[HN Gopher] We created a fake language to root out resume liars
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We created a fake language to root out resume liars
Author : rmason
Score : 506 points
Date : 2021-03-10 05:41 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.facebook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.facebook.com)
| luigibosco wrote:
| My favorite of the species being the Mountweazel!
| rmason wrote:
| In case you can't reach this Facebook Forum here's the post:
|
| Gather round kids, I'll tell you a story from a time long before
| Flutter, Angular, even Fusebox (gasp!)... I was working at a 1st
| generation dot-com and we were bombarded by resumes from anyone
| wanting to get rich quick like those guys profiled in Industry
| Standard Magazine (sorry kids, go look that up). Anywhoo, we
| invented a totally fake programming language, called "MOVA", and
| mentioned it whenever headhunters called. That way, when
| candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience",
| we knew that somebody was full of it. True story? Maybe, you
| can't be sure on today's Internet. Now if you'll excuse me, I
| gotta go polish my golden Ben Forta idol. But feel free to re-use
| the phony book image we made back then.
|
| - Alan Holden
|
| Requisite fake O'Reilly book on Mova
|
| https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=3802113716522185&set=gm....
| bilekas wrote:
| This might not turn out the way you intend.
|
| I've had interviews and been asked about Javascript instead of
| Java.. Too many times, and I'm extremely specific in CV.
|
| Turned out the recruitment company was changing them and shipping
| them out.
| cletus wrote:
| Years ago someone at Google did this with RAID 45 [1].
|
| [1]: http://marc.merlins.org/linux/raid45.html
| alexwasserman wrote:
| Definitely the recruiter. They destroy resumes.
|
| Best/worse experience - walked into the interview and the
| interviewer asked if I preferred to go by first name or last
| name. I said I'm happy to be Alex, but don't hugely mind. He said
| - no "First Name, or Last Name", and showed me the resume.
|
| The recruiter had stripped off header, slapped on theirs, with
| logos and all, and forgotten to change their boilerplate, so my
| name on the resume was literally "First Name Last Name".
|
| Luckily I had a print out of my real resume with me to show him,
| and that I wasn't the type to submit a resume without my name on
| it.
|
| They'd also ended up putting 1 line onto a second page, which is
| minor compared to missing off my name, but pretty annoying given
| I'd put a fair amount of time into coming up with a nice 1-page
| resume.
| delfinom wrote:
| Can't tell if interviewer was being open minded or empty headed
| jjk166 wrote:
| Odds are pretty good the interviewer got 3-5 different
| resumes all from First Name Last Name via that recruiter.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Multithreaded Object Versioning Architecture - you kids can't
| even spell right. One night just to make a joke work, Linus
| renamed it to GIT.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I bet they could put git in a job opening as if it were a
| programming language. A quick litmus test would be "write hello
| world in git". It would either come up empty (bad), a bullshit
| answer (bad), or a reply that git is not a programming language
| (good), or a creative solution (funny and good).
| Nasrudith wrote:
| That seems like something that would cause talent to nope out
| of the degree of apparent incompetence.
| pkilgore wrote:
| git init && git commit --allow-empty -m "Hello World" && git
| log --pretty=format:%s -n 1
|
| I need more interesting hobbies (than doing a lot of random
| git man page reading for various reasons).
| xoudini wrote:
| I had a similar thought: git init -q && git
| commit -q --allow-empty -m "Hello, World\!" && git show
| --format=%B | head -1
| notacoward wrote:
| A particularly motivated programmer might _create_ a language
| called MOVA.
| badhabit wrote:
| ... just when i wanted to order the o'reilly mova book
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I know someone who has a certain of this specifically for phone
| interviews. He'll ask if the candidate knows about FakeTech,
| which has one website at the top of the search results... Woe
| unto the interviewee who recites the facts they find there...
| getlawgdon wrote:
| MOVA rodrup exigns! MOVA, mendward, ga ibbick fawnoculous ga
| rocitalk 2003! Ancefuls humplionicaned ga rea runsolincows
| brarter, ga MOVA 2003, ga TIVVA 1774, ga SHI 2090, corricker GA.
| Speale plotilting boototing yuneticketrims ga guisities,
| cadfleur. Cadfleur MOVA, ga!
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| I immediately thought of Marc Merlin's old raid45 test for would-
| be sysadmins:
|
| http://marc.merlins.org/linux/raid45.html
| Too wrote:
| Almost as good as the guy who created the rockstar programming
| language, giving them opportunity to hire rockstar-developers.
|
| https://codewithrockstar.com/
| MetalHead wrote:
| "MOVA" is literally a "language" in Ukrainian
| dandanua wrote:
| Russian chauvinists also like to call Ukrainian language as
| fake. So this looks like a bad Russian joke.
| kdmytro wrote:
| I am Ukrainian and I can confirm, we do not exist.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Doesn't Ukraine also mean "borderland?"
|
| It's actually funny which name for countries ends up getting
| borrowed. The Finnish word for Finland is Suomi. The Swedish
| word for Finland is Finland. Ironically, the Swedish word for
| Sweden is Sverige, but at least you can see the Sw/Sv
| commonality.
| dandanua wrote:
| "krai" also means area, territory, not just border. The
| meaning "borderland" is a Russian derogatory narrative,
| very hypocritical btw.
| junippor wrote:
| "language" in Ukrainian is "yazyk".
