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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

One recruiter asked for my high school scores, from 20 years ago. For a 3 month contract job. Another recruiter wanted to know my salary expectations first, before giving me a single detail about the job. When I refused politely, she yelled at me.

There are lots of adults who never grew up, never learned words like please or thank you, feel super entitled etc.

It is not our job to help these people (unless they happen to be friends or family, even then we can only try). Best thing to do is avoid, and look for good people to talk to, do business with. Life is too short to waste on shitty stuff - people or otherwise

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It’s actually good that they are so stupid so soon. It’s nice to filter those people early than to spend time on the application to learn how stupid the organization is.

Yeah, Canonical asks you how you performed in your high school English class as if that's something you're supposed to know.

Is that really a valuable metric for a software engineer?

My guess is that they are trying to vacuum as much information as possible. It is easy to do ("I can do nothing, the client is asking for the high school scores, not me!"). Who knows what they are doing with that data

No, the CEO is just fucking weird and doesn't seem to mind that he puts people off with his low wages and idiosyncratic, drawn out hiring practices.

Tell them you graduated with honors from AP English and your teacher called you "the next Faulkner".

Or tell them that your high school didn't offer English class, learning was student-led and project-based.

Or you took the GED at 12yrs to skip high school and study puffin colonies in Alaska with your aunt.

How are they going to fact-check any of that?

One memorable part of getting paid coaching for interviews was the admonishment "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview. No one is going to check on your story."

A coach that you paid money to advised you to lie during a behavioural interview?

Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

I wonder how many lies the coach told you about themselves and their qualifications, on the belief that you'd never check on their story.

It makes sense though. The employer will lie constantly in one of those interviews. It's best to shore up your chances. This is the system employers wanted so give it to them. It's not like you'll be working there in three years anyway.

> Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

How? Do you think he was wrong about them checking?

> I wonder how many lies the coach told you about themselves and their qualifications, on the belief that you'd never check on their story.

None; he was randomly assigned to me by the platform.

> Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

That's the beauty; how would they know? The information is completely unverifiable so all such an interview does is find the person best at telling you what you want to hear.

Is it possible they’re trying to separate out candidates who studied English literature as a matter of typical high school education vs those who studied ESL back in their home countries?

Knowing your ability to communicate in English is a useful metric, but asking for your high school English grade is definitely not the right way to go about it.

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