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We created a fake language to root out resume liars

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

#311

Post by emodendroket »

michaelt wrote: post #228
devenblake wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading all these replies and - what the hell? Are recruiters really that common? Are bad recruiters really that common? I wasn't aware this was even a thing.

Recruiters are quite common in cities with a lot of jobs going, and industries with a lot of demand. In terms of bad recruiters: A recruitment agency will often get a fee of ~20% of an employee's first year's salary - meaning they are extremely motivated. That high level of motivation has some benefits - for candidates, they'll happily take care of any BS like entering your details into different companies' candidate…

I’ve found some are very good at what they do but many more are just going for raw body count.

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

#312

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

tempodox wrote: post #269
pacman2 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

In Johnathan Swift's “Gulliver's Travels” (published 1726) it is stated that fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market. Your comment describes a situation where exactly that happened. It is frustrating to see such an important (and simple) lesson, known literally for centuries, get forgotten or ignored.

> fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market

Can you expand on the quote from Gulliver's Travels? It's been decades since I read it and I can't think of where in the book it could have been from, I don't remember much economics being in the book...

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

#313

Post by moomin »

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…

When I was fresh out of college, a recruiter altered my university grades. I literally asked to see the paper they were holding and told them it wasn’t right.

They offered me the job.

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

#314

Post by zikduruqe »

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…

Now days recruiters are lazy, they just put the word "DevOps" in and call it the day.

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

#315

Post by travisjungroth »

Kneecaps07 wrote: post #272

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.

I made an open application for someone to receive feee weekly mentorship to become a software engineer. I asked for a < 1 minute video. 18/20 applications didn’t include it. Made picking someone really easy.

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

#316

Post by belval »

Until recently I was never part of the hiring process at any company because I was simply too new. I always thought how it was insane that people would say "I only spend 30 seconds on each resume", that I would somehow be better and do a more thoughtful analysis of the candidate.

Boy was I wrong, the amount of resume you can get for a job is crazy and most candidates are absolutely not a good fit. I even had one person put the wrong LinkedIn profile link in their resume so it pointed to someone else with the same name but a lot more experience.

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

#317

Post by jameshart »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #119
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,…

I wouldn’t put “chess” onto my resume unless I was at least titled. Otherwise, what is a signal that it sends to the hedge fund crowd of overachievers? That you have a hobby that you managed to not get good at?

Is the objective of hobbies to ‘get good’ at them? That sounds exhausting.

If someone lists ‘skiing’ as a hobby I’m not expecting them to have Olympic medals to back that up. ‘It says here on your resume that you play guitar. Well, let’s see how you fair in a guitar battle with Slash from accounting’

This is just more of that hyper competitive ‘well rounded college applicant’ performative high school stuff, isn’t it? It’s not enough to just have an interest - you need evidence of performing at a competitive level.

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

#318

Post by seg_lol »

jarcane wrote: post #212
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.…

My second ever job was at a startup that put me through three rounds of interviews, all of them in Python. The homework task, the questions, literally nothing else was mentioned through the entire process. After I got hired, I showed up the first day and one of the managers asks me, "So I heard you know functional programming, right?" I said "yes" and was immediately whisked off to the backend division that worked en…

That is absolutely phenomenal. I assume your Python code had functional stylings that would translate well into how the team used Scala?

What was the rest of your experience like there? Sounds like a place that thinks at a deeper level than most.

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

#319

Post by athenot »

neolog wrote: post #60
JimmyAustin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mate of mine's consulting company offers a 10% discount on any work if the client buys them a plant, any plant, for the office. Apparently they've only had two clients take them up on the offer.

Why do they offer that?

I'm not them but I could see how, for some services, having a savvy client who pays attention to these details will result in a cheaper client to service. Perhaps that particular product/service costs more to deliver when clients are missing on some very elementary diligence.

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

#320

Post by itronitron »

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…

Allaire can be bad while being a smart person, at least according to one of my former coworkers who worked at Allaire.
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