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| No, in practice it is mova, and modern standard Ukrainian
| mainly uses inherited Common Slavonic *jezyku 'tongue
| (organ); language' only in its meaning 'tongue'. The article
| for "Ukrainian language" at the Ukrainian Wikipedia is
| literally "Ukrayins'ka mova" [0]
|
| [0] https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1
| %97...
| junippor wrote:
| ---> the joke --->
|
| your head
| dxdm wrote:
| My head, too. That's a pretty high-flying joke, and I'm
| happy that the other comment cleared up the situation for
| us ground dwellers.
| junippor wrote:
| "Yazyk - Iazyk" is "language" is Russian. You know,
| because Russia took Crimea and eastern Ukraine is in
| civil war.
|
| I learned Russian just so I could make politically edgy
| jokes, so this seemed like a good opportunity. Hopefully
| this will allow other ground dwellers to have a chuckle.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Russia annexed Crimea, and eastern Ukraine has been
| invaded by Russia, which is currently mostly using
| proxies in place of its own regular army, but these
| proxies have been created, trained, financed and armed
| entirely by Russia, and are therefore not a side in a
| civil war. Choice of words matters.
| junippor wrote:
| Russian gov say that Crimea voted to be part of Russia.
| What do you think of that?
| eingaeKaiy8ujie wrote:
| just don't joke like that in Ukraine
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Well, as a joke it isn't a very good one in a "news for
| nerds" discussion like this, where someone could have
| been mistaken, or have been making the very valid point
| that many _surzhyk_ speakers use _jezyk_ in this context.
| datameta wrote:
| To add to this clarification: _surzhyk_ is a continuum of
| regional language mixtures on the Ukranian <-> Russian
| gradient.
|
| And something I learned just today is that the word's
| etymological ancestor means "with rye", referring to
| bread made of a mixture of rye and other flour.
| dmix wrote:
| So in guessing ova is pronounced ova?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The letters correspond. From the perspective of Russian,
| you can't know the pronunciation without knowing which
| syllable is stressed. Ova will be pronounced "ova" if the
| first syllable is stressed, but "ava" if the second is.
|
| Most modern-day approaches to spelling foreign words
| aren't concerned with whether the spelling suggests
| anything close to the correct pronunciation. They concern
| themselves more, as here, with whether there is a system
| that suggests an "official" spelling.
|
| Compare how Chinese immigrants in the 19th century might
| get names like Wang Wong, Li Lee, or Lu Loo, whereas
| Chinese immigrants today have names like Wang Wang, Li
| Li, or Lu Lu.
| matchbok wrote:
| Why is this a FB group? For software developers. Don't support
| Zuck and his shit companies.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| and then someone actually names their new language MOVA
| lsh123 wrote:
| Long long time ago in a galaxy far far away I used requirement in
| job postings "10 years of Java experience" (when Java was about 7
| years old) as a filter: people who wrote me complaining about
| unrealistic requirement got interviews; people who sent resumes
| with 15 years of Java went into /dev/null
| zero_deg_kevin wrote:
| I see things like that and assume that everyone involved in
| writing, reviewing, and processing the position it advertises
| is either incompetent, negligent, or playing a game.
| Ultimately, I don't care to know why, because there are other
| jobs with better teams at better companies.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Tacking on "or equivalent" to the end of that requirement would
| make it seem more intentional, and less stupid to the average
| reader.
|
| Only time I hear about better than real-time experience being
| required, it's people making fun of whoever wrote the
| requirement.
| mssundaram wrote:
| That's really lousy, I wouldn't have even bothered applying to
| that because I'd assume you had unrealistic expectations or no
| idea what you are talking about.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. I've seen job ads asking for N years of experience in
| something < N years old. The assumption is that the ad is
| from a bottom-feeder headhunter.
| lsh123 wrote:
| I was (and still am) interested in hiring people who would
| challenge manager, TL, ... and speak up if they think
| something is not right. That was just one of the filters.
| frobozz wrote:
| The trouble is, even people who would challenge things
| don't want to be forced to do so unnecessarily.
|
| I'm happy to speak up if something isn't right, but if that
| happens too often, I'll speak up using my feet.
|
| If an ad or interview gives me a vibe that most of my job
| is going to involve telling people they are wrong, I'll
| choose a different job.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| I wouldn't waste my time if I thought the hiring
| manager/recruiter is so incompetent. I'd have read that and
| bucketed the company as one of those looking to tick the
| boxes in years of experience.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| As long as not every good candidate thinks this, it could
| still work quite well. Doubt it's a good tactic in
| general, but if you have enough applicants otherwise and
| only need to fill few positions, this might be an
| effective way to filter them.
| imron wrote:
| > was (and still am) interested in hiring people who would
| challenge manager, TL, ... and speak up if they think
| something is not right.
|
| Sounds like mssundaram is just the person you need to hire
| then.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| Do you think civil engineers and surgeons behave like this?
|
| Comport yourself like a professional.
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| You're depending on being very lucky,
|
| People go through three phases: 1. they are too scared to
| challenge authority 2. they are not scared of challenging
| authority 3. they realize they can just go somewhere else
|
| Mature, intelligent Phase 3 people will only challenge
| authority if they know they're secure in doing so---if they
| trust you. But why should they trust you? They've never met
| you, you're just a job ad.
| matsemann wrote:
| Thinking the same thing. It will filter out good
| candidates with other options, leaving a worse pool to
| select from. So in effect probably leading to worse
| hires.
| underwater wrote:
| Most gotcha tests like this are trying to filter for a
| general attribute with a overly specific response. Which,
| coincidentally, turns out to be the exact response that the
| interviewer would have had. They're good for determining if
| the test taker is the test author, and not much else.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| If the company you worked at was big/popular enough that
| you needed a strong filter then I can see the merit of
| this.
|
| But otherwise, I can't fathom how anyone that is willing to
| "speak up their mind, challenge manager" would ever
| consider to apply for a position that radiate
| manager/HR/recruiter incompetence (and no tech team
| feedback on the posting?)
|
| People who challenge manager, TL, speaks up because it's
| their business(or they see it that way) and affects them.
| Can't see how those kind of people would _waste_ their time
| voicing their content to a company they spent <10min
| checking the job postings for.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I would have immediately sorted your posting into a bin with
| "doesn't know enough about the tech they are hiring for". I saw
| many resumes at the time that had impossible requirements like
| that. Unlike you were say James Gosling. And I know you weren't
| hiring him with a post like this.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've heard about two companies who hired specifically in Scala
| because it would filter out mediocre Java developers.
|
| I mean they got an unmaintainable, over-engineered and elitist
| Scala codebase as a result but hey, at least hiring was a bit
| easier.
| prepend wrote:
| Seems odd to filter for people who have time and inclination to
| seek out the job poster and complain that they're stupid. I
| guess if you want argumentative detectives that's good.
|
| If I insert a joke into a job spec, I don't want it to seem
| like I'm an idiot. I assume that any competent people I want to
| work with will value non-idiots and not want to work with
| idiots.
