The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.
At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.
Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example.
As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that.
At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.
OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.
Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.
It's credit-taking all the way up.
If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.
I mean one of the companies they mention is Amazon
Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.
It has become the premier cloud provider. That wasn't the original goal, but it's good for them.
As a marketplace it is degenerating into an absolute mess. The force that maintains Prime membership is about 70% inertia.
Not the people deciding rankings and promotions.
Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.)
Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion.
And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.
/s
I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement.
Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.
The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget.
Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.
If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.
Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...
Anyway, a king that hoards priceless art seems worse? The good stuff belongs in a museum visible to the public, not a private collection or walled off throne room. And lots of the art (jewelry for example) produced for royals was just expensive gaudy crap anyway, a waste of gold.
I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.
Based on how I believe the world works, and on larger patterns at play here, this general cultural trend (if this is in fact what it is) will backfire.
If this is deemed culturally acceptable, and one extrapolates this pattern further, there is little deeper value that a culture has to offer.
Everything becomes more expensive and dangerous when there isn't basic trust. You have to verify, surveil, and credential everything.
Old people get scammed not because they are dumb, but because they grew up in a society insulated from dishonesty.
Taxi laws are an instance of almost 100% public corruption, unnecessary bureaucracy, and regulatory capture, but at the same time they would have been almost impossible to dislodge except through widespread disobedience. What happened with Uber and Lyft was for the best. The market spoke.
I think there is plenty of reason to think people who actually know the stuff instead of cheating would be better on average. It's a signal that they were smart enough and motivated enough to learn the material (basic algorithms/coding skills in this case)- both traits that would probably make them better on average at the job.
Being a good cheater is a useful skill that probably also helps people on average- but I doubt it's nearly as useful an indicator of future success as being good at the skills necessary to do well on interview questions (w/o cheating).
Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself. The best interview that I've encountered is the long interview. I hire you for four months as a co-op, see what you can do, and we go from there. Impractical in many/most settings, obviously.
But this is usually not possible- it's contingent on other people having already solved and posted solutions online for some question worded nearly the same. Much of the knowledge behind interview questions applies to all sorts of programming problems where the solution won't be available to copy. A knowledgeable programmer would know quickly that some problem is best approached by dfs or bfs, while the cheater may not.
> Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself
I agree, but this will always be a hard process. LC problems are like IQ test or SATs, they work fairly well most of the time, but probably better to weed out the particularly weak candidates than determine how good people truly are.
Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer.
A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full libraries and reference sites open and ready to go. This is actually how they will be doing their work (we hope!). Then judge on efficient lookups AND insightful comments on how to build upon the found knowledge.
Or, based on the above sample recognize that the process is really totally broken, that almost anyone coming in will work out well (the cheaters clearly lacked the skill or confidence of OP, yet did fine in the actual job), and either fix the criteria (obviously difficult based on the last decade of HN discussions on the hiring sh^tshows), or just cut wasting resources on extensive interviews and take the first N applicants and be done with it.
I'm satisfied, in an interview, if I feel the person is interested in the topic, is able to admit that they don't know something, and seems like they'd be pleasant (although i'd settle for "not difficult") to work with.
The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary and it's always a gamble because people excel at putting up very convincing façades of whatever it is that they think they're being evaluated for.
People have different things to offer, and you really don't find out until at least 6-12 months into their employment what they really excel at, you have no chance in 30-60 minute (or whatever) interview.
The best you can hope for is to rule out the obvious sociopaths.
That's what the parent comment is saying. Open-book instead of closed-book, just have the candidate walk you through figuring out what they don't know, listen to them think aloud, and evaluate that.
I hate jumping through hoops too, but have you seen other industries (LSAT, mcat, etc)?
If you've never done it before leetcode style problems are bound to teach you something useful to your work.
The problem is while you can’t control randomness, on average those roofs do fail much more.
But more broadly it’s amazing how far developers on HN will go to defend things that will mildly inconvenience developers.
Cheating to bypass a stupid gatekeeping system that's designed to ration 1 job per N perfectly qualified applicants is only a problem if it's a problem. If you claim that people who didn't cheat during that process are any less likely to do something unethical when hired, I'd say that's a claim in need of proof.
My preferred solution is to come up with a less stupid gatekeeping system. But I only ever hire co-op students, and no one will let me try anything that involves more than a 30-minute chat. Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.
If an individual cheats but turns out to be competent, it's no loss for the company or anyone else, really. But on average, if cheating is common, more incompetent people will slip through and ultimately cause problems. I can bet my life savings on black and win, but that doesn't make it a good decision.
> Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.
If you'd like to know about the research behind interviews, they've found that unstructured interviews aren't better than pulling people out of a hat, regardless of how effective they feel.
It's not "right" or "wrong" - it's just a decision. There may be other choices and other decisions but to paint this one as flat wrong seems, well, wrong.
> They may not have found the very best person for the job
The vast majority of job searches do not have this as a goal!
Most companies want to hire somebody who's good enough relatively quickly for a price they want to pay.
No you don't! Or else you'd never hire anybody because how can you be sure anyone is the best person for the job?
You want to hire the person in front of you who is good enough to be likely enough to be able to do the job.
The process did not fail in the same way my bear repelling crystal necklace has not yet failed me in repelling bears.
My process is that I hire only men. I have not yet had an underperformer. Hence, my process never failed.
At some level, fairness is important. And no, it's not important only when there is a law behind it.
Look at it from the point of view of the hiring company now, not the interviewer. They got a person who was good enough (based on the merits of their actual work, not interview performance) to subsequently get promoted. So, hiring mission accomplished, end of story. They may not have found the very best person for the job (very subjective and unknowable anyway), but if the process didn't result in an under-performer taking the job, the process did not fail. And, importantly, there's no reason whatsoever to think that if no cheating was allowed and a different person took the job, that they would on average be any better.