The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

I once hired a guy who had no experience, but seemed like a good culture fit for our company and seemed very interested in learning.<p>We interviewed him and made e-mail communication a large part of the interview, because it is a critical part of our business. And his communication was great!<p>After hiring, a recurring problem we had was his e-mail to us and to customers were terrible. Bad grammar, bad spelling, uncorrected typos... It got so bad that we had to have someone review all e-mails he sent to customers.<p>We had regular &quot;improvement plan&quot; meetings with him, but after a year of paying him, we had to let him go. As part of the exit interview we went back and looked at his interview e-mails, and compared them with his current e-mails. So we asked him:<p>&quot;During the interview, all your e-mails were great! Why was that?&quot;<p>&quot;My wife wrote all of those.&quot;<p>I guess we should have hired his wife!

I&#x27;ve been a hiring manager for remote positions for a long time. If your recruiting channels are good, most of your candidates are going to be honest and good intentioned.<p>But interview enough people, and you&#x27;ll start encountering people trying to abuse remote work. They&#x27;re not interested in contributing to your company. They&#x27;re only interested in collecting paychecks while they do as little work as possible for as long as possible. They might already have a full-time job or other remote jobs, or maybe they&#x27;re just trying to travel the world and do a &quot;four hour workweek&quot; thing where they answer e-mails once a day and phone in a couple hours of work at key times during the week.<p>The common theme is that they aren&#x27;t really interested in fighting too hard for the position. As soon as the interview or job turns out to be something they can&#x27;t just talk and smile their way through, they&#x27;re out, just like this:<p>&gt; I think my last update for a while: as soon as HR got on the call with him, before they could get through their first question, John said the words “I quit” and hung up the calls. He has since been unreachable!!<p>Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue.

Practices like this are hilariously common in the industry.<p>Right out of college I accepted a job offer at a small consulting company on the east coast. They promised they would give me free housing at their luxury apartment for the first few months and give me all the training I need to excel in areas of my interest. I flew across the country and found out the whole thing is not as advertised. Their luxury apartment had piles of unwashed dishes and flies in the kitchen and piss on the bathroom floor. They had bunk beds in each room and I slept with three other dudes from wildly different backgrounds. My first night, this guy from Turkey assured me that everything is going to be fine, that he was shaking in fear for the first couple nights but he soon learned that if you work with them, they get you what you need. At the same time, another guy from Chicago was telling me how I need to look out for myself because the company likes to steal money from your paychecks.<p>The next day, I learned that &quot;working with them&quot; meant going through their &quot;resume revision&quot; process. Turns out, there was a network of consulting companies like this one, each creating fake experiences for one another. Fresh grads who clearly have never coded anything of significance became senior engineers with 5 years of experience. The resulting resumes looked real stacked, filled with keywords that recruiters love. Furthermore, during live interviews, they actually placed someone with actual technical knowledge behind the laptop camera to basically write out all the answers on the whiteboard while the candidates read out the answers.<p>Some of the people there loved talking about how so and so got placed at prestigious companies and became hugely successful in their career. Most of them knew what they were doing wasn&#x27;t the most ethical thing to do, but not many complained given their visa status. Also, they were actually really grateful to get a developer job that pays ~$40k. They were just regular people.<p>I personally didn&#x27;t need visa support, and I had the luxury of being able to fall back on my parents. So about a week after I flew over, I gathered my things and left. It was an interesting experience overall, one I&#x27;m glad I could experience.<p>My 2c for interviewing: always look up key phrases you see on resumes and see if identical copies show up. It&#x27;s usually a giveaway sign.

Earlier this year, I was asked to interview a man who was procured through a remote-staffing firm. He was based in Southeast Asia, and on his resume it looked like he met all of the competencies we needed -- including English proficiency.<p>But on the call, I noticed that whenever I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the question, then turn his video back on.<p>Eventually, I cut the call short and messaged the guy from the remote-staffing firm who had set up the interview to ask about this bizarre behavior.<p>An investigation determined that the man was using a translator and really didn&#x27;t speak any English whatsoever.<p>I have no idea how he expected to be able to do the job if he had been hired, but I guess he thought it was worth a shot.

In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I&#x27;ve seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you &quot;give them a chance&quot;, complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the team. In short, they do it because it is profitable.<p>PS.. To add insult to injury, the &quot;engineers&quot; on the team will update ther CV&#x27;s to show that they worked for &quot;large company X&quot;.

