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?"
I recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.
Dear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning, but corresponding with people — especially in formal settings — makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.
Reminds me of my gripe with interviews and tests, they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome by each employee.
Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more holistically for an accurate signal?
Apparently my coworkers interviewed someone a while back who got pretty far into the onsite interview panel before they realized the candidate was not the same person typing out the code they were seeing on CodeBunk...
This is why we can't have nice things. Or in other words, why we must usually do a coding test per company we apply for, and not just 'point them at the Github'.
There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file.
Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors that her husband or someone in her home country was doing the work (would have been daytime over there). Nobody really complained. She wore a hijab and the company had just hired it’s first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why. Thankfully they stopped using that vendor not long after.
>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why
At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")
Oddly enough, once a friend of mine was hired to work on a project which one of the selling points was that it was designed and implemented by women.
He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project. Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because they were well aware about what's happening?
I had a friend who's wife worked in tech and even had a patent but she could barely code and could barely make her way through real world, on the job, tech problems. Her husband (my friend who worked in a major tech company) every night helped her do her work and she happily told us about it.
I have a relative who is severely dyslexic, whose spouse will revise/rewrite/advise on written communication extensively. But they know better than to take a job where written communication is a large, critical part of the work!
I do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done.
I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.
Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.
I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
We were a Linux System Administration consultancy. The product wasn't the e-mails, but nearly everything we did for our clients was designed/planned, scheduled, organized, and documented in e-mail. Yes, sometimes we would work on things with the client on the phone, those were usually followed up with an e-mail about what was done.
These e-mails were copied to our internal mailing lists so that they could be peer reviewed and someone else could be cross-trained on it in case the primary wasn't available. Also, every task we did had a one sentence description written up that would be shared with the team, again as a kind of peer review.
Product/Software support. Above the Tier 1 level, at the stage where you're talking with the Dev team directly.
Developers don't want to talk to customers. So you need someone who can understand either the code or the developer's comments, but can then put it in layman's terms.
In my team, Duty Managers / Service Delivery Managers / Operations Managers. Communication in every which direction is #1 skillset I look for in the team (as well as being organized, disciplined, eager to learn, sense of ownership).
A lot of the job is talking to technical teams, talking to functional teams, talking to business teams, talking to management and executives; translate, summarize, liaison, co-ordinate, plan and inform. Customize medium, format, length, message for each group to enhance understanding. Develop spidey sense of paranoia against assumptions, misunderstandings.
I guess this is like when companies try to use correctness and formatting of a resume for proof of attention to detail or communication skills or something like that—but people just pay for professional proofreading and formatting instead.
(it's proof for a certain kind of social and professional awareness, rather, I'd say, which is true for quite a few hiring norms, really, but doesn't mean you can expect a new hire to compose really good documents on the job...)
I do the same for my husband for tricky communications/yearly reviews/etc. He's perfectly capable of communicating acceptably, but it takes him half an hour to draft something that takes me under 5 minutes and he dreads it so much he'll procrastinate until it HAS to be done.
I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.
Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.
I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
This why I've had to deal with very regressive HR on-boarding processes. I'm sick of companies treating new employees like their data doesn't matter and they can be required to sign up to any service no matter what the ToS is like.
That sounds to me like it would meet the legal definition of fraud. A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the business might even be worth looking into.
> A lawsuit to recuperate the wages and damage to the business might even be worth looking into.
No, probably not. Speak to any business owner who has been in a lawsuit and they'll likely tell you it's not worth the headache. A close relative told me that even if a customer straight up won't pay for a done job, he'd rather forgo the payment then deal with a lawsuit.
Lawsuits usually have:
1) monetary costs - those lawyers are very expensive
2) emotional costs - take a big mental toll to deal with
3) reputational costs - it goes in the public record. Next time a potential candidate googles your company, it might show up that you sued a former employee. Hopefully they read further to see if you were justified in doing so....
4) opportunity costs - you (hopefully) have better things to do with your time
If you are big enough, maybe you have a legal team to deal with this stuff. But even then, you have to choose your battles. A hired lawyer is still expensive and it's not worth going after small battles, even the ones you know you will win.
Also, as others have mentioned, it's not unreasonable to have a friend or relative look over your email communications during your interview process unless you were explicitly asked not to do so. In fact, it's a smart idea!
There are laws against employer retaliation. If that employer never asked him prior and he never lied, what crime was committed? The employer failed to do their due diligence. As others have said, it's VERY common to request assistance in drafting resumes/emails/letters when pursuing employment.
Writing your own emails or resume isn't required or expected. Some people have assistants that do a lot of work by proxy of you. Its just very awkward that it becomes noticeable in a negative manner in the workplace.
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.
> 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.
I'll take a stab at it, and predict... all of them. Or nearly so. There seems to be an ever-present fraction of employees at any large corporation that are essentially worthless. Just along for the ride, raking in a paycheck while someone else does the meaningful work.
We've had stories here on HN about people exploiting it. There's a moment, I think, in many developers' careers where it occurs to them that there is almost never any reward for hard work. And when you're a wage slave for a large corporation, it's easy to blur the morality until it feels okay to take advantage of the situation.
