Ask HN: Have you experienced “hiring fraud?” | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you experienced “hiring fraud?”

441 pointsdopamean546 comments

I put hiring fraud in quotes because I'm not sure what else to call this and there isn't enough space in a title to explain it.

Basically my company interviewed a candidate who was fantastic. Checked all the boxes, nailed the interview, and had extremely relevant work experience. We made an offer. He accepted. A few weeks later on his first day the guy in the Zoom was definitely not the guy I interviewed. All the other interviewers agreed. Not the same guy.

We've had a number of candidates in the pipeline who seemed to be obviously lying about their identities who didn't make it to an offer but this case seemed different somehow. I cant quite put my finger on it.

I'm just curious to hear how many of you have experienced something similar. Is it common? Is there something obvious I'm not thinking of to help avoid these situations?

We may have passed on other candidates because of the strength of this one guy. This has put us in a pretty unfortunate position.

Some maybe noteworthy facts: we're a 100% remote company. The candidate was US based and said they didn't need visa sponsorship. They only spoke to one in house recruiter, an HR rep, and 3 people in engineering for the interviews. I discovered after the fact that one of the name brand companies on their resume was actually not the company we thought it was but one with the exact same name in a different industry.

View on HN

There are significantly worst things happening in the industry by much much bigger consultancy names. We, an enterprise, hire complete teams from the consultancy that would pick some of the work in different projects with their own product owner and so on but under our contract.

We seldom see all the people whom we interviewed for the teams, as devs, being present in the meetings that they are all expected to be present (of course it is most often the timezone difference that is the mentioned reason). Or people who join have their camera turned off, so no way to see them.

Code quality that comes, is not on par with the skillset we evaluated during the interviews and I suspect the whole consultancy is doing something similar with presenting top engineers in the interview and then moving them between many teams. Leaving the less skilled engineer to do the work.

Swapping the team that did initial meet&greet for B team to do actual work is classic contractor move especially if client makes the mistake of not including specific names on the written contract or doesn’t care to. I’ve seen it in non-IT industries like construction too.

Yes, I have direct first-hand experience with the "presenting one thing in initial talks pre-signature, and getting something completely different later" with the "big consulting firms". We spoke with actual senior engineers with highly relevant experience up front, and the dev team they sent to us to actually do work (completely with entire suite of product, ux, qa, etc etc etc...packing as many as possible) were people of a...lesser experience level. I'm being polite here.

I have a friend working in the business side of one of the large consulting firms, and the insight I got there is that sales is ahead of engineering staffing by _a lot_. In other words, the supply is being outstripped by the demand. Not wanting to leave money on the table these firms (or at least the very large "name brand" one my friend works for) will sign for projects which they do not have bench staff to fill. They then hit the streets and hire whoever can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Now we have to work alongside these people, who themselves are not so much to blame in many cases. They are pawns in the often-fraudulent game called Software Consulting, Inc. It's great fun. I feel for you.

Name and shame the firm at least?

Did anyone ever had a genuinely positive experience with one of the software consulting giants - IBM, Accenture, Tata etc?

No, of course not, but there's plenty of apologists that will show up and tell you that these companies are actually very important because replicating their enormous "domain knowledge" or whatever is impossible.

Nevermind the fact that even if such domain knowledge existed in them, they probably wouldn't have a process for transferring it to the juniors they throw in the fire pit to actually "execute" a project.

Best you can get with these companies is avoiding a complete crash landing and "only" striking the tail.

TCS's revenue has been growing for the last 10-20 years so they must be doing something right.

paying low wages and taking more profit

They've found a way to dupe corporations into hiring them and also are riding the ubiquitous "outsourcing for lower cost cutting" trend of late, so no one really questions if it makes sense to hire them.

I've seen managers hire them a couple times - usually, it's often when the manager's department is very understaffed, incompetent and frankly a bit clueless (even as to what the strategic direction should be) [1]. Then, in comes the TCS salespeople, who convince the department head to effectively outsource the department to them, and they'll just execute all its functions, and provide strategic direction as well. They promise to implement "top industry standards", and, if you're say a head of department in a bank, it sort of makes sense to believe that these people have been to dozens of banks, and have collected a body of knowledge on what the best practices are. Also, I think it's extremely tempting for the department head, since he'll just have to deal with TCS managers from now on, and not run his department. Not to mention the cost savings. All in all, on paper, their offer is very enticing (also for the manager who makes the decision, as it looks like TCS will make his job much easier), and, given the outsourcing trend in the industry, it's not controversial, so managers very often go for it. Afterwards, the execution is always a disaster and huge disappointment (and manager's career is very likely seriously damaged) - but TCS makes its money in the process.

Oh, and on top of that, there's of course also just regular graft, if the manager is willing to take the bribes.

Basically, the likes of TCS are a parasite, exploiting systemic weaknesses of corporate management.

[1] The other common scenario is when the CEO/CFO demand x% cost cuts from the department and is basically suggesting outsourcing himself.

I have the strangest feeling people hire Accenture because they have a “no one ever got fired for hiring Accenture” vibe about them for some unknown reason.

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.

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?

All of them.

isn't that like, the entire big consulting business model?

They all do, but here's an actual example from Tata (TCS). The company I used to work for hired them to support a complicated product requiring an unusual skillset, and the usual story ensued: they wooed the decision makers with the A team and then actually gave them the B team. They got even greedier, though: I stumbled on their hiring ads in the market in question (with the rare skillset requirements), and it was obvious they actively lowered the salary they were offering as the engagement went on, in order to boost their own margins. One year in even the B team was all gone and we were left with D to F- players.

All these "mass recruiters" do this.

The first symptom will be a few fresh faces in training sessions who aren't billed to your project.

Then systematically the experienced engineers will be pulled off your project (and dangled in front of a new client), while being replaced with the new chaps. Who are now billed, of course, at the full rate.

Within a few weeks they'll replace every guy with new hires.

But try explaining this to the bean counters.

I can't believe they're still getting away with these stunts. I first saw it in 1999.

All of them. I used to work for one. Every government/private sector contract is like this. A giant waste of money. This is where we spend so much money on the military and government projects with poor results.

I always worked with individual contract engineers. I mentioned it here, a couple of weeks ago[0]. The type of work we did was waaaaayyyy too dicey to chance on "just anyone."

In the Days of Yore, they had "Contractor Agents," that acted like talent agents. We would deal with them, to get introduced to the ICs that they represented.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838336

> They then hit the streets and hire whoever can walk and chew gum at the same time.

You made my day kind sir. You deserve a cookie for that phrasing. Thank you!

I think that hiring organizations by now should have been immune to this kind of "switcheroo" or "bait and switch" tactics on the supply side of labor.

It always amazes me that some businesses still fall for this kind of deception, it's like the oldest trick in the book.

I worked at a smaller 130 or so person consultancy. I have a masters in CS, so my resume was always included in the resume pack sent to people. It was listed as "representative". A woman with a PHD (Physics) and a guy with a PHD in Systems Science Math (ORR) were the other usual suspects. This was in around 2005. Benefit for me was that sales was always updating my resume every time they went out to sell so it was in great shape and I did no work on it.

But who worked on the contract was just based on who was free at the time based on who was needed on other contracts. It was very likely I was tied up on another contract as a lead most of the time. Acutally one anti-pattern I pushed against was that we took the person on the bench and had them write the proposals... I pointed out this both landed us with bad implementations but also was likely less efficient than having the leads do the writing.

Anyway, this is very common, you can't hire people to fill seats until you have a contract in hand or you're taking someone else's risk. It's also likely that less effective employees are more often free to go sit on a new project. At the start of the project those extra folks are super numerary anyway while the leads design with the customer. Same at the end of the project where you're just cleaning up core deliverables.

Right. I've been on both sides of this (person proposed for contract I did not end up on, as well as working with teams different than proposed).

For the client, one way to ensure you get what you want, if it's important, is 'named resources' section of the contract. Use it wisely and with awareness.

Other way is to be predictable and forthcoming during sales/negotiation/signing process. This is not meant to victim blame in the least, but there's lack of appreciation sometimes that people don't sit and twiddle their thumbs while internal processes grind the approval process to a halt: Frequently, who comes to oral presentation as part of sales cycle is who was available at the time, and who comes to perform the work is who is available at this other time, which may have been a predictable 2 weeks later, or (all too often) a completely unpredictable random 6 months and three weeks later. People you saw in February may not be waiting for you to finally sign and start come September.

Oh, and all the other bait & switch practices as well, sometimes intentional -<

In practical terms, it largely depends how actually "representative" people during orals were of the actual quality of workforce to deliver the project. Sometimes it's a close match, sometimes not. Ideally it's a fixed-price contract and it doesn't matter - it's vendor's responsibility to deliver, whether with many junior members supervised by senior members or however else, and hopefully contract and SLA and CAT/UAT are well designed.

It always amazed me how insistent clients were on specific people but also slow to sign contracts as if it was possible for us to hold heads for 6 months while they decided to greenlight a project. That's really on feasible if you pay them to be on the bench, or you deal with us not starting for 3-6 months after you greenlight."

Other thing that amazed me was clients dictating when we had heads active versus not. Generally I'd go for a right shifted gradual increase and sharp tail off. But many of our contracts wanted "all heads down" on day one. They also refused to do a shorter term in parallel design contract while we were negotiating.

Essentially their requirements were forcing us to burn money with idle hours.

Managing consultancies is a full-time job in itself.

If you don't have someone in your company scrutinizing everything and spot-checking work that comes across, they will notice and they will take advantage of it. Starting with strong developers to impress a client and then swapping them out with newbies is standard practice.

When we engage with agencies, we make it clear that the people working on our project are expected to be present for the one weekly meeting and that they will be the ones doing the work.

We also reserve the right to "fire" specific agency team members and request a replacement if they're not working out. This is crucial as the agencies will often send teams of three: 1 strong developer, 1 strong communicator, and 1 straggler who needs a lot of supervision from the first two. You pay for all of the developers, so you might as well insist that you're getting what you pay for.

The only time I’ve seen working with bodyshops work out was when we had a senior spend most of his time checking their work and managing the project they were staffed on. He also happened to be from the same country/willing to talk with them outside of normal PST working hours.

They still didn’t produce great work but they did produce work that was usable and did what we wanted to do.

Most of my team actually had started out in consultancies earlier in their career so they knew exactly how things worked. A few times we had to “send someone back” when we got someone who was claimed to be an expert on X but was barely able to do basic tasks on the computer.

I’ve seen some consultancies with a much higher hit rate compared to WITCH and co though, on par with regular hiring. I am not privy to the financial details but I suspect they are a lot more expensive.

Wipro Infosys Tata C ... ? H ... ?

cognizant hcl

> scrutinizing everything and spot-checking work

Which leads to another paradox (that I think I first saw Joel Spolsky point out, but I can't find the reference). Business software - and consulting services - always costs $20 either or $200,000. If it costs $20, you just buy it and use it. Once it gets over a certain price point - around $1000 or so - it requires approvals before it can be purchased. This leads to vendors having to develop full in-house departments dedicated to navigating those approval processes, so the price of the software has to be hiked to account for the additional headcount.

This one, great reading too: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

It’s a long piece. The “credit card“ vs “3 months of hard core PowerPoint by sales” pricing is about 75% into the post.

I’be been the developer in your trio. 3 or 4 years in noname large consulting stuff.

Lead of a teams of joyful green horns in a loosely specify environment. Delivering shit software on loosy deadline.

And then I switch to place where everyone is pretty senior. It’s less fun, I like to explain stuff and kinda miss it. But damn, not having to manage junior allow me to just produce large chunk of code faster.

And knowing that the guy next door is solid as well allow us to agreed on a contract and call it a day. ( it actually works )

I have little interaction with my coworker and yet our review are actual review. Syntax or petty issue are rarely mentioned. We agreed on linter months ago.

Anyway; sorry. Long détour to say that as much as I enjoy getting down with the stragglers, being in a mature team is pretty great.

Yes, more than 10 years ago when I was hired as engineer 2 in a startup, I had to work with a remote team working as contractors. The manager was in Alaska but the team was in India. The CEO used them to create the first prototype of the product and raise money. We worked with them for 3 months. I tried to train them but there was a big ethical problem. It was clear they were not honest. We supposedly had 3 engineers. One was good, the other 2 were not good at all. It was clear that they were not working full time on our project and the good engineer was working even less with us (pretty much when the CTO was having discussion with the guy in Alaska). There were times when he asked: "Did you do task X?" Answer: "Yes!" CTO: "Can you show me the code?" contractor: "I did not do it." There was also a language gap and the good guy ended up leaving to work with Microsoft. We let them go and we started put that codebase in maintenance mode. At that time we also got a new talented designer and we started building the new features in a different codebase.

Whose fault is in all of this?

Again not to look like flogging a dead horse here, but it's the hiring manager's and the organization's not the contractors' for this turn of events.

They should have done their own due diligence and cross-checked the references and the whole nine yards.

I’m a contractor and I don’t get this attitude. It’s my responsibility as a contractor to do the things I agree to do and if I can’t do them due to whatever reason, be upfront about that as soon as possible. In fact as a contractor that’s pretty much my only responsibility. I’ve definitely worked with people who weren’t good managers and had projects not work out but what parent is describing is just flat out fraud.

What was the pay? Oftentimes outsourcing means trying to get software for 1/10th of the real cost. Then when another company amazingly delivers any software at all, they are blamed for the quality problems that are really the result of the completely unrealistic budget.

And sorry to say but racism often plays a part in these stories.

A counter view - how long are your purchase decision cycles? I ask because that matters. The internals of a large consulting firms are:

- Resumes are often used "as an example". Consulting teams who present are usually in between staffed roles, and are not the exact you'd see face to face. They do this because ... others are working on existing engagements and taking that client's calls.

- Big companies decide very, very slowly. And they might not even sign on a deal. So consulting firms have to continually juggle team members + skills + their own staff's needs to fill slots. The members you spoke with may have been available when you talked to them 2 months ago - but were staffed on a different project while this one closed.

etc.

This happened to a former employer back in 2008. They sold us on their A-team and we got the guys they hid in the backroom closet. We cancelled the contract after their second code dump. They threatened to sue and my former CEO openly challenged them to. In the end they backed off.

Unfortunately this happens in all sorts of consultancies and agency work. The partner makes the sale and (hopefully) at least reasonably supervises the associates or others doing most of the actual work.

This has always been my experience hiring consultant teams. (Unless you're hiring a team from a consultancy that only has enough staff to field a single team, that is.)

I'm not sure if this is specific to government procurement, but when hiring teams for federal contracts, some personnel on the team described in the proposal would be "key" and others would not. Key personnel could only be replaced by mutual agreement, and non-key personnel could be replaced at will by the bidder.

Based on my experience with such firms this is the prevalent modus operandi. Hence I don't trust them. In our company we cannot commit code without review, and this turns up these "replacement" developers pretty quick. But it's pretty disheartening. You don't even make it 5 lines and there is .ToString() on a string, and it just gets worse from there.

I used to take some effort in trying to be nice about it figuring the person probably who wrote the code doesn't know they're a replacement and is just doing the best they can, but I eventually stopped caring. Now I just butcher them, point my boss at it, and see how long it takes before they get fired.

All consultancies (IBM global services, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Deloitte, Pwc, Accenture, etc) just want billable hours. Only way to make a fat profit: by underpaying. Who will take "less" pay? Of course, less qualified people. Since every consulting company is doing this, there is no incentive for big companies to switch from Infosys to TCS or from TCS to IBM.

Hiring managers do get kickbacks from consulting companies. These kickbacks are sophisticated, and there is no way to prosecute them, esp if immigrants are the hiring managers.

It is a very common practice for these companies to rotate competent people between multiple projects. Friend used to work as a senior exec for CG in India

Former consultancy managing partner here. (My conscience would only allow me to be in that industry for 3 years.)

Consultancies exist for one reason only: to maximize the delta between what we charge customers and what we pay employees/contractors. Charging $400/hr for someone we're paying $80/hr is non unusual. In fact, it's probably the norm.

What could possibly go wrong?

>Charging $400/hr for someone we're paying $80/hr is non unusual

It's a funny business, as these posts reveal. But there's nothing magical about the profit margins in consulting. There are some efficiency gains with streamlining HR and expertise and knowledge sharing. Throw in some profit, and that's what they are able to charge clients.

If it was excessively expensive, companies would do the work themselves. Many do, to lesser or greater degrees of success.

> Code quality that comes, is not on par with the skillset we evaluated during the interviews

Could it be that your interview process is not evaluating the correct skill set? As an engineer with 15 years of experience, very few of the many interview processes I've completed were actually an acurate reflection of my abilities.

I work for a consultancy that does some things I dislike to impress execs but nothing this shady. Close though!

I’ve managed to separate myself from those parts and should be totally out the door soon!

I've been remote hiring for years. Remote positions are a magnet for fraud of all types.

If you have the budget, I highly recommend moving your compensation points up and focusing on top engineers in remote locations. It's much easier to vet people who have an established online track record and you can tap references from well-known companies. Unfortunately this way you will miss out on some great candidates that haven't yet established themselves, so you still have to branch out.

For remote work we require video interviews and cameras on during meetings. We'd make an exception if someone really needed accommodations to keep their camera off for some reason, but otherwise it's cameras on. I know some people don't like this, but it improves communication and team cohesion in a noticeable way. It also immediately highlights fraud like this.

Get your security team involved. You should be tracking where remote employees access your VPN and company services. Don't be afraid to ask about discrepancies and changes. If someone has logged in from one IP or region for the first 4 weeks and then suddenly you're seeing new logins from a different city or country, investigate. I don't care if people travel, but we need to firmly understand the security situation.

Watch out for people with frequent excuses for missing meetings, having to turn their camera off, excuses like "my camera isn't working today", and so on. Send everyone known-good webcams and company laptops.

And as always, performance management is key. Managing remote is harder than managing in person, and I say that as someone who manages remote and loves remote teams. You need strong performance management practices in place and clear ways to measure it. People who aren't getting their work done should show up quickly in your system and warrant additional manager investigation.

But if someone shows up in Zoom who isn't the person you hired, lock it down ASAP. Don't let being "nice" get in the way of handling an urgent security situation. Someone you didn't hire who hasn't agreed to your contracts is in your system, and that's a red alert emergency.

> Watch out for people with frequent excuses for missing meetings, having to turn their camera off, excuses like "my camera isn't working today", and so on. Send everyone known-good webcams and company laptops.

