Earlier this year, I interviewed this guy who gave me really strange vibes. He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. I google'd some specific, peculiar phrases I remembered him saying after the interview and found that the phrases came straight out of places like the Kubernetes documentation, word for word. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me.
His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."
Wait... Intellectsoft isn't the name of this company. Did these "Data Service Group" people steal Intellectsoft's website?
Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence:
> His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."
> Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence
It looks like that text is part of the default template for a commercial WordPress theme named Engitech[1]. If you check the live preview and browse to the "Main Home" template, you'll find it there.
I wonder how many of these "companies" paid the $59 licensing fee? :^)
I noticed something similar when I looked into a "website optimization agency" offering their services to one of my customers. Their website was a nearly 1-to-1 clone of the content of another website whose company name they accidentally left in the footer. That company's website however in turn used a slightly different design and after digging a bit I found that it was a vanilla copy of a themeforest template down to the stockphotes and everything. So it was a copy of a copy of a template.
Their tactic seemingly consisted of running the website through a free tool like Lighthouse, picking one or two low hanging fruits and then presenting them as world-ending problems they can fix for cheap. I'm sure the follow-through would have left the site in a worse state and suspect they may actually have a backchannel income via SEO backlinks or malware as the price they would initially quote seemed low even for a country like Pakistan.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are actually layers of these Potemkin company websites used for various purposes.
My employer hired a guy from this company! I wasn't involved in the interview process but was tasked with mentoring him. His resume was covered with DevOps buzzwords and he obviously said the right things in the interview, but the guy could barely move a mouse around the screen...
He took extremely long to do anything and then when he presented the work, it was very wrong and obviously copied from a bunch of stack overflow answers.
To this day I'm astounded my employer hired him and even more so that it took 2 months to fire him. Just think, he was on a senior salary for a couple of months for doing nothing... not a bad scam if you can do that a few times a year.
That illustrates perfectly my question regarding people like this: What do these people think is going to happen if they're hired?
In your case, sure he had a salary for two months, but that can not be the plan? Do people just expect that if they are hired, they'll sort of figure it out along the way? If that's the case, then maybe go for a more junior position and hope there is good on the job training.
Years ago, I worked as a test engineer. One issue that repeatedly turned up when trying to get information about one of the tools we used, was that forums, mailing-lists, you name it, would get swamped by Indians who just wanted the answers to some standard hiring quiz. They just wanted to memorize the 150 or so answers, so they could get a job. Knowing those answers wouldn't help me in my day to day work, or at least very little, so what did they expect would happen if they got hired? Sure you can scam your way though a job interview... Then what? Your new colleagues is going to notice your shortcomings rather quickly.
If you can scam your way into a few jobs at a time, and keep a revolving door of jobs, you might be able to hold upwards of 10 jobs simultaneously and collect paychecks from each of them until they fire you.
This sort of experience frustrates me to hear. I'm out here trying my damnedest to be knowledgeable, well-spoken and engaging during interviews, and failing to get an offer. Someone with a buzzwordy resume and Google for interview answers gets hired instead...
> This sort of experience frustrates me to hear. I'm out here trying my damnedest to be knowledgeable, well-spoken and engaging during interviews, and failing to get an offer. Someone with a buzzwordy resume and Google for interview answers gets hired instead...
Blame the automated candidate selection process that these very tech companies helped create and standardize in order to be 'ultra efficient in on-boarding qualified' candidates; this is the problem with just slapping AI to something as a branding exercise without considering the underlying mechanics and unintended consequences.
I guess be glad you got to even speak with a Human at this point because so many are just getting binned for not having the right buzzwords in their resume to pass the first screening.
He would stall for a good 15-20 seconds after each question I asked... and then spit out a perfectly worded answer. He was googling my questions and then reading the documentation aloud to me.
If he's just Googling everything then he sounds like a senior developer to me!
I'm half-joking. Obviously you want people who understand the problem you're asking, and who have a good knowledge of the domain, and who can answer based on their experience and knowledge, but if a few lines from the documentation answer your interview question then it's a bad interview question.
What if the candidate had an exceptional memory and had simply memorized the docs? Would that have been acceptable? Of course not. Your job as an interviewer is to ask questions that looking something up in the docs won't answer. After all, when you're in the job, Googling something is a perfectly acceptable strategy.
