Ask HN: Have you experienced “hiring fraud?”
Basically my company interviewed a candidate who was fantastic. Checked all the boxes, nailed the interview, and had extremely relevant work experience. We made an offer. He accepted. A few weeks later on his first day the guy in the Zoom was definitely not the guy I interviewed. All the other interviewers agreed. Not the same guy.
We've had a number of candidates in the pipeline who seemed to be obviously lying about their identities who didn't make it to an offer but this case seemed different somehow. I cant quite put my finger on it.
I'm just curious to hear how many of you have experienced something similar. Is it common? Is there something obvious I'm not thinking of to help avoid these situations?
We may have passed on other candidates because of the strength of this one guy. This has put us in a pretty unfortunate position.
Some maybe noteworthy facts: we're a 100% remote company. The candidate was US based and said they didn't need visa sponsorship. They only spoke to one in house recruiter, an HR rep, and 3 people in engineering for the interviews. I discovered after the fact that one of the name brand companies on their resume was actually not the company we thought it was but one with the exact same name in a different industry.
571 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 476 ms ] threadI suggest calling the candidate in person for 1 day at a co-working location and meet them in person once you are ready to make an offer. Pay for their time since you have anyway decided to hire them. Yes, this adds cost to you but it will be a huge deterrence for fraud. If a candidate doesn't like it, they can move on.
As an interviewee I'd take this as a very good sign that the company is serious about offering me a long term position. If I'm living on the west coast and my employer is on the east coast and my contract says 100% remote I'd seriously doubt the company is trying to fool me by wanting to meet me for one day, on their own dime, without further interviews.
There's a difference between trusting remote employees and aspiring employees.
I wouldn't hold it against the company if they want to do proper due diligence on a prospective employee especially given real-world accounts of such frauds occurring.
Why should an aspiring employee trust that a company is going to allow 100% remote if the first thing the company expects you to do is to travel into the office?
1. completely or entirely
It absolutely does mean zero travel.
Are they? I've been recently contacted for remote positions that turned out to be not remote twice.
But I like exploring new places. I’m not sure how popular all expenses paid weekend vacations are.
The only thing business travelers have in common is that they all think everyone views business travel just like they do.
Even with disabilities, inability to meet the job description is a legally valid reason to discriminate.
They work fine with people, can parse small talk and bring a positive attitude, etc. But they were out like a shot when the workday was over, and they would never dream of attending a company-sponsored teambuilding event. If they were hired for a 100% remote job, they would expect to never see a coworker in person, and consider it a perk.
Some people just don't want to mix their personal and professional lives. What's wrong with that?
I wouldn’t assume remote meant absolutely zero travel unless that was spelled out.
Remote means you don't need me physically present at a particular place (outside of knowing my location for tax purposes). It's pretty clear in the word "remote". If that's not always 100% the case, I would expect those expectations to me made clear during the hiring process, not after I've already come aboard.
Do you really think it would be unreasonable for someone to balk if you hired them for a remote role but then asked them to fly somewhere quarterly after they were onboarded?
Obviously people should take positions that align with their preferences however. Just be sure to specify upfront and be prepared to move if circumstances change.
I never attended any meet ups. I felt guilty about it but like you're saying here, I signed up to work remotely, not in an office ever.
Someone who won't help you avoid fraud might as well be pushing you into it.
Still, that wouldn't solve for the "My laptop doesn't have a camera" problem for the early phases of the interview. You would need to save face / voice samples to cross-reference at various stages of the pipeline to watch for the changeling.
I've done it many times, pre-COVID. I live in a small town (<25k) in the South and have been working remotely for ~10 years. In that time I've gone through four rounds of interviews. The first three were pre-COVID, and they all included at least a "half day" of on-site interviews, most of which were in LA or SF. The most recent round was about eighteen months ago and didn't include any travel.
> Maybe the reason the candidate is looking for a remote job, is they don't have to travel?
This is not my experience. In my personal network of remote workers we're pretty uniformly working remotely because we don't want to move to where the companies are, not because we are entirely opposed to traveling. Each person has their own expectations of course, but I see traveling for less than a week per quarter as entirely acceptable.
But we're not pre-covid. Before covid I worked remote because it allowed me access to a larger job market without having to relocate, but I didn't mind occasional travel. Now that we're dealing with covid, there's no way you'd get me on a plane or in an office for a job interview. My health is worth far more than any particular job.
Generally in my experiences as a candidate, _someone_ on the interview loop is with the team one would end up working with, and should catch this kind of thing. Generally as an interviewer, whether remote or onsite, it hasn't been part of the process to check the ID of the person I'm speaking to (and I'm not confident I could spot a fake anyway). Thinking back to a time where I did a day of interviews at a BigCorp and I don't know that any of my interviewers were on the specific team I'd work with ... I don't recall any rigorous attempt to establish my identity on the day.
