We seldom see all the people whom we interviewed for the teams, as devs, being present in the meetings that they are all expected to be present (of course it is most often the timezone difference that is the mentioned reason). Or people who join have their camera turned off, so no way to see them.

Code quality that comes, is not on par with the skillset we evaluated during the interviews and I suspect the whole consultancy is doing something similar with presenting top engineers in the interview and then moving them between many teams. Leaving the less skilled engineer to do the work.

I have a friend working in the business side of one of the large consulting firms, and the insight I got there is that sales is ahead of engineering staffing by _a lot_. In other words, the supply is being outstripped by the demand. Not wanting to leave money on the table these firms (or at least the very large "name brand" one my friend works for) will sign for projects which they do not have bench staff to fill. They then hit the streets and hire whoever can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Now we have to work alongside these people, who themselves are not so much to blame in many cases. They are pawns in the often-fraudulent game called Software Consulting, Inc. It's great fun. I feel for you.

I can't tell you how much it hurts your soul to work at a consulting firm or implementation shop. I took a job once where they said I could hire a team of great engineers for a very complicated/technical contract, we talked before about how much salary/benefits/timeframe it would be to get the right folks onboard to meet some project deliverables.

Once I was onboard, it was like "oh, well you said you needed $X, but we only have budget for $Y, so you will need to make due with these jr resources". They suggested I work with the sales team to get more business for the things we wanted to do. I suggested they find a replacement and bounced from that clusterfuck.

The frequency at which they show up on the front page makes me think someone's trying to build a narrative.

This is particularly concerning given that this website is also one of the tech sector's most respected hiring sites.

My main question isn't /whether/, as I have enough to go on that this is somehow deliberate. What I'm asking myself is what the ultimate goal of this is.

It got to the point where we actually had a manager suggest taking a photo of candidates when they interviewed to confirm that the person coming in when they got hired was the same person.

You do get frauds. So what? It's always been the case. It hasn't appeared out of the blue this year, so why is there now an outcry about it? It hasn't increased one bit, all things considered. People have been running bait and switch scams since before the internet existed. Read up on penpal bride scams - you send a photo of a younger, more attractive sister or daughter and entrap a prospect. Or about "flattering portrait" matrimony scams - the same thing, but using paintings, since that was done in the middle ages, before photography.

So again, why is the narrative building being done?

What I'm saying is that it's worrying that there are many front-page posts that /ask specifically about this/. It's like facebook groups being flooded with "Ask FB: anyone live close to a 5G tower and get headaches?" Most people in cities do. It's the /question/ that builds the narrative. Not your anecdote.

So again, why is this specific point being dredged up this often recently?

This sort of fraud has always been around, however covid-19 changed the equation dramatically in favour of the scammers, due to many more companies being willing and able to hire remote employees.

This has allowed the scammers to scale in ways that were previously not possible.

As the profitability increases due to scale, more scammers are attracted to it, which leads to more people experiencing it, which leads to more people talking and posting about it, which leads to those posts ending up on the front page of HN.

I don't think it's a driven narrative, however one of the consequences will be companies lowering their appetite for remote-only work.

Now consider how many companies were willing to hire fully remote workers before the pandemic, and how many were willing to hire fully remote workers during and after the pandemic, and that will answer why the scammers have been able to scale.

Imagine if every week you got "ask hn: what's the best git tutorial?" or something equally trivial and open-ended on the front page. This simply does not seem like a natural occurrence.

Ending remote work?

Nevermind the fact that even if such domain knowledge existed in them, they probably wouldn't have a process for transferring it to the juniors they throw in the fire pit to actually "execute" a project.

Best you can get with these companies is avoiding a complete crash landing and "only" striking the tail.

I've seen managers hire them a couple times - usually, it's often when the manager's department is very understaffed, incompetent and frankly a bit clueless (even as to what the strategic direction should be) [1]. Then, in comes the TCS salespeople, who convince the department head to effectively outsource the department to them, and they'll just execute all its functions, and provide strategic direction as well. They promise to implement "top industry standards", and, if you're say a head of department in a bank, it sort of makes sense to believe that these people have been to dozens of banks, and have collected a body of knowledge on what the best practices are. Also, I think it's extremely tempting for the department head, since he'll just have to deal with TCS managers from now on, and not run his department. Not to mention the cost savings. All in all, on paper, their offer is very enticing (also for the manager who makes the decision, as it looks like TCS will make his job much easier), and, given the outsourcing trend in the industry, it's not controversial, so managers very often go for it. Afterwards, the execution is always a disaster and huge disappointment (and manager's career is very likely seriously damaged) - but TCS makes its money in the process.

Oh, and on top of that, there's of course also just regular graft, if the manager is willing to take the bribes.

Basically, the likes of TCS are a parasite, exploiting systemic weaknesses of corporate management.

[1] The other common scenario is when the CEO/CFO demand x% cost cuts from the department and is basically suggesting outsourcing himself.

The first symptom will be a few fresh faces in training sessions who aren't billed to your project.

Then systematically the experienced engineers will be pulled off your project (and dangled in front of a new client), while being replaced with the new chaps. Who are now billed, of course, at the full rate.

