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

We've had more than a few in my company. We work in Cybersecurity for the company, so we've definitely seen them and seen the details. I don't actually think they're that hard to avoid .. but to say they're not a problem at all is not fair. I agree with you that if taken the wrong way that this is just ammunition for "return to office" efforts.

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.

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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 people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are.

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

> A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are.

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.

No disagreement there. The best way to get honest information from people is NOT to really leverage the power balance over them and try to "catch" them in an interview. People also commonly mistake "the stuff I know" for "general intelligence," and so they incorrectly think that their interview questions really tell them very much about a candidate.

Just spent a day coding in C using intrinsics with the help of ChatGPT - trying to get it to produce results - purely as an experiment, and i can say someone who'd copy-paste from it without understanding things, will never pass an interview with me and i'm by far not the toughest guy to get through.

There's not much incentive for the median industry engineer to develop meaningful skill as a panelist.

>Would it be fair to say that interview processes don't differentiate good hires from bullshit artists?

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

I think that's fine, but I would expect people to have a realistic appraisal of their skillset (or lack of skillset) -- it's the self knowledge gap and false confidence which is the problem.

Actually, that sounds brilliant. The only problem is taking into account those that are not good at public speaking.

Is your company hiring?

This sounds terrifying and like something I'd never, ever put in the tons of time to properly prep for for a single company's process just for a chance at a job, but add it to the list of things I'd much prefer to the current system if it were widespread enough I could prep only for that.

Sure, but who's in the picture to provide the quality of feedback that allows for that kind of realistic self-appraisal to develop?

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.

If I’m hiring “senior” developers, being comfortable communicating technical topics and answering questions is a requirement.

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

> If I’m hiring “senior” developers, being comfortable communicating technical topics and answering questions is a requirement.

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.

>The only problem is taking into account those that are not good at public speaking.

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.

Those sound like very good adjustments.

>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.

Age old question, who will judge the judge?

The problem is that interviewers have a strong tendency to judge candidates based on whether they come across as self-confident, even when instructed not to. It's possible to get people to not do this, but it requires fairly rigorous training. tptacek wrote about this a decade ago: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

You ask the 3rd person to be present/to review the interview later. It is not perfect but it may provide a necessary perspective.

It may take me a week (or more) to prepare half hour talk. It takes even more time if I have to compress it into less than 20 minutes (think ted talk).

The first company I worked for out of college did that, as it was a technical position that hired people out of university who studied science and engineering. They had two of us and an interviewer. The other guy gave his presentation on Ruby lasers, but his explanation was a more complex version of "the ruby filters the input light", which is completely incorrect. I tried to hint at that in a question or two, but the interviewer did not have any physics background, and seemed to think it was an informative explanation.

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

If it’s a topic of your choosing, a lot of engineers who aren’t super junior probably have a lot of the fixins for a short technical talk on something of interest even if they haven’t presented at a conference. And even juniors probably have something from school.

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

I'd argue the "presentation and Q&A" format addresses that directly. The candidate gets to pick exactly what the interview is going to be about, at least at the beginning, so they have full control over first impressions. No gotchas at all. Who wouldn't pick something they're confident about?

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?"

The idea is to pick a topic you're so jazzed about that your enthusiasm overrides The Fear.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Can you tell the different between someone who really just leans on ChatGPT all day but is actually incompetent?

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?

They typically don't.

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.