Far easier to blend in as a remote employee.
Usually when this happens, the fake employee will come up with excuses to leave video off: They'll say their camera isn't working today or that their internet connection isn't good enough to turn the camera on right now. If they do turn it on, it will be massively backlit so you can't see their face.
Many companies don't even expect people to have video at all. The identity-swapping fraudsters are hoping that their companies fall into this category.
I'm not entirely sure there is a good fix for this, the problem would have always existed with in-person work as well - however the perceived risk/reward ratio would be different.
It’s plausibly a crime too (actual fraud), if pushed hard enough, though most courts will just laugh at companies and tell them they clearly didn’t do enough due diligence, so most people trying it will be worried about being arrested in person.
If doing fully remote, they could be dialing in from another country and immune from arrest. Makes it much easier to do.
This also substantially increases the reward. Traveling to SF for a 2 month con as a mid-level software engineer isn't a good deal. Working remote from a low cost location for a 2 month con might be a fantastic deal.
Bonus - chances are, little to no taxes compared to the other option too, depending on how they structured the scam. The cut-out/middle man would get left holding the bag, but what else is new.
Other Bonus - they wouldn't be using their real name, so chances are, no longer term impacts to the patsy either, unless they happen to end up trying to work legitimately with someone involved at the target company years later. Pretty unlikely to bother folks involved in this type of scam, IMO.
There's a contradiction here, right?
If someone has never committed a crime before (which most likely, these patsies would be in that camp - it's too high risk and expensive for someone experienced to want to do themselves if they could send someone else), fear of prosecution is going to be high. After all, THEY know they're doing something wrong, even if no one else does.
Someone doing this is also very unlikely to have the direct experience managing a company, or dealing with these issues, to actually know the real risks of prosecution and likelihood of damaging consequences.
So since it's new, uncertain, potential consequences seem personally very damaging, and it's 'bad' == high fear.
They get a lot more dangerous once they've done it a few times, and the fear of the unknown wears off, and confidence starts to replace it. But since they're showing up in person, and would need (in this example) to physically be there for awhile, that's expensive, time consuming, and high risk.
Also, I fail to see how this can be prosecuted when there's no identity theft or forgery i.e. real crimes involved in this act. It can be all boiled down to being just another case of an under-qualified candidate holding a role without proper or adequate credentials due to flawed hiring procedures, or more frankly the incompetence of the decision makers inside the organization.
In this case, they were impersonating someone else. For them to get to the point of getting paid, they'd likely have to provide identity documents (including a SSN, some form of photo ID, etc.) if the company was doing their paperwork correctly. Even contractors have to cough up a SSN, and that is enough to trigger federal identity fraud charges.
If they provided real credentials and their real name, but had someone else sit in who pretended to be them to do the interviews, it gets trickier - it would still likely to be some variant of conspiracy to commit. Conspiracy at the federal level generally only requires a concrete action by a conspirator in furtherance of a crime, which with only a little squinting would likely apply here to anyone involved (including the fake interviewee).
I present to you 18 USC 1028, the federal identity fraud code. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028], which provides penalties up to 5 years for a first and non-violent/non-drug related offense, or 20 years (for a second offense or other nastier qualifications). A felony, either way. It includes transferring said documents electronically.
My 'favorite' section is 7, which explicitly states that SSN, DOB, etc. count, as well.
Conspiracy would likely be under 18 USC 1346 & 1349 [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1346] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1349], which makes it a crime to 'deprive another of the intangible right of honest services', or conspire with another to do so.
Either way, as I said elsewhere, I doubt anyone would be particularly interested in such prosecution unless it was very high profile for some reason. It's hard to get anyone sympathetic about a large company getting scammed by someone this way. Most companies also don't like having a reputation or PR as being scammable.
So companies should be very interested in covering their asses here. That said, it IS also a federal (and likely state) level felony, so folks SHOULD also rightly be scared to attempt it.
If the right parties were motivated, it could easily result in many years in federal prison. And it's hard to say when someone will want to make an example out of something like this.
I doubt that it really happened since as you may have hinted, no prosecutors are interested in pursuing these cases for lack of sympathy as you put it, which I can't verify, or failure of winning the case which I suspect to be the chief motive here since misrepresenting facts or exaggerating events on your resume is not a crime.
And you're wrong - lying about MATERIAL facts, events, or qualifications to get a job is a crime.
Lying that you had a dog when you were a kid (when it's not relevant), for instance? No problem. That's not likely to be a material fact.
If you're interviewing to be a host of a kids show about dogs?
A problem.
Just not one most people are willing to make a case over. There also is the court precedent about 'mere fluffery' or 'puffery' not adding up to a lie, which would need to get worked out somehow. See [https://contractslawinaction.law.miami.edu/?page_id=171]
There is a line, for instance, between exaggeration and lying, that not everyone would agree where it sits.