Yes, "camera isn't working" should be the easiest problem for the company to solve! "OK, we're overnighting a laptop with a working webcam to your address in our HR system. Please use that known working camera tomorrow."

I keep my camera off all the time because I don't like having it on when I'm tabbed off doing my actual job. While the PM is bleeting on about whatever they feel is important I can do actual work.

Cameras shouldn't be required. Learn to vet your employees.

For me personally I need people's cameras on as I find hearing a bit difficult (I wear a cochlear implant) so I utilise lip-reading to fill in the gaps.

That's a good counter-argument. Don't most major providers provide closed captions? Or is it only Google Meet?

Skype does, teams does not, slack does not.

Zoom does, Teams does, Slack does.

How do you manage it if there are latency issues / sudden quality drops?

Personally I find it disrespectful when people don’t pay attention in meetings and decide they’re going to make their own call about what’s important and what isn’t. So I’d probably enforce the “camera on” policy, notice that you’re not paying attention and this means the issue gets discussed.

At this point I do more digging/reviews and I either agree with your point and work with the PM to get them to be more concise, or I disagree with you and you’re released from the team for having values that don’t align with ours.

Either way my problem gets fixed because I had people put their cameras on and communicate like grown ups.

Personally I find it disrespectful to be pulled into random meetings I have no reason to be in. Or be held up in meetings that are 45 minutes longer than they need to be. "They are paying you" only goes so far. If I wanted to be paid to be in meetings, I would have gotten a business degree.

Right, so the solution here is not to have you in the meeting if you’re not required (and perhaps give individuals some latitude to decide for themselves whether they’re required), but if you are in the meeting you ought to be paying attention.

I'm not your slave. If you have important info, I'll listen. If I think you're wasting our time then you are, unless you convince me otherwise.

This is the kind of attitude and response I would expect from a 9 year old, not a professional adult.

If you think you're not needed in a meeting, or the content isn't relevant, or someone else should be there instead, pretend you're an adult human and raise the issue. But if you're going to be in the meeting, pay attention. It's astounding to me that this could be a controversial statement.

The only thing controversial is you saying someone with a differing opinion is acting like a 9 year old. This is only serving to further reinforce the general feeling that PMs are overall useless, overpowered, and undersupervised.

Likewise if it's a problem my camera is off except in certain meetings (with clients or whatever) then bring it up to me. To this day that has yet to happen. Shockingly, work gets done, I listen to the important points of the meeting and talk when needed, and I don't have to let someone look at me while I'm not looking at them. It sounds like you have a problem communicating without a face to look at. If it helps, you can tape faces to the screen or request people put an avatar/photo of themselves up for you to talk at.

You're arguing a point I haven't made.

> > If I think you're wasting our time then you are, unless you convince me otherwise.

That's not a differing opinion, that's petulant and childish.

Your coworkers deserve the benefit of the doubt when they say you're needed for something.

> Personally I find it disrespectful to be pulled into random meetings I have no reason to be in. Or be held up in meetings that are 45 minutes longer than they need to be.

Then raise those issues like an adult, rather than passive-aggressively tuning out.

Quoting from The Testament of a Dealer:

> Do you spend far too much working time at meetings? Do you try to make important decisions in groups of more than 10 people? Do you have more than, let’s say, 15 co-workers under your direct management? Do you receive daily reports which you don’t read on the day you get them? Do you have days when you don’t have time to ring back the person who’s been looking for you to discuss an important matter? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then you yourself are part of the problem, because you’re no longer on your guard against ever-increasing bureaucracy.

I am paid to write code not sit in 10 meetings a day. If I raise the issue everyone gets all pouty. There is an unspoken feeling of being forced to attend every meeting assigned to you just in case something feels useful. You deliberately ignore this to make your (absolutely wrong) point.

> I am paid to write code not sit in 10 meetings a day.

Unless you're some kind of modern-day ornamental hermit, writing code is unlikely to be the end goal; more likely you're getting paid to produce something useful, something for which communicating and understanding the problem is often far more important than actual coding.

> If I raise the issue everyone gets all pouty.

This does not sound like a healthy working relationship, although I'm not sure the problem's on their end.

> There is an unspoken feeling of being forced to attend every meeting assigned to you just in case something feels useful.

Well, nut up and get over it. Either attend or don't, but don't half-ass it. The surest recipe for pointless meetings that go on for too long is meetings where half the participants are coding instead of paying attention.

> I am paid to write code not sit in 10 meetings a day. If I raise the issue everyone gets all pouty.

Then it's time to move on. This is not a way mature adults should be handling such a situation.

A passive-aggressive reaction isn't mature either though, so maybe this is mutual and your company and you are actually perfectly in tune.

I wish the good old fashion art of writing an agenda was still practiced. And not an hour before the meeting. Give me at least a day. I’ve clarified many a meeting just by looking at the agenda and communicating with the host that J. Doe has more experience in that area than I do. I’ve also been able to get meetings canceled by reading the agenda and figuring out what the person needed.

Agendas. They’re worth the 10 or 15 minutes you’ll spend writing it.

My biggest pet peeve is meetings that come out of Zoom chats “Let’s chat about that later in the week” and the subject of the meeting is “Continue Discussion from Zoom”. Awesome.

Oldest trick in the book was to write the agenda AND the minutes of the meeting in advance, run the meeting per the minutes, tweaking them on the fly and publishing them as soon as the meeting was done.

Only the minutes count as the results of the meeting. Works only in large, bureaucratic, political companies.

Then say no to the meeting.

And if you can't, find a job that treats you like an adult.

You sound like a great boss to work for lol.

I know, right? Boss who listens to the team and tries to resolve problems, must be awful for people. /s

Seems like a collective punishment for people who are perfectly attentive to the meetings with their camera off.

I'm an adult, I can work on something else while listening in and make the decision to shift my focus when it affects my area of responsibility.

Bullshit. Everyone thinks they can multitask, no-one actually can.

I did not claim to multitask. I listen for key words and stop coding.

People should be able decide if they want to allow a camera in their home. So mandatory “camera on” policy is completely off limits.

You could decide to work an office job?

Maybe that's people which absolutely want to see other people face that should take office jobs ?

Lots of open source software have been developed in the last 40 years with what we call now "fully remote team" without any need for webcams. Why it's suddenly becomes mandatory for some people that develop software ?

I agree that people should be able to decide if they want to allow a camera in their home. But workplaces should also be free to decide if they only want to employ people who are OK having a camera in their home.

ICs literally have half their work time taken by meetings here. Nothing would get done if they didn't work at the same time.

I think you are not seeing from the other side, many times the information conveyed for a certain duration is not relevant for some members of the team, instead of always saying i dont want to join this meeting entirely its much easy to only listen the parts that are relevant to you. Using a camera and forcing them to look won't help much here, as they won't be paying attention still.

Turn it on for the initial greetings, turn it off for the rest of the time, on a big enough call nobody is paying attention anyway. Turn it on if you need to speak. I don't think your crown would fall off your head if you did that, and it would be a compromise.

> we're overnighting a laptop with a working webcam

"Sorry, boss, this latest laptop didn't work just like the last 10 you sent that I definitely didn't sell on ebay"

I mean this is just getting silly now, isn't it?

Selling or not returning company equipment is a crime and will land you in prison. If you don't have appropriate reach in a given jurisdiction to use the police force there you probably shouldn't be hiring there anyway.

> If you don't have appropriate reach in a given jurisdiction to use the police force there you probably shouldn't be hiring there anyway.

San Francisco?

San Francisco doesn't have a police force so much as it has a couple thousand people just hanging out sucking $700M off of the city budget.

> If someone has logged in from one IP or region for the first 4 weeks and then suddenly you're seeing new logins from a different city or country, investigate. I don't care if people travel, but we need to firmly understand the security situation.

Couldn’t they just say they use a VPN?

A login from a data center IP would stick out like a sore thumb.

Employees should only even use a company supplied computer with a corporate VPN to access internal company resources. That's just a basic security practice.

There are plenty of ways of securing access from BYO devices. There are certainly circumstances where your statement is true but it’s very far from universal.

Aren't background checks that include verification of past employment and educational history the norm for North America-based businesses for candidates that have gotten to the on-boarding stage? I'd have thought it would be difficult for a fake candidate to get past those.

Sure, but what we're talking about is working with consulting companies and agencies who are assumed to have done their own vetting of their employees, and are representing the skills of those employees accurately to the companies that contract with them.

The fraud in these cases are standing up all the credentials, then sending some random afterwards

I've seen 30 - 60 - 90 day reviews and seen people let go in that timeframe. Is that not a thing in the US ?

Of course it is, but what does this have to do with someone else showing up for day 1 rather than the person who interviewed?

I'd not saying its helping, but you got a legal out.. at least.

Good advice

I think I've had my camera on once the entire time I've been remote in ~5 years at my organization, and the same for 90% of my colleagues. I understand the need to ensure the person on the meeting is the person hired, but is this really how it is elsewhere? Everyone wants to see everyone else?

For a big meeting where someone is presenting anyway? No. For one and ones and small team meetings? Generally yes unless there’s some one off reason not to.

Completely the opposite in the places I have worked. Never seen anyone who had camera off regularly.

Yep, working for a BigCo and the culture was just as a matter of course to turn cameras on and see each other. I am really curious where the opposite is coming from

During the pandemic, it was HR’s policy that people shouldn’t be pressured to turn on their webcam when working from home. Reason being that not everyone had an ideal working environment, and being forced to turn on your camera would only add to the stress.

That policy has kind of stuck around with our team, and now people rarely turn on their cameras during team meetings. I would prefer to see peoples’ faces, but it seems I'm in the minority, and I’ve given up on trying to advocate for it.

This seems like the kind of policy someone would make if they didn't understand how a blurred background worked.

For what it's worth, the Zoom Linux client didn't have decent support for virtual backgrounds (i.e. without requiring a green screen) until the 5.7.6 release in August 2021.

I can also understand how Windows and Mac users might be hesitant to put their full trust in the technology, as it does occasionally glitch and blur out more or less than it should. Virtual Backgrounds also don't really help with poor lighting, or pandemic induced weight gain, etc.

So would say it's not that they didn't understand how virtual backgrounds work - just they were aware of their limitations and decided to err on the side of being lenient toward employees during a stressful period in a lot of peoples' lives.

Yeah same. I have found a strong correlation between people who always(not sometimes) have camera off and people who are average-to-poor at their jobs and end up getting let go. It’s a decent indicator of someone who is checked out or mediocre. It’s such a low effort thing to do, and shows respect to your colleagues. If you can’t be bothered doing that… (obviously excluding folk who have legitimate reasons, but that’s a tiny %)

Same. I like to walk around while I talk so you won't see me (and I won't see you) anyway. When I'm sitting down, unnecessary visual input (what's with your hair and are you really listening or browsing the web?) immediately distracts me.

It is very company-specific. My last job, we would do cameras on for our monthly engineering meeting (~10 people maybe?) and that was it. Even 1:1s were audio only probably 90% of the time.

In my current role all 1:1s, all meetings with clients, and all internal demos are cameras on by policy. I have friends that work places where the rule is camera on all the time unless it's a larger meeting or there's a presentation or something.

A huge benefit is being able to see how people react to what you're saying. I especially like this during brainstorming or retrospective meetings.

The other is just to make work more fun. Beyond 3-4 people, everyone stays muted, and with no cameras, a lot of the jokes and banter just stops. Dead air is a soul-draining response to jokes (whether good or not) that an individual can only try so many times. This works well during scrum meetings (when it's just the small team anyway).

I say this as very much an introvert: meetings are tiring for me anyway; I'd rather they're not also boring.

> For remote work we require video interviews and cameras on during meetings.

I can understand interviews, but once a person is part of the team and team members have met with him often enough (with the camera on) to recognize his voice, what is the point of having the camera on?

> I know some people don't like this, but it improves communication and team cohesion in a noticeable way.

This is one of those things for which there is no True Method. Yes, a lot of people have better team dynamics with the camera on. And yes, a lot of people have worse team dynamics with it on. Mandating one way or the other is suboptimal.

> what is the point of having the camera on

Human social interaction is deeply dependent on facial communication.

I don't know, there was a time when an enormous amount of human social interaction took place over the phone. Even when doing business.

> Human social interaction is deeply dependent on facial communication.

It's a broad statement, and not clear how applicable it is for work purposes and for which category of work.

Also, while it has its positives, it also as clearly has its negatives. Most miscommunication is due to misreading of visual cues. I can say it certainly is nice to be able to talk to people and not have them register any frown I may have, when the frown is unrelated to them. Not having to modulate my facial expressions frees up my brain to focus on the content of the meeting.

In my experience, people who seem to need facial communication do exist[1], but it's not a universal thing and likely not the majority. It's annoying when instead of phrasing it as an accommodation they would like to have, they try to make objective sounding statements to support their preference.

[1] I'm guessing that set has a strong intersection with the set of people who used to insist that they be able to travel pre-COVID to meet other team members as "in-person interactions are more effective". They certainly are - for them.

Have things changed that much? I have worked in quite a few teams where remote meetings were a thing and never come across anyone who regularly had video off.

The only exception is one on one work meetings, like pairing, where both of you are going to be looking at code or something and the video serves no purpose.

> Have things changed that much?

Funny question, as it should be asked the other way round. People have been having remote audio only meetings for quite long - videoconferencing was very costly until recently.

In my company, it's a rare exception that people turn the camera on during meetings. When COVID hit and everyone switched to remote, I can't think of a single person in any of the meetings I've attended (including 1:1) who wanted the camera on - with the exception of introductions when people were new to the team.

It's not at all surprising as prior to COVID we had meetings with people located in other offices all the time (as well as some remote workers) - it was almost always audio only.

In my experience I think it helps a ton with non-verbal communication. I would never demand someone have their camera on apart from interviews/important conversations. But I can visibly see if someone is confused/engaged/understanding if I can physically see them and I think there's something too that.

> You need strong performance management practices in place and clear ways to measure it. People who aren't getting their work done should show up quickly in your system

What performance management practices or metrics worked well for you?

I never turn my camera on because I feel uncomfortable. I have zero references. I have zero public facing projects.

I've been a programmer for the last 30 years. I can solve any problem. I've created more than $1B value for companies I worked for in my career. That alone makes everything you said about cameras or strong vetting or online track records simply invalid.

Instead take the time to find out who you're talking to and if they make sense. If you can't, first hire someone who can. And if you're hiring so fast that you can't tell whether you hired the same person as who showed up, then you're hiring too fast. Stop trying to out-grow time.

I agree about the raising alarm bit, that stuff needs to happen very quickly.

Can you elaborate more on why you feel uncomortable? Not saying you're wrong - just trying to get a better understanding of why a lot of people seem to feel that way.

Yes, and I did [1] during one of the myriad other threads that are curiously [2] popping up all the time.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674503 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002690

> I can solve any problem. I've created more than $1B value for companies I worked for in my career.

That sounds suspicious. I don't know anyone who "can solve any problem". And in order to deliver larger value you need to work in a team. How can you be an effective team member with a fear of video calls?

> How can you be an effective team member with a fear of video calls?

LOL, maybe because video calls are not part of that?

> I don't know anyone who "can solve any problem"

that's what happens when you hire for "seniors" but pay junior salary: you get juniors occupying senior positions. Not surprised that's all you know - the industry does that a lot.

30 years programming, a billion dollars in value generated, and you don't have a single reference?

I’ve been leaving my camera off for the past couple of weeks because I’m going through radiation treatment for cancer in my throat. My neck is red, my cheek is swollen from the canker sores that won’t go away, my beard (which I’ve had for over a decade and was quite proud of) is patchy and falling out, my left eye won’t quit “crying”, etc. I don’t have my camera on because I don’t want to explain all that to people. The people that need to know know.

So just an FYI. Maybe people are turning their cameras off for a reason.

Yes that's what OP said: "We'd make an exception if someone really needed accommodations to keep their camera off for some reason".

Yep. But my concern is with the phrasing “We’d make an exception if someone really needed accommodations”. Like it’s their decision whether or not someone has their camera on. Who is included in that decision? Just the manager? Do they get to look at you and say “You don’t look so bad”? Do you get to veto if you really don’t want to turn your camera on? I think it’s easier to approach every situation with an open mind towards kindness. And sometimes people just don’t want their camera on.

I would absolutely never work anywhere that required webcams on. Maybe for the interview but that's it.

Why not?

It's invasive and draining. I'd have to worry about looking like I'm paying attention the whole time, couldn't do dishes or anything like that, I'd have to make sure I'm wearing something work appropriate (no going shirtless), and I'd have to be careful about what I put in my surroundings.

You would never put it on? I think it’s fine if you turn it off because it’s a huge call or you’re occasionally doing the dishes or whatever, but always off is disrespectful to your colleagues imho.

At my company nobody turns the cameras on in the first place. I don't see any value they would add to a meeting, only distraction.

i mean ok, if thats the culture at your workplace, thats what it is. However, if you cant see the extra human engagement, social/communication cues, and generally increased feeling of attentiveness and respect that watching a speaker's actual human face brings, vs audio only... then i dont know what more to say. If you're just some passive listener in a large group call then yeah, whatever. But small groups, 1/1s, etc cameras on is absolutely adding value, even if you personally don't see it.

> However, if you cant see the extra human engagement, social/communication cues, and generally increased feeling of attentiveness and respect that watching a speaker's actual human face brings

I think his concern, along with several others, is that you are seeing a lot of things that aren't there. As I said in another thread, visual cues are a great source of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Being aware that people can't see you can certainly improve your verbal communication skills.

Our company has offices in several countries, and long before the pandemic it was a given (part of new employee training) to not rely on these cues.

I guess the multi-cultural misunderstanding is an angle I hadn’t considered. However, if you’re not operating in that context (multinational with big cultural/ language differences) I’m not sure why you would pick the lowest common denominator and choose the lower bandwidth, less engaging, less human way of collaborating.

> However, if you’re not operating in that context (multinational with big cultural/ language differences)

If you're operating in the US, it is still multicultural. As a simple example, about 40% of the US is introverted, yet most strongly extroverted people have little understanding of the differences. And they very often misread the facial expressions of introverts.

> I’m not sure why you would pick the lowest common denominator and choose the lower bandwidth, less engaging, less human way of collaborating.

In all these threads, you've failed to understand the low signal to noise ratio that video brings. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but comes with a thousand more falsehoods than words do.

