Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

The controls summarized in the CNBC piece seem reasonable, or, if not that, then at least not all that onerous.

The controls in the actual proposal are less reasonable: they create finable infractions for any claim in a job ad deemed "misleading" or "inaccurate" (findings of fact that requires a an expensive trial to solve) and prohibit "perpetual postings" or postings made 90 days in advance of hiring dates.

The controls might make it harder to post "ghost jobs" (though: firms posting "ghost jobs" simply to check boxes for outsourcing, offshoring, or visa issuance will have no trouble adhering to the letter of this proposal while evading its spirit), but they will also impact firms that don't do anything resembling "ghost job" hiring.

Firms working at their dead level best to be up front with candidates still produce steady feeds of candidates who feel misled or unfairly rejected. There are structural features of hiring that almost guarantee problems: for instance, the interval between making a selection decision about a candidate and actually onboarding them onto the team, during which any number of things can happen to scotch the deal. There's also a basic distributed systems problem of establishing a consensus state between hiring managers, HR teams, and large pools of candidates.

If you're going to go after "ghost job" posters, you should do something much more targeted to what those abusive firms are actually doing, and raise the stakes past $2500/infraction.

I don't think it's unreasonable or onerous to shift the burden of hiring onto companies well-suited and minimally impacted by this process compared to individuals.

The fines should definitely be proportional though, with larger companies facing very severe infractions.

There are rules like this in other countries around the world, and the impact is that it's much harder to change full-time jobs, because companies work around them by replacing full-time roles with contract positions, something that's much harder to regulate.

But the big thing here is: obviously there's a cheering section for any rules that make things harder for hiring managers, because most people here are on the other side of that transaction. Ok, sure, whatever. But none of this has anything to do with the "ghost job" phenomenon, where job postings are literally fig leaves satisfying a compliance checkbox so that roles can be sourced to H1Bs.

I completely agree that there isn't any legislation that will "fix this problem" (other than perhaps abolition of H1B).

If it helps soothe the feelings of those who think hiring managers are demon spawn out to get them, I can add, as one of those who spent a whole season this year doing basically nothing but conducting first-round interviews all day, to hire four open SWE seats, it's misery out here for us, too.

It was a mix of laughably unqualified people; people in India lying and pretending to be in the US ("Which neighborhood in NY do you live in?" - "I live by the Statue of Liberty"); people sending ringers to do their coding exercises for them including different ringers or two ringers at once (oops); and entirely made-up resumes (we have your resume from an application 3 years ago but your entire life history has changed since).

> people sending ringers to do their coding exercises for them including different ringers or two ringers at once (oops)

Found this part mildly fascinating. That it's more lucrative for a significant portion of the population to be so highly skilled at programming that they can regularly serve as "ringers" to falsify entrance exams, than it is to simply complete such an exam and get a job in America. Must make great money as exam falsifiers.

Quick check on Google says it runs upwards of ₹50,000 ($570) for valuable falsifications (data is mostly from Indian exam falsification though). If you can actually manage to get one per day it's $200,000 USD in India.

It's not being skilled at programming, it's being skilled at interview programming, which is very different.

Also ringers are black market, so you can be hired everywhere and not blocked by not being in the USA in the first place. You can pass the interview, but you can't find a job that hires you in the USA because of non-interview reasons or market conditions. Anybody could become a ringer because it's a purely skill based job you can self teach, while getting a job at an Indian big tech might require a degree from an ITT or even just a degree at all might be too much for you.

Honestly they would be a great hiring pool on some level if the reasons why they can't get hired had nothing to do with skill but more socioeconomic barriers like that.

I've never hired a ringer, been a ringer or even looked into it, so it's total conjecture on my part.

> It's not being skilled at programming, it's being skilled at interview programming, which is very different.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm suspicious of the existence of skilled programmers who cannot handle writing small programs, and vice versa.

The topic set is very different and the conditions are very artificial. There are many engineers who are amazing, but are absolute shit about writing code, under pressure, while someone is looking over their shoulder, to a leetcode medium that they haven't practiced for. Their brains go blank.

Like seriously, go to leetcode, pick a random medium+ problem and solve it within 15-30m without bugs under pressure, on coderpad, without code execution or being allowed to look up syntax. Make sure you've never seen or been asked the question before. Now do 10 more. You'll see it's something you need to practice for specifically. Make sure you throw in a few binary search questions while you do it.

Anybody going for a leetcode interview without doing prep work first is not a good candidate to start with.

I coached a newly minted PhD engineer into spending 3 weeks studying leetcode prep materials before the interview, telling him that per-hour it would be the best investment of his career. Shockingly, he listened, studied for 3 weeks, and absolutely nailed it. And landed the big bucks job, too.

> Their brains go blank

Anyone with a degree has undergone exams that were critical to graduation. I know all about time pressure, high stakes exams. After all, I attended Caltech. I learned how to deal with them. Study the material beforehand, work all the problem sets beforehand, make sure you have it cold backwards and forwards. That's the cure for brain freeze.

Going in without prep for a $250,000 job interview is just lazy, no matter how smart or capable you are.

A crackerjack programmer that cannot learn leetcode is not a crackerjack programmer.

Just for fun, I found among my dad's papers the written tests he had to pass before he could even sit in the cockpit of an F-86 Sabrejet. They were quite comprehensive and full of minutia. For damn sure the AF wasn't going to let anyone fly one of those monsters without proving they could study and learn everything about them by heart. No excuses about brain freeze is going to fly (pun intended).

One day, he was flying along in his F-86 over the Arizona desert when the engine conked out. He radioed the situation to the tower, who advised him to bail out. But he knew how to figure out hour far he could fly given his speed, altitude, weight of the fuel, wind speed, etc. and calculated that he could make the strip. And he did, with a few feet to spare.

There's no way I would even dare fly one without mastering all that stuff, either.

Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s

Test anxiety is real. Anxiety disorders are real in general, not to mention ADHD, autism and more where these disabilities can interact in bad ways in interviews. It does not mean that people with these issues are bad engineers. If your instrument is inaccurate, it does not mean the thing it is measuring is wrong.

One of the best and smartest engineers I have ever hired had visible anxiety and objectively did not pass the interview but we pushed for it anyway and was hired as a jr engineer. He is a staff engineer now, leads various large company library projects and is the go to expert about various systems in the entire company and will probably become a sr staff engineer. He also probably hasn't changed jobs because he knows he's bad at interviews, which is incredibly sad.

Are you suggesting that being in a life or death situation as a pilot is less stressful than taking a test or writing a software program over time?