corporate environment to our more relaxed environment, which is a common sentiment in people we interview)

After the slow motion train wreck that was his time with us finally departed for another station, I got talking to a guy in the local bar, who, while quite drunk, asked me "Say, you're not Edward from Company X are you?"

I told him I was, and then he promptly sprinted off to the bar, and came with a beer for me and said "I need to apologise and at least buy you this beer".

I asked him why, and it turns out it was his guilty conscience - he had been the supervisor who gave us the glowing reference for Trainwreck, and he had done it solely to get rid of Trainwreck. All the issues we'd had with him, they'd had, for longer, and in my country it's notoriously difficult to fire underperforming devs without risking penalties in an employment tribunal, how exactly do you quantify how much they are or aren't delivering?

So yeah, he lied to us to move Trainwreck out of his team. So these days I am very dubious about references from current employers/managers. And I don't quite think that the beer made up for it.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#99

Post by lonelappde »

juanbyrge wrote: post #15

What if you missed out on hiring the Steve Jobs of the catering industry? Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gott…

Indentation on HN is for code, not blockquotes.

Steve Jobs isn't a particularly good employee, anyway. He's a good CEO.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#100

Post by ChuckMcM »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #98
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.…

Our worst hire ever had a glowing reference from his current supervisor. (the candidate stated he wanted to move from the larger corporate environment to our more relaxed environment, which is a common sentiment in people we interview) After the slow motion train wreck that was his time with us finally departed for another station, I got talking to a guy in the local bar, who, while quite drunk, asked me "Say, you're…

Ouch. I've heard of telling recruiters that a co-worker is super great in order to get them recruited out of your org but never with the glowing review.
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