As an example, where I work, meetings are a heck of a lot better than when we used to have them in person at work. The few that insist otherwise are simply unwilling to accept that they have not adapted, and the problems lie with them, and not with the format.

Late last year we had a candidate who seemed really promising: she had a CS degree from an Ivy League school and had a few years of work experience using relevant technologies.

She absolutely killed the Byteboard technical assessment, and seemed like a good cultural fit during my initial screen. I advised the technical interviewer that he didn't need to go too deep; I was satisfied with her answers on the technical assessment. Then something odd happened - she completely bombed the interview. The interviewer told me that she couldn't even answer the most basic questions e.g. "what tech stack does your employer use?" I was thoroughly confused about that, but still passed her on to the VPE to help us get to the bottom of the discrepancy. Our VPE confirmed the previous technical interviewer's assessment.

We came to the conclusion that she could not have completed the technical assessment on her own and obviously didn't move forward from there.

Consider avoiding 3rd party screening solutions and put in the effort up front to talk to candidates in detail. Asking people to go through such hoops before they can even talk to a tech person from the company will put many good people off.

I kinda glossed over the interview structure for the sake of brevity, but they do speak to one technical person (me) before the tech assessment. I'm the hiring manager, and I see my primary role as getting the candidate excited for the position and to answer any initial questions. I've already narrowed down the applicant pool through resume review at that stage, so most people make it to the technical assessment from there. I feel like technical assessment shouldn't come too much later in the process: we're trying to be respectful of time on both sides, and while the assessment is 2 hours long, it's only completed once by the candidate, whereas if we have the technical interviewer come earlier on in the process, it will add many more hours across candidates who would have otherwise been filtered out.

As far as using 3rd party solutions: I see your point, and actually used to administer homespun "code challenges". The downside with that approach is that it adds a ton of overhead. As terrible as it may seem, we may not be able to invest that kind of time unless we're willing to be more heavy-handed in candidate selection early on. In at least one case, there was a candidate who had a fairly unremarkable resume but really impressed us in the interview process, and they may have been eliminated earlier on if we were more selective from the beginning.

My take on it is that instead of spending most of the initial interview getting the candidate excited only to disappoint them afterwards, it would be far more helpful to give them some offline material beforehand that they can read / watch and then use the interview to get a strong feel of their experience, abilities and interest in the role. In practice, hiring managers are biased to present an overly-positive / exciting view of the work that the new hire will actually end up doing and it's so demoralising to start a job with high expectations only to be disappointed soon after.

Personally, I completely refuse to do any form of live / timed coding test but might accept a homework assignment with a very generous deadline if I feel it's well aligned with something I'm willing to spend personal time on, assuming that they're not satisfied with what I already have up on GitHub (although I'd expect a good explanation for why that's the case). Otherwise, I'm more than happy to discuss past projects, system architecture, API design, development practices and so on.

> give them some offline material

In the same time I can watch your BS infomercial or read your CEO's book on how the company is a ship or whatever, I could sent off 5 different applications to companies that don't waste my time... guess which wins

Anecdote: I killed the leetcode-ish assessment and virtual technical interview. But bombed the on-the-spot data structure and algorithms interview.

Rant: when companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good?

This is just companies getting back the same treatment they've been subjecting their customers to for over a decade.

In business this is called "business process outsourcing", aka send off sensitive data & permissions to sweatshops in third-world countries.

While it's a shame that it happened to what I assume is a legitimate small/medium business that doesn't do the aforementioned practice, I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it.

The market has reacted, and as more and more things go remote it allows the "little guys" to take a stab at it with varying degrees of success.

(to be clear, I do not condone this behavior despite being approached several times to be a "front" for foreign developers - however, I totally understand the market dynamics that push them to do this)

It doesn't make sense to suggest that the OP's company deserves this because some other companies did some things you didn't like. This idea that all businesses are bad and deserve to be cheated by their employees is extremely immature.

> When companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good?

Subcontractors are engaged on different terms and with specific contracts that require subcontractors to also engage in specific contracts.

If an individual employee hands their logins to someone else and says "pretend its me" then it's clear fraud, not to mention a breach of the documents you agreed to when you signed.

> In business this is called "business process outsourcing",

No, it's not. Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary.

Hiring a programmer and giving them access to your company Slack and source code is entirely different.

> Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary.

So carefully limited that insiders from said sweatshops end up taking (laughably low) bribes to perform things like fraudulent SIM swaps, access customer accounts, etc?

In theory it must be all well and controlled and in a proper world nobody would be doing fraud, whether for themselves or a third-party. In reality there's very little oversight over it on the companies' side (and a slap on the wrist if by some miracle regulators actually get involved) so seeing them complain about being on the receiving end of this is some sweet schadenfreude.

> It doesn't make sense to suggest that the OP's company deserves this because some other companies did some things you didn't like. This idea that all businesses are bad and deserve to be cheated by their employees is extremely immature.

When the business lobby (that represents, or at least purports to represent, businesses as a whole) has asked for, and got, the laws that make this profitable for them, the responsibility falls on all businesses to a certain extent.

> I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it.

That seems like a sentiment better expressed in an instance where it actually happens then? I don't have much sympathy for burglars who fall through glass windows, but it doesn't have anything to do with OP's situation.

I don't see how it's relevant.

If you want a company to provide services without outsourcing to a third party, you can make it a requirement in the contract. But most likely you don't need this assurance, just that they maintain a certain level of quality. If a company misrepresents the quality of their goods/services it is essentially a breach of contract and it's not "fine". If they never made the promise in the first place and you're just bitter that some companies cut costs to achieve the bare minimum level of service, well that's capitalism for you. But irrelevant. Those companies could have hired dodgy people in-house and they'll still have shitty service.

Finding somebody to interview then having another person show up at work is straight out fraud. That's also not OK.

1) two wrongs don't make a right

2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud.

3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing.

> 2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud.

> 3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing.

Is this asymmetry reasonable or fair? This kind of "identity fraud" seems to be much the same as business outsourcing (represent that the work is going to be done by one party, then it's actually done by another, cheaper and less skilled one); why should one be more illegal or immoral than the other?

There is no asymmetry. Regular business outsourcing isn't deceitful, it is expected and encouraged.

If a business promises up and down that they don't outsource or subcontract and do, then of course it is amoral as well.

I rarely see the 2nd situation with businesses.

Expected perhaps, encouraged no. And I don't see individuals promising thatthey don't outsource or subcontract either. So the only justification would seem to be that people have lower expectations for businesses, which is pretty unconvincing.

Have some empathy, man. If you owned a company and hired someone, but the person who showed up isn't the same person, the word "fraud" is wholly appropriate and I feel bad for Op. When you are trying to hire the very best, and you do but someone else shows up in their place..? Not cool.

There's no reason to have a comparison with companies outsourcing. Companies outsource to lower cost with, ideally, a balance between decreased customer service and standards. The alternative is to raise prices on consumers. Profit motivation is real and not immoral -- companies which outsource and lower their standard of service should get beaten up by the market and competition. That being said, when a company has a monopoly or some other anti-competitive practices there is no way to balance this.

>Have some empathy, man. If you owned a company and hired someone, but the person who showed up isn't the same person, the word "fraud" is wholly appropriate and I feel bad for Op.

Fraud? Sure. But feeling bad for the person exploiting the value of one persons labor because they didn't get to exploit someone elses labor for more instead is fuckin nuts.

Who said anything about exploitation?

100%.

If this wasn't on this end of the labor pipeline, it would be spun as "Marketing" or similar.

Interesting parallel. I think I'd disagree that it's considered "fine" when company's do it, though.

What the OP describes is basically a version of a "bait and switch" fraud, which is pretty widely illegal and not considered OK by anyone. Although you can find examples where people ride that line pretty closely[1], but even then people think it's bad behavior.

A subtly different thing that's maybe closer to what you're talking about is hiring contractors and then blaming them for problems. A current major example being many of the Amazon-branded delivery trucks that only deliver for Amazon, but when they do something wrong "oh they're a subcontractor, not Amazon's fault!"

So, not sure I agree 100%, but I understand the anger.

[1] For example, this guy that found name-brand USB-C hubs had the same "guts" as cut-rate crap. https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...

I remember seeing a couple of people post on here about basically becoming their own consulting company, by applying for the position (as their real selves) and then farming out the work to junior devs. They said they could juggle half a dozen "job" like this. Good for them, I guess, but that's real work, too; just very different work than programming.

Then there was the guy who said he had enough rep to take jobs, do basically nothing until they figured out he wasn't producing, at which point they'd fire him, but meanwhile he'd collected 6 months of salary. Again, he had a half dozen of these "jobs" in the pipeline.

In my own job, I've gotten roped into a years-long email chain where a legitimately hired programmer, working in our affiliated consultancy, in a foreign country, couldn't figure out how to install NodeJS to satisfy his ReactJS stack. LONG story, but who's at fault for hiring someone so clueless that they couldn't figure out one of the first steps of modern web development?

I helped interview a replacement for a position I was leaving, and sat across the table from a guy who said he'd programmed several .NET and Rails applications. He was hired. When it came time for me to do the "knowledge transfer," I watched him literally open a browser, and type "Ruby on Rails." He'd never even heard of it. Again, LONG story, but they threw away everything I had written, and he used Java. It was the only thing he knew. He'd made up projects on his resume, and lied to our faces.

All of these examples in this thread are just different data points along the sliding scale of trust. There are many different places to inject mistrust, and -- human nature being what it is -- someone will always find these holes, and try to take advantage of them.

Don't trust. Verify.

Sadly, a new risk with "100% remote anywhere" culture. Employers need to stop trusting blindly and do more due diligence. People like these are the reason why some employers will never trust remote employees.

I suggest calling the candidate in person for 1 day at a co-working location and meet them in person once you are ready to make an offer. Pay for their time since you have anyway decided to hire them. Yes, this adds cost to you but it will be a huge deterrence for fraud. If a candidate doesn't like it, they can move on.

How's that different than one person showing for an on-site interview and then another person on the first day at the job?

Ease of doing so.

As an interviewee I'd consider the 1 day of co-working an indication that the job isn't as "100% remote" as the posting says. It's a problem now as some employers start trying to claw workers back into the office and pretend the last few years of productivity never happened. But I also have a good quality camera I turn on for interviews and meetings, so you can be sure it's me the whole time.

How is that a problem though if the employer is upfront and honest that its to make sure you are who you say you are, and everyone honestly wants to get to know one another?

As an interviewee I'd take this as a very good sign that the company is serious about offering me a long term position. If I'm living on the west coast and my employer is on the east coast and my contract says 100% remote I'd seriously doubt the company is trying to fool me by wanting to meet me for one day, on their own dime, without further interviews.

It absolutely shows commitment to me getting a job, sure, but it shows that the company fundamentally doesn't trust remote workers. I would assume that I'd be spending a lot of time being asked to fly out as time went on.

> it shows that the company fundamentally doesn't trust remote workers

There's a difference between trusting remote employees and aspiring employees.

I wouldn't hold it against the company if they want to do proper due diligence on a prospective employee especially given real-world accounts of such frauds occurring.

There's a difference between trusting remote employees and aspiring employees.

Why should an aspiring employee trust that a company is going to allow 100% remote if the first thing the company expects you to do is to travel into the office?

Fully remote does not necessarily mean zero travel and very often doesn’t.

Then it's not fully remote.

adverb: fully

1. completely or entirely

It absolutely does mean zero travel.

> How is that a problem though if the employer is upfront and honest that its to make sure you are who you say you are, and everyone honestly wants to get to know one another?

Are they? I've been recently contacted for remote positions that turned out to be not remote twice.

I think you would have a hard time getting a valid candidate from Louisville, MO, to take a ~5 hours flight to LA, for a job that was supposed to be remote. Maybe the reason the candidate is looking for a remote job, is they don't have to travel? But I get what you say, maybe this approach is better when hiring in the same city/area.

Put it on a Friday, let them stay the weekend, and pay all the expenses. My company does that for a less glamorous location than LA and I loved it. It is essentially a vacation, and if you are deciding to relocate, a good opportunity to explore potential homes/neighborhoods.

But I like exploring new places. I’m not sure how popular all expenses paid weekend vacations are.

The very reason I want remote is to stay around my family, this seems to be made to appeal to the young and/or unattached.

I love my family, but that doesn't mean I would object to a weekend away.

Having worked in business travel tech, and run a LOT of customer interviews, travelers have very different views on it. Some love it, some hate it, some are in it for the points or for the tourism.

The only thing business travelers have in common is that they all think everyone views business travel just like they do.

really? At my company, full time WFH still expects a couple trips a year to meet up with the team.

Barring unusual circumstances, e.g. disabilities, I will never travel at all is probably disqualifying for a lot of roles.

Yeah, refusing to fly even for a final interview/on boarding is a very hard line.

Even with disabilities, inability to meet the job description is a legally valid reason to discriminate.

If the job itself doesn’t require travel such as to meet with customers I’m at least sympathetic to hopping on a plane being a higher bar for some than for others.

Many people are afraid to fly and/or have motion sickness on long road trips. If remote roles require travel and crossing borders working locally becomes more appealing.

I would think if someone doesn’t want to travel they could find some low to mid level coding position where no one travels outside a local office. That would make the most sense to me.

Absolutely, we would not hire someone with such a hard line, and we hire a lot of remote. There’s a good reason… a tiny tiny amount of in person time every year or so pays outsized dividends in team productivity

If most of the team is in LA, yes, I'd expect the candidate to travel for an interview. Of course, if everyone is distributed anyway, then it doesn't really make sense to fly them to a specific location.

I donno. There is a difference between "I want to work fully remote but don't mind coming in for a day or so every once in a while if its fully paid for" vs "I never want to meet you in person". I personally would never hire the 2nd type of candidate.

Some of the best engineers that I've ever worked with have been quiet types who don't particularly want "work mates".

They work fine with people, can parse small talk and bring a positive attitude, etc. But they were out like a shot when the workday was over, and they would never dream of attending a company-sponsored teambuilding event. If they were hired for a 100% remote job, they would expect to never see a coworker in person, and consider it a perk.

Some people just don't want to mix their personal and professional lives. What's wrong with that?

Nothing wrong with it but it probably excludes them from a lot of roles. I’ve been essentially fully remote for years but I still traveled a quarter to a third of the time pre-Covid.

I wouldn’t assume remote meant absolutely zero travel unless that was spelled out.

I would absolutely assume that "remote" means "absolutely zero travel" unless that was spelled out.

Remote means you don't need me physically present at a particular place (outside of knowing my location for tax purposes). It's pretty clear in the word "remote". If that's not always 100% the case, I would expect those expectations to me made clear during the hiring process, not after I've already come aboard.

Do you really think it would be unreasonable for someone to balk if you hired them for a remote role but then asked them to fly somewhere quarterly after they were onboarded?

Yes. I would think it unreasonable. I know a ton of remote people including myself and we all travel quite a bit. Now a job with 25% travel should certainly state that in the job description but if zero travel is non-negotiable you need to specify that up front—and don’t be surprised if you run into issues if managers change.

You are not in a role position if you are required to travel. It isn't as common as you think.

Remote means you are not assigned to an office period. It says nothing about whether you never/rarely travel or travel essentially 100% of the time eg many consultants.

Obviously people should take positions that align with their preferences however. Just be sure to specify upfront and be prepared to move if circumstances change.

I've worked exclusively remotely for the past seven years and a surprising number of companies I've worked for and interviewed for "strongly encouraged" on-site meet ups at difference frequencies (quarterly, bi annually, annually).

I never attended any meet ups. I felt guilty about it but like you're saying here, I signed up to work remotely, not in an office ever.

I’ve been involved in hiring at multiple companies with fully remote positions, and all expected travel to a team building offsite at frequencies around once every 6-12 months. From everyone I have talked to at other companies too that is a standard expectation, and for very good reasons - humans work so much better as a team (communication, empathy, charity, etc) with just that small amount of face time.

That's fair, I guess sometimes people have different definitions of "100%".

There's no problem with preferring not to hang out at work, there is a huge problem with being unwilling to help your employer solve a huge trust issue in the engineering team. Those engineers are 100% toxic to the business goals that pay their salaries and should be let go immediately if they truly would never dream of attending a physical meeting as you describe.

Someone who won't help you avoid fraud might as well be pushing you into it.

I was the first type of person before covid, but now I'm entirely the second type of candidate. Remote work has gone from being a nice option to have access to a larger job market into an absolute necessity if you want to avoid covid.

You are not hiring remotely if you require coming in every so often. You have a hybrid workplace.

Not really if you are expected to come in person once for the final interview and then max of 1 or 2 weeks within the whole year (fully paid by the company). Hybrid is when you have people required to come in at least 1-2 times every week and expectation is that you cannot live far away from the office.

I still see some companies posting "remote" positions and yet have mandatory 1-2 week bonding exercises per year and the language used makes it sound like a a job perk. Immediate back button for me.

Yeah, describing it as a perk always makes me gag. Why would I be attracted to working remotely AND simultaneously want to have my life upended every 3-6 months to travel?

A-grade melodrama here. It's a flight once a year that requires you to pack your bag and get on a plane. Not some gargantuan event that "upends your life"

You really don't know my life. Besides a full time job I am a caretaker for a disabled person in addition to having a family. It's extremely stressful to arrange for me to be away.

I don't think it's that unreasonable if the employer is covering the cost of the flight and paying for the person's time.

What if the employer came to meet you instead?

For most remote jobs I've had there was still an expectation of some travel, usually 1-2 on or off-site visits per year. Further, many Big Name companies will ask that you travel out as a part of the interview process in the first place, remote or not. So long as there is no undue burden out-of-the-gate, i.e. you pay and or we reimburse, it's not particularly untoward.

Still, that wouldn't solve for the "My laptop doesn't have a camera" problem for the early phases of the interview. You would need to save face / voice samples to cross-reference at various stages of the pipeline to watch for the changeling.

I've flown out-of-state twice for interviews for jobs that were local to me. It was just where they were better set up to interview.

> I think you would have a hard time getting a valid candidate from Louisville, MO, to take a ~5 hours flight to LA, for a job that was supposed to be remote.

I've done it many times, pre-COVID. I live in a small town (<25k) in the South and have been working remotely for ~10 years. In that time I've gone through four rounds of interviews. The first three were pre-COVID, and they all included at least a "half day" of on-site interviews, most of which were in LA or SF. The most recent round was about eighteen months ago and didn't include any travel.

