My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

Life insurance companies (in the USA 20 years ago when I sold it) would require a medical exam for every life insurance application. If the applicant commits fraud by having someone else take the examination (usually a blood draw, height and weight measurement, and maybe a heart EKG for bigger policies), the policy is considered valid after two years. Even if the insurance company finds out fraud was committed, the benefit payout is guaranteed after two years.

What happens during the actual in-person interview that follows ??

I'm always amazed at the extent people go to to cheat. It gets to the point that you're putting in more effort than you would have to be successful without cheating.

I sometimes feel some people simply enjoy cheating too much. Its not about accomplishing a goal by any means necessary, its something about doing something wrong that certain people seem to enjoy.

If they can still answer the question and show evidence that they understand it, what's wrong with reference materials and googling?

- If the answers are so basic and guessable that one can both find and then deal with a printer to commit it to slow-RAM physical legacy memory, then the problem is not with the candidate

- People with such little self awareness that fail to perceive this problem have demonstrated why you don't want to work with them. The problem is not the fact that they were hotfixing answers straight to prod

- This was just a reverse racial discrimination security test. By identifying the non-authenticated user, you both demonstrated exemplary awareness of identity phishing attacks as well as a base standard that 2 people aren't the same based on their protected identity criteria

I think there is plenty of reason to think people who actually know the stuff instead of cheating would be better on average. It's a signal that they were smart enough and motivated enough to learn the material (basic algorithms/coding skills in this case)- both traits that would probably make them better on average at the job.

Being a good cheater is a useful skill that probably also helps people on average- but I doubt it's nearly as useful an indicator of future success as being good at the skills necessary to do well on interview questions (w/o cheating).

Based on how I believe the world works, and on larger patterns at play here, this general cultural trend (if this is in fact what it is) will backfire.

If this is deemed culturally acceptable, and one extrapolates this pattern further, there is little deeper value that a culture has to offer.

Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer.

A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full libraries and reference sites open and ready to go. This is actually how they will be doing their work (we hope!). Then judge on efficient lookups AND insightful comments on how to build upon the found knowledge.

Or, based on the above sample recognize that the process is really totally broken, that almost anyone coming in will work out well (the cheaters clearly lacked the skill or confidence of OP, yet did fine in the actual job), and either fix the criteria (obviously difficult based on the last decade of HN discussions on the hiring sh^tshows), or just cut wasting resources on extensive interviews and take the first N applicants and be done with it.

The problem is while you can’t control randomness, on average those roofs do fail much more.

But more broadly it’s amazing how far developers on HN will go to defend things that will mildly inconvenience developers.

It's not "right" or "wrong" - it's just a decision. There may be other choices and other decisions but to paint this one as flat wrong seems, well, wrong.

> They may not have found the very best person for the job

The vast majority of job searches do not have this as a goal!

Most companies want to hire somebody who's good enough relatively quickly for a price they want to pay.

The process did not fail in the same way my bear repelling crystal necklace has not yet failed me in repelling bears.

My process is that I hire only men. I have not yet had an underperformer. Hence, my process never failed.

At some level, fairness is important. And no, it's not important only when there is a law behind it.

- No country for old men

When the easier money dries up, that will change.

I don't bother prepare for client support calls, mostly because I don't want to do them and want to be considered incompetent at them so I am not asked to help in the future as much. So at least for me, presentations are nothing but more work.

Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all these presentations?” instead of “why do you all put so little effort in your presentations.”

If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because they don't care about the cheating or you getting an education either.

There's any number of situtations like this that happen in real life, from school, government, politics, work, etc. Not understanding these rules is much worse than being able to do some assignment in university.

I am curious to know what conclusion you draw from the anecdote about the test?

Is it that you aren't good enough because you tried your best and failed?

Or is it that the test is a fallible instrument, designed by a human being who works within the constraints of an institution and has no choice but to treat education as if it is a magic juice that it's his job to squirt into the students heads and then administer tests to determine if the juice stuck there or leaked out, thereby identifying the defective and leaky craniums?

Or is it that you seemed out of touch with what every else intuitively understood? ie. That they're being evaluated and that a negative evaluation can have profound consequences for the rest of their life, regardless of if the testing procedure is fair or not?

So if delivering a lousy presentation is good enough for whoever wanted the presentation, why go to the effort of making a great presentation? Are the rewards for that effort worth the expenditure? Probably not, which is why people are "spitballing" it.

