[Multiplayer]

Here's a heretical thought: Remote hiring is a massive achilles heel.

I've been duped simply by hiring a great engineering candidate who then farmed out the actual work to remote workers in Pakistan and India. We caught on fairly quickly thanks to one of them forgetting to login to one of our backend systems via vpn a few times. No idea how many companies he was "working for" but I'd bet we were one of many.

Remote work has amazing upsides and tremendous security implications.

[causal]

So that's probably a sign that your team culture and management isn't the best... Healthy teams communicate a lot and really get to know each other, whether in person or remote. Ideally with regular in-person meetups to reinforce those working relationships.

If you're just throwing work over the fence and it takes network analysis to figure out who's doing it...then maybe you should just be hiring a contractor anyway.

[sanderjd]

Yeah I similarly find this baffling. This very flatly would not work in any job I've had, whether in person or remote.

[mattlondon]

Yep. It started with COVID where understandably 100% of interviews were remote.

But now with COVID a thing of the past, for "fairness" reasons (DEI?) we still do 100% remote interviews, but now have the ludicrous situation where we're asking interviewers to do absurd things like look for the reflections in the candidates' eyes/glasses to see if they're using ChatGPT, ask the candidate to swing the webcam around to make sure there are not other people in the room, ask them to hold their hands up to the camera to show they're not typing a prompt (which is even more stupid than it sounds because voice recognition is amazing these days), or ask them not to look away from the camera when answering questions (so not reading answers from another monitor) and other stupid things. How ridiculous.

The sooner we get back to in-person interviews the better. Get them to come to the office (which they'll need to do one day if they get the job) and sit next to them while they code on a work laptop).

Sorry to all those folks who want 100% remote, but this is why we can't have nice things.

[sanderjd]

And similarly forbid them from using AIs while they code on that work laptop in person? Are employees forbidden from using AIs for work? If not, why require that during evaluation? If it's not required during evaluation in person, why require it remotely?

(I don't know the answers to how to interview in this brave new world, but I'm increasingly skeptical of forbidding tools that people will be using for the job.)

[emchammer]

If you want to work as a clerk at Target, the video is not even an interview, it’s a one-way audition you record to be judged anonymously.

[Espressosaurus]

My suspicion is that it's purely monetary and driven by the finance people.

a) Don't have to pay to fly candidates out, pay for their hotel, etc.

b) Don't have to pay relocation

c) Get access to a larger pool of candidates, so can price the wages lower than local wages would require

My last company there was a top down directive that in-person interviews were straight up not allowed, everything had to be over Zoom. Even for local candidates, for a job that was supposed to be in-person! Completely crazy IMO.

[exhilaration]

Yeah after a disastrous remote hire I started requiring in-person 2nd round interviews. Company policy is that all future hires are hybrid only (not that we or anyone else is hiring these days...) so it just makes sense.

For developers I share my screen on MS Teams so everyone can watch, then hand them my laptop with Visual Studio. They've got 90 minutes to complete a small assignment while we look at them code - Google is allowed, so is copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, and we'll probably allow Copilot as well. The code needs to run and return the expected results. One candidate said, "this was great, it felt like real work".

For cloud admins, our Devops lead creates a new resource group, hands over his laptop, and we ask them to create a few resources and do the network and authentication to make them talk to each other. Most candidates can't do that anymore - we're finding they've become Terraform operators that don't know how the underlying technology works.

[tehjoker]

COVID isn't in the past, just no one doing anything about it. :)

[qingcharles]

I had a colleague doing this in 2006, and he wasn't remote. He would just sit playing games on his phone all day yet he would check in code. I could never figure it out, so I just asked him and he showed me the chat window to his friend back in the Czech Republic that he paid 25% of his wages to each month.

[ryandrake]

I'm not sure I'm really against this! --IF-- the company is happy with the results and code being delivered, and the compensation they are paying for that code, what is the actual, meaningful business difference between whether your colleague wrote it or the Czech guy wrote it?

I'm not asking what the moral or ethical difference is. They're paying for engineering output, and if they are getting that output, why does it really matter whose fingers are typing it in?

