“fake developer accounts” (for remote work, which is all we do) collecting paycheques until fired,

I remember reading a story on such an incident. But honestly, I thought it would be something extremely rare.
Because, how does someone get money without providing work? And if they are giving actual work, then does it really matter if they are doing it themselves or making a bot do it? (despite it possibly requiring much greater effort to make a bot do a person’s job well enough)

On the other hand, I see it being possible in case managing party doesn’t care about whether or not the work is being done, for a long enough time, but can’t the fake worker be caught and dismissed before the payment period in that case?
I mean, in my case, after working for the month, I have to submit a time-sheet and get it approved by the project manager and if they say that the work I have done doesn’t justify the time I state, they can simply refrain from paying up and ask me to reduce the claimed time (and still keep the work I have given them (ok this part would be illegal if they don’t pay me at all, but it’s not like I can prove that they used my work)).

spying

This seems more viable. Industrial espionage and what-not. No idea how many sectors are competitive enough for anyone to consider this, though.

And then comes the point of interviews. Either it would be that the person has enough domain knowledge to clear the interview, or they are somehow getting lucky and not having to clear the interview (??feels weird saying that in the comments section of a post showing how hard it is to even get to an interview).
I feel it difficult to understand how someone would be able to get anything more than an entry level job, when they don’t even care to work in the field. Some kind of master con-artist, maybe.

Don’t know if there’s a ready-made site for stuff like that, but it’s not hard to do.

Here’s a quick and dirty AI generated piece of trash code as a proof of concept:

# sankey_hiring_funnel_direct.py
# Requires: plotly
# Install: pip install plotly

import plotly.graph_objects as go

# Node labels (unique)
labels = [
    "Network",            # 0
    "Hiring.cafe",        # 1
    "Abandoned Lead",     # 2
    "Applied",            # 3
    "Rejected",           # 4
    "No Response",        # 5
    "Screener",           # 6
    "Rejected by Screen", # 7
    "Full Round",         # 8
    "Rejected by Panel",  # 9
    "Offer",              #10
    "Accepted",           #11
    "Declined"            #12
]

# Colors for the two source groups (consistent)
network_color = "rgba(31,119,180,0.8)"      # blue-ish
hiring_color  = "rgba(255,127,14,0.8)"      # orange-ish

sources = []
targets = []
values  = []
link_colors = []

def add_link(src_idx, tgt_idx, val, color):
    sources.append(src_idx)
    targets.append(tgt_idx)
    values.append(val)
    link_colors.append(color)

# Direct flows from Network and Hiring.cafe into Abandoned Lead and Applied
add_link(0, 2, 1, network_color)    # Network -> Abandoned Lead (1)
add_link(1, 2, 58, hiring_color)    # Hiring.cafe -> Abandoned Lead (58)
add_link(0, 3, 11, network_color)   # Network -> Applied (11)
add_link(1, 3, 70, hiring_color)    # Hiring.cafe -> Applied (70)

# Applied -> Rejected, No Response, Screener (split by original group)
add_link(3, 4, 5, network_color)    # Applied -> Rejected (network 5)
add_link(3, 4, 40, hiring_color)    # Applied -> Rejected (hiring 40)
add_link(3, 5, 3, network_color)    # Applied -> No Response (network 3)
add_link(3, 5, 15, hiring_color)    # Applied -> No Response (hiring 15)
add_link(3, 6, 4, network_color)    # Applied -> Screener (network 4)
add_link(3, 6, 15, hiring_color)    # Applied -> Screener (hiring 15)

# Screener -> Rejected by Screen, Full Round
add_link(6, 7, 1, network_color)    # Screener -> Rejected by Screen (network 1)
add_link(6, 7, 5, hiring_color)     # Screener -> Rejected by Screen (hiring 5)
add_link(6, 8, 3, network_color)    # Screener -> Full Round (network 3)
add_link(6, 8, 10, hiring_color)    # Screener -> Full Round (hiring 10)

# Full Round -> Rejected by Panel, Offer
add_link(8, 9, 1, network_color)    # Full Round -> Rejected by Panel (network 1)
add_link(8, 9, 7, hiring_color)     # Full Round -> Rejected by Panel (hiring 7)
add_link(8, 10, 2, network_color)   # Full Round -> Offer (network 2)
add_link(8, 10, 3, hiring_color)    # Full Round -> Offer (hiring 3)

# Offer -> Accepted, Declined
add_link(10, 11, 1, network_color)  # Offer -> Accepted (network 1)
add_link(10, 12, 1, network_color)  # Offer -> Declined (network 1)
add_link(10, 12, 3, hiring_color)   # Offer -> Declined (hiring 3)

# Sanity check
assert len(sources) == len(targets) == len(values) == len(link_colors)

# Node colors (visual guidance)
node_colors = [
    "rgba(31,119,180,0.9)",   # Network
    "rgba(255,127,14,0.9)",   # Hiring.cafe
    "rgba(220,220,220,0.9)",  # Abandoned Lead
    "rgba(200,200,200,0.9)",  # Applied
    "rgba(220,180,180,0.9)",  # Rejected
    "rgba(200,200,220,0.9)",  # No Response
    "rgba(200,220,200,0.9)",  # Screener
    "rgba(255,200,200,0.9)",  # Rejected by Screen
    "rgba(210,210,255,0.9)",  # Full Round
    "rgba(240,200,220,0.9)",  # Rejected by Panel
    "rgba(200,255,200,0.9)",  # Offer
    "rgba(140,255,140,0.9)",  # Accepted
    "rgba(255,140,140,0.9)"   # Declined
]

fig = go.Figure(data=[go.Sankey(
    node=dict(
        pad=18,
        thickness=18,
        line=dict(color="black", width=0.5),
        label=labels,
        color=node_colors
    ),
    link=dict(
        source=sources,
        target=targets,
        value=values,
        color=link_colors,
        hovertemplate='%{source.label} → %{target.label}: %{value}<extra></extra>'
    )
)])

fig.update_layout(
    title_text="Hiring funnel Sankey — direct source flows (no Leads node)",
    font_size=12,
    height=700,
    margin=dict(l=20, r=20, t=60, b=20)
)

fig.show()

# To save as interactive HTML:
# fig.write_html("sankey_hiring_funnel_direct.html", include_plotlyjs='cdn')

Couldn’t be bothered to write this by hand for just an online comment. There’s enough that can be improved with this, but I think it’s ok to show how it can be done quite easily.

Been doing it this way for 12 years.

you can guess from this.

Last time was this year.

To be fair, I only worked at small/medium companies ( <100 people ) and a quarter of the time I had a contact there from some networking event.

Oh yes.

As the old joke goes:

“Well, we don’t want our future employee to be unlucky… *grabs half of the printed applications and tosses them in the trash*”

My friend who works in marketing usually try to find out the hiring manager and also emailed them directly while also providing something similar to the commenter above (3-month marketing and content plan instead of a sample project) and it’s basically 100% success rate for getting a response for him.