> 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 Exchange 2000. I had no experience with Exchange 2000, so I told them, and watched their faces drop.
That was specifically why they wanted to speak to me. The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them. I'm surprised I'm not still doing time for murder.
What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it. I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while.
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 magically my CV had modified itself to say I had 7 years of Java experience.
I told them I did not put that on my CV, I actually had my own copy with me and showed them that. We all realised the recruiter changed my CV. They apologised and wished me luck.
Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me and berating me for not going along with the ruse. He said "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?"
Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.
> Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.
This doesn't always help either though. I have only ever sent PDFs to recruiters for this reason. Yet I have still had a recruiter completely rewrite my resume and add false information.
I generally keep a resume on me when I go to an interview just in case an interviewer had not seen it. I'm glad I do that.
I've had them re-type the resume and add typos and errors. I don't need a recruiter for that. I can put typos and errors on my resume by myself just fine.
I was doing some interviews and the resumes we were getting were like 5+ pages long. Maybe it was some cultural difference or something but I'd always been told to keep my resume to 1 page front & back at the absolute longest.
Turns out it was a different resume that the recruiters would send us. They were garbage in quality and I hate them.
It's not cultural. I think the agencies are trying to put in every single keyword and "skill" to get past algorithmic filters and also make sure non-technical managers see the words they are looking for.
At a past role we were looking for a contract Tableau person and one of the agencies that was approved by HR sent me 20+ resumes. All of them were 5+ pages, with things like "Made a Bar Chart in Tableau," "Made a Pie Chart Tableau", etc.
After looking at 10 of these, I told our HR exec these resumes all looked the same and I thought they were fake. I had a meeting with the agency rep and they said they smiled when I said these resumes were BS. Their response was "Usually we send resumes to a manager and they have a 30 minute phone conversation with some of them. After that they sign a contract with one of them."
The point is, a lot of hiring managers want a person to do X on a contract basis, but they don't understand X or have anybody in their group that does X. For all they know, connecting to a SQL database and making a bar chart is rocket science. These agencies target these managers.
I did end up interviewing 2 people from that agency, both of which were actually quite good with Tableau. Of course, those people were curated by the agency after I made my comment.
I'm not sure entirely that it's not cultural, though I'd love for someone to confirm. I interviewed with a recruiter for jobs in Australia, and they asked that I make my resume into a novel.
I wasn't trying to imply that all countries have similar expectations of resume format and length. I was just saying that if all the resumes from recruiting firms are atypically long, it's probably the recruiting firm that is responsible. It's not because they employ people on visa or anything like that.
I'm an immigrant to the US, and in my home country resumes are all really long. Even people who have never had a job and just finished their bachelors somehow find a way to have 5 page resumes. I think immigrants to the US in IT/Tech roles figure out fairly quickly that they need to drastically reduce the lengths of the resumes.
Huh. How long ago was this? Genuinely curious (pessimism and cynicism in cheek, if you will) if this is a good idea for me to do if I'm applying somewhere not deeply technical (eg, FAANG).
I'm actually in Australia myself. Guess my choice of reference for "nearby offices of competent tech companies" had unintended geographic connotations, woops
Some companies want resumes submitted as text or .DOC, for easier keyword searching perhaps. Or to avoid viruses? So the recruiter may OCR the PDF, then "improve" on it.
It's really not made to be and with the exception of an embedded file that's actually editable (eg: LibreOffice optionally keeping an ODT version inside the PDF), "editing" a PDF tends to be a disaster of trying to match the layout with whatever text you are attempting to edit.
Certain tools, such as Word and LibreOffice, make it a bit easier as most of the source text is in the document, others like LaTeX end up looking like garbage through machine processing.
> Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me
I once refused to let a recruiter send my resume to this company because I thought the company was slimey (it looked like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking for a free government service to use their paid service instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not affiliated with the government)
The recuriter started getting angry at me, so I made it clear I would not work with someone who didn't respect me, and hung up. A recruiter who views you as simply a product to sell is not worth keeping. There's a million recruiters.
A recruiter called me out of the blue years ago when I was looking for a job, probably from LinkedIn. I didn't know much about contracting so I was just curious as to what he could do for me.
He called me once screaming at me because he thought I was not being exclusive to him with regards to a particular job. I told him quickly where to go, it was him who called me, grow up and stop wasting my time. To this day I have no idea what he was smoking that day cause I'm as bewildered now as I was then about what he was on about.
> it looked like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking for a free government service to use their paid service instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not affiliated with the government
> Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java
>Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?
Yea, hear that from the other side:
I went for interview at Amazon (~2017?) for Java backend engineer. During the interview they were asking me only JavaScript questions from what looked like a standardized form to filter out phonies. I obviously failed the interview. Was told if this isn't the job I wanted I should apply for a different job and come back when I get some more experience in... Java. The recruiter had absolutely no idea that Java isn't JS and was interrupting me when I tried to explain the situation. I really should have applied for a job I wanted. One of the worst interviews I event went to.
Java devs with wide recruiters network got such emails weekly, calls monthly, until TypeScript came to rescue.
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.
How did you find your recruiter? Do you mind sharing the rough process that unfolded? Not asking for you to share them, just wondering if there are any takeaways you would have for others on the process.
No prob. He actually had a position advertised on roberthalf.ca.
The position seemed right up my alley. The directions part explained he was the recruiter for this position, and to reach out on LinkedIn first. So, I did that. I guess it was a pre-screen to see if I read directions.
He accepted the request but didn't respond to my message for a few days. I'm really not good at self promotion, but I also really wanted to get his attention. I saw that he posted regularly to LinkedIn and also engaged with a lot of posts. So I posted a cool side project[0] to LinkedIn that I had recently done. I was feeling pretty exasperated, I think I wrote something like "if i will do this just for fun, imagine what I will do if you hire me." I don't necessarily recommend that exact approach, but he did notice it and that is what got the ball rolling. Thankfully he thought it was cool, because it is a little bit edgy. I was looking for a smaller company that valued a hacker mindset, so it was a bit of a filter as well I suppose.
We immediately hit it off. He seemed to understand what I was all about, which is cool. I'm an aspie and a lot of ppl just don't get me. He has over 20 years experience so he really knows his stuff and he was just nice and down to earth.
I got extra lucky because he was friends with the hiring manager for 20 years, they worked in the game industry together in the 90s.
I'm not capable of generating any takeaways currently, as I am real tired, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Hopefully my response was vaguely coherent and at least tangentially related to your question. Sleep time!
Seems like a wonderful red-flag system to me. I'd rather live in a world where bad recruiters make their values apparent than in one where they are well hidden.
TBF the recruiter likely was parroting what a previous candidate they were repping told them. I frequently find I have to re-educate recruiters who were previously informed incorrectly.
Absolutely, but that was kind of my point. A lot of recruiters I've encountered are like talking to a markov chain trained from some job ads. It sounds right if you don't actually know what the words mean.
..."maybe they are"...
did you check for a pulse?
I suppose there's nothing preventing walking Markov chains from having pulses...
But your comment is the pithiest most succinct one here.
Throw away the OP's tweet and all these comments, especially mine, and just put your comment on a blank page and let's call it's the succintestist summary possible.
I had one where "OWL is just like MFC, right?". At least she did listen while explained the differences. Sadly, I took a report writing gig to get out of one place. That was a hell of a bad call.
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.
Keyword-happy business HR: "Sorry, we're looking for Java. Case-insensitivity? No, we have to be sensitive to everyone. Being insensitive is not what HR does."
Even one month - two months is a long time for any non-esoteric language except maybe C++ (even that one I doubt) for any developer with experience picking up multiple languages. Most teams are actively working on making their ecosystems easy to pick up for beginners.
That is, unless the company in question has made a complete mess of their pipeline and aren't aware or unwilling to admit it.
The trick isn't memorizing them. The trick is discovering them. I've been emitting various versions of Wingardium Leviosa at Spring Boot for days now, with no effect. Once I've learned the incantation I'll have it and can repeat it in ten seconds, but until I have it I'm producing no actual work.
Arguably, I'm more valuable because I have the capacity to eventually figure this out, rather than having already memorized it. But if this were a crisis rather than a minor bug, it would be much, much better to have somebody who'd already spent that decade learning all of the many, many, many incantations that Spring Boot requires.
(I'd also argue that Spring Boot in particular is much, much, much too dependent on incantations, and the main lessons I've learned could be put on my resume as "Expert in Spring, and you can be too in one lesson: Don't.")
That really applies to all ecosystems. Hiring somebody smart is better. But there really is something to be said for having somebody with X years experience, who can therefore do some things in 10 minutes because they've already done the painful part on somebody else's dime.
I was once backed into a corner to write a web app in some form of Java. So I chose Spring and Angular. After months of frustration, trying to find examples, and put something together, I had gotten just one "show" page and an "edit" form worked out (but not the "update" function side). I put it all aside one day, and wrote what I was working on in Rails. It took me 1 afternoon, including authentication with SAML.
That's when I realized 1) how much Spring and Angular were NOT doing for me (compared to Rails), and 2) how much knowledge lies buried in BOTH stacks. I feel that Rails is by far the better tool for creating CRUD simple web apps, but the ability to be quick with it comes from years and years of living with it, and understanding how 3 or 4 lines of configuration work together to produce the effect of several hundred lines of explicit Java and JS in Spring and Angular.
Disclaimers: YMMV. TACMA. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Et cetera. Et alia. Ad nauseam. E Pluribus Unum. QED.
From my perspective, a great advantage of Java over non-statically-typed languages is that when I make a stupid error, most likely the IDE will notice it and underline it immediately. Thus I don't waste my time hunting for stupid errors.
That is, unless I use Spring. The stupid Spring-related errors only appear at runtime.
Ok, honestly, after a year, using Spring is more convenient than not using it. (Basically, there are two or three types of stupid errors I usually do, and I learned how to decipher the intimidating error messages.) But the first experience is quite a shock. You write something with algorithmic complexity of Hello World, then you run the program, it throws a screenful of error messages, and you want to scream.
It reminds me of my childhood experience with Turbo Pascal, where you had to wait until the compiler told you that you missed a semicolon... and then it pointed at the wrong place -- not the place where the semicolon should have been, but usually the beginning of the next line. After some time, it becomes obvious, but the first time it's definitely not.
Oh, if only you get error messages. My most common mode of failure in Spring is "nothing happened". Which there's no way to debug, or Google. At least error messages show up in Stack Overflow. You missed an annotation, or provided the wrong kind of annotation, and Spring just said, "Well, apparently that code doesn't matter."
Inversion of control means you have no control.
At least Spring has switched mostly to annotations, which are sorta like Java. The IDE can spot some errors.
Until now, I felt bad that I haven't learned Spring earlier. Now I feel happy that I only met Spring after the annotations were added. I can't even imagine the horror...
> It reminds me of my childhood experience with Turbo Pascal, where you had to wait until the compiler told you that you missed a semicolon... and then it pointed at the wrong place -- not the place where the semicolon should have been, but usually the beginning of the next line. After some time, it becomes obvious, but the first time it's definitely not.
C++ template expansion and linker errors come to mind. First time you encounter those it's typically either very short and cryptic or at least 500 errors and the compiler hitting an internal limit of how many of them to display.
I reach for Spring Boot as my tool of choice for most APIs, but I feel your pain. There’s always a particular corner, the dreaded “configuration” folder, filled with a collection of random annotations, single-purpose beans, filter chain setup, etc.
I find that most of my business logic ends up being really compact and powerful, but the tradeoff is that one chunk of the project is really dense.
The problem isn't can I learn, the problem is do you want to wait. You need a few great developers who have a lot of experience to ensure that a mess that is hard to clean up isn't main. If you have a 10 great developers who know how to do whatever right, then 100 other great developers who no nothing about the whatever can learn. However without those 10 experts in the domain to start with nobody knows what the right decisions are in the first place - in 3 years they will realize their mistakes but by then it is too hard to fix them.
To qualify the anecdote below, let me be clear that I’m an outlier: I have shipped‡ software on _lots_ of different stacks and 35+ different languages°.
I know exactly the difference between having to deal with the Java ecosystem for SOAP and the Microsoft ecosystem for SOAP—I had to deal with both at the same time at one job a decade ago. At that job, I worked with a lot of really smart people, but it was a Windows shop. Most of the people I worked with _could NOT_ work with the non-Windows platforms we had to deal with (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, VMware, and HP-UX). They would _constantly_ break code that was written to be cross-platform safe because it wasn’t what they were used to. On the other hand, at least I didn’t have to become familiar with how Exchange worked in order to integrate with _that_.
The number of people who can make the level of context switch you’re referring to, or working with multiple contexts like this, is vanishingly small in our industry. It can be done, but I think that you deeply underestimate the surface area of those ecosystems and the _willingness_ of people to put themselves in uncomfortable positions. The OP who talked about knowing C# but being interviewed for a Java position would have been _deeply_ uncomfortable writing Java because the tools they were used to weren’t available.
I would not make the same judgement you’ve made here. That said, if someone _wants_ to learn a new ecosystem, I’m happy to have them explore that (I prefer ability to learn over proven experience when I’m in a hiring position).
‡ Shipped: made it so that others could use, not just myself. This would include a project that I ported from Ruby to IO so that I could learn IO and a project that I ported to Elm in order to learn Elm. It does not necessarily indicate pickup. If we restricted this to stuff that I know that other people used, I might lose a couple more than the two I just mentioned.
° Languages: I include variants of languages that are _sufficiently different_ from their predecessors so as to require translation. This mostly affects the shell scripting variants (Posix sh, ksh, bash, and zsh are all _similar_ but sufficiently different that I count them; I have shipped substantial scripts in each). I don’t count gawk vs awk. Regardless, I vary between 3–4 languages and ecosystems weekly at my current job.
Yup. Very similar language, but good luck going from ASP.NET MVC to Spring Boot without missing a beat. Or from WinForms and WPF to Swing and whatever else is new and hot in Java-land. Not to mention NuGet vs Maven, EntityFramework vs Hibernate, etc.
I think this hides/hints at a greater point, though. C# or Java is a technology choice (among many, such as which ORM to use or even whether to use an ORM at all). All technology choices have an impact, and, in my experience working with both of these and other languages, it's just as likely for two shops that chose the same programming language to have made enough other different technology choices to make the transition challenging.
No one said there wouldn't be some ramp up time. Especially if there is another senior Java dev on the team that can "show the ropes", I don't think its that bad.
If we're talking about a lead or solo dev position, it would cause issues though.
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 same thing, etc, etc, etc.
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.
Lots of new languages that arose in reflex to the "stack complexity" of Java ... eventually achieved the same stack complexity with a totally different set of framework/tool names.
Ruby/Rails in particular became this. Javascript rocketed to this complexity level, with the added chaos of seemingly reinventing the entire toolchains every 2 years.
yeah, i never understood that part. People wanting to use javascript on the backend, but not having any of those tools. They exist for a reason, and it's not to make things more complicated.
When I started developing I felt the same way. One day I finally decided that maven was going to be around long enough (and I was going to be a java dev long enough) to spend some time learning. It didn't take long, couple days at most, man has it saved me a lot of grief over the years. CSS was the same, although it took longer than a couple of days, it has been more than worth it.
Honestly unless a candidate would have to learn to code in a significantly different paradigm (eg has only OOP experience and the work is in Erlang), I can’t think of a reason why prior experience with the language would be an issue.
Ironically, going the other way seems to be more difficult. C# has more features to learn, but simply not using them until you learn them won't really hurt you. Going from C# to Java, on the other hand, has some traps. You can get yourself into hot water if you don't know, for example, that the boxed and unboxed numeric types have different equality semantics.
I think the biggest hurdle going from Java to C# is how you think about asynchronous code, more so for desktop software. My last role was C# with me coming from Java and I got a few rude awakenings.
I think it also depends on the role. If the role expects a deep dive into the language and its ecosystem (more of a senior role), then the ramp up time is longer. But if it is a more junior role where you are just implementing stuff using core components of the language, then it should be easy enough to make the switch.
> "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?"
While it was extremely unethical for him to change your CV, Java and C# are indeed very similar, to the point that most organizations use devs with that background interchangeably.