When I find myself starting to think such thoughts, I know that it's time for me to move on to another opportunity. And a smaller company, even though it pays less, because it's better for your soul.
From my experience once you have ~1,000 employees AND a complicated org chart/raci/etc then it’s fairly easy for people to do little work and hide. In smaller orgs too many people see you, and in orgs that are running efficiently if you don’t do your job it causes issues.
Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)
The fundamental problem is that the bar for "get hired" is higher than the bar for "get fired." Invariably, this means some people will sink to the minimum just shy of the latter.
People bitch about stack ranking, and it is terrible for moral and politics, but it solves exactly this problem.
Because there isn't enough manager gumption & attention time to address this systematically, manually.
Or sometime you gave up on the organization being able to provide a meaningful workflow.. that’s usually when I switch job because it depress me to fake it too much and fuck around all day on a computer while not being actually free to do whatever I want.
It’s fine for few months while looking for something else and trying to let management know that you have no backlog.
It's as if the Robin Hood mentality met with Jack Sparrow: take what you can and give nothing back. However, they aren't interested in the well-being of the company because they have more important places to put their effort and dime, such as hobbies or their family. It's an aversion to doing 50% more work for a 15% raise.
As long as it pays more to half-ass your current job and take on a second, then people will prefer doing that. 100% effort is rewarded correctly almost nowhere.
In the software industry it should be pretty easy to track tickets someone is working on and compare that to how long similar tickets are completed by coworkers.
I'll present an alternate case, mine. I'm in a senior IC role sitting in India making almost 1/4th of what my US Counterpart makes. I work as much as them if not more. We as Indians are always taught to be sincere and obedient and I try to show that in my work trying to stay up finish the work so that my sincerity is never questioned. I'm always on the side to prove my quality - even though I'm highly underpaid for the same work.
Overall, I'm someone who needs to prove everytime that I'm sincere and I'm intellectual while I'm known only for being a cheap resource.
Your criticism is fair. However "obedient" isn't always what an engineering organization needs. Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing or what, but it seems they are more hesitant to speak out. It has been my anecdotal observation that our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to management if they feel something is wrong.
Maybe it is time to get a new job. These days there is a big shortage of tech talent and deserving candidates can get very good pay in India. The typical trick is to apply for and interview to as many companies as you can. Get a good offer and put in your papers. Given that most companies have a 2-3 month notice period, once you are on notice, you can continue applying for jobs and shop around.
The funded startups in India are paying very good money to their staff. Even somewhat junior resources with 4-5 years of experience can get in excess of 50l inr per anum, which is roughly 65k usd in cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore & Gurgaon.
A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while still having a good quality of life.
So comparing your salary to American workers doesn't really say anything about whether or not you're "underpaid", but it's how your salary compares to others in your area. If you just want to earn more money, you could move to the USA, but there's a cost associated with that (even ignoring the difficulty in getting a work visa) and you may find that your "1/4 salary" is worth more at home that it is in the USA.|
There are certainly a lot of employees that have moved away from the SF Bay Area to take a job in an area with a lower cost of living and even though they make significiantly less money, they still have a better quality of life (in particular, they can afford a house)
I got paid 15% less to transfer from one city to another 100 miles away. You get paid based on where you live, unfortunately.
Although 1/4th sounds a bit extreme for India. My understanding is that FAANG is paying more than half - and considering the cost of living - I know a lot of people that willingly took gigantic pay cuts to transfer back to India.
I mean - for one - ~45% of your income goes straight to tax in CA - in India IIUC it's 20%.
If you are trying to prove anything to your managers - it's a waste of time. If your peers are happy with you - it's all that matters. Looks like it got professional work ethics and it's something to be proud of. Having worked onshore, offshore, remotely - I don't think there is any difference really.
There is a whole community about this called Overemployed [0]. Their reddit posts are quite entertaining, like this guy who works 5 jobs and is making 1.2 million a year [1].
Man, I am kinda shocked not so much that this is a thing but seems to be a bona fide _movement_.
It's highly interesting but my one job keeps me more than busy enough, thankyouverymuch.
Edit: A few other thoughts I had since hitting submit:
1. It feels to me like the most challenging part of living a double working life is making sure your mandatory meetings at each job don't conflict. I wonder how people get around that?
2. Many (most?) employers already have a "no moonlighting" clause, I wonder how long before there will there be explicit legal language stating you cannot have this full time job plus another full time job?
3. I believe there are a few places in the tax code where there is a difference between having a full-time job and a part-time job, are there any areas where you would have to lie to the govt when you have multiple full-time jobs?
He thought he was pretty good at his job and took a second job. His coworkers (included me) felt like he was slimy and was not good at his job.
Everyone was suspicious of the dude and finally one day his boss’s boss called him for an emergency, and he said the company name while answering his phone… the other company he worked for.
Company fired him, told the other company, and threatened to sue him. He paid back a good chunk of his recent salary (they didn’t need the money I suspect wanted to make an example).
