I love when cheaters fail to prosper.
Back when I still used Reddit, so many posts were just CS students trying to get other Redditors to do their homework for them. I don’t think I ever came across any technical interview cheaters, but I’m sure there were some.
I remember one interview I had with a candidate. It was for a database analyst position that required SQL.
The first round was typically a phone screen where I chat with the candidate, get to know them a bit.
Second round was code review. I asked them to do a SQL query that did x.
The queries were simple. The goal was to get the candidate to walk through the query.
I had one candid that, over screen share, wrote the query flawlessly. Then I asked them to explain what it was doing. The candidate froze.
I can get understand getting nervous so I moved onto an insert statement. I had them write one and then do another without using certain terms (often leading to a sub query).
Again, flawless. I asked what situations would you use one over the other.
Again, they froze. I started to get suspicious that they were cheating and had them, instead of typing the answer, say the answer. When they couldn’t, I knew enough that it wasn’t going to work.
I wonder why people do this. You wouldn’t apply to a welding job if you can’t weld. Why so many people apply to programming positions if they can’t actually code (or a database analyst position without knowing SQL)?
Some people seem to think you can just Google stuff or more recently use AI to do the coding, not knowing that being a dev is mostly about knowing what to search and that being a dev isn’t just coding.
I mean, Google and AI can be really helpful, but you should be able to do stuff without it. Google won’t help you if you have a problem with a customer/company specific problem that requires knowledge about the whole technical infrastructure.
atleast
Okay, you illiterate fuck, this I do for the planet and not for you.
Chill out. They may be German or something where shit like that is concatenated into one word.
At least -> zu mindest -> zumindest
Checks out, +Comment+
What would happen to him if he where to miraculously pass the interview?
I used to make jokes to juniors/interns like the above. Then I watched a junior start typing my joke in terminal, and I freaked out and stopped.
Sometimes I forget these jokes go over the heads of people.
And this is exactly why I don’t make those jokes to people unless I know very well they’ll get it
I’ve seen frustrated senior start writing this. Sometimes it’s just a different state of mind that pushes us over critical thinking edge into the void.
The same brain state that leads to chocolate milk mashed potatoes
Do I have to worry that I understand to what you’re referring to?
Did they execute the command on localhost or the remote? Because hey if they had privileges to root-nuke the target that’s gotta count for something right? Lmao
The way this reads I think the company did not actually provide a good sandboxed environemt. So when they
rm -rf /'d the thing they actually deleted a lot of stuff the recruiters still needed (likely the pentest environments for other candidates). Because imo that’s the only reason I can think of to just outright ban a candidate from applying for any other role at the company.You should ban anyone who tries this regardless of the outcome. There is always a small chance they did it on purpose trying to cause damage. There is no benefit by giving them another chance, you just riks giving them the possibility of doing more damage. If the thing was a mistake, the person will learn from it and find another job.
If the task would have been to find general security risks this would have counted. I mean, he did some serious harm, but he was able to find a security issue.
I think there is kind of an assumption that the scenario is “outside host gains privileged access” so there’s not really a security issue with some attacker deleting root on their own box.
If it has been done properly you’re right. If this also affected the host machine it is a security issue.
