
Noticing You're Confused - Nyubis
https://arr.am/2020/01/23/noticingconfusion/
======
ChuckMcM
That is a uniquely scary story. I have only had the displeasure of hiring one
person who effectively lied their way into the position. It was really obvious
after they started that they had grossly overstated their skills and
experience. My point of 'confusion' was that their reference checks were
people who had worked with them, liked them but not for very long because they
were leaving when that person joined, Etc. I had asked about many short
tenures in their resume but as an individual contributor they passed it off as
"finding a challenge they could bite their teeth into" and basically working
their way up the pay ladder.

At Google people got "starter projects" I liked this idea to get an idea of
what they could do, and its an opportunity to understand what they are good
at. I gave the person an assignment that, given their experience, should have
been well within their capabilities. They kept not delivering and kept up a
steady patter of "knocking down the barriers" communications which, valid or
not, got me wondering what was going on with this person. At the one month
point I gave them a pretty clear deliverable and worked with them for a
timeline for when it would be done. They were "almost" done at the agreed upon
time two weeks later, so I asked them to present it one week from that date to
the group. The presentation was an epic disaster in terms of not coming close
to meeting the deliverable, not showing any development in understanding the
problem, and generally being something a new hire could have come up with in
less time.

At our 1:1 that week we talked about the deliverable, my expectations given
the experience they claimed to have, and what we got. I got a lot of "I just
need x, y, and z and then it will be done." kind of discussion. Delving into
those needs became "waiting on p, q, and r to deliver this part." kinds of
discussions.

At the end of our 1:1 that week I asked them if they were satisfied with their
performance. They felt it was ok and would get better with time. I told them I
didn't feel we could afford that time and that Friday would be their last day.
I was bummed that we wasted nearly 2 months on this person. I don't think
anyone in the organization was surprised to see them go.

~~~
Ididntdothis
We once hired a contractor through a phone interview which went pretty well.
Then he started working and I noticed that all his work always was done the
next morning. It was almost impossible to have a conversation with him about
coding. He seemed to have no clue about the most basic things but when you
described what you wanted it was done the next day. We started to suspect that
the interview was done with another person and that his work was also done by
something else. To verify I had him sit next to me and make a simple change.
He sat there and clicked around the whole day but got nothing done. But,
surprise, it was done the next day. Unfortunately his ghost writer wasn’t that
great either or maybe we would have kept him ;)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ha, reminds me of the guy who outsourced his own job :
[https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2013/01/16/169528579...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2013/01/16/169528579/outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web)

------
rjkennedy98
I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing
engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive
they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing
them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the
interview and ask to reschedule.

When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed
by people who did phone interviews well, and in the on site interviews were
completely incapable of answering the same questions at all. They we sure they
had been catfished by multiple recruits.

~~~
binarytox1n
This has happened to us many times and we now do the same for remote
interviews. No video? No interview. And even then, if you do great in the
video we fly you in for an in person interview just to be sure. There's
clearly a market for stand-in phone interviewers. I can't imagine that jobs
acquired this way ever last, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

~~~
vsareto
>I can't imagine that jobs acquired this way ever last, but that doesn't stop
people from trying.

Probably because there's a real slice of the job market that gets paid six
figures to do nothing much more than browse the internet all day.

2 of the 5 tech jobs I've had have had this. I kid you not, I spent 6 months
opening my PC, watching email, and doing whatever I wanted from home. My
current job is like this as well but I actually get to help others, so it's
not as bad. Believe me, I don't want it -- it gets very boring, very quickly,
but legal agreements mean you can't really work on anything else.

And it's not hard to imagine someone trying to cover up a blunder of making a
bad hire by giving them no work or busy work because the company is just awash
in so much cash that it doesn't actually affect much to just let them leech
compared to the reputation damage of admitting that mistake.

Every time someone cannot believe this is possible, I have no empathy for
them. It has happened over and over and over and over again. If you don't
believe this happens, you are being willfully ignorant! Don't be ignorant!

Sadly there just isn't a good solution for it. A more complex interview
doesn't fix it.

------
dpiers
The interesting thing about white collar fraud is that it rarely goes
reported, and there are little repercussions unless it does. Companies care
less about protecting other companies from harm than the risk of exposing
themselves to claims of libel or slander by the accused. It's also not great
press if people find out you hired a con-artist or allowed someone to steal
from you because of your poor internal controls. A study in Norway found that
96% of cases of corporate fraud were not reported to authorities.[1] The
financial and reputational costs of a company pursuing prosecution outweigh
the benefits, and it's usually better to keep things quiet: terminate the
individual and recoup whatever losses you are able to without involving the
legal system.

Even in this scenario of blatant fraud, Arram stopped short of explicitly
naming the individual. ZeroCater was saved a huge hiring mistake, but 'Sam'
probably went on to another company that is clueless to his scam.

This is why I always ask why someone is looking for a new opportunity/why they
left their previous position. If the answer doesn't add up, I press for more
info. Maybe they're just embarrassed because they were fired? People get fired
all the time for reasons that don't necessarily preclude them from being
valuable to me. But if they still can't come up with an answer that makes
sense, I start "noticing I'm confused".

[1]:
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2016.11...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2016.1196993?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=udbh20)

------
sumanthvepa
Clearly there was fraud here. But I'm curious about the the interview process.

If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management
interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if
they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero
decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just
check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process.