Yeah there is a lot of imaginary stories obviously. But at the same time as a contractor you could always work with multiple clients, not sure why it comes as a surprise in 2021. A full-time employee for 2 companies? Bullshit. Not a sustainable model.
“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.”
It’s not only remote people. I have seen multiple people at my company who are basically incompetent or lazy and produce nothing of value or even negative output. Some of them get let go after years and some of them get promoted into management.
Having a pleasant demeanor can get you very far without doing any work.
My coworkers and I have a term for those that are providing no value, but seemingly impossible to remove. The "barnacles" are ever present and likely making more money than you. Such is life.
When I worked at an arcade, one the cleaning crew was well known to also be hired, for the same shift times, at the movie theater across the way. He would dash between the two (in the same all black uniform) just enough nobody noticed him missing.
I know a guy who's actively interviewing to take on a second remote job while keeping his first. He has no plans to make either party aware that he has other employment.
His argument is that at his current job he can get all of his assigned work done in 10-20 hours a week (though he doesn't share with them that he's basically only working part time) so he has plenty of time to take on a second job where he also expects to get his daily work done in just a few hours a day.
I don't have an issue with it IF both parties are aware that he's only working a few hours a day but are happy with what he's getting done. It's the inevitable lies when there are conflicting meetings, etc. that bother me.
I agree that the conflicting meetings bit could be tricky, but I don't think he has a moral obligation to inform either company of what's going on, assuming one company's work doesn't interfere with the assigned work from the other. Also I would hope that the two companies he ends up working at aren't even remotely in competition with each other, because that would be unethical.
If both companies are happy with the guy's work output, then he is fulfilling the terms of his employment, at least in spirit and morally/ethically.
(I'm aware that some companies include in their employment papers a clause that states that employees won't take on other employment. I believe I've signed such a thing at my current job. But I personally consider such clauses to be unethical in the first place, and would feel no qualms violating that if I was in a position to want to do so. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure nearly all salaried jobs will stipulate something like that, so it's not like people can vote with their feet.)
I would personally find this sort of arrangement to be pretty stressful, and wouldn't do it, but if someone wants to give it a go, more power to them.
>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.
Probably the vast majority of companies! If you ever get an employee like this as a direct report and try to do something about it, the process is incredibly draining and shitty. Easily the worst I've felt about work in my career (so far!). I see why people try to ignore the issue, but it also feels pretty bad having your other team members constantly pick up the slack around a non-performing team member.
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".
> 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.
I’ve seen it work exactly once.
The guy was absolutely brilliant, however. And a great communicator. But everything had to be done asynchronously for the most part, except a few slots where he was guaranteed to have good network and be able to hop on a conference call. He was also a performance advocate, since everything had to work great on his laptop with poor network and contributed several patches to make the dev experience better. He was a stellar communicator with emails and knew the codebase really well and since he responded in batch he gave a lot of context in his responses (because he wouldn’t often know what the response would be for another day or two).
I think the key thing here is that even though he was placing a burden on his employer and teammates, the arrangement was well understood by both parties, and the employer agreed to accept it.
If someone wants to do something non-traditional and not inform the company about it, then the onus is on the employee to make sure their "odd" work habits don't impact others negatively.
> 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.
I can't imagine it's much worse than it was in the before-times. Wally has always been able to skate along with a certain amount of meeting-attending.
I worked for a computer security company once, it was my first real programming job and I had no experience with the kind of crazy stuff that goes on with hiring, I was really naive and had no clue that certain kinds of people existed in the workforce.
So one day my boss (CTO) calls me up and says “Hey, we are hiring another Windows guy, can you do a quick interview and check him out?” (I was the only Windows dev at the time) So they send me the guy’s resume and he’s a PhD in Electrical Engineering. I feel really nervous about having to interview the guy because he had a PhD, but I figured other people had already checked him out so I meet with him and just have kind of a softball interview, not going into a technical deep dive or anything like that. He seems alright and has a ton of experience, so I figured what the hell.
Well about a month later my boss calls me again and he’s like “Hey, we’ve been having some concerns about John Doe, can you check in on him and see how he’s doing?”
So I go over to John Doe’s office and sit down with him and talk about what he’s been doing. He shows me that he’s having trouble with some things that are so basic that it’s almost like he’s never even seen a Windows machine, much less done any programming on one; and I’m not exaggerating, it was really that bad!
Long story short, they let him go. A few days after, I’m in the break room and one of the Unix guys walks in. He asks me how things are going and I’m like “Well, not so good, we’re back to just one Windows developer because they had to let the new guy go.” He says “Who was that?” So I tell him “this guy John Doe…” and before I can go any further he exclaims “Good God! Not THE John Doe?!?” Apparently this guy was a legend in the IT community in the city - he would fake resumes and get hired for as long as he could run the scam.
> Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.
There are corporations that over-hire and often provide no work at all for weeks or months, but they require that worker is always on stand-by in case there is a surge. I know full-time workers who throughout an entire year maybe done one or two small PR-s, but when suddenly there is an issue needing solving and product teams have full capacity, these people save the day. They are sometimes also utilised for pairing, when given product team members have no spare capacity.