We had this happen, but it did not get all the way to being hired thankfully.<p>I got on a call to interview a candidate, and he didn&#x27;t know <i>anything</i>. Like, hilariously unqualified, his knowledge level on software engineering was effectively zero. Fairly short call once we realized what the score was.<p>Immediately the recruiter calls me back (she was on the call as well) and started apologizing profusely. She said the guy on this call was definitely <i>not</i> the guy she screened on an earlier phone call.<p>Luckily we didn&#x27;t get as far as hiring a fraud.<p>But I have to say, also, that this kind of incident is why I really love a <i>good recruiter</i>, and try to hold onto them if at all possible. We had one guy we worked with who had a nearly 100% success rate placing people with us. He didn&#x27;t just phone screen randos, he had a pool of people that he cultivated, he interviewed them himself in depth. So when he made a recommendation, he knew it was a good fit, and he was right almost every time.

I once interviewed a person who couldn&#x27;t answer a single question, not even the easiest ones. He would just say &quot;I don&#x27;t know, ask me the next question&quot;. A few weeks later I realized it was probably a plant that another candidate sent to collect the interview questions. And I think I even know who it was. We hired her, she wasn&#x27;t very good writing code. But she answered all our questions perfectly, which only happened once before.

We once had a contractor who interviewed pretty well. After a while I noticed that it was impossible to have a technical discussion with him. He only took notes and never said much. I also noticed that he never delivered anything the same day. He took notes and then next morning it was done. I once told him to fix a simple bug NOW and had him sit next to me. He starred at the screen for several hours and did nothing. And not unsurprisingly it was done the next day. We came to the conclusion that he had a ghostwriter somewhere else who would do the actual work from the contractor’s notes.<p>Problem was that the ghostwriter was not a great dev either and wrote bad code. So we had to let him &#x2F;them go. The contractor is now a principal developer&#x2F; team lead at another company……

It&#x27;s like the flip version of the guy that got let go and then re-recruited for his just vacated position.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;firr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1456324664628846599" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;firr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1456324664628846599</a>

Late ‘90s. Rapid growth, many interviews. Got used to taking CVs with a grain of salt. Had the best and worst interview experiences ever.<p>The best: really strong CV, older candidate, really poor English. Frustrating process, more for him than us, he is struggling so hard. Finally he stands up, grabs my pen and my colleague’s pad, and sketches DB schema. Uses the pen to point back and forth between the CV and the sketch. I’m more of a networking guy, I was lost pretty quick, but my colleague, one of my best hires, started leaning in, eyes widening, slow “wow” escaping his lips.<p>That guy ended up being another of my best hires. Communication was always a chore, results always through the roof. With the colleague from the interview and one other, he became one of my three developer archetypes in a much longer story.<p>Worst experience: different colleague (my test lead) and I interviewing another strong CV. We try and lead and shepherd, do everything we can to link the CV to what this person can do. Communication isn’t the issue, the CV is obviously doctored&#x2F;bumpfed.<p>We’re running out of steam, trying to get the session to a minimum acceptable length, when I notice blood on my hands. I wonder how I cut myself and I am subtlety looking for the wound.<p>When I notice the open sore on their hand, the hand they shook. The hand attached to a body with some obvious hygiene issues (trust me).<p>I settle my hands, wind things up, have my colleague see them out, hop into the nearest coffee station, throw away my pen and notebook and basically scald my hands and mouth (I used to nibble my pen compulsively).

Had similar experience in 2017. We interviewed many candidates (10+) for the position, narrowed down to about 5 in the second round and decided to hire one. All over the phone. Took maybe 2 months. So when the guy shows up in the office my manager was like &quot;Who are you? I never spoke with you.&quot;. We made some noise with HR and later Legal and he left right away, and the consulting company we went through had some conversations with the executives. From that point on we set some rules: require candidates to provide video feed, take screenshots, ideally record at least part of the interview, document every single question. Funny thing, had a very promising candidate for another position short time later but she kept refusing to turn on the camera, it was either broken, or connection was slow, or something else... So we rejected her because of that.<p>I believe there are some unofficial services that provide well spoken&#x2F;knowledgeable professionals that will help you get hired, it&#x27;s either directly through headhunting company or they might suggest (wink-wink) one for you.

&gt; HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud.<p>Though at this point they all know John is committing fraud, they still decided only to approach this guy claiming a poor fit for his resignation. I don&#x27;t know why they do that. They have discussed a lot and considered many things. I am sure there are many reasons to do so. but do they just want John to go away and then try that same thing with another company?<p>It might be too strong to say this, but a failure to confront evil is a evil.