Within a few weeks they'll replace every guy with new hires.

But try explaining this to the bean counters.

I can't believe they're still getting away with these stunts. I first saw it in 1999.

You made my day kind sir. You deserve a cookie for that phrasing. Thank you!

In the Days of Yore, they had "Contractor Agents," that acted like talent agents. We would deal with them, to get introduced to the ICs that they represented.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838336

- Resumes are often used "as an example". Consulting teams who present are usually in between staffed roles, and are not the exact you'd see face to face. They do this because ... others are working on existing engagements and taking that client's calls.

- Big companies decide very, very slowly. And they might not even sign on a deal. So consulting firms have to continually juggle team members + skills + their own staff's needs to fill slots. The members you spoke with may have been available when you talked to them 2 months ago - but were staffed on a different project while this one closed.

etc.

If you don't have someone in your company scrutinizing everything and spot-checking work that comes across, they will notice and they will take advantage of it. Starting with strong developers to impress a client and then swapping them out with newbies is standard practice.

When we engage with agencies, we make it clear that the people working on our project are expected to be present for the one weekly meeting and that they will be the ones doing the work.

We also reserve the right to "fire" specific agency team members and request a replacement if they're not working out. This is crucial as the agencies will often send teams of three: 1 strong developer, 1 strong communicator, and 1 straggler who needs a lot of supervision from the first two. You pay for all of the developers, so you might as well insist that you're getting what you pay for.

They still didn’t produce great work but they did produce work that was usable and did what we wanted to do.

Most of my team actually had started out in consultancies earlier in their career so they knew exactly how things worked. A few times we had to “send someone back” when we got someone who was claimed to be an expert on X but was barely able to do basic tasks on the computer.

I’ve seen some consultancies with a much higher hit rate compared to WITCH and co though, on par with regular hiring. I am not privy to the financial details but I suspect they are a lot more expensive.

Which leads to another paradox (that I think I first saw Joel Spolsky point out, but I can't find the reference). Business software - and consulting services - always costs $20 either or $200,000. If it costs $20, you just buy it and use it. Once it gets over a certain price point - around $1000 or so - it requires approvals before it can be purchased. This leads to vendors having to develop full in-house departments dedicated to navigating those approval processes, so the price of the software has to be hiked to account for the additional headcount.

It’s a long piece. The “credit card“ vs “3 months of hard core PowerPoint by sales” pricing is about 75% into the post.

Lead of a teams of joyful green horns in a loosely specify environment. Delivering shit software on loosy deadline.

And then I switch to place where everyone is pretty senior. It’s less fun, I like to explain stuff and kinda miss it. But damn, not having to manage junior allow me to just produce large chunk of code faster.

And knowing that the guy next door is solid as well allow us to agreed on a contract and call it a day. ( it actually works )

I have little interaction with my coworker and yet our review are actual review. Syntax or petty issue are rarely mentioned. We agreed on linter months ago.

Anyway; sorry. Long détour to say that as much as I enjoy getting down with the stragglers, being in a mature team is pretty great.

Hiring managers do get kickbacks from consulting companies. These kickbacks are sophisticated, and there is no way to prosecute them, esp if immigrants are the hiring managers.

Consultancies exist for one reason only: to maximize the delta between what we charge customers and what we pay employees/contractors. Charging $400/hr for someone we're paying $80/hr is non unusual. In fact, it's probably the norm.

What could possibly go wrong?

It's a funny business, as these posts reveal. But there's nothing magical about the profit margins in consulting. There are some efficiency gains with streamlining HR and expertise and knowledge sharing. Throw in some profit, and that's what they are able to charge clients.

If it was excessively expensive, companies would do the work themselves. Many do, to lesser or greater degrees of success.

And sorry to say but racism often plays a part in these stories.

But who worked on the contract was just based on who was free at the time based on who was needed on other contracts. It was very likely I was tied up on another contract as a lead most of the time. Acutally one anti-pattern I pushed against was that we took the person on the bench and had them write the proposals... I pointed out this both landed us with bad implementations but also was likely less efficient than having the leads do the writing.

Anyway, this is very common, you can't hire people to fill seats until you have a contract in hand or you're taking someone else's risk. It's also likely that less effective employees are more often free to go sit on a new project. At the start of the project those extra folks are super numerary anyway while the leads design with the customer. Same at the end of the project where you're just cleaning up core deliverables.

For the client, one way to ensure you get what you want, if it's important, is 'named resources' section of the contract. Use it wisely and with awareness.

Other way is to be predictable and forthcoming during sales/negotiation/signing process. This is not meant to victim blame in the least, but there's lack of appreciation sometimes that people don't sit and twiddle their thumbs while internal processes grind the approval process to a halt: Frequently, who comes to oral presentation as part of sales cycle is who was available at the time, and who comes to perform the work is who is available at this other time, which may have been a predictable 2 weeks later, or (all too often) a completely unpredictable random 6 months and three weeks later. People you saw in February may not be waiting for you to finally sign and start come September.

