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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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.

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