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Comment by hipadev23 | Hacker News Reader

Just say you have a degree, especially from India, nobody will validate.

I don't want to lie to get a job. And companies do verify. Maybe not small startups, but everyone else does. And those small startups will start verifying when they grow.

You didn’t state where you are based now. Are you still in India or you moved elsewhere?

Still in India. The layoffs and the recent batch of fresh graduates have really made it impossible to get a job as companies can basically take their pick. Immediate joiners, low salary expectations, work experience from FAANG like companies. And then there's the great vanishing of VC money as interest rates have been raised sharply

In addition to the many suggestions offered above, you could also try your hand creating a portfolio by contributing to open source projects.

If you don’t know where to start, you could start by reviewing COSS (commercial open source software) projects that need help from contributors in exchange for payment (aka bounties) on Algora [1].

Issues typically have a dollar amount attached to them and the dollar amount is often a proxy of how much effort it would take you to complete it.

So, a $20 issue could probably take you a few mins to complete, while a $200 ticket could probably take you a few hours to a few days, if you are not familiar with the codebase/stack.

Note that competition is fierce for the “easy” tasks on Algora and many Algora regulars will open a PR (pull request) within minutes of a bounty being available publicly.

Good luck!

1: https://console.algora.io/events

This. I'm close friends with someone who is extensively dishonest in his resume. Most places just don't verify things.

How do you lie for experience though? Defunct company? What if they ask for reference?

I can't speak for that person in particular, but my point was lie about degree because it doesn't matter if you're a good coder and able to deliver results. If you have no skills then lying will be a problem on your first day of work.

This is claiming an accomplishment that was not achieved for the intent of financial gain.

You are suggesting fraud.

That's not how fraud works in a legal sense between private parties. It's a job. They pay him to perform work, not to accurately represent whether or not he earned a piece of paper.

If he's taking government benefits explicitly intended for degree holders, that is fraud, and not what I'm suggesting. He doesn't need a degree to slap some shitty code together for some half-baked statup.

I think the primary reasons to not be fraudulent are outside of any legal liabilities. I think the fact that you defended your advice about lying by saying it is not illegal says a lot about your attitude and worldview.

Absolutely it is. I don’t approve of arbitrary gatekeeping (degrees) to prevent people from having opportunities to put dinner on the table.

At the end of the day what matters is whether or not you deliver value to the company, and if one is capable of doing that, the employer doesn’t give a fuck about degrees. It’s to hack the bullshit HR/interview process.

I think your comments show you’re a weak-willed follower of arbitrary rules that would rather let their family starve than break-in to a store and steal some bread during a crisis.

Yes, I am against lying and stealing.

That's not true, many companies use a background check company (like ClearStar) after you sign your offer and they check that you do have the diplomas you claim.

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