by lgsilver on 8/31/22, 9:38 PM with 402 comments
by iaaan on 8/31/22, 11:39 PM
His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."
Wait... Intellectsoft isn't the name of this company. Did these "Data Service Group" people steal Intellectsoft's website?
Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Over+the+past+decade%2C+o...
I'm still not really sure what was going on with that as we politely rejected him and never heard from him again.
If you look up the company on LinkedIn, it appears to be made up of hundreds of immigrant DevOps engineers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-service-group/
by __d on 8/31/22, 11:20 PM
As we got into it, the candidate often asked me to repeat the question. I was happy to do so, but after a few times, I was already taking care to speak slowly and clearly, and it was still happening a lot.
Then I noticed a quiet murmuring sound after I'd asked a question. It was like .. a TV on in the next room or something. I ignored it at first, assuming it was someone else in the next room, but then it seemed like it was only happening after I'd asked a question, and before the candidate answered.
I was now pretty suspicious, but confused: what was going on? The candidate was flubbing the interview anyway -- their understanding was pretty shallow and they didn't appear at all confident in the material, so I wrapped up the interview, and showed them out.
As we were walking to the door, I stood beside them for the first time. And that's when I saw the earpiece: the candidate had a hearing aid-like earpiece in, with a wire running into their collar.
I was basically too surprised to do anything, and by this point we were at the elevator, so I just let them leave.
The way I figured it, afterwards, was that they had someone on a radio who they thought would help them with the interview. But either the radio was noisy or they just needed more time for the answer, so asking me to repeat the question was for the benefit of their remote assistant. If they'd been better at it, even had I seen the earpiece, I'd have assumed it was just a hearing aid. Fortunately, even with the remote assistance, they didn't pass.
Never happened again, but I can tell you I casually check everyone I've interviewed since for earpieces.
by atrettel on 8/31/22, 10:17 PM
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-crypto-job-cand...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/fbi_korea_freelancers...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/
by bb88 on 8/31/22, 10:12 PM
We had one person we hired as a contractor, but then her voice changed on the phone, and started calling people by their last names in chat. It looked like it was someone that subcontracted another who then quit, and the first was trying to hold onto the contract as long as possible.
Another answered complex questions during the interview, but after the start they knew nothing.
A third contractor I knew was trying to do two jobs at the same time. Unfortunately while he was supposed to be working for one company he was making public github commits for the second. He was shown the door that day.
Tangentially, another contractor "lost" two macbooks assigned to him. Apparently right after travelling to Colorado after they legalized weed.
by ericol on 8/31/22, 10:31 PM
We don't have a established process for this as it was some years since we hired a coder, but then we are in the industry (hiring) so published a couple of adverts here and there and we got the thing rolling.
Most of the applicants were seriously under qualified, and my colleagues had to go through a lot of rubbish in the form of CVs in order to find suitable candidates.
But a few of them were good enough to at least make it to the interview step, and off the invitations went.
One of'em candidates - Let's call him "Rajeed" - promptly accepted the meeting, and due to the small amount of people that made it that far - let me remind you, first interview - my colleagues were slightly excited, but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders from India is far from stellar.
You can imagine my colleagues surprise when they opened the Zoom session and Rajeed was nowhere to be found. Instead, there were two person of whom we knew nothing about - apparently they were running some sort of coding shop - and when my colleagues asked for Rajeed they just said "Oh, it's OK, it's OK. You can talk to us."
For obvious reasons the meeting didn't last long.
We ended up hiring a coder from Poland that, even thought he was decent, was miles ahead of the rest of the candidates.
by plebianRube on 8/31/22, 10:47 PM
But only a few weeks later he was back, in the same building, but using a different name on a different floor working as a Senior Software Architect.
He got caught because someone in the DB department recognized him, called him by his old name and they pretended they never new him.
by kube-system on 8/31/22, 9:49 PM
I haven't seen it recently, but I am now in a position where we have good recruiters who filter people before I ever see them.
by xupybd on 8/31/22, 10:08 PM
Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.
by jamestimmins on 8/31/22, 10:11 PM
The company didn't want to disqualify those candidates, since we couldn't prove cheating, but it was pretty fascinating to witness.
by snapetom on 8/31/22, 11:08 PM
Turns out though, I don’t live that far away from there. I can see his window was full of heavy, dark clouds. However, there was a heat wave going on and there wasn’t a cloud for hundreds of miles.
