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Comment by genmud | Hacker News Reader

All of them do this, having been on both sides of the equation.

I can't tell you how much it hurts your soul to work at a consulting firm or implementation shop. I took a job once where they said I could hire a team of great engineers for a very complicated/technical contract, we talked before about how much salary/benefits/timeframe it would be to get the right folks onboard to meet some project deliverables.

Once I was onboard, it was like "oh, well you said you needed $X, but we only have budget for $Y, so you will need to make due with these jr resources". They suggested I work with the sales team to get more business for the things we wanted to do. I suggested they find a replacement and bounced from that clusterfuck.

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This is the nth time I see "have you experienced hiring fraud" ask-hn's in the last couple of months.

The frequency at which they show up on the front page makes me think someone's trying to build a narrative.

This is particularly concerning given that this website is also one of the tech sector's most respected hiring sites.

My main question isn't /whether/, as I have enough to go on that this is somehow deliberate. What I'm asking myself is what the ultimate goal of this is.

Any reason why you would suspect it is deliberate astroturfing rather than a frustratingly common problem?

Even with "frustratingly common" problems, recent-duplicate discussions are knocked off the front page with extreme prejudice. Plus you'd assume people who come to HN to ask questions also come to... read the front page, so they'd know that the exact same discussion has happened literally a few weeks ago.

Imagine if every week you got "ask hn: what's the best git tutorial?" or something equally trivial and open-ended on the front page. This simply does not seem like a natural occurrence.

Dude, no. The sheet number of times I've seen candidates point blank lie to my face in a zoom is to high. Spend some time at the manager's side of the table in the interview process and you'll see this immediately. This is a major problem.

This assumes I've never done any hiring... which I have done, massive amounts of.

You do get frauds. So what? It's always been the case. It hasn't appeared out of the blue this year, so why is there now an outcry about it? It hasn't increased one bit, all things considered. People have been running bait and switch scams since before the internet existed. Read up on penpal bride scams - you send a photo of a younger, more attractive sister or daughter and entrap a prospect. Or about "flattering portrait" matrimony scams - the same thing, but using paintings, since that was done in the middle ages, before photography.

So again, why is the narrative building being done?

Asking why "the narrative building" is happening presupposes it's some sort of coordinated thing, which I don't think it is. I agree that it's been going on since before widespread virtual work (I saw it first-hand almost immediately upon sitting on that side of the interview table). I don't agree that there's any sort of coordinated "narrative building" happening. You just have a bunch of junior managers or folks who have never hired before being shocked that people will try to make a lot of money by less than scrupulous means.

I don't believe in such closely occurring coincidences, which follow the exact same playbook. But even if (big if): why aren't these getting knocked off the FP for being re-runs?

It's a major problem, but it's not new. I worked for a consulting firm (not one anyone here has heard of) and it was an issue with in-person candidates just the same as it is with virtual candidates now. It might be more prevalent now because it's marginally easier to pull it off, but that's about it.

It got to the point where we actually had a manager suggest taking a photo of candidates when they interviewed to confirm that the person coming in when they got hired was the same person.

I have no reason to push a narrative, and I can tell you the same thing happened to my boss hiring someone for the team I’m on.

It's happened to everyone. I'm not even saying you made this up. You definitely have something to say about this, as it is a common occurrence.

What I'm saying is that it's worrying that there are many front-page posts that /ask specifically about this/. It's like facebook groups being flooded with "Ask FB: anyone live close to a 5G tower and get headaches?" Most people in cities do. It's the /question/ that builds the narrative. Not your anecdote.

So again, why is this specific point being dredged up this often recently?

> So again, why is this specific point being dredged up this often recently?

This sort of fraud has always been around, however covid-19 changed the equation dramatically in favour of the scammers, due to many more companies being willing and able to hire remote employees.

This has allowed the scammers to scale in ways that were previously not possible.

As the profitability increases due to scale, more scammers are attracted to it, which leads to more people experiencing it, which leads to more people talking and posting about it, which leads to those posts ending up on the front page of HN.

I don't think it's a driven narrative, however one of the consequences will be companies lowering their appetite for remote-only work.

> covid-19 changed the equation dramatically in favour of the scammers

I disagree. The same scam could be pulled any day of the year before the pandemic. And eventually those who saw the extreme profitability of this made a "plausibly deniable" outsourcing shop and ran things that way.

Yes, the scammers could have pulled this scam any day of the year before the pandemic, and I’m sure they did, but that’s only one side of the equation.

Now consider how many companies were willing to hire fully remote workers before the pandemic, and how many were willing to hire fully remote workers during and after the pandemic, and that will answer why the scammers have been able to scale.

>ultimate goal

Ending remote work?

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