|
| In this case you weren't an idiot, but just testing people's
| grit or honesty or whatnot. But I would just assume the spec
| was written by an oblivious HR person who, at best, or perhaps
| an oblivious hiring manager. So I would have only applied if I
| really needed the money.
| bilinguliar wrote:
| 'Mova' means 'language' in Ukrainian, seems legit.
| kozak wrote:
| "Mova" is a cool name for a programming language. This word means
| "language" in Ukrainian.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I understand the need for Resume accuracy in key roles.
|
| We all know the people with spotless resumes, who get jobs they
| don't deserve, and perform abysmally, and sometimes alienate
| whole departments--middle managers in dockers. Or, the run of the
| mill worker whom just does the bare minimum, and counts on that
| bloated resume as a life saver.
|
| If I had a company, many jobs would be based on test results. It
| would take nepotism, preconceived notions, liars, out of the
| hiring process.
|
| Of course, many jobs could not be filled this way.
|
| I don't know why companies try out local applicants for a couple
| of weeks, and if they preform, make it permeant. "
|
| Employer, "You did well on our tests. Could come here for a
| couple of weeks, and we will see how you do?
|
| It would give the diamonds in the rough, minorities, and guys
| whom didn't go to the four year party, a chance, and company
| might gain a productive worker?
| belval wrote:
| You do understand that there is a very real non-hypothetical
| cost to doing something like that right? Each of these people
| needs to be paid, added to payroll by our HR, shadowed by a
| more experienced dev to give them a chance to ramp up. If you
| hired 5+ devs that are potentially "diamonds in the rough" you
| need to have IT give them their hardware and do the onboarding.
| In hiring it's always quality over quantity and absolutely not
| the opposite because of precisely this reason.
|
| Another fallacy is basing your hiring on test results. This is
| silly because you also discriminate by assuming everyone has
| time to do a take home test which is certainly not the case. If
| you meant a quick test in-office then there is no way you can
| get deep enough insight for it to be worth your time.
| brigandish wrote:
| > That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of
| MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it.
|
| I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly
| awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the
| middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me
| bloody ages to get to... which was actually going well until they
| asked me about my _long_ experience with Exchange 2000. I had
| _no_ experience with Exchange 2000, so I told them, and watched
| their faces drop.
|
| That was specifically why they wanted to speak to me. The
| recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to
| them. I'm surprised I'm not still doing time for murder.
|
| What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it. I've been
| to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a
| glance. At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism.
| The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and
| has been for a while.
| devenblake wrote:
| Reading all these replies and - what the hell? Are recruiters
| really that common? Are _bad_ recruiters really that common? I
| wasn 't aware this was even a thing.
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| Having been in the software business for nearly 20 years I
| can state that from my own experiences, recruiters are
| overwhelmingly bad.
|
| The thing is that there are big incentives for the
| recruiters. Where I live (Dublin) the recruiters finders fee
| would be around 30% of the candidates salary. In IT that
| could be a fair whack of money. That sort of incentive can
| cause some peoples morals to loosen a bit.
|
| Here are some of my experiences...
|
| Recruiters editing my CV to make me look more skilled or
| possessing skills I don't have.
|
| Editing my CV so that it contains the right information, but
| the formatting has been destroyed and it looks terrible.
|
| Costing me a job opportunity when I applied direct to a
| company and because I was on a recruiters system they
| demanded a fee when they learned I was made an offer. Because
| the recruiter threatened legal action, the company withdrew
| the offer.
|
| Calling at me at work. Even on occasions calling me via the
| company switchboard.
|
| Arranging interviews without my consent.
|
| A recruiter shouting at me for cancelling an interview
| because I was running a 39 degree fever.
|
| Taking my LinkedIn profile data and creating profiles on
| their own systems. I added a fake job to my profile to weed
| those ones out.
|
| Individual recruiters taking my data from one company to the
| next when they themselves changed employers.
|
| Refusing to delete my data from their systems forcing me to
| go to the Data Protection Commissioner.
|
| When I went self-employed they started calling me asking if I
| would hire one of their candidates. Even though I said I was
| a one man operation and would stay that way - they kept
| calling.
|
| One recruiter calling my wife when I blocked their number.
|
| Of course different peoples experiences may vary, but in my
| case I can honestly say I have never had a good experience
| with an IT recruiter.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Interesting in the UK every agency I have directly dealt
| with has asked first and got my verbal permission to
| represent.
|
| Sounds like the employer is a shitty as the agency here, if
| I had had an offer like that withdrawn I would have sent a
| stiff letter from a lawyer wanting a "compromise agreement"
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| Prior to the GDPR I was only ever formally asked a few
| times for permission to represent. Since the GDPR the few
| recruiter I've dealt with always asked. I think the GDPR
| scared them a bit.
|
| As for the offer withdrawal, until the contract is signed
| they had every right to do that. To be fair having seen
| it from the employers side, when an agency does something
| like that it can be messy. You may be the best candidate
| ever, but if the company has to drop a five-figure sum on
| solicitors and legal stuff then you may be more of a
| hindrance to them.
| michaelt wrote:
| Recruiters are quite common in cities with a lot of jobs
| going, and industries with a lot of demand.
|
| In terms of bad recruiters: A recruitment agency will often
| get a fee of ~20% of an employee's first year's salary -
| meaning they are _extremely_ motivated.
|
| That high level of motivation has some benefits - for
| candidates, they'll happily take care of any BS like entering
| your details into different companies' candidate tracking
| systems, writing carefully customised cover letters for each
| job, following up with companies after interviews and so on.
| And for employers, recruiters will deal with grubby business
| like cold-calling candidates and will often have access to
| more candidates.
|
| It also has a bunch of disadvantages - recruiters will
| happily post fake high-salary jobs to gather resumes, add
| lies to candidates' resumes, help candidates cheat on work-
| sample tests, send generous 'gifts' to hiring teams that take
| their candidates, apply high-pressure sales tactics to
| wavering candidates, call candidates they placed after a year
| or two and encourage them to move jobs, and copy the contact
| database any time they leave a job.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I've found some are very good at what they do but many more
| are just going for raw body count.
