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Comment by ollien | Hacker News Reader

What I can't piece together here is what the scammer's endgame is. They land a cushy developer job under some false identity and ... then what? They're not going to pay some random college student to attend every meeting, are they? Even if they were, are they going to be able to maintain the level of work they lied about? If they really had those skills, they would just interview on their own.

Something's not adding up

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Maintaining is not the goal. Say you get a job that pays senior engineer money, and they fire you after maybe three weeks of you just saying "it depends" and pretending your connection is bad. You still made like $5,000. And you're probably running more than one of these scams at a time. And you're doing this from a relatively poor country with not much formal education. 100% worth it.

And who knows, maybe you manage to actually KEEP one of those jobs, which given how bad some employers are at figuring out who's good and bad at this stuff, is entirely plausible.

At a big telecom we had an employee that maybe closed 10 tickets in two years. He was the highest paid team member (as reported by our director) and worked remotely from an RV in Oklahoma. When he was finally discovered by our director, he was fired and his immediate manager was fired.

How much do you want to bet that he also had one or two other jobs that he treated the same way?

He was a long time employee with a legacy job title "wintel engineer." A transformational ex-IBM director was finally brave enough to PIP and fire him. I think he was mostly retired while putting in 8 hours of work a quarter.

Its possible they need someone with a "Senior" resume so they are able to charge $200/hour for their work. Then they are free to outsource it to 2 or 3 junior devs in a much lower priced market and pocket the difference.

They could be fully technically capable but unable to secure those jobs because of visas, location/timezone, the company having a prejudice against outsourcing/remote work, etc.

I had two past co-workers who were almost certainly having someone else do their work, I think (especially) at non-software companies folks just don't get caught.

Frankly, the work environment was slow-paced and generally non-confrontational so both co-workers I suspect of this behavior just managed to tread water. When I joined the group there was a very tight-knit group of 3-4 developers who were very protective of each other. There was always a handy reason why some schedule was slipping and the other fact is that in hindsight, there just weren't very high expectations for them to accomplish anything.

It would take months for the company to figure out that the person is not doing anything, is not who they pretend to be, and fire them. Months during which that imposter would have been paid to do literally nothing.

I guess at some company scale that would happen... you'd probably need pay someone to do onboarding for you (so you're not immediately flagged as a no-call-no-show), then you could go AWOL after that?

I assume they avoid jobs involving standups.

In roles where communication is fully asynchronous, a competent offshore dev whose written English is considerably closer to a native speaker than their spoken English might be able to hold onto the job for a while, especially if they're good at excuses.

If they're applying for US onshore jobs with below-local-market pay, they might even be considered relatively productive members of the team.

1) they could have developers from 3-rd world countries who have necessary skills but get low pay rate

2) they could have developers from countries currently under sanctions

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