This is the one thing that I always remind myself and my people, whenever the temptation arises.

If my cheating works, I could never stop myself from doing it again, bigger, causing much worse damage to me and people around me when I get caught.

If my cheating fails, I've lost more than what I could have gained anyway.

To me its a lose-lose. I'd rather get up and leave, or find another way than cheat.

And I hold that standard for people around me too. If I know they've cheated, even when I'm not involved or affected, that person or group and I are done.

Its a hard non-negotiable thing. And I think I'm better for it.

It's strange to me that anyone would care about people cheating at job interviews and not say CEO pay that's 1,000X the average employee. More power to those who can balance things in their favor against those who have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

However, I think you're being a little naive if you think the days of "yesteryear" were somehow different in man's capacity and willingness to do what he needs to do to survive.

    I mean in every facet of life we're basically awash in never before seen capacity to benefit from dishonesty.

    it isn't inherent to the discipline of technology itself anymore.

    Like, there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA

The reality is that humans have not fundamentally changed in hundreds of thousands of years. If we're doing it today, you can bet we were doing it yesterday and that we'll be doing it tomorrow.

I remember listening to a podcast recently that compared boys and girls in school. The takeaway was that girls generally try to do all of the work, whereas boys were far more likely to take short cuts to success. And this was the reason why boys were doing better in university and afterwards. The conclusion of the podcast was that we should be encouraging girls to try to take the same shortcuts as boys. It's a learned skill to know exactly what needs to be done to get what you want.

Maybe that's what's going on here. Rules, whether we like it or not, can be broken.

Which a lot of the blind demographic are from

> In business there is no cheating, there is only making money and not making money.

This attitude is very common among people I know. You ask "how the world can function if everyone were to think and act like that." We muddle through, is the answer.

Look at this "personality type" as you call it: People who bullshit their way through life, self-promote, swindle, grift, fake it til they make it, hustle, exploit people's good intentions, take credit for the work of others, and so on... They aren't weirdo sociopaths who simply go get an MBA. They're CEOs, SVPs, business and political leaders, the ultrarich. They're Presidents and Senators. They are the elite, the few who our society is set up to most highly reward. Of course people who want to get ahead are going to emulate this behavior. It's practical. It works in the world that we have set up.

I'd love to live in the Star Trek world. I'm one of those naive suckers who thinks hard work in the trenches should be rewarded. At work I often sit there doing the dirty gritty work that needs to get done, while peers write bullshit presentations and get face-time with the execs, and schmooze their way to promotion after promotion, and it sucks. If I was younger and had a lot more ahead of me, I'd probably cheat and grift like the rest of em, and if I could send a message back decades to 20-year-old me it would probably be "lose the ethical spine and take whatever you can."

I certainly agree though that cheating is a sad thing to build your life on, regardless of whether the system is broken or not. Obviously there are exceptions to this as things get more extreme, but a strong desire to work at amazon is not what I would call extreme lol.

The fact that people can just cheat in these interviews and not get PIP'd within 6 months, at an organization notorious for PIPing its under-performers, does illustrate how bad the screening process it. Not only do they need to shift back to in-person interviews, they also need to fix their process to actually test skills.

No it's the other way around. Hinton, basically the father of "AI" and other real experts who are involved in the creation of LLMs are massively divided about the future. Hinton even says the AI actually understands you. The fact that there's division among the real experts (ie not you or me) shows theirs legitimacy in the defense.

There's a fierce artificial downplaying of AI when it comes to programming. A lot of people say that it's not remotely close to replacing programmers. I think this is the delusional group. It's not replacing us yet, but it's obviously close and the trendline is unmistakable.

I think it occurs because a lot of people's identity rests on their actual ability to program. They think they're superior programmers and the fact that a machine is on track to trivialize the skills they take so much pride in causes them to dismiss the technology in the face of actual experts who fear and question it. There's bias on both extremes and one Hallmark of bias is when one fails to address the division and actual controversy.

You have failed to address the controversy instead you categorize people who "defend" AI as people who don't "understand" it and you imply it's some psychological quirk or bias people have. I agree somewhat, but clearly not all who "defend" AI are like this as their are preeminent experts who are on the "defence" side. Instead I think your behavior is an exhibition of other common psychological defensive quirks and biases.

