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

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

#271

Post by bambax » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

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,…

"Knows (most of) the rules of chess" would be an accurate description of my level.

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

#272

Post by Kneecaps07 » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

I had a boss who would put one simple instruction at the end of the job posting - "Please send your resume as a PDF". This was for a technician job at an MSP. He would immediately delete any applications that didn't have a PDF attached. If I recall, it was something like 60% of the applications he got that he deleted immediately.

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

#273

Post by throwanem » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

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.

I never have. But I've worked with people who did.

One such person had done so effective a job of BSing that he got twice the going rate for contractors in his role. It didn't last long enough to count for much, though, because he couldn't do the work. He was on his way out when I was on my way in; my first major project was salvaging his last one.

Another, with more modest ambitions, joined as a junior on the team where I was then operating as a de facto senior and co-lead. He was a little slow getting up to speed, but he got there, and then spent the next year doing good work, entirely consistent with what I'd expect to see from someone in that stage of their career. When we took him to lunch on his last day, he admitted he'd come in with zero real experience in our tech stack, and snowed his way through the interview with the plan of figuring out how to do the job once he had it.

I won't work with the first guy again. I'd be happy to work again with the second.

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

#274

Post by justusthane » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

dmos62 wrote: post #264

wccrawford wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We recently discovered that someone lied about their one of their skills during the interview. We fired them. End of story. No other option. Do not lie on your resume or during the interview. I've never worked at a company that it wasn't grounds for immediate dismissal.

I've heard hiring is not a cheap process. That must have been a critical skill if you chose to restart the process.

Not necessarily. It might not be about the lack of the particular skill they lied about, but the fact that they lied at all and what that indicates about them as a person/employee.

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

#275

Post by eeZah7Ux » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

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.

I never inflated my resume but I can understand that some *GOOD* candidates might inflate their years of experience out of a bad suggestion from recruiters, or because they see other candidates do the same, or because many companies greatly inflate the requirements.

Even more so if exaggeration is part of the culture they come frome.

HN loves to play armchair psychologist and make claims about people's honesty and trustworthiness based on a CV.

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

#276

Post by eternalban » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

dempseye wrote: post #209

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.…

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.

Nonsense told to me repeatedly by recruiters over the years:

- (your point) no incentive to send you for an interview if not a good fit.

- "I make more money if you make your money" often said to spin the "what is your salary requirement" question

Most recruiters work for an agency. Agencies have accounts with businesses. The account is central. You are in no position whatsoever to make determination as to what incentives drive the recruiter's business.

Recruiters also routinely b.s. young developers by "I get more if you get more money" when pressuring them into agreeing to a "salary expectation" right at the beginning of the employment negotiation.

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

#277

Post by ClumsyPilot » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:14 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #234

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 numbers to meet the targets " But what have they done to deserve the truth? More or less this is how we get thinga like Chernobyl, when the entire chain is lying because the cost of tellong the truth is too high and there is no incentive to do so.

"and there is no incentive to do so. " Still, after the accident some of the engineers went for a literal suicide mission to open some ventil to make it all less catastrophic. And unlike the poor construction workers, who died, too, they knew what they were doing. I doubt they did it just for the postmortal fame. Some people have actually moral standards and can stand by it, even if it means disadvantages.

Absolutely, but the events are not comparable. Sacrafice at Chernobyl might save thousands, sacrafice at %xcorp% saves a fat bonus for the guy responsible for the whole mess in the first place!

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

#278

Post by Nasrudith » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #186

mikewarot wrote: post #42

Multithreaded Object Versioning Architecture - you kids can't even spell right. One night just to make a joke work, Linus renamed it to GIT.

I bet they could put git in a job opening as if it were a programming language. A quick litmus test would be "write hello world in git". It would either come up empty (bad), a bullshit answer (bad), or a reply that git is not a programming language (good), or a creative solution (funny and good).

That seems like something that would cause talent to nope out of the degree of apparent incompetence.

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

#279

Post by danesparza » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #69

harel wrote: post #59

The actual story became irrelevant when I saw it's a ColdFusion developers group. I used to work on that platform in the 90s. That was the Django/Rails/Next/etc. of the day. It even packaged in some ExtJS components at some point (another java script relic). I'm surprised it's still a thing.

> I'm surprised it's still a thing. Because it was a good idea? The whole industry came full circle. Here's some ColdFusion that people now call "Mustache JS": {{Subject}} {{#names}} {{name}} {{/names}} The problem with ColdFusion was that it went in the wrong direction. It tried to copy the trends of the industry by inventing and emphasizing CFScript when it should have doubled-down on the templating strategies and…

So your defense of Coldfusion is a javascript templating language that is over a decade old and has implementations in 30+ other languages?

And then you further defend it by admitting, "The problem with ColdFusion was that it went in the wrong direction"

I'm confused.

Yes. That's why it's terrible. Most things that go in the wrong direction usually are terrible.

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

#280

Post by acdha » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

dmos62 wrote: post #96

arethuza wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get as angry with recruiters as everyone else, but then I remember then time where I worked for a company that shared a floor of a serviced office building with a recruitment company. They were brutal in their treatment of staff - they were too cheap to get rooms for staff appraisals so they would do them in the coffee area we shared with them so we could hear how they were treated by their management - seeing peop…

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

Sadly, it’s not as rare as it should be. Most of us here have limited experience with jobs where the company doesn’t respect you much and is confident that you can easily be replaced. Unless there’s a union the odds are pretty good that you can find a manager like that at a large organization once you get out of the high-status areas - especially when it’s something like an outsourced labor company where margins are low and replacing people doesn’t have much visible impact on customers.

At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.