I forgot the link to USC 1341 (Frauds and Swindles), which is just a great read on it's own.
Regarding their request for an example -
Here is an example of a successful prosecution of someone for fraud (and tax evasion) for material lies about qualifications and job histories.
[https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2020/02/former-health-c...]
20 years for mail fraud, 5 years for tax evasion.
She was clearly going above and beyond on this front.
Trying to characterize having the camera off as being a nefarious tactic because you can't see them working is beyond asinine. There are many good reasons to have the camera off while working.
One being you are there to do work, you are being paid to do the work. One thing video has never gotten right inherently is the whole eye contact part of a video chat.
When you don't look directly at someone (the angle is wrong) while you are communicating its a non-verbal sign of disrespect or in-congruence, and it causes non-verbal communication issues regardless of intent.
The camera has never adjusted your eye angle, so you will always have that issue of people distrusting those communicating over video to a lesser or greater degree. With a flat picture and a phone call, you don't have that. You focus on the work and get things done.
If the candidate misrepresented their expertise, fire them.
If they aren't doing the work, fire them.
If they plain just aren't working out for other reasons, fire them! (after due dilligence).
I don't see why you have to bemoan your lack of due dilligence and instead blame it on something ludicrous like anyone with the camera off is doing this (when they aren't).
Lets call this plug what it is, you want to surveil your employees like a micro manager instead of actually doing due diligence (i.e. the job of hiring).
Seriously how hard is it to just fire someone that's a new-hire?
Its a new position, if it doesn't work out, hire someone else, and terminate the temporary contract with the appropriate legal clause and time periods.
Most work is an 'at will' position, so as an employer, if they lied, use that and 'fire at will'.
Excessively surveilling your employees while they do work only does one thing, and that's drop productivity through the floor. Not only that, it shows serious deficits in Upper Management, and any skilled/experienced candidates will walk away from positions with redflags like that.
You either want work to get done, or you just want to pretend that while doing something else.
What's your actual priority, making money and doing the job (due dilligence is part of that), or watching your employees work in minutia and spinning a narrative. You can't have both.
a person who wants to work remotely but doesn't figure out how to have a good internet connection, then they are not a good fit for remote work. If a person decides to travel to a location where internet connection is not good on the day of the interview, you can imagine what he/she will do when it's a regular work day.
Somebody shows up for a remote job and doesn't have a good internet connection is too big of a hiring risk to even both continuing the interview.
Secondarily there’s the “can they actually do the job” problem that has always existed. The new issue here is that we will now waste time on too many new hires who can’t make the grade, because we’re assuming that our hiring process was really good at weeding out the poor fits, and these “games” exploit the weaknesses. Rather than get into an arms race with fraudsters, perhaps hire two or three people for every opening on a short term and then only keep the ones who deliver.
So what? Those are irrational beliefs. Why should we care that someone never trusts remote workers?
You can never be 100% secure against fraud just like you can never be 100% secure against hacking.
We should certainly try to reduce the incidence of fraud, but only if you don't sacrifice the ability to hire who and when you need to.
Which WILL result in folks not being able to get hired that otherwise would be. It also will result in positions not being filled that are important at companies we likely depend on, resulting in lower quality of service and/or failures of those services.
It’s poisoning the remote employment well, essentially.
I think this is a new risk when it comes to hiring engineers. This kind of fraud has been present outside of Engineering orgs for a long time.
I used to be a hiring manager in a well known company that was 100% onsite. This was on the business side, not IT/Engineering. We were looking for a BI person as a contract hire. Our HR org said they had a staffing agency they had worked with for years. The staffing agency sent us a bunch of resumes that were surprisingly similar, filled with every buzzword and feature (e.g. I made a bar chart) and obviously weren't written by the candidates. After throwing those out, there were a few that looked decent. We had some phone screens and then a single onsite interview, but concluded there was something fishy going on.
I confronted rep from the staffing agency with with this and their response was that typically somebody in a managerial position (at our company) picked a few resumes, had a phone call (not video, just phone) with them, then hired somebody based on the phone call. My team was the first one that had actually done more than that.
Who showed up on the first day, who actually did the work, I don't think anybody had any clue.
The non-technical managers didn't have the skillset to properly evaluate these candidates. So they saw the keywords and picked the person that sounded the best.
Engineers hopefully have the skillset to evaluate and interview other Engineers, so the fraud is different and more sophisticated now.
IMHO, if you're the type of manager who hires somebody like this and what you wanted done gets done, you've probably got bigger problems than a staffing agency scamming you. If you think it's rocket science to build a couple of charts in a BI tool and you're happy when the person you hired takes 6 months to build a couple of dashboards at $100/hr...good luck to you.
plenty of mob types are making mob money on this scam while we type, as excellent young engineers struggle to make $3k USD per month.. I will guess. Overall seems like collateral damage for the relentless wage-war with outsourcing.. from the engineer side, I tend towards "this is the (outsourced workforce) bed you made now you are getting it back"
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.
