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