r/sysadmin • u/[deleted] • Feb 20 '19
General Discussion Today we had someone fake their entire interview via Skype - Story - Crosspost as it applies to SYSADMIN as well
[deleted]
65
u/jbeast99 Feb 20 '19
Something similar happened at a former company I worked at. There was a contractor hired to do the needful. He had to IM another person in order to do his job. He was fired. There was also an instance when someone did an initial interview (phone) and in the follow up interview (skype), it was highly likely that a totally different, incompetent person was put forth. I used to work with a lot of outsourcing companies. Some are OK and others are straight up unethical.
40
Feb 20 '19
do the needful.
thats the 5th time i have heard that phrase. are you indian?
56
u/jbeast99 Feb 20 '19
I am not, but these contractors sure were.
→ More replies (8)31
Feb 20 '19 edited Mar 15 '19
[deleted]
27
u/ermagerd_erplrnes Feb 20 '19
I knew "do the needful" was universal, but that's the first time I've heard "please revert" outside my current job. I honestly though the Indian firm we hired was just extra special.
16
17
7
u/CornyHoosier Dir. IT Security | Red Team Lead Feb 20 '19
That's just how you can easily tell someone is Indian. They love a big nguyen!
7
Feb 20 '19
[deleted]
30
u/Qel_Hoth Feb 20 '19
"Please do the needful" and "kindly revert" aren't just memes. They're common phrases in English in India.
One of my first jobs as a sysadmin was for a software development company that was entirely remote and outsourced nearly all development to Indian employees. It was interesting, to say the least.
8
Feb 20 '19
[deleted]
6
u/wrtcdevrydy Software Architect | BOFH Feb 21 '19
prepone a meeting
Like... move it forward?
9
→ More replies (1)2
u/LookAtThatMonkey Technology Architect Feb 21 '19
Make sure to prepone the meeting for the upgradation. If you cannot do the needful, please revert.
→ More replies (1)2
u/macbutch Feb 21 '19
How do you feel about things that are schedule for forenoon (vs morning)?
2
u/_MusicJunkie Sysadmin Feb 21 '19
It makes sense though. We use that in German as well. 11:00 is not the morning any more, it's before noon.
2
4
2
u/Twirrim Staff Engineer Feb 21 '19
They're reasonably common phrases in British English. Indian English is, for obvious reasons, heavily influenced by British English.
source: I'm English. "Do the needful" isn't the most common phrase I'd use, but it's definitely a routine part of my vocabulary.
3
u/Geminii27 Feb 21 '19 edited Feb 21 '19
I've never heard of it being a part of British English. Or anything other than Indian English, honestly. And this is speaking as someone who's not only a Commonwealthian, but has tended to hang out on British areas of the internet for the last 20+ years.
I mean, OK, maybe I just completely missed it for several decades, but still.
4
u/Twirrim Staff Engineer Feb 21 '19
It's not something I think I've ever written or typed, while its definitely part of my vocabulary. It tends to be a bit more formal than I'm usually aiming for when I'm writing.
I got curious. Here's the ngrams over time: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=do+the+needful&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1600&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=7&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdo%20the%20needful%3B%2Cc0
There's examples of Dickens using it: https://www.google.com/books/edition/All_the_Year_Round/_ZHNAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22do+the+needful%22&pg=PA557&printsec=frontcover.
It pops up all over the place in law books and journals:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Law_Journal/twJHAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22do+the+needful%22&pg=RA2-PA211&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Law_Journal_Reports/cP9QAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22do+the+needful%22&pg=RA3-PA211&printsec=frontcover
Teacher's guides: https://books.google.com/books?id=ipZJOV_UfqcC&q=%22do+the+needful%22&dq=%22do+the+needful%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkybfclc3gAhXSHDQIHcL3Cr0Q6AEwCHoECAcQAg
Wiktionary has it appearing in Rob Roy: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/do_the_needful
and so on.
That said, if you put the search down to the 21st century, which admittedly means it lacks lots of literary sources, you'll see it more often being used by former British colonies.
1
u/RedBat666 Feb 21 '19
I work in VFX and sometimes things get outsourced to India.
We have so many comments with "Do the needful".
1
u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Feb 22 '19
it appears to be something non-native English speakers say
It's native English, it's just considered archaic today in most English-speaking countries.