It turned out 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.
In talking with the remote staffing firm, they were extremely apologetic. He had apparently pulled the same trick with them, but they didn't do video interviews, so it was harder to pick up on.
Even without the camera, I'm not sure how he expected this to fly? Someone who claims to be proficient in English should not always pause for 10-20 seconds before answering a question.
Camera fuckery notwithstanding
This is just companies getting back the same treatment they've been subjecting their customers to for over a decade.
In business this is called "business process outsourcing", aka send off sensitive data & permissions to sweatshops in third-world countries.
While it's a shame that it happened to what I assume is a legitimate small/medium business that doesn't do the aforementioned practice, I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it.
The market has reacted, and as more and more things go remote it allows the "little guys" to take a stab at it with varying degrees of success.
(to be clear, I do not condone this behavior despite being approached several times to be a "front" for foreign developers - however, I totally understand the market dynamics that push them to do this)
> When companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good?
Subcontractors are engaged on different terms and with specific contracts that require subcontractors to also engage in specific contracts.
If an individual employee hands their logins to someone else and says "pretend its me" then it's clear fraud, not to mention a breach of the documents you agreed to when you signed.
> In business this is called "business process outsourcing",
No, it's not. Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary.
Hiring a programmer and giving them access to your company Slack and source code is entirely different.
So carefully limited that insiders from said sweatshops end up taking (laughably low) bribes to perform things like fraudulent SIM swaps, access customer accounts, etc?
In theory it must be all well and controlled and in a proper world nobody would be doing fraud, whether for themselves or a third-party. In reality there's very little oversight over it on the companies' side (and a slap on the wrist if by some miracle regulators actually get involved) so seeing them complain about being on the receiving end of this is some sweet schadenfreude.
When the business lobby (that represents, or at least purports to represent, businesses as a whole) has asked for, and got, the laws that make this profitable for them, the responsibility falls on all businesses to a certain extent.
That seems like a sentiment better expressed in an instance where it actually happens then? I don't have much sympathy for burglars who fall through glass windows, but it doesn't have anything to do with OP's situation.
If you want a company to provide services without outsourcing to a third party, you can make it a requirement in the contract. But most likely you don't need this assurance, just that they maintain a certain level of quality. If a company misrepresents the quality of their goods/services it is essentially a breach of contract and it's not "fine". If they never made the promise in the first place and you're just bitter that some companies cut costs to achieve the bare minimum level of service, well that's capitalism for you. But irrelevant. Those companies could have hired dodgy people in-house and they'll still have shitty service.
Finding somebody to interview then having another person show up at work is straight out fraud. That's also not OK.
2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud.
3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing.
> 3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing.
Is this asymmetry reasonable or fair? This kind of "identity fraud" seems to be much the same as business outsourcing (represent that the work is going to be done by one party, then it's actually done by another, cheaper and less skilled one); why should one be more illegal or immoral than the other?
If a business promises up and down that they don't outsource or subcontract and do, then of course it is amoral as well.
I rarely see the 2nd situation with businesses.
There's no reason to have a comparison with companies outsourcing. Companies outsource to lower cost with, ideally, a balance between decreased customer service and standards. The alternative is to raise prices on consumers. Profit motivation is real and not immoral -- companies which outsource and lower their standard of service should get beaten up by the market and competition. That being said, when a company has a monopoly or some other anti-competitive practices there is no way to balance this.
Fraud? Sure. But feeling bad for the person exploiting the value of one persons labor because they didn't get to exploit someone elses labor for more instead is fuckin nuts.
If this wasn't on this end of the labor pipeline, it would be spun as "Marketing" or similar.
What the OP describes is basically a version of a "bait and switch" fraud, which is pretty widely illegal and not considered OK by anyone. Although you can find examples where people ride that line pretty closely[1], but even then people think it's bad behavior.
A subtly different thing that's maybe closer to what you're talking about is hiring contractors and then blaming them for problems. A current major example being many of the Amazon-branded delivery trucks that only deliver for Amazon, but when they do something wrong "oh they're a subcontractor, not Amazon's fault!"
So, not sure I agree 100%, but I understand the anger.
[1] For example, this guy that found name-brand USB-C hubs had the same "guts" as cut-rate crap. https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...
Then there was the guy who said he had enough rep to take jobs, do basically nothing until they figured out he wasn't producing, at which point they'd fire him, but meanwhile he'd collected 6 months of salary. Again, he had a half dozen of these "jobs" in the pipeline.
In my own job, I've gotten roped into a years-long email chain where a legitimately hired programmer, working in our affiliated consultancy, in a foreign country, couldn't figure out how to install NodeJS to satisfy his ReactJS stack. LONG story, but who's at fault for hiring someone so clueless that they couldn't figure out one of the first steps of modern web development?