> Maybe the reason the candidate is looking for a remote job, is they don't have to travel?

This is not my experience. In my personal network of remote workers we're pretty uniformly working remotely because we don't want to move to where the companies are, not because we are entirely opposed to traveling. Each person has their own expectations of course, but I see traveling for less than a week per quarter as entirely acceptable.

> I've done it many times, pre-COVID.

But we're not pre-covid. Before covid I worked remote because it allowed me access to a larger job market without having to relocate, but I didn't mind occasional travel. Now that we're dealing with covid, there's no way you'd get me on a plane or in an office for a job interview. My health is worth far more than any particular job.

That’s fair, but I’d argue those concerns are separate from the expectation of whether or not it’s reasonable to conduct an interview for a remote position on-site.

Why? They'd travel on company dime in company time. A cheap holiday if you ask me!

Maybe I'm missing something basic, but why is this a remote issue? The person who interviewed is not the person who tried to start working, and the company immediately saw this. In the old days one could also try to fraudulently arrange to have the person who did in-person interviews be different than the person who shows up on day 1 ... and you'd likely still be caught, right? Is the only additional risk of remote work that fraudulent applicants have a broader pool of fake interviewees to hire?

Generally in my experiences as a candidate, _someone_ on the interview loop is with the team one would end up working with, and should catch this kind of thing. Generally as an interviewer, whether remote or onsite, it hasn't been part of the process to check the ID of the person I'm speaking to (and I'm not confident I could spot a fake anyway). Thinking back to a time where I did a day of interviews at a BigCorp and I don't know that any of my interviewers were on the specific team I'd work with ... I don't recall any rigorous attempt to establish my identity on the day.

> Maybe I'm missing something basic, but why is this a remote issue?

Far easier to blend in as a remote employee.

Usually when this happens, the fake employee will come up with excuses to leave video off: They'll say their camera isn't working today or that their internet connection isn't good enough to turn the camera on right now. If they do turn it on, it will be massively backlit so you can't see their face.

Many companies don't even expect people to have video at all. The identity-swapping fraudsters are hoping that their companies fall into this category.

I'm suspicious this is also affecting the hiring pipeline at top-tier firms. Student hiring programs rarely include an interviewer from your future team, It would be incredibly easy to pay someone a few thousand to crush the leet code rounds. The ROI of such a fraud would easily exceed 10-100x.

I'm not entirely sure there is a good fix for this, the problem would have always existed with in-person work as well - however the perceived risk/reward ratio would be different.

Risk/reward is different, and also physically and psychologically more committing going in person to the companies location and interacting with other employees.

It’s plausibly a crime too (actual fraud), if pushed hard enough, though most courts will just laugh at companies and tell them they clearly didn’t do enough due diligence, so most people trying it will be worried about being arrested in person.

If doing fully remote, they could be dialing in from another country and immune from arrest. Makes it much easier to do.

> If doing fully remote, they could be dialing in from another country and immune from arrest. Makes it much easier to do.

This also substantially increases the reward. Traveling to SF for a 2 month con as a mid-level software engineer isn't a good deal. Working remote from a low cost location for a 2 month con might be a fantastic deal.

For sure. It wouldn't surprise me if a successful con like this - even if it only went on a month or two - could net them the equivalent of a 1-2 years of normal income locally or more. If they got lucky and they ended up in a situation like a prior co-worker of mine did at IBM (he wasn't scamming them, just a Software Engineer caught in the middle of a raft of corporate acquisitions and overwhelmed leadership) where they set him adrift for YEARS without direction or line management, it could be their retirement.

Bonus - chances are, little to no taxes compared to the other option too, depending on how they structured the scam. The cut-out/middle man would get left holding the bag, but what else is new.

Other Bonus - they wouldn't be using their real name, so chances are, no longer term impacts to the patsy either, unless they happen to end up trying to work legitimately with someone involved at the target company years later. Pretty unlikely to bother folks involved in this type of scam, IMO.

> though most courts will just laugh at companies and tell them they clearly didn’t do enough due diligence, so most people trying it will be worried about being arrested in person.

There's a contradiction here, right?

Not really - it's a newness/information disparity thing.

If someone has never committed a crime before (which most likely, these patsies would be in that camp - it's too high risk and expensive for someone experienced to want to do themselves if they could send someone else), fear of prosecution is going to be high. After all, THEY know they're doing something wrong, even if no one else does.

Someone doing this is also very unlikely to have the direct experience managing a company, or dealing with these issues, to actually know the real risks of prosecution and likelihood of damaging consequences.

So since it's new, uncertain, potential consequences seem personally very damaging, and it's 'bad' == high fear.

They get a lot more dangerous once they've done it a few times, and the fear of the unknown wears off, and confidence starts to replace it. But since they're showing up in person, and would need (in this example) to physically be there for awhile, that's expensive, time consuming, and high risk.

What I was trying to say is that since courts would laugh at these organization, and rightly so, for not doing their due diligence, these would-be offenders might actually proceed to pull the stunt, and try their luck landing the job.

Also, I fail to see how this can be prosecuted when there's no identity theft or forgery i.e. real crimes involved in this act. It can be all boiled down to being just another case of an under-qualified candidate holding a role without proper or adequate credentials due to flawed hiring procedures, or more frankly the incompetence of the decision makers inside the organization.

It's somewhat difficult to do without committing those crimes in some way. Most states have laws with similar types of clauses, as Fraud is generally illegal, and the core elements of fraud are generally recognized as lying about a material fact for financial gain.

In this case, they were impersonating someone else. For them to get to the point of getting paid, they'd likely have to provide identity documents (including a SSN, some form of photo ID, etc.) if the company was doing their paperwork correctly. Even contractors have to cough up a SSN, and that is enough to trigger federal identity fraud charges.

If they provided real credentials and their real name, but had someone else sit in who pretended to be them to do the interviews, it gets trickier - it would still likely to be some variant of conspiracy to commit. Conspiracy at the federal level generally only requires a concrete action by a conspirator in furtherance of a crime, which with only a little squinting would likely apply here to anyone involved (including the fake interviewee).

I present to you 18 USC 1028, the federal identity fraud code. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028], which provides penalties up to 5 years for a first and non-violent/non-drug related offense, or 20 years (for a second offense or other nastier qualifications). A felony, either way. It includes transferring said documents electronically.

My 'favorite' section is 7, which explicitly states that SSN, DOB, etc. count, as well.

Conspiracy would likely be under 18 USC 1346 & 1349 [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1346] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1349], which makes it a crime to 'deprive another of the intangible right of honest services', or conspire with another to do so.

Either way, as I said elsewhere, I doubt anyone would be particularly interested in such prosecution unless it was very high profile for some reason. It's hard to get anyone sympathetic about a large company getting scammed by someone this way. Most companies also don't like having a reputation or PR as being scammable.

So companies should be very interested in covering their asses here. That said, it IS also a federal (and likely state) level felony, so folks SHOULD also rightly be scared to attempt it.

If the right parties were motivated, it could easily result in many years in federal prison. And it's hard to say when someone will want to make an example out of something like this.

Can you cite any cases where US authorities prosecuted such applicants for lying on their resumes?

I doubt that it really happened since as you may have hinted, no prosecutors are interested in pursuing these cases for lack of sympathy as you put it, which I can't verify, or failure of winning the case which I suspect to be the chief motive here since misrepresenting facts or exaggerating events on your resume is not a crime.

And now the button appears. See reply right above you.

And you're wrong - lying about MATERIAL facts, events, or qualifications to get a job is a crime.

Lying that you had a dog when you were a kid (when it's not relevant), for instance? No problem. That's not likely to be a material fact.

If you're interviewing to be a host of a kids show about dogs?

A problem.

Just not one most people are willing to make a case over. There also is the court precedent about 'mere fluffery' or 'puffery' not adding up to a lie, which would need to get worked out somehow. See [https://contractslawinaction.law.miami.edu/?page_id=171]

There is a line, for instance, between exaggeration and lying, that not everyone would agree where it sits.

Since I can't reply to the sub-respondent, but can apparently reply to myself.

I forgot the link to USC 1341 (Frauds and Swindles), which is just a great read on it's own.

Regarding their request for an example -

Here is an example of a successful prosecution of someone for fraud (and tax evasion) for material lies about qualifications and job histories.

[https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2020/02/former-health-c...]

20 years for mail fraud, 5 years for tax evasion.

She was clearly going above and beyond on this front.

Totally confused why folks are not understanding/believing what you've stated. I can attest, this is happening and at 'top' tier places. I can't tell you how spot on you are regarding the camera off strategy.

Honestly, this has been happening for decades, long before remote work was a 100% thing. If they lie you fire them plain an simple. Company needs to do its due diligence, and the fact that complaints like this keep coming up trying to drive a corruptive narrative instead of performing due dilligence is just stupid, and that's on the company.

Trying to characterize having the camera off as being a nefarious tactic because you can't see them working is beyond asinine. There are many good reasons to have the camera off while working.

One being you are there to do work, you are being paid to do the work. One thing video has never gotten right inherently is the whole eye contact part of a video chat.

When you don't look directly at someone (the angle is wrong) while you are communicating its a non-verbal sign of disrespect or in-congruence, and it causes non-verbal communication issues regardless of intent.

The camera has never adjusted your eye angle, so you will always have that issue of people distrusting those communicating over video to a lesser or greater degree. With a flat picture and a phone call, you don't have that. You focus on the work and get things done.

If the candidate misrepresented their expertise, fire them.

If they aren't doing the work, fire them.

If they plain just aren't working out for other reasons, fire them! (after due dilligence).

I don't see why you have to bemoan your lack of due dilligence and instead blame it on something ludicrous like anyone with the camera off is doing this (when they aren't).

Lets call this plug what it is, you want to surveil your employees like a micro manager instead of actually doing due diligence (i.e. the job of hiring).

Seriously how hard is it to just fire someone that's a new-hire?

Its a new position, if it doesn't work out, hire someone else, and terminate the temporary contract with the appropriate legal clause and time periods.

Most work is an 'at will' position, so as an employer, if they lied, use that and 'fire at will'.

Excessively surveilling your employees while they do work only does one thing, and that's drop productivity through the floor. Not only that, it shows serious deficits in Upper Management, and any skilled/experienced candidates will walk away from positions with redflags like that.

You either want work to get done, or you just want to pretend that while doing something else.

What's your actual priority, making money and doing the job (due dilligence is part of that), or watching your employees work in minutia and spinning a narrative. You can't have both.

> that their internet connection isn't good enough

a person who wants to work remotely but doesn't figure out how to have a good internet connection, then they are not a good fit for remote work. If a person decides to travel to a location where internet connection is not good on the day of the interview, you can imagine what he/she will do when it's a regular work day.

Somebody shows up for a remote job and doesn't have a good internet connection is too big of a hiring risk to even both continuing the interview.

What about 1:1s with their manager, though? I guess I just don't get this at all. If an organization has a bunch of people and absolutely no individual supervisory relationships with those people, then that's a much more general problem and I don't think it has all that much to do with remote work.

Remote workers where I work have company provided business broadband, company laptop, webcam, etc. At any company serious about remote work these aren't things they should be stingy on. It's crazy that they are.

This is why embedded is better than fully remote teams. Your engineering managers should start building relationships with candidates pre-hire, and then be doing 1:1s post hire. Even with camera off, you'd notice if somebody is not the same person, unless you have too many other responsibilities.

what do you mean by "embedded"?

Developers are directly part of the team, reporting to the same engineering manager, rather than being under their own agency manager, pm, etc. You should never be going through an intermediary to work with remote devs that you hire (aside from, perhaps, the handling of payroll & benefits.)

Oh, yeah, that's terrible. Agreed

In fact, if we step back a bit, a new hire _always_ brings some risk with them, because interview processes just aren’t perfect. What we’re mainly worried about here is accidentally hiring someone who we shouldn’t be able to hire, mainly for legal reasons like they’re in another country and we’re not remitting their income taxes properly.

Secondarily there’s the “can they actually do the job” problem that has always existed. The new issue here is that we will now waste time on too many new hires who can’t make the grade, because we’re assuming that our hiring process was really good at weeding out the poor fits, and these “games” exploit the weaknesses. Rather than get into an arms race with fraudsters, perhaps hire two or three people for every opening on a short term and then only keep the ones who deliver.

>People like these are the reason why some employers will never trust remote employees.

So what? Those are irrational beliefs. Why should we care that someone never trusts remote workers?

You can never be 100% secure against fraud just like you can never be 100% secure against hacking.

We should certainly try to reduce the incidence of fraud, but only if you don't sacrifice the ability to hire who and when you need to.

Arguably not irrational, but even if it was, it matters because it causes a chilling effect for hiring.

Which WILL result in folks not being able to get hired that otherwise would be. It also will result in positions not being filled that are important at companies we likely depend on, resulting in lower quality of service and/or failures of those services.

It’s poisoning the remote employment well, essentially.

Yes or at least check a copy of their ID and run a background check.

>Sadly, a new risk with "100% remote anywhere" culture.

I think this is a new risk when it comes to hiring engineers. This kind of fraud has been present outside of Engineering orgs for a long time.

I used to be a hiring manager in a well known company that was 100% onsite. This was on the business side, not IT/Engineering. We were looking for a BI person as a contract hire. Our HR org said they had a staffing agency they had worked with for years. The staffing agency sent us a bunch of resumes that were surprisingly similar, filled with every buzzword and feature (e.g. I made a bar chart) and obviously weren't written by the candidates. After throwing those out, there were a few that looked decent. We had some phone screens and then a single onsite interview, but concluded there was something fishy going on.

I confronted rep from the staffing agency with with this and their response was that typically somebody in a managerial position (at our company) picked a few resumes, had a phone call (not video, just phone) with them, then hired somebody based on the phone call. My team was the first one that had actually done more than that.

Who showed up on the first day, who actually did the work, I don't think anybody had any clue.

The non-technical managers didn't have the skillset to properly evaluate these candidates. So they saw the keywords and picked the person that sounded the best.

Engineers hopefully have the skillset to evaluate and interview other Engineers, so the fraud is different and more sophisticated now.

IMHO, if you're the type of manager who hires somebody like this and what you wanted done gets done, you've probably got bigger problems than a staffing agency scamming you. If you think it's rocket science to build a couple of charts in a BI tool and you're happy when the person you hired takes 6 months to build a couple of dashboards at $100/hr...good luck to you.

Not only that: Make it clear in the job listing that an in-person interview will be part of the hiring process even for remote positions. This will avoid wasting time later in the process as most fraudsters won't bother applying.

And most candidates.. win-win?

Sue them for fraud? If employers are being bamboozled by this why aren't they suing? If there are no consequences it'll keep happening.

It would be difficult for an employer to show actual damages in a lawsuit. The cost of litigating outweighs any possible benefit.

Why not just screenshot the interview call and check against when they show up on their first day?

I've seen a lot of this, and I've started to pick up a few red flags you can watch out for.

- The biggest and most obvious is that they don't have a functioning webcam that clearly shows who they are. If I encounter this, the interview ends immediately.

- Another one is, if you do hire a person, they suddenly want to be paid through some unrelated company. ("Oh, it's my brothers company, I do this for tax reasons").

There are other red flags which aren't as certain, but should definitely raise your suspicions:

- The CV has been professionally designed or laid out.

- The most recent job entry is a vague "Remote contractor" or similar which doesn't list specific companies they've worked for.

- The name on the email doesn't match the name on the CV.

- You get a series of emails following up after a few days, as though someone is running a drip email campaign.

- The application email is sent directly to any of your employees, rather than to your standard recruiting email address, almost as though someone has used a sales tool to find internal contacts.

These last 5 points can occur in legitimate applications, but when you see them, it's a sign that additional suspicion is warranted. These fake employees are generally not individuals, but professional operations.

> - The biggest and most obvious is that they don't have a functioning webcam that clearly shows who they are. If I encounter this, the interview ends immediately.

I get this. I also just did like 10 rounds of interviews and between google meets, zoom, teams, phone calls, I would say there was a 50% failure rate of somebody on the call having a non working webcam or another issue.

I actually missed an opportunity at a job because the HR lady was bizarrely inflexible. I called, no answer, teams, couldn't let me in because of org permissions, yada yada. At some point I had rescheduled for the third time and just replied "look, I don't know what the issue is, but I will be happy to do an in-person interview". Never got a call back.

So... tech problems do exist. I am on a phone call with a client right now who spent 10 minutes trying to get a screen share working. What can I do?

Tech problems exist on the employer's end, that's all on them. If their Teams permissions don't allow someone external to join, then they aren't fit to be even trying to do remote hiring.

In 2022 there's virtually no excuse for a non-functional webcam on the candidate side though. If they don't have a dedicated camera, then most laptops come with one as standard nowadays. If they don't have a laptop, then they at least have a basic smartphone.

You'd have to be incredibly unlucky to have no webcam, no laptop and no smartphone. Yes, people without smartphones exist. But they are an absolute minority.

More than that, equipment is the cheap part of a developer. The company can easily provide any of this.

I was, and I mean, three minutes late to the meeting after having issues with teams (the issue was actually microsoft thinking I was still apart of my former company though I was signed out), and the lady left the call!

I think an incompetent HR person prevented me from getting the job. I almost emailed the CEO out of frustration with the process

As to the last point, I've known or been referred by someone on the inside for all my career jobs that I eventually ended up in. If I didn't, I'd try to make a contact on the inside, to find out what the company and team are like, and who's the hiring manager, before applying.

I think that's just good practice, call it pre-screening. No need to go through the whole lengthy (and expensive for the company) applying and interviewing process if a casual meeting discussion first doesn't go well.

I did cold apply and get a job offer once. I accepted on contingency because their contract had a weird clause. They balked at the contingency and I canceled the acceptance. That was a waste of all of our time.

This has been happening for decades. Long before covid, saddle up and due your due dilligence.

Any decently sized company has employment contractual provisions for misrepesentation of facts, expertise, and experience during the hiring process. Use that, hire one of the other candidates you interviewed, and fire them.

The only unfortunate thing here is having to read about this because your team failed in their due dilligence. That's a team/company failure, and this looks more like fluff spin for a narrative than anything else.

Your people didn't do their jobs, and lost costs vetting a potential hire who wasn't a good hire because of it. That's the business you are in. You knew the risks.