I think you don't realize how it's a dog eat dog world out there and people will do anything to succeed. Maybe your born with talent, so you worship and defend that talent with calls to uphold "integrity." Others, however, will do anything in their power to stay afloat in the face of your "talent." It's more about survival for humans then it is about integrity. Do people really want to live a shitty life getting sub 100k salaries only letting people like you take up all the high paying jobs in the name of "integrity"? No. No one does... not even you, but you have the luxury of talent or ability to master those interviews... that is the only differentiator.

I bet if you couldn't pass those interviews you would be in the same boat. You defend integrity not because you are a stand up person, but because you have the ability to succeed without violating your integrity. That's all.

One thing to note about people is often their truth strangely aligns with their circumstance in life. Why? Most people do not seek actual truth. Instead they construct the truth as a scaffold to support themselves and the weight of their sins. You are no different. I'm pretty sure you are quite good at the technical interview and That strange alignment with your philosophy on interview integrity is Not a coincidence.

Personally I'm unique in this regard. I'm good at interviewing but in my quest in seeking the objective truth of the world... I have, to my own detriment, constructed a life where my truth is not in alignment with what I am in actuality.

If everyone who cheated and passed performed so well that they got promotions then the world would be a much better place than reality where most cheaters fail hilariously.

If you can't even be bothered to give employees a real interview you don't care about the company and at that point the company is already bloated.

What kind of person are you that when reading a story and seeing 100 wrong things you pick out the one thing that is arguable and die on that hill? An VLLM sycophant?

This is work we're talking about. If somebody will pay $250,000 because somebody else can answer a trivia question, people will figure out how to answer that trivia question correctly.

I don't have any problem with it. If your business is getting suckered by people with some 2-laptop scheme, it's on you to fix it. Or if the 2-laptop people end up being good enough at the job, who cares?

Specially with people thinking that the interview process is broken, but somehow the promotion process is pristine and unhackable.

One nuance that may help explain how the change happened is how the status of CS has changed in the last 20 years. Maybe its just my age bias, but there seems to be a perceptible change of how CS majors are viewed by society and that changes the type of people attracted to that curriculum.

It used to be that CS and engineering majors were the nerds who, as you say, "simply thought making stuff was cool." Nowadays, though, as CS commands a disproportionately large salary, it has higher status. This tends to attract more people who are in it the reasons of status and money, rather than for a fascination with the work. Anecdotally, when I ask people why they got into CS a surprising number now say something along the lines of "because it pays well."

It's my opinion that change in perspective can bias how one views cheating. If the curriculum is just a means to an end (i.e., if school is just a means to a degree, which is just a gateway to a job/paycheck), it seems to make cheating more palatable.

Promotions often have nothing to do with merit. It takes a lot of political manoeuvring, back room dealing, negotiations, packet building, documentation, positions trading, making allies to building support/consensus etc etc.

People who cheat are exactly the kind of people who are likely to win big in these processes.

Now we're in 2023 - where making money is cool and building things is just a necessary evil to achieve that.

Software is full of cheating. I am really convinced that maybe 85% (that's actually being generous) of developers have no idea what they are doing. They know enough to complete some tiny agile tasks and push a few lines into a pull request. These people are either suffering from imposter syndrome, deliberately cheating, or just don't care. All the real decisions are made by that last 15%. That's why almost nobody can write software anymore without a plethora of open source software delivering most of their product for them.

In my mind if you aren't part of that last 15% you are cheating whether or not its deliberate. Everybody wants to get paid.

If you want to reduce the amount of cheating in software then the industry must be willing to impose minimal standards of acceptable practice. The industry is not willing to do so.

There are a couple of reasons why such prolific cheating is allowed (and even encouraged):

* Developers are not taught to plan. I take this for granted being a military guy, but seriously I have seen many children with a greater planning ability than many developers tasked with a new product effort. Its like the abstractness of software completely destroys any capability to put simple steps in order. This is why many businesses will offload this to business analysts and project managers.

* Developers are not taught to write. Although many of these people have bachelor's degrees so many cannot put their thoughts into even a simple bullet list.

* There are no ethics in software. The closest thing for most developers might be something like an NDA at initial on boarding. Otherwise, ethics is entirely off loaded to a legal team who mandate areas of compliance.