I helped interview a replacement for a position I was leaving, and sat across the table from a guy who said he'd programmed several .NET and Rails applications. He was hired. When it came time for me to do the "knowledge transfer," I watched him literally open a browser, and type "Ruby on Rails." He'd never even heard of it. Again, LONG story, but they threw away everything I had written, and he used Java. It was the only thing he knew. He'd made up projects on his resume, and lied to our faces.
All of these examples in this thread are just different data points along the sliding scale of trust. There are many different places to inject mistrust, and -- human nature being what it is -- someone will always find these holes, and try to take advantage of them.
Don't trust. Verify.
HR dept's are simply unable/ill-equipped to handle this new reality. Honestly, at larger org's this is really an upper management issue first and foremost, as HR dept's are sort of benefiting from these frauds. ( Before you go off on that last sentence, I did say 'sort of' - and I personally believe in 'you get what you incentivize'...so)
If garbage is flooding the market, it forces employers to pay higher wages for a chance to actually get something good.
This pushes wages up for real, skilled engineers.
I don't think garbage in any market drives up the prices for anything.
Those looking for something good just waste more time looking, and some of them give up and settle for garbage.
Exclusivity drives up prices. If you're the sole supplier of something badly needed, you can charge a lot for it. If a second supplier shows up, but with garbage, you're likely not going to be able to charge even more.
If you have the budget, I highly recommend moving your compensation points up and focusing on top engineers in remote locations. It's much easier to vet people who have an established online track record and you can tap references from well-known companies. Unfortunately this way you will miss out on some great candidates that haven't yet established themselves, so you still have to branch out.
For remote work we require video interviews and cameras on during meetings. We'd make an exception if someone really needed accommodations to keep their camera off for some reason, but otherwise it's cameras on. I know some people don't like this, but it improves communication and team cohesion in a noticeable way. It also immediately highlights fraud like this.
Get your security team involved. You should be tracking where remote employees access your VPN and company services. Don't be afraid to ask about discrepancies and changes. If someone has logged in from one IP or region for the first 4 weeks and then suddenly you're seeing new logins from a different city or country, investigate. I don't care if people travel, but we need to firmly understand the security situation.
Watch out for people with frequent excuses for missing meetings, having to turn their camera off, excuses like "my camera isn't working today", and so on. Send everyone known-good webcams and company laptops.
And as always, performance management is key. Managing remote is harder than managing in person, and I say that as someone who manages remote and loves remote teams. You need strong performance management practices in place and clear ways to measure it. People who aren't getting their work done should show up quickly in your system and warrant additional manager investigation.
But if someone shows up in Zoom who isn't the person you hired, lock it down ASAP. Don't let being "nice" get in the way of handling an urgent security situation. Someone you didn't hire who hasn't agreed to your contracts is in your system, and that's a red alert emergency.
Yes, "camera isn't working" should be the easiest problem for the company to solve! "OK, we're overnighting a laptop with a working webcam to your address in our HR system. Please use that known working camera tomorrow."
Cameras shouldn't be required. Learn to vet your employees.
At this point I do more digging/reviews and I either agree with your point and work with the PM to get them to be more concise, or I disagree with you and you’re released from the team for having values that don’t align with ours.
Either way my problem gets fixed because I had people put their cameras on and communicate like grown ups.
If you think you're not needed in a meeting, or the content isn't relevant, or someone else should be there instead, pretend you're an adult human and raise the issue. But if you're going to be in the meeting, pay attention. It's astounding to me that this could be a controversial statement.
Likewise if it's a problem my camera is off except in certain meetings (with clients or whatever) then bring it up to me. To this day that has yet to happen. Shockingly, work gets done, I listen to the important points of the meeting and talk when needed, and I don't have to let someone look at me while I'm not looking at them. It sounds like you have a problem communicating without a face to look at. If it helps, you can tape faces to the screen or request people put an avatar/photo of themselves up for you to talk at.
> > If I think you're wasting our time then you are, unless you convince me otherwise.
That's not a differing opinion, that's petulant and childish.
Your coworkers deserve the benefit of the doubt when they say you're needed for something.
Then raise those issues like an adult, rather than passive-aggressively tuning out.
> Do you spend far too much working time at meetings? Do you try to make important decisions in groups of more than 10 people? Do you have more than, let’s say, 15 co-workers under your direct management? Do you receive daily reports which you don’t read on the day you get them? Do you have days when you don’t have time to ring back the person who’s been looking for you to discuss an important matter? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then you yourself are part of the problem, because you’re no longer on your guard against ever-increasing bureaucracy.
Unless you're some kind of modern-day ornamental hermit, writing code is unlikely to be the end goal; more likely you're getting paid to produce something useful, something for which communicating and understanding the problem is often far more important than actual coding.