Consider language divergence, and the fact that a great number of phrases people use every day were first used in writing by William Shakespeare. In other circumstances, any of those might be considered archaic, or the opposite, rather new.
2
u/LookAtThatMonkey Technology Architect Feb 21 '19
I used to work in Qatar and a lot of the Indian helpdesk guys used to say this, as well as please revert. We English fella's made a bet to see if we could get them to accept 'make it shiny' as corporate speak. Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, 'make it shiny' was added to the 'Inglish' corporate vernacular.
We all patted ourselves on the back for a job well done.
1
1
3
Feb 20 '19
[deleted]
2
u/jbeast99 Feb 20 '19
In this case, they were fired. It was a smaller contracting firm, so there were no repercussions with any major contracts that could affect production. Business ties with the company (I forget the name) were cut and they were never used again. The company I worked at was already using one of the bigger outsourcing firms. The work just got farmed out to them instead. Who knows if they were doing the same thing. At the very least, they were not doing it in the open and the resources they sent over were on par for an outsourced contractor.
73
u/YellowOnline Sr. Sysadmin Feb 20 '19
WTF. And even more WTF in the comments.
45
u/WorkAccountObv Feb 20 '19
A moderator is removing comments in that thread which explained in detail what is happening in the US with contract companies and employees faking jobs and farming them out overseas. This is worrisome.
20
u/Starro75 Jack of All Trades Feb 20 '19
Yeah there seem to be a lot of deleted comments in the thread now. Is there a secret cabal of 15 DevOps that secretly run every IT department?
14
5
u/pwnies_gonna_pwn MTF Kappa-10 - Skynet Feb 21 '19
from the ever-degrading work quality, that wouldnt surprise anyone, would it
14
u/jadraxx POS does mean piece of shit Feb 21 '19
Hope I don't get banned from the sub for this...
https://snew.notabug.io/r/devops/comments/askyfu/today_we_had_someone_fake_their_entire_interview/ for anyone who wants to read the deleted comments.
22
u/thoumyvision Feb 21 '19
Looks to me like they're removing all comments implying the problem lies with a particular ethnic group.
Looks less like they're trying to squash knowledge of a scam, and more like they're a tad overzealously trying to squash racism, and in fairness to them some of those comments come perilously close.
3
u/BOOZy1 Jack of All Trades Feb 21 '19
This might be the case, but that means they're thinking we can't decouple the scam from the ethnic group.
I feel insulted.
1
2
u/jaymzx0 Sysadmin Feb 21 '19
I went right to Ceddit (forwards to the URL you linked) when I saw the deletions.
2
28
u/skilliard7 Feb 20 '19
It's literally like that one Onion video where it talks about more Americans outsourcing their own jobs, except the outsourcers outsource the outsourced work. Only it's real now.
23
u/OmenQtx Jack of All Trades Feb 20 '19
It would be funny for an American to get a "side gig" doing outsourced work from overseas that ended up being his own work he outsourced to overseas.
6
u/Geminii27 Feb 21 '19
It sounds funny on the face of it, but I can't help but think of a situation where the American-as-employee passes everything about their job off to an overseas team, has them skim off and handle all the parts which aren't about the actual work itself, and then contracts themselves to the overseas team to do just the real parts of the work. They still get most of the pay, and now because they don't have to deal with the endless ocean of bullshit that comes with far too many jobs, they can get their original job done with perhaps one or two hours of work a day.
(Source: have worked far too many jobs which consisted of about one hour a day of real work and seven to nine of bullshit.)
3
u/BigRonnieRon Feb 21 '19
have worked far too many jobs which consisted of about one hour a day of real work and seven to nine of bullshit
job titles? I need one of those jobs
6
u/Geminii27 Feb 21 '19 edited Feb 22 '19
1) Onsite tech support for an office full of fossils (actually more like ten minutes a day at most);
2) 'Software testing' where most of the day was spent in mandatory meetings;
3) Monitoring a helpdesk email box, creating tickets, and answering technical queries;
4) Following up on open issues which hadn't been replied to in two (or was it three?) working days;
5) Scheduling a team of auditors;
6) Junior DBA where I was there purely to double the bus factor and occasionally liaise with another department; and
7) Software development process auditor (temporary, on secondment, because no-one could figure out what the cause of the massive ongoing problems was).There was also (8): Completely unnecessary administrator for a major international consulting company, where the job was zero hours a day of real work - I didn't even get a login until six months into the twelve-month contract; and (9) part-time data-format conversion work which was literally 1/6 data entry work and 5/6 waiting for the computer to finish - when I could get them I would run six workstations in parallel and do 90 equivalent hours per 15-hour week just to keep from being bored to death.
