What's the difference between a foreigner with an accent in your onsite team VS a foreigner that's remote in US timezones (LatAm)? Why just open the job for US-remote?
Compliance? Deel/Remote can help you with that.
Security? It applies if you're working on defense software, but other than that...?
If I give someone in the US access to my code, systems, and, inevitably, customer data then I have a lot of legal recourse against that person if they do something bad. They have a lot of incentive to be careful and follow the rules. Their desire to maintain their reputation and avoid legal liability aligns our interests.
If I hire someone in the US and they hand everything over to a random person in a foreign country who doesn't care in the slightest about US laws, then they don't care about anything other than keeping those paychecks coming for a while. They don't care about anything, especially once those paychecks stop coming. It's even more complicated because the company isn't the one sending the paychecks, it's the person you hired. If that person has a falling out with their outsourced counterpart and the outsourced counterpart decides to take revenge on the company as leverage over their front-person, it gets bad.
> Security? It applies if you're working on defense software, but other than that...?
Are you suggesting that security only matters to defense software? You've never worked on a project that involves customer data? You've never worked on proprietary software that your competitors would love to have?
Do you not get annoyed when companies leak your personal data?
But it’s quite common to get less than you paid for.
Don't forget this is all employment really is. Any employee-employer relationship boils down to this regardless of what you have deluded yourself into believing.
Yes, I do my work for money, and would not do it if they don't pay me, but it's definitely not just money. I like my team, have personal friends among them, and find pleasure and realization in doing a good job.
Everything beyond the core financial relationship is just mythology and propaganda employers have beaten into you since birth to make you a good serf
Similarly those "friends" will throw you to the wayside when their own employment is threatened. Been there, done that.
Employers pretend their employees aren't replaceable cogs, but that's exactly how they see them.
That's not inevitable (for programmers, at least). Post-GDPR European developers generally keep well away from customer data, and it isn't a big impediment.
Typically the person "hired" is the senior and the person doing the work is _extremely_ green.
Do your diligence, and your technical/communication/leadership interviews to make sure you're hiring the right person.
And if it doesn't work out after 2-3 months, fire the person. It happens in all formats of work whether it's remote, hybrid, or onsite.
You're not wrong, but it's missing the point.
It's so much harder and riskier to do this onsite that it's not very common.
With remote, a group of people can defraud multiple companies at the same time this way. They can do it all remotely, which means they can do it without stepping into the legal jurisdiction of the company.
Remote opens the doors to so much more fraud. There is almost no comparison between someone doing this on-site and someone from a foreign country scamming companies as their job.
The edge cases are common and often legally ambiguous. When things go wrong, it can be extremely hard for a company to resolve the situation when it crosses boarders. Heck, even just operating in a different state can open a company up to legal issues.
Once you start opening up to different legal jurisdictions, you basically have to run company policy in a way that accounts for the worst situations across all jurisdictions.
Some things that I'm aware of:
* Import/Export law for software. It may seem mundane, but having any encryption can cause significant scrutiny.
* Import/Export law for hardware (like getting a company laptop to an employee)
* Ability to track/down or recover lost/stolen hardware
* Variations in labor laws.
* Variations in copyright/IP protection laws.
* Variations in digital hacking/data integrity laws.
* Government level data monitoring/tracking
* Local data protection laws that you might not be subject to without a local employee.
* Scrutiny from your customers about foreign workers.
* Accidental sanctions violations.
* Potential for customer data to leave legal boundaries via a foreign employee.
* etc
- IP protection - some countries make it super hard if someone breaks the NDA and steals their employer's IP. At least in the US, the employer can go after the IP thieves as a last recourse.
- Secure devices - lot of companies give laptops which come with all sorts of tracking software (eg. to force security updates). It is hard to ship laptops all over the world due to customs requirements.
If someone tried to claim they were from the US but we needed to send their paychecks to an obscure address in Europe for reasons, that wouldn't work at all.
Idk if this is an actual signal of anything, at least with mexican-american people I noticed they still have a unique accent. First gen americans can live in ethnic bubbles, and not speak english primarily, especially if their parents didnt put in any effort to speak english.
I've also heard of situations where one person is hired to do the job, but then after a while their work changes for the worse. They start "forgetting" things you've talked about recently, or they'll "forget" how the code they submitted an hour ago works.
They're either a front person for a dev shop, or they're trying to outsource their work. They don't care about doing a great job because they know most companies will take a long time to fire people. If the company PIPs them, they might suddenly become a great performer again until the heat dies down, then it's back to the same game.
Before the "if they're getting their work done, why does it matter?" comments: Having someone take our codebase and send it to random contractors is a huge security breach. Ignoring that, carefully interviewing and selecting one person to do your work and then receiving deliverables from a cheap contractor is plain fraud.
Having been fooled by 2 "overemployed" people (on a team of 20), these fake candidates are distinct in that they're almost always have an unexplained heavy accent yet they say they're born and raised in the US. They also often have Zoom backgrounds that are just... odd (the room will often look like it has shelving and boxes or whatever that don't look like something you would see in the US).
It's difficult because no single data point is enough to prove they're fake, but when you add all the warning signs together, it's pretty obvious.
In my experience, /r/overemployed people are a lot better at blending in with regular candidates.
