Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions

Some background. I'm a senior developer who has performed hundreds of interviews and seen dozens of questionable recruits long before AI. Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. I've seen this done with A talking while B moves their lips on camera. Now with chatGPT (and earlier to some degree with just Google Search) we just see applicants eyes focused on something they're reading when we ask questions. All of this is just as easy as an AI generated applicant (if not easier) and quite likely to get the recruit hired.

A lot of this narrative is pointing the finger at China, North Korea and Russia/Ukraine. The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. North Korea has executed the largest crypto heists in history. These are not groups who need to fake it.

So who does this narrative serve? It serves the RTO CEOs. This makes CEOs scared to hire remote workers and lets the ones who demand it have a reason.

If anything the panic around AI should reinforce the need to think critically about these things.

reality is way more messy and worse. There are multiple actors involved in each part. Eg 2-3 "actors" for visual screen are ready for each call, 2-4 "audio" knowledge only experts on the call, 1 dedicated speaker, 1 person coordinating answers from audio folks to actor folks.

they are even ready for once in a while visit to offices in us, so they have actors there on the field as well ready to attend calls (probably 1 to 1 mapping after first visit)

and the work assigned is assigned to a completely different set of people, not involved in any of above. those folks and these folks dont interact.

i have worked part time as one of the "audio" person in above interviews. also involved on work side. ama.

A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. And so, a bullshit artist can get hired. Technology now allows these bullshit artists to propagate more, and do more damage than would have previously be possible. AI in the workplace is a similar problem. Can you tell the different between someone who really just leans on ChatGPT all day but is actually incompetent? Probably so, but someone who was that incompetent just wouldn't have previously been able to hang on for quite as long, or deceive so many people.

[edit]

It's clear that my comment was not clearly written -- when I said "A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are," I was referring to the people holding the interviews, and not referring to candidates. I'm shocked at just how bad a lot of folks are at holding interviews, and just how misplaced their confidence in their ability seems to be.

A LOT of interviews are one-sided bully sessions, so people don't jump through the hoops they are expected to.. especially in hazing-friendly cultures like the security and finance sectors

Out of curiosity, what tech sector does Ukraine have? I don't remember ever hearing of any large successful Ukrainian SW compony or unicorn.

This works both ways right? Would it be fair to say that interview processes don't differentiate good hires from bullshit artists? Feels like framing the problem differently might make it tractable.

Also, the purchasing power disparity in different regions is humongous. For what a typical L5 might get paid in Silicon Valley, you can afford a team of 5-10 in India, and India isn’t even ‘low cost’ anymore.

Ways to combat bait and switch is to alter interview questions, add new questions to every interview, ask deeper level questions, and observe the candidate in how they respond. It should be a more conversational tone the entire time, random discussion paths pursued, especially if the candidate's interests perk up about something. Every candidate has a different background so getting them to talk about that and problems they solved and diving into those in detail should be a good gauge of ability.

I'm 100% sure there are some people there using AI to try to get through interviews, but what's the end game? The article mentions faking identification documents and work history. Well the first is a crime, and the second takes about 5 minutes to verify. "RTO to prevent crime" is so dumb even the RTO CEOs aren't pushing that one yet.

Fast forward nearly 18 months into the 6 month contract, and about $40k later, there is no working app and the "CEO" says "well I would love to give you some of your money back but the contract has expired so I am no longer able to do that, we could sign another one for $20k to finish if you'd like."

I've worked with probably a dozen offshoring companies in my life in one way or another and every single one of them has been deceitful to the point of being fraudulent, and puts out some of the worst code you have ever seen.

I tell everyone considering it that if you can afford it, you're getting scammed in one way or another. You're better off going with a US-based firm that guarantees you'll get American workers who are physically in the US working on your product.

I'd rather hire Deloitte or Accenture for 10x the price - I know they offshore a ton but you'll at least have avenues to get your money back if they don't deliver.

Like wich exactly? Jetbrains is one, but it is from Czechia IIRC. I was asking what tech products has Ukrainian tech sector produced.

Europe doesn't have a ton of large and high paying software companies, but it does have a ton of good developers.

Romania probably has produced half a million software developers over the past 30 years (in a population of about 20 million), yet it basically doesn't have any large software companies. Probably the biggest you might have heard of are Bitdefender or in the past Softpedia.

Or the alternative, foreign companies set up shop there to scoop up the local developers. Using Romania as an example, Bucharest has R&D centers with at least hundreds of developers each (some with thousands), for: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, SAP, UIPath, Huawei, Honeywell, IBM, Cognizant, Ericsson, Ubisoft, HP, etc.

There you go, hope it makes more sense for you.

Guess France is a collectivist culture. That's 101 of many consultancies: get the contract by presenting the A-Team then switch with junior employees a couple weeks in.