If that company really ruled you out because you had 7 years of C# experience, and not 7 years of Java experience, you likely dodged a bullet.
> If that company really ruled you out because you had 7 years of C# experience, and not 7 years of Java experience, you likely dodged a bullet.
Respectfully, I disagree. Things that you should learn over 7 years of experience go far beyond learning the language itself or the fundamentals of its standard library. We're talking about two very different ecosystems.
Yeah, there's some truth to both your points. If you need to backfill someone for an existing production project that doesn't have the bandwidth to train them effectively you are setting that person up to fail. This is why tech interviewing is such a pain in the ass though as there are a lot of competent programmers who can pick up new languages quickly. When we decide on who to hire while at megacorp it is always - generalist or specialist. When we decided on who to hire while at a start up it was always - growth minded and quick learner.
> We're talking about two very different ecosystems.
Are we talking about the vast differences between Akka and Akka.NET? ;-)
Honestly, to the extent the ecosystems are different, it is probably more valuable to add someone to a team with experience with a different ecosystem unless there is literally no one on the team with experience with the current one (and in that case, you might question your commitment). Yes, it takes a while to learn a given ecosystem thoroughly, but that's not really what is going to drive the productivity of your team.
Meh, sure a C# dev can do Java and get up to speed with it pretty quickly, but certainly a proper Java dev will be more productive immediately. Knowledge of frameworks is a real skill for example.
The frameworks are typically very analogous between the two as well, it takes a while to learn them but in the meantime it's googling "how to do concept x in framework y". Apart from the initial project setup you're also generally spending a lot less time dealing with the framework and instead looking at other code.
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.
It's common practice for recruiters to replace your personal contact info with their agency's header/contact info.
I don't mind that. It makes sense.
I generate my resume as a PDF from HTML/CSS. It's fun to see how recruiters handle that. I think most use image manipulation to insert their header. One recruiter sent me some image assets and let me add the header/footer myself.
I'm sure some recruiters go too far with the .doc, but there are legitimate reasons too.
Last time I applied for job through a headhunter (2010), they ran my LaTeX resume through an automated .doc converter that destroyed all the formatting and then didn't even attempt to fix any of it. Somehow I still managed to get some interviews, and when I saw the printout on the interviewer's desk I shrieked in horror and handed him one the original paper copies that I'd luckily had the foresight to bring with me.
What are these recruiters you all talk about? Are these some middlemen you contract to get you a job? Like an athlete's/actor's agent?
I only had experience with recruiters who work for the organisation I'm interviewing for. None of this contact info / skills tampering makes sense in that context.
Post your resume on one of the really big job boards like Dice or Indeed and you'll see what we're talking about. Last time I did that I was getting 4 or 5 calls a day. Most of those recruiters were from the same three companies and you could safely rule them out because they would ask for your SSN. But anyone who calls you and tries to establish a personal relationship might be worth working with.
Rather than wait for applications, some companies will hire third party recruiters to find candidates to apply. Some will have in-house recruiters doing the same. If they find a successful candidate, they're paid with commission. Sometimes, being contacted by one is the only way to apply.
I've worked with several recruiters who are trying to shop around as an outsourced recruiter. Basically, they take your resume and slap their name on it in an effort to show companies "You should use me because I provide well-qualified talent."
If you're not going through internal recruitment then this is a great way to go about it. The recruiter isn't just trying to get their 20%, so they spend a lot more time getting to know you and also getting to know where you're going.
The biggest down side is that you'll never hear a negative word about anything, so you gotta be good at asking some pointed questions.
Never send doc. Always pdf. Next time I'm lookin I'm gonna send a jpeg for shits n giggles.
Same goes for references, always, "available on request for the employer who can reach out if they like, no you can't have them. Go find your own clients".
This may be a benefit in this case, as sneaky edits to a JPEG full of text will show up as a difference in patterns of artifacts - original text will be compressed twice, while the edits just once (or once and zero if they save the edited image to PNG). Takes a bit of time and skill to make this unnoticeable.
Ages ago, I was looking for a job. I made my CV using LaTeX, and provided it as a PDF to the recruiters. They straight turned around and asked for a Word format version instead. So I converted each page into an image, and pasted each one into a page each in a Word document, then sent that to them. They complained that there was something wrong with the document, and they were having trouble editing it.
I later had a job interview, and saw what the potential employer had been sent. They had re-typed it, and it looked awful.
> 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?".
Are those types of exchanges still take place at the interviews? I was lucky enough to avoid them, having worked at companies that are able to afford to spend extra time training people. Those types of discussions often remind me of the Linus' quote: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
Pretty much every interview I've had has been like that. Asking lots of exam style question about the language/platform.
In my experience most employers say they want good programmers, but in reality they want quick programmers. People who can get the product out the door ASAP. And that's why I wouldn't take a Java job without learning the ecosystem first. Even if they promise training, there's a high chance of them reneging. So I would end up in a stressful situation trying to learn as I go.
I'd rather stick with what I know and what I'm good at.
Had this happen to me as well, only my background is JavaScript. I've had more than one conversation with a recruiter where they didn't understand the difference between Java and JavaScript, so I'm unsure whether this was done due to malice or incompetence.
+1 to the PDF resume, if for no other reason than you don't have to deal with format issues on windows/mac.
That usually results in a drop in quality if they burn the pdf, and at least so far I haven't had that trick used on me. I suppose you could add some watermarks to discourage it.
> Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.
Although it depends how you generate it how easy it will be, Word has built in support for editing PDFs. So does LibreOffice (in Draw I believe). It's pretty accessible to non-technical people without expensive software to edit PDFs nowadays.
Weird. The recruiter did not show you the job description? Whenever there is a job sent by recruiter, I also ask for JD and the range of annual compensation. For the JD part, it is quite often that it is just a copy-paste from some employment website.
If I felt like I wouldn't get blank stares a lot of the time, I would absolutely love to use this. I'm at a completely different level of the industry than most of HN, so I don't get the benefit of (sometimes) interviewing with someone who is technically inclined rather than just a manager.
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 sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought."
So most good candidates and most good companies have long exited the official job market and work with referrals or whatever. And all what is left is that now shitty companies are receiving shitty applications. And if a non shitty company offers a job in this market or a good applicant applies to a job, the other side will never believe it.
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...
They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. I remember, when I was once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had received by order and ran away with; and happening to tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that it was only a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me to offer as a defence the greatest aggravation of the crime; and truly I had little to say in return, farther than the common answer, that different nations had different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily ashamed.[330]
[330] An act of parliament has been since passed by which some breaches of trust have been made capital.
What a gem this quote is. We index so much on punishing even fake violence in situations where there is real risk to both parties, and as a result, we incentivize fraud on a massive bubble scale level.
Probably some of that, plus the factors mentioned in Joel's old blog post:
In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired or quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job through references they made at their last one. If they happen to not have any references who can get them a new job and enter the general recruiting market, they usually get snapped up quickly.
Bad Developers tend to get fired or forced to quit a lot. Nobody who has experience working with them wants to hire them. They spend a lot of time on the general market applying for tons of companies that reject them. They keep doing this until they either finally learn some skills or figure out that development just isn't for them and find another line of work.
> In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired or quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job through references they made at their last one. If they happen to not have any references who can get them a new job and enter the general recruiting market, they usually get snapped up quickly.
They will also get snapped even before they end-up on the open market. For college hires, might be more than a year before they graduate or accepting a full time position at the end of an internship.
Hey, I said it's oversimplified. Don't get hung up on trying to categorize yourself as one or the other. You CAN get into another stack or another company if you really want to.
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 and reposting a lot of _stuff_ there recently.
I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're just bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for middle/upper-middle class people. Two, there are signalling to and chasing people with access to lots of money, who for reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out on LinkedIn.
Unemployed middle class people who suddenly have a lot of time on their hands -- more than job hunting can possibly consume -- not to mention that many people mope around a bit (dealing with a kind of minor depression) just after fired and take a couple of weeks to get their mojo going again.
I think the "middle-class" comes from the fact that such people have cash savings to weather a job hunt, whereas people without savings have to start working pronto on whatever if they're going to be eating and roofed in two weeks.
> I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're just bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for middle/upper-middle class people. Two, there are signalling to and chasing people with access to lots of money, who for reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out on LinkedIn.
Here's a third one: It's curated to folks with similar professional interests and isn't political.
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.
I don't know. I deleted my Linkedin Account long time ago.
People receive a lot of BS on Linkedin but for some people it works. This being said, the people I know whit 8-9 fig net worth, you wont find on linkedin.
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. I got the job.
I'm not sure. Recruiters can spray and pray with candidates the way candidates can spray and pray with applications. They're not going to be great quality, but if you're paid commission on a hire and the recruitment channel can handle the load... what's to stop the recruiter?
Aside from it destroying future business (we've had recruiters change candidates' resumes on us and that recruiter is blacklisted - by name - forever, to anyone who will listen), most contracts will have a 30-day clause where if the employee leaves for any reason within 30 days the fee is returned. Some even have if employee is fired within 30 days that the next placement fee is discounted.
When I connect with recruiters on Linkedin, I often notice they've spent a short time at their current position. Their tactics might not be sustainable.
That said, it's a bit absurd there aren't separate classes of users on Linkedin. Do I need to know a recruiter's work history?
Spray and pay works for sending people a little underqualified for a job. Sending people who don't know why they've been put forward for a job under false pretences just means the client won't interview any more candidates you send, especially if that candidate is plenty employable enough not to bother bluffing their way through.
And unlike candidates, recruiters can potentially get paid to fill a lot of a company's vacancies, provided they don't get blacklisted by them...
Nonsense told to me repeatedly by recruiters over the years:
- (your point) no incentive to send you for an interview if not a good fit.
- "I make more money if you make your money" often said to spin the "what is your salary requirement" question
Most recruiters work for an agency. Agencies have accounts with businesses. The account is central. You are in no position whatsoever to make determination as to what incentives drive the recruiter's business.
Recruiters also routinely b.s. young developers by "I get more if you get more money" when pressuring them into agreeing to a "salary expectation" right at the beginning of the employment negotiation.
Yes, recruiters have accounts with companies, but in my experience the recruitment fee is a percentage of salary, and the individual recruiter compensation is on a commission model. In short, I personally have no problems in believing that the higher the salary, the higher the payment to both the recruitment company and individual recruiter.
However, I think we all know that closing the deal is far more important to the recruiter than negotiating small changes to the salary, so your point stands.
I haven't worked with a recruiter, so this is pure speculation, but it seems to me that a recruiter's greatest incentive would be to close any deal at all as quickly as possible, because they're competing against the alternative of you finding a position on your own first (or otherwise no longer requiring their services). Getting you a high salary is just gravy.
You’re an engineer with a certain degree of experience and the recruiter will have an idea of how much that’s worth when they start the conversation with you, so they know up front how much money they stand to make as a ballpark figure, and how much work is worth putting into getting you an offer.
Once they get you to the offer stage, and most of the work is done, they want to close the deal as soon as possible for as much money as possible. They know the band for the position so, if you’re lowballing your ask, they have every incentive to bump that up.
On the flip side, if you’re asking for something on the top end of the range, and it looks like a long negotiation, they’re looking to spend a lot of incremental time for not a lot of incremental money, so it’s better to get you to accept an offer - any offer.
> they're competing against the alternative of you finding a position on your own first (or otherwise no longer requiring their services)
Almost every recruiter will constantly ask you if you're interviewing anywhere else or working with any other recruiters. They do this so they can be sure nobody else has the right to represent you to a client but also to gauge how much effort to put into presenting you to any of their clients. If you're not working with a a single recruiter exclusively, you'll often find that the amount of work they put in to get you in front of their clients drops dramatically to the point they no longer return your calls/emails.
It's one of those things that are technically true, but doesn't matter as much as the candidate is led to believe.
Negotiating $10k more for a candidate might see them get some percentage of that. But if they place you now, they can move on to another candidate and get a percentage of $100k or more.
Churn is far more important than min-maxing any single candidate.
Yep, recruiters like other middlemen make most money with volume not price/quality. It's not the size of the deal it's the constant flow of deals which makes them money.
For them to pay lots of attention on a single deal it has to be rather large, so that's why head hunters exist for top CxO type personnel, but not really for rank and file positions.
> You are in no position whatsoever to make determination as to what incentives drive the recruiter's business.
My god, how patronising.
My view on his comes from speaking to several hundred recruiters and owners of recruitment agencies as part of research for a product targeted at those businesses.
I also have close friends who worked or have worked in that industry and we have had very frank conversations about what their incentives are.
Maybe they all lied to me, but none of them wanted to put anybody forward for an interview who would make them look incompetent.
Their ideal flow for a deal was as follows:
- Receive brief from client.
- Find about 3 good candidates and get them booked for interviews. Could be more or less, depending on the role.
- Interviews take place and the client considers all candidates to be at least somewhat suitable, but decides to pull the trigger on one of them.
- The recruiter manages the candidate's salary expectations within a range based on their experience of placing other people in similar positions so that the deal gets done. Generally this means that they will try to get it closed within one or at most two offer-counteroffer loops. That may mean disabusing candidates of unrealistic salary expectations. It may also mean convincing clients to increase the previously agreed salary range to accommodate a candidate who is significantly more attractive than the average.
- The recruiter receives a placement fee equivalent to a percentage of yearly salary in most cases.
This does not mean that individual recruiters or agencies may not have other incentives. I know that sometimes interviews of external candidates are a procedural requirement and are conducted just for show so that a preferred internal candidate may be offered the position.
But in general, I am quite sure that the above is a reasonably accurate account of what the usual incentives are.
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 entirely in Scala, a language I had literally never spent more than 5 minutes on before dismissing because the online tutorial I was using broke about two chapters in.
Is it unusual? I’ve changed jobs three times now going into places with different languages than ones I had much experience of. IME it takes about as much time to learn the codebase as it does to learn a new language and both go hand in glove.
IME it depends on the shop and it's own skill level. If you've got a bunch of devs with only experience in the tech stack the company is using, they'll be heavily selective for a match to their stack. If they've got a broad set of internal tools in a bunch of languages, they're likely selecting more broadly based on overall skill or the ability to get up to speed.
And I'm 100% with you there, learning a new place's codebase can often take as much or more time than learning a new language (at least if you've got experience with a couple of languages already). There's at least tutorials and guides for a new language, and there's rarely good docs and resources for the codebase.
I once applied for an internship at EA and thought I was invited for an interview on C. They gave me some C++ code to fix, which I didn't know, it wasn't on my CV. They just said "well this code is basically C", although I was pretty confused about those extra "&" the whole time, and it was a pretty rough experience.
In the end I didn't get the job, but their response said I didn't get it because the found that my experience didn`t match my CV. Go figure.
Similar situation for me on the other side. Interviewing a guy that would be my colleague. Asked him a few things about his resume, he gave me an odd look then asked, "May I see that?" When I handed it to him he scanned it over, handed it back to me and said, "This is an utter fabrication."
We hired him (interview went on discussing the job, his actual background, etc.) and he was really good, but I don't know what my bosses did with that recruiting agency, if anything. Above my pay grade, that.
This was early 1990's, so this charlatanery is not new.
I get as angry with recruiters as everyone else, but then I remember then time where I worked for a company that shared a floor of a serviced office building with a recruitment company. They were brutal in their treatment of staff - they were too cheap to get rooms for staff appraisals so they would do them in the coffee area we shared with them so we could hear how they were treated by their management - seeing people (men and women) in tears was pretty much a daily event.
Used to work at a place that shared a kitchen with a recruitment company and the same thing would happen. Very awkward to have to make a coffee right next to someone in floods of tears getting absolutely monstered by their manager.
It's a sales job and a hard one and most people are crap at it,hence the churn. I've spoken to a few in their early 20s that were very good but then they aren't your usual Java is the same as JavaScript type of people.
My sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and basically described the same. They set targets for everyone that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and more hours.
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 (obviously wrong.) She is very much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got fired.
Recruitment companies will literally push their employees to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or they break you and fire you.
Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common and frequent.
Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech.
Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)
At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.
In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem.
This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....
