[notsag-hn]

I was going to interview at LandingAI. I was asked before the interview to install a spyware browser extension to monitor my traffic to detect if I was cheating during the interview. I respectfully declined and didn't have that interview.

[kevsim]

Wow if you can “cheat” during an interview - meaning either that they’re asking trivial, google-able stuff or that they’re so bad at interviewing that they can’t tell if you actually know your stuff - then their hiring process is pretty bad.

[tablespoon]

> Wow if you can “cheat” during an interview - meaning either that they’re asking trivial, google-able stuff or that they’re so bad at interviewing that they can’t tell if you actually know your stuff - then their hiring process is pretty bad.

Not necessarily, at least on the first point. Someone could be getting coached.

A few years ago, a coworker of mine hired a contractor onto his team and was convinced the person who actually showed up was not the person who he interviewed (over the phone). He also thought the guy who did show up was getting a lot of help day-to-day from somewhere. The guy was a contractor, so it wasn't a huge problem because we could drop him quickly, but I would have never expected someone would do anything like that. However, it kind of makes sense as a scam: be a decent developer, get a stable of unhirable incompetents, and rotate them through companies while taking a cut of their salary.

[mFixman]

You cannot really prevent those kinds of cheats. Even if you use the most insidious spyware a coach can advice the interviewee from a different device.

The only way to prevent those kind of scams is to put all employees in probation for the first months of work and fire them if they don't perform, like it's common in the UK.

[propwash]

Agreed. Whenever I hear stories like this, I recall this recent essay [1] that said it quite well -

> designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological

[1] - https://jacobian.org/2022/feb/14/that-wild-aam-story/

[deepdmistry]

I once heard where a dev literally offshored his work and had entire teams working on his tasks. He was employed by multiple companies at once and paid a small fraction of his combined pay to offshore team.

Eventually he got caught trying to manage all this

[strikelaserclaw]

i mean, people are good at finding clever ways to cheat.

[cloogshicer]

Well, Ng is also one of those people who believe that we should all work 70+ hours per week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15251769

[mdp2021]

~80hrs on topic A squeezes the available time for being acquainted with the rest. [Edited because there was little way not to make the former formulation read, unwillingly, nasty]

Some of us believe instead on the advantage of being a polymath, (also) to be able to export wisdom from other contexts into the current work.

Also in terms of the proper ground to facilitate innovation.

[nomilk]

Musk recommends 80-100hr weeks, every week

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtaxU6DZvLs&t=1m20s

[belter]

Jack Ma is a slacker...Only 72h per week.

"Jack Ma says his employees should work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week" https://twitter.com/i/events/1116787491707731968?lang=en

[zibzab]

Maybe that's why CCP took the company from him? Not enough totalitarian work conditions?

[weego]

It's literally our job to not just assume the possible solution that rolls off the top of our heads might not be the most up to date / best practice and to research it

[mirntyfirty]

Agreed. A decent interviewer can also determine a person’s understanding of a topic by simply talking to them about it. IE why did you build a model like this? What diagnostics did you use? Have you tried ____ before in your career?

[mdp2021]

I'd just note that if pushed by circumstances (if one was willing to be interviewed in spite of their ways), the interview environment could be (would be) on a throwaway virtual machine...

Possibility which, by the way, makes the interviewer's cautionary move generally useless.

[ThalesX]

Or, in 2022, one could reach into their pocket just use a phone, making the interviewer's cautionary move generally useless.

[mdp2021]

> just use a phone

I assumed that keeping looking in the direction of the camera was relevant (in their idea).

[kelseyfrog]

It's fairly easy to augment a video stream to paste on eyes that always look in the direction of the camera. It's the digital equivalent of glasses with eyes on them[1].

1. https://www.amazon.com/glasses-eyes-them/s?k=glasses+with+ey...

[xtiansimon]

I have multiple monitors

[mdp2021]

...Which one supposedly would not consult during an interview.

[xtiansimon]

No matter how you arranged them. And I would never use a USB camera between them, either.

[kevinventullo]

I suppose if you’re clever enough to set up a VM in order to evade detection, that’s a pretty positive aptitude signal in its own right (though pretty negative on the behavioral/ethics side).

[mdp2021]

> if you’re clever enough to set up a VM in order to evade detection

It's what you would do anyway, unless you suppose that the interviewee would ever install dubious software on his core machine.

[tromp]

Missed opportunity to say you landed an interview at LandingAI :-)