From someone not knowing this, they indeed may seem like deadbeat employees, but the key is - they have to be always available during work hours even if no one contacts them for weeks.
Hmmmmm, it's sort of like renting an apartment with one more room than you actually need so you have a place to put extra stuff, or you can have a guest over. Personally, I would go absolutely crazy if I did nothing at my job, even if it was remote, for weeks on end.
What you described can just as easily be done on-site. Remote work merely lets these people actually do something they might enjoy instead of sitting in a chair and pretending to work for 8 hours. I’ve met people likely this and they’d rather pretend to be busy than actually do something.
> They might already have a full-time job or other remote jobs
Bingo. That was my first thought in this. Especially given how quickly they gave the job up.
They paid someone to interview for them, collected wages for the period they were employed, and then went on to the next opportunity.
Sadly, there is nothing in the story to discourage the person from doing it again. And at most companies, there would be enough egg on HR's face for letting this happen that I'd imagine everyone would quietly sweep it under the rug.
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
I expect the number of employees taking advantage of companies pales into insignificance when compared to the number of companies taking advantage of employees
So what should I do when I realize that a lot of my coworkers are HIGHLY inefficient? And I can do their work in a lower amount of time? And I have a ceiling on how much I can earn? I just go looking elsewhere in parallel.
OR - I build a startup. But I hate the buisiness ethos.
>> 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.
Nearly all of them. And it's why managers who get burned just a single time hate the idea of remote work. It's not about office rent or anything else that gets bandied about here; it's the fact that a very small but significant number of remote workers are grifters and create a ton of negative emotion (out of sight out of mind) for co-workers and managers.
A ton of remote work is obviously the future, but every single negative case like this with legacy managers sets it back orders of magnitude more than the successes it generates. So it goes with everything new.
Large corporations can have a lot of hysteresis. Once someone is hired, it can be quite difficult to fire them.
Even the "90-day probationary" periods are not really useful. I think the only thing that they do, is if the employee quits before the 90 days are up, then they have to pay the company back for all the expenses incurred by the company (I had this happen to someone we hired. They were not expecting that. Too bad. They were actually very good, and dumped us for a job in a location they preferred. I felt bad about that. I actually didn't hold any rancor towards them).
I suspect startups can be a lot more likely to be able to give someone the boot in an efficacious manner.
Collecting paychecks: there is a story that I suspect is centuries old, but which I heard attached to John XXIII. Supposedly somebody asked him how many people worked at the Vatican, and he answered, Maybe one out of three.
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.
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.
> 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
My training at a consultancy company, first job out of college, was like this but actually legit. Nice hotel with a free breakfast, transportation to their facility, and actual (paid) training on a few things, lasting a month. At the end I was put on a client to work for. Pretty good salary for a first job too.
So if a company offers this stuff, it's not necessarily a red flag, just do some research on them. It can be a great springboard if you don't have any better offers.
yeah that was what it was like with my first job. Subsidiary of Accenture. Got set up in a hotel, had some training (that was kind of useless but whatever).
But I got so many spam emails from companies that sounded like a nightmare. Crappy corporate housing, getting sent anywhere, probably shady
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.
I also had to sign a document saying I would end up owing the company money if I left without completing their "training" and/or basically trying my best to get placed. FWIW, I told them it would be difficult as a fresh grad to cough up that much money, and that the arrangements were not exactly as advertised. They tried to add me on linkedin, but I did not accept the request for obvious reasons. They did not pursue.
An offer like that would seem incredibly suspicious to me. You want to pay all of this money to train me right out of school? Why not just hire someone with the right experience? Maybe it's my imposter syndrome speaking but it all feels off. I'm passively looking for new jobs but I always keep my eye out for things that sound too good to be true. If I'm not paying for training or education, then someone else is footing the bill and it's important to consider why. Is this new training making me more productive or is it just to solely make the company more money because they can now claim I'm an expert? I wouldn't want to be oversold to customers as an expert on something I just learned about just as much as I wouldn't want to be placed in a junior role for something I'm really good at.
I would find it suspicious as well, but consider this: People who are great at their job are hard to find and expensive. People who will eventually be great at their job are a lot, lot cheaper, though still hard to find. If you can hire someone before they realize how good they will be, you can save a lot of money and fill a position immediately.
I haven't actually figured out how to find those people, though I have hired at least 2 of them... And hired a few others that looked like they might be, but weren't. (A third coder comes to mind that ended up not working out, but I think we made mistakes and they got in their own head. I think they would have been great otherwise, hence 'at least 2'.)
>You want to pay all of this money to train me right out of school?
Almost certainly less common today. But extended training for new hires did (and I assume in some places) does happen. I think IBM used to do it for sales and once upon a time I interviewed with an oilfield services firm that started out with some fairly lengthy training on their specialized equipment.
Union Pacific does this, at least as recently as a few years ago. Software developers are hired straight out of college and go through months of training before they get shown any actual work.
