14 ms·

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

• drooby 5y ago
  Fake it til’ you - have to quit out of fear of legal repercussions.
  • pengaru 5y ago
    Except there's tons of plausible deniability when it comes to getting interviewed and/or hired for the wrong position. At a former startup I interviewed someone for what was supposed to be a plain old individual contributor developer role, and the suit seated across from me was clearly interested in the newly opened VP of Eng. role. I never bothered chasing down if it was a scheduling mixup on our chaotic startup side, or if he was just trying to get his foot in the door after somehow hearing about the newly opened executive vacancy. Either way the technical interview went so badly he stormed out of the office in a rage. Point being, mixups happen all the time. It's not hard to imagine scenarios where it still results in a hire, and seems difficult to place 100% blame without a recorded confession or something. It's clearly the potential employer in the driver's seat, caveat emptor of sorts applies.
• kabes 5y ago
  How can something like this ever work out? If you're an okay-ish candidate and you hire someone better to do the interview, you might get away with it. But if you don't even know the basics of the job as the post claims...
  • icedchai 5y ago
    If you're "interviewing" at an extremely large and likely dysfunctional organization, it can probably work out. You might get placed on a random team completely divorced from those you interviewed with. I've known guys who've taken jobs and done nothing for months and months. It's sad. I've also seen people quit after two days!
    • kelnos 5y ago
      Yeah, I was thinking the same. In a big enough company, you can spend 3-6 months "onboarding" while drawing a paycheck and not having to do enough to get found out as a fraud. Even after the onboarding period, a skilled fraudster might find a way to blend in and hide if the circumstances are right. Or the company might have a policy (from legal) not to just fire people on the spot, but instead put them on a PIP and/or collect months of documentation of poor performance before doing letting them go. Even if they fail to last, they've still been drawing a paycheck for maybe 3-6 months (or more?), and that might be an acceptable "win".
  • markstos 5y ago
    The person who showed up for work was described as "timid". Perhaps he hired a confident extrovert to do the interview, believing he'd be fine at the job once that stressful part was out of the way.
  • geodel 5y ago
    I have seen these things closely. It kinda works out fine in big companies with large/slow IT departments. It takes ~3-6 months to figure out that person hired is not really up to task assigned. But still works in candidates favor because usually low level IT consultants are hired for 3/6 months + extension up to year or so. This means there is no point to proceed with firing that person as by then contract is about to be over. Also I do not have latest info on this. The stories I have are from 2006-2016 period. So maybe with agile and all it is no longer possible.
• throwaway9191aa 5y ago
  But... is the interviewee proxy doing this as a side gig? If they are good enough to get paid (presumably) for taking interviews, how can that be more valuable than just taking one of the jobs they successfully interview for?
  • farmerstan 5y ago
    Who wouldn’t pay $10,000-50,000 for a guaranteed FAANG job? There are some people out there that can absolutely pass every single interview. And if they look like you, especially over zoom, then how would they know?
    • ghaff 5y ago
      I would hope plenty of people won't commit fraud to get a tech job. >how would they know Maybe someone could get off with it if they're early in their careers. But if you're more senior, lots of people probably know you.
  • omegadeep10 5y ago
    I think the interviewee proxy is probably located in a non-US country where they wouldn't be able to work for a well-paying tech company. They could also be doing it for cash on the side. A few hours of interviews a week for a significant chunk of change.
    • raincom 5y ago
      Yes, they are such services available. You can find them on ethnic forums online.
  • rightbyte 5y ago
    My experience with hustlers is that they do alot of work to not work.
  • jonnycomputer 5y ago
    Sure. OTOH lots of good coders don't do well in interviews; some good interviewers aren't really dependable employees long term. So here we have a case of specialization. Someone making good money doing what they are good at: technical interviews. Not defending it. I think it sucks (and this happens for college admissions too).
• 11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
  Seems pretty hard to successfully pull this off. The better your chances of being successful, the more likely you could have gotten the offer on your own. If you needed the stand in to get the offer, you're not likely going to be qualified and won't last. Perhaps it could be successful for people who are technically competent, but have a severe stage fright when interviewing. At the lease, you'd want the stand in to record the interviews so you could watch and learn who's who and get the context of the job before starting.
  • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    > If you needed the stand in to get the offer, you're not likely going to be qualified and won't last. You don't need to last at all, you forget that in many parts of the world earning even a single US remote paycheck would be absolutely life changing.
  • shubb 5y ago
    I dunno - to get jobs some places you need to be really good at leetcode - and that's a niche skill that is increasingly hard to keep current at as you get older, busier in your role and family life. I'm not confident that I could do a leetcode medium anymore, but I am super confident I could do a similar role to the one I currently do at a company that would only hire me for it if I could do a leetcode medium. I would never actually use a service like this but I can't say I'm not tempted.
• greedo 5y ago
  We "hired" a DBA after a really good remote interview (this was in 2017). Two weeks later, the DBA shows up for work, but wasn't working very closely with the hiring team. His coworkers seemed curious about some of his approaches to problems etc. Turns out he had someone fake his interview. Fired him two weeks later when we had all of our ducks in a row in terms of HR stuff.
• ijustwanttovote 5y ago
  This has happened to me before. The person I was interviewing and the person who was doing the coding during the interview were not the same.
• endisneigh 5y ago
  Record the interviews. Problem solved.
  • advisedwang 5y ago
    I've seen legal depts fight against this. They're worried the recording will capture some question or comment that could be evidence of discrimination. (e.g. someone asks "Did you have a good Christmas?" and is later accused of discriminating against non-Christians)
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      it's unnecessary to record the audio to solve the problem
  • RomanPushkin 5y ago
    Recording without consent is illegal in some states (CA, for example)
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      audio recording is. video is ok IIRC
  • jonas21 5y ago
    And now you have a new problem that you've just signaled to all prospective employees that you don't trust them.
• bitwize 5y ago
  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 iOS programming training, and then have you sign a 2-year contract to be at their disposal to go to client sites. As part of this, they would make up a fake CV for you with fake experience and -- crucially -- a fake telephone number. When companies called to interview you, they would be directed to a call center in India where one of the call center drones would do the interview in your place. Only once they had passed the phone screen for you could you show up at the client site. They may have sent a fake you to the client site for the in-person bit as well, I'm not sure. As part of the contract you sign, you had to agree to all of this. If you refused to sign, or tried to skip your contract before 2 years was up, you had to pay for the training they gave you which they valued at $20,000. One of the scummiest things I'd ever seen or heard of in this industry.
  • bitwize 5y ago
    I just found them again! They're now known as Enhance IT. Same city, too, Atlanta, GA.
  • AlexCoventry 5y ago
    Is a contract requiring you to participate in a blatant fraud enforceable?
    • bitwize 5y ago
      Legally, probably not; effectively, yes! You need a good attorney to defend yourself against an entity like that, and as a (likely) kid fresh out of college who's hard up for cash (else why would you be singing with Unbounded/BrighterBrain/Enhance IT to begin with?) that's an attorney you can't afford. Your ass is gonna get creamed in court and you may end up paying their legal fees in addition to the original $20,000.
    • XargonEnder 5y ago
• hourislate 5y ago
  This is especially true with Indian H1B's. A company I was doing work for complained that they were burned at least 3 times. They got someone else who wasn't the person they interviewed. Wasn't a big deal since they would let them go immediately. What's funny is folks were asking are you sure? The manager would say yes I'm sure, I'm Indian and I know who I spoke to during the interview and it wasn't this guy.
