There are schemes happening in interviews too. I've been doing many technical interviews for a senior role with off shore candidates lately. They come to me after passing a challenging online test that has controls to check for browser focus lost, opening new tabs etc. I think it may require a camera to be on too. Even with that more than half of the candidates can't code.

Our interview usually starts with them breathlessly reading from a script out of the corner of their eye. I'm ok with notes to make sure you hit some high points about yourself even in person. Nervousness shouldn't disqualify a talented person. But with the coding part I've gotten exasperated and started asking these senior candidates to share their screen and do a fizz buzz exercise live in a text editor in the first few minutes. If they struggle I politely end the interview on the 15.

One candidate cheated and it was interesting to watch. In the time I sent the message in Zoom and them sharing their screen, just a few seconds, they had either queried or LLM-ed it on their phone or another computer, had someone off screen or in the same room listening and sharing the answer on another monitor or something else. Whatever it was they turned their head slightly to the side, squinted a bit and typed the answer in Java. A few syncopated characters at a time. When asked what modulo was they didn't know and couldn't make any changes to it. It was wacky. In retrospect I think it was them reading the question out loud to an LLM.

I'm waiting for the candidate who has someone behind them with the same shirt on pretending to be their arms.

> They come to me after passing a challenging online test that has controls to check for browser focus lost, opening new tabs etc.

These are the absolute worst.

You're taking people out of their comfort zone (highly customized IDE like JetBrains / VSCode / Vim) which cause them to lose shortcuts and decently working intellisense. Yes, my TypeScript in my projects is configured in such a way that I get way more information from the compiler than the standard config. After all, you're testing my ability as a software engineer, not a code monkey, right?

In this very uncomfortable place there is no way of asking questions. Yes, sometimes stuff is ambiguous. I rather have someone who asks questions vs someone who guesses and gets it right.

The testing setup is horrible too. No feedback as to what part of the tests fail, just... fail.

No debugger. No way of adding log messages. When was the last time you've been in that situation at your workplace?

All under the pressure of time, and additional stress from the person that they really NEED a new job.

Oh, and when you use compiled languages, they're way slower than say TypeScript due to the compilation phase.

And then even when your score (comprised of x passed tests and y failed tests) is of passing grade there is a manager out there looking at how many times someone tabbed outside of the window/tab?

Where am I supposed to look up stuff? Do you know all of this information by heart: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BTreeMap.ht...

Which reminded me that one time I used a function recently stabilized, but the Rust version used was about 8 versions behind. With that slow compilation cycle.

/sigh.

Have you considered using onshore candidates instead?