I wasn't entirely serious and short of surgically grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)
Great advice. Another variation on that is just getting them to look something up for you that is at least tangentially related to your work. Anything where they are now helping you changes the power dynamic and will make them super uncomfortable.
A good project manager will be confident in their position and in doing whatever they can to help the project and won't mind. But that type of person wouldn't be looking over your shoulder unless invited.
As someone of a more libertarian bent myself, I find the opposition to unions slightly puzzling. It's clear the disdain is driven by opposition to socialism, as so many unions are subverted by socialists and their influence, but as a general idea they are perfectly acceptable if not ideal and should be championed - free association, individuals coming together to use their bargaining power to provide corrective balance to a part of the market suffering from power and information asymmetry… there's so many good things about unions.
In fact, if they were championed by - shall we call them economic liberals? - then they might be a damned sight harder to subvert and be a whole lot more effective and palatable. I know Sweden has strong unions and workers on boards (something I learnt from the very readable though still arguable book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism[1]), with restricted power (the employees can never become a majority in any vote on the board) and it seems to me to be an obviously good idea.
"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.
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.
Absolutely, but the events are not comparable. Sacrafice at Chernobyl might save thousands, sacrafice at %xcorp% saves a fat bonus for the guy responsible for the whole mess in the first place!
Edit: Everyone at the time probably thought that they were being sent to their deaths so they were staggeringly brave - but that's not how things turned out.
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. "
Nope. Sales is sales is sales. It’s a pretty harsh world. If you’ve been a solid performer for years, maybe you can miss one monthly quota. Lots of abuse.
I used to know a chap who was a successful partner at a top UK law firm - he had a very successful run of work that lasted for years and made a lot of money for everyone. However, eventually he it came to an end and he had a less than successful month - he got the same bollocking about performance as everyone else, and in front of his entire team too.
the thing with sales is one you develop a sales skill and network - you go and set up your own shop and become an equity owner.
consider sales as a learning experience to set up your own shop
I imagine a lot of people here would consider it pretty awful if they would be routinely punished because something happened totally out of their control--like a decision maker at a customer changing jobs tanking an "in the bag" deal. Yet that sort of thing happens all the time in sales.
Sales is especially harsh in some environments.
I knew someone who ran the business side of a small company. They thought they were really good at sales. But they were really just handling client service, billing, etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through their own relationships. They ended up going on to do "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't pretty.
My brother worked in commission-based sales for a while. He said the performance bonus structure was awful. It was basically based on your performance increase, rather than your absolute performance. So the top performer would likely get the lowest bonus because it's hard to improve when you're already at the top. If 100% of your calls led to a sale, you might get a good bonus the first year, but you will have made it impossible to get anything in subsequent years.
It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when you first start so you can "get better" every year and get a bigger bonus.
What made it worse was that each year, they would "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went down while expectations on sales went up.
It's funny, you actually see this broken incentive system everywhere once you start looking for it. Here's a quick example from outside the business world.
I've been playing with Duolingo. The main incentive is seeing your "streak" increase (the number of days in a row you complete a lesson). You are allowed to make five mistakes total every day on the free version. If you struggle with a lesson, you might use up all five of them, in which case your streak will die. Duolingo allows you to spend points to buy a new thing of five "hearts" (the traditional video game lives). So you have a fairly strong incentive to make sure you always have a cache of points.
Once you blow through some easy incentives in the first few weeks, there aren't that many ways to get points (besides completing more lessons, which you can't do if you run out of hearts). One of the main ways to get points is to do well in the bracketed competition system, where you are compared to 49 other users you are grouped with every week.
Unless you're in the top 3 (hard, because there are a handful of people who treat Duolingo like a full time job), you don't earn any points from your bracket placement. You only earn points from going up a bracket at the end of a week (top 10). Once you reach the top bracket, you don't get any more points. So the system is actually incentivizing you to repeatedly drop down one bracket so that you can climb it again.
(Interestingly, there's a very easy time-zone based trick to get yourself much easier competition because their matchmaking algorithm is unintelligent. All weekly competitions start at midnight UTC on Monday morning, which is what allows the trick to work. I managed to get top three finishes in a pretty high bracket without much work. Been meaning to write this up...)
Sadly, it’s not as rare as it should be. Most of us here have limited experience with jobs where the company doesn’t respect you much and is confident that you can easily be replaced. Unless there’s a union the odds are pretty good that you can find a manager like that at a large organization once you get out of the high-status areas - especially when it’s something like an outsourced labor company where margins are low and replacing people doesn’t have much visible impact on customers.
At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.
It was a branch office of one of the big UK recruitment companies - I can't remember their name (it was ~10 years ago).
I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!
they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit
It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for more senior hires. The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher pay
Just like the real estate agent is incentivised to get you a higher price for your home?
No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a repeat customer their incentives are to get decent candidates quickly into a role without causing any issues.
"The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivized to help you negotiate higher pay"
Not really. Like realters, "Real estate agents do not generally represent the buyer," says Florida real-estate attorney Barry Ansbacher. "But buyers think they do."
I learned that quickly, so when I go into an interview I'm always honest and take a couple of extra CVs just in case the recruiter has changed something.
At one interview they told me they thought I would be a good fit, but couldn't hire me at my requested salary.
I hadn't put down a requested salary, the recruiter had put down an unreasonably high salary and almost cost me the job
Really, the breakdown was with the recruiter doing that without telling you.
Flip side: I helped interview someone to replace me for an old position. He was put forward by a recruiting company as having had .NET and Ruby on Rails experience. I asked if he had done any Rails projects. "Oh yes, 2 or 3." Because of time, I didn't press further. We knew we were hiring a junior guy, and I didn't want to tangle with specifics, or trying to smoke out how much he knew through technical questions. I'm a brutally honest person, and I can never quite catch myself being naive at the wrong moment...
When the time came to hand off the Rails project to him, I told him it was written in Rails, and he literally opened a browser, went to Google, and typed in "Ruby on Rails" in front of me. And that's when I knew the recruiter had lied FOR him, and coached him to just go along with the lie. At least THIS guy had THAT going for him.
When I told my new management about the lie, knowing what was coming, I just got a stupid look, and a "Well, this can be an opportunity to learn something new."
It took him 3 years to rewrite my 3-month Rails app in .NET, and I've heard it doesn't work.
Yes, recruitment is broken. In this example, it was an utter lack of care to follow up on malfeasance from a recruiting firm. They got what they ultimately wanted -- a warm body on an H1-B visa -- and that's what they'll continue to get with their process.
Had a similar experience when I showed up to an interview for a Windows sysadmin job that a recruiter had arranged. First thing they said was "so your resume says you have 5 years of AS/400 system administration experience?"
I think I was 22 years old at the time and had never seen AS/400 in my life, and told them so. They showed me a copy of my resume which had AS/400 and a few other skills falsely inserted by the recruiter. They appreciated my honesty and did call me back for another open position later, and told me they'd fired that recruiter.
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.
Having read a lot of CV's myself, recuiters will still edit PDFs.
Subtle formatting errors make it apparent when recruiters have reordered lists or inserted bullet-points here and there.
They'll try to cover contact details with white rectangles - infamously not great at removing data in a digital document.
Even when it it's not clear from the document itself, I like it when candidates come in with their own copy of the CV, I'm always interested in comparing the difference between that and the one the recruiter provided.
I have to say that it pretty much doesn't matter anymore.
In the last ~4 years I've only sent out PDF copies of my Resume to Recruiters.
A couple of have turned around and asked for it in DOC/DOCX, but a whole bunch more have just copy/pasted it into their own template and sent that to the employer.
I've turned up to interviews and offered the interviewers copies of my resume, and they wave something with the recruiters's logo all over it and not looking at all like what I sent in.
Exactly this. As someone on the hiring side, most Resumes that come my way are identical layout for every candidate a recruiter sends.
As soon as I'm talking to a candidate 1-on-1 (without the recruiter proxying) I ask them to provided me an original copy of their Resume, because the recruiter may have left out important details (thinking them irrelevant, as recruiters typically aren't tech-savvy) when copy+pasting into their template.
Just a note to anyone considering using PDFs for their CVs. Plenty of companies use Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) to manage recruitment process. Most often keywords are extracted from the CVs. PDFs are harder to extract from meaning you might not even be considered (or even ever seen) by a recruiter due to a far from perfect implementation. Of course the case here is different all together but maybe this insight will save someone's a fair bit of frustration.
On the other hand, I've seen companies where the ATS is able to perfectly extract information from a PDF resume, and I'm always quite impressed by that.
Recruiters routinely & legitimately edit CVs to remove your identifying information when they send your profile over to clients to prevent them from bypassing the recruiter.
You're right of course that with OCR, and the right typefaces, it's always possible to automate the process of building an editable document from a PDF or printed page.
But I doubt anyone would take the hazzle of doing OCR. Because it is still a lot of work to spot misstakes (which still do happen, also with standardfonts).
Also, who would want to lower the perceived visual quality of his resume? And scanning a document, means just that. It will be still readable, yes, but you can see, that it was scanned in.
I just went through a round of job hunting and got plenty of private sector responses using a latex-made PDF. My resume is really not obvious that it was made in latex though.
I've gotten my last four jobs with a LaTeX made PDF and plenty of other offers.
I had a couple of recruiters ask for a doc/docx. I think I only made one conversion where it was the actual HR from the company using it for keyword matching and I refused to do it for the other recruiters. Still got invited to interviews of companies for those other recruiters.
Intermediary recruiters are well-known for asking for editable formats, e.g. docx. So technically you can stop them from editing your CV, but non-technically they can just decline to represent/use you. Or, they might just copy-paste your PDF into a new doc and present that to the potential employer.
If they come to me with a vague offer they can get my LinkedIn URL, and if they can't work with that, or really need a .doc then the conversation is mostly over for me.
It might seem harsh, but it's an easy way to weed out lazy recruiters that just want to spam your C.V. to many clients based on a keyword match when they upload it into their automated system and the recruiters that want to take time and even invest into a relationship to build a decent portfolio.
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.
The same here!
I tell them that I don't own MS Word and that I don't know how to use it. If that's deal-breaker then I don't want to work with this recruiter.
But I must add that I am only looking for C Linux coder contracts.
I am really surprised so many people actually use recruiters :O Why not just look for a job yourself? They are so annoying to me, I can barely imagine anyone actually taking them serious...
> 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.
> 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.
I don't agree. If I'm interviewing someone straight out of college there are things I wouldn't expect them to really know and focus on whether they are focused and motivated enough to learn those things on the job. If the person at 15 years experience and doesn't know things which are a normal part of the kind of job I do, it would be a deal breaker.
Where I work, the interview is based on the level we're hiring for, not their background. If someone's expected to perform as a mid-level engineer, it doesn't matter to me how long they've worked as long as they can solve the technical problem as expected for someone of that level. It's a different philosophy, and has it's pros and cons.
I start off by asking them about an interesting technical problem they worked on recently, so I get to talk to them about that stuff. Unfortunately, many candidates mention the company they work for off the bat, which may introduce unconscious bias or whatnot.
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 tracking systems, writing carefully customised cover letters for each job, following up with companies after interviews and so on. And for employers, recruiters will deal with grubby business like cold-calling candidates and will often have access to more candidates.
It also has a bunch of disadvantages - recruiters will happily post fake high-salary jobs to gather resumes, add lies to candidates' resumes, help candidates cheat on work-sample tests, send generous 'gifts' to hiring teams that take their candidates, apply high-pressure sales tactics to wavering candidates, call candidates they placed after a year or two and encourage them to move jobs, and copy the contact database any time they leave a job.
Having been in the software business for nearly 20 years I can state that from my own experiences, recruiters are overwhelmingly bad.
The thing is that there are big incentives for the recruiters. Where I live (Dublin) the recruiters finders fee would be around 30% of the candidates salary. In IT that could be a fair whack of money. That sort of incentive can cause some peoples morals to loosen a bit.
Here are some of my experiences...
Recruiters editing my CV to make me look more skilled or possessing skills I don't have.
Editing my CV so that it contains the right information, but the formatting has been destroyed and it looks terrible.
Costing me a job opportunity when I applied direct to a company and because I was on a recruiters system they demanded a fee when they learned I was made an offer. Because the recruiter threatened legal action, the company withdrew the offer.
Calling at me at work. Even on occasions calling me via the company switchboard.
Arranging interviews without my consent.
A recruiter shouting at me for cancelling an interview because I was running a 39 degree fever.
Taking my LinkedIn profile data and creating profiles on their own systems. I added a fake job to my profile to weed those ones out.
Individual recruiters taking my data from one company to the next when they themselves changed employers.
Refusing to delete my data from their systems forcing me to go to the Data Protection Commissioner.
When I went self-employed they started calling me asking if I would hire one of their candidates. Even though I said I was a one man operation and would stay that way - they kept calling.
One recruiter calling my wife when I blocked their number.
Of course different peoples experiences may vary, but in my case I can honestly say I have never had a good experience with an IT recruiter.
Interesting in the UK every agency I have directly dealt with has asked first and got my verbal permission to represent.
Sounds like the employer is a shitty as the agency here, if I had had an offer like that withdrawn I would have sent a stiff letter from a lawyer wanting a "compromise agreement"
Prior to the GDPR I was only ever formally asked a few times for permission to represent. Since the GDPR the few recruiter I've dealt with always asked. I think the GDPR scared them a bit.
As for the offer withdrawal, until the contract is signed they had every right to do that. To be fair having seen it from the employers side, when an agency does something like that it can be messy. You may be the best candidate ever, but if the company has to drop a five-figure sum on solicitors and legal stuff then you may be more of a hindrance to them.
yes, even on larger agencies, you can find shitty recruiters that think their work is to move meat around.
once a recruiter made me run trough 5 interviews. I had a full time job at a time, with a decent pay, and explicitly stated my requested salary upfront. after the whole charade, which burned a significant amount of my vacation days since I was working at another city at the moment, they just came out and said the budget for the position was less than the asking price, but feel convinced it would have been a great opportunity for me.
goddamn scum.
oh, and the "opportunity" went into bankruptcy forced liquidation two years later.
Bad (external) recruiters are absolutely the norm. I'm sure a good one exists somewhere but I've never interacted with one. They are shady, they lie to you, they edit resumes, they are rude, they waste your time, they don't listen, they have no attention to detail, and they berate you if you even consider not accepting an offer.
Many small companies use them anyways for some reason.
Recruiters who work for the company they are recruiting for are normally pretty good.
That's why I always take multiple copies of my CV with me to any interview that's arranged through a recruiter and give the interviewer one at the beginning of the interview.
I once had a recruiter do the opposite to yours and remove something really important that I'd included specifically for the kind of role they put me forward for. They had just decided that they didn't think it was important. The interviewer disagreed and we spent a while talking about it.
The interviewer in that case referred to the recruiter as "the car salesman" throughout the interview. He said the guy was a bit rubbish, but better than all others they'd tried. They were a small firm so had turned to recruiters to take some of the workload. I think he was regretting it.
Just a question, is it common in your country to actually bother with recruiters? I ignore them by default as I consider it a slimy business and quite frankly I dont care what they have to say. If I am interested into working for some company, I will send them an email, regardless if they are recruiting or not and I was rejected in around 30% (but I do have something to show in my resume or even if they ignore it, in my hobby projects). 3rd party recruiting, with their generic letters? Come on, at least try.
But I must say this is something relatively new to me, I started to get those letters on linkedin like 2-3 years ago, is this like a common practice?
> The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them.
It's been a while, but when I doing technical interviews I would give the candidate a copy of the resume that I had and ask them "Before we start, is this your resume? Is everything on it accurate?"
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.
I had a front-end long-term contract many years ago that required expertise with C#, WPF, Silverlight and something else I forget. I had those things covered, but I soon learned that I was also supposedly an expert in SharePoint and an experienced graphic artist. The reality is that if they had given me any requirements for SharePoint I could have built that for them even though I had never used it. But graphic design I had no interest in. A few weeks in there was a lunch with recruiters and contractors for the project and one of the other recruiters (not the one who submitted me for the job) asked me something like, "when did you first realize that you loved to draw?" or something. I told her honestly I was horrible at drawing and not interested in it.