~~~
nordsieck
> If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and
> management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you
> figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview
> process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then?
> They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview
> process.

There are many things people evaluate during the interview process. One of
them is technical competence. Another is integrity.

From the story, it doesn't appear OP's interview process is broken.

~~~
jiofih
How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director
even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?

~~~
nordsieck
> How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a
> Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?

There are diminishing marginal returns on better screening. Most people are
pretty honest, and of those people who aren't honest, most of those people
will mess up their deception; this means that a pretty basic level of
screening brings a lot of value while only letting through a few bad apples.

One could intensify the screening to avoid more bad apples, but that costs
money and increases the false positive rate. At some point, it's better to
just hire people and fire them when it doesn't work out.

------
NhanH
Imagine if you read the autobiography of a big name and they told a story
about how they hack the interviewing process of X company, getting they first
big break which resulted in all the big successes afterward. How much
admiration would he get for that, a #1 HN story even.

I do get confused reading this story, at least I wish it continue on for a bit
afterward (how was his reaction, other people's reaction. Did you end up
hiring someone?)

~~~
lilyball
I'm pretty sure "blatantly lying about your past experience and getting your
wife to cover for you" isn't "hacking the interviewing process".

~~~
r1chard5mith
Why though? I can just imagine someone at the time saying something similar of
Steve Wozniak and the other 'phreakers' who were stealing phone calls. If it
had worked, and was retold as an old-timer story by a rich and successful man,
it would be high-fives all round.

~~~
lilyball
Stealing phone calls is fighting back against large faceless corporations.
Lying your way into a job at a startup is very much not.

------
rainyMammoth
> the demand for qualified engineering managers being far, far, greater than
> the supply.

That's not really what it is. Let's rephrase it as "the demand for engineering
managers that pass your completely subjective interview process which is
completely unrelated to the job".

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
No, I think the original statement is fair. Good engineering managers, like
good staff-level engineers, will generally receive multiple solicitations a
week to please come work for some company or another. Notice how the author
considered it "entirely believable" that the candidate would have disabled his
Linkedin profile due to recruiter spam; people at the level he was claiming
really can get recruited so much that they need specific strategies to deal
with it.

------
juanbyrge
What if you missed out on hiring the Steve Jobs of the catering industry?

    
    
      Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. 
      He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was
      in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early.
      But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology,
      and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard.
    
      "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't
      have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him."

~~~
sdan
There's a difference between lying about one position and making entire
linkedin profiles that you set up.

One's mischievous and one's deception.

~~~
jaspax
No, they're both deception, and they're both strong negative signals.

Think of it this way. Out of the 1000 people who will outright lie about
having worked some place, 999 of them are sociopaths or grifters who will do
serious harm to your company if you hire them. The last one is Steve Jobs. We
only hear about the last one, usually, but if you're hiring someone and you
_know_ that they've lied about their experience, don't take that chance.

~~~
GFischer
And Jobs WAS a sociopath. He was also a ruthless genius.

------
rainyMammoth
And yet the sad conclusion is that even though that hire lied on his resume he
might very well be an excellent match for that job given he passed the
interviews and everyone seemed to love him.

If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many
artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the
job if he was going to be good at it anyways?

I'm getting mad at all of those artificial gatekeepers that like to also play
victim because "there are not enough talents out there".

Yes that guy lied on his resume and therefore should not be hired (and he
should be shamed). But this CEO should also realize that his artificial gate-
keeping is the reason why people feel the need to lie.

~~~
Austhou
Because it's a VP position and not an entry level job?

~~~
rainyMammoth
It is a VP position for a small, medium startup. The equivalent of a middle
manager anywhere else.

------
kstenerud
Hang on... I'm confused here:

> Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities
> complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten
> people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the
> phone.

> I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a
> LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because
> he got too much recruiter spam, which was entirely believable. He said he’d
> turn it back on and send me the link, but hadn’t followed up. It wasn’t
> much, but it was certainly a bit odd given how reliable he seemed in
> general.