• nikcub 5y ago
  Reminds me of the lip syncing interview candidate that went viral a little while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg This is why remote exams have all of those strict requirements like "show us your room" and "don't leave sight of the webcam"
  • ZoomerCretin 5y ago
    This is why that ML/AI realtime deepfake software is so scary. Imagine if the person speaking is just mapping their facial expressions onto the face of the person you're actually getting. >This is why remote exams have all of those strict requirements like "show us your room" and "don't leave sight of the webcam" I'd imagine this could be defeated with a prerecorded video of the "interviewee" showing their room.
• LanceH 5y ago
  One place I worked, we hired someone into a senior developer position. A whole section of the interview is about what is expected of a senior (making juniors better, talking to clients, etc...) He gets there day one and says he will only write code. Everyone in the interview process had good notes and positive recollection of him. The two working theories were that either someone else interviewed for him, or that he expected to show up and export his work to someone else (all remote).
• tempnow987 5y ago
  Very common with overseas contractors. Often the person communicating has good English skills, but they swap in a friend etc for the actual work. In some cases fine (you'll actually get both of them to eventually show up on calls together with some random excuse). Other times less fine (basically a scam).
  • baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    Sounds like the "fine" case is a scam as well. You're too lenient.
    • Tenoke 5y ago
      If the work is getting done, whether by 2 or 1 person what are they scamming you of?
      • baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        Software development work has more attributes to it than a binary "done" / "not done". The quality of what you get is going to be orders a magnitude worse when the work is being done by a team of cheaters compared to when it's done by an honest person who didn't cheat to score a job.
• mod_mouse 5y ago
  If you have a common name, there are probably people on LinkedIn with much better CVs than yours. Their references should work for you.
• chillytoes 5y ago
  This also happened to me. I interviewed someone from an IT staffing agency. Seemed perfect. A different person showed up for the job, and he knew next to nothing about IT.
• klausjensen 5y ago
  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.
  • baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    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.
    • klausjensen 5y ago
      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.
      • andirk 5y ago
        If the position is learnable from where their skillset is within a reasonable amount of time, they should learn up! I've been given plenty of positions that were above my abilities but that I could learn within a couple months. There are a lot of types of people in the world, and one type is people who don't mind being bad at their jobs.
      • baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        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 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.
• miked85 5y ago
  I don't think this is rare when dealing with large contracting companies, and especially remote. I've seen it happen multiple times, luckily we terminated the contracts when it was painfully obvious what happened after a couple of weeks.
• afinlayson 5y ago
  Ohh no ... I really hope this doesn't become a thing ... I don't want corporate espionage to become this insane.
• Rafuino 5y ago
  Whoa... the part about being able to trace if work is being done on another computer is alarming. How can they do that?
  • notpachet 5y ago
    Welcome my son, to the machine: https://www.jamf.com/solutions/compliance/ https://www.jamf.com/solutions/compliance/
    • Rafuino 5y ago
      I'm more concerned about a company being able to see what you do on your personal computer, which is what the comment seemed to allude to. I know there are many sketchy tracking mechanisms out there, but if they can extend to your personal network, that's scary
      • kelnos 5y ago
        In one of the updates, they mention that they hope they'll be able to get company equipment (presumably a computer/laptop) back from "John". So I'm sure the "spying" software (pretty standard fare for most corporate IT departments) was on company hardware, not personal hardware. If a company said I could bring my own laptop, but that I'd have to install their "security" software on it, I would definitely decline. Ditto for an MDM on my phone.
• lostcolony 5y ago
  Had this happen once. For an on-site job...with an on-site interview. And, yeah, from day 1 it was "this...is not the guy we interviewed". Plus of course the time we were hiring remote, and someone screenshared for something, and didn't end it, and then later questions we had that was broad ("can you tell me a little about (technology)") we got to watch him search for and answer from what he read, which was a unique experience.
• lormayna 5y ago
  Couple of year ago, my team was hiring an employee in India through Teams interviews. Local HR warned us to mandatory ask to the candidates to switch on the camera, because person exchange after the interviews is quite common.
• dillondoyle 5y ago
  We only have 10 ish staff during election season. For us it's always been unpredictable and I wouldn't go as far to say intentional fraud. But there is a trend that the people who put the most experience, list best tech skills, have good buzzword filled interviews often don't live up to it. Often it's the fresh person with less experience, or the person coming from something different that doesn't even have the baseline skills, that becomes the super talented value adder. I think a big part of their success is ability to teach themselves. Google it success. I wish we had a better way to make choices. Still though it's not like it's horrible. out of like 10 we usually only get one we need to let go of or move to a less intense role. We tried doing some basic tests of like paying people to do 2 hours of work, proof reading, etc. But didn't go well.
• oneepic 5y ago
  Most comments here are not mentioning TFA, but I wanted to point out this line: > Their security teams are trying to discover what all he downloaded, if they’ll be able to get their equipment back, is John really his real name, etc. !! If they'll be able to get their equipment back? Incredible.
  • not1ofU 5y ago
    Equipment comes back with a rootkit installed, plot twist, he wanted to get caught :-D
  • kelnos 5y ago
    I mean, it's up to "John" to actually send it back to them. And if he doesn't, the cost to get it back via the courts is probably more than it's worth.
• chefkoch 5y ago
  Just wait what happens when people start to deep fake virtual interviews.
• wayanon 5y ago
  Fascinating if one person is interviewing for many roles then sending in proxies to do the jobs in return for a kickback.
• nhoughto 5y ago
  reminds of me of this post, however true it is.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27454589
• tmule 5y ago
  Seems made up, though I don’t doubt that it’s a thing. If someone is getting someone else to interview for them, the least they would ensure is that no aspect of personal life is discussed during the interview. This is also something that no hiring manager would inquire about since there are possible legal repercussions to doing so. Finally, I think it’s alarming that the spouse has this level of detail about the happenings at her husband’s office - if this were true, this is a mini-scandal by itself
  • XargonEnder 5y ago
    If this happened to me there's no way I wouldn't tell my spouse the story
• aasasd 5y ago
  What I'm seeing in the article: the legal dept forbid HR from saying “you aren't the guy that we interviewed”, but meanwhile permitted the security dept to put a ‘trace’—presumably spyware—on the guy's machine. HUH? Apparently this is the state of corporate attitude toward employees now.
  • theamk 5y ago
    Legally, the computer is company property and thus company can do whatever they do with it (sometimes there are exceptions, like "stop looking if this looks like personal documents"). Even if there is no one manually looking at the specific computer, there is often antivirus/antimalware which reports to IT department. This makes sense -- if an employee went to a shady site on a work PC and got infected with malware, central IT should know ASAP about this to stop the spread / block stolen credentials. Even if the employee is unwilling to report it. https://www.findlaw.com/employment/workplace-privacy/privacy-at-work-what-are-your-rights.html https://www.findlaw.com/employment/workplace-privacy/privacy... The situation is different if the employee's personal computer is used -- then it can be expected to be full of personal stuff. This is why a lot of bigger places prohibit placing company code/credentials onto a personal device.
