Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 281: Contractor is sus and too much job hopping?

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Zach asks, A few weeks ago, I interviewed and recommended we hire a contractor candidate, who I will call “Bob”. We hired “Bob”. Today was the first time I saw “Bob” since the interview, only “Bob” was not the person I interviewed. It seems “Bob” had someone else pretend to be him to pass the interview. What should I do? Thank you for doing this show, it’s amazing and I look forward to listen to it every week. I’m a software engineer with 3.5 years of experience and in those years I’ve worked at 5 different companies consecutively, increasing my salary by around 50~70% every time I change jobs. At this point I’m afraid that it looks really bad in my resume since the longest that I’ve been at one company is 1 year and 3 months but at the same time it is really tempting to keep growing my salary and benefits that easily. Does changing jobs every ~1 year have a negative effect on my employability in the long run?

it takes more than pressing the up arrow 20 times in your terminal to avoid retyping a four-letter command to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 281 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff that it takes like how to really undo all that stuff you automated in your workflow by typing the up arrow 20 times it's it's necessary but not sufficient to be a great engineer to hit up 20 times i've done this too i'm just like oh my gosh i know it's yeah i i got in a bad vim habit with that too like vim is the perfect editor because it gives you so much power to jump around and then i just hit j like 30 times

in a row exactly should i thank our patrons please do thank you so much to these folks who are contributing to our patreon such that we shout them out every single week thank you to andrew pollock an invisible iframe click jacking attack trans rights ian walter aaron duna kashokton ohio cameron hall patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org roman denisov fizzbuzz influencer oladapo fadie karen spainson will angel ragnar harrison nick hathaway travis sanders dennis bogdanov braden canes john grant i bought winrar nick cantar philip john basile and bites of wisdom with a y thank you so much do you think the person who wrote i bought winrar just bought a license of winrar or the whole company oh yeah

maybe this is a bigger flex than we thought if it's i acquired winrar then i feel like i would i would know it was the company so i acquired winrar as a badge of honor but i bought winrar is a badge of shame why you paid for a winrar license i don't know you gotta support whoever it is oh yeah i guess i forget sometimes that i'm a huge cheapskate and just always try the free stuff for as long as i can winrar develop it's one person eugene rochelle sorry eugene maybe not oh now i've been seeing conflicting google things and i'm moving on okay do you want to read our first question dave oh let's do it this comes from oh this comes from a non-anonymous listener named zach once in a while we got to double check make sure that's

actually are we good to say zach yeah we're good okay all right thank you i don't ever want some of these questions they just people don't want to i would say like 90 of the questions that come in are anonymous right anyway not zach zach is confident okay zach says a few weeks ago i interviewed and recommended we hire a contractor candidate who i will call bob we hired bob and by the way bob is in air quotes and the reason will become clear in just a minute we hired bob today was the first time i saw bob since the interview only bob was not the person i interviewed it seems bob had someone else pretend to be him to pass the interview what should i do wow i was thinking about this and in the zoom world it feels like it'd be pretty easy it'd be

much easier to pay someone to attend meetings for you yes camera but then you could also just turn your own camera off and attend so maybe the incentive isn't there yeah that's wild this is amazing i guess there's a pretty strong incentive to do interview fraud in the world um with salaries as high as they are you know nowadays yeah but i've seen surprisingly little of it i've seen one instance of plagiarism but i haven't been just exhaustively checking so maybe there's more i just haven't seen um and that's that's the only thing i've seen where it felt like someone was out and out trying to deceive us in the interview process by copying someone else's code that solved a problem yeah not saying this they use someone else's code the most i've only

seen i've seen two instances of severe like obvious fraud one was a video interview where the interviewer clearly had someone directly off camera feeding answers to them and actually no oh it was even wilder than that they were lip-syncing the answers were being what yes i'm this memory is all coming back this was this was like five or six years ago and someone was lip-syncing this is like a pre-recorded video session someone was lip-syncing off camera and the the candidate the alleged candidate a couple of times had to elbow the other person because they were leaning into frame it's like go scoot over it was incredible so that was one but then i did i did actually have a phone screen that i called the candidate and i could hear it

was like a a lot of muting so like when the candidate wasn't speaking they would be on mute which is fine except there was a lot of really long mutes where i would ask a question and then it would be like a 10 second pause and i'd be like hello hello and then they would answer and then i would ask a follow a quick follow-up question like oh did you mean this and it was like 10 more seconds on mute and then an answer so that was the other one did you tell them they were caught i did not i played it really cool i just went with it and said and then i you know when I submitted my recommendation to the recruiter, I just said, Hey, we're not going to proceed. And I said, and I suspect there was fraud involved. And I'm like, you do with that

