last years falcon (crowdstrike specific conference) they for the first time every showed live the interviews of 3 north koreans trying to get a job in software engineering positions at some forture 500 companies. i was baffled at every 'security' question to validate the person is actually in the US gets glossed over like: "my ID is at my home right now, and im in my office so i don't have that with me".
I mean you see that here on HN right? People claiming that any arbitrary question is something they have no idea about, like the color of their front door.
I’m not sure I know what you mean—I’m not sure I’d want to discuss the specifics of my living environment here though. Would you have any examples handy?
If your resume says you live in NYC for example, and I do something like "Man, I went to NYC once and got stuck in traffic on that stupid highway that goes up and down the coast of Brooklyn, what was the name of that thing?" and they respond with I-278, that would raise red flags. I have never heard of anyone calling the I-278 anything but the BQE.
It's just like the bar scene in Inglorious Bastards, with the fingers. There are so many obvious tells you can have people divulge if they aren't actually telling the truth.
I had a candidate who said he lived in San Francisco, so I asked him what neighborhood, and he responded "Uh, by the Golden Gate Bridge." Cool.
Later I looked more closely at the resume and saw some more red flags, like, he had a degree from "CA State University" -- like, which of the 23 CSUs bro?
We did have a couple fake people make it to the final round, the last one was cheating and still bombing -- I sent a picture to the guy who did the second-round interview like "is this the Jason Smith you interviewed?" and he said "Lol, no"
> If your resume says you live in NYC for example, and I do something like "Man, I went to NYC once and got stuck in traffic on that stupid highway that goes up and down the coast of Brooklyn, what was the name of that thing?" and they respond with I-278, that would raise red flags. I have never heard of anyone calling the I-278 anything but the BQE.
A counterstory: When my former boss started at the company, for the first years [!] he only "knew" very specific places (office, appartment, and one or two places associated with intensely practiced hobbies of him) in the city where the company is located, and basically lived inside the bubbles associated with these places and their surroundings.
Thus, to me it is very plausible that even if you lived in a city for many years, it is very easy to live in very isolated bubbles, and have barely any contact to people and their habits outside these bubbles.
> "Man, I went to NYC once and got stuck in traffic on that stupid highway that goes up and down the coast of Brooklyn, what was the name of that thing?"
I lived in NYC for a year and I have no clue. My answer would be probably something along the line of "Haha! Yeah. Traffic is terrible in the city... or so do my friends with cars say. I for one take the subway everywhere, so no clue what you are talking about. But sounds like a pain! Hope you were not delayed too long."
> It's just like the bar scene in Inglorious Bastards, with the fingers.
The problem is that's a work of fiction. These shibboleth tests work great in fiction where the author has full control over the whole universe. Work less well in reality where "universal" signals turn out to be a lot less universal. You will have a ton of false positives and a ton of false negatives.
I could answer questions about the lines I used, yes. Doesn’t mean that I studied the subway maps.
But my point is that the “everyone in X calls Y Z” kind of trivia is not reliable way to say if someone is in X. For example because not everyone in X is native to X. Also because many would use the proper and official name of the landmark in an interview setting.