> If I raise the issue everyone gets all pouty.
This does not sound like a healthy working relationship, although I'm not sure the problem's on their end.
> There is an unspoken feeling of being forced to attend every meeting assigned to you just in case something feels useful.
Well, nut up and get over it. Either attend or don't, but don't half-ass it. The surest recipe for pointless meetings that go on for too long is meetings where half the participants are coding instead of paying attention.
Then it's time to move on. This is not a way mature adults should be handling such a situation.
A passive-aggressive reaction isn't mature either though, so maybe this is mutual and your company and you are actually perfectly in tune.
Agendas. They’re worth the 10 or 15 minutes you’ll spend writing it.
My biggest pet peeve is meetings that come out of Zoom chats “Let’s chat about that later in the week” and the subject of the meeting is “Continue Discussion from Zoom”. Awesome.
Only the minutes count as the results of the meeting. Works only in large, bureaucratic, political companies.
And if you can't, find a job that treats you like an adult.
Lots of open source software have been developed in the last 40 years with what we call now "fully remote team" without any need for webcams. Why it's suddenly becomes mandatory for some people that develop software ?
"Sorry, boss, this latest laptop didn't work just like the last 10 you sent that I definitely didn't sell on ebay"
Selling or not returning company equipment is a crime and will land you in prison. If you don't have appropriate reach in a given jurisdiction to use the police force there you probably shouldn't be hiring there anyway.
San Francisco?
Couldn’t they just say they use a VPN?
That policy has kind of stuck around with our team, and now people rarely turn on their cameras during team meetings. I would prefer to see peoples’ faces, but it seems I'm in the minority, and I’ve given up on trying to advocate for it.
I can also understand how Windows and Mac users might be hesitant to put their full trust in the technology, as it does occasionally glitch and blur out more or less than it should. Virtual Backgrounds also don't really help with poor lighting, or pandemic induced weight gain, etc.
So would say it's not that they didn't understand how virtual backgrounds work - just they were aware of their limitations and decided to err on the side of being lenient toward employees during a stressful period in a lot of peoples' lives.
In my current role all 1:1s, all meetings with clients, and all internal demos are cameras on by policy. I have friends that work places where the rule is camera on all the time unless it's a larger meeting or there's a presentation or something.
The other is just to make work more fun. Beyond 3-4 people, everyone stays muted, and with no cameras, a lot of the jokes and banter just stops. Dead air is a soul-draining response to jokes (whether good or not) that an individual can only try so many times. This works well during scrum meetings (when it's just the small team anyway).
I say this as very much an introvert: meetings are tiring for me anyway; I'd rather they're not also boring.
I can understand interviews, but once a person is part of the team and team members have met with him often enough (with the camera on) to recognize his voice, what is the point of having the camera on?
> I know some people don't like this, but it improves communication and team cohesion in a noticeable way.
This is one of those things for which there is no True Method. Yes, a lot of people have better team dynamics with the camera on. And yes, a lot of people have worse team dynamics with it on. Mandating one way or the other is suboptimal.
Human social interaction is deeply dependent on facial communication.
It's a broad statement, and not clear how applicable it is for work purposes and for which category of work.
Also, while it has its positives, it also as clearly has its negatives. Most miscommunication is due to misreading of visual cues. I can say it certainly is nice to be able to talk to people and not have them register any frown I may have, when the frown is unrelated to them. Not having to modulate my facial expressions frees up my brain to focus on the content of the meeting.
In my experience, people who seem to need facial communication do exist[1], but it's not a universal thing and likely not the majority. It's annoying when instead of phrasing it as an accommodation they would like to have, they try to make objective sounding statements to support their preference.
[1] I'm guessing that set has a strong intersection with the set of people who used to insist that they be able to travel pre-COVID to meet other team members as "in-person interactions are more effective". They certainly are - for them.
The only exception is one on one work meetings, like pairing, where both of you are going to be looking at code or something and the video serves no purpose.
Funny question, as it should be asked the other way round. People have been having remote audio only meetings for quite long - videoconferencing was very costly until recently.
In my company, it's a rare exception that people turn the camera on during meetings. When COVID hit and everyone switched to remote, I can't think of a single person in any of the meetings I've attended (including 1:1) who wanted the camera on - with the exception of introductions when people were new to the team.
It's not at all surprising as prior to COVID we had meetings with people located in other offices all the time (as well as some remote workers) - it was almost always audio only.
What performance management practices or metrics worked well for you?
I've been a programmer for the last 30 years. I can solve any problem. I've created more than $1B value for companies I worked for in my career. That alone makes everything you said about cameras or strong vetting or online track records simply invalid.
Instead take the time to find out who you're talking to and if they make sense. If you can't, first hire someone who can. And if you're hiring so fast that you can't tell whether you hired the same person as who showed up, then you're hiring too fast. Stop trying to out-grow time.
