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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

#481

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 when you reply: no, "UML" was 3 versions before "XML"

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

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"But can you code in API? I don't want your life story, just answer me! Do you know API?!" I'm so lucky, I think I found the best recruiter in all Vancouver. He helped me get my ideal role and was generally kind and competent. Just to offset the horror stories.

“But can you code in API?”

“Sure, can I pay you in ATM?”

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

#483

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.

I do most of my development in a what looks like a watered down version of JAVA. Last year I had to dive into C# and asp.bet for a bit. I felt like at home. The language makes sense,there are hardly any surprises and most of its features are excellent. You are right, however, that the ecosystem itself is different and it will take some time to get used to it. However, unless a company hires a contractor on a short term basis,the expectations are that he'd be there for at least a year or two. That's plenty of time to get going and adjust to the ecosystem,which,I think any competent developer would do in a month or two. There are also arguments when it comes to some very niche types of jobs,e.g. deep optimization all the way to the compiler,some esoteric use cases,etc. Yes,in those cases it's better to hire language native,but for most jobs that won't be the case.

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

#484

> 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…

Oh my experiences of the CV days when agencies would take your CV and send the client their formatted one (your contact details excluded of course) saw many fun times , today they kinda push the work onto you and just robot send what you give them for most area's. Some contract work with good earning rates for agencies will still see them tailor your CV somewhat, but for most for the best focusing on relevant area's for the role.

But a few of my more interesting experiences in the past in interviews regarding CV's have been:

1) Them having somebody else's CV content with my name attached - had that a few times 2) Them having 3 versions of your CV and first question is which one do I use and why I always carried a copies of my original printed out on nice paper. 3) Being interviewed for a different job than applied (my CV and experience covered wide area) for and not finding out until the offer came thru. 4) Turning up at an interview expected to speak Hungarian as I had Hungarian notation upon my CV. 5) Many instances of reused aberrations or when one letter be mistyped by agency making for much fun, maybe been bitrot/errors at play thinking about how some of those transpired.

But often my favourites would be when you turn up and the interviewer is down to earth and starts by glancing over the cv he got and pops it into the bin saying, we don't need that and gets into some technical questions and banter. Those always enjoyable and in a way often been a sign of a good boss - somebody who can cut thru the crud and get down to the issue at hand without the song and dance.

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

#486
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I can do programming problems in Java, but I definitely can't lead a team doing a Java project. I don't what Gradle/Maven/etc really are. I don't have years of experience with how libraries, the API request pipeline, middleware, etc work. I don't know little tricks / nuanaces, like the fact that Visual Studio has to be restarted for local code to pick up new environment variables, why String and string are the…

Gradle & Maven are just build tools. They can be used for other stuff, but that's what they're mostly used for in my experience.

I actually find the things _around_ the languages like build tools and ansible and such by far the more confusing parts of dev work just because I never know which of them I should spend time trying to understand and if I just want a runthrough for someone who can already program I never know where to look.

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Hobbies don't have to be maximally mastered, no. But what's the point of putting something on your resume if you're not particularly good at it? In my opinion that's the only kind of thing that should be on a resume. I think if you put a hobby on a resume for the purpose of signaling some kind of orthogonal skillset ostensibly related to the job (like in this example, "strategy"), it stops being just about your perso…

Resumes are meant to be highly subjective and bias inducing things - you're trying to convince someone to hire you. Your resume is a brief summary of why you're a good fit for the company in general and the role in particular. An extremely large portion of that fit is your personality. Hobbies and interests are an excellent way to convey the type of person that you are. Putting down that you enjoy camping doesn't mean you are trying to convey that you will be useful in a survival situation, it means you'll probably get along well with Dan in accounting who is also quite the outdoorsman. There might be some jobs out there where you are highly siloed and your skillset is really the only thing that matters, but this is rare.

It's dumb to lie and say you enjoy chess when you don't, just like it's dumb to put any other lie on a resume, but if you do enjoy it then there's nothing wrong with communicating that you're the type of person who enjoys chess, which means you are probably a person who enjoys somewhat adversarial situations where you need to win with your logic and you are comfortable with taking short term losses for long term gains, a personality which would likely be both comfortable and familiar in a hedge fund environment.

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

#488

So, let me get this straight - you lie about your job requirements, but get all bent out of shape when the candidates lie right back at you? Brilliant. I can’t think of a better example of why hiring is broken; of how unequal the power dynamic is between employers and employees.

Welcome to game theory! In an iterated prisoner's dilemma where everyone is already defecting, then defecting is the optimal strategy.

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

#489
post #183

On the other end of this I include "Staying Hydrated" as a skill in my CV so as to increase the chance of detecting whether the person who's interviewing me received the original version, something doctored or someone else's CV entirely. One time they didn't receive my CV at all , because apparently this was the extent of paranoia the consultancy through which I was hired was exhibiting.

How do you distinguish between those who have and those who haven't received the original? I'm going to hazard a guess that "Staying hydrated" is sufficient obscure that they ask you about it.

I count on that, but last time I asked if they could find this phrase in the CV.

Of course this gives no protection against inserting unauthorized entries, but my experience so far is that recruiters either send the original CV or go all out and change whatever they want.

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

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think this would explain the status of places like LinkedIn? Long ago, it was an OK place to have an online CV. Now it is a place people use show off with non-relevant _stuff_.

LinkedIn is a weird place indeed. Every couple months or so I pop in to check something or somebody out, and my eyes briefly skim my "feed". What I've noticed over the past year or two is that people who I know personally that have much more clout and much better network than I do, particularly the ones I know from the local startup culture - the people who have no reason to visit the site - they seem to be posting a…

Though I don't really use it myself, it's apparently very effective for companies to use to post stuff. So there's a fairly systematic effort at a lot of places to get employees to post recommended articles/posts on LinkedIn.
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