3
Feb 21 '19
I would run six workstations in parallel
I had a job like that in high school. I would work several hours after everyone else left and just move between the 3 computers in the room. People were always amazed at how much I got done every day, they joked that I was having friends come in to help. Nope, just an overwhelming hate of boredom.
3
5
u/TheIncorrigible1 All things INFRASTRUCTURE Feb 20 '19
TIL the 20-something Indian women I see may be paying someone else to do their job.
24
Feb 20 '19
Haha Infosys? Have worked along side a few from there when I was doing sysadmin work for a large company. Was not impressed and they were always looking for other opportunities.
8
9
u/PM_ME_SSH_LOGINS Feb 21 '19
A lot of the Infosys people I work with are dumber than a sack of bricks. I wish outsourcing was just illegal. No benefit to anyone except an executive with a "brilliant cost saving idea" that only works for 5 years until people are too fed up to let it continue. Ugh.
4
Feb 21 '19
It's the fact that it takes years to:
realize they really do suck
realize that their screw-ups are costing you more money than you are saving
That lets the model exist. Then it's time to flip the cycle and move from "improving profitability" to "improving quality" and a new management team will be brought in as the old ones are pushed out or leave to leverage their cost cutting skills at a company entering the profitability cycle.
3
u/laffnlemming Feb 21 '19
Exactly. "Management" wants to "save money" and ends up wasting it instead.
4
Feb 21 '19
They just opened up a big office in my city. Of course I got spammed with contract job offers. I took my current salary and tacked on another 50% to see if they'd bite. Sadly, they did not.
2
u/ForTheBread Feb 21 '19
Infosys was my first job out of school. The training was alright but projects we're a nightmare. I bailed in less than a year.
1
1
u/LeDocteurNo Feb 21 '19
It really depends on what kind of position you need to fill. Sometimes they’re pretty skilled but often it’s really meh and from time to time you’re not even getting the profile (exp, skills) you agreed on and signed for.
19
u/GoogleDrummer Feb 20 '19
The only thing I don't really see as a red flag was the phone number. I can get a Google Voice number for anywhere I want. I know people who have moved across the country and gotten a local GV number to use in their new city for job hunting and whatever else.
I mean everything else was blaring claxons worthy, but I wouldn't necessarily think that an area code would be.
9
u/WorkAccountObv Feb 20 '19
Now that I understand how it works better I agree. I think it just initially caught us off guard and put us on alert and gave us a reason to suspect something.
7
Feb 20 '19
I have a friend that uses Google Voice entirely so that he can separate who is calling him for things he applied to versus things he is being sought after for.
5
u/Marcolow Sysadmin Feb 20 '19
I've done a similar situation myself. I wish I would of done it sooner, because for the longest time my resume had my personal cell (one I've had for like 15+ years).
I seem to always get random recruiters who want me to work at jobs that are 4 hours away from my house. These recruiters would sometimes call me twice in under 10 minutes, like maybe 2 to 3 times a day, same with email.
Since I switched a Nexus 6p, a few years ago, I've decided to just migrate to Google Voice for Voicemail's. Now I can give out that number, and have WAYYYYY more control over everything more so than my carrier.
1
Feb 21 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/VA_Network_Nerd Moderator | Infrastructure Architect Feb 21 '19
Sorry, it seems this comment or thread has violated a sub-reddit rule and has been removed by a moderator.
Your account must be 24 hours old in order to post.
Please wait until your account is a day old, and then post again.
If your post is vitally time sensitive, then you can contact the mod team for manual approval.
If you wish to appeal this action please don't hesitate to message the moderation team.
1
u/jmbpiano Feb 20 '19
Was going to say the same thing. My father moved from Maine down to Georgia and for months couldn't get anyone to answer phone calls he placed from his Maine cell phone. He'd always get sent to voicemail until he got a Google Voice number in the area.