This used to happen to a company I was consulting at all the time. It was mostly in the context of hiring H1B workers from India. The company would interview &quot;the ringer&quot; in India - the guy was poised, articulate, knew the answers to all the questions etc. etc. But the guy who showed up didn&#x27;t know anything, usually had difficulty with the language etc. This was pre-Zoom so it was all phone screens, making it much harder to be sure.<p>However, years later I was telling this story to a Wipro recruiter who said casually:<p>&quot;Oh yeah, we call it the Hindu Switcheroo&quot; (I kid you not)

My son reports working with a person who had always worked at the same company as his sister. Soon after hiring (both of) them, the sister changed to another company.<p>This guy&#x27;s performance dropped to zero. He never finished another task. At lunch he often commented he had always enjoyed working with his sister, since he got lots of good ideas when they worked on the same projects.<p>My son&#x27;s take: this guy had never had an original idea in his life, his sister had always propped him up since high school. And she had finally cut the apron strings. But the guy was so clueless, he never realized how little he could do and how his sister had essentially done his job his whole life.

Coming soon: a service that will have ringers do Zoom interviews on your behalf while using real-time deep fake tech to look and sound just like you.<p>All the pieces of the technology required to do something like that may already exist today.

It&#x27;s not just a thing, for some crooter firms it&#x27;s a business model.<p>Gonna name and shame here, there was an outfit that was once called Unbounded Solutions, then BrighterBrain. God knows if they&#x27;re still around or what they&#x27;re called now. Anyhoo, their whole deal was this: they offered free IT training and job placement, but there was a catch! Oh, boy, was there ever a catch. They would put you through 2 weeks of iOS programming training, and then have you sign a 2-year contract to be at their disposal to go to client sites. As part of this, they would make up a fake CV for you with fake experience and -- crucially -- a fake telephone number. When companies called to interview you, they would be directed to a call center in India where one of the call center drones would do the interview in your place. Only once they had passed the phone screen for you could you show up at the client site. They may have sent a fake you to the client site for the in-person bit as well, I&#x27;m not sure.<p>As part of the contract you sign, you had to agree to all of this. If you refused to sign, or tried to skip your contract before 2 years was up, you had to pay for the training they gave you which they valued at $20,000.<p>One of the scummiest things I&#x27;d ever seen or heard of in this industry.

This is what the large Indian IT-outsourcing companies do at scale.<p>When they need to win the contract, they bring in bright and very qualified people to win the client-org over.<p>After the contract is won and the work begins, they replace them with completely unqualified staff, managed&#x2F;whipped by moustache-wielding blue-shirts to read from support-scripts.

I worked at the company where as a first filter we had a remote coding task (roughly 2- hours of implementing some simple data structure plus unit tests). A candidate sent us a prefect solution indicating very good knowledge of Java, testing framework, clear thinking, good problem solving etc. When the candidate came for the live interview she was absolutely shocked that we asked her coding questions again. &quot;But I have already did the coding task!&quot;. It was very clear that she didn&#x27;t know how to write a line of code if her life depended on it. I wonder what was her plan if she got hired by mistake.

We &quot;hired&quot; a DBA after a really good remote interview (this was in 2017). Two weeks later, the DBA shows up for work, but wasn&#x27;t working very closely with the hiring team. His coworkers seemed curious about some of his approaches to problems etc. Turns out he had someone fake his interview. Fired him two weeks later when we had all of our ducks in a row in terms of HR stuff.

The new job that I was hired for is not the same one I interviewed for.

I&#x27;ve experienced the following hiring remotely:<p>* A candidate who was caught lip syncing to someone talking in the room behind them.<p>* A candidate who had air pods to listen to someone coaching them.<p>* Plenty of candidates who just wont turn on the video no matter what.<p>Remote interviewing has some bizarre drawbacks.

<i>...Cyrano de Bergerac’d their interview.</i><p>That&#x27;s a great phrase, though I don&#x27;t get people who do this kind of thing. But then I was also the killjoy in some college class when other people were like &quot;Yes! Let&#x27;s just <i>skip</i> more stuff and pass anyway!&quot; and I went &quot;Uh, no. What if you actually need to <i>know</i> that stuff for a future class or a job?!&quot;<p>Everyone glared at me. They just wanted an easy A (or easy passing grade). Apparently no one but me was actually interested in <i>learning</i> anything when they signed up for the class.<p>(Smacks head on desk.)<p>(Context: the professor had announced we were skipping something due to time constraints.)

