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Gergely Orosz Profile picture
@GergelyOrosz
Nov 24, 2023 • 29 tweets • 10 min read • Read on X
Imagine a tech conference having no CFP, as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and 3 women speakers.

Now imagine my surprise that 2 of those women are FAKE profiles.

They do not exist.

Nada.
I contacted speakers I know about this.

They had no idea.

One of the fake women profiles is supposedly a core Ethereum contributor, and a staff engineer at Coinbase.

No such contributor, no one heard of her at Coinbase now or before.

Why do this?
Sad to say but going forward if you are invited to speak at a lesser-know conference: do your diligence… if other listed speakers actually exist?!

This is a paid online conference, large number of (paid) attendees, workshops sold out.

What a mess.
Just to be very clear this is about the organisers creating fake profiles.
To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers. Because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns.

Incredibly lazy.
Which conference?

Well, where Anna Boyko, Staff engineer at Coinbase and Ethereum core contributor is a speaker.

Her. She doesn’t exist. Except as a listed speaker at a prominent online conference! Image
Or another Java conference by the exact same organizer where Microsoft MVP and WhatsApp senior engineer Alina Prokhoda is a featured speaker.

Would you know there is no such Microsoft MVP and Meta employee.

Speakers listed on these conference had no idea I talked with… Image
This conference doesn’t have a call for papers because they follow the “Hollywood principle” (that sounds made up btw)

But then do AI generated images, fake names and titles for some fake women speakers profiles… and I cannot fathom WHY.

Absolute laziness and dubious ethics. Image
If you bought tickets to DevTernity (“DevTernity”) on 7-8 Dec you’ve been duped with fake speaker Anna Boyle who is still on the website. A made up profile, AI image, no such staff eng at Coinbase.

And some other listed women speakers don’t actually talk

devternity.com
And if you are planning to buy tickets to JDKon 2024 (#1 international conference designed specifically for professional Java developers.) on 22-24 May 2024: save your money because Alina Prokhoda doesn’t exist either.

This conf:

Same organizer.dev.events/conferences/ta…
Anything organized by “Dev events” is by the same organizer who creates these fake women speakers (and has some in the past as well) for some mysterious reason.

All their conferences:



I would avoid like the plague with such dubious ethics.

Why?? dev.events
Image
What do you know - after being called out, the organizer is removing some fake women profiles.

Here’s the archived website. Fake Anna Boyle (staff eng at a Coinbase, core Ethereum contributor) was there for only 10 months, while most tickets were sold.

web.archive.org/web/2023110914…
DevTernity has had fake women speakers listed for years.

Here is fake Anna Boyle’s “colleague” fake Natalie Stadler claimed to be at Coinbase (no such person ever worked there ofc - I checked).

She “spoke” in 2022 there as well.

Just incredible.

web.archive.org/web/2021112802…
Image
And there’s no more conference website.

For now, that is. Image
The website had a public GitHub repo where you could see the full edit history that someone found and pointed to me.

You could see eg how fake Anna was added 10 months ago. Or how after being called out for what it is, the organizer removed fake women speaker profiles.
Image
Image
The organizer responded, claiming he tried so hard to get women speakers but it’s… too hard. For a paid (!) conference w a price of €789 / $870 per person.

Meanwhile others just… invite a variety of people, including so many women. They exist. If you actually care that is.
The conference website is up and fake Anna removed.

But fake Julia is still there. Listed every year as a speaker, never delivered a talk any year (and “dropped out” this year as well) @lizthegrey did some digging.

A fake catfishing profile, it seems.

linkedin.com/posts/efong_ge…
Image
@lizthegrey This is Julia’s Xing profile (basically LinkedIn for Germany). She is/was an architect at Uber Estonia?!

Uber never had no eng office in Estonia. No such person ever worked at Uber.

On LinkedIn, her profile used to have Microsoft in the past as well.

xing.com/profile/Julia_…
Image
@lizthegrey The organizer claims they 1x accidentally added a fake speaker to their conferences. But actually:

2021 & 2022: fake Natalie & Julia
2023: fake Anna, Alina & Julia

All listed as speakers. Never delivered a talk. Not removed from the site till this thread.

Once a mistake, sure.
@lizthegrey Several speakers cancelled, already let the organizer know they won’t present.

I don’t blame them for not wanting to endorse a conference with a history of catfishing with fake women speakers for years.