“Huh. Odd that we’re so close, it’s almost 90 down here and it look like it’s about to pour rain up where you are…” I said.
by b800h on 8/31/22, 11:16 PM
My favourite example of this was a interviewee for a post working on Oracle data warehouses. A colleague ran the guy's CV under my nose before the interview - it was strange - it kept on changing tense, and contained a bit too much random technical information about Oracle's tooling.
I Googled a random phrase, and discovered that 50% of the CV was directly lifted from the Oracle manual for their ETL and DW product.
The point is that despite being comically bad, he'll have interviewed somewhere else, got the job thanks to a clueless hiring manager, and have spent three months learning the product before getting canned (optimistically).
The last time I saw a boom in this behaviour was in 2007.
by s1k3s on 8/31/22, 10:51 PM
The job market is a market. Nobody owes you anything. In most job fields the buyer has the leverage over the seller so the buyers will go out of their way to press that leverage (low pay, low benefits, impossible demands etc). It just happens that in a few fields the seller has the advantage so they're doing the same thing to you. My point is you have to accept it and move on, because things like this happen all the time and won't ever stop.
by Spooky23 on 8/31/22, 10:21 PM
Usually you’d get weird looking resumes from someone based out of New Jersey or Arizona. In most cases the employees were Indian and would phone screen well. When the person landed, usually they were green staff who would basically send their work back to a more senior person or team who would do the work elsewhere overnight.
With remote, there’s definitely more fraud in this space, from people lying about where they are, stealing information and just grifting.
by patrakov on 9/1/22, 10:03 AM
On a particular week, we received a lot of CVs for a DevOps position. They shared a few common characteristics: were sent through Indeed, allegedly from Indians who emigrated to the USA, talked about skills and duties but not achievements, and were longer than one would normally write. Additionally, they used too-low-level phrases that one would never use in the CVs, like, e.g. when describing their experience with Ansible, "use the 'file' module to copy files to and from remote systems". I.e. phrases that would appear in a course curriculum, but not in a proper CV.
The final red flag for me was a phrase repeated word for word in two CVs allegedly from different people.
I don't really know how to react properly to this, in order to avoid lawsuits for rejecting candidates based on nationality and other kinds of discrimination (ans I was specifically instructed about discrimination-based lawsuits as a very real risk, something that happened before). So I just told about the problem to the head of HR, marked all CVs received through Indeed on that week as highly suspect (even those that a casual reader would mark as OK), and let him deal with it. I don't know what exactly he did.
by paxys on 8/31/22, 9:57 PM
by jmcgough on 8/31/22, 10:46 PM
Makes me wonder what % of the time this actually works and no one is willing to fire them, or if it's just worth the salary of collecting a month of pay before you're found out.
by SkipperCat on 9/1/22, 12:24 PM
Conversely, anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can learn most tech topics. With the right amount of self study, personal project work and focus, you can acquire the skills needed to land an entry level job and then work your way up.
Maybe it just boils down to the fact that there are always people who try to short cut the path to senior dev salaries.
by atdrummond on 8/31/22, 10:38 PM
Happy to share more info with founders over email or IM; I don’t want to publicly draw the ire of those who attempted this.
by giobox on 8/31/22, 10:52 PM
by nprateem on 9/1/22, 11:53 AM
I've had people use IDEs to auto create empty test cases, hard code file paths etc. No point wasting time on an interview and anyone competent will smash it.
by askafriend on 8/31/22, 10:02 PM
by geoffbp on 9/1/22, 2:23 AM
- Multiple candidates with the same resume
- Resume doesn’t include full name, location or LinkedIn
- Candidate blatantly lies during interview
- Candidate is observed copying answers from the web, unable to explain how it works
- Language barrier issues
- Candidate applying for a senior role can’t solve simple problem
- Job hopping every 6 months or 1 year
by pmccarren on 9/1/22, 1:28 AM
We enable companies to asynchronously collect a short series of video responses from an applicant either at application time or later in the process.