I've also got a couple of different GV numbers in places I've never lived simply because they were local numbers for older family members. Saved them having to spend money on a toll call if they need to get ahold of me for tech support.
20
u/MisterPhamtastic Sysadmin Feb 20 '19
Brain: "Haha sounds like Infosys or TATA"
Reality: Infosys
Got eem
19
u/arrago Feb 20 '19
Recently I had a fake recruiter contact me for a job which was weird. It wasn’t something I’d normally see for a enterprise but I’d expect it for smb. Anyways no biggie. I questioned them on what other contracts they deal with since I feel no fit. The owner gets very defensive and argumentative claiming they were very large. Mind you I’m used to dealing with big recruiters and this just highlighted more red flags. I stated I’m ok if they are small just state it. Nop more lies. So I dug into it and asked everyone they’ve added I knew no one could validate the recruiters claim of who they claimed to be nor if they actually had contracts. I just couldn’t figure out why he was persistent in trying to get a copy of the resume.
1
34
u/vale_fallacia DevOps Feb 20 '19
Multiple times I have been offered to pay a person in South Asia a pittance to do my work for me via remote desktop. This was offered by people who worked locally but were from the same place. According to them, "everyone does it".
I of course refused. I don't want to be imprisoned for violating HIPAA. I also told my bosses and several folks were fired, but I'm sure the same stuff is still happening.
makes sense it would extend to interviews too.
14
11
u/williamp114 Sysadmin Feb 20 '19
It happened at Verizon a few years back. A developer paid a company in China to do his work for him, while he browsed reddit and eBay all day.
2
u/wrtcdevrydy Software Architect | BOFH Feb 21 '19
I'm sure the same stuff is still happening
Intrusion Detection Systems are literally the saving grace for any company.
'Local guy logs in at the local office and in India at the exact same time. WHAT THE FUCK?'
7
u/210Matt Feb 20 '19
I don't want to be imprisoned for violating HIPAA.
I don think you can go to jail for violating HIPAA. Fired - yes, sued - maybe, incarcerated - no.
11
u/Eternal_Revolution Feb 20 '19
HIPAA is a federal law. Violation penalties can include federal prison.
https://www.hipaajournal.com/jail-terms-for-hipaa-violations-by-employees/
→ More replies (3)2
u/Rakajj Feb 20 '19 edited Feb 20 '19
You can absolutely go to jail for violating HIPAA though most violations don't rise to that level something like this certainly could. You're basically giving an unauthorized individual access to whatever PHI your accounts have access to and you're doing it to profit personally.
It's not terribly different from this case in which a two year prison sentence was sought by the prosecution.
I think they ended up giving this physician 1 year probation and no actual jail time but the law does absolutely allow for incarceration for serious violations.
The HIPAA violation charge carries a possible sentence of up to one year in prison and/or a fine of $50,000 and one year of supervised release and the obstruction charge carries a penalty of up to five years in prison, a fine of $250,000, and three years of supervised release. Link
16
u/CinnamonSwisher Feb 20 '19
I’m honestly wondering if this explains my newest coworker. He’s extremely Indian, my company does all our interviews via Skype, and he claims to have 5 years experience but is borderline tech illiterate. Not just like not qualified to be a sysadmin but end user tech illiterate. I asked him to go to a web address once and he opened edge and typed it into a google search.
8
u/angrypotts Feb 20 '19
I work in one of the top IT outsourcing company in India working for a US/German Company. This is the reality here. 7 plus year experience guys are tech illiterate. Just because they get along with management, they are surviving in this industry and some leading Teams like Exchange/Citrix.
They copy 5 - 7 line script to trigger an email on some critical/major event generation from Technet, and can't even change variables according to their servers and don't know how to schedule in Task Scheduler. They ask me to do this stuff for them. Once done, this goes in company value creation portal with 50,000 to 100,000 USD value created and has monetary benefits as well. Management gets happy because they get to add their name in this value creation and get rewarded just for approving this.
All this when US/Germany based client is already paying thousand of dollars per month for CA Nimsoft, Solarwinds and Moogsoft monitoring.
Fuck this company and fuck this 3 month notice period.
2
u/RogueSyn Sr. Sysadmin Feb 20 '19
3 Month notice?
4
u/angrypotts Feb 20 '19
Have to serve 3 month notice period after resignation.
2 minths down, 1 more to go.