Oh, and all the other bait & switch practices as well, sometimes intentional -<

In practical terms, it largely depends how actually "representative" people during orals were of the actual quality of workforce to deliver the project. Sometimes it's a close match, sometimes not. Ideally it's a fixed-price contract and it doesn't matter - it's vendor's responsibility to deliver, whether with many junior members supervised by senior members or however else, and hopefully contract and SLA and CAT/UAT are well designed.

Other thing that amazed me was clients dictating when we had heads active versus not. Generally I'd go for a right shifted gradual increase and sharp tail off. But many of our contracts wanted "all heads down" on day one. They also refused to do a shorter term in parallel design contract while we were negotiating.

Essentially their requirements were forcing us to burn money with idle hours.

I used to take some effort in trying to be nice about it figuring the person probably who wrote the code doesn't know they're a replacement and is just doing the best they can, but I eventually stopped caring. Now I just butcher them, point my boss at it, and see how long it takes before they get fired.

I'm not sure if this is specific to government procurement, but when hiring teams for federal contracts, some personnel on the team described in the proposal would be "key" and others would not. Key personnel could only be replaced by mutual agreement, and non-key personnel could be replaced at will by the bidder.

It always amazes me that some businesses still fall for this kind of deception, it's like the oldest trick in the book.

Could it be that your interview process is not evaluating the correct skill set? As an engineer with 15 years of experience, very few of the many interview processes I've completed were actually an acurate reflection of my abilities.

I’ve managed to separate myself from those parts and should be totally out the door soon!

If you have the budget, I highly recommend moving your compensation points up and focusing on top engineers in remote locations. It's much easier to vet people who have an established online track record and you can tap references from well-known companies. Unfortunately this way you will miss out on some great candidates that haven't yet established themselves, so you still have to branch out.

For remote work we require video interviews and cameras on during meetings. We'd make an exception if someone really needed accommodations to keep their camera off for some reason, but otherwise it's cameras on. I know some people don't like this, but it improves communication and team cohesion in a noticeable way. It also immediately highlights fraud like this.

Get your security team involved. You should be tracking where remote employees access your VPN and company services. Don't be afraid to ask about discrepancies and changes. If someone has logged in from one IP or region for the first 4 weeks and then suddenly you're seeing new logins from a different city or country, investigate. I don't care if people travel, but we need to firmly understand the security situation.

Watch out for people with frequent excuses for missing meetings, having to turn their camera off, excuses like "my camera isn't working today", and so on. Send everyone known-good webcams and company laptops.

And as always, performance management is key. Managing remote is harder than managing in person, and I say that as someone who manages remote and loves remote teams. You need strong performance management practices in place and clear ways to measure it. People who aren't getting their work done should show up quickly in your system and warrant additional manager investigation.

But if someone shows up in Zoom who isn't the person you hired, lock it down ASAP. Don't let being "nice" get in the way of handling an urgent security situation. Someone you didn't hire who hasn't agreed to your contracts is in your system, and that's a red alert emergency.

Yes, "camera isn't working" should be the easiest problem for the company to solve! "OK, we're overnighting a laptop with a working webcam to your address in our HR system. Please use that known working camera tomorrow."

Cameras shouldn't be required. Learn to vet your employees.

At this point I do more digging/reviews and I either agree with your point and work with the PM to get them to be more concise, or I disagree with you and you’re released from the team for having values that don’t align with ours.

Either way my problem gets fixed because I had people put their cameras on and communicate like grown ups.

Then raise those issues like an adult, rather than passive-aggressively tuning out.

> Do you spend far too much working time at meetings? Do you try to make important decisions in groups of more than 10 people? Do you have more than, let’s say, 15 co-workers under your direct management? Do you receive daily reports which you don’t read on the day you get them? Do you have days when you don’t have time to ring back the person who’s been looking for you to discuss an important matter? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then you yourself are part of the problem, because you’re no longer on your guard against ever-increasing bureaucracy.

Unless you're some kind of modern-day ornamental hermit, writing code is unlikely to be the end goal; more likely you're getting paid to produce something useful, something for which communicating and understanding the problem is often far more important than actual coding.

> If I raise the issue everyone gets all pouty.

This does not sound like a healthy working relationship, although I'm not sure the problem's on their end.

> There is an unspoken feeling of being forced to attend every meeting assigned to you just in case something feels useful.

Well, nut up and get over it. Either attend or don't, but don't half-ass it. The surest recipe for pointless meetings that go on for too long is meetings where half the participants are coding instead of paying attention.

Then it's time to move on. This is not a way mature adults should be handling such a situation.

A passive-aggressive reaction isn't mature either though, so maybe this is mutual and your company and you are actually perfectly in tune.

Agendas. They’re worth the 10 or 15 minutes you’ll spend writing it.

My biggest pet peeve is meetings that come out of Zoom chats “Let’s chat about that later in the week” and the subject of the meeting is “Continue Discussion from Zoom”. Awesome.

Only the minutes count as the results of the meeting. Works only in large, bureaucratic, political companies.

If you think you're not needed in a meeting, or the content isn't relevant, or someone else should be there instead, pretend you're an adult human and raise the issue. But if you're going to be in the meeting, pay attention. It's astounding to me that this could be a controversial statement.