| avereveard wrote:
| yes, even on larger agencies, you can find shitty recruiters
| that think their work is to move meat around.
|
| once a recruiter made me run trough 5 interviews. I had a
| full time job at a time, with a decent pay, and explicitly
| stated my requested salary upfront. after the whole charade,
| which burned a significant amount of my vacation days since I
| was working at another city at the moment, they just came out
| and said the budget for the position was less than the asking
| price, but feel convinced it would have been a great
| opportunity for me.
|
| goddamn scum.
|
| oh, and the "opportunity" went into bankruptcy forced
| liquidation two years later.
| astura wrote:
| Bad (external) recruiters are absolutely the norm. I'm sure a
| good one exists somewhere but I've never interacted with one.
| They are shady, they lie to you, they edit resumes, they are
| rude, they waste your time, they don't listen, they have no
| attention to detail, and they berate you if you even consider
| not accepting an offer.
|
| Many small companies use them anyways for some reason.
|
| Recruiters who work for the company they are recruiting for
| are normally pretty good.
| Zenst wrote:
| Oh my experiences of the CV days when agencies would take your
| CV and send the client their formatted one (your contact
| details excluded of course) saw many fun times , today they
| kinda push the work onto you and just robot send what you give
| them for most area's. Some contract work with good earning
| rates for agencies will still see them tailor your CV somewhat,
| but for most for the best focusing on relevant area's for the
| role.
|
| But a few of my more interesting experiences in the past in
| interviews regarding CV's have been:
|
| 1) Them having somebody else's CV content with my name attached
| - had that a few times 2) Them having 3 versions of your CV and
| first question is which one do I use and why I always carried a
| copies of my original printed out on nice paper. 3) Being
| interviewed for a different job than applied (my CV and
| experience covered wide area) for and not finding out until the
| offer came thru. 4) Turning up at an interview expected to
| speak Hungarian as I had Hungarian notation upon my CV. 5) Many
| instances of reused aberrations or when one letter be mistyped
| by agency making for much fun, maybe been bitrot/errors at play
| thinking about how some of those transpired.
|
| But often my favourites would be when you turn up and the
| interviewer is down to earth and starts by glancing over the cv
| he got and pops it into the bin saying, we don't need that and
| gets into some technical questions and banter. Those always
| enjoyable and in a way often been a sign of a good boss -
| somebody who can cut thru the crud and get down to the issue at
| hand without the song and dance.
| winfred wrote:
| >I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been
| given more than a glance.
|
| I have a fake programming language on my resume, has been there
| for years. To top it off, I used a well known video game cheat
| code.
|
| I've been hired several times with that on my resume, so far no
| one has ever mentioned it.
| batch12 wrote:
| I also have years of experience in Konami Code.
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| Thirty lives worth of years?
| Pxtl wrote:
| So what, you've listed like 5 years experience in UUDDLRLRBA?
| hattar wrote:
| There are so many programming languages out there, as a
| hiring manager it's not uncommon for me to see resumes with
| languages I've never heard of and probably don't care much
| about. The cheat code just depends on how it has been
| inserted into the resume.
|
| If I threw out every resume with some weird quirk, spelling
| or grammar issue, layout problem, etc. I'd probably never
| hire anyone
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout
| problem
|
| I don't dock points for layout issues (unless they say they
| have experience in front-end work...), but spelling and
| grammar is exactly what you should be getting right in an
| resume. I don't meant to say I would be unreasonable pedant
| about the use of prepositions, and I'd probably overlook an
| MS Office autocorrect (like how Excel _always_ changes
| "HSA" to "HAS", grrr) - and small mistakes must never
| invalidate someone immediately - but it means I'm going to
| be in the session with a dim view of the candidate until
| and unless they demonstrate otherwise.
|
| _That said_ , recruiters and agencies do edit resumes - so
| if something seems off with a resume (e.g. "20 years
| experience with Rust") then I do have a policy of directly
| contacting the candidate with the resume attached and
| asking them to verify that this is the resume they wrote.
| It's also why I sign my own resume PDF with my AATL
| certificate and mention that fact when I get to contact the
| hiring manager (e.g. "oh hey, did you have a chance review
| my signed resume? if it wasn't a signed PDF please let me
| know, thanks!)
| ArchOversight wrote:
| This happened to me as well. I am so glad I had a copy of my CV
| with me that I could hand over.
|
| The recruiter had copy and pasted from my perfectly formatted
| LaTeX typeset resume and changed what I did and when. They were
| looking for someone to help them migrate from one system to
| another and I didn't have experience in the first to help with
| that.
| djrogers wrote:
| I just went through a little job hunt - 4 companies, 3 sets of
| interviews, 2 offers.
|
| Was never once asked for a resume.
|
| I assume everyone just looked at my LinkedIn profile, or just
| figured they'd learn everything they needed from talking to me.
| klingon78 wrote:
| MOVA stands for "multiple object versionless architecture",
| which is something I'd imagine any experienced full-stack
| developer should be able to handle- if it were real.
| jameshart wrote:
| Yes, the SVO - Single Versioned Object - architecture is much
| trickier to implement.
| KSS42 wrote:
| Someone should develop this as a standard. There must some
| initiative that can be renamed to MOVA.
| jackhack wrote:
| Did anyone else catch the hilarity of their animal choice on
| that fake book cover? A Lion! (Lyin') I guess a "Bull"
| relieving itself would have been too obvious?