Re: overemployment, the best counter-offense I've found is to require LinkedIn profiles and to require background checks that include employment verification. Most "overemployed" people are smart enough to not have a LinkedIn profile. This has a side effect of excluding applicants without a LinkedIn, but it's a tradeoff.
Would you exclude someone for successfully verifying their employment, but having an outdated LinkedIn profile?
The more I think about it the more it sounds like an EEOC violation.
Having your current employer on LinkedIn drastically raises your chance of being spear-phished—something to keep in mind.
Also, did they come out clean at the end? Or did they try to get away with it
The hope of these fake candidates is that they can sneak in and get a few good paychecks from a corrupt and disorderly employer. And it costs then almost nothing to try.
On the phone with the candidate, his ID "was at his brother's house". He also joined the call with the name "Senior Dev" rather than a real name. I asked him why he used a pseudonym, and he mumbled something I couldn't understand.
I politely said thanks for your time, but it's not a good fit.
Honestly as an American I would much prefer to hire Americans from Midwest or Texas, than someone outside my country.
https://www.eeoc.gov/pre-employment-inquiries-and-citizenshi...
Can I apply in hopes of moving to the US? Or in which situation would a non citizen be authorised to work?
> An employer has no legal obligation to commence an immigration case. ... The employer may lawfully reject the job applicant because, if hired, that individual will ask the employer to take steps before the federal government to obtain authorization to employ him (an employment-based immigration case).
In other words, if you are not currently legally authorized to work in the US, the employer has no obligation to sponsor you for work authorization, and can simply reject you.
> This situation differs from one in which a job applicant has temporary work authorization that is independent of the employer and the applicant does not ask the employer to take on the legal obligation of an immigration case in order to employ him. The employer should not reject the job applicant simply because he has temporary work authorization.
On the other hand, a non-citizen with a green card, EAD, etc. is protected, and refusing to hire because of those documents is illegal.
The company could hire you the same as they could contract an outsourcing firm, but it’s not the same as direct employment.
"Similarly, employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant. If needed for identification purposes, a photograph may be obtained after an offer of employment is made and accepted."
https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices
Check out EEOC enforcement actions and settlements, its better than the news
i think remote work is great, but some early face to face can fix a bunch of problems imo.
in his case i think he more or less knew what he was doing, and showed up on calls, but delegated the work to some other people.
we’d hear people in the background of his audio discussing things really oddly similar to tasks he’d been assigned and had outstanding. he was putting in (bad) PRs at all hours of day and night, and never had any recollection of any email, slack conversation, or his own PRs.
the company fired him after six months or so.
Darknet dairies has an interesting episode about this: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/133/
It's a real problem which makes it harder for people like me that are legitimately working remotely. This has existed for a long time but it wasn't as popular because remote working was unpopular before the pandemic.
> Really frustrating because it's making us have to do silly things like require photo ID verification over video on the first screening call
Unfortunately, this wouldn't solve it, a person can join the calls and get someone else to do the work.
You have potential to make a lot more money catching these bad actors rather than enabling them.
I was under the impression that every job posting right now is instantly buried with a glut of top quality candidates, and that you simply pick your favorite, lowball them and you're done.
Born in the states but currently living in Canada to take care of family, unsure if it is worth applying to the litany of US remote positions
I guess it’s mostly my own fault for being nervous about switching jobs, but hearing them accidentally hiring obvious frauds makes me think it’s not as daunting as I feel.
We started scheduling video chats with the candidates clearly using ChatGPT with our virtual recruiter, and they all got on the call and began reading scripts, and could not answer more unique phone screen questions like: What engineering principle is important to you?
It’s the most frustrating thing, taking up so much of our time and taking time away from strong engineers who deserve our time.
I heard a good podcast about this, https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/133/
We’re testing a solution for this to keep our own product operating fast and delivering amazing candidates.
We’re also keeping a list of red flags:
- LinkedIn profile was created in the last year - GitHub link has a generic identity, 0-2 followers, very little activity - Candidate will say yes to a phone screen immediately, literally right now - Or candidate will ask if the meeting is a technical screen - Candidate will go quiet if you ask them if they are available to fly to HQ to meet the team for their final interview - Job history includes large, non-tech enterprises where employment would be hard to confirm; think CVS, The Home Depot, Best Buy, etc - LinkedIn About Statement is written in the third person - LinkedIn profile uses generic language like “cutting edge technologies” - Profile photos may be avatars, or look like stock photos
None of these things individually can indicate a fake applicant, but taken all together with language used with our virtual recruiter we’ve gotten good at identifying the fakes. We’re still doing a lot of tests to prevent discrimination on our part.
If anyone wants to chat, my CoFounder and I have become obsessed with solving this.
Have you been plagued by applicant fraud? We've found for all of our remote engineering roles, we get 100's of amazing applicants who are all fake (clearly not actually in the US) once you get them on a screening call. They're often reading from a script, broken english, and say strange things like they're born and raised in Texas, yet can't speak fluent English or have a heavy accent.
My best guess is it's dev shops overseas who are using an English-speaking "front" person who then delegates the work to other people with the "front" person being the one who joins company meetings, etc.
Really frustrating because it's making us have to do silly things like require photo ID verification over video on the first screening call (which I would rather not inconvenience applicants with, but there are just SO many candidates lying about residing in the US).
With our most recent role, about 60-70% of applicants were fake ("fake" = candidates who lie about living/residing in the US)