Even so, I'd expect an candidate to say something like "this is something I know <some details> but I'd have to look at the docs for in depth information about the detail you're asking". That would convince me that he knows what he's talking about. Googling for every question and then reading back verbatim what's in the docs sounds shady to me.
This whole problem seems like it would go away with more sophisticated interview questions. Interviews should be precisely about stuff that you can't just google. Googling information is pretty much a required basic competency nowadays, right next to reading and writing.
One would hope so, but as someone who has a support aspect to their role I can guarantee you that this competency is lacking in an astonishing proportion of people. From the lowliest admin to the most senior dev with a PhD in computer science there are people who are entirely incapable of googling for information (or reading the effing manual). Don't even get me started on C suites
From my own perspective (on the other side of support) I can add that often I delegate things merely because I don't have time, not because I can't resolve issues myself. For example, I could always go ahead and spend hours reading a tool's documentation to fix a particular issue that would seem obvious to someone more versed in it, but why not just give it to the guy who can do it in one minute because that's his main job? I don't mean to say that there aren't incompetent people out there, but to me tech support is more of an accelerator for my own work, not some magic holy grail that enables it.
I have no issue with that type of support request, that's the job of support. It is when the question is something that can be answered by typing the question into Google, clicking on the first link, and following the steps. We're talking about things like amending a time sheet in a particular system, changing a customer or supplier address, resetting their password etc. Non technical questions. I genuinely don't understand why people find this so hard to do as a first step. It would actually save them time. It's like some people have absolutely no problem solving abilities, which is worrying when a lot of them are devs!
Even with those things there's a lot of leeway when it comes to shitty design. Yes, changing a password or address should be trivial by all means, but I've seen tons of apps that needlessly complicate even basic stuff. After getting enraged for wasting time on this a few times, I too would delegate it to support without even bothering to try sooner or later, just because I won't even risk a potential rabbit hole / time sink.
Being able to look up stuff is important but there is also a baseline of knowledge that is really important. If I'm working with somebody in a meeting and they need to stop every 30 seconds to look up a term or concept then we aren't going to be able to collaborate effectively.
I'd reach out to Crowdstrike with the domains names (https://dataservicegroup[.]com). This follows the MO of APTs out of North Korea: https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/ If you share the list of similar phrases and the domain names that pop up when you search for those phrases the Crowstrike researchers can (a) probably help confirm which group(s) you're dealing with or at least (b) write up an analysis piece on yet another APT trying to gain a foothold in sensitive systems via the ol' fake candidate mechanism.
Although I think I get the intended humour, the daily job certainly shouldn't be to Google answer to questions.
Google to get to documentation... Sure. Reading documentation.. Sure. Ability to understanding it and how it is used, that's what would be missing, and what is suggested the interview question failed to pick up on.
That's an illusion. Almost all of a coder's daily work is stuff that has been done already about a hundred thousand times. Every time I'm coding on easy mode (eg some sort of personal project where I have all the leeway) I can get through all of it just by googling $language how to $x ... been doing exactly this workflow recreationally during times when I don't feel like exerting myself for years now. It's neither slower nor does it provide worse results than in situations where I'm dealing with technologies I know inside out. With the tougher stuff, you should be consulting your colleagues anyways. If no one knows - then you research together... on google.
> interview fail: googled answers to questions
> daily job: google answers to questions.
But you have to cram to make it seem otherwise... seriously one of the most interesting things I have ever seen was a HR person say that they had a stack of CVs but self-selected for those who were able to use 'know how to google when stuck' remarks on their applications.
I think we should just be honest and come clean and state that it is impossible to gatekeep like this while at the same time then expect people to be 'efficient and self-starters' and know how to use stack overflow at the same time. We have built these immense, entirely contradictory, ways of virtue signalling in this Industry that this is the outcome you get and can come to expect from optimizing for this vetting process--in-person interviews only partially elongated the farce of it being a good way to parse through applicants.
Because the truth is you know they are doing this for 2-5 other potential employers and have to do the same there and this is the most 'efficient use' of their time to solve a problem: googling it.
This is why I used to use interview questions that were useful to research by googling and see how effectively resourceful people were with finding relevant information quickly. it’s also a skill and it’s apparent when someone is googling and skimming results way out of their element
I was that thinking of a cool idea, where the conversion was translated in real time and gpt3 was giving you answers to common questions like give me an example of when XYZ
In the tenth year, they would have 4001 clients. However, they would have passed 35 clients about five years prior, and therefore the implication is simply that that is the cohort that is completing now and projects last on the order of five years.