Prior to the first interview you should have covered an introduction and some of the expected vetting processes (i.e. Should we choose to extend an offer... there are requirements for an in-person report for HR to check I9 and other forms (i.e. potentially a certification of the facts they submitted as part of the process ...), and the required process of reporting instances of fraud to IC3/FBI). [It is often across state lines].

That's just some examples, I'm sure you can figure it out with your legal team if this is really an issue, because its seriously not that hard. You set up a process that gives bad actors enough rope so that if they cost you money in bad faith, there will be consequences.

Regarding in-person I9 checks, I had a very interesting experience recently with a friend who was hired at a big 4 accounting firm. They deputize a friend of the employee (me) to verify that they have checked the I9 in person. They use a service for this: https://www.lawlogix.com/

It was a very strange experience. Here I am a totally unrelated party becoming an "authorized representative" of the firm to look at a document and verify it's real. There was no real verification of me, mind you. I could have been anyone.

I have no idea how normalized this sort of thing has become, but I was quite surprised that they appoint some random individual rather than have an actual employee do the document verification.

I found this process strange at the last company I worked. While the service required photo evidence of the documents they allowed you to elect a "representative" who can verify the documents physically. Typically at other jobs I had that were remote a company official would verify photo copies of the documents and use either a video chat or other means to corroborate them.

This is pretty normal, I’ve done it at several FAANGs too. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to verify but I guess the penalty is if your representative lies they can put them in jail.

That seems to be overstating their "failure" here. It seems that the person they actually interviewed may have been qualified, personable, and so forth. The problem is that a TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSON showed up to work. How is that a failure in "vetting?"

I haven't been through a cold hire in a while (where I wasn't already known to the company), but I suppose the only solution is to demand photo ID and check online records as well. But I doubt many companies actually do this.

In the UK, it's required by law to confirm the applicant has the right to work in the country [1] - which means checking photo ID, and confirming photos are the same across all documents and look like the applicant.

If that hadn't been done, it's a failing of the hiring process.

However, the ID check would usually be done by someone in HR after the hiring decision had been made, and exchanging photos of applicants is not the norm. So I suppose you could send someone competent to the tech interviews, and swap in the incompetent person at the ID check.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work

Same in Australia, atleast for professional jobs you will need to give your Passport or Citizenship Certificate for verification.

https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/employing-and-sponsori...

Yeah, all of that is too late. The ID verification has to take place at INTERVIEW time, not later.

> This has been happening for decades. Long before covid, saddle up and due your due dilligence.

Some ancedotal evidence to support what you're saying.

My first real development gig was for a startup in 2005. It was a small salesforce team, and I was a front-end guy. We had a small cluster of cubes in a two story, tiny office in a warehouse district. Indian guy sitting to my left kept getting up and going over and asking the team lead questions and then he'd go back to his desk. Repeat about every 20 minutes.

I come in one morning and he's at his desk, furiously paging through the ".Net Nuke for Dummies" book. Another day of him getting up and continually asking the team lead how to do stuff. Since this was constantly taking place out of my peripheral vision, it was really distracting. I finally asked the team lead to go to lunch. After we sit down, I ask him WTF is going on with the guy sitting next to me.

He rolls his eyes and tells me, "Dude, this is the second time this has happened. We interview a guy over Skype, he does well, passes the code challenge, and we hire him. He gets into our office and doesn't know how to do shit. I'm talking like basic shit man. Like, you're a front-end dev. It would be like hiring you and you come in and start asking how to write HTML. We're still trying to figure out how this scam works and we thought adding a code challenge would weed some folks out, but I guess not. Anyways, he'll be gone by the time we get back from lunch."

This all happened in 2005, almost 20 years ago. I've been at larger companies and have seen the same thing happen over the years. It seems like a cat and mouse game. As soon as you add something to try and weed these folks out, they figure out how to game whatever due diligence you've put in place and then it starts all over again.

My employer is gigantic and well-known and this still happens. I refrain from looking at a resume before an interview, the recruiter just tells me what to interview for (front end developer). I start basic, like "Write a 1-5 star rating widget in HTML", I even show them a picture of what it should look like, only to be met with hmm and uhhs, some broken, invalid HTML, and not a single line of working code written. In one instance, the candidate attempted to surreptitiously call their friend for help (it's very obvious because I heard the ringing tone). Later, when I actually look at their resume, I find the expected flowering claims of 10+ years experience in front-end and whatnot listed on their resume. What a waste of time

I made a comment [1] in a similar thread a month ago. Even thought there were people not happy with some of my words, I'll copy it here verbatim (Mostly because the comments inferred opinions that I was not making):

Some time ago (~6 months) my company was looking to hire a programmer.

We don't have a established process for this as it was some years since we hired a coder, but then we are in the industry (hiring) so published a couple of adverts here and there and we got the thing rolling.

Most of the applicants were seriously under qualified, and my colleagues had to go through a lot of rubbish in the form of CVs in order to find suitable candidates.

But a few of them were good enough to at least make it to the interview step, and off the invitations went.

One of'em candidates - Let's call him "Rajeed" - promptly accepted the meeting, and due to the small amount of people that made it that far - let me remind you, first interview - my colleagues were slightly excited, but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders from India is far from stellar.

You can imagine my colleagues surprise when they opened the Zoom session and Rajeed was nowhere to be found. Instead, there were two person of whom we knew nothing about - apparently they were running some sort of coding shop - and when my colleagues asked for Rajeed they just said "Oh, it's OK, it's OK. You can talk to us."

For obvious reasons the meeting didn't last long.

We ended up hiring a coder from Poland that, even thought he was decent, was miles ahead of the rest of the candidates.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669193

  > but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders from India is far from stellar.

it boggles the mind that you apparently don't understand selection bias, and would say something like this on a public forum, in the year 2022.

That, in exchange, was proven right empirically.

> and would say something like this on a public forum

Why, is it a crime against humanity, or what? Based as well on my experience, there are things said constantly in public forums that are much worst than this.

How high is the moral pedestal you are standing on?

OP also probably means 'wary' (on guard, distrustful) instead of 'weary' (tired).

Thanks for the correction.

Wow, I don't think I've ever seen an HN post with text that light.

Of course there are many talented developers from India, but unfortunately they are overshadowed by the massive number of frauds to the extent that even people in an industry overflowing with performative leftists can't help but be a little prejudiced despite ourselves.

Good Indian devs, please run the frauds out of the industry one way or another. It'll be good for you as well as the industry as a whole.

>..that even people in an industry overflowing with performative leftists..

This got a good laugh out of me. This is a perfect description of the so called Left in America. I am totally stealing this.

I've posted a bit of a rant below but I figured I'd make another comment with actual tips to prevent this.

First off, a lot of comments indeed recommend insisting on a functioning webcam. This might be uncomfortable for some (and shouldn't be a mandatory, long-term "webcam mandatory" policy), but explaining the reasons behind it should make the vast majority of people be fine with it at the start. Long-term, a culture where people feel comfortable having their cameras on regularly is also good so people turn it on voluntarily, even beyond deterring fraud (personally I prefer seeing someone's face rather than a profile picture).

Second, this kind of behavior is only going to get more common; there's no way to deter it in advance. The best you can do is optimize your hiring pipeline for faster turnarounds so you can quickly react when you detect such behavior and it doesn't cost you as much. Maybe an initial, short "contract to hire" system is better, as it allows you to delay all the employment-related formalities (which are slow and costly) to after you've already confirmed the candidate isn't a fraudster.

Finally, the reason people do this kind of fraud is because they won't get in if they stay honest. If you actually need development services, does it actually have to be an employee? Maybe you can just be open to contractors or outsourcing agencies, let them in "honestly" with appropriate contract terms that protect both sides, and then it reduces the incentive for the "fake" employees to lie to you if they can get in legitimately.

> Finally, the reason people do this kind of fraud is because they won't get in if they stay honest. If you actually need development services, does it actually have to be an employee? Maybe you can just be open to contractors or outsourcing agencies, let them in "honestly" with appropriate contract terms that protect both sides, and then it reduces the incentive for the "fake" employees to lie to you if they can get in legitimately.

What kind of argument is that? These people aren’t trying to get on 1099 and sure as shit won’t be good, honest contractors either.

Contract-to-hire positions only appeal to the most desperate, least qualified candidates. Those who are already employed elsewhere or have other offers aren't likely to accept an offer that leaves them in a precarious state.

I did a couple of contract-to-hire positions and found it a great way to get to know the company, the people I'd be working with, and the type of work I'd be doing. As well, it was a way for them to get to know me and my work without a convoluted 3 month long interview process full of useless whiteboard puzzles, personality tests, and silly questions like "If you were a sandwich, which type of sandwich would you be?"

It can be precarious having nothing long-term lined up, but at least you're working and getting paid. More precarious would be having nothing long-term lined up and just sitting around hoping for a call back for yet another round of interviews.

Of course if you have other immediate offers, that changes things a bit. But that doesn't mean someone who doesn't is somehow desperate or the least qualified. When so many companies take so long with their hiring process, even good candidates don't usually have immediate offers.

The sweet spot is taking a contract-to-hire in your spare time while you're currently employed, so you can make the switch cleanly without months of downtime, uncertainty, and financial stress in between. And without most of the silly interview games. Gives you time to wind down, document, train somebody at the old job, and when you start the new one you're ready to go from day one.

if you aren’t using a webcam and working remotely i don’t want you on my team. this is a line i will not back down for “inclusive” reasons. i’ve been on teams where people don’t turn on video. it is horrible for team engagement. i understand things happen from time to time or you’re eating, no issue. but never or very rarely showing? no

As an IC, I've even gone the extra step of buying a small light ring off Amazon, at my own expense, to light my face better because my room is always a little dark on camera.

Remote "butts in seats" policy/monitoring. If the work is getting done and is up to standards, then it shouldn't be an issue to work without being watched.

Hopefully you're upfront about that. Personally, from a business perspective, wouldn't use this method. From an employee perspective, I wouldnt want to work for anyone who would require this. Comes off as voyeuristic, controlling, untrusting, and just weird.

> Remote "butts in seats" policy/monitoring.

I don't think your parent commenter meant that you have a camera on for the whole duration of the workday, I think they were talking about having a camera on in meetings.

I want the camera on during meetings, not 24h a day.

I need to see your face if I'm talking to you. It's no more onerous than requiring audio in this day and age.

Are you talking about using a webcam during meetings or are the people on your team required to have a webcam on for a large chunk of their working day?

Likely talking about meetings. I'm not quite as forceful, but I agree. Webcam off is fine for large meetings, but if you do speak it's nice to turn it on for that moment. In small meetings we strongly encourage having your camera on as the norm.

> If you actually need development services, does it actually have to be an employee? Maybe you can just be open to contractors or outsourcing agencies, let them in "honestly" ...

No, they're dishonest people so we don't ever want them. There's no amount of desperation that makes hiring a scammer a good idea, they're willing to steal from and cheat you.

Last year, I was asked to interview a man who was procured through a remote-staffing firm.

He was based in Southeast Asia, and on his resume it looked like he met all of the competencies we needed -- including English proficiency.

But on the call, I noticed that whenever I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the question, then turn his video back on.

It turned out that the man was using a translator and really didn't speak any English whatsoever.

I have no idea how he expected to be able to do the job if he had been hired, but I guess he thought it was worth a shot.

In talking with the remote staffing firm, they were extremely apologetic. He had apparently pulled the same trick with them, but they didn't do video interviews, so it was harder to pick up on.

> I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the question

Even without the camera, I'm not sure how he expected this to fly? Someone who claims to be proficient in English should not always pause for 10-20 seconds before answering a question.

If you can get a job that's entirely async it might actually work out for a few weeks, and a few weeks of a western developer salary can last a year or more in some parts of the world.

Depends on the question. I wouldn't mind waiting 30s for a thoughtful answer.

yeah but if it's "How are you doing today" that might be kind of weird

I mean, yeah? There are very few people who can go straight from my question to the answer. And pausing to collect your thoughts is much better than saying uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm uhhh I ... uhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Camera fuckery notwithstanding

GC?

He may not have even cared if he got fired after 2 weeks. 2 weeks of a US salary can go pretty far in some parts of SE Asia. If he can run this scam several times a year, it may provide a decent living.

I dealt with a number of people who weren't who they said they were in my last bout of hiring.

There's typical ones where an engineer will stack their resume with buzzwords that they don't understand at a basic level. An example of this is putting Kubernetes on ones resume but not being able to explain the different workloads. People don't often call this fraud, but I do when it crosses some magical threshold. The reason I call it fraud is that fraud, to me, generally implies intent to deceive. About a year ago I discovered on Reddit there were people coaching others through lying on their resumes and in interviews with the reasoning that "everyone does it" and "you'll learn on the job".

The second kind I've encountered is more analogous to what you experienced, though we never hired any of these folks. Retrospectively I think one of the things that helped us avoid hiring these folks is that we don't refer to an engineers provenance. Early on I took the stance that just because you say you're from Google, or any other large engineering firm, doesn't mean you're the right fit for the team. We had candidates invest in a 2-3 hour take home exercise that was pretty easy, it mostly tested your API design skills but because it involved code we got some good peeks into what that would look like in a contrived scenario. Second, we ask that candidates bring an example of projects they've worked on, starting with ones they led. This one is a little harder to fake the funk on, especially if the candidate is Senior+.

The problem is the flip side: companies that demand 10+ years of experience in technologies that have been around for 5, and similar absurdities.

More simply and commonly, the amount of experience required for supposedly "junior" positions has gone up without commensurate increases in pay.

And far, far, far too many companies demand that a candidate be able to hit the ground running instantly—that they have exactly the experience and skills required for this position, rather than being someone who may not know every possible way to configure Kubernetes, but who's flexible and both willing and able to learn quickly.

I would never do it personally (both out of a sense of honesty, and a deep-seated fear that I'd be found out), but I can certainly see why lots of people lie on their resumes.

I agree with you, allowing managers and recruiters to use contrived requirements creates perverse incentives. That said, while it may contribute to an uptick people have been doing this for a long time. I think they're both problems, and I don't think one is causal of the other. If a person lies on a resume to match a search engine that's one thing. If a person is coaching others on how to lie, conceal, and deceive then that's another.

> we don't refer to an engineers progeny.

"progeny" dictionary definition is "a descendant or the descendants of a person, animal, or plant; offspring." I'm not sure if you used the wrong word, or what you mean? I don't think you are talking about literal children?

Sorry about that, it's early for me. I meant provenance. Thanks for the correction.

>Second, we ask that candidates bring an example of projects they've worked on, starting with ones they led.

Just curious what kind of "example" you'd expect someone to bring? Surely not code samples, since most people will not be legally allowed to show you code from their previous employer.

The way I've done this before is to have them talk you through what they did and why, with some questions probing at an appropriate level of detail. But that's not exactly "bring[ing] an example".

Generally speaking to what they did, they're generally encouraged to produce diagrams that could help explain the problem and solution, and that's all usually part of a slide deck (but doesn't have to be). Having an enumerated list of outcomes is also nice. None of what they need to bring needs to be original. We're obviously not encouraging developers to steal from their former employers.

I agree and it drives me insane. Imagine in any other industry, like civil engineering, someone claims to have experience constructing a pedestrian bridge, despite never being near a construction site. Or having credentials that actually belong to someone else. It is fraud. If it was the medical industry they would be sent to prison.

We've seen a significant upswing in this over the last 18-24 months. It has gotten to the point where I can identify the fraudulent resumes as many of them seem to be cooked up from the same template. I wrote a quick script to identify these pretty quickly (assuming the PDF resume they submit has parseable text spans in them).

A lesser form of fraud, but still insidious at this point, are the templated resumes that misrepresent work experience. They will list a top line item in "work history" of something that sounds like tech startup, but in actuality isn't a company at all. It's just an open source project, that no one actually uses, with a website. Apart from the items listed, the candidates never have any legitimate work experience. It smells like a way to get resumes past any ATS keyword filtering and/or less-experienced recruiters.

And usually, the candidate hasn't really written much code at all in the repo. Just a smattering of readme updates, config changes, and maybe some bug fixes amounting to less than ~100-200 SLOC over the span of months.

In 100% of these cases we've seen so far, the resumes look exactly the same, including formatting/layout/etc. The projects all exist under the "OSLabs Beta" github orb [1] and the resume also lists a tech talk they did under the "SingleSprout Speaker Series" moniker. Most often, there is no actual evidence of them doing this talk, but in many cases you can find someone else doing the same talk topic on youtube if you search.

SingleSprout is a recruiting organization, so it seems at least somewhat likely that they are the ones shepherding this process, though I have no evidence of that. It could just be that they partner with this OS Labs entity as part of their candidate funnel. Whatever the case may be, this is at best (if I'm being charitable) a gross misrepresentation of candidate experience.

N.B. I am 100% OK with hiring folks based on (F)OSS experience. An active github is actually something I select for and, if its available, I will spend significant time reviewing such that I can have a meaningful discussion with the candidate about their work. These candidates are different entirely (for hopefully obvious reasons).

[1] https://github.com/oslabs-beta

EDIT: Wanted to add some clarification here that this post is about the candidates involved, on the topic of hiring woes that OP brought up, but not about the specific entities I mentioned. It may just be incidental that all of the resumes we've seen have had the aforementioned patterns. It is not my intent to malign any of the orgs I referenced.

Thanks for the interesting reply. I'm curious who "we" is that you reference several time. Do you work for an organization dealing with this problem?

I am director of engineering / cofounder at a company called Starry (wireless ISP).

To be fair, I wouldn't call this a "problem" insofar as it doesn't cause any meaningful pain apart from extra noise in the funnel. Given how poor the signal-to-noise ratio is in most hiring funnels, the impact is more or less de minimis.

I do still review every submission, at least in a cursory way, just in case the candidate has other legitimate experience and/or novel work on the github they link to.

Used to live in a building with Starry internet, and just wanted to say thanks for the fantastic service while I was a customer.

I'm glad you had a good experience!

Tbh I have more sympathy for this, as long as the actual candidate actually went through the in-person interviews. Resume screens can be brutal and high-loss.

I'm with you on that. I am empathetic to the take that a candidate may view this tactic as industrious & resourceful rather than deceptive.

And as such, as I've stated elsewhere in this thread, I still review every one of these in earnest.