We only have 10 ish staff during election season.<p>For us it&#x27;s always been unpredictable and I wouldn&#x27;t go as far to say intentional fraud.<p>But there is a trend that the people who put the most experience, list best tech skills, have good buzzword filled interviews often don&#x27;t live up to it.<p>Often it&#x27;s the fresh person with less experience, or the person coming from something different that doesn&#x27;t even have the baseline skills, that becomes the super talented value adder.<p>I think a big part of their success is ability to teach themselves. Google it success.<p>I wish we had a better way to make choices. Still though it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s horrible. out of like 10 we usually only get one we need to let go of or move to a less intense role.<p>We tried doing some basic tests of like paying people to do 2 hours of work, proof reading, etc. But didn&#x27;t go well.

Last week, I was recruited for an ongoing project where I would serve as the face of a website development service conducting client interviews, several each day. Most of the actual devs apparently don&#x27;t have good English skills, so I was to be the contact. But the kicker was, I was supposed to actually pretend to <i>be</i> the developer — to adopt their name, skills, and experiences — in my conversations with the client.<p>This seemed to me both unethical and absurdly difficult to do well (how am I supposed to fake dev-level knowledge about systems I didn&#x27;t create?) so of course I turned it down.<p>The difference with this article is who is being deceived — in the offer I got it was the external client, while in the article it&#x27;s the employer. The commonality is that they&#x27;re both using false identities over remote communication.<p>Such deceptions are probably <i>more</i> difficult to pull off using video chat as opposed to audio only, but easier in comparison to in-person meetings. I wonder whether they&#x27;re actually increasing or not.

I&#x27;ve been involved in more than a handful of interviews where it was clear that the candidate was wearing an earpiece or getting answers from someone else. Never hired an actual impostor like in TFA, but the signs of someone cheating the interview were pretty clear.<p>All we had to do was go off script and we&#x27;d have a good idea about how genuine the candidate was being.

Seems pretty hard to successfully pull this off. The better your chances of being successful, the more likely you could have gotten the offer on your own. If you needed the stand in to get the offer, you&#x27;re not likely going to be qualified and won&#x27;t last.<p>Perhaps it could be successful for people who are technically competent, but have a severe stage fright when interviewing. At the lease, you&#x27;d want the stand in to record the interviews so you could watch and learn who&#x27;s who and get the context of the job before starting.

Had this happen once. For an on-site job...with an on-site interview. And, yeah, from day 1 it was &quot;this...is not the guy we interviewed&quot;.<p>Plus of course the time we were hiring remote, and someone screenshared for something, and didn&#x27;t end it, and then later questions we had that was broad (&quot;can you tell me a little about (technology)&quot;) we got to watch him search for and answer from what he read, which was a unique experience.

Reminds me of the lip syncing interview candidate that went viral a little while ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=47mfohGyeBg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=47mfohGyeBg</a><p>This is why remote exams have all of those strict requirements like &quot;show us your room&quot; and &quot;don&#x27;t leave sight of the webcam&quot;

The other side happens too: my business partner, early on in his career, interviewed and was hired into a video-processing software company.<p>He shows up, the building is empty but for a secretary and one guy on the third floor. A Japanese company had bought them for the customer list, and they were now just to support folks locally. He quit after a week or two, after finding a real job.<p>Some time later he met the guy who had interviewed him, and asked about it. His response: &quot;I lost my hiring referral bonus when you quit! I&#x27;ll forgive you for quitting, if you forgive me for hiring you!&quot; See, the guy was already half out the door when he hired my partner, knowing he would report to a nearly empty building.<p>That was 20 years ago. Stuff like this has been happening forever. I guess now its on a production-line basis.

Whoa. I am new to interviewing and hiring developers. We needed to hire quickly and i interviewed someone, they did great and they were hired. And when they showed up for there first day in our remote zoom call I was very confused and thought I had interviewed a different person. I was the only person who interviewed them directly as they are a contractor. I brushed it off and thought maybe I was mistaken but reading this has made me rethink this initial feeling as I never mentioned it to anyone.

I’ve always wondered how companies that do mass interviewing like Google and Facebook determine if the person who interviews is the same person who shows up to work? I imagine especially with completely remote work, if you delay joining by a few months, who is going to remember what you look like?<p>I’m sure this happens and I’ve seen people trying to hilariously cheat on virtual interviews but the fact that people are probably successfully interviewing at FAANGs and getting away with it intrigues me.