Why would someone who'd spent months, perhaps even years cultivating a network
of fake LinkedIn profiles and confederates, not have a linkedin profile
himself when not having one would immediately arouse suspicion? It's not like
it's at all difficult to doctor your work links. Even his wife supposedly had
a profile, faking as a VP at the company in question.

Something doesn't add up here.

~~~
arram
Author here. Your guess is as good as mine, but probably for the reasons other
people have mentioned here. It would be making the lie in public, attached to
his own name. The fake profiles aren't attached to anyone real.

~~~
gield
What is up with you taking one of the most reproduced images in history [1],
but not even linking or showing it?

[1] [https://arr.am](https://arr.am)

>I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.

~~~
arram
Not really on topic, but it's a meme on Justin.tv where I used to work:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jocqSL3m-3U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jocqSL3m-3U)

~~~
GauntletWizard
TL;DW: Kappa

------
rusticpenn
The idea I get from this is that, the quality of a management candidate cannot
be detected from interviews?

~~~
neilk
This is the correct answer

------
Yessing
if the best candidate you interviewed is a fraud:

\- either the candidate was competent:

then why did he need to lie to get the job? maybe you're over-filtering based
on resume and years of experience. The variable your looking for is
competence. Years of experience, is just a proxy. if the proxy is drying up
your supply, maybe it's not an effective one.

moreover, people are not born managers. why not give new talent a chance.

\- the candidate was not competent:

The interview process is therefore broken and is not measuring competence.
Maybe you're overvaluing confidence or the speed of answering. Maybe the
questions are not Technical enough? I don't know. But notice that valuing
anything that is irrelevant would lead to a lower expected value of
candidate's competence.

Using ineffective tools while searching for something rare is unsurprisingly
hard.

As a side comment, I'm kinda taken aback by the fact that interview results
like "culture fit" are shared this way. I would've expected a higher standard
of privacy. Is this commonly accepted?

Another point, I've noticed that the hiring process involved a lot of "friend
/ wife of a friend". Wouldn't this if left unchecked cause some ethnic/age-
based bias ( not necessarily in a legal sense)?

~~~
palebluedot
I think that "competent/not-competent" is a false dichotomy. The candidate
could be exceptionally qualified technically and competent, but have
significant ethical / integrity issues that are difficult to notice in an
interview, for instance. So a technical interview may not catch that, but past
references may.

------
sfink
Reminds me of my similar experience, which I wrote up at
[https://www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-had-a-bad-gut-feeling-
ab...](https://www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-had-a-bad-gut-feeling-about-
someone-and-it-was-right/answer/Steve-Fink)

------
mikedilger
I had an interviewee who was answering questions quite well but kind of
shrugging me off when I dug deeper. Then I asked a question I hadn't asked
before and he actually complained that the question wasn't fair because he
didn't get a chance to study for that question. I recommended against. The
hiring manager, to my suprise, let him go "study" and come back for more
questions. The whole team being on to this, we asked very different questions
the second time around and he failed miserably. We all recommended against.
Again to my suprise, the hiring manager decided he liked him and hired him.
After a re-org and under a new manager, it took about six months IIRC to
legally get rid of the guy. Nice guy - wrong fit.

------
awesome_dude
So, I have been giving this a bit of thought, when I interview badly (and I
have a zillion times), it's mostly because I'm not used to vocalising my
thoughts whilst I work.

That is interviewer: Tell me what your next step is in solving this problem
me: <radio silence>

The problem is two things, I, as an engineer, barely ever talk to people as I
am solving whatever it is I am doing, so the interview is a completely
artificial environment that I am not equipped for (although, as I interview
more I get back into the groove and by the third or fourth interview I am able
to anticipate the questions and produce a mechanical answer that satisfies the
interviewer)

The second part of the problem is obvious, the interviewer has no clue why I
cannot answer the question, so can only assume it's a lack of skills on my
part.

Interviews are an artificial environment, there's no way an interviewer can
actually tell from the interview whether the person in front of them is a good
engineer or not.

When I have got a few interviews under my belt, I am fluent, and able to
demonstrate my theory knowledge clearly. Have my skills changed? Not really,
my interview skills for sure, but my engineering skills?

Interviewers often try to counter this by searching for some obscure factoid
within the technology and wondering why people being interviewed don't know it
(curiously there's the other problem here where interviewers themselves have
an erroneous understanding of the technology and this leads to false
negatives).

------
dnh44
I felt the same sense of mild confusion as I read this, until I got to the end
when I realised that I’ve read various versions of this same urban legend two
or three times over the previous 20 years.

------
Tenoke
You say he passed all your questions with flying colours, everyone liked him,
etc.