what you want. Yeah. Like I value professionalism in interviews a lot. So like, even if someone is clearly abusing the system or trying to be fraudulent, I still try to play it really cool and professional and treat them with a lot of respect because guess what? Like there's a chance that I I'm wrong, you know? And it would be super rude to call someone out if you turn out to be wrong i mean oh my gosh can you imagine so i just go with it yeah and then in the end i just say no well what do we do about bob ask fake bob a question only real bob would know like what i don't know what did we talk about in the interview what color was the shirt i was wearing yeah that i would have i would fail that

yeah me too so hard someone tried that with me though bob had someone else pretend to be him to pass the interview what if okay you need to pull an invasion of the body snatchers type thing here and just start replacing people in the in the office one by one with not the same person but claim it's the same person doing the same job okay so yeah you just start with yourself find another air quotes zach different heights different body shape different hair color different skill set and they're just like they come in one day and they're they're zach they're here to work with bob just like before but and then what they'll be so ashamed by the implicit insult in that we found you out that

they'll just leave with their own accord that's like the ultimate passive-aggressive response as passive-aggressive as you could possibly be and you have to replace everyone that works there with people who don't know how to do the job exactly like it's it's like pretty expensive It's very expensive. You've sacrificed the careers and life of this entire company. But boy, did you deliver a message. Part of me wants to say, just go talk to them and say, hey, you're not the person we interviewed. What's going on? But what you said earlier about not being 100% sure is sticking in my brain too. Like, what if you're wrong?

Right. So how do we decide right and wrong in situations where we think a, I don't want to say the word crime, but you know, like a crime may have taken place. A bamboozle. What do we do? You have to hold a court. Ah, you get a jury. With a fake judge. Yes. A judge who is not an actual judge, but instead a television performer. Exactly. Perfect. Are you, are you referring to the podcast? I think you're referring to. Oh no, I'm talking about judge judy oh even better and and all the others like her i'm pretty sure they're all not real judges right uh geez i don't know probably not i mean i know the show's not a real it's not a well it's not a government endorsed court i mean it is the bailiffs do not come and haul

the losers off to prison yeah exactly yeah okay so hold hold a court uh-huh how do you select to the judge well you've now thought more about this problem than i have i mean you could do it as a team building activity instead of playing like scrabble over zoom you you hold a trial for sus bob bob the sustractor i'm just thinking through this and if you wanted to prove it how would you do that? Because it's not like they have to submit ID when they interview, right? Like to pay them money, you have to have some kind of documentation. But if they just show up to an interview, it's not most likely you did not scan the driver's license of the person who

you interviewed. Yeah, yeah, very likely. And you know, it's interesting, I would hate to live in a world where we have to do this. But in many other similar scenarios, they have people actually present their government issued ID, photo ID during the interview process to prove they are who they say they are. And that's the solution, but... I think you're thinking about this all wrong. Okay. It's a different Bob. Let's accept that. Do you like this Bob better? Yeah. Maybe keep this one. They showed some moxie. Thinking outside the box. Yeah. This Bob is a real go getter. Imagine what they're going to do with your code base. Imagine who they will bring in to pretend to do their own work for your code base exactly this might be the most productive

hire you've ever had all right more more alternative suggestions you now have some pretty solid blackmail material about bob oh yeah and it'll be pretty easy to get your pull requests that's right reviewed let's just listen let's just say bob would be very willing to bob i'm gonna need a plus one on this pr yeah it's a plus one yeah or else or else i'm gonna tell the world your secret yeah oh right away here's your plus one it's like wait who are you it's like a third person that's actually interesting what's it's gonna get this could be a new person every week but then okay i've watched enough procedural crime shows to know what happens next okay now you're giving bob power over you right because if if you later go

to say bob is an imposter then bob can say but zach used this knowledge to to blackmail me and you know you're kind of in a standoff um usually someone dies that's how that gets resolved okay in the tv shows i see so you're saying don't go down the blackmail route yeah probably not okay i would just go tell my boss if i'm trying to answer this seriously um i would still have a teeny tiny little voice in the back of my head saying maybe you're wrong and this is gonna yeah really offend this person and then an even tinier voice saying maybe you're right but you will lose this argument right but i don't know it seems pretty clear and and if someone did this if someone came to me and said hey the person who showed up is not who i interviewed

i would believe them i think because i work with them and know them and it would be really weird for them to do that without it being true i'm just imagining this scenario where you you you accuse bob and then bob provides irrefutable evidence that bob was indeed the person so then your next question to the soft skills engineering podcast is i've realized i can't remember faces from one week to the next what do i do well i am living proof that you can make it 34 years through life without remembering faces yeah jameson and i've never actually seen each other in person we're in the metaverse already bob had someone else pretend to be him to pass the interview yeah i don't know just i think you just gotta out him really you would do that yeah

