Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 49: Candidate Plagiarism and a Tightwad Employer

Episode Date: February 28, 2017

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: What do I do if I suspect my co-worker plagiarized my homework assignment in their own interview? My employer is making me provide my own laptop. Is this normal? We mention The Joel Test. Also remember to tweet about the show for endorsements from Dave and Jamison for completely serious and relevant skills like doomsday-bunker-building and yodeling.

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, episode 49. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I actually, just for a brief moment, forgot the name of the podcast right there. I panicked. I thought you were just doing a dramatic pause. This is...

Oh. the gears were turning what am i doing well they turned quickly oh how's it going uh it's going so well i have oatmeal and i have blueberries and that's all i need in life so you really you should have used that in your intro oh that's true i'm like an oatmeal blueberry haver or something it feels like i'm writing java like everything has to be a noun yes oh i'm exactly i had that exact thought this week as i was writing java i was like why do i always name things with nouns and then every noun has a verb it's like you have to name everything twice wait a minute wait a minute that was not soft yes we've digressed should we get into our

questions i think we should just rescue us from our hard skills version we said we said technical things all right uh i will read the first one this one is from an anonymous listener i just started a new job about two months ago the hiring process included a homework assignment to be submitted on github we just hired a new engineer on my team who seems like a great person and they're learning very quickly however they almost exactly copied my interview homework assignment from my github account the code i have is licensed under mit so they're legally free to copy it but now i feel an obligation to say something the code homework is a relatively small portion of the interview process and they seem to be doing well at the company but the company obviously

wouldn't have hired them if they had known the truth i'm torn because i'm having trouble seeing the upside of saying anything but no problem seeing the downsides is this something i should report ethically that is a great question oh also i'm a huge fan of the show you guys are awesome keep it up thank you yeah thank you that part is easier to respond to than the question yes this is a hard question let me just start by saying thank goodness you licensed your homework code i mean what would happen if you didn't license it if you didn't license it then it's easier because then they they just go to jail right they go to programmer jail oh you should have had like an end user license agreement with which specifically prohibits using this code

for purposes of plagiarizing you for a job have you seen that license that is basically if we're ever in a disaster and you're around and you have the ability to save me you have to save me no i haven't i haven't seen that yeah i i don't know how legal that is but that is a license you can use on your code they say open source doesn't pay well it just saved my life um yeah that's a great question i have a i have a story about this actually also yeah a few jobs ago we had a pretty lucrative referral bonus system where you could make quite a quite a decent amount of money if you referred someone and they got hired um it was kind of too much money you know where and you're about to learn why

so basically i referred a friend who i knew was going to be really good and he was by the way he turned out to be really great on the job and i coached him about the interview process like i prepared him for the phone screen i told him here's some of the stuff you'll probably get asked and he was well prepared he did a really good job and then one of my co-workers found out later that like he told he's like oh yeah dave told me that you'd ask me all this stuff and one of my co-workers found out and he literally told me that it was shameful what i had done by email and i was he was right it totally was i just got so i got so fixated on the referral bonus and um and i knew that he would do a good job that i just didn't want the chances

of a faulty interview process shooting it down you know but it was wrong what i did was wrong it was definitely ethically out of bounds and he called me on it if okay if you didn't have a referral bonus do you think it would have still been ethically out of bounds is it the the financial motivation that made it shady oh man i don't know because you you said you knew he was going to be a great engineer on the team and it turned out he was so if if it's like dave skirted the interview process to get a paycheck that that does seem weird but if it's like dave wants to make sure we hire this really awesome person and they don't get caught up in the sometimes noisy interview process that can give false negatives i think

the short question you're asking is do the ends justify the means like if i had to murder the phone screener yeah there's there's a trolley and on one side of the tracks there's a referral bonus on the other side there's i think i think the candidate would be on the other side and you have to pull the lever i don't know but i don't i don't ethics good obviously like why are you asking me what's ethical after that story jeez i you seem harder on yourself than i would be on yourself in that situation because i feel like i feel like i know you well enough to think that the financial thing was probably a small part of it but mostly it was like you wanted to make sure that this guy made it through the interview process okay because you knew you knew he would do well you mean even

after i just told you that i was like heavily influenced by this financial thing you're like oh i'm sure it was the the goodness in your heart yeah okay maybe i'll believe you when you say you were a scumbag i rest my case how does this relate back to to the question asker it's it's just kind of like well so here we have things can happen in interview processes right yeah that's true but here we have a situation where the employer created an incentive system that uh you know you want to get the job and the information to get the job is basically one google search away and someone did that google search and got the job that's how i see this yeah the real question is how good are you at googling

yes and they've purposefully seeded the internet with answers to a question maybe maybe they got the job because they exactly copied the code is what yeah who are you to say that they didn't get maybe a bigger offer than you did because not only did they complete the assignment, but they did it in record time by copying you. Oh, geez. Oh, man. This has gone into silly land.