    • aasasd 5y ago
      Ah, yes, ‘it's fine because it's technically legal’. The pinnacle of Western morality, wow. You may notice, however, that the question of legality wasn't my objection in the first place.
• retah 5y ago
  In 2014, Indian voters voted for a candidate who claimed he will remove corruption, end poverty and make India better than Japan, South Korea and Europe. Turned out in 2022, Narendra Modi was a fraud, uneducated and full of ego. He did not know how to do the job at all. He just got the gig by enciting violence in local constituency. If top posts can be rigged, corporate jobs resume fraud is a child's play.
  • known 5y ago
• ojbyrne 5y ago
  I’ve had the experience (at a FAANG) where I showed up for an site and all the interviews had info on a completely different person. So my initial thought was there 2 Johns and somewhere between interview and offer they got switched. New John is going to graciously accept the offer, old John got ghosted.
• bufferoverflow 5y ago
  I once interviewed a person who couldn't answer a single question, not even the easiest ones. He would just say "I don't know, ask me the next question". A few weeks later I realized it was probably a plant that another candidate sent to collect the interview questions. And I think I even know who it was. We hired her, she wasn't very good writing code. But she answered all our questions perfectly, which only happened once before.
  • mcv 5y ago
    I tend to ask way too personal questions for that. I want to know their favourite project they worked on, and then I ask questions about that project. That's far more interesting than "test" questions, it gives me insight in what they like and how they work, and it's not as easily faked.
  • donatj 5y ago
    We interviewed a guy who had a great resume, seemed like a perfect fit on paper. I was pretty genuinely excited to interview him. Start by asking him softball questions about his experience, can’t give a straight answer to any of it. Start asking some technical questions and everything we ask he knows little to nothing about. Finally I am getting fed up and I ask him “Why did you put all these things on your resume you know nothing about?” The guy just deadpan replies “The recruiter told me to”. I don’t know if we worked with that recruiter again, but my boss who was also in the interview was none too pleased.
• TheGigaChad 5y ago
• enw 5y ago
  Tangential, but it’s the first time I’m hearing of MuleSoft. I wonder what kind of companies use it? There’s a side of “enterprise” software that’s so foreign to me. I still don’t know what Salesforce is. Or SAP (I see their name in a lot of shitty software though). I wonder how the developers in those companies are like, what their processes and code reviews and technical discussions look like.
• ncmncm 5y ago
  Tl;dr: when confronted, he quit and was subsequently unreachable.
• defen 5y ago
  While I don't doubt this sort of thing happens, the following line leads me to believe that this is an exercise in creative writing by someone: > In the meantime, legal approved security to put a trace on John’s computer to review if there have been outside messages or if his work is being completed with outside help or on a different computer altogether.
  • tempnow987 5y ago
    right - that's weird language. That said, machines are often under GPO / Mdm type control, and it is trivial if needed to monitor a machine if there is an OK (ie, not used to harass / flirt / spy) on someone. Normally best practice is that someone outside of workgroup reviews results for a predefined concern (ie, slacking off, running a side business on company time, etc). This is just because you can end up with tons of personal details (ie, bank balances - wow they are rich / poor etc). With remote work I think this is less common / would be less acceptable. I have some light govt exposure and this was sometimes done to see if folks were browsing porn (ie, new firewall or something would start reporting adult site use and then they'd do something on the actual computer to see what was up) or slacking - partly because govt work didn't always have good productivity metrics to work against. More recently they just seem to block things like porn at work by default.
  • probablyexists 5y ago
    Agreed. This reads like those memes about men writing female characters..
  • andylynch 5y ago
    We used to do this in the 90s for suspected fraud/ misuse of office. I’m sure it’s way easier now.
  • nevi-me 5y ago
    I worked at an audit+consulting firm, and our laptops had at least 5 different "security" applications, most of them spyware. Then 2 anti-viruses (eew). They actively MITM TLS traffic, getting some Java applications like IntelliJ to work was a mission. ___ I once interned at a defence company where it was common to hear folks saying "if your PC keeps on freezing, it's IT taking screenshots". This was in 2007-2009, so a while ago. ___ My colleague's spouse got sabotaged by their former employer, to make them break their non-compete. The employer spied on their laptop (not a work one, as they'd left). One day the cursor started moving, files getting copied, kind of vibe. They also sent "customers" to their business, legit and otherwise, to make them err and break their non-compete. Then with some legal muscle, they enforced the non-compete, forcing them out of business. This is a recent thing of 2020.
• rightbyte 5y ago
  I guess you need to remember your lies? Or don't say you are single when you have wife and three kids. Which just makes it sound like a mixup rather than fraud. Maybe the recruiter called the wrong person. I mean you only say your name once during a call. The person that got the job just made the initial screening interview, and answered the recruiters mail, while they talked to another guy. He then thinks they are scammers , hire to fire or something and bails.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    > I guess you need to remember your lies? Or don't say you are single when you have wife and three kids. Yeah, that's the odd thing. You'd think that the guy who handled the interviews would have gotten some background on the guy who would actually join the company and adjusted his small-talk story to match. Then again, the low-effort approach "worked", at least to get the guy hired. If the interviewed guy was getting paid just for getting an offer letter, he doesn't care if the worker guy gets found out later. > Which just makes it sound like a mixup rather than fraud. I dunno, the mixup scenario sounds pretty farfetched too, perhaps even more so.
    • rightbyte 5y ago
      Sure. But he had the wrong hair and glasses etc. It feels like one of these things a scammer would think about, assuming the scammers are not incompetent. Imagine the opposing side write up of this. Note that HR did not confront him with allegations of fraud. "My boss is staring at me with a confused look. My smalltalk about my family made him leave the room hastely. Lawers are lurking around in the hallway. They starts to question my competence after just one week. Is this place a joke? Did they hire me to fill a fire quota?"
      • kelnos 5y ago
        > But he had the wrong hair and glasses etc. It feels like one of these things a scammer would think about, assuming the scammers are not incompetent. If the scam was just a dude hiring someone off the internet to attend his interview, the guy who interviewed may not have cared about what happened after the interview (or after an offer was given), as he already got paid. So he might not have expended the effort to make himself more like the "real" potential employee.
• simmanian 5y ago
  Practices like this are hilariously common in the industry. Right out of college I accepted a job offer at a small consulting company on the east coast. They promised they would give me free housing at their luxury apartment for the first few months and give me all the training I need to excel in areas of my interest. I flew across the country and found out the whole thing is not as advertised. Their luxury apartment had piles of unwashed dishes and flies in the kitchen and piss on the bathroom floor. They had bunk beds in each room and I slept with three other dudes from wildly different backgrounds. My first night, this guy from Turkey assured me that everything is going to be fine, that he was shaking in fear for the first couple nights but he soon learned that if you work with them, they get you what you need. At the same time, another guy from Chicago was telling me how I need to look out for myself because the company likes to steal money from your paychecks. The next day, I learned that "working with them" meant going through their "resume revision" process. Turns out, there was a network of consulting companies like this one, each creating fake experiences for one another. Fresh grads who clearly have never coded anything of significance became senior engineers with 5 years of experience. The resulting resumes looked real stacked, filled with keywords that recruiters love. Furthermore, during live interviews, they actually placed someone with actual technical knowledge behind the laptop camera to basically write out all the answers on the whiteboard while the candidates read out the answers. Some of the people there loved talking about how so and so got placed at prestigious companies and became hugely successful in their career. Most of them knew what they were doing wasn't the most ethical thing to do, but not many complained given their visa status. Also, they were actually really grateful to get a developer job that pays ~$40k. They were just regular people. I personally didn't need visa support, and I had the luxury of being able to fall back on my parents. So about a week after I flew over, I gathered my things and left. It was an interesting experience overall, one I'm glad I could experience. My 2c for interviewing: always look up key phrases you see on resumes and see if identical copies show up. It's usually a giveaway sign.