At my Big Corp (tm) we&#x27;ve had HCL and TCM send one candidate for interview and drop off different people entirely. HR caught on when HCL started dropping off men when we had specifically selected several women.

Here&#x27;s a funny one:<p>I worked at a financial company as a web developer. A co-developer sat at the desk opposite, with the wall behind him. He would sit there playing games on his phone all day. ALL DAY. Yet, his work got done, but it was the barest minimum and really poor code.<p>So, one day I say &quot;Tomas, I never see you write any code. Yet, your work is always done.&quot;<p>&quot;Oh!&quot;, he says with a grin, &quot;I&#x27;ve outsourced my entire job to my friend back in the Czech Republic. I pay him about 30% of what I earn and he writes all my code and sends it back.&quot;

But... is the interviewee proxy doing this as a side gig? If they are good enough to get paid (presumably) for taking interviews, how can that be more valuable than just taking one of the jobs they successfully interview for?

I worked somewhere that was mostly remote. We hired an SRE, who was decent at their job, but there was always something off about them. Things like not being available when you would expect, but then would have reasonable explanations, but just a lot of coincidences to be happening to one person.<p>Early in their tenure, they said they had to go to Australia (from the US) due to a death in the family. However, someone saw that he tweeted from a bar in airport somewhere in the US, when he purported to be in Australia.<p>HR asked him to provide a death certificate &quot;just for our records&quot; and he provided a badly forged certificate, the inauthenticity of which was confirmed by a quick call to the agency that supposedly provided it.<p>It was all very strange and funny. Of course he was let go, and he just kind of said, &quot;ok.&quot;

If you interview at enough companies you can find one that allows a Gattaca to slip through. Of the subset of companies that allows that some companies let people float without doing any real work for a long time. The longer they coast the more likely they can find a corner to hide in. There is no penalty for them to try this approach. Even if you caught them in a lie the effort to make them pay for their actions means they likely will never be responsible.<p>One company I worked with checked government issued ids at every stage of the interview process. I&#x27;m sure people will find a way around this. This also opens your company to discrimination lawsuits, &quot;everything was going fine in the interview until I turned on the camera, then they didn&#x27;t hire me.&quot;

While I don&#x27;t doubt this sort of thing happens, the following line leads me to believe that this is an exercise in creative writing by someone:<p>&gt; In the meantime, legal approved security to put a trace on John’s computer to review if there have been outside messages or if his work is being completed with outside help or on a different computer altogether.

Couple of year ago, my team was hiring an employee in India through Teams interviews. Local HR warned us to mandatory ask to the candidates to switch on the camera, because person exchange after the interviews is quite common.

Fake it til’ you - have to quit out of fear of legal repercussions.

I was hired on e for a position at a 35% pay raise; while this isn&#x27;t particularly unusual in tech, on the first day, I couldn&#x27;t figure out what they were talking about with most things. They couldn&#x27;t figure out why I couldn&#x27;t figure out their setup requirements. After almost 8 hours passed, they said they switched resumes on accident... so I&#x27;d quit my last job for this job, worked there a day for no reason, and was back on the street. The previous employer wouldn&#x27;t take me back, and I had to start over.

I was wondering about this after running across a couple of people who I have no shadow of a doubt could not code a fizzbuzz solution that all our screens use. They did end up on PIPs and let go but I always wondered how they got in to begin with. (This was before Covid, too, but still unless you did biometrics and had in-person friends who could recognize a person I could see a stand-in coming in to help with the on-site interviews).

The worst thing about this case, if its true, is that this kind of thing will poison the pool for others. for legit people.<p>its already getting a little nauseating with the number of shops who insist on coding tests -- for people with tons of evidence already that they are legit programmers. This type of incident will be used to justify even more creepy and insulting behaviors on the employer&#x27;s side. everybody loses

Were the interviews online? Couldn&#x27;t John study a recording of those to know who Holly is and bring up some story to explain some of the other odd stuff? I wonder how long you can pull this off without knowing your stuff.

I knew a hiring manager about a decade ago at a company that used a <i>very</i> intense interview practice. The sort of multi-day, tests, whiteboard coding, several rounds of panels interview. The worst employee they ever hired somehow made it through that entire gauntlet then showed up to work and it was like somebody had lobotomized him. He was no longer able to write code, simple SQL SELECT statements, anything. It was utterly bizarre and unlike anything I&#x27;ve ever seen. For months my friend vented about this employee&#x27;s utter ineptitude and every conversation ended with &quot;how the hell did he get through the interview process?&quot;<p>They never did figure out what was going on, but did eventually have to terminate the employee.<p><i>edit</i> I just asked me friend if they had any ideas what happened. They said they believe that a &quot;recon&quot; person interviewed before them and just recorded the interview questions so they could study and regurgitate answers. But that&#x27;s the best theory that doesn&#x27;t involve identical twins, clones or time travel.

