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Comment by djitz | Hacker News Reader

A company I was working for wanted to bring on a couple of freelance devs for a short-term project and I had to handle the interviews.

I ended up uncovering a whole scheme where an experienced dev in the US would hop on the calls/video interview and then the actual work would be handed off to some other people based overseas.

If you tried to contact the “dev” for something, your call would be routed to a google voice number and you’d receive a text message in somewhat broken English shortly after.

Their scam only lasted a few hours with us, but I often wonder how well they are able to pull this off.

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I was once pulled in to observe (in the “are you seeing this shit?” sense) an interview where someone off screen was answering questions and the person on camera was moving his lips. I’m not sure if they wanted me to share in the joke, or verify that there was no form of latency that would make lips and audio fail so badly to line up. I’m pretty good at pattern matching. There was no pattern. It was two guys pulling a fast one. Or at least trying to.

This was an outsourcing group. In the grand scheme of things, “white people are stupid” is not entirely wrong, but there’s a line you know. And there are lines beyond that line. And then there are these assholes off in the distance.

Had similar while hiring for a Sr Dev. The person who first joined the call was not able to articulate any of the frontend or backend work they had done at the previous contracted company.

Call goes static, call drops.

"Person" rejoins. Who is obviously a completely different person who was able to thoroughly fill in the previous details missed.

We ended the call there. Mistake: didn't require video for the session when the first individual proclaimed they were having issues with video.

I’m floored by this. We have a sr engineer who conducted an initial technical screen and swore he saw this happening, the person on screen moving his mouth while someone else talked and wrote the code. My managers recounted this story to me, laughing because they thought the suspicion was ridiculous and that the interviewer was just being paranoid (they had not been on the call). Turns out he was not paranoid…

I did this for a friend to help him land a job. We got away with it.

Do you think you helped anyone in this scenario?

My friend, who is still earning a 200K salary 9 months later. He got terrible initial reviews, but they kept him.

Sounds like they’re stealing that salary, not earning it. Hope they work at a place that will never affect me personally.

> Sounds like they’re stealing that salary, not earning it.

On the contrary – if someone has been at a company for 9 months & had terrible early reviews, the company had about ~6 months to deal with them. In my experience, truly bad hires get lukewarm 30 day feedback, negative 3 month feedback, and are on a PIP soon after.

If you're there after 9 months, it suggests you've demonstrated some level of value to your employer.

I can assure you there are plenty of underperforming, incompetent and even flat out absent employees cozied up in hidden little niches at all kinds of companies that don’t let them go for a variety of reasons.

Shhh!!!

this happens all the time in big companies, you find people who are basically just a potted plant in the corner soaking up a salary and benefits.

(upvote) its encouraging to see real info like this here - especially when semi-anonymity supports that

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