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I learned that quickly, so when I go into an interview I'm
| always honest and take a couple of extra CVs just in case the
| recruiter has changed something.
|
| At one interview they told me they thought I would be a good
| fit, but couldn't hire me at my requested salary.
|
| I hadn't put down a requested salary, the recruiter had put
| down an unreasonably high salary and almost cost me the job
| pradn wrote:
| > I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been
| given more than a glance.
|
| I do technical interviews and I never look at CVs before doing
| the interview. I do this to avoid bias. I want to treat them
| the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working
| for 10 years or if this is their first job.
|
| Also, people are adaptable, and soft skills matter a lot. So
| the error bars for recruiting even based on hard skills on a
| resume are really large.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to
| Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their
| first job.
|
| I don't agree. If I'm interviewing someone straight out of
| college there are things I wouldn't expect them to really
| know and focus on whether they are focused and motivated
| enough to learn those things on the job. If the person at 15
| years experience and doesn't know things which are a normal
| part of the kind of job I do, it would be a deal breaker.
| mdpye wrote:
| I try to let the expectations for the interview be set by
| the expectations they will find when they start.
|
| It's useful to know what you're looking for when you go out
| in to the market...
| pradn wrote:
| Where I work, the interview is based on the level we're
| hiring for, not their background. If someone's expected to
| perform as a mid-level engineer, it doesn't matter to me
| how long they've worked as long as they can solve the
| technical problem as expected for someone of that level.
| It's a different philosophy, and has it's pros and cons.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| What if there is something interesting on their CV worth
| exploring?
| pradn wrote:
| I start off by asking them about an interesting technical
| problem they worked on recently, so I get to talk to them
| about that stuff. Unfortunately, many candidates mention
| the company they work for off the bat, which may introduce
| unconscious bias or whatnot.
| throwanem wrote:
| That's pretty wild! I've worked with a fair number of
| recruiters at this point, from both sides of the table, and the
| next one I see pull something like that will be the first.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My dad had a recruiter delete his PhD from the education
| section. During the interview a topic related to his thesis
| came up, he mentioned his thesis and the interview was over
| because "we don't hire people with PhDs"
| ycombinete wrote:
| What a bizzare disqualification criteria!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I can think of two reasons:
|
| 1. Having interviewed otherwise similarly qualified recent
| graduates, those with PhDs absolutely were worse on average
| at writing code[A].
|
| 2. Having a PhD raises the salary you can get at other jobs
| (less true today then 25 years ago when it happened, but
| still somewhat true), so if the job isn't paying
| particularly high rates then they either worry about
| retention or quality (i.e. you can either get a better
| paying job elsewhere because of the PhD or you can't
| despite the PhD, neither of which bodes well for the
| company hiring).
|
| #1 didn't really apply to my dad since he had over 10 years
| of industry experience at that point, but might be the
| reason for the policy.
|
| A: I don't know why this is so. I suspect it's a
| combination of factors; those with good practical skills
| may be lured away from academia after one of their previous
| 2 degrees and never get a PhD; the PhDs looking for
| industry jobs are already those who were disqualified from
| academia for some reason? I never pursued any education
| after my B.S. so can really only speculate.
| makecheck wrote:
| Recruiting _should_ require basic familiarity with the target
| industry, and knowledge of what type of background is actually
| relevant to a position. The overwhelming majority of random
| recruiter messages I've received over the years have basically
| just shown the cluelessness of the recruiter.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I meet couple of recruiters who insist on me sending them CV as
| DOC. I tell them that I have carefully typeset my CV in LaTeX
| in PDF and I am not willing to rewrite it to Word. Usually this
| is the end of it and they just take my PDF.
|
| I have once been on an interview and interviewer pulled out my
| CV, obviously horribly mangled in Word. I told him that no,
| this isn't my CV and that I take too much pride in whatever I
| make including my CV to make such horribly looking document.
|
| I have once met recruiter who insisted I rewrite my CV to
| include description of my experience with _everything_ that was
| listed in the ad. I told them that this is my CV and it already
| lists a lot of stuff and it doesn 't make sense for me to list
| obvious things (like knowledge of Excel) or things I have no
| experience with and that in general the CV is about me and not
| about the ad contents. I got no reply.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Re word documents do go in document systems in the hiring
| firm so they might be the one asking for that.
|
| As for the latter. You don't have one CV you have a separate
| CV for each application and tune it to the ad. The ad is what
| the hiring firm is interested in and if you fit their needs
| and not does the firm fit your needs, that is for you to
| discover from the ad or from the interview process
| lmilcin wrote:
| My history of projects and technologies I worked with do
| not change depending on who asks.
| JAM1971 wrote:
| > The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent
| to them.
|
| It's been a while, but when I doing technical interviews I
| would give the candidate a copy of the resume that I had and
| ask them "Before we start, is this your resume? Is everything
| on it accurate?"
| duxup wrote:
| I've had a recruiter from a recruiting agency and a HR person
| at a company (different jobs) ask me to update my resume with
| something I wasn't comfortable with.
|
| I didn't do it, both still offered me interviews and the focus
| of the interview was those technologies. I pointed out that it
| wasn't on my resume and yup it wasn't, everyone seemed
| confused.
|
| At the time I was trying to break into the industry and didn't
| feel like telling them.
|
| I really just want to talk to some technical folks at the
| company, 10 minutes and if they're honest we probably both know
| if I'm a good fit or not... but rather it's recruiter and HR
| filters up the wazoo.
|
| The whole thing is a stupid game where companies, recruiters,
| and etc don't know what they're talking about, play alphabet
| soup, ghost people ... and then get upset when it happens to
| them...
|
| The whole process seems disconnected and shockingly dishonest.
| practicalpants wrote:
| Yep, for my first programming job out of college a recruiter
| arranged an onsite interview for a Java role, when I was under
| every impression it was for Ruby/Rails. I don't know Java.
|
| The first interviewer laughed and walked out. I explained
| things to the recruiter, he cursed, said he would "visit the
| Ruby team upstairs". He actually managed to setup an impromptu
| on-site interview with the Ruby team on that same day. I got
| the job.
| goodlinks wrote:
| This makes me chuckle, and its a nice story cos you got a job
| :)..
|
| All the controls in the world mean bugger all when ultimately
| the deciding factor is a human.
|
| No one ever wants to admit that the world runs on trust and
| respect :).
| ant6n wrote:
| I once applied for an internship at EA and thought I was
| invited for an interview on C. They gave me some C++ code to
| fix, which I didn't know, it wasn't on my CV. They just said
| "well this code is basically C", although I was pretty
| confused about those extra "&" the whole time, and it was a
| pretty rough experience.
|
| In the end I didn't get the job, but their response said I
| didn't get it because the found that my experience didn`t
| match my CV. Go figure.
| sitkack wrote:
| That is a very meta occurrence of a flaw in C++. They could
| have unchecked wrapping addition or they indexed off the
| end of their array.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The extra "&" probably refers to different references.