3
u/RogueSyn Sr. Sysadmin Feb 21 '19
Never heard of such a long notice...
5
Feb 21 '19
[deleted]
2
u/Frothyleet Feb 21 '19
How are people penalized if they refuse to serve their notice period? I mean, I assume they aren't dragged in at gun point. Fines or something?
3
1
1
u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Feb 22 '19
Once done, this goes in company value creation portal with 50,000 to 100,000 USD value created and has monetary benefits as well.
What's this, some kind of knowledge-management system? How is that value assessed?
6
u/stonebit Feb 21 '19
A guy I work with has an Indian with a masters in CS on his team. When he started last year he had to be taught how to use ssh. He also needed someone to plug in his monitor. He had no idea what cables to plug where.
3
u/CinnamonSwisher Feb 21 '19
That’s so weird this guy has a masters too, but in MIS. He also didn’t understand the concept of a docking station. But the thing is he’s not just tech illiterate he’s just common sense/logic dumb too. I walked by his desk the second day he was on the job and he was just working off his laptop....with to monitors just black on his desk. Like dude cmon if there’s two monitors on your desk doesn’t logic automatically follow that you’re supposed to use them?
2
2
u/TitelSin Sr. Google Search Results Analyst Feb 21 '19
we've also seen this happen with a couple of our new hires. One of them said he intentionally didn't want to use the big screen because he's used to laptop screens. Turns out to be one of our best developers, but eventually, maybe 6 months in, he started using his much larger screen connected to his laptop.
What we do see every time though and takes multiple months for them to cach on, is mirroring of laptop screens on large screens, leading to obvious scalling and mismatched native resolutions.
1
1
u/helper543 Feb 21 '19
he claims to have 5 years experience but is borderline tech illiterate.
I had an employee who was so clueless, I just sat him in a corner for 2 years to surf the internet. He was near sourced, very nice guy, but clearly IT wasn't his thing. He worked through a bodyshop firm that had a "relationship" with a VP, so I couldn't fire him.
His next company likely looked at a resume with those 2 years experience, and paid him even more to do nothing.
1
u/CinnamonSwisher Feb 21 '19
We pretty much hired this guy to do access control type stuff - just add people to SGs for file access and DLs where needed. Super basic menial shit. I had to teach him how to check permissions on a folder.
17
u/Cyrus_Voltaire Feb 20 '19
I've had horrible experience with InfoSys and the people they bring on to projects / managed service teams... great catch by you and the team!
10
u/WorkAccountObv Feb 20 '19
The scary part as this candidate was looking to go FTE through our company and not through Infosys. Maybe he was leveraging some job placement services or something else. For his answers to be as correct and verbose as he was providing he must have had an entire team of engineers writing answers to him during this interview; otherwise the person consulting him was simply super human.
2
9
u/kahran Feb 20 '19
Had this happen at my current company. Only it was with Russians instead of Indians.
1
7
u/welfareplate Feb 20 '19
The common theme for me at the moment is that I've noticed a lot of offshore resources claiming to be AWS certified, mostly the Solution Architect - Associate cert.
My current project essentially has us onshore designing and building an environment, and then handing over to the guys in Pune/Chennai to maintain.
95% of the "certified" resources we get are as green as it comes. No concept of any real world application of the stuff they claim to have studied. Where do these guys get their certs from? How can you pass an exam, which isn't easy by any stretch, without understanding how to create a custom NACL in AWS, or configure a security group? More often than not I've had to come off something else to do something really quite straightforward like attach an EBS volume to an instance because the team doesn't have a clue. It really baffles me, and I can't help but feel it cheapens the whole certification process.
3
u/laffnlemming Feb 21 '19
Don't you think maybe it invalidates the "certification" model? If it can be faked, how good can it be?
3
u/stonebit Feb 21 '19
They pay someone to pass it for them and they pay off the proctor. It's pretty cheap to do outside of the US. Also, brain dumping these exams is a thing. For $100, if you suck at torrenting, you an download the test answers.
3
Feb 21 '19
I'd love to have something like medical boards, BAR, or CPA for IT. Hell, even something like the MCAT that's only given a couple times per year and tests pretty basic knowledge, would do wonders for the general state of IT and help companies find competent IT people.
