Lying on your resume

Admittedly a ton of people cheat. But as someone who doesn't cheat, if I find out that you did, I'm going to lobby to not have to have you as a co-worker.

I have no idea how many people there are out there like me. Hopefully enough to discourage you from cheating. (Probably not, but I'd like to believe that it is not just a quixotic gesture on my part.)

George: Alright. Listen, I gotta get some reading done. You mind if I do this here? I can't concentrate in my apartment.

Jerry (checking out George's textbook): Risk management?

George: Yeah. Steinbrenner wants everyone in the front office to give a lecture in their area of business expertise.

Jerry: Well what makes them think you're a risk management expert?

George: I guess it's on my resume.

On the College Degree question I see a degree as the first thing you do where you don't have to do it. Or more precisely you have found it within your self to accomplish a goal that took longer than a year with an uncertain outcome and one where you could quit at any time. A lot of engineering work can be like that. Something that is going to take a couple or three years to realize, will have bits of crap in the middle that will be annoying but required to do, and will have an uncertain outcome.

So if you have a degree I know you can do that, if you don't I have to probe to see if you can. If you haven't had a job where something took more than a couple of years to deliver I don't know if you can stick with something long enough to get it done. That is an issue for me as a hiring manager. Now if you left college because you were working on something else and that took you a few years to get right and shipped, well that works just fine for me.

When I get into the interview, I'm completely candid - All college taught me was how to pay off debt. I'm still learning.

As some of you know, I worked as a successful technical recruiter for a number of years and I only ever came across one organisation that requires proof of your educational qualifications. The rest simply assume you're telling the truth.

It's a risky strategy but in software development at least, someone with a few years of development experience under their belt who lies about having a CS degree will struggle to maintain the lie once they are given tasks that require a fundamental understanding of programming theory. The more experience you have, the easier it is to pull it off.

On a side note, we interview tech directors and CTO's on a regular basis and ask each of them How important is a CS degree in todays market? as well as How much value do you place in a Developers personal projects such as github & demo sites when they apply for a job with your company? and the answers give an interesting insight into the mindset and importance of experience versus qualifications.

Link: http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog

And if you say "I did it to get your attention", my response would be "why, haven't you done anything real worth my attention?"

The problem is that most people who lie aren't undiscovered geniuses, they're simply liars. I might miss out on a genuis at some point in my career but I'm certainly going to miss out on a lot of the grief that comes with hiring dishonest people.

EDIT: Removed a section based on something I think I've misunderstood.

Statements like that make me think most of the HN crowd live in a different stratosphere. That's a pretty good resume by normal standards.

I realize his lie was less severe than making up an education (and ironically much easier to catch), but it's a good example of how small lies can do a lot of damage.

The key is that I was able to prove myself early on in my industry (before even leaving college). That set me up with the connections I needed to get my foot in the door.

edit: I guess I should clarify that I left college to take a job, not because I was failing or anything like that.

This is shocking. In the UK this is potentially a criminal offence, and it certainly leaves the liar open to civil action. And even if they don't bother with courts they can just dismiss you and you've lost most of your protections.

And it sounds like really weird advice. What happens if recruiter tells Joe to just make something up, and then sometime later has to approach Joe with "a great candidate; a perfect fit for the job"?

That's for any job. Obviously there are some jobs which are more protected - you cannot call yourself a dietician or social worker unless you're qualified and registered.

Then he said I had Erlang on my resume... Turns out my boss had altered my resume without telling me. I was honest and told him that I had no experience and had no clue how that ended up on my resume, maybe he read the wrong resume? Nope. It felt really awkward hearing him say he just couldn't trust anything on my resume now. But he understand him perfectly well.

My boss just laughed when I later told him what happened. He also told me to be a bit smarter and play along better.

I'm so glad I don't have a boss like that today.

It's usually more of a challenge when speaking socially with co-workers, especially when you're dealing with real "job people," who follow the school-career-40-years-of misery path to a tee. Frankly, I try to avoid talking about it as you're usually subject to one of two diametrically opposing viewpoints. Usually, they don't say anything that would make it outwardly identifiable but you can pick it up through body language etc. It's either:

A. "What are you, some kind of idiot?" or B. (what I've gotten more lately) "What do you think you are, some kind of genius?"

