Still in India. And I will not learn a single new thing if I go back to university, unless it's a good one, and I'll have to compete with more than 1 million students to get into one of those and there are maybe 15-30k vacancies per year. In the rest of them, the lecturers just dictate what you need to cram into your brain and vomit it out on the answer sheet and that's it. Lecture done.
Still in India. The layoffs and the recent batch of fresh graduates have really made it impossible to get a job as companies can basically take their pick. Immediate joiners, low salary expectations, work experience from FAANG like companies. And then there's the great vanishing of VC money as interest rates have been raised sharply
I don't want to lie to get a job. And companies do verify. Maybe not small startups, but everyone else does. And those small startups will start verifying when they grow.
The problem was that he was terrible at problem solving. He failed at simple logical problems like flattening a nested json array, cleaning data before running operations on it, etc. And probing further on his memorized answers, he couldn't explain anything. He'd just repeat the same thing but change voice of the sentence (active/passive)
I dislike cheating. I've taken ~50 interviews and in 90% of them cheated:
a) I could hear their keyboard clacking when they googled the answer
b) they'd stall with "umm" and "ooo" while their friend googles the answer and shows it to them
c) (the best one) they'd memorize everything from leetcode style solutions and definitions to mathematics MCQs.
In my country, you're the odd one out if you have an exam or an interview and you don't prepare for cheating. It's a cultural expectation among peers to cheat to get ahead.
To work around this, I follow the advice I've read here on HN:
1) Ask them about their programming experience. Bugs they ran into, solutions they thought of, implementation of those solutions etc.
2) take a problem I faced in my work and present it to them and observe how they navigate the problem to reach a solution. They don't have to solve it, I just see their approach
3) just talk to them while asking basic language syntax and definitions. Again, the goal here is to check if they've memorized the answers or are they speaking from experience. If the answer is a regurgitation of some interview prep website, probe deeper to see if they know what they're saying.
The downside of this approach is, of course, time. It takes 40 minutes to an hour for each of these interviews. Time that sometimes I don't have and I have to move some stuff around to accommodate, work late to cover up or delegate. This approach has worked for me so far. I've hired 5 people in my team and all of them have been good hires.