* The goals of hiring/employment often do not align to the skills required to perform product delivery. This indicates employers have completely lost faith in candidate preparation and/or candidate availability and are just willing to take what they can get. Typically that means dumbing things down to widen the pool of availability.

* Many developers are grossly entitled. The most important word for most developers: easiness. Comparatively nothing else matters, and they will fight you to death on this.

Edit: two grammar corrections.

Sorry to say, but it never was. Anti-cheaters have always been the extreme minority in every profession since the dawn of man.

I am curious to hear more about what you mean by this.

I crave living in a high trust society. I've attempted to act as though I do (though not with complete success), but reality often rebuffs me. I am discouraged by the high (and seemingly increasing) "capacity to benefit from dishonesty," especially as I feel powerless to meaningfully affect this trend/condition.

It sounds like you see ways in which society can shift to be higher trust. Can you elaborate?

I could easily say "ethnic Chinese" and be accurate, but what about the mid-IQ Frat guys from the "fly-over" states? all pale skins.. So I thought about it at the time and it seemed like sports teams, fraternities, strong social ties with a lot at stake.. those groups, not ethnicity, were a common theme.

In my own wanderings, since travelling internationally and gaining some maturity, I believe that calling out an ethnicity is indeed racist in a mild way. I agree with both "lots of students from India cheated" and "I am concerned about ethnic stereotype" .. both have some basis in reality.. We as animals are wired to see "us" and "other" .. so.. you have to choose to apply some sense and mercy, or not.

It functions because the premise, that interviews actually work as filters to choose the best candidates, is false.

It also works because finding the answers for a question is a skill, likely more valuable at work than memorizing a dozen of algorithm implementations.

The current interview culture is a joke.

Quite possibly that some commentators think that way, but I doubt that cheaters suddenly stop cheating after the interview, particularly not if it worked out so well for them. I rather think they'll continue their path of alternative facts; blaming others for failures, mis-attributing successes, mis-charecterizing their contributions, lying, gas-lighting, bullying and even squeezing their colleagues out of their job. There might be work environments where this is a net positive for the organization, but I can't think of one right now.

And when real people are faced with a broken system which penalises honesty and rewards cheating, many will choose pragmatically rather than idealistically.

* Candidates now lie about experience. * promotions are given for loyalty, not contribution. * Companies cheat on hiring using false job descriptions and fake career carrots. * Your performance at work does not matter. Advance your career by interview prep, not excelling at your role. * Prestige (ex-FAANG, Ivy league degree) matter more than hard work.

I've noticed that tech companies are now filled with people who have zero interest in computer software. Management at tech companies is comprised of non-technical people.

https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a...

Cheating is okay because most interview processes is BS to start with. In most cases the interview itself is a dog and pony show, often reflecting the outright incompetence of the interviewers or organizations that are hiring.

> I guess the silver lining is there will probably be incredible opportunity down the road to combat this,

You are being naive here. Many people value honesty in principle, but are not willing to enforce it in practice. For example if they catch a close, likable colleague or friend in the act of cheating, they will not fire them.

check out the flags at the top of the list.

So, what happens when a company succeeds is that the competent people eventually either get tenured, or they get forced out by bozos (I'm using this as a term of art. Look up the bozo effect.) Eventually, the bozos win, and the company becomes unable to do anything other than extract monopoly rent. Then, some technology or regulatory shift arrives, and the incumbent gets forced out by a startup, or they somehow shed their bozos for a while.

So, if you are competent and honest, you have three choices:

- Learn how to be productive despite the promotion criteria. This is the path to tears and burn out, because most of your colleagues will only be good at gaming interviews / promotions, and your attention will be split between that and doing your job (and probably their jobs), placing you at a significant disadvantage.

- Somehow become the tenured engineer on top of this mess, and try to create pockets of competence in the organization. Ruthlessly detect + fire the bozos. This isn't fun either.

- Leave for a startup that's targeting a weak and foolish incumbent, and then leave when the startup grows up and becomes the weak and foolish incumbent (a good sign that this is happening is that the founding engineering team is leaving, or that your boss's boss is incompetent.)

Note that the last option is the lowest stress one for technically strong engineers. It is very hard to fake your way through knowing what you are doing when the entire company has direct visibility into your work.

If you can somehow solve the above problem then you can build a company larger than any of the FAANGs.

