That couple in New England that was doing it probably made more money off of selling their story to Hollywood than they did off the lottery tickets.
The amount of time they were putting into their “scheme” sounds brutal. I think a lot of people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview instead of buying lottery tickets one at a time.
> people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview
My experience of that was that Google asked me to interview, I did, my recruiter congratulated me on passing the interviews and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the hiring cycle, and then at the end of the hiring cycle she informed me that, although I'd passed the interview, my interview performance was too poor to be considered for hiring.
1. Weeding out the people you surely don't want... that is it answers: does this candidate meet the minimum bar for working here?
2. Providing enough information about a candidate to give them a score... that is it answers: how good is this candidate?
You can "pass" an interview - that is the answer to question 1 is "yes, this person meets our qualifications", but fail in question 2 under conditions where there are more qualified candidates than there are positions. It's really common actually to wait until there are a few qualified candidates before making a hiring decision, rather than just hiring the first person that meets the minimum standards. This bit of hedging allows for making better teams from the available hiring pipeline (on average anyway).
I've never this at Google, but at my company, if you pass the technical screen you're offered to hiring managers. If they don't want you on your team because they want more leadership (or less leadership), or if there were 5 senior python roles and you were the 6th person to pass the interviews, you still won't get hired.
Unironically yes. Although it's arguably a win-win. Google constantly keeps its pipeline of candidates open which means that if you're looking for a job and you clear the resume bar, you'll get an interview. Meanwhile teams are constantly hiring so they'll want a steady stream of candidates.
The alternative would mean that unless your timing for a job search is perfect, you won't even get a foot in the door and teams within Google will also struggle to fill open positions since it would take a while to interview the candidate pool.
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People still line up for their purported incentives, despite these stories.
The reason why nerds nevertheless apply at MAANG companies is thus the same reason why "ordinary" people buy lottery tickets - nerds are not that different. :-)
The company changed mind on how many people it wants to hire during the interview process. Of course they wouldn't admit "I just got news from the higher-ups that we're not actually hiring because shit is on fire", so they came up with some lame excuse that puts the blame on the candidate. I solved the interview question for Uber, but then there was news that Uber stops hiring company-wide. I solved the interview questions for Microsoft, but then got feedback that I didn't.
You should try again, there's a lot of variation on interview performance. Also, Google is a bit unique in that they put a lot of emphasis on what your thought process is, compared to other FAANGs. If you just code a working solution and didn't ask enough questions, that might only get you a mediocre score.
> You should try again, there's a lot of variation on interview performance.
Read the comment again. This is not a story about interview performance. My interview performance didn't change after I completed the interview.
If Google doesn't want to hire you, they won't, and your interview performance is irrelevant enough that they feel free to revise it retroactively. Perhaps they aren't willing to state their actual reasons.
Studying is not a sensible approach to this problem. You would have to address something they actually cared about.
There are hundreds of teams and hiring managers in Google, and an almost infinite number of possible reasons why you weren't hired or why the HM changed their mind. Treating any large company like a monolith is not gonna help you get a job there...
Also, not sure what your recruiter was talking about - there's no concept of "passing" an interview at Google - you're rated on a scale from "strong do not hire" to "strong hire", and the folks doing the selection are provided that rating along with a ton of notes about the interviews.
My 2nd Google interview was a guy that played a lot of chess, and I never played chess, and all of his questions were about it, nothing to do with you know, coding, algorithms, problem solving, etc.
Was not offered a job. Mildly disappointing considering the other two interviews went pretty well.
They were making something like $20+ an hour each if I recall correctly. Better than working retail of course but he’d have been better off keeping his career longer.
And also availability bias. They've thought of a cool scheme, and not thought of anything else they'd want to do more, even if it might pay better. I think this is why some prices on ebay seem unusually low, many on ebay are probably paying themselves less than minimum wage.
Manufactured spend is a common arb. My favorite was when the US Mint had a free shipping deal and let you buy coins with credit cards. Someone figured out how to buy many $100k coins, wheel them into the bank, payoff his card and get free airline tickets for many years.
That story was made up. The U.S. Mint charges more than face value for coins purchased through its retail store. It also doesn't accept credit cards for large orders; like most government agencies it requires large payments to be made electronically through the EFTPS system.
The banks treated the dollar coin purchases as cash orders after being made aware of them (and the U.S. Mint soon changed to recording the purchases as cash advances themselves so it wasn't dependent on the banks). So, while the original story may have been that the guy thought he got away with an essentially free bunch of airline miles, in reality he got stuck with cash advance fees for several hundred thousand dollars of cash advances (assuming that part was true).
Plus, depositing several hundred thousands of dollars of cash with the bank would have triggered all sorts of mandatory reporting of the kind that usually ends up with the DEA getting involved. Kind of weird that nobody mentioned having to deal with a absolute shit ton of extra paperwork to make this "hack" viable.
But the little guy not getting away with the exploit doesn't make for a great story. It's like the infamous Hot Coffee story; people only share part of the story because they want to believe it but reality paints a very different picture. (In the Hot Coffee case, it's generally described as a the reason that tort reform is needed, but the reality is that the plaintiff suffered 3rd degree burns and only asked for $20k to cover her medical damages; McDs was the one that fought back and their own lawyers were responsible for accidentally proving that her damages were significantly higher than the amount she had asked for.)
By the U.S. Mint. The banks always had the leeway to recharacterize those transactions.
And given that we never heard about any of these jokers having to file reams of paperwork to get away with this hack or having long discussions with the DEA about money laundering, it's clear that the banks just treated these as cash advances like they clearly were.
>I think a lot of people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview instead of buying lottery tickets one at a time.
Bro, saying stuff like this is why everyone hates us.
The amount of time they were putting into their “scheme” sounds brutal. I think a lot of people here could have netted more money per hour by studying up to pass a FAANG interview instead of buying lottery tickets one at a time.