Competent candidates might also disqualify you as employer right there. Plus you'll be part of normalizing hazardous behavior.
> it's very similar to anti-phishing training/tests
With the crucial difference that the candidate is someone external who never consented to or was informed of this activity.
Will there be trap clauses in the NDA and contract to see if they carefully read every line ? Will they be left with no onboarding on day one to see how far they can go by themselves ? etc.
You're starting the relationship on the base of distrust, and they don't know you, they have no idea how far you're willing to go, and assuming the worst would be the safest option.
The equivalent here would be to ask the candidate to have some folded paper showing his name on camera for the interview, not threatening them with malware.
It became clear that it was a scam when I started asking about the project. He said they were a software consulting company mostly based out of China and Malaysia that was looking to expand into the US and that they focused on "backend, frontend, and AI development" which made no sense as I have no experience in any of those (my who wants to be hired post was about ML and scientific computing stuff). He said as part of my evaluation they were going to have me work on something for a client and that I would have to install some software so that one of their senior engineers could pair with me. At this point he also sent me their website and very pointedly showed me that his name was on there and this was real.
After that I left. I'll look for the site they sent me but I'd imagine it's probably down. It just looked like a generic corporate website.
No one does this. It's invariably a scammer manipulating by appeal to ego.
Also goes to show that anywhere there is desperation there will be people preying on it.
- info is public
- random person reaches out with public info
- ???
- HN harbours fugitive hackers