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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

#181

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?

I have cycling on my CV but I have no intention of doing tour de france

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

#182
post #69
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…

Software development is cyclical in that regard. I mean another example is JSON, which has a subculture where they are trying to add structure and schemas to it. At the same time there's gRPC, which is more aimed at performance.

But some really smart people already built all of this decades ago with XML and XSD. It's painful to write, but computers don't mind at all. And for transfering effectively, there's EXI which can move XML documents over the wire in a compressed binary format, instead of awkwardly converting it to a text-based format and gzipping it over http before converting it back to a digital format.

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

#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.

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

#184

It baffles me why anyone would lie about the languages they know. Why. Always tell half truths, never whole lies. I live in a country where companies distrust former startup founders regardless of exit. So when a good opportunity cones around - people pretend to have been merely working for said startup instead of the guy running it. Thats a good lie.

Because there's good money to be made, even if they don't do any productive work. Second, they can learn on the job.

But, niceness and political correctness aside, there's a percentage of people working in IT who are simply incompetent. They do not have the 'knack', and will never get it. They struggle to make some code edits here and there, and somehow that's good enough for some employers.

Someone at some point made a statement that you could probably make do with only 10% of the software engineering workforce if they're actually competent people. A lot of it is just overhead for mediocrity.

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

#185
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s fair to give credit to CF for templating. In that I think we’d have the exact use of templating today if CF never existed, due to the other templating approaches that existed before CF.

As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and in particular the first "Application Server".

PHP templated before CF (94 v 95), but I feel like the concept was around long before.

I’m not sure what you mean by “application server” but there were in memory modules for web servers earlier than CF (eg, CGI).

I think CF was around before ASP, Java, and JSP. But it always seemed like a commercial version of PHP to me.

Looking at Wikipedia’s list of application servers [0] there’s quite a few older than CF (Tuxedo in 1983, Maybe CF was the first to be web specific? They were windows only so they can’t be that old.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers

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

#186

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).

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

#187

> 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…

In the spirit of Hacker News I'd like to respond to this decidedly human problem with a technical question: which file format did you use for your CV? Was it an easily-edited .docx file, or a PDF? The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.

When I used a latex-made PDF, the only places that responded to my application were universities for PhD positions

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

#188
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFT for physical objects is the new hotness. That way they can just demonstrate ownership of the plant instead of having to move it around.

Transparent OLED screens on window sills cycling through simulations of virtual plants, together with their NFT tags... I want the future back, we were promised hoverboards!

NFT is revoked when physical plant dies.

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

#189

Reading this made me think: if someone from 1900 were to see this paragraph, it would made absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's interesting how new slang and technology words develop so quickly.

It works in reverse, too: slangy school-newspaper style writing from back then is almost incomprehensible now.

My dizzy age afternoonified chuckaboo looks arf’arf’an’arf, I bet they want to bricky batty-fang that bag o' mystery, could be bow wow mutton.

IDK I just googled 1900's slang.

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