[AmericanBlarney]

When I was interviewing developers from a very large offshoring firm, they covertly had an account manager listening in to take down the questions for future candidates. Each interview, I'd ask a slightly different variation and it became obvious what was going on when a candidate gave a textbook answer to the question I'd asked the previous candidate, including references to tables I hadn't mentioned and that had no purpose in the problem I presented them.

Also had an incident where I interviewed one person but am pretty sure someone different showed up and was completely clueless about the most basic tasks. Within a week I think they figured out that I was onto them and made some excuse to quit about taking a contract closer to home.

Honestly, at this point many American companies have an office of their own offshore, and it's generally considered more prestigious and better condensated to work for those companies directly, so I assume there's close to zero talent left in the large outsourcers.

[osrec]

Large outsourcing companies are not really hired for talent (at least not from what I saw in the investment banking world).

They're hired as scapegoats, and attached to an already failed project. Then they're publically blamed for the failure, while the actual guy responsible gets away with murder (and maybe even hops into a new internal role with better pay).

If I was to rename the consulting/outsourcing industry, I would probably call it the "professional scapegoat" industry.

[raincom]

Indian offshoring companies like Wipro, TCS, etc pay $500 per month for fresh graduates from the engineering colleges, where lecturers are incompetent. In a team of 10, only two are capable, all others are for billable hours for these companies. Some of these newbies can learn and improve skills and jump to other companies in a couple of years.

In the end, what matters is the cheapest labor, and billable hours. Account managers are judged on how much profit they bring.

[anononaut]

I presume something must have caused you to start giving slightly different questions, right? You did so because you wanted to see if they were collaborating in this fashion.

What was that "something," if you don't mind me asking?

[AmericanBlarney]

I generally like to base my interview questions on the candidate's resume, asking questions of various levels of difficulty about the areas they claim to be skilled. I find it gives a better sense of their abilities than strictly asking about the tools/languages/algorithms being used on the hiring project. As such, each interview was already unique to an extent - and I might have noticed something like a person whiffing the easy questions but then getting an advanced one that didn't add up.

Also, the "architect" I inherited on the team seemed totally incompetent in a variety of ways, and insisted on using a fixed set of questions without deviation. To He kept flagging people through who seemed totally inept when I'd dive into their background, so they was also probably a tip off that they figured him out.