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Comment by ghost91 | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know Capgemini is doing much outsourcing in India.

A lecturer at my university is by Capgemini. Do you have any more good stories?

It's technically a French company, but they have an incredible 50,000+ employees in India.

There was one development candidate I was interviewing who was speaking to himself in hushed tones, during the interview '...google...sql join...', 'YES, YES, JUST A MINUTE SIR', '...next page...no, no..ah..' etc. Quite ridiculous.

I have to interview about 20 shortlisted people to find 1 decent developer. Problem is it's difficult to use CVs/resumes to shortlist, since many are complete fabrications.

Normally I would say "what's wrong with knowing what to Google for and getting the right answer in a short enough time span to seem like a reasonable response to your dev question" since that's how many devs (who actually get stuff done) work. However, it's hilarious because the internet speeds are so slow in India that they probably would be better off actually spending the time in front of a reference book than waiting for their browser to crawl through Google.

I've no issue with using Google (or whatever your favourite search engine happens to be) in day-to-day work. But in an interview setting, and especially for extremely basic questions, it's completely inappropriate.

Regarding Internet speed, India has seen phenomenal infrastructure changes in the past decade. Internet speed in this particular office in Mumbai is very fast.

Fast connections are available in major cities, for consumers as well as businesses. There are a number of ISPs in Mumbai offering ADSL and FTTH connections (I've only just got FTTC where I am in the UK!).

Hey Gordon, I'm fascinated by your challenges with scaling applicant evaluations.

Could I learn more about it? We conduct blind auditions at scale for companies and it's a problem we're keen to learn more about.

Could we connect?

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