[sally_glance]

Ironically if he told management that he's able to manage a remote team which provides the same amount of work for 25% cost there's a good chance they give him a raise and promotion to outsourcing manager /s

[ryandrake]

I don't think this has anything to do with remote vs. onsite work. It has more to do with remote vs. onsite interviews. A thorough onsite interview should catch all of these fake candidates. Companies should be doing at least one onsite interview regardless of whether the role itself is remote or onsite.

[hughes]

A very easy way to verify a remote candidate's identity is to buy them a plane ticket to an in person interview.

If they cannot board a plane using their claimed identity from their claimed city of origin, you can stop there.

[vunderba]

A friend of mine's company is completely remote only, but they use a shared workspace to conduct interviews for exactly this reason.

[sam-cop-vimes]

Totally agreed. The number of "engineers" who try to cheat their way through interviews, juggle multiple jobs without disclosing them makes it a total nightmare.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

I've heard through the grapevine of some designers (one who worked at Shopify) getting caught using Fiverr (or something similar) to farm out all of their work.

Despite all the weird crazy dog and pony show and jumping through hoops that most companies do now, most companies are abysmal at hiring.

[criddell]

What can you do during the hiring process to know that this amazing person, who aces every part of the interview, will farm out their work to cheap subcontractors?

[woah]

The funny part is that in these stories about fake candidates using a whole team of people, it sounds like they are actually successful in doing the work, something that had not been achieved in software dev outsourcing before

[InitialLastName]

It's only "successful" because there's an alternative, presumably-nefarious funding stream from a third party who wants to gain access to IP/user data/influential functionality.

It's essentially a subsidy heavily distorting a very specific market.

[bluGill]

Are they? I suspect someone I used to work with was outsourcing. They did great on the interview but their on the job performance wasn't nearly as good.

[ferguess_k]

Some people did this with in-office too I think, some years ago. Some people actually had two jobs, both sort of in-office. It's still possible to pull the tricks.

[financypants]

The rate of this happening has got to be so low it's negligible.

[aoanevdus]

The common pattern of requiring three days a week of in-office time makes it much harder.

[pokstad]

Don’t forget remote workers who are required to work in one area and then travel to restricted areas and continue to work.

[eloisant]

Between this and legit candidates cheating with AI, I think we'll soon see the return of on-site interviews - even for remote positions.

[tomrod]

Unless you're in a regulated industry, you might just have a new cost reduction strategy presented to you.

[corytheboyd]

How do weekly 1:1 meetings with a manager not catch this very quickly? Okay, maybe the original suave interviewer comes back for those… Still feels like a good EM would pick up on discrepancies between work done and how the suave person talks about it.

It depresses me, but you’re probably right about in-office work being the only guarantee against this type of scam. I wish we could just have nice things.

[noitpmeder]

This isn't necessarily the issue here -- this attempt seemed to be fairly motivated and had access to resources (AI, coaches, ...) to help them get through the process.

IF they can get such a 'candidate' hired... whats to say they couldn't continue the sham. One could imagine a team of hackers could easily pass of work that a single IC could reasonably have produced.

If their goal is exfiltration (or some other hack) of a {bitcoin exchange, govt, ...} actually putting in {weeks/months/year[s]} of actual work to insert someone into the right position at the right company is insanely worth it.

[barbazoo]

I also can’t imagine this not getting caught if not in the interview process surely during every day work. Maybe this says more about their work culture and not actually connecting with co workers. Perhaps the manager was just garbage who knows.

[whatnow37373]

Hate to be that guy, but.. what’s the problem? The work is getting done for the price you agreed on. You care how it’s done suddenly?

If AI does it, it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

I’m sorry but capitalists that want to have it both ways annoy me. Agree on what gets delivered for how much and get out of the way. The “employer” mindset doesn’t jive with capitalism ya’ll are so fond of.

[mr_mitm]

An arrangement like that is probably violating data protection rules that everybody agreed on. In my company, customer data must not leave company systems, let alone the country.

[badmintonbaseba]

If you don't want to be an employee then don't sign an employment contract.

[triceratops]

It may cause the company to violate data protection, privacy, labor, and tax laws.

[dboreham]

And yet: do the same thing with AI and you're a cutting edge genius.