Beware the scammers posing as tech recruiters (Ep. 498)
As the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. But if you work in tech as an engineer, you have the unfortunate perspective of knowing all of the tiny details that have the potential to go wrong. Even when everything is going right, those edge cases can still feel haunting.
In today’s podcast episode, the home team and Jon Chan get together to laugh at themselves as they reflect on their fears of self-driving cars and share horror stories of recruiters promising job offers that turned out to be scam artists.
Episode notes:
Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true!
Jon, Cassidy, Ceora, Matt, and Ben reflect on whether they trust software to operate a vehicle.
Cassidy tells us that she once sat in a car that parked itself and screamed the entire time.
Matt brings us back to reality, reminding us that airplane flights have been automated for a while now.
Matt and Ben point out that in the medical technology space, robotic surgeons are so advanced that they have become more precise than human hands.
Shoutout to lifeboat badge winner GKG4 for a great answer to the question “how can I check if an array index is out of range?” which has been viewed 67,000 times.
Follow Jon, Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.
Tags: fake tech job ads, self driving cars
5 Comments
I ran into one of these today, he was trying to get me to take freelance gigs off upwork then send him the money
Aren’t they all scammers anyway?
Re: driverless cars
Check out the work of Edgar G. Daylight (this is his pen name.)
He has written about and researched many of the relevant issues, and has worked as a software engineer in the autonomous vehicles space.
There is good reason to believe that we may never achieve safe and reliable self-driving cars. There are many correctness and reliability issues; the story about the inability of the Tesla to judge the difference between a truckload of streetlamps and a streetlamp that is in actual use in the “real world” sounds hauntingly similar to some of the stories Professor Daylight has shared.
Here is his website:
https://dijkstrascry.com/about
A particular post by Edgar Daylight is helpful:
https://dijkstrascry.com/WittgensteinCarsTuring
One more, and I’m done:
This is a link to a more recent post in Daylight’s blog, lest you conclude that his concerns have been silenced/assuaged by recent breakthroughs:
https://dijkstrascry.com/node/173