you wouldn't uh i guess it depends on who i am in this scenario if i'm boss's bob boss's bob if i'm bob's boss okay so you're bob got it boss's bob is bob the boss is Bob. If I'm Bob's boss, I'm going to definitely ask the question. If I notice like, Bob, I'm a little concerned that the person who interviewed isn't you. Here's a screenshot from the zoom call. It doesn't look like you. I would do that. But if I'm like a coworker of Bob, I don't know. Although I got to say, you really wouldn't say anything. It's there's, there's just that twinge of doubt that I'm wrong. Like if I'm a, if I'm a hundred percent certain because i mean remember this is like video calls you know things i i interview

so many people i would not i would not be surprised if i just remembered the wrong face you know yeah i don't know yeah and and this is a hard thing to verify without letting bob know that you you told someone exactly that this is happening like the only way to check is going to be someone talks to Bob and say hey did you pay someone else to interview for you how's that going to go though like a person who's willing to fraudulently put a proxy in for their interview is probably prepared for that question no that was me oh man it's gonna make your manager's life so horrible I know it's gonna be awful for a little while but i'll tell you like if i had irrefutable evidence and i knew for sure this

wasn't the right person i would absolutely move to fire them because it's like this is major fraud you've totally misrepresented yourself that does not fly on any of my teams it's just that first part can i actually feel 100 confident that it's wrong that it's them yeah so that's my answer interesting meanwhile you've got a lot i mean it's gonna be a lot of fun be like hey bob remember that story we talked about remember that story we talked about in your interview oh man that was great remember that time you you told us about how you climbed mount kilimanjaro and you almost died with the error in the altitude oh man tell us more about that bob remember that time you said that you would come in and juggle for all of us on your second day at work in the interview remember

that well i just happen to have these juggling clubs i okay i can also see someone admiring the grift and saying it's it's bold i like it but i don't know this is i would suspect that the person would do this because they wouldn't be able to pass the interview because they don't have the skills to do the job so selfishly if i'm a colleague i don't really i want to have to deal with that on the other hand if they lack the skills to do the job that'll become pretty apparent pretty fast and you could make a move to terminate on those grounds yeah especially if it's a contractor you know in the u.s letting go of a full-time or of an employee is a lot more challenging you know a lot of paperwork a lot of legal requirement but a contractor you can say

okay your contract is over depending on the terms though i mean what was signed yeah and they're new here so they don't know how it works so you could just say every week we just pick someone at random to end their contract. And I'm sorry. I know it's only been a week, but you lost. But that's you this week and we don't question the dice.

Okay. Have we answered the question? I think so. This is a wild one. Good luck. Look, I would love... We ask this all the time, but in this case,

Zach, will you please let us know how this goes? I want like a weekly status report. Yeah. I want to meet Bob. Either of them. Yeah, either one. Okay.

should i read the next question go for it thank you for doing the show it's amazing and i look forward to listen to it every week i thank you from an anonymous listener so it could be me i could be complimenting myself i am a software engineer with three and a half years of experience and in those years i've worked at five different companies consecutively increasing my salary by around 50 to 70 percent every time i change jobs wow at this point i'm afraid that it looks really bad in my resume since the longest i've been at one company is one year and three months but at the same time it's really tempting to keep growing my salary and benefits that easily does changing jobs every one year have a negative effect on my employability in the long run okay so

i'm going to do a little math here yeah that's what i was just doing so three and a half years five jobs one of those was one and a quarter years so that means you've done on average one job four jobs in a row that were six months long wow that's a lot of job changing kind of and then the other thing i want you to do math on so i don't have to do it on air in front of people is 50 to 75 percent or 70 salary increase every time yes so even if you start out pretty underpaid it feels like that would after four job switches that would be very highly compensated and it would be hard to get a huge bump again yeah so i'm doing some math on that one that's that can't be right I'm just waiting.

So, okay. Well, I'm going to go with the lowest. I'm going to assume 50% increase every time because the listener said the range was 50% to 70%. Let's say you start at the lowest starting salary I've heard of for a new developer in the U.S. of like $40,000. That would be $200,000 a year. I'm questioning that number. What did you say? The starting salary was $50,000?

