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> 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.

maybe it only comes into play so you dont use thd training to l3ave and get a higher paying job?

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.

>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.

Back in the late 60s/70s, when I was in university, I knew a bunch of IBMers (those were the days when your System/360-67 came with a flock of IBM staff). The standard for onboarding was that during the first 6 months, a new hire was flown here and there for courses. The goal was to make them feel valued as an IBMer, so that they'd want to stay forever.

That sort of thing probably made more sense when it wasn't at all uncommon for people to stay with the company for a decade or decades. I know a number of people at IBM with tenures in the 25 to 30 year range.

SAP has (or at least had, back in '98) a policy where the first 3 months after being hired, you'd be entering a full-time training program: during this time, you would get your full salary paid and receive a free set of training courses 9-5; people usually just checked emails before and after, so this wasn't really on top of another job. The process got you certified in SAP basis, ABAP, effective teamwork and other modules.

After that training, we would maintain monthly lunches with our training group and exchange anecdotes about our respective departments. The company benefitted enormously in the sense that employees that started at the same time, but would work for different departments, already got a wide network across different functions and departments from the beginning, something that normally takes decades to build, and employees already had valuable contacts and information that they could task about with their co-workers in their own departments.

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.

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'.)

Constant stream of college grads brought in as interns. Just select the hungry ones with hustle and indoctrinate them. This is a typical MO for large established corporations.

I work for a smaller company that typically only has 1 job opening at a time, and low turnover. I agree that big corps do what you said and hope for the best, but I don't think it's a valid strategy for a small company.

Especially since letting people go is emotionally damaging, even when they are incompetent. If they have barely enough skill to do the job, my ethics wouldn't let me condone firing them.

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.

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.

A strategy I've seen is that you can make only the new hires work on-site for their first year or so. Once they've proven themselves in their first year, they can start working remotely.

I've seen this strategy adapted for remote. A friend of mine started using IntelliJ's Code With Me for remote pair programming sessions.

I guess it's possible that if the new hire isn't legit, they might send a better person, but since those sessions were quite regular, plus they were also doing "remote stand-ups", it would be tougher to always be able to send the same replacement and / or not get caught.

It’s not just for an interview. Remote work environments allow scammers like this to skate by for years while it’s a lot harder to bullshit in person.

Perhaps the most secure way forward is to make working remotely a "senior perk" that you earn after 6 months or a year of working in person.

Or just require that the person interviewing holds their ID up to the camera, and then do the same on their first day of work. I mean, I assume HR requires some form of ID when setting things up anyway.

> 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].

[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...

Have you written this full story in detail? Sounds genuinely fascinating.

I hope you're doing okay now?

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.

Would definitely love reading a write up of this with more details. Super fascinating

"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."

Huge red flag. Nobody provides training, especially not for one's own interests.