Yeah. But now you're faced with the dilemma, right? Like, do you report this person or not? To me, I can totally understand the desire to report the person because an injustice has occurred. And I feel the same thing. In Utah, there's this stupid habit that drivers have where there's a left turn light it turns red and then like 10 other cars go and turn left after the

light turns red and in that moment i want them to be hit by a train like all of them it's an injustice in the world like there's not a train in the intersection i just want one to drop from the sky and land on them to teach them a lesson like inception yeah and then i'm like oh like they have little kids in the car and people would die so probably not that but but i i just like feel it makes me mad that it's not right but like what what outcome are you looking for it feels weird to just say like this is wrong therefore i should report it because some some outcome is going to happen because of that because guess what there's a lot of wrong things that you are not reporting right i mean i don't know i it's like the cars i'm sure after

those cars drive through the intersection jameson like 30 seconds later you're like okay not even thinking about that anymore right yes i mean sometimes it's like a minute or two no it doesn't ruin my day two minutes if if i'm the first car in line i'll just like hold down my horn at them shake my fist at them and then you're good but then yeah then i'm good so in this case like yeah there's been there has been an injustice done and in the same way when someone makes an incorrect statement on social media you also have this choice where you can right the wrong or not or you can just walk away and never speak of it again so if the if the engineer that got hired through doing this shady thing is doing great and they have a successful career at the

company and do good work um you could say like it's fine you didn't need to say anything but maybe there's there's this concern that this this thing that they did reflects some underlying ethical issues that they'll have and they might go on to do some sketchy things at the company and so you you kind of feel the need to raise the red flag and say like hey be on the lookout do you think that's going on a little bit that's a good question because what would happen if six months from now they made some really unethical choices that undermined your company and now you're like oh i wish i had said something back when they were hired that's possible i'm talking myself into an impasse i'm just gonna wait for you to answer

and agree with you so i would say sit down with someone you trust who's completely disconnected from the situation like like us like didn't they already do that a good point sorry okay well so you step one is complete good job okay which you have done step two is say out loud the words that you would say to the people at your company and listen to your voice and and see how you sound do you sound like a slime bag does it sound like a productive conversation are you happy with where it's gonna go and i think that'll tell you a lot like are you really willing to report this and correct this injustice i mean there are a lot of bad things that could happen it could get back to

the person they could hate you uh the person could get fired and and it could just be like a one-time mistake that they made and then now they're out of a job or it could just like get filed away somewhere and i don't know that it seems weird because it's hard to predict what would happen later in the future based on that but yeah well or it could just be nothing i'm having a hard time seeing myself doing this i'm probably gonna let it go i think if they were doing fine at the company i would let it go yeah that's i would take the coward's way out and just say like well interview processes are weird anyways so so let's now take that to the worst case scenario so you sit on it for now and then six months later this person does

something really bad really harmful um now do you pull it out and say well you know six months ago i kind of swept this under the rug but i i would okay and then your boss is like why didn't you tell me this and then i would refer him to this episode it's well documented yeah i don't know it seemed like they were doing fine work uh i didn't see any other things and i wasn't sure how to handle it but i i have a hard time feeling like you would become the fall person in that case for for the the shady stuff that this other person did because you didn't report this thing earlier so here's one thing i would absolutely not do under any circumstances which would be go to the person the guilty the alleged criminal plagiarist and say i know something about you and your

interview process and as long as you stay on my good side i'll keep it to myself yeah i wouldn't want this information to get out you know what i mean hey you can eat that corn dog so dave's advice is do not commit extortion which is solid advice generally i'm usually in the anti-extortion camp just generally that's like that's where i land on most extortion issues i'm against it oh yeah firmly against well firmly depending on how big the referral bonus is i feel like this is the kind of thing that you either want to like tell to a manager hr person or or say nothing about like you might not want to just kind of gossip about it but i don't know there's they're just a bunch of shady stuff came out about a certain tech company over the weekend

yeah and i'm thinking like this kind of culture would there's shady stuff happening all the time and people either are ignoring it or pretending like it doesn't exist or making allowances for it and is this the first is this the first step towards something worse kind of thing yeah oh i don't know i mean this is this is a much smaller thing than then yeah unnamed tech company's issues but that's true yeah i i think i agree with you i just wouldn't say anything about it if if everything is going well and then if there's an issue i would maybe bring it up all right well question answered do nothing i feel like this is one of the trickier questions that has ever been asked so congratulations congratulations ethical quandary now worst

