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Comment by byrneseyeview | Hacker News Reader

There's an interesting spin on this in Brooklyn's Russian immigrant community: there are companies that will give you fake references--and a crash course in the job you're supposed to have done.

Apparently they do a pretty good job. Since immigrants from the former USSR are usually pretty smart, skilled, and hard-working, they can be very rigorous and not lose students. An acquaintance did this many years ago: she learned SQL Server, and got references for a couple years of SQL Server experience, and now works at a Fortune 500 company.

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From a strict career perspective, this feels like it could be more valuable than college.

It's basically a way to hack the college > HR interface.

It's basically fraud.

Is it? If traditional college guaranteed excellent this would be fraud. Think of money vs. fake money.

But both college and experience are no guarantee of anything. They are more like a faint hope. Hopefully someone with this resume will be as good as the resume suggests they might be!

Now on the other, if this hard crash course + hard working intelligent people results in true valuable skills, then is it fraud? Isn't who ever hires them getting exactly what they hoped they would get? It's like someone slips you Australian dollars instead of US dollars, but enough of them that even after exchange fees you're left with exactly the amount of money you wanted.

At least with that method the candidate has some skills. I've seen CVs that are out-and-out lies in terms of what the candidate can do. And at least one faked reference, but we caught that as the candidate seemed good for the positions but had an air of "something not quite right" so we looked deeper.

And college is not? I believe that 'experience' is probably more valuable, even a few weeks', than 4 years of theory.

Many immigrants don't get their past experience working and educating in russia or wherever they came from recognized even though they have the skills so something like this to cut through the HR idiocy screen is useful.

In economics, this is called the signalling effect. And you're somewhat correct. The pure signalling/screening effect of college can probably be attributed to 50% of a person's wages wages over high school graduates.

Could be?

True story, +1. A fake diploma from the best Moscow University printed in Brooklyn? Нет проблем!

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