Comment by __d | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __d | Hacker News Reader

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Early 2010's, Wall St software tech vendor: I had a candidate show up for an interview, in person, go through the preliminaries and then sit down in a meeting room for the detailed questions.

As we got into it, the candidate often asked me to repeat the question. I was happy to do so, but after a few times, I was already taking care to speak slowly and clearly, and it was still happening a lot.

Then I noticed a quiet murmuring sound after I'd asked a question. It was like .. a TV on in the next room or something. I ignored it at first, assuming it was someone else in the next room, but then it seemed like it was only happening after I'd asked a question, and before the candidate answered.

I was now pretty suspicious, but confused: what was going on? The candidate was flubbing the interview anyway -- their understanding was pretty shallow and they didn't appear at all confident in the material, so I wrapped up the interview, and showed them out.

As we were walking to the door, I stood beside them for the first time. And that's when I saw the earpiece: the candidate had a hearing aid-like earpiece in, with a wire running into their collar.

I was basically too surprised to do anything, and by this point we were at the elevator, so I just let them leave.

The way I figured it, afterwards, was that they had someone on a radio who they thought would help them with the interview. But either the radio was noisy or they just needed more time for the answer, so asking me to repeat the question was for the benefit of their remote assistant. If they'd been better at it, even had I seen the earpiece, I'd have assumed it was just a hearing aid. Fortunately, even with the remote assistance, they didn't pass.

Never happened again, but I can tell you I casually check everyone I've interviewed since for earpieces.

Plenty of this in remote interviews, even if it's just people googling answers. I was slightly frustrated with one candidate and spelled the term I'd just used for him so he could search for it.

Part of me suspects that this is a major reason for the push on RTO. If you hire people remote who used any one of dozens of mechanisms to cheat.. it can be hard to correct. You could have a candidate who does great on your interview then fails to produce a single PR in 3 months on the job.

Speculation aside, this means you have a bad interview process.

If your interview isn't screening for the work you want somebody to do then it's not a good metric for finding successful employees.

I think the fraud is asymmetric. It's relatively easy for me to hire someone to perform the work the employers wants for X hours one time (i.e. interview), but relatively difficult for me to subcontract it reliably for 40 hours every week.

This asymmetry exists regardless of how representative of real work the interview process is, short of a full-time engagement.

If he fails to deliver on the job, put them on a PIP and get rid of them.

If he actually delivers good work, who cares if he cheats?

The loss is three months of salary and the cost of hiring a replacement. Taken en masse, especially for smaller firms, quite a debilitating sum.

Is he actually doing the work? Is just copying code from OSS projects and does not actually understand it? Not only will this cause legal liability, but when the team is under stress will he just disappear or be able to solve an issue?

He already lied once. Why not lie more?

Lying is already rampant on both sides of the hiring process, and expected. The high stakes and algorithmic nature of (tech) hiring is the real problem - the rewards are great and the exploits are obvious.

Reminds me of an old Soviet comedy where a student taking exam in university with an ear piece. https://youtu.be/vADlGmX7-qU

Or the over-the-top cheating scene with Chevy Chase from "Spies Like Us"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaSUOFleNRU

It's nearly 40 years old and it still makes me laugh every time.

Doctor. Doctor. Doctor. Doctor.

In my country this isn't "common" but it's way more common than in other countries.

There was a cheating scandal in Sweden a few years ago with students using earpieces and someone feeding them answers from a leaked test during the equivalent of SATs

Or getting questions to secure placement for future candidates.

Yeah, I did wonder about that, but they could've just recorded the interview.

Although that did happen, but I think that was the recruitment agencies: they'd debrief their candidates after their interviews, and the next time they sent someone in, they'd be prepped for the whiteboard design exercises we'd used previously. I ended up with a dozen different questions that I rotated, which seemed to be enough.

General interview questions were often prepped too. Our phone screen question list had to grow quite long before it seemed like the effort to cram/prep was too much trouble.

Why would you continue to use that contracting agency if they were clearly gaming the interviews?

It's a tough call.

Firstly, all agencies prep their candidates to some extent. They know your stack, they know what skills and experience you're looking for, so they make sure the people they send in match the profile, and you know, just bone up on the important things a bit before the interview.

It's not a stretch to go from that to saying "and they'll ask about X and Y, so make sure you refresh your memory on that".

And then it's not far to outright "here's the list of stuff we know they've asked recently -- do your best!"

The worst offenders would get a grumpy phone call and sit out the next few rounds of recruitment, but ultimately you want the candidates, so ...

I had this happen in a remote interview recently. I think the candidates helper had a language barrier problem. They almost made it through.

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