If he hadn't lied about his specific experience would you have hired him?

------
stevage
I feel like the valuable lesson here is: references provided by candidates
aren't worth very much.

------
austincheney
> It was at this point that I actually said out loud to myself “I notice I’m
> confused.”

Strange how never this occurs when executing or designing web technologies,
particularly the DOM. Instead people jump immediately to the largest
prepackaged solutions currently available without question, everything plus
the kitchen sink, as normal as breathing. _Invented here_ syndrome is the
default without even the most subtle hint of consideration.

This is perhaps most clearly realized in that most developers have some
irrational horrid fear of the DOM when they encounter it and yet
simultaneously find the DOM to be some sort of savior to allowing Web Assembly
to replace JavaScript. Never is the confusion or irrationality questioned in
favor of something comforting.

I also find it strange how eagerly people are willing to impose bias in hiring
and candidate selection to ensure the most important selection criteria is
conformance opposed to performance. It really is as though the thought _I
notice I’m confused_ is something fearful to be protected from instead of
confronted when developers are tasked with hiring.

------
NiceWayToDoIT
Yes I have that sense of "Confusion' just now about this article. So let me
understand, "Sam" was best technical candidate ever, knowing all the answers
and everything but somehow he lied about who he was?!

Over time people build distrust toward recruiters, why: \- they use cold
calling, \- as soon as you resign they call to find who are your references,
not to offer you a job, but to find who is lead contact in previous company
they can call and so they could someone just to get that 20+% fee... \- in
order for these to succeed they need to use social engineering techniques
(they pretend they are friendly) \- they post fake job ads to collect CV ...
\- have I mentioned huge fees for literally doing nothing .... and on and on
and on ....

Who ever was wrote this article he should just zip it ....

~~~
NiceWayToDoIT
Honestly I think this article should be reported and banned from hacker news
it is probably self-promotion for the purpose of gaining more attention and
potential leads and candidates with pretense "we are honest recruiter company"

------
juanbyrge
"Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small
amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated
major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to
have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at
Hewlett-Packard.

"I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills
at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him.""

------
nodesocket
Something about this story doesn’t add up to me. Maybe I am being cynical but
it seems like this was fabricated for the exposure.

~~~
hliyan
I sensed this too. So I looked at the author's profile. Now I'm even more
confused:

From [https://arr.am](https://arr.am):

Stuff That’s Happened to Me

I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.

I once came up with an idea with a friend that accidentally became a national
TV ad featuring Nicki Minaj, Serena Williams, Usher, Kylie and Kendall Jenner.

I once crashed a fashion show, pretended to be a model, and walked on-stage as
dozens of photographers snapped pictures of me.

I was paid in whiskey for a live harmonica performance at a jazz bar in Tokyo.
I don’t play harmonica particularly well.

I DJ’d for Chamillionaire. I don’t know how to DJ.

I was yelled at for five minutes by the founder of Skye Vodka for taking his
favorite table at a restaurant.

I’ve discovered and excavated dinosaur bones in the Montana badlands.

~~~
rusticpenn
Sam should have written "I pretended leading a team of 70 instead of 3 to get
an interview"

------
drewcoo
So "the rationalist community" relies on gut feelings? Now I'm confused and
it's only the first non-italic paragraph.

~~~
pure-awesome
Yes. Taking into account gut feelings has been a part of the rationalist
community's strategy for as long as I can recall.

The rationalist community's "Rationality" is not about using cold calculation
for everything. It's about not letting your human biases and motivated
reasoning get in the way of finding the truth and being effective. (Whether or
not the movement is successful is a bit of a debate, of course, but the core
philosophy is sound).

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hfbWhRrY2Pwwrgi/summary-
of...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hfbWhRrY2Pwwrgi/summary-of-the-straw-
vulcan)

> System 1—the intuitive system—is the older of the two and allows us to make
> quick, automatic judgments using shortcuts (i.e. heuristics) that are
> usually good most of the time, all while requiring very little of your time
> and attention.

> System 2—the deliberative system—is the newer of the two and allows us to do
> things like abstract hypothetical thinking and make models that explain
> unexpected events. System 2 tends to do better when you have more resources
> and more time and worse when there are many factors to consider and you have
> limited time.

...

> The main thing to take away from this System 1 and 2 split is that both
> systems have strengths and weaknesses, and rationality is about finding the
> best path—using both systems at the right times—to epistemic and
> instrumental rationality.

> Being “too rational” usually means you are using your System 2 brain
> intentionally but poorly. For example, teenagers were criticized in an
> article for being “too rational” because they could reason themselves into
> things like drugs and speeding. But this isn’t a problem with being too
> rational; it’s a problem with being very bad at System 2 reasoning!