I agree about the raising alarm bit, that stuff needs to happen very quickly.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674503 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002690
That sounds suspicious. I don't know anyone who "can solve any problem". And in order to deliver larger value you need to work in a team. How can you be an effective team member with a fear of video calls?
LOL, maybe because video calls are not part of that?
> I don't know anyone who "can solve any problem"
that's what happens when you hire for "seniors" but pay junior salary: you get juniors occupying senior positions. Not surprised that's all you know - the industry does that a lot.
So just an FYI. Maybe people are turning their cameras off for a reason.
I think his concern, along with several others, is that you are seeing a lot of things that aren't there. As I said in another thread, visual cues are a great source of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Being aware that people can't see you can certainly improve your verbal communication skills.
Our company has offices in several countries, and long before the pandemic it was a given (part of new employee training) to not rely on these cues.
If you're operating in the US, it is still multicultural. As a simple example, about 40% of the US is introverted, yet most strongly extroverted people have little understanding of the differences. And they very often misread the facial expressions of introverts.
> I’m not sure why you would pick the lowest common denominator and choose the lower bandwidth, less engaging, less human way of collaborating.
In all these threads, you've failed to understand the low signal to noise ratio that video brings. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but comes with a thousand more falsehoods than words do.
As an example, where I work, meetings are a heck of a lot better than when we used to have them in person at work. The few that insist otherwise are simply unwilling to accept that they have not adapted, and the problems lie with them, and not with the format.
edit: I briefly doubted myself, but I checked on his LinkedIn and he has it listed as a 6-month engagement in 2013, with a significant gap until the next role. Even mentioned him to my wife in chats during that time span.
"I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck."
"So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch."
"So um, Milton has been let go?"
"Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the glitch. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally."
"We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end."
Faux identities, sub-hiring for work, outsourcing to low cost countries, even stuff like hiring actors for interviews and intimidation tactics (sic) plus a lot lot more.
Hiring (especially remotely) is a game and at some level you need to incorporate some anti-fraud techniques.
A lesser form of fraud, but still insidious at this point, are the templated resumes that misrepresent work experience. They will list a top line item in "work history" of something that sounds like tech startup, but in actuality isn't a company at all. It's just an open source project, that no one actually uses, with a website. Apart from the items listed, the candidates never have any legitimate work experience. It smells like a way to get resumes past any ATS keyword filtering and/or less-experienced recruiters.
And usually, the candidate hasn't really written much code at all in the repo. Just a smattering of readme updates, config changes, and maybe some bug fixes amounting to less than ~100-200 SLOC over the span of months.
In 100% of these cases we've seen so far, the resumes look exactly the same, including formatting/layout/etc. The projects all exist under the "OSLabs Beta" github orb [1] and the resume also lists a tech talk they did under the "SingleSprout Speaker Series" moniker. Most often, there is no actual evidence of them doing this talk, but in many cases you can find someone else doing the same talk topic on youtube if you search.
SingleSprout is a recruiting organization, so it seems at least somewhat likely that they are the ones shepherding this process, though I have no evidence of that. It could just be that they partner with this OS Labs entity as part of their candidate funnel. Whatever the case may be, this is at best (if I'm being charitable) a gross misrepresentation of candidate experience.
N.B. I am 100% OK with hiring folks based on (F)OSS experience. An active github is actually something I select for and, if its available, I will spend significant time reviewing such that I can have a meaningful discussion with the candidate about their work. These candidates are different entirely (for hopefully obvious reasons).
[1] https://github.com/oslabs-beta
EDIT: Wanted to add some clarification here that this post is about the candidates involved, on the topic of hiring woes that OP brought up, but not about the specific entities I mentioned. It may just be incidental that all of the resumes we've seen have had the aforementioned patterns. It is not my intent to malign any of the orgs I referenced.
To be fair, I wouldn't call this a "problem" insofar as it doesn't cause any meaningful pain apart from extra noise in the funnel. Given how poor the signal-to-noise ratio is in most hiring funnels, the impact is more or less de minimis.
I do still review every submission, at least in a cursory way, just in case the candidate has other legitimate experience and/or novel work on the github they link to.
And as such, as I've stated elsewhere in this thread, I still review every one of these in earnest.
Interestingly though, very few of the resumes I describe actually list CodeSmith at all. So I didn't make the connection immediately.
Grossly misrepresenting work experience in a job application does sound a bit like misrepresenting a material fact in order to obtain action by another party, where the other party relies on the misrepresentation and suffers injury from it.
Now I wouldn't want to have bootcamp graduates prosecuted for fraud, and it would be near impossible to put any concrete number on the damage anyways, but I do wonder if bootcamps that systematically abet graduates to commit fraud run afoul of any laws.