The other attempts just got me either something looking like a regular startup meeting or WH40k figurines with a regular meeting happening in the background.
Wow, that company is 73% at Unix Administration AND 80% at Network Solutions. If only they were 70% at Python I'd have hired them for a project. I need a company with those stats.
So all these Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS (just like FAANG, they accronymize to WITCH) hog the American H1B immigration system by submitting an application for as many candidates as possible, and get a large number of H1Bs approved and send their employees to the US.
The salary for these employees isn’t exactly great. If I’m not wrong they still work through these witch companies and get their wages garnished. So these employees generally try to jump ship once they come to the US.
A second pool is the metric ton of immigrant students who come study an MS in vaguely computer related degrees - typically CS MS degrees are a bit more discerning but one example is this MIS degree from a BUSINESS SCHOOL in TAMU that’s just an Indian immigrant degree mill churning out people without much coding abilities at all.
Both these groups now go to these “consultant firms” in the US which take their money, fill out their resume with fake experience and train them to pass your interviews. I have heard all manner of illegal crap including person A attending the interview (even in person) and person B actually turning up for work. How many times have you looked closely enough to confirm it’s the same dude anyway.
These people are shrewd. Doing all of this does take brains. They’re just shit at coding. Some do actually improve over time but some never do.
Source: Indian dude who had college roommates, relatives, friends, acquaintances, etc all do various versions of these shenanigans.
Only way to protect yourself is to have a culture fit interview component, confirm their LinkedIn history isn’t super shady and have at least an informal verification step post offer to ensure you don’t let a rat into the ship.
Half a decade ago at a large energy company, there was a group that had ramped up hiring of a lot of contract developers for full stack greenfield app dev (not Salesforce or SAP, etc). Lots of us employees were pulled into interview candidates that staffing agencies were throwing us. Many turned out great, but 2 in particular were suspected of being different people from the interviewee. There was a month or more since the interviews and the people managing the teams often weren’t the same as the people who had participated in the interviews but after comparing notes, we realized that the people on the phone were certainly more astute than those who had come on-site (this was before video interviews had taken off). All of these teams were using IntelliJ and one of the team leads I managed expressed concern about how he noticed a contractor assigned to his team was using Windows Notepad to write Kotlin for his Spring Boot server controllers. He also heard of some other developers seeing this guy with his laptop on the far side of the large floor quietly talking on a cell phone for an hour or so. I think we let him hang out for almost a week before we told the staffing agency.
I find it strange that there appears to be international networks within American universities. I have noticed a large number of people from the same countries, attending similar vague programs (like you mentioned), writing theses with advisors from their home country.
It makes me wonder if they are just getting into a completely different program with the "American university" name. Do you have any insight into this?
> It makes me wonder if they are just getting into a completely different program with the "American university" name.
Not op, but I can answer this.
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer:
Most non-terminal Masters degree programs are degree mills, even at well known universities. These are almost always pay-to-play with few opportunities for scholarships, TAships, or whatever.
Most “real” students will enter a doctoral program and take a masters if they decide a doctorate is not for them.
Note that there are exceptions, especially for folks who are changing their career/degree path from undergrad, but these are relatively rare in my experience (at least at good schools).
A few simple examples from Harvard:
- the LLM law degree is a cash cow for the law school. It is only open to foreigners, and it is almost always funded by a company or the government. Ostensibly this program exists because other countries have undergrad law degrees, but the reality imho is that it’s a juicy cash cow that also generates a strong network.
- Harvard EdM degrees are a 9-month program with no thesis — coursework only. There is nothing wrong with this, but it’s a very weak academic program imho. It might be a good practitioner degree, but that doesn’t seem very Harvard-esque.
- The MA degrees in the yard (esp arts and humanities) and the div school are pay-to-play ways for Ivy/Harvard wannabes to get the Harvard stamp of approval. You have to be a decent student to get in, but nothing exceptional (e.g., compared to doctoral students). The key point is that the student is willing to pay. These degrees don’t really say much about the program or the student other than they were an above-average college student who was willing to pay to get the Harvard badge.
I’ve seen similar programs at very good state schools, with the standards lowered a bit. You see a lot of foreign nationals (looking for h1b jobs after graduation) and vets on the gi bill (often coasting on the government dime with no academic skills or ambition) in these state school programs.
