Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We created a fake language to root out resume liars

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 771 posts

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

#241

Post by e12e »

prepend wrote: post #116
fergie wrote: post #37

I find it particularly ironic that it has fallen to a Facebook group of Cold Fusion programmers to call out poor choices. Those of us who actually worked at 1st generation dotcoms know that absolutely nobody had any idea what they were doing, even at the "proper" ones, and things were moving so fast that you absolutely _had_ to fake it until you made it.

I really hated ColdFusion. It made PHP hacks seem like beautiful poetry. So it’s funny that ColdFusion folks would complain about any stupid recruiter. But CF peeps are people too. My opinion is based on having to fix a lot of CF code from people who were “faking it until they could hire prepend to make it.” It’s funny that Allaire now runs RStudio and when I learned that I considered not using it anymore because of…

I used to hate CF until I came across the fusebox pattern/framework[1]. I think they were some of the first to draw up a sane architecture for "template" languages (cf, php, asp, jsp etc).

Much like a book I picked up on sale about asp[2] - it really drove home the point that a programming language really needs to be terrible before it is the main problem - rather than how you use it. See also xmlhttprequest/Ajax and "Javascript - the good parts".

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180928051133/http://fusebox.or... and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusebox_(programming)

[2] "Designing Active Server Pages" 2000, O'Reilly Media

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

#242

Post by arethuza »

e-clinton wrote: post #226
practicalpants wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

That’s either the best or worst recruiter ever

"worst recruiter ever"

Quite a lot of competition for that particular prize!

Edit:

There should be a Razzies for Recruiters!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Raspberry_Awards

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

#243

Post by michaelcampbell »

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…

Similar situation for me on the other side. Interviewing a guy that would be my colleague. Asked him a few things about his resume, he gave me an odd look then asked, "May I see that?" When I handed it to him he scanned it over, handed it back to me and said, "This is an utter fabrication."

We hired him (interview went on discussing the job, his actual background, etc.) and he was really good, but I don't know what my bosses did with that recruiting agency, if anything. Above my pay grade, that.

This was early 1990's, so this charlatanery is not new.

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

#244

Post by pacman2 »

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…

"The whole recruitment process seems broken "

The IT market is pretty good compared to other fields but in the and, the market might have collapsed already.

""The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known[1][2] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

So most good candidates and most good companies have long exited the official job market and work with referrals or whatever. And all what is left is that now shitty companies are receiving shitty applications. And if a non shitty company offers a job in this market or a good applicant applies to a job, the other side will never believe it.

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

#245

Post by that_guy_iain »

arethuza wrote: post #191
that_guy_iain wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience if someone can't read UML and know how to write a decorator pattern something is up. Honestly, I've never used it in depth but for design patterns I expect people who are "seniors" to understand it. And I expect any expert to be able to look at UML and get the gist of it. On a side note about design patterns, once as a junior I was at a digital agency and they were doing an in-house tech talk where o…

What about all the different types of diagrams? Use cases, activity diagrams, deployment diagrams etc. Yeah - 'informal' UML use a lot of people are happy with but some things like exactly what some of the features of activity diagrams mean is amazingly badly understood by a lot of people. I'm ok with the 'UML as sketch' approach, but 'UML as blueprint' is a nightmare that I've never seen work: https://martinfowler.c…

Honestly, most of the time I use these diagrams just to give people the gist of what I'm talking about. And my diagrams are super low effort. Think low effort whiteboard diagrams during a meeting style.

> Yeah - 'informal' UML use a lot of people are happy with but some things like exactly what some of the features of activity diagrams mean is amazingly badly understood by a lot of people.

I'm talking super basic stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern#/media/File:...

> I'm ok with the 'UML as sketch' approach, but 'UML as blueprint' is a nightmare that I've never seen work:

I agree, I would hate that.

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

#247

Post by ant6n »

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.…

I once applied for an internship at EA and thought I was invited for an interview on C. They gave me some C++ code to fix, which I didn't know, it wasn't on my CV. They just said "well this code is basically C", although I was pretty confused about those extra "&" the whole time, and it was a pretty rough experience.

In the end I didn't get the job, but their response said I didn't get it because the found that my experience didn`t match my CV. Go figure.

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

#248

Post by texasbigdata »

GuB-42 wrote: post #129
ALittleLight wrote: post #10

This reminds me of an anecdote I read once, maybe in Liars Poker, about how lots of people applying to this hedge fund put "Chess" on their resume somewhere thinking it made them seem like a deep or strategic thinker. As it happened, at this hedge fund there worked a former Soviet master or grandmaster ranked player. And so, whenever interviewing any candidate who claimed great proficiency with chess on their resume,…

How is it usually written on the resume? I would expect someone to be actually good at chess to put down their Elo rating. For someone just putting it as a hobby, I wouldn't expect much, especially when it comes to the "boring" stuff like memorizing openings. In the same way that there is usually a difference between what high level athletes and hobbyist write. The former usually mention something concrete (champion…

Putting an ELO is like putting your SAT when you’re 25 and over: sort of aggressive and you better have a really high number!

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

#249

Post by hutzlibu »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #152
arethuza wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial to convert PDFs these days to Word documents - Word actually opens PDFs as editable. I suppose you could print out your CV and scan it into a PDF to prevent that - but then there is OCR...

I must be behind the times. You're right of course that with OCR, and the right typefaces, it's always possible to automate the process of building an editable document from a PDF or printed page.

But I doubt anyone would take the hazzle of doing OCR. Because it is still a lot of work to spot misstakes (which still do happen, also with standardfonts).

Also, who would want to lower the perceived visual quality of his resume? And scanning a document, means just that. It will be still readable, yes, but you can see, that it was scanned in.

Post reply on HN