OSLabs and SingleSprout Speaker Series are related to a bootcamp called CodeSmith, so they tell their grads to add those to their resume to seem more experienced. I wouldn't call it fraud but agreed that it misrepresents work experience, and it's very obvious when you see one of these resumes because they all look the same.

I did notice that the youtube videos I was able to find on the speaker series was under the CodeSmith account, should have mentioned that. I was careful in my wording that they (SS) may just be partnering with other orgs.

Interestingly though, very few of the resumes I describe actually list CodeSmith at all. So I didn't make the connection immediately.

> I wouldn't call it fraud

Grossly misrepresenting work experience in a job application does sound a bit like misrepresenting a material fact in order to obtain action by another party, where the other party relies on the misrepresentation and suffers injury from it.

Now I wouldn't want to have bootcamp graduates prosecuted for fraud, and it would be near impossible to put any concrete number on the damage anyways, but I do wonder if bootcamps that systematically abet graduates to commit fraud run afoul of any laws.

I hoped this was obvious but I agree, I wouldn't for a second consider any of this even remotely criminal. Its only misleading and suggests not particularly great judgment from the candidates.

Hyperbole on resumes is the sine qua non of the hiring experience. This is no different, just a more systematic form that I'm not used to seeing historically.

To be fair, legitimate candidates might try to beat keyword screens. I feel like beating keyword screens is fair game as long as it's not an outright lie. It's just a way to get past a flawed step in the process so an actual human can make a decision. Those screens are really just the virtual equivalent of handing an interviewer a resume and them trashing it in front of you.

Earlier in my career I would no joke add an invisible layer to my resume with the job description from the company I was applying to copy pasted in it in order to beat the auto keyword scanning.

ha nice I’ve done that for website metadata and crawling scripts there

never thought of for resume

Glad I'm not the only one. I tracked the uptick in interview offers using this method, and it was nearly 4x more. Only one recruiter seemed to notice, and gave me a dressing for it. In my eyes, play stupid games, win stupid prizes (me).

Noticed this increase in response with this method as well, while I was applying a couple years ago.

Seemed to work really well specifically with city government jobs (New York), based on the response/application ratio. I'm guessing it may have to do with their antiquated systems.

Like an embedded passage of text within a PDF document?

That's plain old keyword stuffing.

> To be fair, legitimate candidates might try to beat keyword screens.

IMO, this technique has been exaggerated to the point of being counterproductive.

As soon as the interviewer discovers that some claimed experience on the resume was a lie, they can't trust the rest of the resume. The interviews get harder and the interviewer starts looking deeper for other inconsistencies or outright lies.

Often, discovering outright lies on someone's resume is sufficient to drop them out of the hiring pipeline completely.

Spamming keywords that you don't actually know might get you into flawed companies that don't know how to screen or interview candidates, but those generally aren't good places to work.

Keywords are useful though because there are so many ways to say the same thing and half the time nobody cares about that keyword anyway. I've seen more than one place demand keywords they clearly don't use on the job - if I can talk about php even a little I can claim it even though it has been 15 years since I last saw php...

Yes, at this point I see technical keywords in a job posting as accumulating into a set of reasons that I wouldn't want to apply.

I agree, but it seems like every company does it. Apparently they're all great companies to work for with exciting opportunities to change the world using a cutting edge tech stack built by world class expert coworkers.

I'm not talking about lying.

The main thing I was talking about is using something like tiny white color text to reiterate stuff from their post. Or literally say I don't have any experience with X, Y, and Z. It's not lying, a printout doesn't show it, but it can trick the system.

One other example might be using the same inflated wording that job postings use (puffery?). Using fancy jazzed up language sometimes helps, especially if it includes keywords that are reasonably true or a matter of opinion (like the job posting saying it's a great opportunity or cutting edge tech).

Very much agree on keyword scanning — all of our resume review for us is done by the recruiting team and hiring managers. If candidates take the time to thoughtfully apply, I believe we should be making reciprocal efforts to review in kind.

These resumes however are all identical to one another. It's a different situation, but that notwithstanding— we still do review all these and your sentiment very much aligns with my own.

It reminds me of “Nathan for you” when he held his own award ceremony so he could claim to be an award-winning filmmaker, or he did parodies of songs at open mics so he could then claim to be a renowned parody artist, before opening his famous “dumb Starbuck”

That is funny, this thread reminded me of a completely different "Nathan For You" episode. He hired a Web Dev to build an evite template that included a bunch of spammy foul language in "invisible" text in the footer, causing the invite to go to receiver's spam folder. The idea was that you could invite people to a party whom you didn't ACTUALLY want to show up, but also didn't want to hurt their feelings. If they asked why they weren't invited, you could incredulously claim that you DID invite them, and suggest that maybe it went to their spam folder.

Just chiming in here on behalf of SingleSprout -- I know the two founders, David and Natan, and have recruited through them multiple times at Harry's when they and we were both fledgling companies in NYC. I have also been in touch with them on behalf of clients since.

SingleSprout is much bigger today so maybe things could fall through. But it is unlikely that they would be willingly or knowingly shepherding this process. I'll point them to this thread so they're aware of what's going on and can chime in if they'd like.

Thank you for clarifying - I tried to be careful in my wording here to be about candidates and not make any claims about entities involved apart from the pattern recognition I've noticed.

I'm happy to edit my post to add any needed language to properly represent anyone mentioned.

Oh wow this is fascinating, I have someone I'm doing a tech screen for this week that matches your exact description. They have both the Single Sprout Speaker Series talk along with the OSLabs Beta open source experience which takes up a good chunk of their resume.

No mention of the CodeSmith bootcamp, although I had deduced they were probably a bootcamp grad due to their degree in a separate field.

Also fishy is that one of their experiences just lists "stealth startup" as the company name, now I'm wondering if that role existed at all. Thanks for the heads up here.

You are amongst a cohort of many that have shared with me that you've seen the same in your own funnel.

That said, I'd encourage you to still review the candidate as you would any other. I try to give all folks the benefit of the doubt, even if I don't entirely agree with this particular practice. They may have some bright spots in the code you're actually able to check out. It's a great topic for conversation if you choose to have a call with them as well.

Yes this doesn't appear to be so egregious that I would cancel the interview, still worth giving them a shot for the phone screen.

That said, as a bootcamp grad myself, it personally irks me when I see other bootcamp grads try and misrepresent their bootcamp projects as work experience. I know that some bootcamps direct their students to do exactly this, but that doesn't make it okay.

I guess it works though. I feel like I'm always the one pointing out to our recruiting team that certain jobs on a resume are not actually jobs. If someone else is doing the tech screen, they may just make it through.

Very interesting that you're also a bootcamp grad. Thanks for sharing all this.

I love when candidates are up front about things like this, seeing a cover letter thats akin to "Hey, I'm just getting my started in this industry. I graduated <bootcamp-x>, I would love to get some feedback on the work I did on <project-x>."

I have no degrees myself, very much identify with the self-learning journey.

There was a thread on this topic about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694

lol, there's a story in there about some guy that got fired for being unqualified and then came back under a different name. That's some Costanza shit.

with a fake mustache.

they say they want loyalty from their employees...

“was that wrong? should I not have done that?”

link : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669330

I had the same thing happen ~9 years ago. Interviewed a candidate who was fantastic, knew his stuff, and had a solid resume. We made him an offer that day and he started the next week.

The guy that showed up (in person!) for the job was definitely not him, and asked rudimentary questions ("how do I access the terminal", "what programming languages should I download", "how do I install git", etc). We gave him the day in case it was just a bad morning or something, but ended up firing him the next day for misrepresenting 'his' experience.

If a different person shows up, why even give them until end of day?

True. Even if they seem nice and a quick learner, the identity fraud can be a security issue.

> The guy... was definitely not him

But:

> We gave him the day

That was very nice of you, but my first thought in that situation would be security. Your best case here is you have a fraudster "accessing the terminal" -- but maybe he's otherwise harmless?

Standard onboarding had him paired with our director of engineering for the full day, who was aware of the situation and handled the security aspects. AFAIK it ended up just being a case of recruiter fraud.

Happened with my partner, and have heard of this from a lot of friends. This is a real issue. It hurts 'real' candidates and everyone that takes time to be apart of the hiring process.

HR dept's are simply unable/ill-equipped to handle this new reality. Honestly, at larger org's this is really an upper management issue first and foremost, as HR dept's are sort of benefiting from these frauds. ( Before you go off on that last sentence, I did say 'sort of' - and I personally believe in 'you get what you incentivize'...so)

I'm not actually sure it hurts real candidates?

If garbage is flooding the market, it forces employers to pay higher wages for a chance to actually get something good.

This pushes wages up for real, skilled engineers.

How do higher wages discourage fraud?

it's probably to avoid spinning the wheels down in the budget garbage being referenced here and wasting a bunch of time. Pay the upfront cost and leapfrog over the delay.

That only works if the upfront cost actually does anything to make the fraud more difficult. Just paying higher salaries does fuck all, the fraudsters will adapt to the higher prices and reap more profits.

Yup that's what I'm thinking. Higher wages would encourage more elaborate fraud (faking identity, paying a strong interviewer to sit in for you, paying people to pretend to be your references, paying someone in the company to refer you) because the payday makes it all even more worth it.

I was thinking along the line of putting it towards higher quality sourcers on the recruiting half. There's some some specialty boutique stuff out there in many spaces.

As I see it, the hurt is going to come from more hoops expected, as any burdens are always passed down to the individual. In in an ideal world, companies would actually read/think/analyze all the data/metadata they already have; however, we don't live in this world. And the individual's going to have to spell everything out in gross detail.

When a fake candidate accepts an offer, the first real runner up candidate gets a rejection and has fewer offers to choose from.

> If garbage is flooding the market, it forces employers to pay higher wages for a chance to actually get something good.

I don't think garbage in any market drives up the prices for anything.

Those looking for something good just waste more time looking, and some of them give up and settle for garbage.

Exclusivity drives up prices. If you're the sole supplier of something badly needed, you can charge a lot for it. If a second supplier shows up, but with garbage, you're likely not going to be able to charge even more.

If enough people do it this can create a negative feedback loop. It’s called Market for Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

We did one interview with a candidate who had a great looking resume and was from a town somewhat close to a city I used to live in. Started off with some general get to know you talk and asked him about where he was from... crickets. Then went into his experience and it 100% did not line up with what was on his resume. I started asking questions about the jobs on his resume and he hung up.

My PM, who was also on the call, had looked up the name on the resume and found the linked in of guy whose resume had been stolen. We notified him that someone was using his resume and actually ended up interviewing him! We came close to hiring him but his salary ask was out of our price range.

I'm not sure the exact rules here (and you might not be in the US), but you might want to avoid asking candidates "about where they are from"

> Any questions that reveal your age, race, national origin, gender, religion, marital status and sexual orientation are off-limits.

> "State and federal laws make discrimination based on certain protected categories, such as national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, disabilities, arrest and conviction record, military discharge status, race, gender, or pregnancy status, illegal.

> Any question that asks a candidate to reveal information about such topics without the question having a job related basis will violate the various state and federal discrimination laws," Lori Adelson, a labor and employment attorney and partner with law firm Arnstein & Lehr, tells Business Insider.

https://www.businessinsider.com/11-illegal-interview-questio...

Err, not relevant here. GP specifically said the interviewee “was from a town somewhat close to a city I used to live in”, so this is information that was already disclosed.

If you’re interviewing for a US position, making small talk about where the interviewee lives is absolutely not out of bounds.

I’ve been the dev that replaced the strong candidate.

It was even worse, I was simply the guy in the meetings, the actual work was done by another dev that I translated for.

The best way to prevent it on remote teams is having the actual team in the interviews.

I managed up to 3 other devs while having a full time job on my end. Managing 3 daily meetings is no easy task.

The missions where short and we got fired only once, but that’s because the dev who was supposed to do the work was not up to the task.

Can you explain how you were paid? Was the company U.S. based?

The front guy got the money and then sent it to us.

One of the companies was US based but the front guy is a freelancer from a western european country (the devs and I are from eastern countries, mostly Russia and Ukraine)

Absolutely! I made a comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694 just recently about this. My company hired a guy who passed their tests, yet the guy who joined us for work was barely able to move a mouse around the screen, let alone get stuck in as a "Senior DevOps Engineer".

After we finally fired him I did a little digging. His resume was very similar to 100's of others found across linkedin, a list of devops keywords basically. Almost all of the people he had "worked" with in a previous company had the same text and even looked very similar.

I'm pretty sure that the company gets these people in the door and they try to last as long as possible earning western senior dev salaries. Rince and repeat a few times a year and it probably earns them a decent amount.

It wouldn’t surprise me either if the candidate paid them for them to do it, with promises from them that he’ll be making tons of money from a clueless company.

Grifts like this usually take advantage of multiple parties.

is it possible to include language in the contract that comes with a penalty for things that result in this? At the least a money back guarantee.

I don't do a lot of interviewing at my company, but I encountered my first fraud candidate two weeks ago. He said he was having connectivity issues and asked about not joining video. I offered to work with HR to reschedule but he said he didn't want to inconvenience anyone. If it was purely my decision, I would say no video = no interview, but I guess fraudsters thrive when administrative coordination breaks down.

He gave a technically sound answer to every question, but I was extremely skeptical. For one thing, he wholeheartedly agreed to the design outlined in my "honeypot" question where the solution would be something prone to triggering immense technical debt. He also dismissed the "soft" question about a time he encountered a challenge.

His most recent work experience was at a competitor where a former colleague works (we're in a niche space). That friend told me he encountered the same thing, including a candidate who recently claimed to work at my company and was moving (I never heard of the name nor could find mention in Slack/AD).

I am glad that a lot of people in this thread have figured out the fraud and caught the rogue employee early on. But the reason this fraud is so prevalent is because it works.

I have a friend who had someone else go through the interview process for him and ended up getting hired at one of the top 10 largest banks in US. Not only that, but because he was grossly under qualified for this job, he hired someone to teach him how to do his job. He works his normal 8-5, then he screen shares with this guy and they work together to complete his tasks. I'm a bit surprised that this worked and that they still haven't caught on, he has been working there for 8-10 months now. He has been sharing company intellectual property of a top US bank to foreigners for 8-10 months. The saddest part about this is that, he isn't a dumb, he is knowledgeable enough to get a decent job without cheating. In fact he has worked, both legally and ethically, for reputable companies.

I'm just flabbergasted at how this can happen, or how someone thinks they can get away with it.

Our company is pretty much entirely remote, but the interview process includes an initial screen (on video, about 45 mins), and then about 4 hours of interviews, again all on video, with about 8 different people. Point being, we know who you are. Do people think humans can't recognize faces or voices? Do some companies interview without a face-to-face conversation? I honestly just don't understand how this works, or how someone could think this could work.

I think even this model can be gamed.

I interviewed a contractor over video a few weeks ago. Both of us live on camera. The candidate wore glasses and I could see their eyes darting back and forth across their screen while answering questions. There were also a high number of really abnormal pauses before responding.

I'm 99% convinced the candidate was being fed answers by someone else listening in.

Ask anyone who is involved in certifications. During the height of COVID, a huge amount of effort had to go into preventing remote test proctoring from being gamed--of course often inconveniencing the honest test takers.

Not to be too harsh, and judging by your response you did detect this bad interviewer, but IMO if someone can game your interviews in that manner, you need to re-evaluate how you do interviews.

E.g. a big part of our interviews is to ask about previous projects, pitfalls they hit, reasons they made certain technology choices, etc. I'm 100% sure that if the interviewer had no idea what they were talking about and was being fed answers it would be extremely apparent.

No idea if this was what was going on, but when I'm interviewing my eyes are moving between 3 things: The camera for eye contact, the interviewer's video so I can read body language, and my notes/resume so I don't forget to say anything.

You can get interview rounds with random people from the company, and maybe the hiring manager will be the only one that will keep working with you in the future. That's pretty common for big tech companies. In those cases, you would have to deceive only one person, I guess?

We had pretty much the exact same thing happen earlier this year. Our team is remote. The guy I interviewed with on of our team members was an excellent hire. The guy that showed up online the first day was having all sorts of connectivity issues. And his communication was completely different.

We got suspicious pretty quick and eventually forced the guy we hired into a call and confronted him about it. His excuse was that it was his roommate online because he had some unexpected errand or something that morning.

The candidate didn't even come to us from one of the big faceless recruiters, but from one we've worked with in the past who's provided several of our current team members.

It's the first instance of that happening since we've gone remote, so I foresee us doing some more verification day 1, etc. for future hires.

And a few years ago, after we were acquired by a large enterprise company, we had several instances of the big contracting firms sending us different people than who we interviewed, or even catching the interviewee being a stand-in for someone else on their computer doing the work, etc. And this was prior to us being remote, so we'd get completely different people showing up in our office back then, etc. Our process at that time was to basically reinterview as soon as they stepped through the door, and then usually walk them right back out. Eventually, we were able work around having to hire from those firms.

This is almost ‘mainstream’ news at this point - it was discussed in a recent This American Life episode: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/770/my-lying-eyes

I knew this story sounded familiar.

One of my favorite failed interviews was a candidate who wore glasses and took his interview in a dimly lit room. This allowed me to see the google search box from his monitor reflecting on his glasses lol. And sure enough, every question was followed by typing, screen flashing on his glasses, 20 seconds of silence, and a really poor response.

You're getting the person's photo ID for their I-9, and it's simple enough to verify employment history before making an offer. Just ask for a photo ID during the interview process as well. I mean they could still have a fake ID but that would be a much more elaborate and much more serious fraud.

Really though, for all prospective hires it's a leap of faith to assume performance in the interview will translate into performance in the actual job, and you need to be prepared for that not to be the case. Whatever safeguards you have in place to protect you from someone who isn't as good as they seemed to be should presumably also protect you from someone who isn't who they seemed to be.

The problem is that you hire someone legit that could pass any verification, but the person you talks to once hired is not longer the candidate.

If you don’t notice it on day one, it’s almost impossible to detect it afterwards. The fake dev could be somewhat competent even and do a great job.

Okay but you know the name and identifying personal details about the person you verified, and the person you talk to once hired needs to give you their photo ID. If the person you are interacting with doesn't match the photo on their ID, or if the name or identifying information on the ID is different from the one you verified, then it should be immediately clear they are different people. It's the person who interviewed that had to be the fake.

Nobody ever checked my id when starting on a new team.

And I never use my webcam so on remote teams the only think they know is the name I give them and my voice.