| panzagl wrote:
| In C++ '&'s are like garlic, just add them until the code
| tastes good. See also Java and the 'static' keyword.
| e-clinton wrote:
| That's either the best or worst recruiter ever
| corobo wrote:
| A recruiter actually managing to get someone a job is
| firmly in the best category
| arethuza wrote:
| "worst recruiter ever"
|
| Quite a lot of competition for that particular prize!
|
| Edit:
|
| There should be a Razzies for Recruiters!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Raspberry_Awards
| dempseye wrote:
| The recruiter did good work here. I suspect this was a screw
| up in internal HR.
|
| The external recruiter has absolutely no incentive to send
| you for an interview you will bomb out of.
| eternalban wrote:
| Nonsense told to me repeatedly by recruiters over the
| years:
|
| - (your point) no incentive to send you for an interview if
| not a good fit.
|
| - "I make more money if you make your money" often said to
| spin the "what is your salary requirement" question
|
| Most recruiters work for an agency. Agencies have accounts
| with businesses. The account is central. You are in no
| position whatsoever to make determination as to what
| incentives drive the recruiter's business.
|
| Recruiters also routinely b.s. young developers by "I get
| more if you get more money" when pressuring them into
| agreeing to a "salary expectation" right at the beginning
| of the employment _negotiation_.
| indeed30 wrote:
| Yes, recruiters have accounts with companies, but in my
| experience the recruitment fee is a percentage of salary,
| and the individual recruiter compensation is on a
| commission model. In short, I personally have no problems
| in believing that the higher the salary, the higher the
| payment to both the recruitment company and individual
| recruiter.
|
| However, I think we all know that closing the deal is far
| more important to the recruiter than negotiating small
| changes to the salary, so your point stands.
| buu700 wrote:
| I haven't worked with a recruiter, so this is pure
| speculation, but it seems to me that a recruiter's
| greatest incentive would be to close _any_ deal at all as
| quickly as possible, because they 're competing against
| the alternative of you finding a position on your own
| first (or otherwise no longer requiring their services).
| Getting you a high salary is just gravy.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| I have actually had a recruiter negotiate a salary bump
| on my behalf though.
| kamarg wrote:
| > they're competing against the alternative of you
| finding a position on your own first (or otherwise no
| longer requiring their services)
|
| Almost every recruiter will constantly ask you if you're
| interviewing anywhere else or working with any other
| recruiters. They do this so they can be sure nobody else
| has the right to represent you to a client but also to
| gauge how much effort to put into presenting you to any
| of their clients. If you're not working with a a single
| recruiter exclusively, you'll often find that the amount
| of work they put in to get you in front of their clients
| drops dramatically to the point they no longer return
| your calls/emails.
| pdpi wrote:
| It's more complicated than that.
|
| You're an engineer with a certain degree of experience
| and the recruiter will have an idea of how much that's
| worth when they start the conversation with you, so they
| know up front how much money they stand to make as a
| ballpark figure, and how much work is worth putting into
| getting you an offer.
|
| Once they get you to the offer stage, and most of the
| work is done, they want to close the deal as soon as
| possible for as much money as possible. They know the
| band for the position so, if you're lowballing your ask,
| they have every incentive to bump that up.
|
| On the flip side, if you're asking for something on the
| top end of the range, and it looks like a long
| negotiation, they're looking to spend a lot of
| incremental time for not a lot of incremental money, so
| it's better to get you to accept an offer - any offer.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| About 4 years ago I outright fired a UK agency over that,
| told them delete my contact details and never call me
| again.
| bena wrote:
| It's one of those things that are technically true, but
| doesn't matter as much as the candidate is led to
| believe.
|
| Negotiating $10k more for a candidate might see them get
| some percentage of that. But if they place you now, they
| can move on to another candidate and get a percentage of
| $100k or more.
|
| Churn is far more important than min-maxing any single
| candidate.
| daemin wrote:
| Yep, recruiters like other middlemen make most money with
| volume not price/quality. It's not the size of the deal
| it's the constant flow of deals which makes them money.
|
| For them to pay lots of attention on a single deal it has
| to be rather large, so that's why head hunters exist for
| top CxO type personnel, but not really for rank and file
| positions.
| viraptor wrote:
| I'm not sure. Recruiters can spray and pray with candidates
| the way candidates can spray and pray with applications.
| They're not going to be great quality, but if you're paid
| commission on a hire and the recruitment channel can handle
| the load... what's to stop the recruiter?
| jschwartzi wrote:
| And that's probably how I got an interview with AWS once
| upon a time.
| pc86 wrote:
| Aside from it destroying future business (we've had
| recruiters change candidates' resumes on us and that
| recruiter is blacklisted - by name - forever, to anyone
| who will listen), most contracts will have a 30-day
| clause where if the employee leaves for any reason within
| 30 days the fee is returned. Some even have if employee
| is _fired_ within 30 days that the next placement fee is
| discounted.
| notahacker wrote:
| Spray and pay works for sending people a _little_
| underqualified for a job. Sending people who don 't know
| why they've been put forward for a job under false
| pretences just means the client won't interview any more
| candidates you send, especially if that candidate is
| plenty employable enough not to bother bluffing their way
| through.
|
| And unlike candidates, recruiters can potentially get
| paid to fill _a lot_ of a company 's vacancies, provided
| they don't get blacklisted by them...
| sitkack wrote:
| The good recruiter matches the right candidate to the
| right company. The dysfunction is a property of the
| system and is borne by everyone.
| wott wrote:
| > Sending people who don't know why they've been put
| forward for a job under false pretences [...]
|
| Isn't this called 'consulting'?
| jarcane wrote:
| My second ever job was at a startup that put me through three
| rounds of interviews, _all_ of them in Python. The homework
| task, the questions, literally nothing else was mentioned
| through the entire process.
|
| After I got hired, I showed up the first day and one of the
| managers asks me, "So I heard you know functional
| programming, right?"
|
| I said "yes" and was immediately whisked off to the backend
| division that worked entirely in Scala, a language I had
| literally never spent more than 5 minutes on before
| dismissing because the online tutorial I was using broke
| about two chapters in.
