Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
Let me give you a perspective of why people might legitimately not want to do camera during interviews.<p>A little about me: I&#x27;ve started doing remote work 15 years ago - long, long before the modern remote push. I&#x27;ve been coding for 30 years; I started with 8 bit micros; I can probably work with any technology and any deep problem you throw at me; I&#x27;ve led and launched projects worth billions of dollars. I prefer to work remotely because I hate commuting and open plan.<p>I&#x27;ve started denying camera interviews for a while now. I still do voice, but no camera, for the following reasons:<p>1. It impacts not just my earnings, but whether I&#x27;ll be considered in the first place. There&#x27;s a lot of sexism and racism happening in tech.<p>Sexism: if you&#x27;re presenting as female, or presenting as male but don&#x27;t look like Jim Halpert from the office, you can get looked at differently, which happened to me. This applies to people who are older, people who have visible tattoos or piercings, people who have blue hair, scars, etc.<p>Racism: you only need to look at other replies here with people talking about how bad eg Indian developers are. This extends to people of other skin color as well. In Europe there is a huge amount of racism against white Europeans from eastern Europe and from the Balkans and Europeans from Latin countries; in Asia there is racism against people ethnically from other Asian countries; in America there&#x27;s racism against pretty much everyone; etc. This is endemic. One look at someone&#x27;s face can be enough to disqualify them at a company that has this problem.<p>Ageism doesn&#x27;t even need to be explained.<p>Based on the three points above, by demanding camera interviews you betray yourself as a company which doesn&#x27;t have the issue of systemic bias against minorities figured out yet.<p>Incidental information leaks: The background - the location where you are - is important as well. Is the person located in their bedroom with a single bed? Probably a flat share, pay them less, they&#x27;ll take it. Are they in their garden? Hmm, they are probably worth what they ask for. Is it dark outside whereas it&#x27;s light where you are? Uh oh, remote work with someone who&#x27;s not in your time zone! Better start worrying!<p>Especially the last one is egregious. Dev work is mostly solitary, asynchronous work; most of the time there&#x27;s a lot of overlap even between eastern Europe and west coast US which is plenty of time for meetings and pair programming if necessary. People who insist on such things are usually inexperienced with remote work. Misconceptions like these destroy opportunities that can work out very well otherwise. I&#x27;ve had people make comments about &quot;oh it&#x27;s light out over there&quot; many times in my career and it&#x27;s always lead to a no-hire.<p>2. Issues that remote work solves can be brought to light in an ugly manner. For example, maybe the person feels they are not attractive, and are just generally shy around people in person - something that a lot of technical people share; their performance in front of a camera will be worse. Being shy when physically around other people perfectly fine for remote work. Maybe the person has special needs. Maybe they have to use an oxygen tank, or are missing an eye, or teeth, or a hand, or are sitting in a wheel chair, or are obese. Maybe the tapestry on their wall falling off and they haven&#x27;t had money to fix it due to an economic downturn or because someone in the family had cancer so that&#x27;s where the money went. None of this is stuff that the employer needs to know - but they are things that none the less can impact the recruitment and later career by a lot.<p>3. I experience fewer of the issues brought up in 1 and 2 than most others; however, I still deny camera interviews to see what will happen. Being this worried about job applicant fraud betrays that you likely can&#x27;t afford it. Job applicant fraud is a little time off your hands and a little money as well. That fraudulent applicant wasted maybe 3 hours through interviews across people in your company, and maybe up to $10k wasted money. If you can&#x27;t factor this into your business, it means to me - an experienced developer who has plenty of choice - that you can&#x27;t afford me at all, and that working for you, should it happen, will be precarious. I&#x27;ll probably skip over you. It is my experience that the most resilient companies - and ones that are well established already - absolutely don&#x27;t care about seeing your face on camera.<p>Additional wasted time after the hire is mostly on your hands: either it&#x27;s a complete bait and switch (smart person interviewed, substituted by someone unsuited) - and that&#x27;s something you figure out on the first day - or it&#x27;s someone who&#x27;s never been good enough, and you weren&#x27;t a good enough interviewer to figure this out in the several hours you&#x27;ve spent with them; at that point you&#x27;ll probably take a few weeks to figure out that they&#x27;re not great at their job, but that&#x27;s on you.<p>--------<p>TLDR: a camera interview is purely a disadvantage to minorities and people who aren&#x27;t well off by leaking things that are for good reason illegal to ask about; a job interview where this is demanded or implied betrays the company is standing on a shaky foundation.