If you have a common name, there are probably people on LinkedIn with much better CVs than yours.<p>Their references should work for you.

This article (and all of the anecdotes surrounding it) has opened my eyes quite a bit. However, it actually reads to me more like a “How to get better at this kind of thing” than a cautionary tale. There are even comments acting as such here.<p>Fraud hurts us all. Even (especially?) the people who think they are benefitting from it.

Very common with overseas contractors. Often the person communicating has good English skills, but they swap in a friend etc for the actual work.<p>In some cases fine (you&#x27;ll actually get both of them to eventually show up on calls together with some random excuse). Other times less fine (basically a scam).

I once had a company internal recruiter refuse to look at my portfolio[0], because “I probably faked it.”<p>That was sort of “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”<p>I realized that this entire industry, that I fell in love with, as an enthusiastic, idealistic, young man, had turned into a miasma.<p>At that point, I just gave up, looking.<p>That company folded, not long after. I feel as if there&#x27;s a better-than-even chance that I could have made a real difference (but there’s also a better-than-even chance that I’m mistaken, and I just dodged a bullet. Having their internal recruiter deliver such a stunning insult does not speak well for their corporate culture).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;chrismarshall" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;chrismarshall</a>

Most comments here are not mentioning TFA, but I wanted to point out this line:<p>&gt; Their security teams are trying to discover what all he downloaded, if they’ll be able to get their equipment back, is John really his real name, etc. !!<p><i>If</i> they&#x27;ll be able to get their equipment back? Incredible.

My company hired a senior developer for an Angular project we were working on. They did great in the interviews and on our take home coding challenge. When it got down to time to work, I was walking them through the codebase and it very quickly became apparent they not only didn&#x27;t know Angular, they didn&#x27;t even know much at all about web development in general. They were let go three days later. I&#x27;d heard of things like this happening but I couldn&#x27;t believe it until I saw it in real life. I just can&#x27;t imagine what someone like that is thinking. I get &quot;fake it &#x27;til you make it&quot; but this was on a whole other level.

something similar happened to me but way more hilarious. I had interviewed at a big brand name place in India and thought I did good because of positive feedback from everybody. But then there was complete silence for 2 weeks. Finally when I called them the recruiter was surprised and said &quot;didn&#x27;t you reject the offer?&quot; apparently there was another candidate with similar name who rejected the offer. A month later I finally ended up joining there but worked in a totally different team. Later one day I bumped into the manager who had interviewed me and he was surprised to see me because he thought I had rejected the offer.

Relevant interview of Rami Malek telling a story where he interviewed instead of his twin brother:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HvBwJrc_-ns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HvBwJrc_-ns</a>

This exact scenario played out at a friend’s company a few months ago. Fortunately someone had a screenshot of the “you’re hired!” Zoom call so they could quickly confirm their suspicions and take action.

I can&#x27;t help but wonder: isn&#x27;t this basically just fraud? Shouldn&#x27;t the people involved in this go to prison, or at least have some more consequences than losing the job? Are they even entitled to pay for a job that thought it hired someone else?<p>Then again, there&#x27;s also the reverse of this: employee gets hired for a job that turns out to be different from the one they interviewed for. I&#x27;m pretty sure companies are never going to be held accountable for that one.

One place I worked, we hired someone into a senior developer position. A whole section of the interview is about what is expected of a senior (making juniors better, talking to clients, etc...)<p>He gets there day one and says he will only write code. Everyone in the interview process had good notes and positive recollection of him.<p>The two working theories were that either someone else interviewed for him, or that he expected to show up and export his work to someone else (all remote).

I guess you need to remember your lies? Or don&#x27;t say you are single when you have wife and three kids. Which just makes it sound like a mixup rather than fraud.<p>Maybe the recruiter called the wrong person. I mean you only say your name once during a call. The person that got the job just made the initial screening interview, and answered the recruiters mail, while they talked to another guy. He then thinks they are scammers , hire to fire or something and bails.