Likewise if it's a problem my camera is off except in certain meetings (with clients or whatever) then bring it up to me. To this day that has yet to happen. Shockingly, work gets done, I listen to the important points of the meeting and talk when needed, and I don't have to let someone look at me while I'm not looking at them. It sounds like you have a problem communicating without a face to look at. If it helps, you can tape faces to the screen or request people put an avatar/photo of themselves up for you to talk at.

> > If I think you're wasting our time then you are, unless you convince me otherwise.

That's not a differing opinion, that's petulant and childish.

Your coworkers deserve the benefit of the doubt when they say you're needed for something.

And if you can't, find a job that treats you like an adult.

Lots of open source software have been developed in the last 40 years with what we call now "fully remote team" without any need for webcams. Why it's suddenly becomes mandatory for some people that develop software ?

"Sorry, boss, this latest laptop didn't work just like the last 10 you sent that I definitely didn't sell on ebay"

Selling or not returning company equipment is a crime and will land you in prison. If you don't have appropriate reach in a given jurisdiction to use the police force there you probably shouldn't be hiring there anyway.

San Francisco?

I can understand interviews, but once a person is part of the team and team members have met with him often enough (with the camera on) to recognize his voice, what is the point of having the camera on?

> I know some people don't like this, but it improves communication and team cohesion in a noticeable way.

This is one of those things for which there is no True Method. Yes, a lot of people have better team dynamics with the camera on. And yes, a lot of people have worse team dynamics with it on. Mandating one way or the other is suboptimal.

The only exception is one on one work meetings, like pairing, where both of you are going to be looking at code or something and the video serves no purpose.

Funny question, as it should be asked the other way round. People have been having remote audio only meetings for quite long - videoconferencing was very costly until recently.

In my company, it's a rare exception that people turn the camera on during meetings. When COVID hit and everyone switched to remote, I can't think of a single person in any of the meetings I've attended (including 1:1) who wanted the camera on - with the exception of introductions when people were new to the team.

It's not at all surprising as prior to COVID we had meetings with people located in other offices all the time (as well as some remote workers) - it was almost always audio only.

Human social interaction is deeply dependent on facial communication.

It's a broad statement, and not clear how applicable it is for work purposes and for which category of work.

Also, while it has its positives, it also as clearly has its negatives. Most miscommunication is due to misreading of visual cues. I can say it certainly is nice to be able to talk to people and not have them register any frown I may have, when the frown is unrelated to them. Not having to modulate my facial expressions frees up my brain to focus on the content of the meeting.

In my experience, people who seem to need facial communication do exist[1], but it's not a universal thing and likely not the majority. It's annoying when instead of phrasing it as an accommodation they would like to have, they try to make objective sounding statements to support their preference.

[1] I'm guessing that set has a strong intersection with the set of people who used to insist that they be able to travel pre-COVID to meet other team members as "in-person interactions are more effective". They certainly are - for them.

The other is just to make work more fun. Beyond 3-4 people, everyone stays muted, and with no cameras, a lot of the jokes and banter just stops. Dead air is a soul-draining response to jokes (whether good or not) that an individual can only try so many times. This works well during scrum meetings (when it's just the small team anyway).

I say this as very much an introvert: meetings are tiring for me anyway; I'd rather they're not also boring.

That policy has kind of stuck around with our team, and now people rarely turn on their cameras during team meetings. I would prefer to see peoples’ faces, but it seems I'm in the minority, and I’ve given up on trying to advocate for it.

I can also understand how Windows and Mac users might be hesitant to put their full trust in the technology, as it does occasionally glitch and blur out more or less than it should. Virtual Backgrounds also don't really help with poor lighting, or pandemic induced weight gain, etc.

So would say it's not that they didn't understand how virtual backgrounds work - just they were aware of their limitations and decided to err on the side of being lenient toward employees during a stressful period in a lot of peoples' lives.

In my current role all 1:1s, all meetings with clients, and all internal demos are cameras on by policy. I have friends that work places where the rule is camera on all the time unless it's a larger meeting or there's a presentation or something.

I've been a programmer for the last 30 years. I can solve any problem. I've created more than $1B value for companies I worked for in my career. That alone makes everything you said about cameras or strong vetting or online track records simply invalid.

Instead take the time to find out who you're talking to and if they make sense. If you can't, first hire someone who can. And if you're hiring so fast that you can't tell whether you hired the same person as who showed up, then you're hiring too fast. Stop trying to out-grow time.

I agree about the raising alarm bit, that stuff needs to happen very quickly.

That sounds suspicious. I don't know anyone who "can solve any problem". And in order to deliver larger value you need to work in a team. How can you be an effective team member with a fear of video calls?

LOL, maybe because video calls are not part of that?

> I don't know anyone who "can solve any problem"

that's what happens when you hire for "seniors" but pay junior salary: you get juniors occupying senior positions. Not surprised that's all you know - the industry does that a lot.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674503 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002690

So just an FYI. Maybe people are turning their cameras off for a reason.

Couldn’t they just say they use a VPN?

What performance management practices or metrics worked well for you?

I think his concern, along with several others, is that you are seeing a lot of things that aren't there. As I said in another thread, visual cues are a great source of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Being aware that people can't see you can certainly improve your verbal communication skills.