One of the reasons I got fired from that contract eventually (aside from a fight with a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality and was holding the project up in his backend role) was that they were disappointed with my lack of interesting user interface designs.
I never told anyone I was a graphic artist. Even if I did have that skill (or interest) (which I had neither), I was too busy dealing with new WPF/XAML/C# features and software design etc.
Recruiters are very different from “the good ol’ days,” when they acted more like talent agents.
I was a hiring manager for decades, and appreciated recruiters that acted as advocates for their prospects; even when I ended up not hiring the prospect.
Nowadays, it’s all tag searches and fake “personalized” emails. If I have “I once had a cup of coffee” in my CV, I’m a “Java guru.”
I regularly send people interested in working with me to things like my SO Story[0], and they regularly ignore it.
Nowadays, I have the rare luxury of choosing with whom I want to work. If folks don’t want to work with me, then let’s not waste each other’s time.
I had a similar experience when I decided to move on from my first job. I naively accepted a recruiter's request to help and ended up going on a couple interviews where I was completely out of my depth.
5 minutes into the second such interview I asked the interviewer to see the job requirements and handed them a copy of my resume. I then explained that I didn't have any of the qualifications they were looking for, not even relevant experience, and noped my way out the door.
I received a nice email from the interviewer thanking me for not wasting their time and saying they'd keep my real resume on file if they had anything come up.
Yeah, recruiters are incentivised to sell you to a company, that's when they get paid. I believe a lot of companies have a clause that the recruiter only gets paid if the new employee works at the company for an X amount of time, but I suspect they gamble on the employee blending in.
But it's damaging, and the company will not be pleased with the recruiter if they find out they've scammed them into hiring.
I meet couple of recruiters who insist on me sending them CV as DOC. I tell them that I have carefully typeset my CV in LaTeX in PDF and I am not willing to rewrite it to Word. Usually this is the end of it and they just take my PDF.
I have once been on an interview and interviewer pulled out my CV, obviously horribly mangled in Word. I told him that no, this isn't my CV and that I take too much pride in whatever I make including my CV to make such horribly looking document.
I have once met recruiter who insisted I rewrite my CV to include description of my experience with everything that was listed in the ad. I told them that this is my CV and it already lists a lot of stuff and it doesn't make sense for me to list obvious things (like knowledge of Excel) or things I have no experience with and that in general the CV is about me and not about the ad contents. I got no reply.
Re word documents do go in document systems in the hiring firm so they might be the one asking for that.
As for the latter. You don't have one CV you have a separate CV for each application and tune it to the ad. The ad is what the hiring firm is interested in and if you fit their needs and not does the firm fit your needs, that is for you to discover from the ad or from the interview process
I've had a recruiter from a recruiting agency and a HR person at a company (different jobs) ask me to update my resume with something I wasn't comfortable with.
I didn't do it, both still offered me interviews and the focus of the interview was those technologies. I pointed out that it wasn't on my resume and yup it wasn't, everyone seemed confused.
At the time I was trying to break into the industry and didn't feel like telling them.
I really just want to talk to some technical folks at the company, 10 minutes and if they're honest we probably both know if I'm a good fit or not... but rather it's recruiter and HR filters up the wazoo.
The whole thing is a stupid game where companies, recruiters, and etc don't know what they're talking about, play alphabet soup, ghost people ... and then get upset when it happens to them...
The whole process seems disconnected and shockingly dishonest.
Recruiting should require basic familiarity with the target industry, and knowledge of what type of background is actually relevant to a position. The overwhelming majority of random recruiter messages I’ve received over the years have basically just shown the cluelessness of the recruiter.
There are so many programming languages out there, as a hiring manager it’s not uncommon for me to see resumes with languages I’ve never heard of and probably don’t care much about. The cheat code just depends on how it has been inserted into the resume.
If I threw out every resume with some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem, etc. I’d probably never hire anyone
> some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem
I don't dock points for layout issues (unless they say they have experience in front-end work...), but spelling and grammar is exactly what you should be getting right in an resume. I don't meant to say I would be unreasonable pedant about the use of prepositions, and I'd probably overlook an MS Office autocorrect (like how Excel always changes "HSA" to "HAS", grrr) - and small mistakes must never invalidate someone immediately - but it means I'm going to be in the session with a dim view of the candidate until and unless they demonstrate otherwise.
That said, recruiters and agencies do edit resumes - so if something seems off with a resume (e.g. "20 years experience with Rust") then I do have a policy of directly contacting the candidate with the resume attached and asking them to verify that this is the resume they wrote. It's also why I sign my own resume PDF with my AATL certificate and mention that fact when I get to contact the hiring manager (e.g. "oh hey, did you have a chance review my signed resume? if it wasn't a signed PDF please let me know, thanks!)
I had a recruiter dress up my (at the time) plain sysadmin resume as a .NET developer with sysadmin experience and I got blindsided by what the position I was interviewing for actually was when I got there. What a waste of everyone's time. And to this day it's always third party recruiters reaching out to me for positions I'd be "a great fit for", even though even though they're only loosely related to what I've I've done. I tried to avoid external recruiters for the most part these days.
When looking for a job after university, I once got invited to an interview via a recruiter who - as they do - said I'd be a great fit. I booked a train ticket for the Monday interview, with multiple hours of leeway, and said I'd be glad to attend.
On the Friday morning before the interview, the recruiter gave me a rough idea of what kind of technical questions they'd ask me.
They were nothing like my area of expertise.
If something like this happened to me today, I'd cancel the interview, apologise to all the parties, and wouldn't drive there on the day of the interview. But I was a poor student, I didn't drive, I'd already bought the train ticket and, with the limited funds I had, being able to go to any further interviews was contingent on me getting paid expenses for this interview.
So I spent the weekend dreading the interview, skipped Monday's lectures, and went to my ritual humiliation. During one excruciating question about AC motors, I came within seconds of telling the interviewers that it wasn't going to work out. But, to ensure I got the train fare back, I had to do appear to be trying my hardest.
> The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while.
Exactly this. The most depressing thing to me is that whenever I suggest to my colleagues that 99% of the work we'd hire someone for anyone with half a brain could learn in a few weeks (I work in an office for a big company), they still insist on listing all sorts of required skills. Even though the people we land with job adverts like that don't usually have the skills and then get hired anyway.
>The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end
It is. Have you filled out an online job application lately? I've abandoned multiple opportunities when I was directed to an online application that looked like it was written in the 1990s and literally asked me to rekey every bit of info that is already on my CV. There's no reason for a job application to ask for anything other than name and email with a button to upload your CV in this day and age.
A lot of comments under here are talking about recruiters changing CVs, but I can't imagine why anyone would do that. Like, what is the incentive there?
Are these "outsourced" recruiters that get paid regardless of the quality of the candidate? Is that a thing? (I genuinely don't know, I've only ever talked to in-house recruiters that had their incentives aligned with the company so there's no reason for them to lie about candidates)
We interviewed a person a number of years ago now in a similar boat.
We'd asked him how proficient he was with a number of technologies he'd listed on his resume, and he didn't seem to know what any of them were.
Finally, frustrated, we asked him why he'd put these things on his resume. He said "my recruiter told me to". Sigh. I don't know for certain but I believe we didn't work with that recruiter again.
This happened to me as well. I am so glad I had a copy of my CV with me that I could hand over.
The recruiter had copy and pasted from my perfectly formatted LaTeX typeset resume and changed what I did and when. They were looking for someone to help them migrate from one system to another and I didn't have experience in the first to help with that.
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.
I wonder if that's a factor in the rise of new industry terms - I think devops is quite a good descriptor but it's still quite unnecessary, operations (or the like) is perfectly good - but, for a while at least, it does help mark you out from the crowd.
My dad had a recruiter delete his PhD from the education section. During the interview a topic related to his thesis came up, he mentioned his thesis and the interview was over because "we don't hire people with PhDs"
1. Having interviewed otherwise similarly qualified recent graduates, those with PhDs absolutely were worse on average at writing code[A].
2. Having a PhD raises the salary you can get at other jobs (less true today then 25 years ago when it happened, but still somewhat true), so if the job isn't paying particularly high rates then they either worry about retention or quality (i.e. you can either get a better paying job elsewhere because of the PhD or you can't despite the PhD, neither of which bodes well for the company hiring).
#1 didn't really apply to my dad since he had over 10 years of industry experience at that point, but might be the reason for the policy.
A: I don't know why this is so. I suspect it's a combination of factors; those with good practical skills may be lured away from academia after one of their previous 2 degrees and never get a PhD; the PhDs looking for industry jobs are already those who were disqualified from academia for some reason? I never pursued any education after my B.S. so can really only speculate.
This is why I don't hand out my resume as a word (or whatever doc). It goes out as a PDF. My assumption is that someone smart enough to edit it, is smart enough to know that adding needed shit to the resume is a bad idea.
Exchange 4.5< admin popping in to say hi. The management interface to 2000 was basically the same as 2003 & 2007, it wasn’t until 2010 iirc that the web based interface + everything is cloud doctrine hit.
Where were you when I needed you in the interview? ;-P
I don't remember the year it happened but it could even have been 2001, even 6 months to a year at that time would count as "extensive", I suppose. Can't say I had extensive 5.5 experience at that point either, to be fair.
They were probably concerned about their upgrade path from NT to 2000 and active directory more than just the mail server. I'll never know!
That's pretty wild! I've worked with a fair number of recruiters at this point, from both sides
of the table, and the next one I see pull something like that will be the first.
MOVA stands for “multiple object versionless architecture”, which is something I’d imagine any experienced full-stack developer should be able to handle- if it were real.
Did anyone else catch the hilarity of their animal choice on that fake book cover? A Lion! (Lyin') I guess a "Bull" relieving itself would have been too obvious?
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, at the end of the interview they'd take the candidate to go play the master.
I used to do some work with a software consulting firm. There was a ping pong table in the office, and while talking about rates, our CEO liked to offer clients a 15% discount on our services if they could beat Joe from accounting at ping pong. He did it as a bit of a running joke, and to see how people reacted to the offer.
What our clients didn't know was that Joe was terrible at ping pong. But that didn't matter - from memory he was only ever challenged once in the many years I was there.
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.
If they'd made the clause a kickback and they'd have gotten 100% uptake.
Discounts after the contract is approved are actually a headache in some large orgs. You will have to answer multiple questions each quarter as to why your numbers are off. You won't get to spend the money elsewhere, but will have more work. Plus, you'll never get budget approval for buying or shipping a plant.
Does it? If someone from legal reads the contract, why would they bother dealing with this gimmicky clause? The budget has already been approved and sending someone a plant might cost another 30min of their time they rather spent on doing their job.
"I can think of a hypothetical reason why you might be wrong in very specific circumstances, so I'll suggest that could be a reason why the general case is wrong" is such a dumb argument. Obviously there might be occasions where a client reads the clause and chooses to ignore it. Very rarely, someone in legal might decide to ignore the clause because they're a bit lazy and don't care about saving their employer some money. That isn't an argument against what I said though.
Plus, if the budget has already been approved, someone didn't read the contract before signing it. That's the same as not reading it.
Fair enough. My experience is limited to large corporations with bloated, slow procurement processes. So I would be really surprised if legal would get back to me about something like this. That said, I don't think I've ever encoutered these type of jokes.
If they decide to actually send a plant and this is in the US, dealing with actually selecting and sending it won't take much time. You can order a plant online for delivery [1]. Plants at that site start at $35 for the plant and pot, and shipping is a flat $7 on orders under $75.
If legal reads it you're at least gonna get an email to the tune of "hey WTF is this? did someone sneak a joke into the draft?" which is sufficient for proving they read it.
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.
> [...] [H]e was only ever challenged once in the many years I was there.
I suspect that's because your client's spending their company's money, and it made no difference if the rate were cheaper. They'd rather sign the deal quickly then GTFO. Challenging Joe would only prolong the process.
Well yes, Greenknight gets his head lobed off, but he then puts it back on. The scary part is that in a year's time he'll get to return the favor (but doesn't, because it was a test of chivalry (and the protagonist was chivalrous)). Wikipedia has a synopsis.
Sure, but Gawain only finds that it's a test after the fact (by surviving the test due to his virtuousness). So my take away was always something along the lines of don't play games whose stakes you may not fully understand against people whose power you may not fully appreciate especially if it doesn't seem like there is a downside.
I would expect someone to be actually good at chess to put down their Elo rating. For someone just putting it as a hobby, I wouldn't expect much, especially when it comes to the "boring" stuff like memorizing openings.
In the same way that there is usually a difference between what high level athletes and hobbyist write. The former usually mention something concrete (champion of..., XXX league, a time or score, ...) while the latter just mention the sport, often among other things.
If someone had bad education credentials (bad school, dropout, etc) but they put a high SAT score on a resume that would be a pretty concise way of communicating "it wasn't because I'm dumb"
It’s possible that the received signal would be “I test well, but I struggle to complete a structured, long-term course of action”, which probably isn’t that beneficial.
I'd still prefer that to "I both test poorly and struggle to complete a structured, long-term course of action" which is just as likely an interpretation if you left it off.
At the end of the day, anything could be bad if viewed with sufficient cynicism, and you can't control how others will interpret what you present, you can only control the information which is presented.
I'm interested in why you hold that opinion of Black Swan.
I just read it a couple of months back because I figured I probably owed reading some Taleb as back table stakes for all the hours I've spent reading HN (and SSC). Picked Black Swan because it seemed to be the most well known and I've never liked jumping into a series with the most recent release. I enjoyed it, will read more of him, but haven't yet.
Fooled by Randomness was written first. I found it quite insightful. Having read it, the Black Swan felt like a rehash of the same ideas, while the narrator (Taleb) comes across as particularly insufferable.
If you've read the Black Swan already that's fine. My recommendation is mostly addressed to those who have read neither.
It's been a while since I read these books but I'm surprised to hear someone like Fooled By Randomness but not Black Swan. One of the few complaints I had of Black Swan was that it felt a bit redundant in parts from the previous book. Overall I think both books are great and worth reading.
I highly recommend reading Antifragile next though. It's fairly different from the other two and extremely interesting; probably one of my favorite books.
Hmm, that's possibly where I read it. Unfortunately I'm not turning it up with Google and I don't have any of those books on kindle (so I can't search them). I feel like Google used to be good enough to get this...
But how Dunning Kruger are you to put that down? Like chess has a pretty well known rating system that even a moderately interested player would know about. So in the case of chess you can’t even claim that you didn’t know you are not that great.
You can put down you’re decent at Java or C++ or Python and actually be not that great at it because you have nothing to measure against. But in chess there is a rating system. So you ought to know if you are truly remarkable or not. If you think you are remarkable enough to put it down and then suck at it, how ignorant must you be?! And more importantly, that ignorance is not at all tempered by humility.
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 interest in kayaking, even though I suck at it.
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.
Context. If you're applying as a securities trader, you're great at chess... for a securities trader.
If you were great as chess for a human, you probably wouldn't be applying for a securities job.
Conversely, there was a period of my life where people would hear me talk through a few problems and later confess their surprise/disappointment upon finding out I'm rubbish at chess. I found more lucrative and/or entertaining puzzles to plow my ample free time into, is all.
To be fair, lots of people colloquially claim to be good at chess but can’t even stumble though a proper opening. The difference between say a class-a player and a rando is massive and easy to tell.
Memorizing openings is not a crutch. It's the only path upward past a certain point. It is impossible to play competitively at, say, the 2000 level if you haven't mastered a few openings.
If you want to play 800-level chess, you can have fun without knowing any set openings. Well, almost. You'd better be able to recognize and defend scholar's mate at a bare minimum.
But that is a bit like being an amateur programmer who never learns what a function is. You can still enjoy programming at that level, but it's odd to describe functions as crutches.
I doubt if you can play competitively at the 1600 level without knowing some opening theory. That'd be like playing against a 3200 for the first six moves and then hoping you are not worse. GP has no idea what he is talking about; it is stronger players who study theory. Weak players may/learn a few tricks/gambits, but you have to learn at least enough of those to avoid them.