I don't think it's as much about expertise as "CS college graduates don't know how to make software"
TSMC recently tried to poach me & offered paid on-site training in Taiwan before heading back to the States for the actual position. I reckon it's the modern job-hop game that killed this phenomenon outside of "lifer" companies.
Plenty of more legit companies, including big tech, have training periods for new hires. It's not something to be worried about in and of itself, though it's always a good idea to do your research when your gut says something is off. I was naive and definitely in need of a job.
And people wonder why managers like hiring in person workers?
It's not that you can't fake some stuff like this in person, but it's both harder (more expensive) and a lot more obvious.
This is a pretty uncommon scenario, though. Making everyone work on-site on the off-chance that someone will fake an interview seems like a severe over-reaction.
> 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.
That’s a typical bodyshop [0]. There’s a good chance some of your “colleagues” were using student visa extensions (that might be fraudulent as well, it’s a well known practice [1] [2]) to gain enough “experience” that they could pass as a specialty occupation and claim H1B status. Or just had this consulting shop file 3-4 applications per seat they planned to fill out so that they could game the quota (kicking out legitimate applicants that aren’t trying to game the system).
Thankfully, the previous administration started issuing more RFEs and catching fraudulent applicants [3].
I was actually rather fascinated by it too, so once I figured out what was going on, I started meeting people in the company specifically to ask them about their experiences. I probably have my notes saved on some USB drive somewhere rotting away. There is one comment that I still remember pretty well: "The Chinese do it, the Indians do it, so why shouldn't I do it? The game is rigged."
To this day, that company was the most diverse environment I've been a part of. It had people of all races from all over the world, and I got the sense that these guys generally cared for each other.
I didn't bother writing about it in more detail because most of my friends didn't seem very interested and I wasn't sure where I could share the story. Maybe I will go ahead and do it though.
It's been many years since this happened and I'm doing rather well, thanks for asking.
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.
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.
There are a lot of gullible rural bumpkins out there. It is entirely possible that some recruiter made this guy do this, under the condition that once he is accepted to the job, he will have to pay 1 / 2/ x months of salary to the recruiter.
The recruiter takes the money and disappears. The bumpkin will struggle for a bit in the job and then be let go or resign.
However, he will add this to his resume, have the salary and joining letter as proof and try to get other jobs.
Usually, these people do this so that their marriage prospects are better than their peers.
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)
I had a similar experience early in the pandemic. I had to ask for the candidate to keep his video on.
The voice was much more enthusiastic than the person's demeanor and eventually it became obvious that he was trying to randomly mouth words in sync with the person talking (and presumably doing the coding) then blaming it on lag.
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".
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.
I upvoted you because parts of that are absolutely always true. Some of it depends on the type of consulting contract, though. Some of them call for a dedicated team of X headcount for Y time, and if the consultancy subs people in and out of that team without sufficient cause that's a big red flag.
I don't even understand how that happens. At one point I was a consulting pimp for my dad, and multiple parts of the contract required me to attest that he would be doing the work and if he had help he would be doing the majority of the work and if his time on the contract dropped below 50% of the total the contract would be cancelled and there would be penalties.
There was no way I could have switched him with someone else without paying penalties.
Contracts have to be upheld by a court, to mean anything. I could write in a contract that you will be required to hand me your testicles if you miss the deadline, that doesn't mean I will actually go to court to get them. A lot of companies write aggressive contracts and never actually bother to enforce them, since it would be more costly than what they might actually gain.
Legally, yes - But remember that those provisions are there because someone tried that in the past and so they added legal provisions against it. And remember that those legal provisions are hard to prove; What is 50% of the work? How would they know if he'd had another developer submitting code?
> To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".
And then when they apply to work at their next company, and that company wants to verify previous employment, the previous company that got screwed over is too worried about the possibility of getting sued to accuse the person of lying about who they were... so they'll just say "yes, Y worked here for 6 months".
I'll admit straight up when I fire someone I am usually so relieved if they leave peacefully that I don't just say they worked for me, I will usually even give a semi positive review of them. Not a glowing praise or anything of the sort, but usually a review saying how they're a good team player, they get along well with others, and other aspects highlighting mostly soft skills.
As I've indicated many times on here... most incompetent people are genuinely good, nice people who get along well with others and it's devastating to have to fire them, so when I do fire them it can soften the blow for them to leave some good words, give some positive feedback which allows them to leave on good terms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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……
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.
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?)
Readit News
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!
Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more holistically for an accurate signal?
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Here's some code I wrote back in 1987/88, for example.
http://www.retroarchive.org/swag/MISC/0153.PAS.html
Dead Comment
There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file.
Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors that her husband or someone in her home country was doing the work (would have been daytime over there). Nobody really complained. She wore a hijab and the company had just hired it’s first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why. Thankfully they stopped using that vendor not long after.
At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")
He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project. Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because they were well aware about what's happening?
I'm in the process of studying to transition from engineering into infosec because I have had so much insight into the job by way of helping my husband with tricky communications and I decided that it was something I'd enjoy.
Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.
I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
These e-mails were copied to our internal mailing lists so that they could be peer reviewed and someone else could be cross-trained on it in case the primary wasn't available. Also, every task we did had a one sentence description written up that would be shared with the team, again as a kind of peer review.
