Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

> designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological.

Very interesting insight! However I'm not fully behind some of the points.

Saying that fixing a bad hire is easy is a very USA-centric view of the world. In some European countries it would be very hard to get rid of such people, so the cost is hire.

I think the S3 analogy is not apt either. Sure, the probability of an error for each individual object is negligible, but if you store billions or trillions of objects, it becomes certain.

A better tech analogy is this: imagine a service that creates a bunch of resources every time you create an entry. When you delete the entry, you want to get rid of each resource. Now you have to defensively program around the myriads of errors and possible inconsistencies that can arise from this. And of course everything can just go wrong anyway.

Instead you could do nothing, or an optimistic delete. Then have a cron job that periodically cleans up orphaned resources. This is a much simpler and resilient approach.

The right answer to this question can probably be semi-formalized by account for the volume of transactions (interviews), errors (cheating candidates), cost of error (bad hire), price of increased complexity (more cumbersome interview experience for all), and how effective it is at preventing errors (are we getting all the cheaters?).

EDIT: On an extra note, this reminds me of those anti-piracy measures that don't stop piracy but are a royal pain in the ass for legit buyers.

> Saying that fixing a bad hire is easy is a very USA-centric view of the world. In some European countries it would be very hard to get rid of such people, so the cost is hire.

Most EU countries have laws around probationary periods at the beginning of an employment that can extend up to six months. Once that period has passed it can be difficult to get rid of an employee but until then it's easy.

tbh its not even that hard in the most employee protecting jurisdiciton, which tend to also have the highest indrect cost for an employee as well.

The laws typically align with the values and sensibilities in the societies, but its a tiny bit easier in practice (if you really want to) to make happen. In the USA people think it is easy, especially at will states - even easier than they think. The UK people think it is moderately difficult; its actually pretty easy. France people think it is impossible, its moderately difficult at best, expsensive (like a couple of months salary) at worst, and within probations and first couple of years, pretty easy.

Culturally however, a) people dont like firing people and b) they want to believe that they are unfirable as well. So rather than pay an employee 3 months severance they linger on for years.

> The UK people think it is moderately difficult; its actually pretty easy

It's not too difficult, but it's not quick (and that's ok). Outside of gross misconduct, you have to go through multiple stages of explaining the issue, coming up with a performance improvement plan and then evidence that they haven't met it.

In the case of pretending to be someone else, I'd say this is the very definition of gross misconduct.

Absolutely. I'd have also thought it was criminal fraud. My comment was meant to be about the general case of firing people in the UK.

In the case of pretending to be someone else, and being found out on the first day, at least both UK and Sweden would have the probationary period exception, whereby you can be let go at a moment's notice (works both ways, either party can annul the contract). The probationary period usually lasts 3 months.

Pretty much the ONLY thing that is not a "go" during the probationary period is due to various things that fall in protected categories. I have a hard time thinking "I let someone else do my interview for me" falls under that, in almost every case.

This is actually less true than you think, unless you fire someone for something egregious (Pregnancy, joining a union), they only have a right to challenge whether it was fair if they've been at the company for 2 years. So up until 2 years of employment, whilst there are rules about fair dismissals, the employee can't actually go to a tribunal and enforce those rules, making them basically optional.

To make matters worse, there is a maximum payout anyway, so short of actually writing something totally stupid on the dismisal letter the employer is not going to have many problems.

The maximum amount that you can be awarded as compensation for constructive dismissal is presently the statutory cap of £89,493 or 52 weeks gross salary- whichever is the lower

Here in Brazil, where we tend to copy Europe on those matters, it's very easy to fire someone, but it can become expensive. Anyway, the expense grows the more time the person is working at your place, it starts quite cheap.

> In some European countries it would be very hard to get rid of such people

I'm pretty sure it is very easy pretty much anywhere, because a contract based on deception not being valid is a pretty fundamental principle.

Basically, when the person who shows up is not the person you hired, well, you don't owe them anything.

It would all depend on being able to prove he wasn't the same person. Keep the recording of those video interviews!

> Keep the recording of those video interviews!

Pay a day of salary and move on.

The GP was talking about a place where "pay a day of salary and move on" isn't a realistic choice. If there's fraud involved, you need to be able to prove it.

Yep. You hired person <A>, who you interviewed. Person <B> showed up. Person <B> is trespassing.

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