  • Mc91 5y ago
    I work for a F100 company. We have some consulting companies working for us, who themselves sometimes subcontract contracts, to subcontracting companies who sometimes themselves subcontract contracts. One consultant (US citizen) checked the boxes of your situation. Young, graduated college recently, a sub-contracting company presents him as senior even though he had little or negligible experience before. They had him in a hotel being billed to the F100, and then later at (crummy) corporate housing when the contract was not renewed. Another consultant (also a US citizen) was in a similar boat, but never in corporate housing, for another sub-contractor sub-contractor. He was older, but also pretty junior - new to programming - although they presented him as senior. He had to sign all of these things about how much he would owe the sub-contractor under various circumstances. Technically he signed something that he would owe them a lot of money for "training" if the contract was not renewed, but when he was let go they did not pursue it - why sue to try to get blood from a stone? He also had mandatory meetings at all three companies and was on the phone all of the time with the consulting companies after the regular work. Both contractors did one three month contract and were not renewed.
• farmerstan 5y ago
  I’ve always wondered how companies that do mass interviewing like Google and Facebook determine if the person who interviews is the same person who shows up to work? I imagine especially with completely remote work, if you delay joining by a few months, who is going to remember what you look like? I’m sure this happens and I’ve seen people trying to hilariously cheat on virtual interviews but the fact that people are probably successfully interviewing at FAANGs and getting away with it intrigues me.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • kelnos 5y ago
    I think this especially could be a problem at companies where you don't interview for a specific team, and instead get matched with a team after you start. So the new hire might not work with or even see anyone who interviewed them after joining. Their eventual teammates and manager might have no idea that someone else interviewed in their stead.
• jzellis 5y ago
  I didn't realize they were making a sequel to The Internship
• ljm 5y ago
  I've been involved in more than a handful of interviews where it was clear that the candidate was wearing an earpiece or getting answers from someone else. Never hired an actual impostor like in TFA, but the signs of someone cheating the interview were pretty clear. All we had to do was go off script and we'd have a good idea about how genuine the candidate was being.
  • jollybean 5y ago
    This one might be a little bit different though. It's one thing to have outright fraud, or people who want to screw over your company for a free paycheck. Having someone early in their career, really nervous and wanting to succeed ... I can just see a college dorm buddy saying 'hey man, I'll get you the answers from Google!'. It might have a kind of 'immature prank' element to it as opposed to 'nefarious intentions'. If this happened to me with a kid just out of college, and they were visibly nervous, I'd actually ask them to take it out and have conversation with them about what that kind of behaviour implies, why it's wrong, that they are lacking in self awareness to think they are going to get away with it. I also feel that some people grow up in cultures and family / community situations which are just completely toxic. They have no faith, belief or understanding of how people get along in normal, productive societies. They've never remotely been exposed to a professional environment. In fact, professional behaviour is a hallmark of well organized civilizations and hiring people from any place that is not '1st world' you get these kinds of issue quite often. It happens everywhere obviously, just more often in places with zero exposure to certain kinds of social socialization. Finally, I believe that these kinds of problems are going to be more common with remote work as one of those issues for which we have yet to contend with. Anyone who's worked with offshore teams understand the struggle, now we're going to have those issues with greater preponderance in remote orgs.
  • smallerfish 5y ago
    I did an interview like that once where I could actually hear the colleague whispering answers to the candidate, during awkward pauses between when I asked a question and the candidate responded. I asked him "are you getting help from somebody" and he straight up denied it.
• covermydonkey 5y ago
  At my Big Corp (tm) we've had HCL and TCM send one candidate for interview and drop off different people entirely. HR caught on when HCL started dropping off men when we had specifically selected several women.
  • propogandist 5y ago
    what if they identified as female?
• theshowmustgo 5y ago
  Yes, this is a thing. And even more frequently, online assessments done by someone else. Somehow Java developers got hired who don't know the difference between Java and JavaScript.
• foobarian 5y ago
  I was wondering about this after running across a couple of people who I have no shadow of a doubt could not code a fizzbuzz solution that all our screens use. They did end up on PIPs and let go but I always wondered how they got in to begin with. (This was before Covid, too, but still unless you did biometrics and had in-person friends who could recognize a person I could see a stand-in coming in to help with the on-site interviews).
• clueless123 5y ago
  In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the team. In short, they do it because it is profitable. PS.. To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".
  • morelish 5y ago
    Haha that PS note is great. "Not only did we abuse you, we're going to tell everyone you loved us"
    • cestith 5y ago
      And in the meantime if the consultancy kept the contract and delivered, it was on a successful project. The C- team had little or nothing to do with it being successful, barring maybe filling headcount until the A team finished another billable project. Bonus points if it's a publicly notable new initiative for the consulting client.
  • Tarragon 5y ago
    In the contract houses I've been in the vast majority of contracts were repeat business. A good contracting house won't pull this kind of thing because the company doesn't survive if they piss off clients. I'm out of that world now but can still talk about it. The non-scammy way this happens is senior engineers are part of the interviews and requirements gathering. They do the design and estimation. They develop task and proof of concept code for junior engineers. During the work the senior engineer almost never 100% on a single project. They are on three different projects in different stages: design/early development on one that just started, resource and mentor on a second that's been going a while, writing quote for a third, and initial sales contacts for multiple other. Based on availability it might not be the same senior person at any step of the process. It's hard to impossible to a give you the same person who was part of the initial contact because by the time you get teh PO approved they are already hip deep in something else.
• sudoaza 5y ago
  Were the interviews online? Couldn't John study a recording of those to know who Holly is and bring up some story to explain some of the other odd stuff? I wonder how long you can pull this off without knowing your stuff.
• hui-zheng 5y ago
  > HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud. Though at this point they all know John is committing fraud, they still decided only to approach this guy claiming a poor fit for his resignation. I don't know why they do that. They have discussed a lot and considered many things. I am sure there are many reasons to do so. but do they just want John to go away and then try that same thing with another company? It might be too strong to say this, but a failure to confront evil is a evil.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    If they terminate for fraud, they might be asked to prove it in some kind of wrongful termination claim, or risk being charged with libel or slander. Though the possibility might be remote, and the employer likely would prevail, the legal team and HR will not want to take any chance of having to spend time on that. They will want to take the lowest risk approach.
    • ilamont 5y ago
      Do wrongful termination cases like this ever come up when obvious fraud is involved from the get-go for a remote position? Resume fraud happens all the time with fudged degrees and job titles and positions. Usually when corporate HR finds out termination is immediate.
      • flybrand 5y ago
        Crazy people who commit fraud are the same people who continue the fraud and make things weird. Get away from the crazy.