I wouldn’t agree with that. Memorising openings is something you do so that you don’t have to repeatedly calculate every tactic in a position, and to help you reach a favourable mid game
Besides, once you get into the middlegame, you still need the tactical and positional skills that I suspect you consider opening knowledge a crutch for
In chess (and life) it’s far easier to pattern match a solution for a position rather than coming up with a brand new solution every time
In my opinion, this makes memory and experience far more important than intellect in chess, especially in the faster time formats
There are bad players who know openings, but there an no good players who don’t know openings.
Without opening theory you will just get worse middle game against any competent opponent. Furthermore, if you could just calculate everything ab inito your play would be identical to “memorized opening,” alpha zero did learn a lot of standard openings from self-play (without being shown these opening explicitly). If someone plays a “bad” opening in a serious game it’s because not only they don’t know theory but they also can’t calculate well enough.
Memorising openings is also good for avoiding well known traps like the fried liver, fishing pole or Eric Rosen's favourite the Stafford gambit. Most strong players have a variety of book openings memorised.
The point is that that still is pretty meaningless. You can enjoy a game of chess even if you are not very good at it, much like you can enjoy a game of golf for the aspect of walking around in a well-kept park and having a chat, and see some improvement in your handicap over time.
I would not expect someone who puts chess on a resume to play competitively, which is a whole different beast.
Sure, only like 100 top GMs can play competitively, but there are over 1000 GMs who do it as a hobby while they work at Google, Microsoft or any other company.
But it's impossible to play chess or golf at even the most leisurely level without improving at least a little, as you say with handicap. I'm sure an expert can tell the difference between an earnest hobbyist and someone who learnt the rules as a child but hasn't played since.
James Damore must have read that book as well, he lied on his CV saying he was a FIDE master.
I'm always fascinated at the esteem chess is held in for some reason. I don't have a high rating (lichess rapid ~1900) but to me, improving at chess is the same as improving at everything else: practice.
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.
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 personality and becomes explicitly performance-oriented. And I would even argue your resume is not the play to round out your personality, because it's such an overly subjective and bias-inducing thing.
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.
> 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.
It doesn't matter if you're good at it - there is no evidence that being good at chess makes you better at any hedge fund related tasks or vice versa. However you should most definitely care if your employees like what they do and the environments they are in. Those who dislike some critical element of the job may be perfectly capable of doing it, but will have a very low barrier to jumping to other opportunities compared to someone who genuinely likes the job.
Let's say you're hiring people to work a fish market. One candidate loves going out on the boat and fishing in their spare time, the other hates the smell of fish. Both are fully capable of doing the job, which doesn't involve catching fish or being on a boat, but which does involve spending a lot of time with dead fish. Who do you think is more likely to stick with the job for an extended period of time and be pleasant to work alongside?
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.
Nonsense. Entertaining a crowd is nothing like entertaining a grand master. A 1400 USCF player could organize a chess tournament as a company social event.
Guitar is a performance art. Mediocre people are entertaining. Chess (and skiing) mostly isn't.
I wouldn’t put down ‘travel’ as a hobby if I weren’t prepared to take the interviewer on a quick day trip to Paris.
I wouldn’t list ‘reading’ as a hobby unless I could do a professional audiobook-level reading of a book for the interviewer, including doing all the voices.
I have chess on my CV even though I stopped seriously playing at 15 and ~1700 OTB ELO - not to showcase my competitiveness but to add some flavour/personality to what is otherwise a very dry career oriented document and maybe get an anecdote in that I can use to break the ice or relate to somebody.
I was just thinking this. If it's labeled as an optional skill or something like that, I see nothing wrong with it. Applicant has no reason to lie about it. Have confidence in their other skills. At the same time, we have this new thing called search engines. If a language can't be found, they'll probably figure out that it's trap. Even better for the company. A person who won't lie and/or can research out BS for themselves. Pretty good candidate thus far. Devs are supposed to be self-reliant to a degree. A good question for the interviewee to ask the interviewer too.
If it's labeled a "requirement", yea, they were inviting dishonesty. No one should bother to apply since they don't qualify instantly.
> No one should bother to apply since they don't qualify instantly.
I never assume the "requirements" are actually hard requirements to an application, and I encourage others in the job market to do the same.
Sure, if you miss 3 out of the 5 requirements listed you might pass on that application. But if you've got 4 out of the 5 requirements, and think you could accomplish the job as described, you should still strongly consider sending in an application. Don't lie on your CV that you submit, but you can still submit your CV.
You never know which requirements are actually hard requirements for the org, and which were just listed that way on the job listing.
Be aware when you do this that there are a minority of companies for whom the requirements are actually requirements, and you may get yelled at by an interviewer for "wasting everybody's time." Yes, this has happened to me. On the up side I now have a list of a few companies I know I won't work for unless I'm desperate.
The advice is still good; the requirements are really more of "strong desire" than actual requirements, and if you look at the typical requirements listing, its' unlikely that they will find enough people at the salary they offer to fit all of them anyways.
> and you may get yelled at by an interviewer for "wasting everybody's time."
They had an opportunity to evaluate your resume or CV before inviting you in for an interview. If it was a hard requirement for them, they shouldn't have invited you in for an interview. The only time you're really wasting is the time of the person who is screening resumes.
> Yes, this has happened to me. On the up side I now have a list of a few companies I know I won't work for unless I'm desperate.
I'm sorry that happened to you! What a terrible experience. It's definitely good to keep that list of places you know you should avoid.
> If a language can't be found, they'll probably figure out that it's trap.
If you're a qualified dev, you'd more likely conclude that it's a mistake on the part of whoever wrote the listing. I've seen skills listed like "Microsoft UML" or "Python, PHD, Nodes", so wouldn't think much of seeing "MOVA".
I consider myself fairly well versed (at least breadth-wise) in programming languages and general IT, and I'm still surprised at least once every six months when something crops up I've just never heard of before. The two most recent examples are Conan[0] and Slurm[1].
If you're the employer, you'd know that you put the non-sensical item in the job posting. If someone calls you out on it, then you know they at least are not bullshitting you. If you're the applicant and you feel strongly about it being bullshit, then the question is do you get bonus points for knowing that.
The how would know it doesn't exist is what separates the chaff from the wheat.
Someone currently working on a new language should grab that name. Not bad to from the get go to be able to put a name like Facebook as a heavy user of your technology on the landing page ...
Edit: and then go to an interview at Facebook and claim not just that you are an expert in this language but the creator
I’ve worked with body shop contracts at big orgs where the subcontractors are pure scum and will send fake people, etc. if you’re forced to deal with something like that, you need controls to detect deceit so you can take action.
These are the games played when Recruiters and HR are involved in the solicitation of resumes. HR will demand 20 years Swift experience, and Recruiters will pad your resume with 30 years.
Most experienced interviewees will show up to a face-to-face with copies of their resume in hand because of the way Recruiters fudge things.
Most experienced interviewees will show up to a face-to-face with copies of their resume in hand because of the way Recruiters fudge things.
I had learnt this by my second or third job, I can't believe that other industries operate this way, doctors, lawyers, accountants, civil engineers, etc.
The entire hiring process is laughable. Few positions advertise correctly. Most claim they need diety level abilities for as little as they can get away with. Businesses post phantom advertisements to gauge the perceived market value of positions, keep talent pools of people in the wing to fill in what seem to be increasing turnover rates, and so on.
Most of all of this is an artifact of businesses trying to commoditize human labor, including professional/specialized skills, and these are the sort of responses and gaming you see in such an artificial environment. Intelligent people are going to fight back and game your system when you try to game them.
The side with leverage that dictates the rules of engagement is to blame here and that isn't the labor force at large since there is almost no organization from the labor force, it's the employers that create this mess yet they complain about it continuously.
It's not that bad. Real hypocrisy would be lying about how great the job is to get better candidates, and then getting upset when the candidates lie about how qualified they are to get better jobs.
Real hypocrisy would be lying about how great the job is to get better candidates, and then getting upset when the candidates lie about how qualified they are to get better jobs.
This happens a lot - it was a running joke for a while, it seemed that every recruiters was touting "functional programming" for what were actually very normal corporate software jobs, with the promise that if you just did a few years of Java then maybe, maybe the company would think about Clojure one day in the future!
I remember people asking for X years of Java experience and thinking, "Gosling was still calling it Oak X years ago and if you want any of his team members you're going to have to double your starting offer."
Agree with the first part, obviously, but: why shouldn't there be an unequal power dynamic between employers and candidates? Isn't that sort of true by definition in employment?
No. Employment is a trade between two entities. The employee gives labor, the employer compensates them. Ideally, the two negotiate a contract laying out the terms of employment, and move on.
However, corporations typically don't offer any form of contract negotiations, at least in the US. An employee is often offered a take-it-or-leave-it contract with lots of non-compete and broad IP assignment riders, and their pay is usually based on their previous pay, not the value of their work.
Some folk claim that they're able to negotiate around these, but I've personally never found negotiation to work. Two of my favorite answers I've received from negotiation are (paraphrased): "The IP assignment for 1 year post employment is not negotiable." and, "We know what you made at your last job, so we'll offer you that."
The fact that individual employees have little negotiating power with a large business is one of the conditions that give rise to collective bargaining agreements and unions.
Thank you. Other than unions, I don't see any other solution to the fundamental imbalance. It's (group + resources) vs (group + resources) until groups with the most resources decide they want to be nice. Until that becomes a reality, via regulation or epiphany or whatever, any expectation that it's not David vs Goliath is naive.
I totally agree with you on the general dynamics, but would add govt regulation as another potential balancer. The govt can require things like breaks, overtime pay, and safety conditions that would otherwise have to be negotiated (often unsuccessfully) by employees.
Also, providing a stronger economic safety net gives employees more bargaining power, since it decreases their downside risk.
Small note on this: Companies, especially large companies, spend an exorbant amount of money on lobbying lawmakers. That lobbying money works hard to limit workers' (and consumers', and competitions') rights.
And ultimately, it's not the government alone which got us breaks, overtime pay, and safety conditions - it was the unions using their dues to push the government for those things.
I almost mentioned regulations but didn't for this reason. It would be nice if the government actually put individuals above corporations; but at least here in the USA the situation has been clear for decades... or forever?
They can hire anyone, I can work anywhere. In a properly functioning market, neither side should have any problem walking away from the table if the other side is being unreasonable.
In practice though, companies can survive for months or even years without filling a position and the hiring manager rarely suffers directly for any inefficiency created by not filling a position, while most people can go only for a short period of time without a job before their quality of life starts to suffer. At the same time, corporate consolidation means that in many areas (both geographic and technical) there are only a few major employers, meaning that being blacklisted by any one could be catastrophic for someone's career and meaning only a small number of individuals need to act in unison to manipulate the labor market (driving wages down, spreading bad hr practices, etc), basically all the problems of any other oligopoly. There is an asymmetry of information: the individual will only take on a few jobs over the course of their career and can not afford to experiment much as they go - for any given point in their lifetime, they're basically working with a sample size of 1; even a moderately sized employer on the other hand might hire dozens and interview thousands of people a year and have records of such recruiting data going back decades. Finally there is a social asymmetry - a company trying to poach an employee will likely not face any negative consequences for it, but an employee simply looking at what options are out there could potentially be viewed as disloyal and either be fired or removed from advancement tracks intended for long-term employees - a simple phone call to check a person's references could potentially put them into a much worse negotiating position. None of these issues are inherent, they pretty much all stem from weak labor laws and inadequate social safety nets.
I've had the opposite, for example adding my boss to my linked in profile & updating just before pay negotiations has worked nicely for me. I've seen friends/colleagues go to their boss with a job offer and say I don't want to leave but with this rise I'm struggling to justify staying, and it's worked fine. I'm not in the US however.
This would be like me leaving little breadcrumbs of an affair for my SO to find and then have it all culminate in an "AH HA! I caught you snooping!" when they call me out on it.
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 some lurking, unknown to me technical debt. But I’m sure he’s a smart person and CF was not terrible due to him being bad. So I’m still using RStudio.
I used to hate CF until I came across the fusebox pattern/framework[1]. I think they were some of the first to draw up a sane architecture for "template" languages (cf, php, asp, jsp etc).
Much like a book I picked up on sale about asp[2] - it really drove home the point that a programming language really needs to be terrible before it is the main problem - rather than how you use it. See also xmlhttprequest/Ajax and "Javascript - the good parts".
I didn’t use CF professionally until 2000 and started with fusebox. I think fusebox was a good idea, but still CF sucked to use as a developer (me comparing it to cgi, php, asp, java).
I stopped using CF in 2001, but the fusebox ideas stuck with me as I worked with other web frameworks like struts, spring, other mvc stuff.
Ha, so true. Man, there were a few months back then when I was being phoned about 5 times a day with job offers. None of them were even vaguely related to the skillset I had (doing a bit of ropy HTML) but I could have tripled my salary without even breaking a sweat. I worked for Waterstone's Online at the time, glad I stayed put, we had fun.
Cold Fusion though - I loved that. It was my first scripting language (apart from a brief foray into Perl), and it seemed like magic.
Yes but how else will you kick down the ladder once you made it?
FAAGs are where we put people who are really good at colouring within the box these days. It's pretty stunning how in 15 years it went from being a place where the best and brightest used to go a way to filter resumes.
As a counter example, a recruiter once called me asking if I could "put the angular in outlook," recognizing this as total nonsense I said, "Sure that's something I could do" knowing that I would be able to talk to the team looking to hire and ask them for clarification.
It ended up being one of my favorite contracts; I was able to be part of an industry changing technology platform. Had I said that I didn't have any experience putting angular in outlook, its doubtful any of that would have come to fruition.
The lesson I learned here is when I'm hiring to make sure I don't eliminate good candidates with bad requirements and as a candidate I'm inclined to say "yes" to non-technical recruiters even when I know 100% that its impossible.
Half the battle is "beating requirements out of users" as I like to put it. This bullshit of trying to bait people into lying is just wasting everyone's time. I hope it leads to them ruling out a lot of really good candidates (eg, honest people who won't answer the ad because they've never heard of 'MOVA').
And before someone counters with "you should be flexible", I consider myself unfit for a position if I've never even heard of something they list on the want ad. If I found out they intentionally made up something just to trip people up, that's a big red flag for me. Who knows what other bullshit they'll try to pull once you're actually working for them.
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 generates strings that sound like potential pokemon names? And what might be the simplest possible way to make that into a service? Also, would it be possible to generate pokemon names that start with three random characters and end with 'base' (KREBASE, MONBASE would be appropriate but IEYBASE would not be).
Somewhat orthogonal but reminds me of the old map makers who used to insert made up islands / villages on their maps in order to prevent plagiarism. More here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry]
Hah, even more orthogonally but - I run a small statistics site for a specific esports title, and very often large companies (who host tournaments with hundreds of thousands of dollars in production and prize money) just use data from the site in their production without even crediting it. I added a bunch of very innocuous and subtle changes to some data somewhat akin to trap streets - specific values rounding in key ways, slight ordering changes for lists, etc.
You could probably monetize that service with a public API. Then screw over companies that take advantage of your services by providing them data that makes them liable, e.g. if they use it in gambling and they award the wrong prizes.
There is a public API, and yeah many gambling sites use it as a reference when paying out stakes. They sometimes even screenshot from it - and punters tag me because the bookmaker messed up (for example, including qualifiers in a specific tournament market).
A relative has a business publishing information about high school athletics. They created a fictitious school and used it to prove a company had infringed their copyright.
Thankfully the supreme court saved us from an epidemic of misinformation pollution with Feist v. Rural by making it not good for making them any money.
Best/worse experience - walked into the interview and the interviewer asked if I preferred to go by first name or last name. I said I'm happy to be Alex, but don't hugely mind. He said - no "First Name, or Last Name", and showed me the resume.
The recruiter had stripped off header, slapped on theirs, with logos and all, and forgotten to change their boilerplate, so my name on the resume was literally "First Name Last Name".
Luckily I had a print out of my real resume with me to show him, and that I wasn't the type to submit a resume without my name on it.
They'd also ended up putting 1 line onto a second page, which is minor compared to missing off my name, but pretty annoying given I'd put a fair amount of time into coming up with a nice 1-page resume.
> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it.
hmm, I've found 3 jobs today I'm absolutely perfect for and this one that I'm nearly perfect for but wants some experience in something called Mova. Guess I just send a resume to the 3 jobs I'm perfect for.
You could still send your resume to the company but not lie about having MOVA experience. They are called job "requirements" but companies often hire someone that is the best fit even if they miss out on one of the requirements. Of course, some companies also have a hard filter against requirements that you wouldn't get past, but you won't know unless you send your resume.
ok, most 'sending a resume' involves going through a job portal of some sort, doing some work to fill out some stuff, uploading your resume, making a cover letter etc.
If they give me interviews for the 3 that I perfectly match, which most companies do for me, and take home assignments which often happen, I might have basically a full week of stuff to do. At that point I don't want to put out the effort to to go to an interview for a job that on the face of it looks less likely to hire me than one of the other three.
If I see no jobs that perfectly match me then I drop to the close match jobs, but if I see jobs that perfectly match me I don't do the work for the close match jobs.
on edit: and of course what if the company is already only a close match, there is one technology I don't match for the actual job, but then you add a fake tech on top, suddenly I don't match two things.
basically this idea means that you help sort out some of the honest qualified people for your position because they will evaluate the job posting as being less relevant to them than otherwise.
A while back a few of us created a April fools 'Face Gestures' video for Opera software.
For years after I would occasionally have people mention they were interviewing a candidate that said using our 'face gestures' was one of their favourite features of the browser.
A well implemented version of the idea would actually be useful for people with impaired mobility. Perhaps focusing more on eyes and blinking, or combining limited gesturing with eye movement/blinking...
anything to avoid having to lick to bookmark or shake your tongue is a plus, really
I had forgotten gestures. I paid for Opera for years because I loved mouse gestures so much. Now I'm back to moving my cursor all the way back to the top left to hit a back button. I don't know what happened.
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.
I've always had trouble with my worth as a developer. There are multiple reasons I won't get into, but the recruiter I used to get hired at my current employer helped me drive my salary request way North of what I was comfortable negotiating for on my own. I grappled with whether or not I deserved it, and still do at times, but I was obviously very appreciative - regardless of their reasoning.
Now that I've been promoted to a manager position, we get recruiters presenting us candidates at the same, or higher, salaries than what I started at 4 years ago, and in many cases I don't feel the candidate's experience and skillset warrant the salary ask.
I'm not sure what the take away is, except maybe I'm still undervalued, or recruiters are just padding salaries to earn that sweet, sweet commission. I'm thankful for recruiters in my own personal journey, but as a hiring manager, I'm skeptical.
My guess is that salary is mostly unrelated to one's skills. It mostly depends on what company you work for, and your negotiation skills. Actual knowledge and skills are maybe on the third place. There is also timing: if you join when the company desperately needs another developer, you may get better deal than the developers who are already there. Also, whom you know, who recommends you.
I know a guy who is 10x smarter than me, but is paid 1/2 of what I am. It's because he works at a different company. (I used to work there, too, and then my salary was 1/2 of what it is now. I didn't get twice as smart when I changed jobs.)
I know a gal who is 10x smarter than me, but is paid about as much as I am. It's because she works at the same company.
In my opinion, software companies are unable to tell the difference between developers. The bad ones are overpaid, the good ones are underpaid. Smart developers learn to code; smarter developers learn to network.
From this perspective, it makes sense to contact a job agency and tell them you want 2× what you have now. Chances are, there is a company where people with your skills (or worse) are paid that much. It just takes lot of luck to find that company. Call ten different job agencies, tell them that you only accept that much... and let them search the market. You may be surprised.
I really appreciate this perspective. I'm not looking to leave my current employer anytime soon, but I definitely want to start networking now. Not only for a potential move, but hopefully to build my own thing one day.
Seems to me you might be in a good position to start calculating an appropriate salary.
You know what your staff are paid, how productive they are, and (potentially) how their salaries figure into your organization profit-and-loss numbers.
Whether or not anyone "deserves" the money is probably not really your problem (in an org chart sense), and I think you should be happy with whatever "excess" you or the candidates are receiving. Don't internalize the capitalism too much, I guess is what I'm saying. If you think someone will do what you need them to do in a role, and the company is willing to pay them N dollars for it, all is well.
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.
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.
Years ago I had in wasted interview because a well known financial institution had an internal system named after a particular type of financial product which it later became clear it had zero relation to.
Despite flagging concerns regarding an apparent mismatch, the recruiter said my experience was perfect.
I went along and within minutes of getting past the intros and onto the role specifics, it was clear it was a waste of time.
Multiple red flags there for me: much as I back myself and have a strong CV, it was concerning my CV got past their basic screening for what they should have known was an inappropriate role.
I blacklisted the recruiter and found another job through word of mouth soon after (a much better method where possible).
Long long time ago in a galaxy far far away I used requirement in job postings “10 years of Java experience” (when Java was about 7 years old) as a filter: people who wrote me complaining about unrealistic requirement got interviews; people who sent resumes with 15 years of Java went into /dev/null
That's really lousy, I wouldn't have even bothered applying to that because I'd assume you had unrealistic expectations or no idea what you are talking about.
I was (and still am) interested in hiring people who would challenge manager, TL, ... and speak up if they think something is not right. That was just one of the filters.
If the company you worked at was big/popular enough that you needed a strong filter then I can see the merit of this.
But otherwise, I can't fathom how anyone that is willing to "speak up their mind, challenge manager" would ever consider to apply for a position that radiate manager/HR/recruiter incompetence (and no tech team feedback on the posting?)
People who challenge manager, TL, speaks up because it's their business(or they see it that way) and affects them. Can't see how those kind of people would waste their time voicing their content to a company they spent <10min checking the job postings for.
A few people I hired this or similar ways became my friends and we still connect, get coffee, etc. Your mileage may vary. If you want to hire warm bodies to write code then this is not a good way. If you want to hire people who will make strategic difference to your startup/company, then it is one of the possible ways.
>A few people I hired this or similar ways became my friends and we still connect, get coffee, etc.
Becoming a friend or not is not a causal relation to competence, but rather to your preference. And in this context makes me doubt that what underwater said in his comment might be the real goal: >They're good for determining if the test taker is the test author, and not much else.
More plausible that you only wanted to hire, well, people just like you (and that's why you became friends). Not withstanding the glaring obvious survivor bias. But if it worked, who am I to question it.
> If you want to hire warm bodies to write code then this is not a good way.
Yea but my point wasn't (or yours either) to hire warm bodies, but people that "speak up their mind, challenge manager". And we are talking how efficient(or inefficient) this is, and how many false negatives this method produce. and if your pool of applicants is big enough, it will produce true positives anyway, irrelevant of the efficiency of the filter.
Personally I think even "agreeableness" personality test mumbo-jumbo would be a better metric/filter for gaining people with "speak up their mind, challenge manager" characteristics.
People go through three phases:
1. they are too scared to challenge authority
2. they are not scared of challenging authority
3. they realize they can just go somewhere else
Mature, intelligent Phase 3 people will only challenge authority if they know they're secure in doing so---if they trust you. But why should they trust you? They've never met you, you're just a job ad.
Thinking the same thing. It will filter out good candidates with other options, leaving a worse pool to select from. So in effect probably leading to worse hires.
I wouldn’t waste my time if I thought the hiring manager/recruiter is so incompetent. I’d have read that and bucketed the company as one of those looking to tick the boxes in years of experience.
As long as not every good candidate thinks this, it could still work quite well. Doubt it's a good tactic in general, but if you have enough applicants otherwise and only need to fill few positions, this might be an effective way to filter them.
I think your experience would strongly depend on whether people listen when you tell them they are wrong. I think you will enjoy it if they actually do listen and fix things you point out as wrong.
Most gotcha tests like this are trying to filter for a general attribute with a overly specific response. Which, coincidentally, turns out to be the exact response that the interviewer would have had. They're good for determining if the test taker is the test author, and not much else.
I would have immediately sorted your posting into a bin with "doesn't know enough about the tech they are hiring for". I saw many resumes at the time that had impossible requirements like that. Unlike you were say James Gosling. And I know you weren't hiring him with a post like this.
This is exactly what you are doing. You a hiring manager are not special and allowed to opt out of human decency and professional conduct. In fact you need to do more of both.
As a candidate I spend about the same amount of time on reviewing job positions as you do on resumes. When I'm looking for candidates I don't interview every resume I see, it's like 50:1 on contacts. As a candidate it's the same.
I currently filter out any company who doesn't have pricing on the website for instance. I don't want to work for a purely enterprise sales based company as I hate working with them as a customer.
In your case at best I might say your position has impossible requirements to be helpful. But I did that in the early days if java and was given many excuses. None of them led to interviews and I don't think any of them changed their postings.
Tldr, you're just convincing me more that I wouldn't want to work with you.
Seems odd to filter for people who have time and inclination to seek out the job poster and complain that they’re stupid. I guess if you want argumentative detectives that’s good.
If I insert a joke into a job spec, I don’t want it to seem like I’m an idiot. I assume that any competent people I want to work with will value non-idiots and not want to work with idiots.
In this case you weren’t an idiot, but just testing people’s grit or honesty or whatnot. But I would just assume the spec was written by an oblivious HR person who, at best, or perhaps an oblivious hiring manager. So I would have only applied if I really needed the money.
There is a difference between being argumentative and being a person to question things.
Let me give you an example. I am a pilot and I was flying to Long Beach a few weeks back. It was morning with a low marine layer so there was only one option - ILS 30. The controller was doing a harD job of merging small planes like myself and big iron (Southwest, Delta, etc) going to the same runway. The Cessna in front of me got vectors (and accepted!) to fly 10 miles into the ocean for spacing. When I heard it on the radio my first thought the was “their engine quits and they better know how to swim”. When controller asked me to follow that Cessna, my reply was “unable, don’t have my swimsuit today, but I can do left or right 360 for spacing”. The Cessna pilot accepted controllers directions without asking any questions putting himself and passengers at risk. Very few software engineers face life or death decisions, but I still like people who ask questions ;)
I see things like that and assume that everyone involved in writing, reviewing, and processing the position it advertises is either incompetent, negligent, or playing a game. Ultimately, I don’t care to know why, because there are other jobs with better teams at better companies.
If I took the time to ask probing questions every time someone makes a bad first impression, I wouldn’t have time to work, eat, or sleep. My heuristics have served me well, and I’m sticking with them.
I know someone who has a certain of this specifically for phone interviews. He'll ask if the candidate knows about FakeTech, which has one website at the top of the search results... Woe unto the interviewee who recites the facts they find there...
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 skills).
Now if you ask these candidates some junior developer question outside of React Flux Capacitor bullshit they are not only hopelessly lost, but expect to be treated as a senior principal.
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 salaries. I've seen it to the point where one guy was willing to cause two departments weeks worth of work to avoid doing two days worth of work.
* 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. Or it's point out it's broken and a big meeting is called to deal with it and then nothing is really done.
* The amount of people who don't know what they're doing. So many people seem to have 1-year * x experience. They reach a certain level and they just stop.
* The amount of people who don't even know what they're talking about - https://toggl.com/track/developer-methods-infographic/ a prime example, kanban is literally how they make cars it's we work on one bit and the next area deals with the next part. The image should have a car manufactoring factory as is. But instead they have nonsense.
* The amount of patting themselves on the back saying we're doing a great job while the system sucks and nothing is getting better and employee churn is sky high.
Honestly, I think if people from other industries worked in IT for a year they would be completely shocked at how crap it is. I don't even think the hiring part is wrong, I think the entire management process of IT is wrong and causes more chaos so you end up with people who are heavily specilised in tools who are considered expert engineers but can't read UML.
> The amount of people who don't know what they're doing. So many people seem to have 1-year * x experience. They reach a certain level and they just stop.
Part of the problem is because people only look at years of experience at all, and recruitment often inflates the requirements. I don't need 5 years of work experience in .NET to modify an existing application with very defined and clear boundaries: within a few months, I can easily read what is happening already and mutate the application within the set boundaries. 5 years of work experience is what I'd need to set up an application the size of Stack Overflow from scratch in an acceptable timeframe.
What we have now is a recruitment procedure within the industry which overemphasizes ticking boxes without looking whether they can actually deliver. We have so many quality online sources available, any half-competent person can read, copy what is happening, use it as a foundation and then change it to their specific needs, producing actual applications. You might not cover the edge cases (a specific cryptographic problem here, an suboptimal solution there, etc.), but that really isn't that different from most of the crap software that's getting shoveled out into the open today.
The biggest problem is that there is no baseline of competency. Seriously, when somebody asks for minimally passable competency for employment as a software developer what do you point to in 5 words of less? Software doesn't have that so instead you get a bunch of posturing and smoke signals. Seriously think about how you would explain this to your non-developer uncle who is an educated professional of any other industry.
Think about it like this:
What is the minimal passable qualifier to be a lawyer: a law license. What is the minimal passable qualifier to be a truck driver: a CDL. It is illegal to do those, and many other, jobs without the minimum qualifier.
Worse is this tooling bullshit. No carpenter or mechanic creates a resume detailing their job experience using a screw driver or a hammer. Those are just assumed. If a candidate felt the need to mention stupidity like that you don't hire them. For some reason software has that backwards which invites and encourages incompetent people to apply and degrades competent people to compete with unnecessary stupidity.
I can expect this experience in tooling if the tools were remotely difficult. They aren't. What's more, teams are documenting their tools much better than before, and many are putting strong emphasis on being able to search the right terms and implementing it before the end of the week. Whatever topic or problem I had on ASP.NET Core, the problem was usually solved and documented by Microsoft. At that point, expecting this much experience over such trivial matters, is just being disrespectful to the teams investing all that time documenting and polishing their tools.
Maybe that's the part which annoys me the most. The entire practice devalues everything, no matter who, what or how old you are.
There's an entire cottage industry of expensive consultants that are happy to give your management team fancy but useless PowerPoint decks on how to "break down silos".
>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
In my experience if someone can't read UML and know how to write a decorator pattern something is up. Honestly, I've never used it in depth but for design patterns I expect people who are "seniors" to understand it. And I expect any expert to be able to look at UML and get the gist of it.
On a side note about design patterns, once as a junior I was at a digital agency and they were doing an in-house tech talk where one of the leads was giving an explaination and he was showing the singleton pattern but what they had allowed for two instances and when I tried to make it clearer to the intern that normally there is only one instance per singleton. The two leads were "Yea but it's still a valid singleton" - it was not but I wasn't point that out directly but continued to make it clear that most people would expect a single instance when talking about a Singleton.
Use cases, activity diagrams, deployment diagrams etc.
Yeah - 'informal' UML use a lot of people are happy with but some things like exactly what some of the features of activity diagrams mean is amazingly badly understood by a lot of people.
I'm ok with the 'UML as sketch' approach, but 'UML as blueprint' is a nightmare that I've never seen work:
Honestly, most of the time I use these diagrams just to give people the gist of what I'm talking about. And my diagrams are super low effort. Think low effort whiteboard diagrams during a meeting style.
> Yeah - 'informal' UML use a lot of people are happy with but some things like exactly what some of the features of activity diagrams mean is amazingly badly understood by a lot of people.
Same with frontend, I give a very rough wireframe trying to translate wtf they are telling me. The end result usually looks very different because once you flesh stuff out IRL there is always a bunch of hills to climb that were unanticipated. And that’s why it always takes 2-3x longer than we first thought.
Especially in a large application with lots of moving and breakable critical parts.
The only solution is constant feedback loops and not being bummed out when your code goes in the dustbin.
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.
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 evolved it. Also, it jumped on the Java bandwagon. And it was proprietary and lost mindshare to free PHP, which also had a strong template story, albeit one that was conceptually more limited.