Anyone involved in interviewing really needs to ask themselves "what are we testing for?" In my world, we require anyone who makes it to the full in-person interview to give a technical talk on any topic they want, followed by Q&A from an audience that has a broad collective knowledge base. This has the benefits of:

- Letting the candidate start the interview on strong ground of their choosing

- Giving both the candidate and the team a chance to talk shop in a way that simulates the day-to-day work context

- Offering an opportunity for the candidate to gauge how curious and cordial their potential future colleagues are

- Making it very obvious if the candidate is BSing if they can't answer live questions about something they chose to present

Its Jetbrains, and they don't deny having workers there at all (the company itself If I recall correctly is located in the Czech Republic). In fact, they went through great expense to exfiltrate their Ukrainian employees and cut Russia off before everyone else got on the bandwagon (IE, before it was 'cool').

(Their response to a customer-service request a year or so ago was sobering. Along the lines of "yes, that's a bug we know about, but the developer who owns that feature lost his home in a missile strike last week. Once he's got housing and a new laptop he'll fix it." A week later he fixed it.)

They apply to multiple jobs at multiple companies..

One team handle interview process to make sure they get the job, once they get the job another set of people handle the actual work.. And then the interview team also handle any instance the person need to be seen or talked to..

Each job pay a few of those guys and the company keep the rest.. If they land enough jobs they can easily pay for all that..

You’re not going to want to pay the rates that they will charge for their best of the best hands on developers based in the US and if they did start staffing lots of devs in the US, they wouldn’t be price competitive.

I have worked at AWS Professional Service (full time direct hire) and now work at a third party consulting company as a “staff consultant”. Only a few large and/or well funded companies (and government agencies pre-DOGE) were/are willing to pay the rates that the companies charge to have me on a project.

Even then, they lean on me far more for leadership and strategy than hands on keyboard

I got my only remote BigTech job post Covid where the entire loop was remote. But it was customary before then to fly people into the office for the final interview.

Yes I realize “remote first” companies may not have an office. But even then, you could fly the interviewees to the location of the interviewer and use a hotel conference room.

Is your company hiring?

I've had candidates I knew 15 minutes into the session I would sell a panel on "no hire" for, still say I was the best interview they've ever done in their life. This is not so much because I'm actually good at it, but going by the substantive content of that and much other feedback I've received especially in the last four years, I earn these rave reviews instead mainly because:

- I'm not afraid to admit where a candidate knows more than I do, and

- when someone seems so nervous it may be confounding their performance, I gently remind them that I've been through this before, it's hard on everyone and I don't hold that against people, and it's okay if they need to take a deep breath and recenter.

It's systemic, and it isn't even about being able to derive a reliable signal from the interaction. The problem is way more fundamental, in the same sense that you don't fix "Lord of the Flies" by reminding everyone regularly to be polite and not swear.

I mean, as I've just discussed, I can't even trust the good feedback I get from candidates, because any signal on actual improvements I could make is totally swamped by the noise of people practically ready to lick a hand in exchange for not being treated like something you'd scrape off a boot heel.

Which is also not something I hold against anyone on an individual level. The system that so consistently produces such outcomes is another matter. I used to think it was shameful people so rarely bother to represent their company in a good light, in the one formal occasion when most engineers ever actually do so. But in retrospect, I think I was the one who was wrong: the median level of representation in this area is more or less exactly accurate to what is deserved.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job-chi...

And as much as I hate to admit it, remote work has so many downsides for most companies, I see why many of them are in on RTO and hybrid.

Luckily in 2020 I pivoted to cloud consulting + app dev where it doesn’t make sense to be in the office since you will either be working with clients remotely or flying into their offices.

And even then AWS forced their ProServe consultants and SAs (full time employees) to be in an office when not on the client’s sites after I had already left. As does GCP.

My definition of “senior” is what you will see in the leveling guidelines of most well known tech companies - not “I codez real gud”.

While I agree completely, I also know plenty of people who fit this description, but would probably aren't the folks you ask to give a power point on a technical topic.

TBH I've done my time in management and done my fair share of presentations, but I would HATE this to the point that I might well opt out.

There's a reason I'm not in management anymore, and a presentation like described is a far cry from working with stakeholders and engineers to define and document technical requirements. Or even presenting those to a group with shared context.

I might well take the fact that you've made it a part of the interview process to be an indication that this is a regular job requirement as opposed to something I have to do here and there.

A very common concern, but overblown in my experience. If you notice, I never actually said "judge the candidate's presentation skills" (or anything of the sort) in why I think this process is great. The presenation is really just level-setting; the candidate gets to set the topic and give sufficient context for a conversation to occur. The presentation is at most the first 15 minutes out of a ~3 hour in-person interview process. That's how little it matters.

It's the Q&A and subsequent discussions that matter.

GP suggested Deloitte and Accenture. They do offer technical consulting services but really as an afterthought specializing in accounting and business consulting. Thoughtworks (home to Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Zhamak Dehghani and so many more) is far more savvy, had been a far better presence in the industry, and has more highly skilled people. I am a bit partial but with reason.