        • throwawayboise 5y ago
          And don't overlook the possiblity of some kind of scam being attempted. Get a foot in the door, get fired, sue. Happens all the time with injury claims. Probably less likely since "at will" is the employment law in most places, but it's still safer to terminate without alleging any wrongdoing. Same reason most former employers will only confirm dates of employment on a reference check. They typically won't comment on performance or reasons for termination, just to avoid any potential backwash.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  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 long as possible. They might already have a full-time job or other remote jobs, or maybe they're just trying to travel the world and do a "four hour workweek" thing where they answer e-mails once a day and phone in a couple hours of work at key times during the week. The common theme is that they aren't really interested in fighting too hard for the position. As soon as the interview or job turns out to be something they can't just talk and smile their way through, they're out, just like this: > I think my last update for a while: as soon as HR got on the call with him, before they could get through their first question, John said the words “I quit” and hung up the calls. He has since been unreachable!! 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.
  • wly_cdgr 5y ago
    There is no company out there that stays in business long paying their employees the full amount of the value they would generate if they were really working full+ time, so why should those employees do that unless they happen to enjoy it or it advances their own goals? That's just whipping yourself so massa doesn't have to
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    The irony of this is what does a business do. It tries to find a way to efficiently serve multiple customers, keeping them happy, giving them value etc. In order to make more money than you would make by serving a single customer. Look at is as more of a scrap on the blurred business/employee lines, as much as a moral outrage or failing. Often a job is "we want you to survive but not fly, .... so that we can".
  • JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Worked at a place hired one of those. He scheduled meetings, then cancelled them at the last minute. Never accomplished a single task. Demanded a good reference and he would go get another job elsewhere - essentially extorted the reference. I guess some folks are sociopaths, and do whatever it takes to live well.
• linsomniac 5y ago
  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, uncorrected typos... It got so bad that we had to have someone review all e-mails he sent to customers. We had regular "improvement plan" meetings with him, but after a year of paying him, we had to let him go. As part of the exit interview we went back and looked at his interview e-mails, and compared them with his current e-mails. So we asked him: "During the interview, all your e-mails were great! Why was that?" "My wife wrote all of those." I guess we should have hired his wife!
  • giantg2 5y ago
    My (professional) written communication is a strong point for me. What kind of job has mostly sending emails as the work?
    • ct0 5y ago
      HR
      • giantg2 5y ago
        Interesting, but I guess they don't get paid well.
        • ct0 5y ago
          Its relative. I know plenty of data nerds making 6 figures in HR.
          • giantg2 5y ago
            6 figures would be good Edit: Thanks! Looking at internal data analyst roles in my HR dept (weird that they aren't under a technical job code, so I wasn't seeing them before). Maybe I'll apply to one.
• kingcharles 5y ago
  Here's a funny one: I worked at a financial company as a web developer. A co-developer sat at the desk opposite, with the wall behind him. He would sit there playing games on his phone all day. ALL DAY. Yet, his work got done, but it was the barest minimum and really poor code. So, one day I say "Tomas, I never see you write any code. Yet, your work is always done." "Oh!", he says with a grin, "I've outsourced my entire job to my friend back in the Czech Republic. I pay him about 30% of what I earn and he writes all my code and sends it back."
  • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >I worked at a financial company as a web developer. [...] "Oh!", he says with a grin, "I've outsourced my entire job to my friend back in the Czech Republic. That sounds like a huge breach of the NDA or employment contract. Pretty sure you're not allowed to expose internal company code or requirements to third party outsiders without approval in any sane company with half decent lawyers who can draft an employment contract, let alone a financial company. Here in EU they do background checks for devs working in most financial companies.
    • kingcharles 5y ago
      This was the UK. No background checks, though it wouldn't have turned up anything. There was no NDA that I remember, and honestly, I don't think the execs would have given a fuck even if they had known, as long as the work got done. I never ratted him out as our manager was fine with his work, and we didn't have a huge overlap of code that we were working on.
      • ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        Wow, can anyone just do what they want in the UK finance/sw scene? This wouldn't have flied in Germany/Austria. You have to sign extensive NDA's before they let you anywhere near their code/IP.
• jawns 5y ago
  Earlier this year, I was asked to interview a man who was procured through a remote-staffing firm. He was based in Southeast Asia, and on his resume it looked like he met all of the competencies we needed -- including English proficiency. But on the call, I noticed that whenever I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the question, then turn his video back on. Eventually, I cut the call short and messaged the guy from the remote-staffing firm who had set up the interview to ask about this bizarre behavior. An investigation determined that the man was using a translator and really didn't speak any English whatsoever. I have no idea how he expected to be able to do the job if he had been hired, but I guess he thought it was worth a shot.
  • bananarchist 5y ago
    Maybe the prospective salary made hiring a full-time interpreter a reasonable expense.
  • prepend 5y ago
    Something like this happened to me years ago before video interviews. On phone interviews people would pause before every question, mute their line, then unmute and answer. This was odd because it happened on about 25% of the calls. A few times they forgot to unmute and we heard multiple voices coaching them in English and the local language. The offshore partner had someone sit in the interview to coach them with the proper answers. Oddly we didn’t change the offshore partner but management figured out some way that the partner stopped doing this. Or at least had interviewers answer fast enough with no lag.
  • Seb-C 5y ago
    Reminds me of a senior tech lead candidate I interviewed a few months ago who was like "I don't know the answer, but can you give me a couple of minutes to sort on my thought?". Then very obviously started searching on internet (thinking he was hiding it well enough...). The question was along the lines of "how do you typically protect your code against sql injections?" (in a language and framework agnostic context)
  • kumarvvr 5y ago
• giantg2 5y ago
  "John is talking extensively about working in a garage because his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk area." If John is reading, you now have documentation that marital status has played a part in the decision process (even if not the sole issue) should they decide to let you go.
  • ds_store2387 5y ago
    No… they have documented evidence that the company noted discrepancies between his interview and subsequent comments. Nothing there states that this was a problem; it’s a diff. Besides, he quit.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      Missed the quiting part. It doesn't really matter if it's a diff. It matters that it was a diff that the husband apparently thought pertinent enough to mention. If it plays any part in the decision, or can show that they preferred single people in the interview, then it could be basis for a law suit (whether it would win or go to settlement is a different issue).
      • ds_store2387 5y ago
        Nothing in the letters even hints that it played a part of the decision-making process for hiring or firing. The husband also mentioned his hair was different and he now wears glasses. Does that mean corrective vision also played a part in the process?
        • giantg2 5y ago
          If the manager mentioned it, then it very well could have. Even if just on a subconscious level. I don't see anything that shows an audit of their thought processes, so you can't rule that out.
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  We had this happen, but it did not get all the way to being hired thankfully. I got on a call to interview a candidate, and he didn't know anything. Like, hilariously unqualified, his knowledge level on software engineering was effectively zero. Fairly short call once we realized what the score was. Immediately the recruiter calls me back (she was on the call as well) and started apologizing profusely. She said the guy on this call was definitely not the guy she screened on an earlier phone call. Luckily we didn't get as far as hiring a fraud. But I have to say, also, that this kind of incident is why I really love a good recruiter, and try to hold onto them if at all possible. We had one guy we worked with who had a nearly 100% success rate placing people with us. He didn't just phone screen randos, he had a pool of people that he cultivated, he interviewed them himself in depth. So when he made a recommendation, he knew it was a good fit, and he was right almost every time.
  • mizzao 5y ago
    Haha, I really appreciate that kind of recruiter. Did his name happen to be John Keenan?