Our company has offices in several countries, and long before the pandemic it was a given (part of new employee training) to not rely on these cues.

If you're operating in the US, it is still multicultural. As a simple example, about 40% of the US is introverted, yet most strongly extroverted people have little understanding of the differences. And they very often misread the facial expressions of introverts.

> I’m not sure why you would pick the lowest common denominator and choose the lower bandwidth, less engaging, less human way of collaborating.

In all these threads, you've failed to understand the low signal to noise ratio that video brings. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but comes with a thousand more falsehoods than words do.

As an example, where I work, meetings are a heck of a lot better than when we used to have them in person at work. The few that insist otherwise are simply unwilling to accept that they have not adapted, and the problems lie with them, and not with the format.

She absolutely killed the Byteboard technical assessment, and seemed like a good cultural fit during my initial screen. I advised the technical interviewer that he didn't need to go too deep; I was satisfied with her answers on the technical assessment. Then something odd happened - she completely bombed the interview. The interviewer told me that she couldn't even answer the most basic questions e.g. "what tech stack does your employer use?" I was thoroughly confused about that, but still passed her on to the VPE to help us get to the bottom of the discrepancy. Our VPE confirmed the previous technical interviewer's assessment.

We came to the conclusion that she could not have completed the technical assessment on her own and obviously didn't move forward from there.

As far as using 3rd party solutions: I see your point, and actually used to administer homespun "code challenges". The downside with that approach is that it adds a ton of overhead. As terrible as it may seem, we may not be able to invest that kind of time unless we're willing to be more heavy-handed in candidate selection early on. In at least one case, there was a candidate who had a fairly unremarkable resume but really impressed us in the interview process, and they may have been eliminated earlier on if we were more selective from the beginning.

Personally, I completely refuse to do any form of live / timed coding test but might accept a homework assignment with a very generous deadline if I feel it's well aligned with something I'm willing to spend personal time on, assuming that they're not satisfied with what I already have up on GitHub (although I'd expect a good explanation for why that's the case). Otherwise, I'm more than happy to discuss past projects, system architecture, API design, development practices and so on.

In the same time I can watch your BS infomercial or read your CEO's book on how the company is a ship or whatever, I could sent off 5 different applications to companies that don't waste my time... guess which wins

This is just companies getting back the same treatment they've been subjecting their customers to for over a decade.

In business this is called "business process outsourcing", aka send off sensitive data & permissions to sweatshops in third-world countries.

While it's a shame that it happened to what I assume is a legitimate small/medium business that doesn't do the aforementioned practice, I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it.

The market has reacted, and as more and more things go remote it allows the "little guys" to take a stab at it with varying degrees of success.

(to be clear, I do not condone this behavior despite being approached several times to be a "front" for foreign developers - however, I totally understand the market dynamics that push them to do this)

> When companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good?

Subcontractors are engaged on different terms and with specific contracts that require subcontractors to also engage in specific contracts.

If an individual employee hands their logins to someone else and says "pretend its me" then it's clear fraud, not to mention a breach of the documents you agreed to when you signed.

> In business this is called "business process outsourcing",

No, it's not. Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary.

Hiring a programmer and giving them access to your company Slack and source code is entirely different.

So carefully limited that insiders from said sweatshops end up taking (laughably low) bribes to perform things like fraudulent SIM swaps, access customer accounts, etc?

In theory it must be all well and controlled and in a proper world nobody would be doing fraud, whether for themselves or a third-party. In reality there's very little oversight over it on the companies' side (and a slap on the wrist if by some miracle regulators actually get involved) so seeing them complain about being on the receiving end of this is some sweet schadenfreude.

When the business lobby (that represents, or at least purports to represent, businesses as a whole) has asked for, and got, the laws that make this profitable for them, the responsibility falls on all businesses to a certain extent.

Then there was the guy who said he had enough rep to take jobs, do basically nothing until they figured out he wasn't producing, at which point they'd fire him, but meanwhile he'd collected 6 months of salary. Again, he had a half dozen of these "jobs" in the pipeline.

In my own job, I've gotten roped into a years-long email chain where a legitimately hired programmer, working in our affiliated consultancy, in a foreign country, couldn't figure out how to install NodeJS to satisfy his ReactJS stack. LONG story, but who's at fault for hiring someone so clueless that they couldn't figure out one of the first steps of modern web development?

I helped interview a replacement for a position I was leaving, and sat across the table from a guy who said he'd programmed several .NET and Rails applications. He was hired. When it came time for me to do the "knowledge transfer," I watched him literally open a browser, and type "Ruby on Rails." He'd never even heard of it. Again, LONG story, but they threw away everything I had written, and he used Java. It was the only thing he knew. He'd made up projects on his resume, and lied to our faces.

All of these examples in this thread are just different data points along the sliding scale of trust. There are many different places to inject mistrust, and -- human nature being what it is -- someone will always find these holes, and try to take advantage of them.

Don't trust. Verify.

There's no reason to have a comparison with companies outsourcing. Companies outsource to lower cost with, ideally, a balance between decreased customer service and standards. The alternative is to raise prices on consumers. Profit motivation is real and not immoral -- companies which outsource and lower their standard of service should get beaten up by the market and competition. That being said, when a company has a monopoly or some other anti-competitive practices there is no way to balance this.