case scenario if you just really can't handle this situation situation you do have one other option that we haven't discussed what's that quit your job oh yeah just just walk away from the whole thing uh what would be the equivalent of that in cars turning left after the light has turned red is it like hit the eject button and like parachute away into the sky i was thinking press the teleport button and go to another dimension yeah okay yeah question answered we we have a much easier question next let's yes you want to read this one dave yeah i'll do this one so also from an anonymous listener it says i'm starting a new job in a few weeks which i'm really excited about however however i love that i've been told that i should bring my own laptop

to work on i've recently graduated from college and only have an old macbook the white one i like how he points out made of plastic not space age iodine wait what's the aluminum diode anodized yes sorry iodine is what they put in salt so you don't get goiters i guess you wouldn't get those too if your laptop was made out of it made out of salt okay uh this person has a white macbook that's the important thing a sizable amount of the work I'll be doing will be iOS development, which I know is a hard skill, but it means it has to be done on a Mac. And I would find that really difficult on such an old machine. I did ask about being provided a computer. However, there's that however, again, I really just need to read

the question. However, they only said I could opt for them to buy a new one. And for me to have it deducted from my monthly pay. I should have spoken up then. But at the time, I was just really excited to have a new job is this normal or are they being incredibly tight oh boy i mean i think i've read a lot of charles dickens novels and this kind of stuff happens all the time that's pretty normal right dystopian future future fiction where the workers have to buy all their equipment and they end up working to pay off the debts to the employers yeah yeah i mean yeah there's There's a large body of literature in which this is normal, like the Muppet Christmas Carol. I was going to say, you should probably go to your employer and ask them how much of a processing fee they're going to charge you every time they write you a paycheck, too.

Like, oh, yeah, we told you we were going to pay you X, but there is a 10% processing fee. A convenience. It's a convenience fee. it's customary to tip your manager for every ticket they assign you oh my gosh uh this is incredibly unusual yeah incredibly unusual even in the most cash strapped startups that i've ever seen they still will offer to buy your equipment yeah i wonder if are they like the only company hiring in a market or something or i feel like tech is is so booming right now that companies are competing to lure developers there not like making them

pay their own laptop and i don't know even when i graduated from college in 2003 and i was one of 200 applicants for a job even in that upside down employer's market they still provided me a computer yeah this is real weird this is broken i mean are you the first employee or something then maybe yeah yeah like if this is someone setting up shop in their basement and they say look we just need you to bring your own computer until we get on our feet that's a really different story then yeah you'll be uh you'll be an engineer number 300 and bring your own laptop i feel like there are even legal reasons why companies want to provide hardware for you too and why you would want to use that because often you'll sign agreements about how they own the work that

you do on their equipment but like it's all in your equipment and so now there's this weird fuzzy line between stuff you do on your own and stuff you do for the company yeah and you're doing ios development like does that just mean they can't hire anyone that doesn't own a macbook already no no they can hire them and then they will deduct the cost of the macbook from oh that's true yeah they'll see there's a nice bow on that problem it's all wrapped they'll take care of the problem which was i mean are they gonna pick it up for you at least or i don't know and are they charging you interest on your laptop payback loan and you're gonna have to pay for your own bus ticket to go to

the apple store and pick up your laptop it doesn't come with a charger that's extra the chargers are 300 dollars oh man yeah this is bizarre crazy this is totally unusual and it's to me as a giant red flag that they either don't have their act together or they have sketchiness inside deep inside of them well not that deep it's it's right there it's right on the surface and deep yeah all the way through so i almost wonder if this is okay this is maybe just me being paranoid but i wonder if this is even a real company is this just like a giant front for a for a long con it's like a money laundering thing yeah if if they say to you on your first day that it's going to be like six or seven weeks until you get your first paycheck i would i would really

just walk away yeah i'd be like this is not real i think i have more faith than you do than you in the ability of companies to just be generally crappy so i i would be surprised if it was a con but okay yeah just a crappy just kind of a crappy place yeah you're right i didn't mean to insinuate that it was a con but just that they might have a problem paying you oh okay that's what i'm more worried about so why don't we this is the the question asker's first job um and we've talked a little bit on the show about how sometimes your first job isn't the best uh and it's kind of your way of breaking into the market i feel like most people have stories about semi or or genuinely crappy first jobs yeah oh yeah i do how would you avoid this issue if you were in