Will we get AI to determine if the candidates are using AI?

If you think these scams aren't real, you aren't looking. We're a remote company, but our policy is now to only hire candidates from internal referrals, or candidates who are in a location where someone on the team they're hiring into can grab coffee with them.

My understanding is that they had the Czech business location with Russian developers so they had a clean public face.

I’d believe you if you insisted on Kiev based too, I don’t know anything first hand.

In balance, I have absolutely nothing negative to say; I loved working there and felt great about the work we did for others. Consultancies and their clients can be messy but it was a wonderful place to overwork (relative to my personal capacities). The technologists were top notch, people cared to do good work and deliver real business value, and the ambient emotional intelligence was soothingly glorious.

It’s as if someone else disconnected us.

I am sure they are North Koreans. Next time I will have a picture of fat leader printed out and I am asking the candidate what they think of Kim.

Age old question, who will judge the judge?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2xjrdy/whe...

tl;dr - Company CTO hires off-shore dev consultant to write an app, the code is horrendously bad, doesn't even fulfill requirements, and has to be thrown out because it's such a bug-ridden mess. Company scrambles to produce the app internally and succeeds. Later, they need to launch a new product, CTO decides to rehire the same off-shore consultant.

This is debatable.

My company now mandates all contractors sourced via one specific firm, and more recently that 70% of contractors are located "offshore", which in practice means India. Of the 5 contractors they have placed, I've let 4 go for performance reasons. Even at the rates they're getting paid (about 25% what a domestic resource would get) they're net-negative value.

So I'm not sure that this method works if candidates can give talks on subjects the interviewers are unfamiliar with.

Call me a conspiracy theorist but it seems vastly more likely that China and Russia (far and away NK’s strongest, nearest, and largest allies) are executing these hacks and blaming them on the NKs to avoid retribution.

You either believe that or that NKs are genetically superior specimens because they’re not doing anything else that would yield the superior results they attain.

Added: I should acknowledge though that talking about technical topics of interest may get more complicated at some proprietary firms than open source ones.

In-person interviews.

And if you don't want to pay for that, proctoring.

And if you don't want to pay for that, I have next to zero sympathy for you.

If someone thinks Cmake is super cool and knows all sorts of great use cases for it, then they should present that. They should also be prepared to answer open-ended follow-up questions like "broadly speaking, how could a project transition from something like Automake to Cmake?" or "what are some footguns in Cmake and how can we avoid them?"

One of the things I like to do on the hiring side is hold interviews in the smallest room people won't complain about. The way we think about public speaking has a lot to do with how close we are to each other.

JxBrowser: https://teamdev.com/jxbrowser/ DotNetBrowser: https://teamdev.com/dotnetbrowser/

They've all drunk the leetcode / cs question koolaid, instead of just talking about projects, and how they would solve some things, and checking their personality (this is like 70% of the weight for me for new team members) if nobody likes you because of your attitude / personality, you'll bring down the team with your personality.

I've run into this with a Ukrainian consultancy. It wasn't even a scam. They told us up-front that they were prepared to pull their best engineers from some other clients and put them on our team in order to win our business. Our obvious reaction: and when you get another opportunity, you will pull those engineers from us and we'll get the B-team, just like you're about to do to someone else.

Naturally we didn't move forward with them (this was before the war, so very lucky decision)

Russia, on the other hand, has traditionally focused more on building its own products and brands, both for its domestic market (Yandex, VK) and the global market (Karsperky, ABBYY, JetBrains). When a technology they create for themselves turns out to be pretty good, it often spills over to the West and gains global popularity - examples being ClickHouse (originally to support metrics collection at Yandex), nginx (originally a reverse proxy at Rambler), etc. I have a hard time remembering something similar coming out of Ukraine?..

I may be wrong, it's just my impression of it (reading Ukrainian/Russian job postings etc.)

More relevant question: even if you can easily tell the difference, can you convince the person who makes the hiring decisions that your colleague is incompetent and only relays words to/from ChatGPT?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...

A deepfaked recruit is a slight extension of that.

> This is debatable

work is being delivered is relative, not talking about good work or great work. its average at best. The debate you want to do maybe is if this is better than call center scams

Compare US tier 1 city salary to India tier 2 city salary and the math will work out.

Second time is very quickly approaching "what salary/bonus/options/401k match can we claw back because this is professional negligence" territory.

I had to take company training in interviewing. The trainer started out by acting out a fake interview. Then he asked us how we felt about him as a candidate. Pretty much everyone agreed that he nailed the interview. Then he began to list all the things he said and how he answered questions, and it slowly became clear that it was all bullshit, and he never said anything that was a direct answer to any of the interview questions. By using deflection and redirection he was able to completely control the interview and give a glowing impression of himself.

I wish I could remember what company was hired to do that because it was one of the best corporate training experiences of my life.

Maybe in the future it will be a more significant problem but not this year, not next year and probably not even this decade.