    • albroland 5y ago
      I worked with John for my last 2 job searches and I must say even from the candidate side he is excellent to work with.
    • rootusrootus 5y ago
      Ha, no, that's not his name. I'd have to think about it for a bit to recall the name, it's been a few years now. He retired :(
  • Seb-C 5y ago
    I know such recruiter, and like 90% of the engineers I know in my company were hired through him. I had a very good experience as a candidate as well.
• savrajsingh 5y ago
  This exact scenario played out at a friend’s company a few months ago. Fortunately someone had a screenshot of the “you’re hired!” Zoom call so they could quickly confirm their suspicions and take action.
• donretag 5y ago
  The new job that I was hired for is not the same one I interviewed for.
  • icedchai 5y ago
    Coincidentally, this has happened to me a few times!
  • kelnos 5y ago
    I've been there once, but the funny thing is that I got my next job based on the not-hired-for work I'd done. And that next job worked out ridiculously well.
  • andirk 5y ago
    So your actual new job isn't traversing red-black trees all day?
  • mcv 5y ago
    That is the true reverse of this situation. And frankly, just as bad.
• DrBoring 5y ago
  Coming soon: a service that will have ringers do Zoom interviews on your behalf while using real-time deep fake tech to look and sound just like you. All the pieces of the technology required to do something like that may already exist today.
  • notpachet 5y ago
    You just described the plot of Gattaca.
    • duxup 5y ago
      Just remember what hand to hold it with!
  • monkeybutton 5y ago
    Supposedly this has already happened! Although in the alleged case, it was an existing employee masquerading as a candidate: https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvicecanada/comments/kr924n/employer_demanding_virtual_police_lineup_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvicecanada/comments/kr924n/e...
  • no1lives4ever 5y ago
    It is simpler than that. Have someone sit opposite you with a mirrored screen and the audio feed going onto his headphones. He can then write the answers that appear on your screen or get shown on another screen around your camera so that you dont look like you are looking away. Spend a bit of time to act about trying to think up a solution, and you have a winning combo. Have seen many people pass online video proctored certification exams using this trick ;-)
    • DrBoring 5y ago
      Yes that would be simpler, but less fun in regards to the deception at hand. I suppose a simpler-than-deep-fake method which would achieve the same level of deceptive-fun would be to have your identical twin do the interview for you.
• michaelbuckbee 5y ago
  It's like the flip version of the guy that got let go and then re-recruited for his just vacated position. https://twitter.com/firr/status/1456324664628846599 https://twitter.com/firr/status/1456324664628846599
  • not1ofU 5y ago
    This is GOLD!! Edit: I am laughing my balls off at this "I offered him a gummy bear. He politely declined."
    • pojzon 5y ago
      Its funny because thats how many devs here get promotion :^] Quit -> apply to the same company for higher grade job and often way better pay. Why companies dont value their current employees is beyond me.
      • chasd00 5y ago
        this is a known short cut in consulting. Quit at your current firm, goto a competitor then come back 2 years later at a level up. Had you stayed at your current firm it may be 3-5 years to level up.
        • k__ 5y ago
          To be fair, you give both competitors inside knowledge that might be worth promoting you.
          • asdff 5y ago
            Former clerks are so valuable to firms not because they've gained some experience in their role as a clerk, but because they were that specific clerk for that judge and being a member of their staff they know how that person speaks and opines behind closed doors better than anyone.
      • asdff 5y ago
• bambax 5y ago
  Relevant interview of Rami Malek telling a story where he interviewed instead of his twin brother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvBwJrc_-ns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvBwJrc_-ns
• VLM 5y ago
  I've been sent to interviews by HR with a folder holding another dude's resume before. This is probably the same thing but remote instead of in person.
• spaetzleesser 5y ago
  We once had a contractor who interviewed pretty well. After a while I noticed that it was impossible to have a technical discussion with him. He only took notes and never said much. I also noticed that he never delivered anything the same day. He took notes and then next morning it was done. I once told him to fix a simple bug NOW and had him sit next to me. He starred at the screen for several hours and did nothing. And not unsurprisingly it was done the next day. We came to the conclusion that he had a ghostwriter somewhere else who would do the actual work from the contractor’s notes. Problem was that the ghostwriter was not a great dev either and wrote bad code. So we had to let him /them go. The contractor is now a principal developer/ team lead at another company……
  • josefresco 5y ago
    If the "ghostwriter" was good, would you have cared?
    • teej 5y ago
      It's typically a good idea to know the folks you've given code access to.
    • kelnos 5y ago
      I think the example parent gave was enough to answer that: if there was a critical issue that needed to be fixed in hours, this employee would have been unable to do it. (Also agree with the sibling about it being good to know who you're giving access to your company's resources and private information. If someone is willing to lie about their skills and have someone else do their work overnight, what other sketchy things might they be doing without your knowledge?)
    • spaetzleesser 5y ago
      I would have cut out the middleman and hired the ghostwriter. The guy that sat in our office was useless and probably made the majority of the money. I don't think he deserved to be paid.
    • kumarvvr 5y ago
• nickdothutton 5y ago
  It’s quite possible the guy was running 3 or 4 jobs at once. It happens.
• david-cako 5y ago
  just hire new people every year so you always have exactly who you want
• tflinton 5y ago
  I've experienced the following hiring remotely: * A candidate who was caught lip syncing to someone talking in the room behind them. * A candidate who had air pods to listen to someone coaching them. * Plenty of candidates who just wont turn on the video no matter what. Remote interviewing has some bizarre drawbacks.
  • heywintermute 5y ago
    >A candidate who was caught lip syncing to someone talking in the room behind them For those who haven't seen this before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mfohGyeBg
  • smilebot 5y ago
    Funny story: I was interviewing a candidate who was lip syncing. They used internet lag as an excuse for the de-sync between audio and video. Anyway, we got into some questions about how they manage branches and features etc and the candidate started to fall asleep! But we could still hear the other person answer questions lol
• iafiaf 5y ago
  My first job out of college was at a J2ME mobile startup (circa ~2005). Startup was the baby of a rich Arab, and I was the first actual technical hire in the team (the prototype was outsourced). I hired 3 engineers within the first month. A couple weeks into the project, I realised that one of the juniors was a bozo at programming and I had made a severe hiring mistake. The guy spent time re-writing Java classes as objects, making superfluous inheritance hierarchies, installing and re-installed the J2ME emulator, etc. I would have to fire the guy soon and explain it to my Arab boss ... Fortunately, new hire was sending sexually explicit SMSes to the cute Filipino receptionist. Arab boss threw him out the next day.
  • vincentmarle 5y ago
    So you made a bad hire, what does this have to do with a bait and switch?
• friendlydog 5y ago
  If you interview at enough companies you can find one that allows a Gattaca to slip through. Of the subset of companies that allows that some companies let people float without doing any real work for a long time. The longer they coast the more likely they can find a corner to hide in. There is no penalty for them to try this approach. Even if you caught them in a lie the effort to make them pay for their actions means they likely will never be responsible. One company I worked with checked government issued ids at every stage of the interview process. I'm sure people will find a way around this. This also opens your company to discrimination lawsuits, "everything was going fine in the interview until I turned on the camera, then they didn't hire me."