CFScript and the Java integration weren't bad, per se. ColdFusion did have a problem when it came to extending the core engine functionality using traditional software architectural approaches. CFML had the concept of modules, but ultimately to do anything remotely sophisticated you had to drop down into C or C++ (and then later Java, I presume). IIRC, CFScript was superficially similar to Javascript, and if they had evolved it in that direction or just adopted Javascript outright, I think ColdFusion would have had more staying power. But the switch to Java probably made that impractical. A template engine integrated with a Javascript runtime running atop the JVM comes with too much performance baggage, even today. And the Javascript would have felt second-class and the "wrong" way to do things, anyhow, even if people ditched CF for an ecosystem that was that--Javascript or similar dynamic, RAD language instead of a "proper" strongly typed language.
I worked for a consulting shop that started with ColdFusion and tried to make the switch to Java but they could never make it work. I think I was the only technical consultant in the whole company with the time and motivation to learn Java. Java (including runtime and tooling) was too complex and sophisticated for both the application developers and the client's needs. That would still be true today. The technical leadership of that company, which at the time had also just became a subsidiary of ADP, drank the Java and then XML kool-aid and drove the whole thing into the ground. For similar reasons (including some similar leadership) ADP lost out to PeopleSoft (later acquired by Oracle) in the race to build and solidify their middleware and web-app positions.
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.
For a long while I felt oddly bitter that Apache AxKit, a pluggable XML transformation pipeline and web application framework, never enjoyed much attention. I always wanted to use it for serious work but could never justify it owing to lack of mindshare. I was never an XML advocate, but I never hated it either. Ditto for XSLT. AxKit just seemed so elegant and practical, smoothing over some of the problems with XML and XSLT and complementing them in a way that made their promise seem more attainable.
For a startup I vetoed Ruby on Rails in preference to an AxKit-like approach, extending the PoC I had originally cobbled together. In retrospect it was incredibly stupid. Most importantly, I should've just let our dedicated web developer use what he was comfortable with, even though I had strong opinions about the usefulness of that approach. (Object binding had like near zero utility in our particular case.)
Like with ColdFusion is was a hard-earned lesson in understanding that the best tools are the ones that maximize the productivity of your actual and prospective staff, not some hypothetical 10x coder. It's a seemingly obvious principle, but not so obvious and easy in application. It turned out that Ruby on Rails would still be on the upswing for some time afterward, so vetoing it was especially dumb. But ColdFusion, which made sense in context for similar reasons, was doomed to flame out quickly and so even if I teleported my post-RoR-veto self to my first ColdFusion job, I would have made the wrong decision as I had actually successfully advocated moving away from ColdFusion, the accidentally correct decision.
I had 2 startups in total that were CF based, and still have a business running on ColdFusion (or a legacy version of it that is still in use). And yes, at it's prime, when choice was limited and 1 core was plenty, it was the best way to get a web application going. I actually welcomed the Java days since the original had enough issues that were resolved and having access to the JVM and it's ecosystem was a great thing. At this point ColdFusion became a JSP tag library. However, I cannot compare it to today's tech. It's not apples to apples.
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".
Especially true for Windows. Interest in commercial web development exploded at a time when Windows NT still held a dominate position in the emerging small- and medium-sized business markets. Perl bootstrapped web development in the Unix world, but Windows didn't have anything like the Unix software ecosystem--Perl, Apache, mod_php, etc. ColdFusion was where it was at for dynamic page generation in the Windows world. (I was only ever a visitor in that world. I had originally discovered programming thanks to Slackware Linux and Perl.) In the beginning ColdFusion was all Windows, IIRC, with Solaris and Linux ports coming about the time ColdFusion seemed to peak.
ColdFusion programmers also tended to use Allaire's HomeSite, one of the first web-oriented IDEs. Allaire being the creator of ColdFusion.
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.
Maybe "First web specific application server" in the sense of a server specifically serving dynamic HTML output over the web" is better? I'm not vouching for the accuracy of this statement.
Maybe “first sold” as the CGI spec in C came out in 1993 [0].
But this seems more of a marketing spin as PHP was out earlier and was the first, I know of, to have that easy “scripts in a folder that are interpreted by the http server” thing going where there was no compile process needed.
My memory of the time was that CF was one of the many commercial web software companies that were selling to companies.
Yes, CF was hardly the first to provide a templating framework for output generation. But ColdFusion's competitive advantage was how it seamlessly integrated database access, in particular SQL SELECTs and INSERTs, into HTML-based template looping and HTML forms. For a ridiculous number of applications, especially business applications, that's all anybody really needs. It was abstract enough to support many kinds of data sources (e.g. CSV files), which IIRC was one of the most common ways to extend the engine. And it was simple enough that even people who struggled jumping from HTML to a proper programming language could crank out useful applications, especially if someone provided them a SQL query to copy+paste.
Years later C# would be lauded for LINQ, which provided for C# what ColdFusion provided to markup transformations.
These sorts of language integrations weren't new, either. Years later I would discover and dabble with Perl's format framework: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlform. I had actually learned Perl a few years before I was introduced to ColdFusion, though I don't think many Perl programmers were ever familiar with formats. (It is rather frustrating for modern uses.) And while I didn't make the connection at the time, I believe some older languages (Fortran? SPSS?) which I was briefly introduced to in college supported similar language-integrated data source and record processing capabilities, though like Perl formats they were designed for tabular text output.
But this history only emphasizes how important of a competitive advantage this was for ColdFusion, which was completely squandered.
Regarding the discussion of PHP elsethread, about a year after taking over maintenance of a ColdFusion website (where I was first introduced to ColdFusion), I advocated for and was allowed to migrate the site to PHP. That was about the time PHP made the switch from Perl (PHP 2) to C (PHP 3). Before then I actually didn't even know PHP existed, despite being an avid Linux and Perl user. At the time I was convinced ColdFusion sucked. It was only later in my career that I slowly began to appreciate what ColdFusion brought to the table technologically.
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.
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.
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.
This is a misguided project with some moral failings (some have pointed out already).
It is always easy to beat up the candidate at the bottom. They are persona non-grata. Not so with recruiters; let's be honest, most early in their career are afraid the recruiter might blackball you.
That said, there is a huge difference between contingency and retained recruiters.
In a very simplified explanation, contingency recruiters search for jobs, blanket potential candidates with the jobs, then try to sell the responding candidates to the company. The company pays a finder's fee to the recruiter. There is no agreement between the contingency recruiter and the company until the candidate is presented to the company.
Retained recruiters are retained by the company to find the right candidate, and often get paid a baseline or retainer and a finder's fee. These openings are mostly for very senior roles.
I have worked with contingency recruiters early in my career. They tend to use a quantity based or shotgun method, blanketing both companies and job seekers. They do not seek relationship with you or the company. It is a numbers game, and the candidate is just a number (sort of like spam).
The retained recruiter wold is very different. Most are specialized by industry and are familiar with the top candidates. At this stage the candidates have leverage to demand a certain amount of respect, and proper treatment.
And, that is where my contention lies. There is no reason candidates at any stage of their careers could not treated humanely. The notion that we should delight in trapping someone with a lie, is also ethically questionable.
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).
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.
Serious question: if you're applying for positions you're not totally confident in your experience and skillset, do you inflate your resume?
My thinking goes that if I slip in by being dishonest, I'll be nervous of being found out, feel an intruder. So being honest and taking a longer time looking for match would get more comfort later on.
I never have. But I've worked with people who did.
One such person had done so effective a job of BSing that he got twice the going rate for contractors in his role. It didn't last long enough to count for much, though, because he couldn't do the work. He was on his way out when I was on my way in; my first major project was salvaging his last one.
Another, with more modest ambitions, joined as a junior on the team where I was then operating as a de facto senior and co-lead. He was a little slow getting up to speed, but he got there, and then spent the next year doing good work, entirely consistent with what I'd expect to see from someone in that stage of their career. When we took him to lunch on his last day, he admitted he'd come in with zero real experience in our tech stack, and snowed his way through the interview with the plan of figuring out how to do the job once he had it.
I won't work with the first guy again. I'd be happy to work again with the second.
I've interviewed ~50 people by now - being honest and admitting ignorance earns you minor plus points. Weaseling, dodging the questions or answering the question you wish you were asked instead of the question you were asked - those are major red flags. Remember - you're likely going to be interviewed by somebody more senior than you - the likelihood they'll find out is quite high.
Your task as an interviewee is to provide an honest and accurate assessment of your skillset and competence level.
I've only ever increased the amount of experience I have with a technology and only when I am already proficient in it. No sense not applying to a job demanding 2 years of xp when I have 1 year but can use the tools proficiently, especially given the X years metric is usually pulled out of thin air by a recruiter.
Do not lie on your resume or during the interview.
There are lies and there are lies. For example I wrote some shell scripts to create VMs in AWS and install some packages on them. This appears on my resume as "expert in rapid provisioning of infrastructure as code in the cloud" or something like that. It sounds a lot more grandiose than it really is, but that's just how the game is played these days.
Not necessarily. It might not be about the lack of the particular skill they lied about, but the fact that they lied at all and what that indicates about them as a person/employee.
I've interviewed on occasion (IT related). By far, the worst experience was about someone I approved and later discovered he clearly cheated/lied in the interview. Like, I set too high expectations and slowly but consistently realizing that "this guy just lied to me" in so many levels.
I learnt from that so yes, for me, lying in an interview is the worst thing you can do.
Yup. I've had something similar where the interviewee was giving answers that felt very practiced. The recruiter was present in the room as well, taking notes (probably to prep applicants for the interview). We didn't hire the guy, and we no longer allowed the recruiter in the same room because of that.
When hiring, we filter applications on what they claim on the CV but also actually dig into the required skills on interview.
If we find a mismatch, it invalidates the candidate as a whole. If someone claims 8 years of MOVA but doesn't know basic stuff about MOVA semantics, they were either lying, they are incompetent, or they have been coasting.
When I started interviewing I used to do that, until I realised it would eliminate about 20% of all useful candidates. The killer is c++. The industry is filled with people who have vague memories of trying to use C++ in the 90s before switching to Java or c# as quickly as possible, but still put C++ on their resume. In reality they can't even do basic tasks like reading a file into an array. Knocking them out because of this exaggeration would have just throttled the candidate stream unnecessarily and it didn't seem like a consequential exaggeration.
Other lies on the other hand, do cause me to drop people. One guy claimed to be an expert in the internals of hotspot. Unfortunately for him I actually am such an expert. It turned out he hadn't even read the user manual. That sort of lie is a problem because it's the sort of thing that will sound impressive to a lot of people who can't verify it, and he surely knew that.
People also have different priorities. I never wrote an application in C++ and don't care about boring but practical stuff like the file API or syntax.
But I like learning about C++. It has many interesting features and concepts. Understanding those, their design trade-offs, how and why it differs from other languages (e.g. Rust) is fun. So I know more about "advanced" C++ than I know about "basic" C++.
I think you’re spot on about C++. I am one of those people who wrote C for many years, worked exclusively in C++ for 4-5 years, but haven’t touched it in about 10-12 years.
In one sense it feels silly to leave it off my resume because it was literally what I did. But I’m not interested in writing C++ and really haven’t touched it in a decade, so I could never pass a technical C++ interview.
> do basic tasks like reading a file into an array
not 100% on-topic, but that's an interesting one because I'd expect many active devs could stumble over: Reading a file isn't difficult, but it's also not something you actually do very often. If you do C++, you're often working in large projects where reading files is something done by libraries, custom wrappers, ... It's firmly in "if you need it, once every few years, it's in the docs" land.
Whereas I do comparatively little code in Python, but a lot of it is small one-off scripting where file handling using the basic facilities is typical.
I never inflated my resume but I can understand that some *GOOD* candidates might inflate their years of experience out of a bad suggestion from recruiters, or because they see other candidates do the same, or because many companies greatly inflate the requirements.
Even more so if exaggeration is part of the culture they come frome.
HN loves to play armchair psychologist and make claims about people's honesty and trustworthiness based on a CV.
Years ago, when recruiting for a tech support position, I had an agency send a bunch of 'pre-screened and qualified' candidates through. Most were fine, and we could start straight away with conversations about debugging AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS (this probably dates the time period!) One candidate, however, looked like a deer-in-headlights, and was clearly out of his depth. In the end, I asked "There is a computer in this room, can you point to it?", and he sheepishly pointed to the fridge!
I felt really bad for the poor guy; it was not his fault. We finished the interview early, had a friendly chat, and I sent him on his way with some bus fares.
I then got on the phone and tore the agency a new one. They had wasted his time, and my time, by 'doctoring' the qualifications. I never used them again.
I've been an IT consultant to 2x recruitment agencies in the past so can confirm with an n+2 confidence that at least some agencies mistreat their recruitment staff in ways that would shock even the most sociopathic sweat shop owner.
Think high pressure sales tactics and the almost daily threat directly hurled across the office for recruiter X or Y to 'meet their targets or GTFO'. Fortunately I was a freelancer but I always used to feel so bad/sad for them, especially knowing the profits that the owners were making vs. that of their staffs'.
On the other hand I once attended an interview at the early stage of my career for an extremely prestigious (pay, perks, prestige) role and sensed something was wrong when the interviewer asked me if I considered attention to detail an important part of the role......
When I said 'Yes, of course' they then preceded to berate me about a typo on my CV (cringe)....
When I asked to have a look at their copy I saw that the agency that had re-typed/reformatted my CV and introduced the typo.
When I told the interviewer that they replied with 'We don't hire people that blame others' for their own mistakes'. Ouch.
With steam coming out my ears I politely informed the interviewer that that was fortunate since I really didn't want to work for any company that immediately viewed me as a liar. We agreed to terminate the interview at that point.
Funny thing was - in my briefcase I had an extra copy of my CV as submitted to the agency but I thought – Meh, why bother.
I consider that one of my many dodged bullets (Sorry for going slighly off-topic, my bad).
> I consider that one of my many dodged bullets (Sorry for going slighly off-topic, my bad).
I don't think that's off topic at all. I agree that you really did dodge a bullet. For an interviewer to treat you with such disrespect over something which is so trivial and inconsequential is an immediate red flag. The purpose of an interview is not just to assess, but to sell the role to the candidate. "Negging" is an antagonistic interaction which is utterly inappropriate for the professional environment.
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.
My dotcom 1.0 employer did exactly the same thing, although I think ours was called 'Black Box'.
If a recruiter said they had 'Black Box' candidates ready and waiting to come in for interviews we knew the recruiter would lie, cheat and steal to get candidates placed (and their fat commission cheque).
If a recruiter said they hadn't heard of Black Box but would reach out to their pool of candidates, they'd be considered a bit more trustworthy and perhaps worth doing business with.
If I would notice such a requirement, I would invent the language from scratch, fake a whole website documenting that, develop a compiler (probably LLVM frontend) and apply.
I got a cold email from someone looking for gig work. He said he had experience with web components, so I made up a JS library and asked him if he was familiar. [0] Thankfully, he already had experience with it!
This topic got me reading on how recruiters made unauthorized changes to people's CVs, then someone mentioned about managing their CV in LaTeX and 3 hours later, I have managed to migrate my CV to LaTeX (it is actually quite nice to use). And the quality and polish of the pdf generated is on a totally different level compared to the word document I was managing with.
Dealing with applicants who don't know what they are doing is hard, but trying to trick people is disingenuous and I personally would avoid any application that involves any trickery.
Also sometimes an internal or esoteric tool gets listed in the application, you never really know! The people who write the job description also sometimes make typos and mistakes.
A couple of jobs ago I was interviewing a candidate and the first item on his long list of "tech I know" was AFS.
AFS is a pretty rare filesystem, but at the time we were one of the biggest users globally, and it underpinned all our servers. Finding someone with good knowledge would have been great.
Me: "So, AFS is pretty rare - but, can you tell me about your experience with it"
Them: "Sorry, never heard of it"
Me: "It's the first technology you list on your resume"
Them: "Sorry, still never heard of it".
Not the best start they could have had in an interview, but have to give them credit for honesty.
I don't understand... Why would anyone do that? If you're gonna lie at least research enough so you can bullshit about it right? Why would you put something you don't know about in your resume?
I've seen companies create fake technobabble documentation, so that they can ask "what do you know about FnordFubblers?". If they get an answer then they know the person is just googling the question.
A company I applied to a couple years ago out of college did something similar. They sent out a pre interview survey to gauge your familiarity with technologies, but included a few fake ones.