this fresh graduate's shoes it's it's a lot easier to to be more senior in your career and feel like the tables have turned a little bit and you have a pick of jobs and you you can like bestow your favor on a company and descend from the clouds to go work there but if you're just like standing out in the corner with your hat out i can see how you just end up at the first place that or maybe it's the only place that offered you a job yeah yeah and and you also don't know what's normal and there's a million things that could be going on around you that are all very unusual and you just wouldn't know like it's the water you're swimming in for the first time how would you go about finding out well you could ask us yeah that's true no i i actually think this is really

hard to do you there are so many things you don't even know what to ask yeah you know like wait all the desks at your office aren't purple oh yeah i don't know like what's normal yeah i think you just kind of have to go through life and you get your first job and there's some crazy stuff that you think is normal and then you get your second job and go oh that was crazy okay so it sounds like the two answers to this question are yes this is weird but like broadly it's less weird that things are a little weird at your first job yeah is that what you're saying yeah and and if i were in your shoes i would go to your employer and say hey i'd really like to work something out where you buy my laptop and yeah i'll give it back to you when when i'm done working here

it's okay i'm not gonna steal it yeah oh man if you're doing ios development on a white macbook you will spend a lot of your time just staring at progress bars in xcode because those things are pretty old by now so it's it's in their interest to provide you with a faster computer and the the the time it will take for that to pay back to the company is is not that long so i feel like yeah yeah it's not even like a cost it's an investment to them they buy good hardware for their developers their developers are more productive and and they get more out of them hey jameson did you ever read way back in the day the joel list yes and one of the the things on the joel list i just found the date it's august of 2000 one of the things on the joel list is do

you use the best tools money can buy and there's there's 11 other items on the joel list but that's one of them maybe you could reference this send it over to your employer and say hey are you do you want to create a great environment for engineers because here's some things you should consider check out number nine the the joelist is a little out of date by now i feel like i think a lot of things on the joelist are just de facto standard now like do you use source control hopefully that's another thing to look out for but i wonder is there an updated one somewhere also did he name it after himself did he write the list and say this is called the joelist yes he did and i just i was having the same thought you were i was like wow well that's going on the

jameson list of things that make you kind of arrogant i guess it's not arrogant because he is super famous and i don't know it's just it's justifiable yeah that's a resource you can look at to see just a baseline of like things that are generally normal and accepted at tech companies we should make a joel list that's like one step down so instead of do you do you use the best tools money can buy, it would be something like, do you use pretty decent tools that your employer buys? I thought you were going to say we should make like the anti-joel list, like the Scrooge list or something. Do you deduct the cost of your employee, of your employees laptops from their salary? That's a great idea. Yeah. I think this question has been answered. Yep. It's really

weird they're incredibly tight if they're a super early stage startup that's fine maybe it might be that they're just i think again this is like a culture thing that's normal among tech companies but there's there are lots of companies that do software that aren't like newer tech companies or haven't adopted the newer tech culture that's true it's possible they're just like a 50 year old company and that's just kind of how things worked back in the day and they've never never change stuff and and don't forget that computers are really cheap compared to paying an engineer um even a even the low end of the engineering salary a decent computer is going to be like five to ten percent of their salary yeah so it's not like you're asking them to really sacrifice

ten percent of their salary it'd be a really nice computer yeah or a really bad salary but yeah it's it's a small chunk and i think i think you can make the case that it will be in their best interest to provide you with a computer because it will make you a better developer yep well question answered question answered hey jameson yeah uh where can people do go if they want to be our marketing department uh if they want to market for us yeah we actually have infinite openings for marketing interns and there's only one task that they do and that's tweet about the show and we will not buy you your own laptop just so you know you have that's pretty normal for marketing interns unfortunately it's all unpaid uh so if you want to be an unpaid marketing intern

for the podcast tweet about it we have past episodes at softskills.audio and you can listen to all those tweet about those too uh the twitter handle for the show is softskillseng ng and um we'd love to hear feedback on the show or just general like what's a cool thing you saw today that'd be nice too and that's another avenue that you can submit questions you can send them via direct message on twitter there's also a form on our website that you can give a little more detail or be completely anonymous if you would like uh and that's that's how we collect all the questions thank you for sending all those in and thank you to the people that have said nice stuff about the show we really appreciate that and as as a huge incentive to you if you tweet

about the show we will endorse your linkedin profile for marketing oh yeah that's a great idea yeah we'll do it and everyone knows that's the gateway to success in life yeah linkedin endorsements um how about how about this i will make it one better we will endorse your linkedin profile for any made-up skill that you want it has to be like a made-up skill though it can't be like web development or something because that's that's boring yes but like yodeling is on the menu uh artisanal egg scrambling is a good one animal husbandry oh man yeah the possibilities are limitless they are literally anything besides like html5 all right well thanks for listening yep catch you next week