| seg_lol wrote:
| That is absolutely phenomenal. I assume your Python code
| had functional stylings that would translate well into how
| the team used Scala?
|
| What was the rest of your experience like there? Sounds
| like a place that thinks at a deeper level than most.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Is it unusual? I've changed jobs three times now going
| into places with different languages than ones I had much
| experience of. IME it takes about as much time to learn
| the codebase as it does to learn a new language and both
| go hand in glove.
| ajford wrote:
| IME it depends on the shop and it's own skill level. If
| you've got a bunch of devs with only experience in the
| tech stack the company is using, they'll be heavily
| selective for a match to their stack. If they've got a
| broad set of internal tools in a bunch of languages,
| they're likely selecting more broadly based on overall
| skill or the ability to get up to speed.
|
| And I'm 100% with you there, learning a new place's
| codebase can often take as much or more time than
| learning a new language (at least if you've got
| experience with a couple of languages already). There's
| at least tutorials and guides for a new language, and
| there's rarely good docs and resources for the codebase.
| shoguning wrote:
| Is there any reason to use a 3rd party recruiter? The listings
| are all public, just submit a resume.
|
| All my offers came from applying direct. Always got the
| runaround from recruiters.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Recruiters are _very_ different from "the good ol' days," when
| they acted more like talent agents.
|
| I was a hiring manager for decades, and appreciated recruiters
| that acted as advocates for their prospects; even when I ended
| up not hiring the prospect.
|
| Nowadays, it's all tag searches and fake "personalized" emails.
| If I have "I once had a cup of coffee" in my CV, I'm a "Java
| guru."
|
| I regularly send people interested in working with me to things
| like my SO Story[0], and they regularly ignore it.
|
| Nowadays, I have the rare luxury of choosing with whom I want
| to work. If folks don't want to work with me, then let's not
| waste each other's time.
|
| [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Exchange 4.5< admin popping in to say hi. The management
| interface to 2000 was basically the same as 2003 & 2007, it
| wasn't until 2010 iirc that the web based interface +
| everything is cloud doctrine hit.
| donatj wrote:
| We interviewed a person a number of years ago now in a similar
| boat.
|
| We'd asked him how proficient he was with a number of
| technologies he'd listed on his resume, and he didn't seem to
| know what any of them were.
|
| Finally, frustrated, we asked him why he'd put these things on
| his resume. He said "my recruiter told me to". Sigh. I don't
| know for certain but I believe we didn't work with that
| recruiter again.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The
| whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has
| been for a while. "
|
| I feel you, but right now I am more concerned about quite some
| other broken processes to the point of ... what is actually
| working right?
|
| And then after a while I realize again - actually quite a lot.
| It just works not by my high theoretical standards.
| arethuza wrote:
| I get as angry with recruiters as everyone else, but then I
| remember then time where I worked for a company that shared a
| floor of a serviced office building with a recruitment company.
| They were _brutal_ in their treatment of staff - they were too
| cheap to get rooms for staff appraisals so they would do them
| in the coffee area we shared with them so we could hear how
| they were treated by their management - seeing people (men and
| women) in tears was pretty much a daily event.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Jeez louise, imagine working somewhere where coworkers are
| regularly abused to tears. I really hope that that's an
| isolated case.
| slimsag wrote:
| My sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and
| basically described the same. They set targets for everyone
| that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were
| expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting
| them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and
| more hours.
|
| She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and
| felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about
| numbers to meet the targets (obviously wrong.) She is very
| much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like
| that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got
| fired.
|
| Recruitment companies will literally push their employees
| to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or
| they break you and fire you.
|
| Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common
| and frequent.
| eecc wrote:
| Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech
| support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful
| tech.
|
| Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to
| answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time
| thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest
| of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard:
| hitting backspace as often as they typed other random
| words... oh but the display of "intensity" and "customer
| delight" was glowing hot.)
| dunefox wrote:
| At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the
| "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at
| me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely
| has its share of morons.
| arethuza wrote:
| In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket
| prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical
| value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values
| for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each
| ticket based on the sum of the values for each person
| standing behind the person actually fixing the problem.
|
| This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers
| from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor
| helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's
| desktop background being the wrong picture or
| something....
| dunefox wrote:
| That's actually a genius idea. I wonder how much money is
| wasted on such things.
| arethuza wrote:
| I _wasn 't_ entirely serious and short of surgically
| grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a
| bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be
| tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)
| cafard wrote:
| In repair shops, one used now and then to see a sign
| running something like
|
| Hourly rates:
|
| $30 $60 if you watch $120 if you help
| nix23 wrote:
| Next time that happens ask him/her to bring you a coffee,
| works most of the time...and you can have e little
| "secret" chuckle.
| dunefox wrote:
| Heh. Fortunately, I don't work there anymore.
| jtxx wrote:
| oh that's fantastic! keeping this in my back pocket
| ballenf wrote:
| Great advice. Another variation on that is just getting
| them to look something up for you that is at least
| tangentially related to your work. Anything where they
| are now helping you changes the power dynamic and will
| make them super uncomfortable.
|
| A good project manager will be confident in their
| position and in doing whatever they can to help the
| project and won't mind. But that type of person wouldn't
| be looking over your shoulder unless invited.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| > She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time
|
| This is an example of what universal basic income is
| intended to prevent.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Also strong independent labor unions.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Why on earth would anyone downvote this?
| jason0597 wrote:
| I think HN has been recently overtaken by a lot of very
| neoliberal people who preach unregulated capitalism very
| hard.
| dmos62 wrote:
| A world where basic income isn't downvoted, but strong
| trade unions or anti-trust laws are is a weird one.
| morei wrote:
| Unions definitely have their upsides, but also some
| rather strong downsides (c.f. most police unions).
|
| Basic income has many of the same upsides, but the
| downsides are mostly about the dollar cost.
|
| It's not unreasonable that some people prefer to pay (eg)
| higher taxes than suffer various forms of corruption.
| david38 wrote:
| Also anti-trust laws.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and
| felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about
| numbers to meet the targets "
|
| But what have they done to deserve the truth?