• octobus2021 5y ago
  Had similar experience in 2017. We interviewed many candidates (10+) for the position, narrowed down to about 5 in the second round and decided to hire one. All over the phone. Took maybe 2 months. So when the guy shows up in the office my manager was like "Who are you? I never spoke with you.". We made some noise with HR and later Legal and he left right away, and the consulting company we went through had some conversations with the executives. From that point on we set some rules: require candidates to provide video feed, take screenshots, ideally record at least part of the interview, document every single question. Funny thing, had a very promising candidate for another position short time later but she kept refusing to turn on the camera, it was either broken, or connection was slow, or something else... So we rejected her because of that. I believe there are some unofficial services that provide well spoken/knowledgeable professionals that will help you get hired, it's either directly through headhunting company or they might suggest (wink-wink) one for you.
  • smm11 5y ago
    Sorry, I thought I could pull that one off.
• kuboble 5y ago
  I worked at the company where as a first filter we had a remote coding task (roughly 2- hours of implementing some simple data structure plus unit tests). A candidate sent us a prefect solution indicating very good knowledge of Java, testing framework, clear thinking, good problem solving etc. When the candidate came for the live interview she was absolutely shocked that we asked her coding questions again. "But I have already did the coding task!". It was very clear that she didn't know how to write a line of code if her life depended on it. I wonder what was her plan if she got hired by mistake.
• DoreenMichele 5y ago
  ...Cyrano de Bergerac’d their interview. That's a great phrase, though I don't get people who do this kind of thing. But then I was also the killjoy in some college class when other people were like "Yes! Let's just skip more stuff and pass anyway!" and I went "Uh, no. What if you actually need to know that stuff for a future class or a job?!" Everyone glared at me. They just wanted an easy A (or easy passing grade). Apparently no one but me was actually interested in learning anything when they signed up for the class. (Smacks head on desk.) (Context: the professor had announced we were skipping something due to time constraints.)
• robofanatic 5y ago
  something similar happened to me but way more hilarious. I had interviewed at a big brand name place in India and thought I did good because of positive feedback from everybody. But then there was complete silence for 2 weeks. Finally when I called them the recruiter was surprised and said "didn't you reject the offer?" apparently there was another candidate with similar name who rejected the offer. A month later I finally ended up joining there but worked in a totally different team. Later one day I bumped into the manager who had interviewed me and he was surprised to see me because he thought I had rejected the offer.
• rectang 5y ago
  Last week, I was recruited for an ongoing project where I would serve as the face of a website development service conducting client interviews, several each day. Most of the actual devs apparently don't have good English skills, so I was to be the contact. But the kicker was, I was supposed to actually pretend to be the developer — to adopt their name, skills, and experiences — in my conversations with the client. This seemed to me both unethical and absurdly difficult to do well (how am I supposed to fake dev-level knowledge about systems I didn't create?) so of course I turned it down. The difference with this article is who is being deceived — in the offer I got it was the external client, while in the article it's the employer. The commonality is that they're both using false identities over remote communication. Such deceptions are probably more difficult to pull off using video chat as opposed to audio only, but easier in comparison to in-person meetings. I wonder whether they're actually increasing or not.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• noisepunk 5y ago
  Whoa. I am new to interviewing and hiring developers. We needed to hire quickly and i interviewed someone, they did great and they were hired. And when they showed up for there first day in our remote zoom call I was very confused and thought I had interviewed a different person. I was the only person who interviewed them directly as they are a contractor. I brushed it off and thought maybe I was mistaken but reading this has made me rethink this initial feeling as I never mentioned it to anyone.
  • raincom 5y ago
    Take a screenshot while you video interview, also record the interview with permission. Once people know about it, they won’t even take the offer.
• dhosek 5y ago
  I expected the "not the same person" to be more metaphorical than literal. Imagine my surprise.
• PeterWhittaker 5y ago
  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 sketch. I’m more of a networking guy, I was lost pretty quick, but my colleague, one of my best hires, started leaning in, eyes widening, slow “wow” escaping his lips. 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. Worst experience: different colleague (my test lead) and I interviewing another strong CV. We try and lead and shepherd, do everything we can to link the CV to what this person can do. Communication isn’t the issue, the CV is obviously doctored/bumpfed. We’re running out of steam, trying to get the session to a minimum acceptable length, when I notice blood on my hands. I wonder how I cut myself and I am subtlety looking for the wound. When I notice the open sore on their hand, the hand they shook. The hand attached to a body with some obvious hygiene issues (trust me). I settle my hands, wind things up, have my colleague see them out, hop into the nearest coffee station, throw away my pen and notebook and basically scald my hands and mouth (I used to nibble my pen compulsively).
  • alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    > 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.
    • mariusor 5y ago
      I recently saw that the Daily WTF is still up.
      • mcv 5y ago
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I once had a company internal recruiter refuse to look at my portfolio[0], because “I probably faked it.” That was sort of “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” I realized that this entire industry, that I fell in love with, as an enthusiastic, idealistic, young man, had turned into a miasma. At that point, I just gave up, looking. That company folded, not long after. I feel as if there's a better-than-even chance that I could have made a real difference (but there’s also a better-than-even chance that I’m mistaken, and I just dodged a bullet. Having their internal recruiter deliver such a stunning insult does not speak well for their corporate culture). [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
• JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  My son reports working with a person who had always worked at the same company as his sister. Soon after hiring (both of) them, the sister changed to another company. This guy's performance dropped to zero. He never finished another task. At lunch he often commented he had always enjoyed working with his sister, since he got lots of good ideas when they worked on the same projects. My son's take: this guy had never had an original idea in his life, his sister had always propped him up since high school. And she had finally cut the apron strings. But the guy was so clueless, he never realized how little he could do and how his sister had essentially done his job his whole life.
• syngrog66 5y ago
  The worst thing about this case, if its true, is that this kind of thing will poison the pool for others. for legit people. its already getting a little nauseating with the number of shops who insist on coding tests -- for people with tons of evidence already that they are legit programmers. This type of incident will be used to justify even more creepy and insulting behaviors on the employer's side. everybody loses
• JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  The other side happens too: my business partner, early on in his career, interviewed and was hired into a video-processing software company. He shows up, the building is empty but for a secretary and one guy on the third floor. A Japanese company had bought them for the customer list, and they were now just to support folks locally. He quit after a week or two, after finding a real job. Some time later he met the guy who had interviewed him, and asked about it. His response: "I lost my hiring referral bonus when you quit! I'll forgive you for quitting, if you forgive me for hiring you!" See, the guy was already half out the door when he hired my partner, knowing he would report to a nearly empty building. That was 20 years ago. Stuff like this has been happening forever. I guess now its on a production-line basis.
• wayanon 5y ago
  This reminds me of the Trump ‘Four Seasons’ media event.
• eric_b 5y ago
  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 harder to be sure. However, years later I was telling this story to a Wipro recruiter who said casually: "Oh yeah, we call it the Hindu Switcheroo" (I kid you not)
  • daggerdrone 5y ago
    I wonder why they didn't just call it the "Indian Switcheroo". Why would it be named after a religion?
    • the_snooze 5y ago
      It rhymes.
    • boojing 5y ago
      Probably because "Hindu Switcheroo" rhymes
    • augusto2112 5y ago
      Because it rhymes :)
    • csomar 5y ago
      India is derived from "Hindu". It rhymes and in some languages, it is the same.