If a professor is from a foreign country and/or has a relationship with schools/businesses in foreign countries, it is very easy to use masters degrees as a gateway to employment and residence in the US, and the school largely doesn’t care as long as the student pays and (in some fields) is able to get a job.
I should also add that undergrads who do a 5-year dual degree (BA/MA or BS/MS) don’t fall into the “buying a degree” category. Often times the upper level undergrad courses are the exact same courses as the lower level masters courses, so this is just prudent in some fields and or student situations (e.g., wanting to extend time at school in order to improve professional opportunities after graduation ).
It used to be possible to do a research MSc at Northern Universities (Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, etc.) with no bachelors degree, just needed enough industry experience to satisfy the department.
Yeah it’s becoming more and more common that universities allow previous experience to count, probably after raising the number of student intakes allowed in the UK. Now if you can pay and if you will probably pass you’re allowed in, from what I gather.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with SE degrees, they can be as rigorous on CS topics while swapping later maths modules for engineering modules. I ended up taking an MSc in CS fwiw.
I don’t know, I got an MSc in Math/Finance from Oxford and there were tough exams, the selection process was very strict (only 30 people got in), classmates seemed high quality, …
This one was a bit of a cash cow. I lived in Oxford for a few years while my wife worked on her DPhil and agree in general the other courses are much more difficult to get in.
I don't know how much I judge this candidate you're talking about. Somebody who can give you the right answer after 20 seconds despite apparently not knowing what he was talking about before seems like a pretty useful employee to me.
Many interview questions aren't about the right answer -- they are just questions that are designed to show how much the applicant knows about whatever is on the CV.
If you have Python on your CV, and I ask you how the garbage collector works, I don't want you to read some stack overflow summary to me. I want to hear your own description, so I can make a judgement how deep your knowledge of Python internals goes.
Anybody can type specific questions into Google. But if it comes to producing performant code, you need to have that knowledge in the back of your mind, because nobody is going to tell you to google that.
I'm a 10 year Python veteran and I've never had to think about garbage collection. Back in the day I did find out that del didn't actually free up memory (memory footprint could only ever increase for a process, only way to "free" memory would be to restart it). Don't know if it's still the case.
If asked today my very terse but immediate answer would be: "Rather poorly when I last checked. Haven't had to check for roughly 8 years."
Would that qualify as a "knowledgeable individual" in your books? (just curious)
I think that would meet the definition of a "knowledgeable individual". Python does GC under the hood and most folks who use it extensively never see it at all. The wrong answer would be "what is garbage collection" or "its excellent, better that C++"
It’s one thing to openly use web search as a tool and another to pretend you know something when you don’t.
It’s usually fine to say “I don’t know, I’d have to look that up”. That’s what you’d actually want on the job, honesty and professionalism.
People make mistakes all the time. What you want is a culture where they can admit those mistakes so that the team can engineer them away from happening again.
If a candidate is willing to lie over something so small as looking up an algorithm then that would be a big red flag to me.
The Google thing is very common now with remote interviews.
I've interviewed several candidates that were clearly googling questions. Some I thought were scammers, others not so much.
The funny thing is that they were all on camera. You can see the pause,you see the slight head turn and the eyes gaze away from the camera, you hear the click clack of typing and then the sudden recitation of a perfectly worded dictionary answer.
> The funny thing is that they were all on camera. You can see the pause,you see the slight head turn and the eyes gaze away from the camera, you hear the click clack of typing and then the sudden recitation of a perfectly worded dictionary answer.
What was your reaction? Would you prefer they be more subtle of the poorly kept secret that most of this job is simply trying to figure out why the code isn't running and looking for specific error codes from other people's projects?
I'm being sincere, because I'm studying AI and ML and I kind of doubt most CS majors could describe 85% of the concepts we cover at the undergrad level let alone describe the use of the sigmoid function and soft max when building a gradient descent algorithm in a NN if put on the spot; I know this because when I went searching for this they often say that even their professor sucked at describing it so much that they had just glossed over it entirely and admitted they would look it up when working with TF in the future.
His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."
Wait... Intellectsoft isn't the name of this company. Did these "Data Service Group" people steal Intellectsoft's website?
Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Over+the+past+decade%2C+o...
I'm still not really sure what was going on with that as we politely rejected him and never heard from him again.
If you look up the company on LinkedIn, it appears to be made up of hundreds of immigrant DevOps engineers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-service-group/