Fraud? Sure. But feeling bad for the person exploiting the value of one persons labor because they didn't get to exploit someone elses labor for more instead is fuckin nuts.

That seems like a sentiment better expressed in an instance where it actually happens then? I don't have much sympathy for burglars who fall through glass windows, but it doesn't have anything to do with OP's situation.

2) There are legal/tax ramifications to identity fraud.

3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing.

> 3) There is nothing inherently illegal or amoral about businesses outsourcing.

Is this asymmetry reasonable or fair? This kind of "identity fraud" seems to be much the same as business outsourcing (represent that the work is going to be done by one party, then it's actually done by another, cheaper and less skilled one); why should one be more illegal or immoral than the other?

If a business promises up and down that they don't outsource or subcontract and do, then of course it is amoral as well.

I rarely see the 2nd situation with businesses.

What the OP describes is basically a version of a "bait and switch" fraud, which is pretty widely illegal and not considered OK by anyone. Although you can find examples where people ride that line pretty closely[1], but even then people think it's bad behavior.

A subtly different thing that's maybe closer to what you're talking about is hiring contractors and then blaming them for problems. A current major example being many of the Amazon-branded delivery trucks that only deliver for Amazon, but when they do something wrong "oh they're a subcontractor, not Amazon's fault!"

So, not sure I agree 100%, but I understand the anger.

[1] For example, this guy that found name-brand USB-C hubs had the same "guts" as cut-rate crap. https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...

If you want a company to provide services without outsourcing to a third party, you can make it a requirement in the contract. But most likely you don't need this assurance, just that they maintain a certain level of quality. If a company misrepresents the quality of their goods/services it is essentially a breach of contract and it's not "fine". If they never made the promise in the first place and you're just bitter that some companies cut costs to achieve the bare minimum level of service, well that's capitalism for you. But irrelevant. Those companies could have hired dodgy people in-house and they'll still have shitty service.

Finding somebody to interview then having another person show up at work is straight out fraud. That's also not OK.

If this wasn't on this end of the labor pipeline, it would be spun as "Marketing" or similar.

I suggest calling the candidate in person for 1 day at a co-working location and meet them in person once you are ready to make an offer. Pay for their time since you have anyway decided to hire them. Yes, this adds cost to you but it will be a huge deterrence for fraud. If a candidate doesn't like it, they can move on.

Generally in my experiences as a candidate, _someone_ on the interview loop is with the team one would end up working with, and should catch this kind of thing. Generally as an interviewer, whether remote or onsite, it hasn't been part of the process to check the ID of the person I'm speaking to (and I'm not confident I could spot a fake anyway). Thinking back to a time where I did a day of interviews at a BigCorp and I don't know that any of my interviewers were on the specific team I'd work with ... I don't recall any rigorous attempt to establish my identity on the day.

Far easier to blend in as a remote employee.

Usually when this happens, the fake employee will come up with excuses to leave video off: They'll say their camera isn't working today or that their internet connection isn't good enough to turn the camera on right now. If they do turn it on, it will be massively backlit so you can't see their face.

Many companies don't even expect people to have video at all. The identity-swapping fraudsters are hoping that their companies fall into this category.

I'm not entirely sure there is a good fix for this, the problem would have always existed with in-person work as well - however the perceived risk/reward ratio would be different.

It’s plausibly a crime too (actual fraud), if pushed hard enough, though most courts will just laugh at companies and tell them they clearly didn’t do enough due diligence, so most people trying it will be worried about being arrested in person.

If doing fully remote, they could be dialing in from another country and immune from arrest. Makes it much easier to do.

There's a contradiction here, right?

If someone has never committed a crime before (which most likely, these patsies would be in that camp - it's too high risk and expensive for someone experienced to want to do themselves if they could send someone else), fear of prosecution is going to be high. After all, THEY know they're doing something wrong, even if no one else does.

Someone doing this is also very unlikely to have the direct experience managing a company, or dealing with these issues, to actually know the real risks of prosecution and likelihood of damaging consequences.

So since it's new, uncertain, potential consequences seem personally very damaging, and it's 'bad' == high fear.

They get a lot more dangerous once they've done it a few times, and the fear of the unknown wears off, and confidence starts to replace it. But since they're showing up in person, and would need (in this example) to physically be there for awhile, that's expensive, time consuming, and high risk.

Also, I fail to see how this can be prosecuted when there's no identity theft or forgery i.e. real crimes involved in this act. It can be all boiled down to being just another case of an under-qualified candidate holding a role without proper or adequate credentials due to flawed hiring procedures, or more frankly the incompetence of the decision makers inside the organization.

In this case, they were impersonating someone else. For them to get to the point of getting paid, they'd likely have to provide identity documents (including a SSN, some form of photo ID, etc.) if the company was doing their paperwork correctly. Even contractors have to cough up a SSN, and that is enough to trigger federal identity fraud charges.