by Consultant32452 on 9/1/22, 12:22 PM
One of the offshore folks was amazing so we offered him an on-shore position and moved him here. He told us insane horror stories about how the offshore team worked. Basically 1-2 people did all the work for everyone to turn in. The managers were in on it and sometimes were one of the few competent people who did the work. As he described it, it was corruption from top to bottom. We were paying for 10-15 workers but really getting 1-3.
by clcaev on 8/31/22, 11:09 PM
by edgyquant on 9/1/22, 12:06 AM
Yes all of them appear to work a couple hours of day and I’d wager they get 3-4 jobs and work a few hours a day on each
by macksd on 8/31/22, 10:00 PM
by remote_phone on 9/1/22, 5:59 AM
by rexreed on 9/1/22, 12:02 PM
by ivanvanderbyl on 9/1/22, 12:25 PM
On his resume his name was Daniel, but when he joined the zoom call he introduced himself as Andrew. Moreover the photo on his LinkedIn was of Asian appearance but this guy had a very White American accent. I asked him to turn his video on and he fumbled around for a bit and then said his camera was broken, so giving him the benefit of the doubt I jumped into asking him about his experience with svelte. He asked asked me what svelte was, I thought that was weird given it was one of the buzzwords on his resume, but 20 seconds later he all of a sudden knew what svelte was.
I reminded him that in our email exchange he said he had worked with svelte for 3 years and I'd like to hear more about what he had built. He told me, and no joke, he had worked in the same office as some guys who had used svelte.
by strongpigeon on 8/31/22, 10:09 PM
by mouzogu on 9/1/22, 7:01 AM
this is what happens when you filter people based on keywords. they game the system.
by philipkglass on 8/31/22, 10:11 PM
by pkrotich on 9/1/22, 12:18 AM
While not as bad as fake candidates, professional interviewers who interview really well but cannot deliver a lick on the job are also very problematic. Once hired someome who sounded perfect for the role (even in person) - relocated him - but months into the job they couldn't deliver.
That said, I just hired someone without meeting them in person (just Zoom call) and they're pretty good thus far! I guess you just have to be lucky.
by erdos4d on 8/31/22, 10:28 PM
by i_like_robots on 9/1/22, 8:13 AM
Prior to my current company I think I'd only met two candidates face-to-face who had sent misleading CVs (one of whom memorably tried to tell me MooTools was a new Linux based operating system.)
But so far this year I've cut short half a dozen interviews once it became clear the candidate was hopeless, despite having good CVs. In some cases they seemed to struggle to even to use their own computer.
And in the last 12 months we've also cut ties with somebody who joined during lockdown after it became clear that they'd falsified details of their background and experience.
by levi_n on 9/1/22, 10:31 AM
by badrabbit on 9/1/22, 12:20 AM
by dcarr178 on 9/1/22, 2:52 PM
by s1k3s on 8/31/22, 10:21 PM
by fsckboy on 8/31/22, 10:40 PM
by giantg2 on 8/31/22, 11:07 PM
by sys_64738 on 8/31/22, 10:12 PM
by dijondreams on 8/31/22, 10:26 PM
by somehnacct3757 on 8/31/22, 11:56 PM
When does this work?
by dom96 on 8/31/22, 10:43 PM
by tomt00001 on 9/1/22, 3:06 PM
I got 25 years of varied experience(network admin, server admin, cloud stuff, scripting, etl and actual development) and now feels like being a jack of all trades is screwing me :)
by robtani on 9/5/22, 1:10 PM
by neilv on 8/31/22, 10:50 PM
I don't know whether an AG's office would be interested in hearing about it, but you could try calling.
by ByersReason on 8/31/22, 10:17 PM
by b20000 on 9/1/22, 5:31 AM
by t_mann on 8/31/22, 10:06 PM
by tillcarlos on 9/1/22, 12:06 AM
On the CV there were some companies with dubious consulting websites, super generic. I emailed them, no reply.
