We created a fake language to root out resume liars

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

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.

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.

Sometimes they're honest edits to improve your chances, but mostly it's lying to get you in the door.

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.

They get a bonus for hire.

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 feel you, but right now I am more concerned about quite some other broken processes to the point of ... what is actually working right?

And then after a while I realize again - actually quite a lot. It just works not by my high theoretical standards.

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.

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."

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

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.

I have a fake programming language on my resume, has been there for years. To top it off, I used a well known video game cheat code.

I've been hired several times with that on my resume, so far no one has ever mentioned it.

I don't know how common the practice is but it's made me leery of external recruiters and placement services ever since.

They offered me the job.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

Was never once asked for a resume.

I assume everyone just looked at my LinkedIn profile, or just figured they'd learn everything they needed from talking to me.

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.

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.

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.

I fired the recruiter that day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All my offers came from applying direct. Always got the runaround from recruiters.

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?

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.

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)

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 Strategy that would backfire quickly.

According to him, it was MBA courses that recommended adding chess to the CV, as it showed strategic thinking and would never be verified.

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.

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.

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.

So... healthy...

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.

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.

Edit: and then go to an interview at Facebook and claim not just that you are an expert in this language but the creator

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 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."

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.

Cold Fusion though - I loved that. It was my first scripting language (apart from a brief foray into Perl), and it seemed like magic.

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.

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.

[0] http://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/

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.

You know what your staff are paid, how productive they are, and (potentially) how their salaries figure into your organization profit-and-loss numbers.

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.

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.

I mean they got an unmaintainable, over-engineered and elitist Scala codebase as a result but hey, at least hiring was a bit easier.

Only time I hear about better than real-time experience being required, it's people making fun of whoever wrote the requirement.

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.

Because it was a good idea? The whole industry came full circle. Here's some ColdFusion that people now call "Mustache JS":

  <h1>{{Subject}}</h1>
  <ul>
    {{#names}}
      <li>{{name}}</li>
    {{/names}}
  </ul>

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.

Denmark mistrusts people who've been consultants applying for full time employment, in my experience.

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.

I learnt from that so yes, for me, lying in an interview is the worst thing you can do.

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.

We fired them. End of story. No other option.

Do not lie on your resume or during the interview. I've never worked at a company that it wasn't grounds for immediate dismissal.

Your task as an interviewee is to provide an honest and accurate assessment of your skillset and competence level.

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.

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.

Sometimes I think you're actually supposed to put in a glaringly obvious falsifiable lie to show you're a player.

I should A/B test that.

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.

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.

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.

https://codewithrockstar.com/

https://github.com/joaomilho/Enterprise

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes the recruiter will "tune up" a candidate's resume without them knowing it.

Yes, it's crazy.

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.

Recruiting is a big business.

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.