Developers don't want to talk to customers. So you need someone who can understand either the code or the developer's comments, but can then put it in layman's terms.
Edit: DevOps, too.
A lot of the job is talking to technical teams, talking to functional teams, talking to business teams, talking to management and executives; translate, summarize, liaison, co-ordinate, plan and inform. Customize medium, format, length, message for each group to enhance understanding. Develop spidey sense of paranoia against assumptions, misunderstandings.
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(it's proof for a certain kind of social and professional awareness, rather, I'd say, which is true for quite a few hiring norms, really, but doesn't mean you can expect a new hire to compose really good documents on the job...)
Unfortunately in the past I've been pressured/pushed into sales and/or client side positions because of my communication skills, though. Frankly, its a bit insulting since it means that I've gotten less technical opportunities and mentoring because managers keep trying to point me in the less technical direction.
I just want a job where I can be good at it and not have to be the one responsible for dealing with dramatic clients and extricating the company from sticky situations. Just because I'm good at breaking bad news to clients and dealing with the fallout doesn't mean I enjoy it (does anybody?), and too much of it definitely hits my mental health (anxiety, depression, burnout).
Of course.
You would never ever send an important email without getting it checked, or having someone write it, if it's not your thing.
I do like the way the replies to this seem like they are frankly, retarded.
I get you are single but if you don't understand how relationships work this might be a good start at retrospectively thinking about it.
Relationships are about teams of two putting the best of either forward.
This does not make you twice as good, it's somewhat exponential. It's even more powerful when you decide to do it for life.
(And single people use friends, this is exactly how you apply for jobs, with the help of others if available)
You're looking at this from the wrong angle. First that person needs to have basic competencies for their job, before involving someone else.
Classic comment.
No, probably not. Speak to any business owner who has been in a lawsuit and they'll likely tell you it's not worth the headache. A close relative told me that even if a customer straight up won't pay for a done job, he'd rather forgo the payment then deal with a lawsuit.
Lawsuits usually have:
1) monetary costs - those lawyers are very expensive
2) emotional costs - take a big mental toll to deal with
3) reputational costs - it goes in the public record. Next time a potential candidate googles your company, it might show up that you sued a former employee. Hopefully they read further to see if you were justified in doing so....
4) opportunity costs - you (hopefully) have better things to do with your time
If you are big enough, maybe you have a legal team to deal with this stuff. But even then, you have to choose your battles. A hired lawyer is still expensive and it's not worth going after small battles, even the ones you know you will win.
Also, as others have mentioned, it's not unreasonable to have a friend or relative look over your email communications during your interview process unless you were explicitly asked not to do so. In fact, it's a smart idea!
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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.
I'll take a stab at it, and predict... all of them. Or nearly so. There seems to be an ever-present fraction of employees at any large corporation that are essentially worthless. Just along for the ride, raking in a paycheck while someone else does the meaningful work.
We've had stories here on HN about people exploiting it. There's a moment, I think, in many developers' careers where it occurs to them that there is almost never any reward for hard work. And when you're a wage slave for a large corporation, it's easy to blur the morality until it feels okay to take advantage of the situation.
When I find myself starting to think such thoughts, I know that it's time for me to move on to another opportunity. And a smaller company, even though it pays less, because it's better for your soul.
Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)
People bitch about stack ranking, and it is terrible for moral and politics, but it solves exactly this problem.
Because there isn't enough manager gumption & attention time to address this systematically, manually.
Overall, I'm someone who needs to prove everytime that I'm sincere and I'm intellectual while I'm known only for being a cheap resource.
I mean no disrespect, by this observation.
The funded startups in India are paying very good money to their staff. Even somewhat junior resources with 4-5 years of experience can get in excess of 50l inr per anum, which is roughly 65k usd in cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore & Gurgaon.
A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while still having a good quality of life.
So comparing your salary to American workers doesn't really say anything about whether or not you're "underpaid", but it's how your salary compares to others in your area. If you just want to earn more money, you could move to the USA, but there's a cost associated with that (even ignoring the difficulty in getting a work visa) and you may find that your "1/4 salary" is worth more at home that it is in the USA.|
There are certainly a lot of employees that have moved away from the SF Bay Area to take a job in an area with a lower cost of living and even though they make significiantly less money, they still have a better quality of life (in particular, they can afford a house)
(i.e., are other local companies offering worse or better benefits?)
Although 1/4th sounds a bit extreme for India. My understanding is that FAANG is paying more than half - and considering the cost of living - I know a lot of people that willingly took gigantic pay cuts to transfer back to India.
I mean - for one - ~45% of your income goes straight to tax in CA - in India IIUC it's 20%.
[0] https://overemployed.com/
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...
It's highly interesting but my one job keeps me more than busy enough, thankyouverymuch.
Edit: A few other thoughts I had since hitting submit:
1. It feels to me like the most challenging part of living a double working life is making sure your mandatory meetings at each job don't conflict. I wonder how people get around that?