If I wouldn’t have given him a live coding test I wouldn’t have known.
by Aperocky on 8/31/22, 10:15 PM
by mv4 on 9/1/22, 11:44 AM
by Madmallard on 9/1/22, 11:21 AM
by bubblethink on 9/1/22, 4:13 AM
by donsupreme on 8/31/22, 9:43 PM
by hankchinaski on 9/1/22, 2:26 AM
by Kinnard on 8/31/22, 10:36 PM
by boltzmann-brain on 9/1/22, 10:40 AM
A little about me: I've started doing remote work 15 years ago - long, long before the modern remote push. I've been coding for 30 years; I started with 8 bit micros; I can probably work with any technology and any deep problem you throw at me; I've led and launched projects worth billions of dollars. I prefer to work remotely because I hate commuting and open plan.
I've started denying camera interviews for a while now. I still do voice, but no camera, for the following reasons:
1. It impacts not just my earnings, but whether I'll be considered in the first place. There's a lot of sexism and racism happening in tech.
Sexism: if you're presenting as female, or presenting as male but don't look like Jim Halpert from the office, you can get looked at differently, which happened to me. This applies to people who are older, people who have visible tattoos or piercings, people who have blue hair, scars, etc.
Racism: you only need to look at other replies here with people talking about how bad eg Indian developers are. This extends to people of other skin color as well. In Europe there is a huge amount of racism against white Europeans from eastern Europe and from the Balkans and Europeans from Latin countries; in Asia there is racism against people ethnically from other Asian countries; in America there's racism against pretty much everyone; etc. This is endemic. One look at someone's face can be enough to disqualify them at a company that has this problem.
Ageism doesn't even need to be explained.
Based on the three points above, by demanding camera interviews you betray yourself as a company which doesn't have the issue of systemic bias against minorities figured out yet.
Incidental information leaks: The background - the location where you are - is important as well. Is the person located in their bedroom with a single bed? Probably a flat share, pay them less, they'll take it. Are they in their garden? Hmm, they are probably worth what they ask for. Is it dark outside whereas it's light where you are? Uh oh, remote work with someone who's not in your time zone! Better start worrying!
Especially the last one is egregious. Dev work is mostly solitary, asynchronous work; most of the time there's a lot of overlap even between eastern Europe and west coast US which is plenty of time for meetings and pair programming if necessary. People who insist on such things are usually inexperienced with remote work. Misconceptions like these destroy opportunities that can work out very well otherwise. I've had people make comments about "oh it's light out over there" many times in my career and it's always lead to a no-hire.
2. Issues that remote work solves can be brought to light in an ugly manner. For example, maybe the person feels they are not attractive, and are just generally shy around people in person - something that a lot of technical people share; their performance in front of a camera will be worse. Being shy when physically around other people perfectly fine for remote work. Maybe the person has special needs. Maybe they have to use an oxygen tank, or are missing an eye, or teeth, or a hand, or are sitting in a wheel chair, or are obese. Maybe the tapestry on their wall falling off and they haven't had money to fix it due to an economic downturn or because someone in the family had cancer so that's where the money went. None of this is stuff that the employer needs to know - but they are things that none the less can impact the recruitment and later career by a lot.
3. I experience fewer of the issues brought up in 1 and 2 than most others; however, I still deny camera interviews to see what will happen. Being this worried about job applicant fraud betrays that you likely can't afford it. Job applicant fraud is a little time off your hands and a little money as well. That fraudulent applicant wasted maybe 3 hours through interviews across people in your company, and maybe up to $10k wasted money. If you can't factor this into your business, it means to me - an experienced developer who has plenty of choice - that you can't afford me at all, and that working for you, should it happen, will be precarious. I'll probably skip over you. It is my experience that the most resilient companies - and ones that are well established already - absolutely don't care about seeing your face on camera.
Additional wasted time after the hire is mostly on your hands: either it's a complete bait and switch (smart person interviewed, substituted by someone unsuited) - and that's something you figure out on the first day - or it's someone who's never been good enough, and you weren't a good enough interviewer to figure this out in the several hours you've spent with them; at that point you'll probably take a few weeks to figure out that they're not great at their job, but that's on you.
--------
TLDR: a camera interview is purely a disadvantage to minorities and people who aren't well off by leaking things that are for good reason illegal to ask about; a job interview where this is demanded or implied betrays the company is standing on a shaky foundation.
by throwaway787544 on 8/31/22, 10:04 PM
by durnygbur on 9/1/22, 10:27 AM
by samstave on 8/31/22, 10:46 PM
I am convinced of it now.
by exnot on 9/1/22, 10:18 AM