If they provided real credentials and their real name, but had someone else sit in who pretended to be them to do the interviews, it gets trickier - it would still likely to be some variant of conspiracy to commit. Conspiracy at the federal level generally only requires a concrete action by a conspirator in furtherance of a crime, which with only a little squinting would likely apply here to anyone involved (including the fake interviewee).

I present to you 18 USC 1028, the federal identity fraud code. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028], which provides penalties up to 5 years for a first and non-violent/non-drug related offense, or 20 years (for a second offense or other nastier qualifications). A felony, either way. It includes transferring said documents electronically.

My 'favorite' section is 7, which explicitly states that SSN, DOB, etc. count, as well.

Conspiracy would likely be under 18 USC 1346 & 1349 [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1346] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1349], which makes it a crime to 'deprive another of the intangible right of honest services', or conspire with another to do so.

Either way, as I said elsewhere, I doubt anyone would be particularly interested in such prosecution unless it was very high profile for some reason. It's hard to get anyone sympathetic about a large company getting scammed by someone this way. Most companies also don't like having a reputation or PR as being scammable.

So companies should be very interested in covering their asses here. That said, it IS also a federal (and likely state) level felony, so folks SHOULD also rightly be scared to attempt it.

If the right parties were motivated, it could easily result in many years in federal prison. And it's hard to say when someone will want to make an example out of something like this.

I forgot the link to USC 1341 (Frauds and Swindles), which is just a great read on it's own.

Regarding their request for an example -

Here is an example of a successful prosecution of someone for fraud (and tax evasion) for material lies about qualifications and job histories.

[https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2020/02/former-health-c...]

20 years for mail fraud, 5 years for tax evasion.

She was clearly going above and beyond on this front.

I doubt that it really happened since as you may have hinted, no prosecutors are interested in pursuing these cases for lack of sympathy as you put it, which I can't verify, or failure of winning the case which I suspect to be the chief motive here since misrepresenting facts or exaggerating events on your resume is not a crime.

And you're wrong - lying about MATERIAL facts, events, or qualifications to get a job is a crime.

Lying that you had a dog when you were a kid (when it's not relevant), for instance? No problem. That's not likely to be a material fact.

If you're interviewing to be a host of a kids show about dogs?

A problem.

Just not one most people are willing to make a case over. There also is the court precedent about 'mere fluffery' or 'puffery' not adding up to a lie, which would need to get worked out somehow. See [https://contractslawinaction.law.miami.edu/?page_id=171]

There is a line, for instance, between exaggeration and lying, that not everyone would agree where it sits.

This also substantially increases the reward. Traveling to SF for a 2 month con as a mid-level software engineer isn't a good deal. Working remote from a low cost location for a 2 month con might be a fantastic deal.

Bonus - chances are, little to no taxes compared to the other option too, depending on how they structured the scam. The cut-out/middle man would get left holding the bag, but what else is new.

Other Bonus - they wouldn't be using their real name, so chances are, no longer term impacts to the patsy either, unless they happen to end up trying to work legitimately with someone involved at the target company years later. Pretty unlikely to bother folks involved in this type of scam, IMO.

a person who wants to work remotely but doesn't figure out how to have a good internet connection, then they are not a good fit for remote work. If a person decides to travel to a location where internet connection is not good on the day of the interview, you can imagine what he/she will do when it's a regular work day.

Somebody shows up for a remote job and doesn't have a good internet connection is too big of a hiring risk to even both continuing the interview.

Trying to characterize having the camera off as being a nefarious tactic because you can't see them working is beyond asinine. There are many good reasons to have the camera off while working.

One being you are there to do work, you are being paid to do the work. One thing video has never gotten right inherently is the whole eye contact part of a video chat.

When you don't look directly at someone (the angle is wrong) while you are communicating its a non-verbal sign of disrespect or in-congruence, and it causes non-verbal communication issues regardless of intent.

The camera has never adjusted your eye angle, so you will always have that issue of people distrusting those communicating over video to a lesser or greater degree. With a flat picture and a phone call, you don't have that. You focus on the work and get things done.

If the candidate misrepresented their expertise, fire them.

If they aren't doing the work, fire them.

If they plain just aren't working out for other reasons, fire them! (after due dilligence).

I don't see why you have to bemoan your lack of due dilligence and instead blame it on something ludicrous like anyone with the camera off is doing this (when they aren't).

Lets call this plug what it is, you want to surveil your employees like a micro manager instead of actually doing due diligence (i.e. the job of hiring).

Seriously how hard is it to just fire someone that's a new-hire?

Its a new position, if it doesn't work out, hire someone else, and terminate the temporary contract with the appropriate legal clause and time periods.

Most work is an 'at will' position, so as an employer, if they lied, use that and 'fire at will'.

Excessively surveilling your employees while they do work only does one thing, and that's drop productivity through the floor. Not only that, it shows serious deficits in Upper Management, and any skilled/experienced candidates will walk away from positions with redflags like that.

You either want work to get done, or you just want to pretend that while doing something else.

What's your actual priority, making money and doing the job (due dilligence is part of that), or watching your employees work in minutia and spinning a narrative. You can't have both.