As fast as the organizer was to remove fake Anna, they are still listed.
@lizthegrey Conference page lists speakers who have cancelled. Several others have asked to be removed.

No one with a sense of integrity will want to be associated with such a conference. One where organisers created fake speakers for 3 years in a row and still deny there was a problem.
@lizthegrey Jetbrains no longer wanting to be associated with DevTernity or JDKonf. Pulled sponsorship and had their logo removed.

Again, show me another conference that has had advertised fake, non-existent speaker profiles for years.

Why would any brand want association with one.
@lizthegrey It’s not just DHH who’s never seen anything like this. None of us have.

A conference organizer inventing and promoting fake, non-existing speakers for years has no business in tech going forward.
@lizthegrey Speakers have been cancelling en masse and asking the organizer to disassociate them from DevTernity and JDKon. They are still on the site so are making it clear in public they have no further association.

Imagine duping such high profile folks. What was this organizer thinking.
@lizthegrey For years, this conference series (DevTernity, JDKon) has been duping speakers who care about diversity and nominate underrepresented speakers for non-diverse lineups.

Obviously on top of duping customers paying ~$800 per ticket for speakers who do not exist.
This thread started as fake speaker accounts at DevTernity and JDKon.

It ends with what is very likely a catfishing Instagram account operated for 5 years: Coding Unicorn. Growing it to 115K Insta followers to promote the conference.

Shameful.

@TimothyMaksim Oh wait you’re an AI generated image. Ok anon.
@AlexeyEccc @simekadam @lizthegrey And sure: some reviews might not be fake. But the only objectively verifiable review is from a fake account!

This goes back to: what can you possibly trust after that?

Perhaps all reviews are real, save for the one with the full name? Maybe. But then, why??
Published a summary, summarizing what I uncovered about the non-existent speakers.

Fun fact: the first fake speaker was added *the same day* as someone complained about the lack of women speakers, here, on Twitter, on 3 Aug 2021!

Coincidence?

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/devternity-fak…
Image

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More from @GergelyOrosz

Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Feb 19
Klarna was the company that went all-on replacing customer support with an AI bot and went on to brag about the cost savings.

Now they are reversing course.

Easy to see more companies blindly replacing quality customer support with a worse AI implementation will follow... Image
Back when Twitter was full of influencers declaring the end of customer support thanks to Klarna I did something few people did:

Signed up for Klarna, bought an item, and used the bot.

I was NOT impressed. At all.

Called that this was... very basic. blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-cha…Image
A year ago I wrote this, and I still stand by it.

You probably don't need an AI bot when you think you actually need an AI bot...

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-cha…Image
Read 6 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Feb 16
"Leetcode-style / DSA / algorithmical interviews are useless and don't measure what's really expected on the job. They are also inefficient, and companies using these are hiring for the wrong people."

Heard this SO many times.

The responses almost always miss the point.

I'll do a longer post one day, but a few thoughts:

1. YOU are not Big Tech. You probably don't have 1,000+ qualified applicants show up for an entry-level job posting and 100+ for a senior posting - in just a day or two, without advertising it

2. When a company gets large enough combined with #1, the game becomes not reducing false negatives but reducing false positives to zero

3. "LeetCode-style interviews are BS and don't measure what you do on the job." Yes. This is part of the reason. Guess what else is BS at Big Tech? A lot of stuff? Do you think people who are unwilling to put up with BS (that has historic context and can be internalized) would last at these companies? No: they would quit shortly or be pushed out as they refuse to do what everyone else does. These interviews conveniently self-select for people who can and do put up with BS

4. Career ladders. There is a notion that a Principal engineer should be as good or better than a new grad in every area - including algo coding. Like it or not, it's how it is

5. Technical managers. Many of these companies expect managers to pass the same bar. Like it or not, again: the reality is at these places many (probably all) line managers can code, and can do it very well.

6. Scalability of process. Have you ever had the challenge of onboarding 120 new interviewers in a month? Every quarter? These companies have this problem.

