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

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

#381

Post by pradn » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

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…

> I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance.

I do technical interviews and I never look at CVs before doing the interview. I do this to avoid bias. I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their first job.

Also, people are adaptable, and soft skills matter a lot. So the error bars for recruiting even based on hard skills on a resume are really large.

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

#382

Post by HelloNurse » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

Doing it in a real job listing is dangerous because some good candidates will decline to apply because they know nothing about MOVA and it looks like an important requirement. It might be better in open requests for CVs, where the company asks about knowledge of zillions of technologies.

Honest candidates answer truthfully that they don't know MOVA with the expectation of being considered for non-MOVA jobs, without any incentive to lie, and moderate liars would choose what to exaggerate based on their actual know-how, not indiscriminately.

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

#383

Post by matsemann » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

travisjungroth wrote: post #315

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.

That heavily biases what kind of people you select. It's not about following instructions, it's about not caring for the weird requirement.

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

#384

Post by belval » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

hellbannedguy wrote: post #355

I understand the need for Resume accuracy in key roles. We all know the people with spotless resumes, who get jobs they don’t deserve, and perform abysmally, and sometimes alienate whole departments—middle managers in dockers. Or, the run of the mill worker whom just does the bare minimum, and counts on that bloated resume as a life saver. If I had a company, many jobs would be based on test results. It would take ne…

You do understand that there is a very real non-hypothetical cost to doing something like that right? Each of these people needs to be paid, added to payroll by our HR, shadowed by a more experienced dev to give them a chance to ramp up. If you hired 5+ devs that are potentially "diamonds in the rough" you need to have IT give them their hardware and do the onboarding. In hiring it's always quality over quantity and absolutely not the opposite because of precisely this reason.

Another fallacy is basing your hiring on test results. This is silly because you also discriminate by assuming everyone has time to do a take home test which is certainly not the case. If you meant a quick test in-office then there is no way you can get deep enough insight for it to be worth your time.

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

#385

Post by DoubleGlazing » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

noneeeed wrote: post #372

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV. Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and ma…

I had a recruiter say "XML and UML are basically the same, right?". There's almost a dangerous level of knowledge among some recruiters where they think they know enough to do crap like this.

That's something I've noticed over the last 10 years or so as job descriptions get longer.

All those new terms like React, Vue, SaaS, Azure, AWS etc. They don't really know what they mean.

I was asked if I could code in Azure. This led to a weird conversation where I was trying to explain what Azure was, whilst he wouldn't listen to me and was adamant that it was a programming language.

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

#386

Post by halostatue » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #340

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…

Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV. Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and ma…

I fired a recruiter looking for jobs for me once when he created a .doc version of my resume (unmodified from what had been in the PDF, but it looked like _crap_). I told him that was completely unprofessional and I couldn’t trust him to find jobs that suited my targets or skillsets.

Now, I tell people to look at my LinkedIn profile as that is the only resume that I keep. I’ll download the PDF of it if they want, but I haven’t maintained an actual resume in at least ten years.

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

#387

Post by halostatue » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #354

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV. Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and ma…

The recruiter was in idiot but not to consider c# dev for Java job is quite silly too.

C# and Java the language are similar enough; the ecosystems are very different. A C# developer would mostly be expecting to develop Windows programs or possibly Windows server / IIS applications. A Java developer could be working on all kinds of different things.

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

#388

Post by sumnole » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #354

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV. Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and ma…

The recruiter was in idiot but not to consider c# dev for Java job is quite silly too.

> sure aren't Java and c# the same thing?

I wouldn't have gotten my first .net job without this line of thought. Sure enough, I picked up enough c# to be effective in the first week.

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

#389

Post by DoubleGlazing » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

halostatue wrote: post #387

cosmodisk wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recruiter was in idiot but not to consider c# dev for Java job is quite silly too.

C# and Java the language are similar enough; the ecosystems are very different. A C# developer would mostly be expecting to develop Windows programs or possibly Windows server / IIS applications. A Java developer could be working on all kinds of different things.

That's the case for me. I'm Okay with the Java language, but everything else about it's ecosystem is different from the .net world.

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

#390

Post by macintux » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:11 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.

> It is curious--curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.

— Mark Twain in Eruption