And that you accomplish your tasks well enough that they are willing to keep paying you. And that you have the login credentials of the person they were expecting. And you are familiar with the things they expect you to be familiar with.

I mean if you can somehow find someone who is able and willing to do your job for you for sufficiently lower than your salary that you'd be willing to pay them and who wouldn't just get the job (and the full paycheck) for themselves without the middle man, then cool, go drink margaritas on the beach while your subcontractor slaves away. As long as they're not like foreign spies or something, why would anyone care?

From a candidate's perspective this would turn me off having to show a photo id during an interview. It would be one thing if it is in person and I flash it to them like getting into a bar. But I would not want to send it online to someone I don't know, seems like a good way of getting your identity stolen.

You're already giving them your name, phone number, home address, and extensive details about your past whereabouts. While the idea of an interviewing bait and switch seems incredibly dumb to me, if there is a serious need to verify identity then that's what ID is for. And it's not like it needs to be at the very beginning, it can be the last step before the offer is formally extended, by which point the relationship is exactly as developed as it will be when you submit it for your I-9.

I have not experienced this personally, but someone I met told me they have encountered (or maybe also heard of) candidates who were lip-synching someone else's voice to answer questions during an interview. Basically, this person was warning that we should pay attention to a candidate's lips to make sure that they are the person who is actually speaking because there may be someone out of sight of the camera who may be providing competent answers. It doesn't surprise me because a lot of these remote or tech jobs are in high demand; but I don't understand what the cheater who actually gets hired would actually do. Part of me thinks they may actually be hackers or foreign agents.

The company owner hired via upwork a dev for about 2x my salary and he produced little work but he billed 80 hours/week, turn out he recorded a work day session and used like a mouse recording/replaying app, each day he will just start the program and it will reproduce the same result, was really fun trying to figure out what's going on, and a strange way to get a raise

This is a brilliant scam. If he can fool 100 companies per month with this and only gets caught (on average) after a couple of weeks, he's making an incredibly good income.

Just once, I interviewed this guy with a clearly european name. On the call he had no camera on, a very thick chinese accent and barely spoke English. In our email comms he was fluent.

There was no way for me to verify this guy was real, he couldn't give me his address because of "tax reasons" and wanted me to use his "wife's address" for his W-2 and legal paperwork.

Just all around fishy. After a bit he just stopped responding in the call, hung up and never responded to emails again.

---

Unrelated, I've had many chinese nationals reach out to purchase my freelancing profile so I guess this is a common scam.

I have never experienced it and I don't think it's a thing in my corner of the world.

However there was a post here or on Reddit (the line is blurry sometimes) where some developers from a specific Asian country described several cases. They made it sound like a frequent, organized thing, like a consultancy or some kind of racket. Most of them cited desperation and a "fake it until you make it" culture as the reasons for lying.

In my opinion this is bound to happen at places where people are poor and unhappy. And it's not limited to the software industry.

Honesty is in shorter supply than you think in the consulting industry (with good exceptions). I have been around long enough to see fabricated resumes, bait-and-switch of candidates, and dedicated engineers that were not so dedicated.

What surprises me the most is that you have managers that not only end up getting in business with them but they are not able to find what it is really going on. And in some big companies some managers know what is going on and are fine with it!

> dedicated engineers that were not so dedicated

what do you mean by that?

Here is a tip: just inform the interviewee that because of "hiring fraud", the whole interview video will be recorded. Such frauds won't accept your job offer, even if they clear interviews.

We've seen a form of this a lot recently too. Some patterns we've noticed, at least for those coming to us:

- Name / ethnicity / accent don't add up. By itself these weren't necessarily direct red flags, but combined with others it's been a common pattern.

- A lot of background noise of others talking. Can't really make out what the others are saying but sounds like a bunch of other people interviewing.

- Long pauses before answering questions, and often times the "candidate" looking somewhere off camera.

- Very short direct answers. When they do answer, it's very short and direct with no further elaboration. Any follow ups, even simple ones are follow but long pauses as well.

I think contractors taking on 2 or more full time roles at once is rife at the moment in the UK. In 2021 I put together a team of 7 contractors, and I’m as sure as I can be there 3 of them were double billing. Incredible!

As a UK contractor myself, would you be able to share some tips as to how to give reassurance to the client that you're not doing that?

With easy, well-defined tasks it's easy - just do the work and the regular commits prove that you've done the work on time and aren't taking the piss.

But in my case I'm sometimes stuck on long-running tasks that involve dealing with lots of legacy technical debt where I have a local branch going for 2 weeks that's a complete mess and doesn't pass CI or where I have to spend lots of time thinking about the solution and trying different approaches before settling on something I'm actually happy to commit and build upon. During that time, from the client's perspective it might look like nothing is happening, so I try to make up for it by taking on smaller, auxiliary tasks which don't take much time but can be completed and pushed to at least show some activity.

Before remote you show up in the office and everyone assumes you're working so this wasn't a concern at all.

They're literally contractors for that reason, why are you surprised?

Because I was contracting these people for Monday-Friday 9-5 approx (i.e typical working week rather than fixed deliverables) and the contract said likewise. It was therefore a breach of contract, and I was surprised because I thought people had higher professional standards.

Then they're not contractors, they're full time employees that you refuse to pay the benefits for. Given this level of cutting corners, I'm not surprised your counterparts are pulling one over on you as well.

Nonsense.

Not sure if you are in the UK but there must be hundreds of thousands of people working in this way and being paid significantly more than FTEs even when benefits are taken into account.

The overwhelming number of contracts signed with them are time and materials rather than fixed scope, and usually with some expectation around working hours.

It is a perfectly fair and reasonable way to contract with someone, for instance if they are operating as part of a team for a fixed project period.

No I get what you're talking about, I have worked in the UK job market for many years. You are under this illusion that those people work exactly every day of the year, in which case they might earn more than an employee who gets benefits. Which they don't. Even during good years being able to put more than half a year on the bill is rare. And now look at the last two years and tell me about job security for "full time contractors", go on. Especially when faced with medical issues.

None of that is relevant. My point is that if you accept a time and materials contract with an expected working day clause then it’s unethical to double book time and in no way a reflection on the employer or hirer.

Oh but on the contrary, it's extremely relevant. The fact that it's uncomfortable to your agenda that the basis of your "time and materials contract" is immoral and unethical doesn't make it less relevant - in fact, it makes it exactly the most relevant thing to say about this.

You have an unethical contract meant to remove people's safety and wealth and based off of that piece of paper you expect people to be ethical about it. Come on dude, you can't be this self-contradictory.

The scale of this on the thread is astonishing. I hired in the past through marketplaces. One particular candidate started strong but then his productivity began to taper off. Camera off in more and more meetings. Less availability. And this was a full time position! I haven't been able to prove it, but a very similar profile photo showed on LinkedIn as working full time for a different company. Whether or not he was working 2 jobs, more, or even being a face of a dev shop, all are possibilities. All I know is this individual was not just working full time for us.

I was at a remote company last year and hiring (was lead, building the team) and right before one interview, I reviewed a resume and saw that there were.. 2 jobs for the same time period.

The best way to get the truth is to make all answers acceptable.

me: "So, job A was a 40 hour/week job, right?" him: "Yup" me: "But you were also doing work for job B then right." him: "Yeah, basically" me: "So you basically did job B whenever there was some slack for job A?" him: "exactly."

I was dumbstruck internally and then just wrapped up the interview politely and let him know a couple days later that it wasn't a good fit. No use alerting him that he should change his resume (for other possibile employers..)

I don't see an issue here… He was completely honest about working two jobs at once, to the extent of putting it on his resume.

Surely you'd have followed this up with some questions about how the contracts for those two jobs were worded, or that you'd expect someone to be working full-time for yourselves and wether that would be acceptable?

Yep had the same experience multiple times in tech industry especially when hiring via contracting companies.

I asked around and while what you encountered is one way they cheat, there are many ways the do it. I collected all possible ways candidates cheat and redflags to look out for when interviewing candidates in my blog post.

(here is post link) https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/how-to-catch-a-cheati...

* if this falls under self-promotion, I can remove it.

Someone actually attempted to hire me to play a part in a scam like this over LinkedIn about a month ago. The guy who contacted me says their devs don't know web tech well and don't speak English very well, so he wanted me to do the interviews for them over phone calls and offered a modest rate for the service I'd provide.

I ended the conversation as soon as the plan was revealed, and was struck by just how brazen the dude was just blatantly asking me to lie for them professionally after exchanging like 2 messages.

While remote work has made it easier and more prevalent, "hiring fraud" has been around forever. Especially in larger corporations, where interviewing was done by loosely associated teams, and the faces of all the in-person candidates blended together or were rapidly forgotten. I personally witnessed this 3 or 4 times back in the 90's, while an employee of a Fortune 5 company.

Contracting agencies were the worst with the bait-and-switch game though, even prior to H-1Bs.

Yes! I have a long-ish tenure at my current org (10+ years). I have had at least two co-workers in that time window who were clearly having someone else do their work assignments off-hours.

Honestly, it kind of worked for them. I was very naive about it and it took me a long time to realize that the reason both co-workers could not discuss technical issues at work (or "their" own code) was that they simply didn't know anything (and it wasn't "their" code). As far as I know, only a very small number of tech people suspected anything.

I've been on the hiring process for rather big company and all kind of frauds happened on daily basis.

Faux identities, sub-hiring for work, outsourcing to low cost countries, even stuff like hiring actors for interviews and intimidation tactics (sic) plus a lot lot more.

Hiring (especially remotely) is a game and at some level you need to incorporate some anti-fraud techniques.

I feel exactly zero sympathy for companies at this point. Y'all have spent years suppressing wages, making candidates jump through all kinds of hoops, and encourage a "fake it 'til you make it" culture among founders.

Now someone pulls some dirty, saucy tricks on you and you're crying about? Cry me a fucking river. Boo hoo.

2 wrongs don't make it right.

Okay, George Washington. You sure showed me the error of my ways.

Yes I did. They wanted my stuff to be sent. When I said "no", I just show it on-screen they lost all interest suddenly and finished the call after encouraging to do the exercise and "take the time I need" (bc I was working already in my day job).

But this was more employer-fraud, not employee.

Not this way, but a few years ago we got an entire team of 5 people with a very specific skillset for a project and after the first week I discovered they have no such skills. Higher management in my company did not believe, but a month later they started to realize something is wrong, so they talked to the higher management from that other company with no good result. It took a bit over 1 year to terminate that contract.

Also about hiring fraud, I saw many positions that were advertised, interviews were performed, the "right" person was hired - all the interviews were fake, the positions were arranged for certain people from the very beginning. It is quite common in some companies and positions in my country, including international companies with local branches.

I worked for a consulting (bodyshop) almost 10 years ago and they had this happen. Someone did phone interviews with flying colours. The candidate himself was barely functional with English and had a pocket translator in hand at all times. He was let go within a couple months.

"a couple of months" ... why not immediately?

Funnily enough, the interview fraud (I wasn't a part of that) only got brought up after he was gone. Between being at a very passive government client, plus company culture, it's almost more amazing that he was able to burn bridges at a place people spent years accomplishing nothing.

edit: I briefly doubted myself, but I checked on his LinkedIn and he has it listed as a 6-month engagement in 2013, with a significant gap until the next role. Even mentioned him to my wife in chats during that time span.

ouch.. this sort of makes me think of Office Space for some reason.

"I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck."

"So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch."

"So um, Milton has been let go?"

"Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the glitch. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally."

"We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end."

We're focusing mostly on new hires, but since work-from-home went mainstream, I've observed some existing and trusted employees suddenly always off camera during zoom meetings, with a different voice. Often along with a dip in the quality of their work.

I have had experiences where you do video interviews. When interviewing the audio is off and what is happening is the person answering is on speaker phone and the guy you are looking at is pretending to talk.

The simplest way to discover is ask the color of your shirt.

While I have some empathy, and I am not certain what was involved in your technical interview but the level of difficulty in some cases is just plain nuts. My first tech interview in January was mind boggling, timed questions of 90 seconds. The position was for Django, and not a single question was Django. All pure Python. The main question was so abstract to this day I have no idea wtf they wanted, 12 minutes to solve. Twitter and other places are filled with cases like this. So in an environment like this expect pinch hitters.

On a more positive note my last interview was very fair and on topic.

There’s also this, which is a slightly different kind of fraud made possible by remote work: https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed

Yes. People knocking on our doors thinking they were hired and come to start their first day of work.

What happened was the fraudsters asked the candidates to buy some hardware on their own claiming we will reimburse them. Then they said they are sending them money to reimburse them but they made a mistake and sent too much and asked to send back the difference.

Another variant was they asked them to buy computers and then send to fraudster's address ostensibly for software installation.

We tweaked our website so that candidates browsing our website learn we never do such things, we explained the hiring process and especially the communication.

Years ago I worked at a company where one of the first paragraphs in the contract was that you have to pay a 4 digit sum if you didn't show up on the first day. (The company was small with solid funding but had actually a massive churn)

OTOH I experienced the reverse. Shady offers where red flags kept popping up after accepting the 1st interview round. E.g. the (ext.) recruiter lying about the funding or the company revealing shortly before signing the contract that the runway is just half a year. Not surprising that some applicants aren't 100% truthful either...

Something like that happened with a team at my previous employer. The person nailed the interview, but when the person started they seemed pretty clueless about the position, the programming languages, and the tools that the team used. Plus the person's personality seemed a little different. The company quickly figured out that a front did the interview of this person, and that they were hired under false pretenses. Immediate dismissal.

This sort of situation seems to have become very common in the last couple or three years.

Earlier this year I was part of technical screening interviews but in two interviews we noticed the interviewee being given the answers during the call. They would wear airpods but have their teams device set to the laptop speaker / mic. Someone on our side heard the second voice coming from the airpods and we killed the interview.

We can try to detect / avoid it in the future but ultimately my takeaway is to avoid generic question lists for remote technical interviews, and instead try to hammer into one of their projects.

We recently had to deal with a case of this at my company. The story is almost exactly the same, guy sounded great, passed all the interviews, had a killer resume etc. When he actually got to work, it was clear that he barely knew how to use a computer let alone program one. He had trouble searching for string of text in an open buffer, or explaining simple code in a language that his resume claimed he had expertise. It's very unfortunate and ultimately just wasted everyone's time.

Worst we ever had was a very promising interviewee whom could not elaborate on any of the things on his resume. When asked about specific technologies listed on his resume, he was unable to speak on any of his experiences.

Finally, out of frustration I just ask him straight out "why did you put these things on your resume if you don't have experience in them?" to which he said "the recruiter told me to".

As far as I'm aware, we never worked with that recruiter again.

> I'm just curious to hear how many of you have experienced something similar. Is it common? Is there something obvious I'm not thinking of to help avoid these situations?

Had the exact same thing happen, yeah. One person interviewed on camera and used their ID for employment verification (EVerify/I-9). Someone else was joining meetings instead, initially with their camera off, and then when confronted and turned camera on, was DEFINITELY not the same person.

This should address the worries about how remote work will offshore all job.

Because, think about it a minute:

Why should the top-talent overseas slaver away for your startup for low compensation?

Taking India as an example: There are top companies in India which would give top talent a competitive salary for India, along with corresponding status and responsibility.

So, why should top talent there take your similarly paid remote job which lacks the social standing and credibility that comes by working for a top-tier Indian company? Even if you pay higher than the local top-tier company, the difference in pay should be high enough to offset all other things that the candidate is losing by not taking a job in a respectable local company. This kind of social status is quite important because of social pressure from parents, family peers in many cultures. Not unlike how top-tier candidates still prefer to work for reputable companies in San Francisco instead of going for somewhat higher pay in no-name startups.

To recruit and keep top tier talent overseas, you will have to treat them just like how you were treating your local candidates. If you try to weasel your way out of it through scammy business practices - underpay, overwork, sweatshops etc - you will reap what you sow - scammy candidates.

Been there. This happened about 3 years ago, it was also horribly blatant. We interviewed a candidate who blew us away, superior candidate, easy "yes" from everyone. then when he started, it became pretty clear within 2-ish weeks this was not the same person. He could not do basic BASIC tasks. The ironic part was, we did a video call, but none of us could remember what the original guy looked like, and we did not record the video.

The safest course of action is keeping 100% remote but interviewing in-person at least once.

I've had this occur in a number of ways, typically with candidates who are not US Based. One candidate was clearly the "face" of a group of more skilled programmers. Several others were not the person who was listed in a resume.

Luckily enough, asking them to program while on camera makes it easy to suss out people who are not what they seem.

And if they do not have their webcam on during the interview loop, it is an automatic no-hire.

Interestingly, we’ve had a bunch of fraud where people impersonate OSS devs. They then proxy their docs, and try to run fake traffic for ad revenue.

More info in our blog post: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/09/watch-out-ad-scammers...

I have been on the other end of this. I received an email offer to attend these hiring interviews and meet with customers while not doing the actual dev work.

Too sleazy for me. I'm basically selling my brand to another company. If companies get smart and create an employee blacklist, it becomes a lot harder for me to be employed down the line. (Hrm, maybe I should start a blacklist.)

One of our managers told a story about someone using Deepfake during video interviews; it looked weird and artifacty but the quality was shit anyway so they just attributed it to that.

Honestly don't know if it's true or just a story but now we only hire remote in the US and after the initial screens we fly out candidates for in-person (pay for the flight and -if needed- hotel).

Yes, experienced the exact same situation in 2020. Person starting day 1 was different than person interviewed. They weren't too smart about it either - a little online sleuthing showed how the two people were related. We confronted him about it and fired him the first week. We also notified the feds about it (person had been submitted for clearance so we had to).

More meta:

I wonder if there's an opportunity in the future to tie work identity and work payments to a crypto wallet - i.e. "Your Github is tied to the wallet address, you apply to the job with the wallet address, you log into work accounts with the wallet address, and we pay you at the wallet address." Almost like the next evolution of Yubikeys.

There are many projects that have experimented with something like this - and personally, I think this is the way to go. Staked ID...

Let's hope not, that sounds absolutely terrible. With my physical wallet, if I lose it I can call the bank to get my cards frozen, I can go to town hall to get my ID reissued,...

Whereas with crypto if I lose my key/wallet, I'm SOL.

I've heard of this happening. A friend of mine recently hired a candidate, but the candidate that actually "showed up" (it was a remote company) was completely different. It took his company 3 months to realize they had been duped by a scam out of India.

