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Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

I hope Andrew [0] — the college junior with morals who blew the whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author — gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently was having a hard time with that.

The author's sleuthing is reminiscent of Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg from 1989. [1]

[0] Andrew blogs at https://unfooling.com/, according to the article.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

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Perhaps at the end of the day that's what the scam was about, getting Andrew an internship. I mean if I was writing the movie that would be the twist at the end

He he. For a second, that's what I thought as well. But I want to believe the story is legit.

> I hope Andrew [0] — the college junior with morals who blew the whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author — gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently was having a hard time with that.

Excellent point.

I've been wondering about ways to test students on "trust/morals" and decided its one of the most valuable yet least well understood qualities. Employers generally rank skills, knowledge, salary, even age/gender/race above dependability/loyalty, or barely consider the latter at all.

Other than lengthy vetting and imprecise security clearance procedures this is such a hard quality to discern, and so costly when you miss the mark. The costs of defection, industrial espionage, and sabotage seem poorly quantified in HR. I think a corrosion of work relations has come about from devaluation of workers qua humans, and the corresponding disrespect people have towards their places of work. Is that inevitable under capitalism/efficiency?

And, harder question... does it even matter? Especially once AIs and remote agents take-over many jobs? Does a corporation care if the worker is an imposter and liar who abused a false identity to get the post, so long as they produce working results?

Is there a kind of moral Turing test here? What do work relations have to do with human-relations in the limit of the present trajectory?

>Does a corporation care if the worker is an imposter and liar who abused a false identity to get the post, so long as they produce working results?

It's definitely a concern when you need to worry about spies infiltrating your company

Also - how likely are they to be able to continue doing so, and how much of my companies sensitive information is being leaked to who knows where by whom? Including data that opens up the company to some giant liability lawsuit or PR issue later?

How would you like to constantly wonder if Steven in HR, who has enough of your personal info to take out loans in your name, can just vanish tomorrow without a trail?

I've simply asked candidates 'tell me about a time you had to make a moral judgement'. I'm kind of surprised that it's not a more common question, but of course that makes it work - truly immoral people would have a made-up anecdote if it came up regularly.

I like "Tell me about a time you failed miserably, absolutely and unequivocally, and how you recovered from it."

It's surprising how illuminating the responses are.

I remember in one job the company had a set of questions we had to ask candidates on top of the technical questions. One of them was “what would you describe as your biggest weakness?”

I always grown when I have to ask that question because you always get some stupid answers where people say things like “I’m just too organised” or similar spin to make a negative sound like a positive. Frankly I can’t blame them because it’s a ridiculous question to ask.

However this one candidate not only listed off one flaw but three of them. I remember thinking “shut up, shut up, shut up. You’re not supposed to answer this honestly!”

However this ironically turned out to be the reason I hired him. I figured if he is that honest and able to identify his flaws then he must have a good work ethic.

He turned out to be one of my best ever junior hires.

I tend to coach the question to prevent people from giving it a softball, with something like "I have certainly caused my fair share of crisis, what I'm interested in is the experiences you ..."

It's an adequate test to filter out folks who are simply incapable of accepting responsibility for their actions, or who have yet to really shoulder enough responsibility to meaningfully fail.

I'd have thought a lot of completely regular candidates would be a bit stumped by that (especially since many non-trivial moral judgements are personal life stuff that's really off limits for interviews)

Although maybe that's the point: psychopathic candidates end up making up fairly unconvincing heroic stories whereas regular people look a bit confused and maybe mention something they didn't do because they couldn't trust it was legitimate or ask if their decision to volunteer their time for $cause counts.

I think it goes without saying that interview questions are asking about your work life,. altho it might help if the interviewer specifies that anyway, i.e. "Tell us about a time you had to make a moral judgment at work"

The point is more that "moral judgements" like the time you pointed out that the company might violate the AGPL might actually be good stories to tell an interviewer if you've lead a drama-free working life building CRUD apps for regular employers, but are pretty hard to recall when the first thing the words "moral judgement" bring to mind are the time you had to stop interacting with X because they did Y.

I would put it as "Tell me about a time when you had to take an ethical stand or make a choice based on ethics."

I'm big on personal Integrity.

It doesn't seem to win me any points.

In fact, it seems to actually count against me, as I'm sometimes accused of being "snobby."

Ah, well...

STORY TIME:

A few months after I had been promoted (the first time) to a manager, one of my new employees was hired by my boss' boss, while I was out on medical leave.

When I got back, I found out that he had made a promise to the new (now hired) employee, that he was not "legally" allowed to do, and had to let the guy do it (because he promised).

He asked me to sign it off.

I declined, sure that my job was in jeopardy.

Surprisingly, he took it well, and it was never mentioned again (until now). He actually had a lot of Integrity, and was uncomfortable with it (it was a mistake; not deliberate).

I once had a job where my manager asked me to fake some results to deceive a customer. I refused. Later the manager apologised to me and upon reflection agreed it was wrong, and the matter was never brought up again. But I had a better relationship with that manager after that.

A couple suggestions:

* take them on a tour of your chocolate factory

* ask them to pull a magical sword out of a stone

Unless their moral karma somehow bypasses keyword filtering, leetcode, and discrimination, unlikely.

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