Hyperbole on resumes is the sine qua non of the hiring experience. This is no different, just a more systematic form that I'm not used to seeing historically.
never thought of for resume
Seemed to work really well specifically with city government jobs (New York), based on the response/application ratio. I'm guessing it may have to do with their antiquated systems.
That's plain old keyword stuffing.
IMO, this technique has been exaggerated to the point of being counterproductive.
As soon as the interviewer discovers that some claimed experience on the resume was a lie, they can't trust the rest of the resume. The interviews get harder and the interviewer starts looking deeper for other inconsistencies or outright lies.
Often, discovering outright lies on someone's resume is sufficient to drop them out of the hiring pipeline completely.
Spamming keywords that you don't actually know might get you into flawed companies that don't know how to screen or interview candidates, but those generally aren't good places to work.
The main thing I was talking about is using something like tiny white color text to reiterate stuff from their post. Or literally say I don't have any experience with X, Y, and Z. It's not lying, a printout doesn't show it, but it can trick the system.
One other example might be using the same inflated wording that job postings use (puffery?). Using fancy jazzed up language sometimes helps, especially if it includes keywords that are reasonably true or a matter of opinion (like the job posting saying it's a great opportunity or cutting edge tech).
These resumes however are all identical to one another. It's a different situation, but that notwithstanding— we still do review all these and your sentiment very much aligns with my own.
SingleSprout is much bigger today so maybe things could fall through. But it is unlikely that they would be willingly or knowingly shepherding this process. I'll point them to this thread so they're aware of what's going on and can chime in if they'd like.
I'm happy to edit my post to add any needed language to properly represent anyone mentioned.
No mention of the CodeSmith bootcamp, although I had deduced they were probably a bootcamp grad due to their degree in a separate field.
Also fishy is that one of their experiences just lists "stealth startup" as the company name, now I'm wondering if that role existed at all. Thanks for the heads up here.
That said, I'd encourage you to still review the candidate as you would any other. I try to give all folks the benefit of the doubt, even if I don't entirely agree with this particular practice. They may have some bright spots in the code you're actually able to check out. It's a great topic for conversation if you choose to have a call with them as well.
That said, as a bootcamp grad myself, it personally irks me when I see other bootcamp grads try and misrepresent their bootcamp projects as work experience. I know that some bootcamps direct their students to do exactly this, but that doesn't make it okay.
I guess it works though. I feel like I'm always the one pointing out to our recruiting team that certain jobs on a resume are not actually jobs. If someone else is doing the tech screen, they may just make it through.
I love when candidates are up front about things like this, seeing a cover letter thats akin to "Hey, I'm just getting my started in this industry. I graduated <bootcamp-x>, I would love to get some feedback on the work I did on <project-x>."
I have no degrees myself, very much identify with the self-learning journey.
How did you due diligence the candidate? Background check? Docs to confirm they are US based?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953
Actually I wouldn't even dismiss them... I'd list them as "never having shown up" so they were terminated for cause. Last thing I would do is give an unsub login credentials, e-mail access, etc. so they can continue to perpetuate their fraud.
The DL or State ID card is the de facto national ID card.
Anyone can have a Driver's License, however the newer DLs in many states have the optional citizenship validation and marking, so those can be used as well.
SS Card (unless stamped not for employment or the electronic equivalent) proof of eligible to work.
US passport proof of identity and of citizenship, and of course citizens can legally work.
Probably 99% of US Citizens will have some combination of these as their I-9 eligibility documents.
Permanent residents will likely have a DL/State ID and their green card.
If you look at the I-9 page https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/form-i-9-acceptable-docume... there are a significant number of other documents, which many HR departments seem completely unaware of, like special endorsements on foreign passports and special eligibility documents, or military IDs or Tribal IDs for proof of identity.
Not to say this would not work, but candidates would need to black out/ cover up information the employer cannot view.
I had to get my "badge" 1h away. Had to be sponsored, multiple forms of ID, and an active paperwork on file. Full handprints were taken for both hands. Pictures as well.
Basically if I tried even KIND OF, I'd be going to federal prison. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Some time ago (~6 months) my company was looking to hire a programmer.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669193
> and would say something like this on a public forum
Why, is it a crime against humanity, or what? Based as well on my experience, there are things said constantly in public forums that are much worst than this.
How high is the moral pedestal you are standing on?
Of course there are many talented developers from India, but unfortunately they are overshadowed by the massive number of frauds to the extent that even people in an industry overflowing with performative leftists can't help but be a little prejudiced despite ourselves.
Good Indian devs, please run the frauds out of the industry one way or another. It'll be good for you as well as the industry as a whole.
This got a good laugh out of me. This is a perfect description of the so called Left in America. I am totally stealing this.
Too sleazy for me. I'm basically selling my brand to another company. If companies get smart and create an employee blacklist, it becomes a lot harder for me to be employed down the line. (Hrm, maybe I should start a blacklist.)