It seems like you are implying that a person who gets an MBA is the type of person who would cheat on a test. This fits with a ubiquitous contempt for MBAs and also project managers that comes up a lot on this site. There is a lot of room for criticism of business schools and middle managers in tech. But if you really think of people like that as more likely to be dishonest you are being irrational.

> I don't see how the world can function if everyone were to think and act like that

My brother in Christ, the world barely functions as it is right now. We have a war going on because of one man's misguided attempt at recapturing his country's former glory as an empire, we've had planes fall out of the sky because of boneheaded engineering decisions demanded by MBA types (737 Max), we had a massive train derailment / chemical spill in Ohio caused by other MBA types not wanting to properly maintain the trains and tracks, we are maybe a few weeks away from the most economically powerful country on Earth defaulting because our moronic leadership can't agree to pay our debts (NOT because of an inherent inability to pay)... I could go on. The world is chaos, and it's pretty much always been that way.

> there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA, but Computer Science and Engineering were considered too hard to really be worth the effort.

This part of your reply really, really grinds my gears, because to me it's sort of saying that MBA's can cheat all they want, but CS and Engineering grads should be 'chaste' and not cheat... because reasons. NO. The MBA's took over the technical companies and fucked everything up, but we're just supposed to keep doing the 'right' thing? NO. Fuck them, we should get ours.

Is it sad that this is the current state of affairs? Absolutely. Would the world be an immensely better place if NO ONE was unethical, and no one cheated? Hell yes. But that world doesn't exist. And the people who have the power to bring such a world into existence are not entry level engineers.

People with integrity get run over.

Couldn't it be argued that memorizing leetcode solutions IS NOT cheating? Seems like it would be better to understand things at a fundamental level, but its still proof of ability to master the problem in and takes a lot of effort.

Especially if the person was upfront about the fact they could solve the problem but still didn't understand everything about it.

BUT, it means that Amazon creating a selection pressure for people who cheat. Long term this will be corrosive to the organizational fiber of the corporation as idiotic unrealistic leetcode questions are to the technical fiber.

Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.

So maybe features will get implemented but rules and laws not necessarily respected.

And perhaps that’s useful for some companies.

My conclusion was that:

* some interview problems carried zero signal

* some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal (<0.25. Correlation)

* geographic location is a medium signal (0.2)

* a relevant degree is a strong signal (0.4)

* choice of programming language is the strongest signal (>0.8 correlation (or anti-) for some languages, and some.

There is some selection bias though since candidates who were rejected did not get a chance at the job so we didn’t have a rating for them.

Due to the downsides, I guess it is easier for companies to rely on standardised tests. Even just for the reason that those are easy for anyone in the company to lead the interview. But likewise it is easy for anyone to game the system.

How would you base a job interview on actual work? You have very limited time and you're trying to take a representative sample of a candidate's capabilities.

IMO interviewing is just plain hard and unpleasant. Obviously if you perfectly solve interviewing for software engineers you could rule the world, because you could afford to offer all of your hires $1M/yr which is far less than the best engineers are worth, but more than what everyone else offers.

Here's my take...

The difference between the United States and other countries is how we internalize things. We're very much guilt or shame driven because of the heavy influences of puritanical, fundamentalist, and catholic religions.

It's not that Americans don't cheat/indulge/whatever, it's that they feel bad about doing it. And that doesn't stop Americans from doing things, they just try to hide or repent for what they've done.

* Thinking about it a little more, there are also people here with a strong sense of entitlement and bewildering moral fortitude. They'll break down in tears or want to start a fight if you cuss in their presence but have no qualms about "moving" to Florida to dodge paying taxes or vehicle registration fees.

You are actually being very astute. One of the reasons (there are of course more reasons) that America does so well is that most common citizens are relatively honest. Consequently in many third world countries corruption is rife, not only is it tolerated it is often encouraged.

In some countries, cheating/gaming the system is seen as a noble thing. It is seen as a big "fuck you" to the system / the man / whatever. If you get away with it, it is not you who are wrong - it is simply the system that is too poorly designed.

In other countries, cheating is just too normalized because the stakes are so high, and the competition is too great. I'm just going to throw out India and China - not because everyone there cheats, but because every "edge" you can gain against your competition is fair game. The reward is not only life changing for you, but for your whole family. Maybe even your neighbors.

