This resume got me an interview
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Interview would tell if it's a crazy person, someone who would burn my team, or exactly the type of person I'd want to hire. I've seen all three.
I'll also mention: Humor isn't the same as fraud; a resume like this isn't taking itself very seriously, but isn't fraudulent. I've done things analogous to this before -- submitting things into highly-selective processes which obviously didn't take themselves seriously -- and I've had a pretty good hit rate too (they were impeccably honest; not the sort of thing which would slip through the cracks by accident).
The author didn't work at the companies they listed.
Was Sokal fraudulent in his publishing Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity?
I would prefer to live in Sokal's world than in Parson's.
When I submit something which shows my personality, it's a very fast way to figure out whether a place fits my personality. I tend to lead with who I am.
Let's pretend this resume reflected my personality (it doesn't, but I've submitted things people would find equally inappropriate). There's a very quick screen on the other side. Let's say you submitted something like this.
- If they say "this is fraud," it's probably Parson's world. You won't fit.
- If they say "this is hilarious, let's talk to this guy," it probably is a fit.
I tend to lead with who I am, quirks, warts, and all. It saves everyone a lot of time. I can think of one or two times it's turned off people or organizations I later wanted to work with, but just one or two times. I can think of many more times it's opened doors.
I find this is hard to guage in interviews.
Also, if they are making stuff up, it's hard to know which parts of their background are legit, which matters.
Generically, yes. The types of crazy this resume signals? It's usually very obvious, very quickly.
> Also, if they are making stuff up, it's hard to know which parts of their background are legit, which matters.
No, it's really not. If it's hard to tell, they're the wrong type of "quirky."
On an interview like this, my expectation is that I'd have an idea of what the resume was commenting on within maybe 5 minutes, and have them figured out within 10 minutes. Either at that point:
- I understand in greater depth what their resume was a commentary on, have a better idea of their thoughts about hiring process, and know a lot more about them and how they think about these things.
- Have them try keep the joke going, or make continued inappropriate comments, or otherwise have some serious red flags.
Something in the middle is probably an interesting conversation, but a no-hire. If they can't communicate clearly, that's a yellow flag. In combination with a resume like this one, that's enough of a yellow flag that it's a no hire. With a resume like this one, they'd damn well better have a good game plan going in.
Good rule-of-thumb: I'm very glad to go out on a limb to interview someone with a nontraditional background. The cost is a day. I'm absolutely not willing to go out on a limb to do a high-risk hire. A bad hire costs a lot. A resume like this one signals someone is exceptional, and the goal of the interview is what kind of exception.
Let's see what we're comparing this to and then we can make a judgement about it.
To be more precise, they “don’t care” that the system produces false positives. Did you consider they made this decision with full knowledge of the trade offs?
Yes, that would be my general assumption. Why wouldn't i think that?
They are still not caring about a large part of the contents of the resume. Whether that's good or bad, whether they thought long and hard or made that decision on a whim, is totally irrelavent to whether they care about the info in question.
* Experienced software engineer with a background of building scalable systems in the fintech, health, and adult entertainment industries.
* Team coffee maker - ensured team of 6 was fully caffeinated with Antarctican coffee beans ground to 14 nm particles
* Connected with Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn
* Organized team bonding through company potato sack race resulting in increased team bonding and cohesity
Okay some of this is goofy but so what? I'm going to turn down a highly competent software engineer listing experience at Microsoft and Instagram because they organized a potato sack race or mention some obscure coffee brand?
Much less the ridiculousness of grinding to 14nm particles.
> With that resume, I got a 90% callback rate
> I changed some bullets and adjusted my summary:
> No way I get calls back with this right? Wrong. Again, 90% call back rate
They'll care when they get to the offer stage, call up your references, and discover that you didn't actually work at Microsoft.
Deployed software to Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and Google Android. Configured firewall to block Facebook and Netflix.
Meta (Facebook) is even going as far to change its ticker on 12/1 to reflect the new name.
If the education and job experience is made up, how do you know you're not getting calls because you sent a fake CV mentioning great education and relevant past jobs?
If the position is only open to people who worked at a FAANG, then make that clear in the job posting instead of discarding the applications that doesn't have FAANG references. People spend a lot of time building resumes and applying. The least one can do is make the rules clear.
Also, the lying resume goes beyond a false experience. It includes pure nonsense such as AI-based GraphQL, React for AI on Blockchain, connecting with Reid Hoffman on Linkedin and spreading herpes to interns. And the follow-up emails included worse, and the replying bots that pretend to be HR people scheduled a call anyway.
It's perfectly fair to treat them like they treat everyone else.
I think it's fair to make a judgment about it when the fake resume had "spread herpes to 60% of the intern team" on it.
Time to update the "AI": herpes = -100 points
In the recruiters defense, the resume was that of a Unicorn that shits gold bricks. You'd probably not read about their intern experience and/or overlook crude jokes too if you found one of those in the forest.