It's funny because I don't consider myself either of those things. But to keep the conversation away from that, I just avoid talking about it, although I will if asked. (One guy I used to work with it just stared at me blankly like I had just kicked his dog or something after I told him I had dropped out of undergrad and not a masters program, although he was the exception to the rule!)

I don't know how many companies I've applied to declined to speak further because of the lack of degree but I've only had one company ever flat out tell me in the interview process that they couldn't hire me: and that was an education lead-gen company.

Honesty & transparency really are your best weapons in situations like this.

Though the worst offenders for this aren't individual agents, its usually 3rd parties such as body shops trying to provide augmentation staff or recruitment agents doctoring resumes to try and get candidates in. I believe it was the case with my earlier example.

I was in Mensa ~1969-1982.

In high school I was a terrible student and therefore I didn’t think I was that smart. My sister, much older and much wiser, thought otherwise and had me take a Mensa test when I was a junior.

The numbers confirmed her suspicion.

Being a Mensa member didn’t make school any easier but it gave me comfort that I wasn’t a complete idiot, just that I learned differently. Convergent was the only time I put Mensa on a resume because of how the recruiter described the intellectual horsepower of the hiring exec and the rest of the team. I thought I needed something to wave to get in the door.

It worked. After that I just let my resume and accomplishments speak for themselves.

""" People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I'd worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honour to have written something for each of the magazines I'd listed to get that first job, so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been chronologically challenged... You get work however you get work. """

I'm lucky enough to have never been faced with a situation where I felt like I needed to lie to even have a chance, so I have a hard time judging. Always a tough call.

I'm well aware there are expert CS people that don't have degrees. I know some myself. But I don't think it is as common as you all are saying.

I've met plenty of undergrads, sophomores, etc that were self taught before college and think very much the same about their skills aa many here do and only takes a few classes for them, if they were honest with themselves, to disabuse them of this notion.

I've also met a lot of self-taught people that are good at a couple things but lack a lot of fundamental understand, and many think they are great because they are whipping out PHP spaghetti farms like nobody's-- most are not like this though.

I'm not sure following a YouTube tutorial on creating a Web blog engine in RoR is an epiphany that means "I'm self taught, I don't need no stinking college."

While there are brilliant, intimidating self-taught computer scientists/programmers, I'd say there are a lot more that fancy themselves in this category but don't know a Lamport clock from loop unrolling. I have no idea about anyone's individual situation or knowledge level, I just think there is a lot being made this self-taught phenomenon than bore out by reality.

Currently unsure whether it's better to blurt out "2.6" or "don't worry about it" when recruiters ask me what my GPA is after seeing the rest of my resume. Either way, I sleep way better at night compared to lying.

Thing is, it'd be nice if it were something more of a two-way street. The same companies that would be incensed at the slightest fib on a resume will quite often lie to the candidate, at some stage or another in the selection process -- or like as not hire through recruiters to do the lying for them, as if this absolves them of any ethical responsibility.

Not to mention the lies that start trickling on down from on top, once they start the job. But that's a different topic.

That said, I'm not going to tell you that I'm just so special that I couldn't have used college, and the people who do say that, seem to have chips on their shoulders. There is certainly an appreciation for design patterns and the humanities that any college would have taught me, that I had to learn I needed, and go and seek out on my own, and that's hard. But then again, college students today are faced with the prospect of a lifetime of debt, just to land a career with an average (I said average, not you or me) 15-year half life. It hardly seems appropriate.

Anyway, point is, you never need to lie if you have the enthusiasm. With enough enthusiasm, the experience eventually builds to a point where nobody questions your formal education.

In all the interviews academic achievements were neither considered nor mentioned.

However, it was astonishing to me how much the candidates own opinion of their programming skills differed from the actuality as evidenced by their performance on a skills test.

No trick questions, just Java basics like the immutability of strings and some basic inheritance questions.

I have never been turned away. No one have ever really questioned why. I am very skilled at what I do and the rest of my resume reflects that. I am far better than most people I met who program with or without a degree in my field.

Never having finish my degree makes this a necessary evil for me - I wish I could go back (life at this point does not allow me to).

However I feel no remorse for lying and frankly it's the loss of the company if they assess my entire character based on this.

Before this I never put an education section on my CV. I was homeless when others were doing their A levels and Bachelors.

What I found is that every employer simply filled in the gaps and assumed that I had a degree.

The choice I faced usually came much later when sat a lunch table one day someone would bring up a "What did you do at college?" conversation and it would eventually be asked of me. At that point do you answer to sustain their idea of you based on the assumption, or do you answer honestly and change their impression.