And it is not to say that they would cheat each other directly, like scamming money off the other guy - but if you're the competition, then the gloves are off.

Either the code is short, or it isn't.

Either the chair supports your weight, or it breaks.

I think I enjoy these pursuits as an antidote to the kind of software I have to deal with on a daily basis - it's the kind that is so complex there are "no obvious deficiencies", so being able to retreat to domains where there are "obviously no deficiencies" is a treat.

Man, you crushed it here, so true.

There just such asymmetry between the risks vs payouts.

Sadly, I imagine your professor was simply wrong. Most likely even for you there is something you could cheat/lie about that would be practically undetectable and give a huge payout for almost no risk.

This is also why a level of a self delusion is an advantage in our system too. Then you get the benefits of cheating/lies without even knowing it or having to intentionally cheat/lie.

"Cheating ultimately cheats oneself" sounds right but just isn't reality.

At any rate, being from a "low trust society" can also motivate someone to go in the other direction because they have seen the injustice that is a consequence of cheating and dishonesty.

The reality (speaking from experience) may be that international students are a lucrative market and getting a reputation as being hard on cheating will make them choose to go elsewhere.

There's no reason to not-cheat unless you absolutely don't have to and what's the maxim about good programmers, they're so lazy they'll figure out a work-around to save themselves some time? Even if it's stuff they know already? Once you're into the system there are mutual shared interests and political efforts that can support such a career.

Sadly, the time horizon is far too long, and the individual short term benefit far too high for this to be (currently) working out as hoped..

0: https://ncase.me/trust/

I strongly disagree with that professor. Dishonesty does not have to be, and absolutely should not be, respected. Even if it is a "cultural difference" [citation required].

Edit: I should also add that I realize by low-trust OP meant the academic term for kinship-based society but my worry is that tying low-trust with cheating students from a country that gets its image tarnished because of various other reasons like low-wage labour and tech scams might paint a different picture to those who don’t know about the term or OPs intent

The explanation provided by the professor assuaged your concerns, but their salary was funded in part from the tuitions paid by the cheaters.

The 'grift' is a collaboration between the academic institutions that tolerate cheating and award degrees and GPA scores, and the cheating students that game the process.

What he meant to say was "they pay sticker price"

Pull the bandaid off and just admit it -- we're just becoming one of those "low trust societies". And it has nothing to do with who we're doing business with, and it is due to our own culture.

Disagree from my experience.

When I was a TA in grad school, I had a PhD student who clearly had access to the instructor's solution manual. His answers were copied verbatim. If the solution's manual had an error, so did his answer. If the professor assigned a problem not from the book, he wouldn't answer it. I debated reporting him to the professor, but didn't want the drama and figured what your professor did: He'll do poorly on the exams (I was right), and poorly in the work place.

He got his PhD, got a fairly senior position, and quickly rose to be the director of a well known company's research division.

He probably was smart - he did get the PhD from a top ranked university. But I strongly suspect he gamed the system at his company just as he gamed the system there.

In grad school, I had a close friend. Clearly a very bright, skilled guy. Was kicked out of the PhD program when it was discovered he had been fabricating data (Nature was right about to publish his paper when he got discovered).

He went off to another top ranked university and got his PhD in the same area. I don't know how/why he had the balls to do it, as surely his former advisor would be in close proximity (conferences, etc) - and at least within my university his advisor was quite open about my friend's malfeasance.

He then got a research position at the top company in his field. Got promotions, and then quit and founded a startup that is doing well, and is known to some in this crowd here. If all goes to plan, he'll have his exit and be quite rich.

Now I don't know if he cheated in his second PhD or on the job, and I'm still in touch with him. But ... no - cheaters often continue to do well after graduating.

It’s the same philosophy of “it’s not bribing it’s lobbying.”

I mean I'm sympathetic to your experience, the treatment you're describing is unfair, but... that also sounds pretty racist.

Any "fix" to the interview process has to accommodate the reality that the left half of the applicant pool distribution is of terribly low levels of ability.

I mean it is really common and not your fault, but people end up getting a PhD in these really advanced subjects all the time and then just leverage the ancillary coding and data analysis skills they happened to pick up on the way to get high paying tech jobs in unrelated fields. It seems like a massive waste of brain power that we could target more effectively.

Don’t even get me started on cheating metrics.

I guess I have low appetite for risk.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive."

