We created a fake language to root out resume liars • Hacker News Board

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#201

Post by sdflhasjd » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:18 AM UTC

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #128

brigandish wrote: post #77

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

In the spirit of Hacker News I'd like to respond to this decidedly human problem with a technical question: which file format did you use for your CV? Was it an easily-edited .docx file, or a PDF? The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.

Having read a lot of CV's myself, recuiters will still edit PDFs.

Subtle formatting errors make it apparent when recruiters have reordered lists or inserted bullet-points here and there.

They'll try to cover contact details with white rectangles - infamously not great at removing data in a digital document.

Even when it it's not clear from the document itself, I like it when candidates come in with their own copy of the CV, I'm always interested in comparing the difference between that and the one the recruiter provided.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#202

Post by isolli » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:20 AM UTC

indy wrote: post #137

isolli wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This anecdote was recounted by Nassim Taleb in one of his books, either Fooled by Randomness (which I recommend) or The Black Swan (which I don't). According to him, it was MBA courses that recommended adding chess to the CV, as it showed strategic thinking and would never be verified.

It was Fooled by Randomness. (Randomly enough I was reading that book for the first time yesterday)

Thanks. I hope you enjoy it :) And I really don't recommend reading the Black Swan, especially after reading Fooled by Randomness!

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#203

Post by arethuza » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:24 AM UTC

dunefox wrote: post #200

eecc wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech. Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the displa…

At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.

In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem.

This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#204

Post by prepend » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:25 AM UTC

harel wrote: post #192

prepend wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP templated before CF (94 v 95), but I feel like the concept was around long before. I’m not sure what you mean by “application server” but there were in memory modules for web servers earlier than CF (eg, CGI). I think CF was around before ASP, Java, and JSP. But it always seemed like a commercial version of PHP to me. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of application servers [0] there’s quite a few older than CF (Tuxedo…

Maybe "First web specific application server" in the sense of a server specifically serving dynamic HTML output over the web" is better? I'm not vouching for the accuracy of this statement.

Maybe “first sold” as the CGI spec in C came out in 1993 [0].

But this seems more of a marketing spin as PHP was out earlier and was the first, I know of, to have that easy “scripts in a folder that are interpreted by the http server” thing going where there was no compile process needed.

My memory of the time was that CF was one of the many commercial web software companies that were selling to companies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#205

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:26 AM UTC

junippor wrote: post #195

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, in practice it is мова, and modern standard Ukrainian mainly uses inherited Common Slavonic *językŭ ‘tongue (organ); language’ only in its meaning ‘tongue’. The article for "Ukrainian language" at the Ukrainian Wikipedia is literally "Українська мова" [0] [0] https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%97...

---> the joke ---> your head

Well, as a joke it isn't a very good one in a "news for nerds" discussion like this, where someone could have been mistaken, or have been making the very valid point that many surzhyk speakers use jezyk in this context.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#206

Post by grey_earthling » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:26 AM UTC

slimsag wrote: post #108

dmos62 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeez louise, imagine working somewhere where coworkers are regularly abused to tears. I really hope that that's an isolated case.

My sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and basically described the same. They set targets for everyone that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and more hours. She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about n…

> She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time

This is an example of what universal basic income is intended to prevent.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#207

Post by nix23 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:29 AM UTC

dunefox wrote: post #200

eecc wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech. Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the displa…

At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.

Next time that happens ask him/her to bring you a coffee, works most of the time...and you can have e little "secret" chuckle.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#208

Post by thu2111 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:31 AM UTC

Deestan wrote: post #179

dmos62 wrote: post #126

Serious question: if you're applying for positions you're not totally confident in your experience and skillset, do you inflate your resume? My thinking goes that if I slip in by being dishonest, I'll be nervous of being found out, feel an intruder. So being honest and taking a longer time looking for match would get more comfort later on.

When hiring, we filter applications on what they claim on the CV but also actually dig into the required skills on interview. If we find a mismatch, it invalidates the candidate as a whole. If someone claims 8 years of MOVA but doesn't know basic stuff about MOVA semantics, they were either lying, they are incompetent, or they have been coasting.

When I started interviewing I used to do that, until I realised it would eliminate about 20% of all useful candidates. The killer is c++. The industry is filled with people who have vague memories of trying to use C++ in the 90s before switching to Java or c# as quickly as possible, but still put C++ on their resume. In reality they can't even do basic tasks like reading a file into an array. Knocking them out because of this exaggeration would have just throttled the candidate stream unnecessarily and it didn't seem like a consequential exaggeration.

Other lies on the other hand, do cause me to drop people. One guy claimed to be an expert in the internals of hotspot. Unfortunately for him I actually am such an expert. It turned out he hadn't even read the user manual. That sort of lie is a problem because it's the sort of thing that will sound impressive to a lot of people who can't verify it, and he surely knew that.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#209

Post by dempseye » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:32 AM UTC

practicalpants wrote: post #110

brigandish wrote: post #77

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchang…

Yep, for my first programming job out of college a recruiter arranged an onsite interview for a Java role, when I was under every impression it was for Ruby/Rails. I don't know Java. The first interviewer laughed and walked out. I explained things to the recruiter, he cursed, said he would "visit the Ruby team upstairs". He actually managed to setup an impromptu on-site interview with the Ruby team on that same day.…

The recruiter did good work here. I suspect this was a screw up in internal HR.

The external recruiter has absolutely no incentive to send you for an interview you will bomb out of.

Re: We created a fake language to root out resume liars

#210

Post by dunefox » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 11:33 AM UTC

dmos62 wrote: post #102

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] [H]e was only ever challenged once in the many years I was there. I suspect that's because your client's spending their company's money, and it made no difference if the rate were cheaper. They'd rather sign the deal quickly then GTFO. Challenging Joe would only prolong the process.

But it would be fun?

Fun doesn't make money.