Secondarily there’s the “can they actually do the job” problem that has always existed. The new issue here is that we will now waste time on too many new hires who can’t make the grade, because we’re assuming that our hiring process was really good at weeding out the poor fits, and these “games” exploit the weaknesses. Rather than get into an arms race with fraudsters, perhaps hire two or three people for every opening on a short term and then only keep the ones who deliver.

I think this is a new risk when it comes to hiring engineers. This kind of fraud has been present outside of Engineering orgs for a long time.

I used to be a hiring manager in a well known company that was 100% onsite. This was on the business side, not IT/Engineering. We were looking for a BI person as a contract hire. Our HR org said they had a staffing agency they had worked with for years. The staffing agency sent us a bunch of resumes that were surprisingly similar, filled with every buzzword and feature (e.g. I made a bar chart) and obviously weren't written by the candidates. After throwing those out, there were a few that looked decent. We had some phone screens and then a single onsite interview, but concluded there was something fishy going on.

I confronted rep from the staffing agency with with this and their response was that typically somebody in a managerial position (at our company) picked a few resumes, had a phone call (not video, just phone) with them, then hired somebody based on the phone call. My team was the first one that had actually done more than that.

Who showed up on the first day, who actually did the work, I don't think anybody had any clue.

The non-technical managers didn't have the skillset to properly evaluate these candidates. So they saw the keywords and picked the person that sounded the best.

Engineers hopefully have the skillset to evaluate and interview other Engineers, so the fraud is different and more sophisticated now.

IMHO, if you're the type of manager who hires somebody like this and what you wanted done gets done, you've probably got bigger problems than a staffing agency scamming you. If you think it's rocket science to build a couple of charts in a BI tool and you're happy when the person you hired takes 6 months to build a couple of dashboards at $100/hr...good luck to you.

As an interviewee I'd take this as a very good sign that the company is serious about offering me a long term position. If I'm living on the west coast and my employer is on the east coast and my contract says 100% remote I'd seriously doubt the company is trying to fool me by wanting to meet me for one day, on their own dime, without further interviews.

There's a difference between trusting remote employees and aspiring employees.

I wouldn't hold it against the company if they want to do proper due diligence on a prospective employee especially given real-world accounts of such frauds occurring.

Why should an aspiring employee trust that a company is going to allow 100% remote if the first thing the company expects you to do is to travel into the office?

1. completely or entirely

It absolutely does mean zero travel.

Are they? I've been recently contacted for remote positions that turned out to be not remote twice.

So what? Those are irrational beliefs. Why should we care that someone never trusts remote workers?

You can never be 100% secure against fraud just like you can never be 100% secure against hacking.

We should certainly try to reduce the incidence of fraud, but only if you don't sacrifice the ability to hire who and when you need to.

Which WILL result in folks not being able to get hired that otherwise would be. It also will result in positions not being filled that are important at companies we likely depend on, resulting in lower quality of service and/or failures of those services.

It’s poisoning the remote employment well, essentially.

I've done it many times, pre-COVID. I live in a small town (<25k) in the South and have been working remotely for ~10 years. In that time I've gone through four rounds of interviews. The first three were pre-COVID, and they all included at least a "half day" of on-site interviews, most of which were in LA or SF. The most recent round was about eighteen months ago and didn't include any travel.

> Maybe the reason the candidate is looking for a remote job, is they don't have to travel?

This is not my experience. In my personal network of remote workers we're pretty uniformly working remotely because we don't want to move to where the companies are, not because we are entirely opposed to traveling. Each person has their own expectations of course, but I see traveling for less than a week per quarter as entirely acceptable.

But we're not pre-covid. Before covid I worked remote because it allowed me access to a larger job market without having to relocate, but I didn't mind occasional travel. Now that we're dealing with covid, there's no way you'd get me on a plane or in an office for a job interview. My health is worth far more than any particular job.

Still, that wouldn't solve for the "My laptop doesn't have a camera" problem for the early phases of the interview. You would need to save face / voice samples to cross-reference at various stages of the pipeline to watch for the changeling.

They work fine with people, can parse small talk and bring a positive attitude, etc. But they were out like a shot when the workday was over, and they would never dream of attending a company-sponsored teambuilding event. If they were hired for a 100% remote job, they would expect to never see a coworker in person, and consider it a perk.

Some people just don't want to mix their personal and professional lives. What's wrong with that?

I wouldn’t assume remote meant absolutely zero travel unless that was spelled out.

Remote means you don't need me physically present at a particular place (outside of knowing my location for tax purposes). It's pretty clear in the word "remote". If that's not always 100% the case, I would expect those expectations to me made clear during the hiring process, not after I've already come aboard.

Do you really think it would be unreasonable for someone to balk if you hired them for a remote role but then asked them to fly somewhere quarterly after they were onboarded?

Obviously people should take positions that align with their preferences however. Just be sure to specify upfront and be prepared to move if circumstances change.

I never attended any meet ups. I felt guilty about it but like you're saying here, I signed up to work remotely, not in an office ever.

Someone who won't help you avoid fraud might as well be pushing you into it.

But I like exploring new places. I’m not sure how popular all expenses paid weekend vacations are.

The only thing business travelers have in common is that they all think everyone views business travel just like they do.

Even with disabilities, inability to meet the job description is a legally valid reason to discriminate.