2. Many (most?) employers already have a "no moonlighting" clause, I wonder how long before there will there be explicit legal language stating you cannot have this full time job plus another full time job?
3. I believe there are a few places in the tax code where there is a difference between having a full-time job and a part-time job, are there any areas where you would have to lie to the govt when you have multiple full-time jobs?
He thought he was pretty good at his job and took a second job. His coworkers (included me) felt like he was slimy and was not good at his job.
Everyone was suspicious of the dude and finally one day his boss’s boss called him for an emergency, and he said the company name while answering his phone… the other company he worked for.
Company fired him, told the other company, and threatened to sue him. He paid back a good chunk of his recent salary (they didn’t need the money I suspect wanted to make an example).
It’s not only remote people. I have seen multiple people at my company who are basically incompetent or lazy and produce nothing of value or even negative output. Some of them get let go after years and some of them get promoted into management.
Having a pleasant demeanor can get you very far without doing any work.
His argument is that at his current job he can get all of his assigned work done in 10-20 hours a week (though he doesn't share with them that he's basically only working part time) so he has plenty of time to take on a second job where he also expects to get his daily work done in just a few hours a day.
I don't have an issue with it IF both parties are aware that he's only working a few hours a day but are happy with what he's getting done. It's the inevitable lies when there are conflicting meetings, etc. that bother me.
I told him so and he was undeterred.
If both companies are happy with the guy's work output, then he is fulfilling the terms of his employment, at least in spirit and morally/ethically.
(I'm aware that some companies include in their employment papers a clause that states that employees won't take on other employment. I believe I've signed such a thing at my current job. But I personally consider such clauses to be unethical in the first place, and would feel no qualms violating that if I was in a position to want to do so. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure nearly all salaried jobs will stipulate something like that, so it's not like people can vote with their feet.)
I would personally find this sort of arrangement to be pretty stressful, and wouldn't do it, but if someone wants to give it a go, more power to them.
Probably the vast majority of companies! If you ever get an employee like this as a direct report and try to do something about it, the process is incredibly draining and shitty. Easily the worst I've felt about work in my career (so far!). I see why people try to ignore the issue, but it also feels pretty bad having your other team members constantly pick up the slack around a non-performing team member.
I’ve seen it work exactly once.
The guy was absolutely brilliant, however. And a great communicator. But everything had to be done asynchronously for the most part, except a few slots where he was guaranteed to have good network and be able to hop on a conference call. He was also a performance advocate, since everything had to work great on his laptop with poor network and contributed several patches to make the dev experience better. He was a stellar communicator with emails and knew the codebase really well and since he responded in batch he gave a lot of context in his responses (because he wouldn’t often know what the response would be for another day or two).
If someone wants to do something non-traditional and not inform the company about it, then the onus is on the employee to make sure their "odd" work habits don't impact others negatively.
I can't imagine it's much worse than it was in the before-times. Wally has always been able to skate along with a certain amount of meeting-attending.
So one day my boss (CTO) calls me up and says “Hey, we are hiring another Windows guy, can you do a quick interview and check him out?” (I was the only Windows dev at the time) So they send me the guy’s resume and he’s a PhD in Electrical Engineering. I feel really nervous about having to interview the guy because he had a PhD, but I figured other people had already checked him out so I meet with him and just have kind of a softball interview, not going into a technical deep dive or anything like that. He seems alright and has a ton of experience, so I figured what the hell.
Well about a month later my boss calls me again and he’s like “Hey, we’ve been having some concerns about John Doe, can you check in on him and see how he’s doing?”
So I go over to John Doe’s office and sit down with him and talk about what he’s been doing. He shows me that he’s having trouble with some things that are so basic that it’s almost like he’s never even seen a Windows machine, much less done any programming on one; and I’m not exaggerating, it was really that bad!
Long story short, they let him go. A few days after, I’m in the break room and one of the Unix guys walks in. He asks me how things are going and I’m like “Well, not so good, we’re back to just one Windows developer because they had to let the new guy go.” He says “Who was that?” So I tell him “this guy John Doe…” and before I can go any further he exclaims “Good God! Not THE John Doe?!?” Apparently this guy was a legend in the IT community in the city - he would fake resumes and get hired for as long as he could run the scam.
There are corporations that over-hire and often provide no work at all for weeks or months, but they require that worker is always on stand-by in case there is a surge. I know full-time workers who throughout an entire year maybe done one or two small PR-s, but when suddenly there is an issue needing solving and product teams have full capacity, these people save the day. They are sometimes also utilised for pairing, when given product team members have no spare capacity. From someone not knowing this, they indeed may seem like deadbeat employees, but the key is - they have to be always available during work hours even if no one contacts them for weeks.
You can't get two on-site jobs at the same time. One of them is going to notice that you're not there.
Bingo. That was my first thought in this. Especially given how quickly they gave the job up.
They paid someone to interview for them, collected wages for the period they were employed, and then went on to the next opportunity.
Sadly, there is nothing in the story to discourage the person from doing it again. And at most companies, there would be enough egg on HR's face for letting this happen that I'd imagine everyone would quietly sweep it under the rug.