$40,000 starting. 50% raise four times. That's $200,000. yeah i mean someone's probably it's it's possible to get 200 grand a year with three and a half years of experience probably in the right circumstances you must be amazing though if you do yeah and and you also started out very very underpaid right both of those yeah and if you started out more moderately paid and got the like i say a 60 raised four times now we're talking 400 000 a year so congrats to you is all i can say way to go yeah was it worth it yes you

did it now hold on to that salary for as long as you can yeah the same time it's really tempting to keep growing my salary benefits i don't think they'll keep growing that easily yeah salary growth in my experience is the the most rapid at the beginning of the career right then it seems to level out a little bit so i would be shocked if you can change jobs several more times and get that big of a raise each time yeah you'll you'll top out because what'll happen is you'll start to encounter companies who will interview you and you'll pass the interview and then you'll talk about salary and you'll tell them i want another 50 raise and they'll say well that would mean you make more than the cto so we're not going to do that yeah yeah i mean i guess if you're going to

do this you really need to know salary info up front yeah but you're probably you're probably paid just about as high as one can be paid at three and a half years of experience yeah that kind of numbers changing jobs the question they ask at the end is just changing jobs every one year have a negative effect on my employability in the long run? Not in today's market. Yeah. If I saw someone with three and a half years of experience and they change jobs every six months and then had one longer stint, I would assume they will probably be here between six months and a year. And I don't think I'd be super excited about hiring that person, but someone would be. Oh yeah, absolutely. Someone will hire this person. Absolutely. Maybe they have a really

unique and specialized skill set right like maybe they can demand a lot because there's some some attribute about them i don't know trying to think of ways this makes sense at all this doesn't make any sense to me yeah it's totally totally doable though and i i will think so now in order to actually answer the question of will this hurt me in the long run we do have to predict the future a little bit and i would predict that probably if you keep doing this for the next i don't know let's say five more years where you have now 10 now you have like 15 jobs under your belt i would say yes that will start to hurt you because what it will do is it will close doors to companies that are looking for long-term relationships with you and it will only retain

doors open for companies who are willing to do short engagements and it might even put you into the world of freelancing or into contracting of some kind and that might be okay yeah that's what i was just thinking but yeah it's more like a consulting right thing than a employee and that's what i found so i've interviewed a lot of people over the last year well over the last 20 years but in particular the last year and what i have found is that there definitely is this caricature of developer who jumps around every six months and they look an awful lot like contractors and oftentimes they come to me through agencies staffing agencies who want to place them and and most of the time i say no we're looking for someone who can be with us for a little bit longer

and who has a proven track record of doing so not only because i want them to stick around but also because when you start to get that many years of experience, but the experience, so here's what ends up happening. You end up having a salary that says I've been working for five, 10 years, but you have the same experience repeated over and over and over. So even though you have 10 years of experience on paper, you actually have like maybe one to two years of actual experience because you haven't lived with the effects of your decisions. And we've talked about this before on other episodes, right? Because it actually makes sense to quit your job that much. So for me and my teams the way the kinds of teams that i have developed a specialty for leading and working

on that doesn't work for us you know we need people who have been around they've made important big decisions and then they've lived with those for a couple of years and they've learned right but you can't really learn in six months you know what a decision will do in two years yeah i wonder if there's also a like there are people who are kind of serial entrepreneurs or something and they just kind of start a new thing pretty regularly maybe you could pitch it that way but if i were hiring i would try to hire someone else yeah and like good news is you did it right it worked yeah yeah you hopped jobs a bunch got giant pay bumps every time it might be beneficial to to prove that you can hack it in the long run at one place where you yeah like you said your decisions

catch up to you right can't outrun them that's right that's right so in other words your strategy worked for now it got you to this point and now you're gonna have to pivot strategies probably Although today's market, who knows? It's so wild out there right now. Yeah, everything comes with an asterisk. Yeah. Have we answered this question? Let me reread the actual question here.

Will this have a negative effect on my employability in the long run? I would say the answer to that question is no. If you stop now and start putting in some longer tenures at your current company, then it will have no negative effect. nobody nobody looks at a resume where the first three and a half years have four or five jobs hopping every few months and thinks anything of it these days for developers yeah given that there are longer periods after that exactly yes good point so i think you're i think you'll be fine yeah i just i didn't say this explicitly but another danger if you look at a resume and see

a bunch of short stints is did this person get fired right like do they keep flaming out at all these jobs so that's another like second asterisk right like if you have a good story for each one yeah the story is someone paid me 50 more to go to this other job what would you do that's a pretty good story yeah yeah okay question answered all right what can people do if they would like their own questions go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button and we just want to take a moment and say thank you from the bottom of my gigantic question backlog thank you we uh from the bottom of our backlogs thank you there are so many questions coming in nowadays and we are just really appreciative we love reading your questions and you keep the show interesting and

fun so thank you very much thank you thank you we'll catch you next week