I&#x27;ve had a reverse situation an interviewee where emails were written very enthusiastically and apparently technically competent, and then when the time for the interview call came, whoever picked up the phone was definitely not the same person. They would just shut up after any technical questions - after a while we simply asked if he was nervous and he said yeah that&#x27;s it. When asked for any previous experience he&#x27;d just copy and paste links to websites which didn&#x27;t work and couldn&#x27;t elaborate on what those websites even were. At one point he just read the description written on one of them. We asked him for his GitHub account or anything similar and he said &#x27;oh I know that one&#x27; (he sent a 404 link) and we just had to end the call right there as it was getting surrealistically hilarious.<p>The next day we got an email from the apparently competent one, claiming that this time the email was being written by a &#x27;friend&#x27; of the candidate we talked to (same address every time), and that if we gave them a chance he&#x27;d be the &#x27;perfect candidate with 100% qulaity&#x27; (sic).<p>We politely refused.

In 2014, Indian voters voted for a candidate who claimed he will remove corruption, end poverty and make India better than Japan, South Korea and Europe.<p>Turned out in 2022, Narendra Modi was a fraud, uneducated and full of ego. He did not know how to do the job at all. He just got the gig by enciting violence in local constituency.<p>If top posts can be rigged, corporate jobs resume fraud is a child&#x27;s play.

Tangential, but it’s the first time I’m hearing of MuleSoft. I wonder what kind of companies use it?<p>There’s a side of “enterprise” software that’s so foreign to me.<p>I still don’t know what Salesforce is. Or SAP (I see their name in a lot of shitty software though). I wonder how the developers in those companies are like, what their processes and code reviews and technical discussions look like.

I can&#x27;t imagine this isn&#x27;t common in all facets of life. I always thought this would have been so easy for college exams to hire a ringer to take it for you, or submit assignments. Usually for the big lecture hall classes everyone would sit down, then just pass their student IDs to the end of the row, then a TA would walk up and down the aisles and collect them and take them back to sign in. It would have been so easy to just have someone else pass up your ID. Plus these would be critical classes, like your big core classes sophomore year where you want to have good grades for summer internships or maybe med school. When I took my GRE they also asked for ID at the testing center but just looked at it, they didn&#x27;t scan it and verify it was legit. I could have just as easily been a ringer handing them a fakeid, something very easy to get at a college campus. I wonder how many people have done stuff like this and have gone on to reap the benefits.

I’ve had the experience (at a FAANG) where I showed up for an site and all the interviews had info on a completely different person. So my initial thought was there 2 Johns and somewhere between interview and offer they got switched. New John is going to graciously accept the offer, old John got ghosted.

This happened to me once. We hired remotely, the guy sounded fantastic, but the guy who showed up didn&#x27;t even speak English. We fired him within two weeks.<p>Another time we hired a guy who seemed enthusiastic and had a portfolio of things he had done, but he turned out to be completely unenthusiastic.

I expected the &quot;not the same person&quot; to be more metaphorical than literal. Imagine my surprise.

My first job out of college was at a J2ME mobile startup (circa ~2005). Startup was the baby of a rich Arab, and I was the first actual technical hire in the team (the prototype was outsourced). I hired 3 engineers within the first month. A couple weeks into the project, I realised that one of the juniors was a bozo at programming and I had made a severe hiring mistake. The guy spent time re-writing Java classes as objects, making superfluous inheritance hierarchies, installing and re-installed the J2ME emulator, etc. I would have to fire the guy soon and explain it to my Arab boss ...<p>Fortunately, new hire was sending sexually explicit SMSes to the cute Filipino receptionist. Arab boss threw him out the next day.

The nice thing, of course, for fake-John, is that they just get to try again. I&#x27;ll bet that fake-John has a 50% chance of lasting at least 6 months in a role by getting in this way. And so much the better if they live actually live in an area with a much lower cost of living than their pay-scale was intended for.<p>And I wonder what &quot;real&quot; John gets out of this. I bet he makes a lot of money. Maybe he gets lots of people jobs this way, he provides all of his own payment information, and then forwards 90% to the people who actually have to &quot;show up&quot; (such as it is) for work.<p>Man, I want to franchise this! Actually now that I&#x27;m at the end of my post I think I just described the consulting industry...

At my last gig, we tried hiring contractors and got bit by this twice.<p>We’d interview a candidate over the phone or Skype and he’d be extremely knowledgeable, answering all our questions flawlessly. Then when he arrives to the office, he can barely speak English, has trouble turning the computer on, and can’t answer any of the questions he answered over the phone.<p>We learned to detect this very promptly and escort them out of the office immediately. They often demanded to be paid for their time and traveling expenses, despite attempting fraud.