Often extremely smart and talented. Working on own projects/business idea.
Their argument is that they can in 1h deliver often as much as you average Joe in a week.
“Put as little effort as possible, but I have expenses”
Can give example of such ppl in: - Samsung - TomTom - Oracle - Amazon
Too many of them tbh. Slowly choking the business.
Sometimes I've been able to fix in an afternoon, what someone has been trying to fix for days.
From and outsiders' perspective it may seem that I am working less
OR - I build a startup. But I hate the buisiness ethos.
Nearly all of them. And it's why managers who get burned just a single time hate the idea of remote work. It's not about office rent or anything else that gets bandied about here; it's the fact that a very small but significant number of remote workers are grifters and create a ton of negative emotion (out of sight out of mind) for co-workers and managers.
A ton of remote work is obviously the future, but every single negative case like this with legacy managers sets it back orders of magnitude more than the successes it generates. So it goes with everything new.
Even the "90-day probationary" periods are not really useful. I think the only thing that they do, is if the employee quits before the 90 days are up, then they have to pay the company back for all the expenses incurred by the company (I had this happen to someone we hired. They were not expecting that. Too bad. They were actually very good, and dumped us for a job in a location they preferred. I felt bad about that. I actually didn't hold any rancor towards them).
I suspect startups can be a lot more likely to be able to give someone the boot in an efficacious manner.
I guess some folks are sociopaths, and do whatever it takes to live well.
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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.
My training at a consultancy company, first job out of college, was like this but actually legit. Nice hotel with a free breakfast, transportation to their facility, and actual (paid) training on a few things, lasting a month. At the end I was put on a client to work for. Pretty good salary for a first job too.
So if a company offers this stuff, it's not necessarily a red flag, just do some research on them. It can be a great springboard if you don't have any better offers.
But I got so many spam emails from companies that sounded like a nightmare. Crappy corporate housing, getting sent anywhere, probably shady
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.
I haven't actually figured out how to find those people, though I have hired at least 2 of them... And hired a few others that looked like they might be, but weren't. (A third coder comes to mind that ended up not working out, but I think we made mistakes and they got in their own head. I think they would have been great otherwise, hence 'at least 2'.)
Almost certainly less common today. But extended training for new hires did (and I assume in some places) does happen. I think IBM used to do it for sales and once upon a time I interviewed with an oilfield services firm that started out with some fairly lengthy training on their specialized equipment.
I don't think it's as much about expertise as "CS college graduates don't know how to make software"
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That’s a typical bodyshop [0]. There’s a good chance some of your “colleagues” were using student visa extensions (that might be fraudulent as well, it’s a well known practice [1] [2]) to gain enough “experience” that they could pass as a specialty occupation and claim H1B status. Or just had this consulting shop file 3-4 applications per seat they planned to fill out so that they could game the quota (kicking out legitimate applicants that aren’t trying to game the system).
Thankfully, the previous administration started issuing more RFEs and catching fraudulent applicants [3].
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
[1] https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/former-ceo-bay-area-univer...
[2] https://thewalrus.ca/the-shadowy-business-of-international-e...
[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-h-1b_b_5890d86ce4b0522c...
I hope you're doing okay now?
To this day, that company was the most diverse environment I've been a part of. It had people of all races from all over the world, and I got the sense that these guys generally cared for each other.
I didn't bother writing about it in more detail because most of my friends didn't seem very interested and I wasn't sure where I could share the story. Maybe I will go ahead and do it though.
It's been many years since this happened and I'm doing rather well, thanks for asking.
Huge red flag. Nobody provides training, especially not for one's own interests.
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.
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.
There are a lot of gullible rural bumpkins out there. It is entirely possible that some recruiter made this guy do this, under the condition that once he is accepted to the job, he will have to pay 1 / 2/ x months of salary to the recruiter.
The recruiter takes the money and disappears. The bumpkin will struggle for a bit in the job and then be let go or resign.
However, he will add this to his resume, have the salary and joining letter as proof and try to get other jobs.
Usually, these people do this so that their marriage prospects are better than their peers.
The lengths people go to.
The question was along the lines of "how do you typically protect your code against sql injections?" (in a language and framework agnostic context)
The voice was much more enthusiastic than the person's demeanor and eventually it became obvious that he was trying to randomly mouth words in sync with the person talking (and presumably doing the coding) then blaming it on lag.
Yikes.
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".
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.
There was no way I could have switched him with someone else without paying penalties.
And then when they apply to work at their next company, and that company wants to verify previous employment, the previous company that got screwed over is too worried about the possibility of getting sued to accuse the person of lying about who they were... so they'll just say "yes, Y worked here for 6 months".
As I've indicated many times on here... most incompetent people are genuinely good, nice people who get along well with others and it's devastating to have to fire them, so when I do fire them it can soften the blow for them to leave some good words, give some positive feedback which allows them to leave on good terms.
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.
I had a very good experience as a candidate as well.
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.
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……
(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?)
How reliable or accurate do you think those notes are?
How secure is having someone outside your company writing code that runs inside your servers?