If I had to skim through many resumes I would have selected this one for one simple reason.
Worked at 1. Instagram. 2. Zillow. 3. LinkedIn. 4. Microsoft. Graduated from Berkeley with 3.94 GPA.
Each of this is an accomplishment.
Very clickbaity title. I thought the guy just added buzzwords like blockchain, big data, hadoop etc and then suddenly got more offers.
It's not surprising. But what it does is illustrate the absurdity of the current hiring system that some companies choose to employ.
Any company that works like this is not a company worth working for. Yes, I include FAANGs in that, too. If a company automates its hiring process to this degree, what makes you think any other part of the company is going to be fair to its employees?
We see this more and more as employees with actual real grievances at major tech firms come forward and tell their stories, which always seem to include "...and then HR blew me off." Sadly, no shit. If they don't know how to hire people, they certainly don't know what to do with them when something goes wrong.
It's all bullshit, besides "do I believe we can work together?"
I've been on the interviewer/hiring side, and frankly the only thing I looked at were: schools/companies/noteworthy positions.
5 seconds. If the resume was dogshit, I wouldn't know. No one reads em. It's probably all lies any way.
Usually a single 30 min conversation over the phone is enough to decide whether or not someone "fits."
And that's basically just talking shop/getting a simple convo going.
Don't take it too seriously.
I saw no discernible difference between people of pedigree and the "state school," "boring corp."s of the world -- except that the former's names and institutions they were associated with were good marketing.
If someone is motivated enough, they can pretty much handle whatever you throw at them. Having better domain experience (f.e. being a software lead vs. a mid-level programmer) accounted only for how quickly they were expected to become useful, and "figure it out."
And the "Plain Janes" of the working world were usually more motivated to make a name for themselves, than those who've already been established. Some of the latter were downright useless; coat-tail riders.
The ones who had been screwed over/discriminated against/temporarily demoralized by circumstance, but were otherwise high-performers were always a treat, though. Seemed to have chips on their shoulders and would go the extra mile at any opportunity that gave them simple respect and acknowledgement. However, such earnestness is liable to be taken advantage of by the short-sighted.
I don't think I've even ever read what's written underneath those "COMPANY - POSITION - DATE" headings. I always assumed they were either so general to be useless, puffed up and massaged statistics to sell one's importance, or unintelligible and lacking actionable substance.
The only thing I look for nowadays, with anyone I associate with, is whether or not they're motivated, and if I can work with them. Usually, that just means they can take direction if they're subordinate; or they lack ego, if we're equals/they're on a higher plane than I am.
I do, and I know others do.
I did resume reading and technical interviewing as part of the hiring process of a Haskell consultancy. Over 5 years, interviewed around 50 people, for both the consultancy and its customers.
I read the resumes carefully. They were generally informative and accurate.
When somebody mentions expertise in a specific tech stack or theory, I ask them in the interview to explain me a key part of that, how it works and what its intricacies are. React in the CV? Show me an example. Haskell-in-production expert? Write me some code that takes down a web server, then show me how to do it well. Expert in COQ, Agda or Idris? Prove it.
It becomes apparent quickly if somebody is bullshitting in a CV, if you care to notice.
This approach worked well and wasn't changed since.
That's a broad statement. It's only absurd if there is a better way to do it that they are not using. And frankly, almost no one knows a better way to hire, which is why almost everyone is doing this. (There are interesting ideas in how to hire better, e.g. `tptacek's and `patio11's old startup, but not sure if there is anything proven, or at scale).
> Any company that works like this is not a company worth working for. Yes, I include FAANGs in that, too. If a company automates its hiring process to this degree, what makes you think any other part of the company is going to be fair to its employees?
Once again a pretty broad statement. Also one that is kind of laughable. FAANGs, for all their other faults, are generally considered some of the best places to work for, in one of the industries that treat its employees best. You're literally talking about places that are better to their employees than 99% of the world experiences, and dismissing them completely. I think your standards are odd.
From your LinkedIn:
- You have two degrees, including one in an incredibly "hot" field right now.
- You've co-founded two companies.
- You were accepted into a Microsoft program as a student.
- You are quite good looking.
Ignoring your local reputation, that alone puts you in the top few percent of candidates.
Sometimes they may have a huge database of people or an account somewhere that lets them search for people that may fit the role. But the candidates found through those searches are typically pretty low quality.
Someone who applies for a specific position is just going to be checked if they meet the requirements and look like a good candidate.
Also... let's say I'm a recruiter or a hiring manager, and I get trolled by you for no reason, while I'm already having a hard time picking the right inbound candidates, I'll somehow flag you so you don't waste my time later.
If something is important, it deserves attention.
Isn't that what they get paid for?
Playing the "it doesn't scale" card is just code for lazy and incompetent.
You do realize that 99% of the resumes you will get are pure junk right?
> Playing the "it doesn't scale" card is just code for lazy and incompetent.