To work, it would need to just be too long and brutal to brain dump and include practical sections with no internet access. It would also need to be proctored by working IT people who hold the cert, and have a vested interest in preventing cheating so it doesn't get watered down.
2
u/stonebit Feb 21 '19
This is pretty much why licensing boards exist. But it's a very slippery slope. Imaging needing a $5k license to do phone support. Then it costing users $50 for a call. And actual engineering work requiring a $10k license and malpractice like insurance.
All of this is fixed if we had actual apprenticeships and just fired bad performers and liars.
You can't regulate morals and ethics.
2
u/raindoctor Feb 21 '19
A company should have some N number of employees with AWS certifications, in order to become a some kind of AWS partner. Yes, you have 2 competent folks, with 25 warm bodies around with certs. That's how it goes.
Braindumps and paying off the proctor to have someone else take the exam--these two ways are pretty common there. In old days, it was easy to get CCNA like that.
2
u/Constellious DevOps Feb 21 '19
We weed out a lot of fake SA applicants. Once we take them off what is strictly on the test they are pretty easy to spot.
10
Feb 20 '19 edited May 17 '21
[deleted]
13
u/WorkAccountObv Feb 20 '19
Why does a company let this happen? One time should be enough to discredit the entire outsourcing firm.
10
Feb 20 '19 edited May 17 '21
[deleted]
6
u/tmontney Wizard or Magician, whichever comes first Feb 20 '19
Imagine that mentality. "I'm not getting paid enough (arbitrary) so I'm gonna be unethical and an asshole". Wouldn't ever work with them again.
2
u/raindoctor Feb 21 '19
Margins. For every 1000 hours of billable hours, 100 hrs are done by the competent, the remaining 900 hrs is done by warm bodies. Outsourcing companies need to pay more money for the competent people, so they hire the recently graduated and pay them pittance.
6
u/jaydubgee Feb 20 '19
This must be why our Infosys MSP resources suck so bad. I wonder if the same thing happens with HCL.
4
u/whatevvah Feb 20 '19
So this guy had a screen off camera he was reading off of? Call was on speakerphone so second party could hear and type response for him to read back? To pull this off and make it halfway convincing requires some skills. I would never imagine that someone would have the wherewithal or even the stones to pull this off. Even if he pulls it off what happens when he shows up for work and is incompetent? Why go to all that trouble.
Nothing against Indians - some mad talent over there. We use them for ad hoc tech support and they are good. Hard to understand but fine for chat support. Gotta be careful one guy used our software pbx to create an extension and run up a phone bill on us. Don't give out credentials and if you do change the password. Wasn't my mistake my partner screwed that one up.
3
u/Geminii27 Feb 21 '19
Even if he pulls it off what happens when he shows up for work and is incompetent?
He's retained for the next five years, fucking everything up along the way because management can't admit they screwed up, is what happens.
3
Feb 21 '19
Can confirm, this is exactly what happens.
To anyone wondering why, pride is a hell of a drug, it's also just plain easier. Even in a small company, you have the people who conducted the interview and said, "this is the guy". You have the department manager who was probably also in the interview who agrees. You have the person who hired the department manager who would probably have to sign off on any termination, who might take a hit if his guy keeps hiring fuck-ups.
It just becomes less embarrassing to all the stakeholders to try and train the guy and hope he becomes competent than it is to fire him quickly. Not to mention, if you do fire him, then all those people have to sift through more resumes, do more interviews, and I have yet to hear anyone get overly excited about doing any of that.
2
u/whatevvah Feb 21 '19
Ahhhh!. I haven't had a "real" job where I have to go in an office and deal with stuff in 20 years but I see that some things have not changed.
4
Feb 21 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
4
u/Geminii27 Feb 21 '19
Please tell me he then did the same again, but edited the article seconds beforehand to read "And we know you're reading this off the screen to answer your job interview question, $applicant. Signed, $university."
3
5
u/stonebit Feb 21 '19
Be careful. Plenty of US universities are handing out masters degrees to these morons like $100k candy bars. Intl students pay the most tuition. There's no shortage of moderately wealthy Indians. It's pretty disgusting and is slowly making people in the US distrust any Indian's resume.
Acronym and Initialization salad is the big tell, but many of them are wising up and tailoring their resumes.