The situation where the job you accept is below your skill set may be a failing on your side of the interview process. When interviewing I'm as concerned about finding out what I can about the job and what it entails as I am about making a good impression to the interviewer. I'm not going to accept a job where I'm not confident that I'm going to enjoy it. On the other side of the table I'm constantly surprised at how few candidates actually take an interest in what they are going to be doing, even when given very explicit opportunities to engage in that way. I don't want to hire someone that is going to turn around and leave because it wasn't what they expected.

The greatest regret of my life is not lying blatantly to get admissions and scholarships to university.

Heck, I'd even go as far as to say that large corporations that generate a lot of money depend on just a few individuals of extraordinary merit who are (by naivete or (social) design) incentivized to spread the attribution of work done. This sort of distribution is never equal by design; if the genius (proper definition https://geniusfamine.blogspot.com/) is a 100x-er then there'll be a thousand leeches vying for bragging rights to the work that they aren't responsible for. This is often called "prestige", and is something the west inherited from the third world, where people routinely make shit up and even though everyone knows in their bones that it's made up, they play along. In time, people get too stupid to even know that. If you can induce "prestige" in random people, that's brand loyalty. Someone that can do all of this, capture a bright sucker and put a thousand leeches on him is called a really great ""innovator"", like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and who knows how many more. These guys never did much, were handed things on a silver platter and managed to be the luckiest (not in the ironic / "hardwork" manner) guys. Modern large-scale society rewards these people handily because all the extortion and gaslighting of the competent is abstracted away into the "public good" and "shareholder and company value". I don't believe everyone gets a leech or two, because not everyone is able to contribute. Most people can't read above a fifth grade level. Heck, most of finance is based around the upper management servicing their friends at the expense of everyone else. Everything is downstream of that, and most white-collar work is now a scramble just to determine where the most competent people work, and exploiting them (this is done not just the people at the top, but also by their "fellow colleagues"!).

Family is supposed to be exempt from these things. Societies that consider this a given often flourish into first world economies, and remain so as long as they keep the real leeches at bay. Societies that don't never rise from the muck.

It's in the leech's interest to help out others like him.

This also explains the absolute seethe that libertarian viewpoints generate. Reading someone like Ayn Rand actually scares these people because she advocates for people to stop being taken advantage of when there's nothing in it for them. Same for a lot of authors like Rothbard and Mises, they're all "overturned" on their idealism but all the critique of the daylight robbery is quietly squashed (aka never addressed) by the opposition.

Imagine being called a "sucker" by the leeches. Gaslighting at its finest.

1. They are adversarial where the interviewer is trying to tell if the interviewee is cheating and evaluate their performance.

2. They are trying to, as much as possible, emulate the team-oriented work environnment where the relationships are cooperative. So the interviewer is trying to be on the interviewee's "side" as much as possible to see what it would be like to work with them.

These two goals are in opposition, which is one of the reasons why SE interviewing is so hard to do well.

If you make the interview more explicitly adversarial like examinations are, you do a better job of weeding out cheaters. But you also bias towards candidates that are comfortable with adversarial interactions and you lose vital signal about their cooperation ability.

Bingo. The cheaters will get the job because they will look better than similarly qualified candidates.

Sure, they cheated to get in, but then once in they found out it wasn't that hard to stay and get promoted.

What's discussed in the post is clear deception of the interviewers by the interviewee (using a second laptop to google answers), which is a very different thing.

The best option I can see is to refuse to hire "obvious" dishonest people, aka unintelligent dishonest people. But intelligent dishonest people are able to pass without us knowing they are dishonest, and cannot be identified until their low performance becomes apparent. And we wouldn't hire unintelligent people to begin with.

And, evaluating performance in software is notoriously difficult, dare I say impossible? A skilled and intelligent dishonest person can come up with many plausible-sounding excuses for why things are taking so long.

So do you just fire anyone that takes longer than normal? In that case, you scare the actual good engineers, they will just go somewhere safer.

In the end, I don't think there's a way to evaluate honesty, without ruining your business. So I think bad actors are always rewarded.

Calling it “risk taking” seems overly reductive.

On the other hand, not cheating means it will be harder to get the job. This seems to be the riskier strategy (but, I'd argue, has the greater reward.)

"Would you go to a surgeon who cheated their way through medical school?"