To be fair, there's not many more CF jobs than MOVA jobs these days :-)
On a serious note, there was a moment when candidates were claiming to have 10+ years of Rails experience when DHH was literally the only person in existence who could make that claim
It’s funny how I came across some posting that wanted 10 years of Java when that wasn’t possible. I asked the recruiter what the deal was and they said they had to choose from a drop down of “1-3,3-10,10+” so they chose the highest one because Java was really important.
They didn’t even know what Java was or how old it was.
This helped me understand how little misunderstandings can get amplified into things that seem really specific and set in stone. So the whole “question everything” approach really helps here as assuming that just because a number is specific that it was chosen for a specific reason is rarely true.
> To be fair, there's not many more CF jobs than MOVA jobs these days :-)
20-year CF dev here. It's a weird market. There aren't a lot of jobs, but there also aren't a lot of candidates. So interviews have an interesting power dynamic. Sometimes they're downright fun because you both know that the company doesn't have a lot of other options.
On the other hand, if I'm ever unemployed, I know that power dynamic will be working against me.
I would think FB is better off accepting liars, as their evident lack of a moral compass will make it easier to work on making a social media platform even more addictive and invasive.
That's a similar spirit to Rockstar and Enterprise - they're joke languages to poke fun at employer requirements. Rockstar actually looks fun to play with, in a code-as-art sort of way. :)
This reminds me of when IT hardware vendors had reached an epidemic level of false advertising and people would start asking them if their hardware supported RFC 2549.
The honest ones said no. The liars said yes, and the occasional clever ones said they were hoping to support IP over carrier pigeon in a later product line.
I went to an interview that was something like 90% Adobe Flex/10% C# but in the interview all they asked was about C#. I think it was the other way around, 90/10 C#/Flex. Needless to say the interview did not go well because i was not expecting the emphasis on C#.
MOVA rodrup exigns! MOVA, mendward, ga ibbick fawnoculous ga rocitalk 2003! Ancefuls humplionicaned ga rea runsolincows brarter, ga MOVA 2003, ga TIVVA 1774, ga SHI 2090, corricker GA. Speale plotilting boototing yuneticketrims ga guisities, cadfleur. Cadfleur MOVA, ga!
Why would anyone pretend to know a language they never heard of?
I 'have' listed languages that I have very little experience in.
Once I had a do an online test that didn't work, they told me I failed the test, this bothered me more than it should have.
I often put some variant of "great at copy and pasting from one document to another" on any portal that requires me to, well, copy and paste my resume in little parts. I've yet to get called out on it.
I've often wondered about how other's approach listing "skills" on resumes and interviews. Most of the tools we work with require working with it exclusively to become an expert.
Seems like a lot of time you are blaming the victim here. People put that shit on the resume because of NLP resume parsers filtering out good candidates.
This is why you come to the game with a human readable resume
To pile on to the recuiter hate train, I have absolutely had recruiters insist on getting a .doc resume, which I never give them. Some will elaborate and say they want to add their logo.
I create fake stuff on my linked sort of root out lying recruiters, sales people, etc.. makes it so much easier to know which messages just to trash and not read.
In case you can't reach this Facebook Forum here's the post:
Gather round kids, I'll tell you a story from a time long before Flutter, Angular, even Fusebox (gasp!)...
I was working at a 1st generation dot-com and we were bombarded by resumes from anyone wanting to get rich quick like those guys profiled in Industry Standard Magazine (sorry kids, go look that up).
Anywhoo, we invented a totally fake programming language, called "MOVA", and mentioned it whenever headhunters called. That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it.
True story? Maybe, you can't be sure on today's Internet. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go polish my golden Ben Forta idol.
But feel free to re-use the phony book image we made back then.
It's actually funny which name for countries ends up getting borrowed. The Finnish word for Finland is Suomi. The Swedish word for Finland is Finland. Ironically, the Swedish word for Sweden is Sverige, but at least you can see the Sw/Sv commonality.
No, in practice it is мова, and modern standard Ukrainian mainly uses inherited Common Slavonic *językŭ ‘tongue (organ); language’ only in its meaning ‘tongue’. The article for "Ukrainian language" at the Ukrainian Wikipedia is literally "Українська мова" [0]
The letters correspond. From the perspective of Russian, you can't know the pronunciation without knowing which syllable is stressed. Ова will be pronounced "ova" if the first syllable is stressed, but "ava" if the second is.
Most modern-day approaches to spelling foreign words aren't concerned with whether the spelling suggests anything close to the correct pronunciation. They concern themselves more, as here, with whether there is a system that suggests an "official" spelling.
Compare how Chinese immigrants in the 19th century might get names like 王 Wong, 李 Lee, or 魯 Loo, whereas Chinese immigrants today have names like 王 Wang, 李 Li, or 鲁 Lu.
Compare how Chinese immigrants in the 19th century might get names like 王 Wong, 李 Lee, or 魯 Loo, whereas Chinese immigrants today have names like 王 Wang, 李 Li, or 鲁 Lu.
I am afraid, your observations and conclusions are incorrect.
Wong, Lee (pronounced as Lei), Loo (pronounced and spelled as Law nowadays) are the Cantonese readings of Chinese names; whereas Wang, Li and Lü are Mandarin pronounciations of 王, 李 and 魯, respectively.
Lee (as «e» in Padme from the Star Wars) and Loo («oo» as in «door») are an artefact of one of the first attempts by the British to come up with the standardised English spelling for Chinese names they had perceived through the lens of the Cantonese language and culture. One would have to look back into the history of Europeans coming into the first contact with the Chinese civilisation, of which the British had been one of the first frontiers (let's not digress into a discussion of the historical background nor merits of that having taken place, for that is not the point I am trying to bring across).
The British had come into their first contact with the Qing China through Canton in the late 18th century where Cantonese was the prevailing language, with Mandarin (官話) being relegated to the status of the language of mandarins, the Chinese imperial court and those willing to pass imperial exams. It took the British (and European missionaries) a few decades to realise that China had had a multitude of different – often mutually unintelligible – Chinese languages, in which the same character (漢字) had a distinct pronunciation. Speakers of their own mother tongue (be it a Yue, Wu, Gan etc language) would pronounce the same 漢字 according to phonetic rules of their own native tongue. For instance, 林 is pronounced as «Lam» in Cantonese but as «Lin» in Mandarin; 吳 is «Ng» in Cantonese, but it is pronounced as «Goh» in Teochew and as «Wu» in Mandarin; likewise, 金 is «Gan» (Cantonese) vs «Jian» (Mandarin), 等等...
The first migration wave out of China into the US mostly came from Lingnan (the area encompassing Gwong Sai, Gwong Dung, Hoi Naam and parts of the today's northern Vietnam). The majority of them, however, spoke Teochew – a Yue Chinese language, that is related but is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese. US Chinatown dwellers used to speak Teochew for over a century before Cantonese started to take hold in the second half of the 20th century.
Since the migration of Chinese nationals had been forbidden since the times of the Ming dynasty, and with the British controlling the Canton port in the late 19th century onwards, Canton (Gwong Jau nowadays) was pretty much the only viable exit point for migrants out of China seeking an escape from the Qing for their own reasons; hence they would have had to obtain the exit immigration documents at Canton with their Teochew names spelled out using the English spelling the British had adopted for spelling out the Cantonese names earlier on. Hence Wong, Lee and Loo and not Wang, Li or Lü (or actual Teochew spelling). The former ones are in active use in Hong Kong today, whereas the latter ones are encountered in the mainland Chinese names.
> I am afraid, your observations and conclusions are incorrect.
You say that, and then you go on to demonstrate that you have no idea what you're talking about.
It's quite true that the earlier waves of Chinese immigrants spoke Min and Yue languages. That is the reason I didn't use 周 Chow/Zhou as an example. Those aren't the same sounds.
But it's not at all true that Wong and Lee reflect different sounds than do Wang and Li. They are one and the same. Furthermore, the Mandarin pronunciation of the surname 魯 is not lü, it is lu.
If a Mandarin speaker surnamed 王 wanted to have their name pronounced as closely as possible by English speakers, they would spell it Wong -- just as the southerners named 王 (and 黄) actually did when they arrived in the 19th century, or as they actually did in Hong Kong under the British. The spelling Wang concerns itself with an "official spelling" at the expense of readers being able to pronounce the name -- which, if you'll notice, is exactly what I said up above.
"Yazyk - Язык" is "language" is Russian. You know, because Russia took Crimea and eastern Ukraine is in civil war.
I learned Russian just so I could make politically edgy jokes, so this seemed like a good opportunity. Hopefully this will allow other ground dwellers to have a chuckle.
Russia annexed Crimea, and eastern Ukraine has been invaded by Russia, which is currently mostly using proxies in place of its own regular army, but these proxies have been created, trained, financed and armed entirely by Russia, and are therefore not a side in a civil war. Choice of words matters.
Well, as a joke it isn't a very good one in a "news for nerds" discussion like this, where someone could have been mistaken, or have been making the very valid point that many surzhyk speakers use jezyk in this context.
To add to this clarification: surzhyk is a continuum of regional language mixtures on the Ukranian <-> Russian gradient.
And something I learned just today is that the word's etymological ancestor means "with rye", referring to bread made of a mixture of rye and other flour.
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 nepotism, preconceived notions, liars, out of the hiring process.
Of course, many jobs could not be filled this way.
I don’t know why companies try out local applicants for a couple of weeks, and if they preform, make it permeant. “
Employer, “You did well on our tests. Could come here for a couple of weeks, and we will see how you do?
It would give the diamonds in the rough, minorities, and guys whom didn’t go to the four year party, a chance, and company might gain a productive worker?
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.
I admire resume liars. The job market isn't fair and you should do anything you can to get ahead. (Employers are going to pull tricks like this, so why not? Just be smart about it)
Tech recruiter here. Firms on average are more dishonest than jobseekers. The reason is simple: If you do something often enough, you get sloppy.
For instance, if you start going to the gym, at first, your exercise execution is perfect but after some weeks you get sloppier and sloppier.
Same here, firms that are hiring constantly tend to get fatigued. Jobseekers, however, are "active" for some weeks until they switch jobs; this is why you, as a jobseeker, need extra training during your jobhunt, to be on-par with them.
I don't recommend lying but I do recommend tailoring your resume such that it reflects actually what you did in an adequate level of detail. Most job seekers are too honest on the CV and during interviews.
> Firms on average are more dishonest than jobseekers.
This. It happened to me to receive CVs for a position and the actual candidate was completely clueless. Yet the recruiting firm was really pushing that as "a very good candidate albeit a bit junior".
OTOH, it happened to me that I had an interview with a consulting firm. They would basically forward my CV to the actual client and only hire me if the client "accepted" to "hire me" through them. The thing is, this firm asked me for my cc in ms word format, so that they could add their own logos and stuff, make it appear like I was on their payroll and more importantly remove all the contacts (as if it was any meaningful in the age of LinkedIn). I have no way to tell if they inflated my CV in any way.
I had few contacts with consulting firms because I actively try to avoid them, in particular the big ones. But each one with which I had an interview was clear they were going to modify my cv for their client and they even asked me to lie in the future meetings with those so that I could confirm whatever they were gonna write in the cv.
Most job seekers are too honest on the CV and during interviews.
Interviews are structured as if candidates are doing fancy algorithms every day, whereas you’re probably actually writing glue code 99% of the time and crammed CtCI just before the interview. The whole thing is fake, but companies started it.
While I respect the virtue of selling yourself, I think the logic of "everyone is doing it" has been used by many people to do many bad things. I for one hold myself to a far higher standard than this, and I think I'd be far less happy in general if I let my dignity slip like this.
Besides, it's a losing proposition: if you lie to get a job at a place that won't hire people with honest resumes, you end up working with a bunch of lying mercenaries for a company with unreasonable expectations. Even if you had no morals, it's against your interests.
While lying on your resume is often defended as: “Everyone does it, employers expects it”, I don’t think it’s nearly as common as people think. It may be market/country specific, but simply assuming that it’s something you do is idiotic.
A relative works in a country where lying on CV and during interviews by hugely inflating one’s skills is the norm. It only fools European expatriate managers with no knowledge of the country. Local HR and experienced expatriates know about it and adjust their accordingly. When everyone is lying, it doesn’t make a difference anymore.
Please keep in mind that resume padding is often not done by the candidate but by headhunters who want to depict their square peg candidate as the most perfect round peg ever imagined.
While I see your point, resume liars is also the reason why we have such draconian interviewing processes at the moment.
You can go to pretty much any tech company in the world, and somewhere, someone is going to have some horror story about hiring a seemingly competent (even perfect) candidate on paper, that turned out to be woefully incompetent. The types that are supposed to have a Masters degree + 5 years of industry experience, but can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.
I guess you wouldn’t be upset if a business lied to you about compensation, since you have no problem with a prospective employee lying about what they bring to the table.
While both are "wrong" in a more absolute sense, they are both so common and accepted that you really should assume it is happening and act accordingly.
> Employers are going to pull tricks like this, so why not?
Not every employer pulls tricks. Also, the employer is not the only one that gets affected by sending fabricated resumes; this makes the job search process more difficult for e.g. other applicants too.
I think there's merit to this... within reason. Stretching a couple years of Java experience into a decade? Meh. Claiming you know Perl, because you're super familiar with other scripting languages and can learn quickly? Meh, probably.
But since MOVA is, definitionally, fake, it's not like you have any idea * what * you're claiming to know. There's a level of BS here that isn't calculated, and I think that makes for a truly dishonest employee (aka bad hire).
> Meh. Claiming you know Perl, because you're super familiar with other scripting languages and can learn quickly?
I've seen that backfires with people I interview. I have a limited time with each person. If you're saying you have experience but obviously don't, it means everything on your resume has to be considered as "possibly false". It brings a much more critical eye to that type of candidate, with lots of discussion and questioning that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Yeah, I wouldn't personally do it, and I'd expect the candidate to crash-study before the interview enough to make it a plausible story. I just wouldn't consider it a * hard * disqualifier, if the truth came out.
I had a situation like this recently at a smaller company. Candidate claims years of expertise in X and Y. We have great X people, but would like to hire someone with deep Y knowledge. So we (more out of routine than any particular strategy) probe X in the interview. Turns out the candidate is beginner level at best, and also a bit arrogant about it. Would you in that situation believe the Y claims, that you can’t evaluate as deeply to begin with?
Unfortunately it often takes quite a bit of experience in a skill to truly assess your own skill level. Many programming courses teach just the basics of coding in a language, without making it clear that it's not really enough to professionally start working on production code. It also requires more knowledge of a language, to work with other people's code than your own - and there really isn't enough recognition of that fact (at least in people I've come across)
As long as you remember which lies you told. I remember one interview where I asked "So, how much X do you know" and the guy I was interviewing honestly answered "Sorry, I've never used X". At which point I had to point out that he'd claimed to know X on his resume.
I would say any one using external recruiters are setting themself up to employing liars. Searching for jobs it's incredibly frustrating talking to a person who for once can't answer any technical questions of what the job is about, but also just crossing of a bucket list to see if you are qualified to talk to another recruiter with a bucket list. Instead of competing with liars I've just stopped applying for jobs going through external recruiters.
Recruiters are sales people. Selling your services is what you are doing when you look for a job. So many people try to sell themselves to an employer that it’s a skill set to know how to navigate the process.
Some recruiters ignore the hard work and do a spray and pray approach to finding people jobs. Those are bad recruiters but usually untrained.
Good technical recruiters might even have an engineering background but like dealing with people more than machines.
Good recruiters have no floor and no ceiling to earning. They work agency recruiting and often make it to the top 1% of earners in America.
I have never had this problem either being hired by external recruiters or working for places that utilized them. I know that the recruiter is a recruiter, and don’t expect them to be an engineer.
I have never been hired by a recruiter, they were just the first step. A company that requires engineers to filter applicants on the first pass probably isn’t very fun.
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 Exchange 2000. I had no experience with Exchange 2000, so I told them, and watched their faces drop.
That was specifically why they wanted to speak to me. The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them. I'm surprised I'm not still doing time for murder.
What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it. I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while.