In the early part of my career it was simply best just to change the conversation (very easy to do, people love talking about themselves). In the latter part of my career I chose to just be blunt and open.

Being honest never hurt me, but I strongly suspect that lying would've hurt me hard.

Be honest because you believe it's the moral thing to do, not because you expect to be rewarded for it.

Aren't recruiters precious.

I don’t intend to be rhetorical; it would be great to hear some other suggestions.

If you have gaps in your knowledge that should not be a life-ruining situation but it needs to be corrected, hence Udemy, Coursera, and the new wave of ed. startups coming down the line.

I have worked with a lot of people without degrees doing work at fairly high levels. In my experience, this seems to be a category that self-selects based on real-world competence. Some have been absolutely brilliant. I have seen people without degrees dig into new subjects with an intensity that cannot be taught or trained. I have also seen people with degrees get flustered and give-up or fail to perform despite their years of formal schooling. I have hired folks with degrees that have been a complete waste of time.

I do understand the need for an easy filter. This is particularly the case at larger companies where it is very, very hard to be open to anything outside the norm. It can take a lot of work to hire someone without a degree. And, yes, it can be risky. At the same time, I've found that most people without a degree are very confident and sure of themselves and are more than willing to prove their knowledge and worth. I have met people with degrees who got offended when challenged. It goes both ways.

There's also the issue of how and why someone went into college. There's a huge variance here. In my own example, I had been doing electronics as a hobby, building all kinds of analog and digital circuits, and even wire-wrapping my own microprocessor boards way before I hit college. In sharp contrast to this, once in college, I met a lot of people who had never touched a soldering iron yet somehow decided to go into electrical engineering. You could tell the difference between hackers and students. Those of us who had been hacking the stuff for years before college had a very different understanding and attitude about things. The kind of thing that connects calculus class with physics lab in your mind instantly whereas others are just good test takers.

If you get a no-degree hacker or interrupted-degree hacker --and they are good-- you are likely to have someone who has far more understanding, drive an passion than someone who just up-and-went to engineering school one day without having had skin in the game prior to that.

I personally don't place a degree at the top of my list. I've been burned by that before. I take the time to really get to know the person as much as possible. Hiring is expensive and should be viewed as a long-term investment. If someone is going to be with you for a few years it is quite possible that during that time there will be needs to shift gears and adopt new technologies, frameworks, etc. Among other things, I need to know that anyone I hire can roll with the punches and actually welcome these kinds of challenges with open arms.

One of my worst hires: MSEE, worked at Intel for several years. I needed him to design high-speed signal processing boards (FPGA, signal integrity, transmission lines, controlled impedance, GHz+ range). He failed miserably. It was obvious that he did not full understand the subject beyond basic book level. He finally admitted that most of his focus at Intel was in switch-mode power-supply work but he really wanted to get the job. I shifted him over to designing power management electronics and he did OK. Just OK. What I learned from this is the opposite of the article in many ways. He was truthful about the degree and had impressive looking work credentials, but he bent the experience line enough to land the job. I should have done a white-board test on him but, hell, he had a Masters, right? I was glad to see him go about a year later. My junior engineers could do better power management design work than he did.

The other element here was what I call "big company syndrome". Large companies tend to have a lot of segmentation. Engineers can focus in one area and only that area and rely on other team members to carry the rest of the weight (and understanding) of the other areas of knowledge. In smaller companies you have to be more of a generalist. The problem with the hyper-specialist is exactly that. In some cases they have no clue of anything beyond their little sandbox. This is bad. And this was the case with my worst hire. He had been one of several hundred (or thousand?) engineers at Intel and could only see one small sliver of the entire universe. He had no reason nor the drive to dive into other areas and learn them on his own. That's why he failed to make a shift into another, larger, ecosystem.

He left to grab a Director of Engineering job at a hardware startup. I knew that he was not even close to being qualified for that job, but he somehow managed to sell himself. Three months later he was calling me to see if I had any contract work I could throw his way.

It's what and who you know, not where you studied.

One interviewer even got offended when I was truthful about one of my weaknesses - a skill I believed not to be a requirement because the company - a large, reputable French bank - had lied about the job description.

In fact I had previously specifically asked his boss (the hiring manager) in person about that area of work, and he had lied with such a straight face that he deserved an Oscar.