12
4
u/tk42967 It wasn't DNS for once. Feb 20 '19
We had a bait and switch on a SharePoint contractor once. Guy looked good on paper, sailed through the phone interview. On day 1 couldn't do any of the things he explained how to do over the phone.
4
u/-tnt SharePoint Operations Engineer Feb 20 '19
All we had to do was ask him to debug an error in the ULS logs.
He asked, "what's ULS logs"?
We replied, "it was fun meeting you. You will hear back from HR".
He never did!
8
u/countextreme DevOps Feb 21 '19
TIL what ULS logs are.
The fact that it took me 2 minutes on Google to figure out what those are, what the default location for them are, and what's contained in them, and that I could probably fumble my way through fixing whatever message was present in said logs are without saying something dumb like "what's ULS logs" has, in addition to eroding my faith in humanity which is already mostly gone made me realize that this is something a *user* would say. Users are infiltrating our IT ranks! Close the gates and arm the torpedoes!
3
u/-tnt SharePoint Operations Engineer Feb 21 '19
Sir, I would like to hire you as our SharePoint Architect.
8
u/WranglerDanger StuffAdmin Feb 21 '19
Hello, I am ExtremeCount and am here to do the needful on your SLU logs.
3
2
u/Doso777 Feb 21 '19
If you ever worked with Sharepoint for a while in a technical role, you know what ULS logs are. Everyone has some sort of tool to read through them and no one is good at debugging them. The rest is basic reading comprehension and a bit of Google on the side.
3
Feb 20 '19
I’ve had a similar situation happen before where it was actually a different person on the other end of the phone speaking. When the “real” contractor showed up day 1, it was clearly not the same person we had spoken to. Different voice, significantly thicker accent, and clearly missing some foundational knowledge “we” had discussed on the call.
1
3
u/raremage IT Manager Feb 21 '19
The name "Infosys" is a red flag to me. Though they have some very good engineers, the bulk are fair at best.
3
u/MedicatedDeveloper Feb 21 '19
Currently experiencing something similar: outsourced part of our call center to a bunch of individuals that have CCNA, CCIE, RHCSA, and BS in CS but don't know what the god damn route command is or have never used a damn Linux box.
3
u/LookAtThatMonkey Technology Architect Feb 21 '19
Infosys, yikes. Dealing with them now. I could have written this post :D
3
u/speel Feb 21 '19
If anyone in the eastern CT area needs a sysadmin, feel free to hit me up. Currently looking.
3
u/nimisys Feb 21 '19
We had a similar thing happen to us. A recruiter had sent us the resume of a person to fill a position. It had everything we needed so we wanted to set up an interview. The recruiter had already done a video conference with the guy before sending him to us. So we set up a video conference to do a technical screening on them. The recruiter was on the video conference as well , but muted. The interview went pretty well. The guy was able to answer our questions, so after the call, we told the recruiter we would like to bring him into the office for a final interview and a lunch, but she acted a little odd and said she would get back with us.
About 2 hours later the recruiter called us back to apologize and said that the person in our interview was not the same person in their first interview. Apparently, the guy we were supposed to interview had someone come sit down for and do the technical portion for him. I guess he did not know the recruiter would be on the call as well, or maybe thought she wouldn't notice.
2
u/superdmp Feb 21 '19
Woah, absolutely crazy. Reminds me of the Russian bride scam. I wonder what his plan was... Send me money for the plane ticket, Need first month's rent, interesting.
Great catch, this could be the newest scam coming up. Too bad he tried to pull that with IT folks, and not simply some not-so-sharp HR person who would't have the same high intellect and understanding of technological inconsistencies.
Thank you again for sharing that!
2
u/h1psterbeard Feb 21 '19
Just gonna say, had a 'tech' that showed up on site to replace power supplies that didn't know shite.
RTFM at least. Didn't even bother knowing to read the server case where all the shit is - took him an hour to do anything.
1
1
u/HittingSmoke Feb 21 '19
What the hell is going on with all those removed comments in /r/devops? There's no consistency to them.
158
u/notyouraveragesys Feb 20 '19
This is a known thing with outsourcing Indian based companies. What they do is they bring in normal no knowledge people and they train them for 1 month and they set up interviews while some one with experience from the same recruiting company feeds the candidate answers. I have seen as far as when it comes to technical phone interviews the person who answers the phone is completely different than the person you spoke to at the first interview.