      • chupchap 5y ago
        India is derived from the river Indus. As in the land around and beyond the Indus. Hindus came later as a way to describe the people and religion of the people in the region. Now it refers to the religion alone and not the people.
    • 5y ago
• imoverclocked 5y ago
  This article (and all of the anecdotes surrounding it) has opened my eyes quite a bit. However, it actually reads to me more like a “How to get better at this kind of thing” than a cautionary tale. There are even comments acting as such here. Fraud hurts us all. Even (especially?) the people who think they are benefitting from it.
• asdff 5y ago
  I can't imagine this isn't common in all facets of life. I always thought this would have been so easy for college exams to hire a ringer to take it for you, or submit assignments. Usually for the big lecture hall classes everyone would sit down, then just pass their student IDs to the end of the row, then a TA would walk up and down the aisles and collect them and take them back to sign in. It would have been so easy to just have someone else pass up your ID. Plus these would be critical classes, like your big core classes sophomore year where you want to have good grades for summer internships or maybe med school. When I took my GRE they also asked for ID at the testing center but just looked at it, they didn't scan it and verify it was legit. I could have just as easily been a ringer handing them a fakeid, something very easy to get at a college campus. I wonder how many people have done stuff like this and have gone on to reap the benefits.
• ada1981 5y ago
  Isn’t this the premise of 4-Hour Workweek?
• LasEspuelas 5y ago
  Bizarre! Possibly related phenomenon, recently noticed that a bunch of students who dropped out or never finished our program are working as engineers (non-software) in big multinational firms. Does nobody check a transcript anymore?
• rasfincher 5y ago
  My company hired a senior developer for an Angular project we were working on. They did great in the interviews and on our take home coding challenge. When it got down to time to work, I was walking them through the codebase and it very quickly became apparent they not only didn't know Angular, they didn't even know much at all about web development in general. They were let go three days later. I'd heard of things like this happening but I couldn't believe it until I saw it in real life. I just can't imagine what someone like that is thinking. I get "fake it 'til you make it" but this was on a whole other level.
  • sci_prog 5y ago
    Were the interviews not technical in nature?
    • rasfincher 5y ago
      I wasn’t a part of the interview process, but I was told some of the details. The interview was remote and they did well on the video interview and on the take home challenge. My best guess is they were being given help.
• neycoda 5y ago
  I was hired on e for a position at a 35% pay raise; while this isn't particularly unusual in tech, on the first day, I couldn't figure out what they were talking about with most things. They couldn't figure out why I couldn't figure out their setup requirements. After almost 8 hours passed, they said they switched resumes on accident... so I'd quit my last job for this job, worked there a day for no reason, and was back on the street. The previous employer wouldn't take me back, and I had to start over.
  • XargonEnder 5y ago
    Wow that's insane and horrific. Were you able to claim unemployment?
• faangiq 5y ago
  This is some nonsense boomer propaganda to FUD against remote work.
• rickspencer3 5y ago
  I worked somewhere that was mostly remote. We hired an SRE, who was decent at their job, but there was always something off about them. Things like not being available when you would expect, but then would have reasonable explanations, but just a lot of coincidences to be happening to one person. Early in their tenure, they said they had to go to Australia (from the US) due to a death in the family. However, someone saw that he tweeted from a bar in airport somewhere in the US, when he purported to be in Australia. HR asked him to provide a death certificate "just for our records" and he provided a badly forged certificate, the inauthenticity of which was confirmed by a quick call to the agency that supposedly provided it. It was all very strange and funny. Of course he was let go, and he just kind of said, "ok."
• mdavis6890 5y ago
  The nice thing, of course, for fake-John, is that they just get to try again. I'll bet that fake-John has a 50% chance of lasting at least 6 months in a role by getting in this way. And so much the better if they live actually live in an area with a much lower cost of living than their pay-scale was intended for. And I wonder what "real" John gets out of this. I bet he makes a lot of money. Maybe he gets lots of people jobs this way, he provides all of his own payment information, and then forwards 90% to the people who actually have to "show up" (such as it is) for work. Man, I want to franchise this! Actually now that I'm at the end of my post I think I just described the consulting industry...
• freyr 5y ago
  At my last gig, we tried hiring contractors and got bit by this twice. We’d interview a candidate over the phone or Skype and he’d be extremely knowledgeable, answering all our questions flawlessly. Then when he arrives to the office, he can barely speak English, has trouble turning the computer on, and can’t answer any of the questions he answered over the phone. We learned to detect this very promptly and escort them out of the office immediately. They often demanded to be paid for their time and traveling expenses, despite attempting fraud.
• duxup 5y ago
  I suppose that’s a case for recording remote interviews. Sad as this stuff will just be a hassle for everyone else.
• bane 5y ago
  I knew a hiring manager about a decade ago at a company that used a very intense interview practice. The sort of multi-day, tests, whiteboard coding, several rounds of panels interview. The worst employee they ever hired somehow made it through that entire gauntlet then showed up to work and it was like somebody had lobotomized him. He was no longer able to write code, simple SQL SELECT statements, anything. It was utterly bizarre and unlike anything I've ever seen. For months my friend vented about this employee's utter ineptitude and every conversation ended with "how the hell did he get through the interview process?" They never did figure out what was going on, but did eventually have to terminate the employee. edit I just asked me friend if they had any ideas what happened. They said they believe that a "recon" person interviewed before them and just recorded the interview questions so they could study and regurgitate answers. But that's the best theory that doesn't involve identical twins, clones or time travel.
• madmod 5y ago
  Is it possible that this person may have some form of multiple personality disorder?
• rg111 5y ago
  Well, this is the one that they caught. Wondering how many are managing to fool their companies undetected.
• supernova87a 5y ago
  Has anyone else started to take screenshots of the video interviews (as I have, since I have a very bad facial memory anyway) to document who was being interviewed?
• mcv 5y ago
  I can't help but wonder: isn't this basically just fraud? Shouldn't the people involved in this go to prison, or at least have some more consequences than losing the job? Are they even entitled to pay for a job that thought it hired someone else? Then again, there's also the reverse of this: employee gets hired for a job that turns out to be different from the one they interviewed for. I'm pretty sure companies are never going to be held accountable for that one.
• phreack 5y ago
  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.
• cryptonector 5y ago
  This happened to me once. We hired remotely, the guy sounded fantastic, but the guy who showed up didn't even speak English. We fired him within two weeks. Another time we hired a guy who seemed enthusiastic and had a portfolio of things he had done, but he turned out to be completely unenthusiastic.
• defaultprimate 5y ago
  This is why I require on camera, screen shared, live coding sessions or discussion as part of my technical interview process for remote developers. If they're junior, the problems are not hard, literally foundational CS things. If it's for a more advanced role, I give them a coding challenge after a non-technical, on camera interview. Then if it's worthy of a technical follow up interview, they must build, execute, and walk me through the code live on camera. I also ask them to make slight alterations or extensions live. This may sound like a lot but the total time invested by a candidate, including the interviews themselves, should be no more than 4 hours. The challenges are experience and role appropriate and I'm not asking them to build an MVP or anything close. They're also allowed to search and use resources in the live interviews, as they would on the job. I'm not interested in testing your memory-recall abilities, I'm interested in seeing how you approach problem solving using CS. Lastly, record all your interviews.
• deleted 5y ago
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• lashkhi 5y ago