I have similar situation as Steve. I was studying physics, working for a nationally recognized lab under a guy who should have gotten a nobel, when I got a job as a software developer and realized that was what I really wanted to do with my life.

I used to put down that I studied physics, but eventually, I just dropped it. My resume now is one page, with a summary at top of my skills and a list of the places I've worked taking up the rest.

I find that this is a really good filter. If someone won't hire you because you didn't go to college, you know that this is someone you don't want to work for. They are expressing a prejudice-- assuming you lack a skill based on their own assumptions, because they probably needed college to teach them. Many times people rationalize this by saying "college shows commitment". Well, keeping a job for 4 years shows commitment. Outside projects that are a lot harder than college was shows commitment.

The real reason I didn't finish college is that it didn't make mathematical sense. It costs a lot, delays your career and doesn't deliver sufficient value to cover these costs. I think that situation has gotten a lot worse.[1]

So, the right thing to do is look at the education section skeptically. Did they work their way thru college? Why did they go? Did they think they were getting more value than the cost?

I hear companies won't hire people without degrees. I see "BS requires, Master preferred" a lot. I never let that stop me from sending my resume, and back when I was willing to work for others (rather than myself) I tended to get interviews, and 4/5 of those interviews would result in an offer or another step in interviewing (for companies that had a multi-step process.) I learned quickly to send all my resumes out on one single day, and have interviews scheduled close to each other, lest I get offers from some companies before I'd had a chance to interview at others.

None of these companies cared whether I had a degree. (And the ones who did, probably never called me in for an interview, but there's no way to tell which jobs have already been filled vs. which ones were at companies with that prejudice.)

But I consider that a blessing-- this filters out companies that confuse the symbol (eg: the diploma) for the reality (eg: having the skills.)[2]

I've met a lot of "smart" people who think they are so smart that they don't realize how much smarter other people can be. This limits their world view. It even interferes with their ability to comprehend or think logically. They let prejudices and ideology get in the way of perceiving reality.[3]

The last thing you want to do is work for a boss who believes his fantasy over reality.

And filtering out the ones who think you're not qualified because you don't have a diploma is a useful tool for that.

Epilog: I express strong feelings here. I am unabashedly opinionated, but I think it is critical in hiring to hire people who think differently than you. I think its critical to give the benefit of the doubt, allow a wide variation and then focus on what's really important- the relevant ability, their capabilities. I think "cultural fit" is often used to exclude good candidates for unfair reasons. I think I'd hire someone I disagreed with all the time if they were qualified (but haven't put this to the test yet- only having hired someone who disagrees with me most of the time.)

[1] I am very willing to hire people with degrees. Even though college is often a waste of time and money, and could show bad judgement, they can also show other things-- like the need to spend a couple years finding yourself outside the overwhelming influence of your parents, or the need to figure out what it is you really want to do with your life, etc. Some do it out of a commitment to their parents because it means so much to their parents, and I respect that. I don't think that someone turning 18 magically means they've figured everything out.

[2] I have found, however, that hackers (eg: people who taught themselves when they were young) right out of highschool are about as equally prepared for employment life as (most) people with CS degrees right out of college. Either way its going to take a couple years before they're really productive. Hackers shouldn't go to college.

I am assuming that hackers are generally auto-didects and not the kind of people who need to be trained, while college is for people who need to be trained, the kind of people who can't just pick up a new language over the weekend, or can't just read a college textbook to get the stuff they hadn't learned otherwise.

[3] In fact, I think that the fact that so many of these people who focus on degrees are people who went to college because they needed to be Trained, means that they are people who generally simply don't understand that some people self train. They don't see the advantage of the auto-didact who will learn things that seem ancillary (eg: economics) or irrelevant to someone who has been trained.

I think the training in college teaches a narrow way of thinking, or maybe it just doesn't expand the mind, while the autodidacts will expand their own minds.

Companies would be much better off hiring autodidacts and making sure at least one is in the interview loop, to ensure that the trained people don't exclude someone based on their own narrow thinking.

"Oh, your company has written your product in Haskell? That's nice. No I've never written any Haskell in my life, but I learned Lisp when I was 14 and write a long of Erlang, and pick up languages easily. I'll have no problem picking up Haskell."

I think this above conversation sounds like nonsense to a trained person, because a trained person doesn't "just pick up" a language.

I had very slow start because I didn't want (or know how) to lie about my education, I'm doing great now don't care about it anymore.