7. If it ain't broken: don't fix it.

Look at the business results of Big Tech. If the interview process would be broken, it would show up in eg shipping slower and being outcompeted by competition etc. In reality: Big Tech is more nimble than ever. E.g. Threads, Copilot, Gemini etc. Their interview process works *for them*

8. You are probably not Big Tech and don't have to solve for this very distinct set of problems.
Remind me how Big Tech hiring is broken when they built a new social media network in 6 months from idea to launch. This was 2x faster than e.g. Bluesky (a nimble and amazing startup btw)

Threads story: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-the…

Bluesky story: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bluesky

Via @Pragmatic_Eng
The problem is not how these very large companies interview: they've done this for a long time, and will keep doing it for a long time.

The problem is mindlessly copying this approach for companies that would want to optimize for other stuff and don't have the same situation. Like they don't have a massive number of qualified candidates streaming in the door. Or they might want to reduce false negatives as well. Or they are willing to invest more thoughtfulness into a different interview process as they don't need to worry about scaling it like a large company does etc.

Plenty of smaller companies don't follow the algo interviews, btw. Of course it all comes with tradeoffs: e.g. those companies will often have to invest a lot more effort per candidate / update interviews more frequently when questions leak etc.

Don't forget the goal of any interview process is to balance between getting enough signal to confirm this person will be a stellar new hire - while minimizing the process needed for this (and the time investment + annoyance for the candidate).

The most candidate-friendly interview process is this:

"Oh, Jenny here says you were superb to work with. Here's an offer, want to join us?"

No effort for the candidate, but the company might be taking a risk (depending on the quality of recommendation) plus this process excludes anyone who has not worked with someone at the company.
Read 6 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Feb 16
I rarely do predictions but this is an easy enough one to make:

Big Tech will bring back onsite interviews for the final round of interviews, flying in candidates.

When you pay top of market, AND do hybrid work, in the age of invisible AI helpers, remote interviews are a risk
A company expecting staff to work in-office 2-3 days per week will increasingly prefer in-person (final round) interviews.

If they pay top of market: this itself will be enough for most candidates to do it. The payoff is high enough, after all.

In-person interviews also negate all "cheating" that can be done with AI. It also means existing interview formats (eg algo interview, sytems design etc) don't need to be changed to remain as effective as before!
Previous research via @Pragmatic_Eng on GenAI changing tech interviews (given most engineers use these for work already, of course they are changing interviews as well!)

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-genai-ch…
Read 4 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Feb 13
Don’t fall for speculation like this.

Software developer job postings are back to where they were in ~2019, following the COVID boom (and zero interest rates!).

You know what else has the same pattern? Banking jobs. Marketing jobs. Heck, HR jobs: Image
Banking and finance jobs:

The story is not how software developer jobs are disappearing because of eg AI.

The story is how there was an economic boom 2021-2022, massive hiring, and now a correction.

A lot to do with zero interest rates! More: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirpImage
Retail jobs.

Using this one graph you could tell the same story of how “retail jobs are dying” (looking at the clear trend of downwards job postings)

Except there’s noting about AI tools be told there…

If all graphs look the same: consider it’s maybe the economy? Image
Read 4 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Feb 7
Building a profitable company as a commercial open source one with a permissive license feels more challenging these days.

The company needs to make money: which it usually does by selling a managed version of the software.

But here’s the catch: (cont’d)
1. If the open source version of the software is standout and easy to operate: users have little to no incentive to choose the managed version

2. If the license is restrictive, competitors can simply undercut pricing. They don’t need to invest in development of the software much
Open source is a wonderful distribution method. Devs jump on permissive open source projects because… well, permissive license!

It also means that in case of a restrictive relicensing: a permissive fork can be born (see eg Elastisearch vs OpenSearch; Redis vs ValKey)
Read 7 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Feb 3
Unpopular opinion:

Developers are some of the most demanding customers to please with developer tools, and are one of the hardest business to make a profit in.

When we feel something is a ripoff... we'll build ourselves/migrate/adopt a new tool.

Often out of spite!
Can't really point to another business where customers will sometimes leave a vendor even if it costs them a *lot more* to migrate off, or build a tool.

Unsaid is how it's professionally satisfying to prove that we can build a complex tool, plus it's often rewarded by leadership as well!
"Our equity platform doubled pricing? No clue what they do, why do you ask me"

"Our feature flagging vendor wants to push us into a higher tier to keep SSO and would cost us an additional $3,000 per year (10% increase)?

I'll build a new FF system in a week, saving us $10K**

** not counting development, migration, maintenance and opportunity cost. But seriously how hard can it be to build feature flags: I'll show them!
Read 5 tweets

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