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.
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.