A friend of mine got two such "fake" candidates for a coding interview. His experience reminded me of those "Nigerian Prince" emails from 20 years ago. These two gentlemen had western names (like "Brandon Smith") but Asian features and a tenuous grasp of spoken English; even though they claimed to have undergrad degrees from US universities. And he could tell they were looking at another screen to copy code from. After just a few minutes he realized what was going on, but continued the interview just to get the experience.

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rustyhancock 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Frankly sounds like many "real" candidates I've interviewed.

The tenuous grasp of spoken English despite a degree taught in English is also not unusual.

Setting aside the fraud for a moment (which is an insurmountable barrier to employeeing them).

To some extent I'd be satisfied if they actually had a degree and were productive. They obviously need good enough receptive and written English to work.

Especially if they are earning 5k per year as the title suggests.

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cj 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The far more common fraud is:

1) Hire fake candidate

2) You realize they're fake 1-2 weeks into the role. They are unreliable. They don't show up for meetings. You have trouble communicating with them

3) You fire them

But they've already won the game. They collected a single paycheck. And for an intermediate (even junior) dev position, collecting even just a single paycheck is a big pay day for them.

The main cost to the company is time wasted, needing to open the role once more to find a real candidate who can actually do the job.

I think it's incredibly rare for these candidates to actually do the job well. (They also have fake resumes, all of their experience is made up -- so if you're expecting expertise, you're likely not going to get it)

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GrinningFool 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not just paycheck. They had access to some or all of your company's internal system, code, and data for the duration. That's a much bigger threat.

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	▲	rustyhancock 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I wonder how achievable this would be with even a deepfake filter? A single person does remote interviews all day. The person who turns up is just some body to run the scam. That said, as the saying goes that's a lot of hard work, to avoid working hard.

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remarkEon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a little baffling to me, if you're suggesting this is an actual method people employ to make a living. Interviewing is difficult and stressful. Or maybe their approach is a shotgun strategy, so they don't care?

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hackable_sand an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The comment you are responding to is role-playing

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usefulcat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If they're living in NK then maybe their alternatives for making a living are mostly much worse than this?

	▲	cj 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I always assumed it’s equivalent to slave labor. I don’t think these people aspire to having this job.

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fhd2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Especially if they are earning 5k per year as the title suggests.

Not sure that's how the math goes. TFA mentions every employed worker has a team behind them, and is often successful in their job as a result.

Kinda fascinating. Here we are, usually dreaming about how one person could do multiple jobs. There they are, having multiple people do one job in the best (looking) way.

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hackable_sand 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nothing about that sound fake