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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

#701

Post by travisjungroth »

matsemann wrote: post #383
travisjungroth wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was fine with that bias. No judgement if you don’t want to apply and send a video. Some judgement if you want to fill out the rest of the app and then just leave a portion out of it, making the rest of your time a waste.

And the mentorship was over video calls, so it’s not totally unrelated. My initial reasoning was just to make sure I could understand their spoken English enough to help, since I was offering it globally.

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

#702

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

prepend wrote: post #114
k4tz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good take. I like to play chess recreationally; I also know I'm terrible at chess. Never in a thousand years would I put it on my resume.

It depends where. Under skills seems silly, but under interests seems reasonable. I have a single line on my resume with interests. I don’t list chess, but list cryptography. Because I’m interested in it. I just have that line to help with chitchat during the interview. If some interviewer interpreted that to mean I was a professional cryptographer and that I sucked at it, that would be dumb of them. I also list an i…

It's becoming less socially acceptable to be bad at a hobby. I kind of like football but wouldn't dream of calling myself a football fan in more knowledgable company.

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

#703

Post by prepend »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #702
prepend wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends where. Under skills seems silly, but under interests seems reasonable. I have a single line on my resume with interests. I don’t list chess, but list cryptography. Because I’m interested in it. I just have that line to help with chitchat during the interview. If some interviewer interpreted that to mean I was a professional cryptographer and that I sucked at it, that would be dumb of them. I also list an i…

It's becoming less socially acceptable to be bad at a hobby. I kind of like football but wouldn't dream of calling myself a football fan in more knowledgable company.

I suppose we run in different social circles. I’m not sure what “bad at a hobby” means as the reason I hobbies is because they are fun to me.

I list kayaking as a hobby not because I’m competitive and awesome but because I think it’s fun to float down a river. I suppose if a company expected me to be good at my hobby and judged me because of it, I wouldn’t want to work with them because their culture probably has other stupid parts to it too.

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

#704

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

fractionalhare wrote: post #504
jjk166 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mea…

> 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 Sure - to which my next question becomes, are you actually good at it? If you're not, I don't professionally care if you personally enjoy it.

Some people want these things on resumes. Some people don't. That's called culture fit. If you insist on only including hobbies you're good at then it's a signal that someone who includes hobbies they're not good at might not enjoy working for you. The system works.

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

#705

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

prepend wrote: post #703
thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's becoming less socially acceptable to be bad at a hobby. I kind of like football but wouldn't dream of calling myself a football fan in more knowledgable company.

I suppose we run in different social circles. I’m not sure what “bad at a hobby” means as the reason I hobbies is because they are fun to me. I list kayaking as a hobby not because I’m competitive and awesome but because I think it’s fun to float down a river. I suppose if a company expected me to be good at my hobby and judged me because of it, I wouldn’t want to work with them because their culture probably has oth…

I agree. I don't think what I described is a good feature of my social circle.

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

#706

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

sdoering wrote: post #26

This reminded me of a talk [1] at pyData Berlin some years ago. Vincent demonstrated how he used some ML techniques to create fake pokemon sounding names to put into his LinkedIn resume. So that he could filter out headhunters without any real knowledge. To quote from my notes [2] of the conference: > There is a striking phonetic similarity between big data technology and pokemon names. Can you create a service that…

I have a unicode character in my Linkedin name to detect automated messages. It's a strong signal of whether it's worth continuing the conversation.

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

#707

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

belval wrote: post #374
jameshart wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they (or a recruiter) sent in an old resume...

Frankly it's a one letter typo so I'd be inclined to believe the person just made a mistake, but at the same time the only way this resume got to me was because the LinkedIn profile on the resume was impressive, much more so than the resume itself.

So the same name AND the same field? Wow!

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

#708

Post by thamer »

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 had a recruiter ask me for a .doc version of my CV, which I had written with LaTeX. I explained to him that I had no way to do that, and after he insisted I understood that the point was for him to pad it with skills that prospect employers might be interested in.

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

#709

Post by hutzlibu »

softawre wrote: post #392
hutzlibu wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Just FYI, those 3 heroes didn't die right away like it hinted in the show. They lived normalish lives.

I don't know the show you are talking about:

I am talking about actual voluntary suicide missions in chernobyl, like Lelechenko, Aleksandr Grigoryevich:

"in order to spare his younger colleagues from radiation exposure, he went through radioactive water and debris three times to switch off the electrolyzers and the feed of hydrogen to the generators, then tried to supply voltage to the feedwater pumps. "

And he and others did pretty much die right away.

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

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

#710

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #118
austincheney wrote: post #107

Why even bother with a fake language when so often the industry has devolved into some sick level of honest negligence? For example: rarely do candidates need to know JavaScript anymore or even some unnecessary framework. Now people trade in experience of some tool that says nothing of anything: React Flux Capacitor (or some other bullshit like they want to go back in time to make lots of money without any real skill…

Honestly, the thing I hate the most about IT is how bad it is while no one admits to it. These are problems I've encountered at several companies: * No budget for tooling. Be that software outside the ide or be it for hardware. * Cargo cult is so much bigger than anyone will ever admit. * The lack of caring about other departments. We're a team and we need to work as a team so the company can make money to pay our sa…

>The amount of stuff that is just broken, people keep complaining about it being broken and it causes a pile of hassle for other people but just stays broken

Our VPN hasn't been fit for purpose for a year.

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