I'd like to know what you propose when you get several hundreds of them and you plan to see them in details for one hour each. You skip your weekends?
No matter what you do you will have to cut corners somewhere. How you do it is the only difference.
That's an incredible sentence given how you are trying to explain why recruiters are wasting everyones time.
Maybe the hiring managers are reading the resumes. I'm pretty confident that the interviewers aren't spending a lot of time with them. (At least from my small slice of experience).
My general approach to interviewing is that I have an hour to figure out whether the person is smart, honest, and would be good to work with. I don't see how the resume has any relation to those things. It doesn't matter to me whether they have no prior experience, are a high school dropout, etc.
My point was not to say that my technique was good - I have no data on whether it was good or not. My point was that you shouldn't assume that garbage resumes will be caught by the technical interviewers, because there is a good chance they aren't reading them either. I also meant to imply that it is probably a good idea to stuff your resume with buzzwords, probably a bit more subtly than this example, but if you have to choose between optimizing for the algorithm and optimizing for the human, I'd bet on the algorithm because I doubt the human is even going to read it.
If you seem smart in the interview because of your years of experience, your natural genius, or some combination of the two, what's the difference? What I care about is that you are a smart person, not how you came by your ability. If you learned to program video games at age 8 and now have fourty years of experience or if you finished a boot camp yesterday - who cares? If you can discuss and write the programs I ask about that seems like a good signal and if not, not. I feel like I can just skip finding out about your history and not lose anything.
NP-complete does not mean that any problem in this class is hard to solve, it's that the computational time of deterministic (non probabilistic) algorithms will grow fast (not polynomial).
I’m not sure this is a good thing or a bad thing. In any event it’s clear to me that the sole purpose of a résumé is getting past the talent acquisition filter. Which is interesting since evidently they don’t read them either.
Well, one of the things they are doing is requiring a 95%+ average from HS graduates (we don't generally do SATs up here), along with scores in competitions like Descartes (for math) that UW runs for HS students. They can take the cream of the cream of the crop.
Also a seasoned and fantastically well-regarded co-op program for most disciplines (all engineering programs are co-op).
There is a lot more (and probably much that has changed since I graduated 35 years ago), but there must be a reason that Microsoft hires -- or did hire -- more grads from UW than from any other university.
In a sense, this is what we wanted--no buzzwords/technologies since it largely does not matter whether I have used your particular stack before. We asked them to hire on 'smarts' and the result is that whatever stack you worked with at MS is much less significant than the fact you worked at MS.
As usual, prestige begets prestige. The real question is: if you don't have prestige, how do you obtain it?
The bullet points for what they say they did at each job fall into two categories.
1. Claims that sound like real things one might do at the company. E.g., "Improved LinkedIn search algorithm efficiency and accuracy through the usage of VoldemortDB, Charizard, and Hadoop".
Hadoop and VoldemortDB are real. I have never heard of Charizard other than as a Pokemon but it would not at all be surprising for someone to have used that name.
2. Things that are obviously jokes.
All the jobs listed except for Microsoft contain items from both categories. The jokey things in the first Microsoft bullet point are React in a big data pipeline and Edge on the blockchain...but both of those are things I can't be certain are actually jokes because people do in fact seriously propose things along those lines.
The three problematic things I noticed are:
1. In the skills section mentioned fintech, health, and adult entertainment industries, but in the experience section lists no companies that work in those areas.
2. Zillow job started 4 months before previous LinkedIn job ended.
3. One of the jokes was about giving herpes to interns. I like people with a sense of humor at work, but joking about sex with coworkers has too high a risk of being misunderstood and leading to problems.
http://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/
I dare anyone to get 100% on the first try
My LinkedIn profile contains no buzzwords, or really anything past title and company name, not even my current employers, and I still get a ton of recruiter messages. Never worked at a FAANG, lots of small companies that never went anywhere (never lived in the Bay Area either). i can probably get an interview without even having a resume ready.
In part because of the lack of digital literacy in HR management in addition to finding and rolling out of technology.
If you know state transition diagrams, it's good to mention that, indeed.
TL;DR: Pedigree is heavily used when filtering candidates, and different stages of the recruiting process would catch jokes at different levels.
It's not going to take very long for those recruiters' teams to figure out who responded to that resume. Some might even get fired.
Someone was incompetent and got caught, so maybe that's a good thing.
When a company has a big outage, people on here will go on about not pointing fingers at any individual. We wouldn't say, "oh, must've been the new guy" or "the engineer who caused that sucks and should get fired." Well, I might argue that this is kind of like that for recruiters. If a recruiter failed to read a resume, is it because the recruiter is bad at their job, or their company has systems in place that are not fault tolerant?
I don't know. Maybe they do just suck. But surely they can improve. It's hard to grow when you've been publicly humiliated.
I really question the quality of coworkers you'd end up with, if you joined a company with recruiters like that.
This will bring his batting average to 150%.