He speculated that some unscrupulous but relatively knowledgeable guy was sitting in for the interviews, and then coaching the incompetent applicants day to day for a cut of their pay.
In the end he just let the contract lapse. Not a whole lot you can do since it would be really hard to prove any kind of malfeasance, and to make the accusation would just make you look crazy and paranoid.
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. It's a story a friend told me a long time ago. I didn’t and couldn’t fact-check it.
The husband’s theory came from the fact she apparently mentioned her husband was also a software consultant.
Depending on the industry, it's definitely not fine.
I work in healthcare. If one of our employees was giving a foreign national access to our internal systems, that would be a Very Big Deal.
In practice, when you are a developer you get to know lot of infrastructure and even sometimes customer secrets from Facebook, Apple, Google, PayPal, etc.
This is because the tech people actually speak together, ask feedback and share information.
When a doctor doesn't know, he asks the other doctors for opinion.
There are even websites for that (StackOverflow, GitHub, etc).
It's fine. I trust my employees to use their best judgement when making such choices.
It doesn't mean these 3rd-party guys will get access to your systems.
Even the NSA asks for help, you can see them in the reverse-engineering forums, in MediaWiki conferences, etc.
Experienced developers are not teenagers and act rationally, they don't do 10 years of career to suddenly risk losing all their trust/friends and reputation, all that for 5-minute fame on Twitter for a leak that is likely non-strategic to the outsiders.
As long as the work gets done...
No no, it's trivial to prove. You just ask them to work from a supervised location for a short period of time and that they can't have their phone at their desk. You just have to care.
Something like that would have taken extra time and effort, and the problem took care of itself. He had more important things to focus on.
And I think it would have been more difficult to catch than you think. We don't do pair programming, and it's kind of reasonable to ask for time to figure something out. I think the best he could have determined was the guy wasn't good, not any of the suspicions about the scam of cheating on the interview and getting outside help.
Yeah and how many other employees took themselves out the door because they had to compensate for the nonperformer? I've been in teams with these sandbags and it's infuriating.
None.
> I've been in teams with these sandbags and it's infuriating.
The guy was on something like a three month contract, and a good chunk of that time was on-boarding then slowly getting suspicious. When we bring on contractors we expect some of them to be duds, the only thing interesting about this guy was his weird behavior.
My perception after reading a lot of this thread is that there's so much bloat and checked-outness in the tech sector that it's probably very feasible as an employment strategy to bullshit your way into multiple 3-month contracts, sandbag your way through the onboardings then fail to be renewed (without having done a day's productive work) then rinse and repeat indefinitely.
I don't know how much longer that will persist now that the free money tap has been turned off, though.
It's another world from the startup sector I know where you could tell within a week that a guy wasn't any good and you'd instantly show them the door because you couldn't afford the dead weight for literally another day. shrug
Could they get hired at a tech company and put in level-appropriate work for two years? Without domain-specific knowledge and experience? You're saying 'work hard for two years' presumably by that you mean produce level-appropriate or above-level-appropriate work?
You're basically saying that you think just anybody off the street with a 100+ IQ can 'just get hired' at a tech firm and do dev work, for two years, and then coast?
There's definitely an opportunity here to make a bunch of money at least pretending to fix this problem. Or maybe capital just decides to bring everyone back into the office.
I imagine it would be a problem in the US too, just for other reasons probably. You are essentially giving confidential work info to a third party that has no relationship with your employer.
Not a lawyer, but I don't see a deception charge for "under-performing and getting fired for it (while having 2 jobs)" faring well in courts.
Think about it: if you were performing your work well, despite having 2 jobs, what would the deception be? You promised to deliver work on your own, you deliver it on your own. The other job has no intersection with your other one, they are entirely independent. The only difference between that situation and the same situation but poor performance is literally just your performance. Poor performance doesn't automatically turn that situation into deception.
The law is interpreted by human beings, you know, it's not a 'code is law' situation. Remember that a jury would make the final decision. I can see a good lawyer using an argument along the lines of 'well, you said agreed to work FULL time. If a bucket is already FULL would a reasonable person expect the bucket to be able to carry any more load?' and winning.
If there is fraudulent intent it is illegal. The intent is what matters here.
How do you prove the employee wasn’t simply incompetent?
Wow. I can't imagine contracting work from people (and giving them access to commercial-in-confidence data) and yet not knowing with 100% certainty 100% of the time that the people I'm talking to are the people I'm contracting with, you know, the ones I background-checked, the ones I can hold accountable in court.
You know what happened with remote schooling? Teachers didn't demand that pupils turned on their cameras because of the same 'it'll make them uncomfortable' excuse. Result? Kids turned their computers on, their cameras off and played minecraft all day for 18 months.
Don't be odd about this. Nothing at all about face to face contact is uncomfortable for adults. That shouldn't be something that's normalised and it's detrimental to society to allow for it. You are literally reading an article that outlines all the negatives about your 'cameras are uncomfortable' mindset and you still haven't twigged?
Keep doing it your way, but don't be surprised when you've had your entire company's data exfiltrated and sold to a competitor by the 'person' you were too uncomfortable to ask to appear on video.
And don't for one microsecond retain people who mysteriously only produce quality work when 'unsupervised' or 'overnight' or when they're 'on the phone all the time.' Fire them! You have no idea who they're talking to or who's really doing the work. They're not an asset to your company, they're a bullshit artist!
Even in the same company I had teams where no one would turn on their camera and some where everybody would.
First, the top performers on my team right now are essentially ghosts. One I just went on a business trip outside the country with, and I hadn't seen his face for a year and I might not see it again ever. Another one is my "lieutenant" and in two years I've seen him face to face twice. No video. He's probably leaving the country soon and I don't care, because he'll be in the same longitude.
The other point, since this is FAANG, how is the conversation going to go with HR if I want to terminate someone because they won't turn on their camera?
Well, I guess going by what you've said they won't care either. I don't know how you can run a company productively over the long term if nobody cares, though.
If you think looking at a camera view of someone will prevent them from defrauding you, you are an ideal con artist’s mark because you’re taking your cues from the easier parts to fake.
This is also fine. But look at the reply below yours, when the 'team manager' is littering their comments with 'my top performers are ghosts' and 'I don't care.'
Your strategy involves focus and care applied through one perspective. My strategy involves focus and care applied through another perspective. Yours is arguably better, but I don't think mine is insecure, mine is perhaps a reaction to some of the nonsense I'm seeing in this thread in which managers admit they have staff who they think are outsourcing their work or just can't do the job but are 'uncomfortable' dealing with it. I don't think they're uncomfortable, I just think they don't care. I can't stand don't carers. I've had to work on too many teams managed by don't carers and staffed with don't carers and I just don't get the mentality. It annoys me.