How did you due diligence the candidate? Background check? Docs to confirm they are US based?

Same thing happened at a previous company I worked at about one year into the pandemic.

We still gave the guy until the end of the week to prove he could be useful.

He wasn't, so we let him go, but we would have kept him on if he was competent. Despite the fraud. Because it was such a pain to find a good dev at that time (not easy now, but not as hard, subjectively)

This would be impossible for us because despite hiring remote people from all over the UK we take photo ID and various other forms of identification as proof they can legally live and work in the UK.

I get how this would be a thing when you're hiring from other territories. Got to step up the checks and balances in that scenario.

You're not taking IDs until after the offer has been accepted. How do you verify the person who was in the interview was the person you hired?

You have the person taking the ID included in one of the interviews. It's not that hard.

Universities in the USA make proper use of third party checks, while me in poor EU had a postdoc that I suspected was faking something. The thing became big once he could not board a plane due to differences in company Identity (as in company-bought ticket) vs name in passport. I prefer to leave it here.

Not directly, but yes. We must hire someone in India, and we were making interviews through Xoom. HR strongly advises asking the candidate to switch the camera on and take a picture of him, just because it's very common that someone is replaced by someone else during technical interviews.

We had a guy that before COVID interview remotely as iOS engineering contract. When we came on the job was not good. Our boss heard him on the phone talking in his native language asking saying something like "you need to help me here, I do not know how to do it."

He was on the job only one day.

I have been personally emailed to participate in an interview under another candidates name. It set off so many alarms for me. I did not respond.

Here’s what I was sent.

> Hope you're doing well.

> We're a tightly-knit team of full-stack developers and we need someone who can help us with client communications. Most of our developers are not native English speakers and we often face communication issues. That's why we need someone who's based in the U.S and has technical background.

> The main responsibility will be taking job interviews on our behalf. You should be able to join the meetings under someone else's name.

> This is an hourly engagement and the rate is $40 ~ $80 / hr depending on your experience.

> Please kindly reply to this email if you're interested.

If you're planning on sending them a multi-thousand dollar work computer, why not invest in a plane ticket and overnight hotel just to be able to have a conversation with them in person before giving them an offer?

You would save so much hassle with a (relatively) small investment.

Today I spoke with one of ex-colleages. He said he was spending hours to weed out candidates that joined his company through fraudulent means. There are scams at multiple layers: during hiring, proxying in day to day work. It became a huge industry in its own.

How fun (not) is that....

I thought you were gonna talk about a company bringing you in for an interview but turned out they weren't hiring, just seeing who was out there in case they did need people. Meanwhile, I wasted my lunch hour doing what I thought was interviewing.

Five years ago I would have been sympathetic to the OP, but not really anymore. Just running the numbers, if a person interviews at ten companies the odds are very high they will come across multiple companies with shady, broken, or manipulative hiring practices.

The top story on HN right now would seem to indicate that it's not just you/your team: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953

I interviewed a candidate whose lip movements were not matching the sounds. His mouth just mumbled randomly, but a quite eloquent voice was produced, including sounds like "th". I assumed that it was some sort of sound delay and placed the doubts on myself ("it's probably my uncouncious bias"). When he got hired, he happened to be placed in the same team as me, and I was surprised to how thick his accent was. He just stayed for less than one week, because he lied about a lot of stuff to HR as well (he wasn't even living in the country that he said he was, so there was no way to ship the equipment).

I was offered a job at a major defense contractor in Binghamton NY without any interview. I had seen their job postings for this location for years and was mostly curious about the work they were doing. I finally got a response from some recruiters in NJ but they were evasive about any interview claiming the hiring manager was too busy, had some weird housing offer, and had an obnoxious superiority complex.

This was immediately suspicious and I hate slimeball recruiters so I made them arrange an interview and ghosted them. One of the recruiters called to chew me out while I was returning home from a successful interview for a real job.

Curious - what did/will you guys do? Fire him day 1? Are there any repercussions to this...ie do you have to pay him for time worked on day 1? I read it's common, but how in the world do you handle something like this?

When it happened to us, we paid the person for their couple days on the job before we fired them. I'm not sure if you're legally obligated to, but it was easier to pay to make it go away.

In our case the issue was identified basically immediately. His access to our systems was revoked and we're in the process of trying to figure out how, if possible, we can get back the laptop we sent him. I'm not sure how pay will be handled for the few hours he was an employee.

Yep. I am a junior engineer. I got a message on Linkedin, someone was offering me like $2k/week to take interviews/technical assessments for clients overseas. I asked if it was legal and he stopped messaging me.

Yep. Some startup guy in the chat widget space basically used me as free consulting under the premise of hiring for a job. The joke's on him because I'm at one of the MAANG's now as an SRE equivalent.

Reading through all the responses...My personal take on what I've been reading.

The amount of cheating that I ( and my fellow professors ) have seen during these past few years has absolutely exploded (in a way that is beyond belief, and I've been doing this for a while).

The techniques others have outlined/alluded to ( camera off, a big life event just happened, looking off camera, noise, etc ) are all things that I've been seeing. And whilst this is nothing to be lauded, after all how many vectors are there, I do think that perhaps a solution is looking towards academics. (just saying...)

Someone just posted a story on "being impersonated" :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953

Many years ago I worked at a startup where the CEO was a former CS professor. While at the university, he worked with a somewhat legendary guy who ran the CS school's IT infra. Somehow wires got crossed in recruiting while sourcing the candidate, and another guy with _the exact same name_ who _also worked at the university in IT_ but for a different school got hired after what must've been a perfunctory interview.

The startup had a lot of other problems, that one was the most awkward. It folded not very long afterwards.

So what happened next? Did you fire him or is he still working for you?

I'm so dumb that this question didn't even occur to me :-)

I'm not sure how HR has handled it but within a few hours of him starting all of his access was revoked (email, slack, github, etc). I imagine HR fired him but I don't actually know what the official status is.

I have seen belligerent aging managers use a news item about this criminal action to bolster their own "these people" management theories, on the other hand.

plenty of mob types are making mob money on this scam while we type, as excellent young engineers struggle to make $3k USD per month.. I will guess. Overall seems like collateral damage for the relentless wage-war with outsourcing.. from the engineer side, I tend towards "this is the (outsourced workforce) bed you made now you are getting it back"

Just vaguely related, but it seems that various forms of hiring fraud are now appearing, i.e. https://connortumbleson.com/2022/09/19/someone-is-pretending...

In the remote world, it's going to be difficult to address, but it's happened also in the old physical world — albeit less frequently.

When I was freelancing (even before the pandemic and remote taking off), I used to get constant outreaches from people in Asia asking if I could secure contracts, do the meetings and face to face, and let them do the coding. They'd keep 80% and I'd keep 20% for a couple hours of work. I always flipped it on them and said since it's my reputation, I'll keep the 80%. None of them took me up on it. It seems like they've moved on to a new system of fraud.

Yes this happened in my company recently. We took video screenshots and compared faces and fired a few people. But a lot of people were hired before they knew this was going on.

How many fraudulent candidates did you guys hire exactly?

4 that i know of. It was my employer not me personally.

Deja Vu? This exact question and set of circumstances was Asked previously.

Ahh, yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343

Which referenced: https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-...

You didn't hire the guy for his identity. You hired him to do work. See how his performance is. If it's not the level of performance you were expecting, fire him.

Please! If there was a way to skip the ridiculous interview process and go directly to work, I would do it every time. This isn’t scalable and it’s literally fraud, since you’re being paid. But if someone is going to go through all that trouble, at least wait a week and see.

Sometimes there are issues beyond the... creative representation of the candidate. From the company's perspective, this could easily land them in legal hot water as they now have no idea who the "employee" is or what their legal status is.

Also of note is that there's a lot of stories here about companies waiting more than a week. Surprisingly few conclude with "...and it was great work, so we kept them!".

Possible security issues, stealing data, corporate raider.

Where can I purchase this service? I'm a very capable engineer but my time and stress are limited, I'd pay like $20k to avoid having to do interviews

How do the scammers benefit from this? Do they pay people to do well in technical interviews to get the job, then "outsource" the day-to-day job to someone else who is not as technically skilled and/or may not meet the citizenship requirements, then take a cut of the salary in the process?

We had it happen once several years ago when hiring a consultant as a developer through a staffing agency. The candidate passed a webcam interview but then on his start date a different person showed up in our office. It took us a few hours for us to figure out what happened and send him away. Maybe in a larger company no one would have even noticed?

Wow... honestly I'm just amazed at the audacity considering the hoops I've had to jump though. Doesn't' seem at all worth it. I guess they're just banking on it being too much of a hassle to do anything about it but if that happened to me I would clear my day to get to the bottom of it and put an end to it, lol.

At my company, we require camera's on, we meet up 4-5 times a year, I can't see this ever happening at my company but definitely have worked at places that don't collaborate enough or take the time to learn your fellow coworkers. If someone gets away with this you have to question how much synergy your team has IMHO

Our company had this happen, first day the new employee was clearly not who was interviewed and didn't have the skillset. We fired her her 2 hours into the job and thankfully before we did much onboarding.

I'm unclear on what the desired outcome is. A shitty company that can't evaluate on-going employees and let them slide for 30-60 days?

I can certainly see large companies failing to identify and then when it finally comes clear it takes them months to fire.

If the person has some level of tech skill, then they might be able to coast for years. A junior engineer gets hired as a senior engineer, a D student gets the role that an A student would have gotten otherwise. etc. etc.

>> A few weeks later on his first day the guy in the Zoom was definitely not the guy I interviewed.

What do you mean by this? Like the face is another person? can you go into more detail about "not the guy I interviewed"? maybe it's just that zooming/remote work inherently requires more trust.

Thankfully, I work remote and with near-zero chance of fraud.

I had to get my "badge" 1h away. Had to be sponsored, multiple forms of ID, and an active paperwork on file. Full handprints were taken for both hands. Pictures as well.

Basically if I tried even KIND OF, I'd be going to federal prison. No ifs, ands, or buts.

It became an industry in its own. There are different layers of fraud from hiring to proxying day to day work. I know couple of guys who have been proxying for more than 5 people. This will become societal problem soon as this is going at a huge scale.

This sounds related to the other HN post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953

In that case, someone pretended to be Connor Tumbleson to get hired.

Many years ago (1980 I believe) I heard the following rumor about a company I was doing some contract work for: they submitted two full time time cards for many of their consultants, one to a government customer, one to a private sector customer.

You know, it had occurred to me that you could do this with some companies interview styles. If they're just picking random people you aren't going to work with to evaluate you, and the company is large enough.

If as part of the hiring process, something old school and simple as calling just a referenced ex-teammate (or two) of the candidate and tell you things about him/her wouldn't massively remove this risk?

If you can fake an actual interviewer, asking for references is easy.

But you'll see good or bad signals on the quality of the references and their stories, no?

I really meant who is doing the references. Its hard to confirm who was their old boss or colleague. Is hacker6969@gmail.com really their old boss? You could ask a Linkedin account but that has no guarantees either.

An old school phone call to the previous employer to background check at least the very basics?

The problem is HR will do the basic like dates of employment but will never give a rating. Old managers probably have moved on.

If they are willing to game the system by using a different person during the interview, what suggests that they would not have fake references listed to help corroborate. Seems like one of the first things I'd set up if I was running this scam.

It will make you scam one order of magnitude harder to setup, complex to manage and easier to detect incongruences if the company asks the right questions.

Is HR allowed to ask the "right questions", other than "Did N. work there, and when?" I'm not aware of HR departments willing to ask anything else.

They won't for risk of litigation you mean or what?

Probably illegal in EU. For elsewhere I would add individual phone number for every fake ex-teammate so that nothing goes wrong faking voices.

I wonder if companies would be willing to pay for a service that vets remote candidates in person in their city? Effectively the service would hire locals to meet/interview the candidate in person.

Maybe someone read too much Tim Ferris! Never experienced it but never worked remote first. Agree that you need to call it out. With AI advances though this is going to get harder to detect!

Please check in from time to time to let us know how this "remote only" endeavor is working out for you. I know it worked good for 37signals, just wondering if it can be duplicated.

Nobody that made it to the offer stage, but we've had candidates make it through the recruiter screen using a stand-in, then fall on their face in a real interview.

I have first hand experience interviewing developers via Zoom who are trying to mime the audio from a speakerphone on their end with someone answering questions.

On the flipside, I've applied for plenty of jobs- only to be told I lack necessary skills for the positions.

My resume has been edited to fit each job.

On the other hand, we once hired a remote guy at a company I worked for. There was no identity fraud.

He just didn't do any work. Got fired ofc.

Is that better?

Has anyone considered opening a criminal case against such people? Evidence of fraud shouldn't be too hard to collect.

Is fraud actually being prosecuted reliably?

My observation given the vast amount of financial fraud occurring everywhere (with a paper trail), fraud is one of those things that's only selectively prosecuted when you piss off someone powerful enough or with the right connections.

Even if we assume fraud actually starts being prosecuted seriously, I'd assume the astronomical quantity of financial fraud out there would take priority over a relatively little amount of employment/candidate fraud.

I don't think there is a massive problem with financial fraud. What would be an example?

Wage Theft? A 2017 report claimed that US wage theft (by companies against employees) was 100 times the size of reported robberies ($50 B vs $438M). https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-bil...

US GDP is about $21T, so about 420 times bigger. Or to put it differently, about 0.2% of the GDP.

Also, wage theft isn't fraud exactly.

UK has a massive problem with phone scams pretending to be tech support or our tax office for example. They get victims to wire money to the account of a money mule who then cashes it out. This all happens over the normal banking system - enforcement is so bad that they're not even trying to cover their tracks by using gift cards or crypto.

How does that compare to UK's GDP, for the problem to be massive?

I’ve once had a remote coworker who had two full time jobs at the same time.

They would reuse code with both companies.

That was a freaking mess.

When candidates tell me they’re in the US but our conversation has a 3 second lag, that’s usually a red flag.

You thought that going 100% remote wouldn't have any drawbacks... You apparently thought wrong LOL

Nope. Pretty niche field that has small world vibes and such a person would get flushed out pretty fast

I recently saw a video where someone is lip syncing answers to recruiter questions over a zoom call

Is he an Indian? This is well known

I have not but I have heard first hand of people interviewing remotely from India (from big staffing firms of course) that were great for the job and then on the first day (pre covid) they physically showup it is a completely different person. They assume that westerners will not be able to tell the two apart and apparently it is pretty damn obvious.

TLDR: Giant staffing firms suck for everyone

Scary. I can't believe someone would have the nerve to do this. Fire fast.

Yes, I've had this happen at a place I had worked for.

Do you have legal right to claim their compensation?

What was the national background of the candidate?

I’ve seen it at 2 different companies so far.

Constantly.

No ID check and he was given a job? Does this happen to anyone here?

It's not clear to me that the person who we talked to was not who he said he was. It's that the person who showed up was definitely not that person.

Usually ID checks happen at on-boarding, not interviewing, but still you would think it would be a perfect place to verify and then dismiss the person the same day.

Actually I wouldn't even dismiss them... I'd list them as "never having shown up" so they were terminated for cause. Last thing I would do is give an unsub login credentials, e-mail access, etc. so they can continue to perpetuate their fraud.

I've never had my ID checked by potential employer, except when the job requires security clearance. This is in europe, though.

I was told my state drivers license wasn’t sufficient and had to bring my passport. I’m in the states.

Are you a non-US citizen? Because otherwise it makes no sense. Only about 25% of US citizens have passports.

The DL or State ID card is the de facto national ID card.

US born brown dude, they would have accepted a social security card or birth certificate too but nothing below the federal level. At least I'm confident in the real identities of my coworkers (other than security of course).

This is just because they communicated poorly that they require proof of your ability to legally be employed in the USA. Passport and SS card both fulfill this requirement. I'm as WASPY stereotype as you can ask for, I've had the same check done at every job I have had in the past 20 years. For me it's easy, because I always have a passport card in my wallet anyways.

Anyone can have a Driver's License, however the newer DLs in many states have the optional citizenship validation and marking, so those can be used as well.

DL/State ID is proof of identity. You can have such documents and not be eligible to work in the US.

SS Card (unless stamped not for employment or the electronic equivalent) proof of eligible to work.

US passport proof of identity and of citizenship, and of course citizens can legally work.

Probably 99% of US Citizens will have some combination of these as their I-9 eligibility documents.

Permanent residents will likely have a DL/State ID and their green card.

If you look at the I-9 page https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/form-i-9-acceptable-docume... there are a significant number of other documents, which many HR departments seem completely unaware of, like special endorsements on foreign passports and special eligibility documents, or military IDs or Tribal IDs for proof of identity.

Yea, before I got an offer to my current company you had to be vetted by hireright which was quite thorough. They contacted your previous employers and required a near absurd amount of documentation to prove who you are. It wasn’t a pleasant process, but it would be really hard to pass through as a fraud.

Most government issued ID's have a date of birth on it. By law, employers cannot ask for DOB prior to making a hiring decision, as age discrimination is illegal and something the employer can be sued for.

Not to say this would not work, but candidates would need to black out/ cover up information the employer cannot view.

I have got four jobs in my life and the only time I had to provide ID was when I was hired as a night guard.

For remote companies, would you consider outsourcing if there were an outsourcing agency that were easy-to-use, fast, cheap, reliable and high-quality? (Assume for the sake of outsourcing that there were an outsourcing agency that didn't suck and wasn't sleazy.)

If so, I'd like to talk to you and do some customer-validation interviews. Please find my email in my profile.

The benefits would be that instead of having fixed-staff that is sometimes poorly allocated, you could spin up inexpensive reliable staff on demand and it would be easily managed through a clean messaging/chat interface---Slack, Whatsapp, Twitter DM, your choice---with your external chief-of-staff. It also greatly increase the bus factor of your company. It would avoid hiring fraud and focus on matching high-quality inexpensive candidates to appropriate projects, and do project management for you.

If every function of your company (marketing down to content writing, development of every single company, all design etc.) is completely fancy and bespoke or you don't want to decrease your bus factor because you are moving way to damn fast to have any process or knowledge sharing outside of key team members, I guess this offer isn't for you. But perhaps also you've haven't completely bought into a sexiness/coolness mythology, realizing this mentality that everything must be in-house that isn't a great fit for 99% of companies. Perhaps you are open to modular boring solutions for certain company functions that aren't actually part of your core values / differentiators / skill area.

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