Seems made up, though I don’t doubt that it’s a thing. If someone is getting someone else to interview for them, the least they would ensure is that no aspect of personal life is discussed during the interview. This is also something that no hiring manager would inquire about since there are possible legal repercussions to doing so. Finally, I think it’s alarming that the spouse has this level of detail about the happenings at her husband’s office - if this were true, this is a mini-scandal by itself

Yes, this is a thing. And even more frequently, online assessments done by someone else. Somehow Java developers got hired who don&#x27;t know the difference between Java and JavaScript.

Has anyone else started to take screenshots of the video interviews (as I have, since I have a very bad facial memory anyway) to document who was being interviewed?

This has happened to me before. The person I was interviewing and the person who was doing the coding during the interview were not the same.

Ohh no ... I really hope this doesn&#x27;t become a thing ... I don&#x27;t want corporate espionage to become this insane.

Whoa... the part about being able to trace if work is being done on another computer is alarming. How can they do that?

What I&#x27;m seeing in the article: the legal dept forbid HR from saying “you aren&#x27;t the guy that we interviewed”, but meanwhile permitted the security dept to put a ‘trace’—presumably spyware—on the guy&#x27;s machine.<p><i>HUH?</i><p>Apparently this is the state of corporate attitude toward employees now.

I suppose that’s a case for recording remote interviews.<p>Sad as this stuff will just be a hassle for everyone else.

I don&#x27;t think this is rare when dealing with large contracting companies, and especially remote. I&#x27;ve seen it happen multiple times, luckily we terminated the contracts when it was painfully obvious what happened after a couple of weeks.

Bizarre! Possibly related phenomenon, recently noticed that a bunch of students who dropped out or never finished our program are working as engineers (non-software) in big multinational firms. Does nobody check a transcript anymore?

How can something like this ever work out? If you&#x27;re an okay-ish candidate and you hire someone better to do the interview, you might get away with it. But if you don&#x27;t even know the basics of the job as the post claims...

This also happened to me. I interviewed someone from an IT staffing agency. Seemed perfect. A different person showed up for the job, and he knew next to nothing about IT.

Fascinating if one person is interviewing for many roles then sending in proxies to do the jobs in return for a kickback.

Isn’t this the premise of 4-Hour Workweek?

Tl;dr: when confronted, he quit and was subsequently unreachable.

Well, this is the one that they caught.<p>Wondering how many are managing to fool their companies undetected.

Is it possible that this person may have some form of multiple personality disorder?

Just wait what happens when people start to deep fake virtual interviews.

It’s quite possible the guy was running 3 or 4 jobs at once. It happens.

reminds of me of this post, however true it is..<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27454589" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27454589</a>

I didn&#x27;t realize they were making a sequel to The Internship

I&#x27;ve been sent to interviews by HR with a folder holding another dude&#x27;s resume before.<p>This is probably the same thing but remote instead of in person.

This reminds me of the Trump ‘Four Seasons’ media event.

This is some nonsense boomer propaganda to FUD against remote work.

This is especially true with Indian H1B&#x27;s. A company I was doing work for complained that they were burned at least 3 times. They got someone else who wasn&#x27;t the person they interviewed. Wasn&#x27;t a big deal since they would let them go immediately. What&#x27;s funny is folks were asking are you sure? The manager would say yes I&#x27;m sure, I&#x27;m Indian and I know who I spoke to during the interview and it wasn&#x27;t this guy.

This is why I require on camera, screen shared, live coding sessions or discussion as part of my technical interview process for remote developers. If they&#x27;re junior, the problems are not hard, literally foundational CS things.<p>If it&#x27;s for a more advanced role, I give them a coding challenge after a non-technical, on camera interview. Then if it&#x27;s worthy of a technical follow up interview, they must build, execute, and walk me through the code live on camera. I also ask them to make slight alterations or extensions live.<p>This may sound like a lot but the total time invested by a candidate, including the interviews themselves, should be no more than 4 hours. The challenges are experience and role appropriate and I&#x27;m not asking them to build an MVP or anything close. They&#x27;re also allowed to search and use resources in the live interviews, as they would on the job. I&#x27;m not interested in testing your memory-recall abilities, I&#x27;m interested in seeing how you approach problem solving using CS.<p>Lastly, record all your interviews.

just hire new people every year so you always have exactly who you want

Record the interviews. Problem solved.

&quot;John is talking extensively about working in a garage because his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk area.&quot;<p>If John is reading, you now have documentation that marital status has played a part in the decision process (even if not the sole issue) should they decide to let you go.