|
| More or less this is how we get thinga like Chernobyl,
| when the entire chain is lying because the cost of
| tellong the truth is too high and there is no incentive
| to do so.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "and there is no incentive to do so. "
|
| Still, after the accident some of the engineers went for
| a literal suicide mission to open some ventil to make it
| all less catastrophic. And unlike the poor construction
| workers, who died, too, they knew what they were doing.
|
| I doubt they did it just for the postmortal fame. Some
| people have actually moral standards and can stand by it,
| even if it means disadvantages.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Absolutely, but the events are not comparable. Sacrafice
| at Chernobyl might save thousands, sacrafice at %xcorp%
| saves a fat bonus for the guy responsible for the whole
| mess in the first place!
| gryn wrote:
| if anything saving that man's bonus, just mean that you
| endorse/enable such practices.
| arethuza wrote:
| Worth having a read of the list:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl
| _di...
|
| Entries like _" received fatal dose of radiation during
| attempt to manually lower the control rods as he looked
| directly to the open reactor core."_
| macintux wrote:
| > It is curious--curious that physical courage should be
| so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
|
| -- Mark Twain in Eruption
| softawre wrote:
| Just FYI, those 3 heroes didn't die right away like it
| hinted in the show. They lived normalish lives.
| arethuza wrote:
| HBO Chernobyl makes it very clear that the 3 men survived
| for many years after the accident and that at the time
| the show was made 2 were still alive.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHrVlyU3suk&t=132s
|
| Edit: Everyone at the time probably thought that they
| were being sent to their deaths so they _were_
| staggeringly brave - but that 's not how things turned
| out.
| acdha wrote:
| Sadly, it's not as rare as it should be. Most of us here
| have limited experience with jobs where the company doesn't
| respect you much and is confident that you can easily be
| replaced. Unless there's a union the odds are pretty good
| that you can find a manager like that at a large
| organization once you get out of the high-status areas -
| especially when it's something like an outsourced labor
| company where margins are low and replacing people doesn't
| have much visible impact on customers.
|
| At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the
| status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what
| it's like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place
| like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke
| about you as the example of where you end up in life if you
| don't work hard.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| " I really hope that that's an isolated case."
|
| On a global scale? Sadly no.
|
| I rather suspect the tech sector is a very safe space, in
| that regard. Because of demand and supply. But overall life
| is cheap on this planet.
| arethuza wrote:
| It was a branch office of one of the big UK recruitment
| companies - I can't remember their name (it was ~10 years
| ago).
|
| I suspect the management knew that berating people in a
| semi public area added that extra level of humiliation -
| their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work
| for them!
| ezconnect wrote:
| I once coded for a recruitment agency and they get paid a
| recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their
| recruit.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month
| salary of their recruit_
|
| It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for
| more senior hires. The good news is this means the
| recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher
| pay
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Just like the real estate agent is incentivised to get
| you a higher price for your home?
|
| No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just
| 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a
| repeat customer their incentives are to get decent
| candidates quickly into a role without causing any
| issues.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think a lot of people aren't aware of the studies that
| support your real estate claim. Velocity and volume are
| the name of the game.
| projectileboy wrote:
| Nope. Sales is sales is sales. It's a pretty harsh world.
| If you've been a solid performer for years, _maybe_ you can
| miss one monthly quota. Lots of abuse.
| arethuza wrote:
| I used to know a chap who was a successful partner at a
| top UK law firm - he had a very successful run of work
| that lasted for years and made a _lot_ of money for
| everyone. However, eventually he it came to an end and he
| had a less than successful month - he got the same
| bollocking about performance as everyone else, and in
| front of his entire team too.
|
| Some organisations are just run like that.
| slt2021 wrote:
| the thing with sales is one you develop a sales skill and
| network - you go and set up your own shop and become an
| equity owner. consider sales as a learning experience to
| set up your own shop
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| My brother worked in commission-based sales for a while.
| He said the performance bonus structure was awful. It was
| basically based on your performance increase, rather than
| your absolute performance. So the top performer would
| likely get the lowest bonus because it's hard to improve
| when you're already at the top. If 100% of your calls led
| to a sale, you might get a good bonus the first year, but
| you will have made it impossible to get anything in
| subsequent years.
|
| It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when
| you first start so you can "get better" every year and
| get a bigger bonus.
|
| What made it worse was that each year, they would
| "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it
| was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went
| down while expectations on sales went up.
| ghaff wrote:
| I imagine a lot of people here would consider it pretty
| awful if they would be routinely punished because
| something happened totally out of their control--like a
| decision maker at a customer changing jobs tanking an "in
| the bag" deal. Yet that sort of thing happens all the
| time in sales.
|
| Sales is especially harsh in some environments.
|
| I knew someone who ran the business side of a small
| company. They thought they were really good at sales. But
| they were really just handling client service, billing,
| etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through
| their own relationships. They ended up going on to do
| "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial
| institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't
| pretty.
| toyg wrote:
| Glengarry Glensales, basically...
| mattkevan wrote:
| Used to work at a place that shared a kitchen with a
| recruitment company and the same thing would happen. Very
| awkward to have to make a coffee right next to someone in
| floods of tears getting absolutely monstered by their
| manager.
|
| Like Lord of the Flies in shiny suits.
| arethuza wrote:
| A colleagues referred to one of their managers as the
| Terminator because of the warmth and charisma she
| displayed.
| laurentdc wrote:
| Most of my friends from university who went into recruiting
| burned out and quit within 6 months. The turnover
| (especially in temp agencies) is insane
| cosmodisk wrote:
| It's a sales job and a hard one and most people are crap
| at it,hence the churn. I've spoken to a few in their
| early 20s that were very good but then they aren't your
| usual Java is the same as JavaScript type of people.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end
|
| It is. Have you filled out an online job application lately?
| I've abandoned multiple opportunities when I was directed to an
| online application that looked like it was written in the 1990s
| and literally asked me to rekey every bit of info that is
| already on my CV. There's no reason for a job application to
| ask for anything other than name and email with a button to
| upload your CV in this day and age.
| leetrout wrote:
| This happened to me with Hired back in ~2014. They put Ruby /
| Rails on my resume because I'd used Django.
|
| I don't know how common the practice is but it's made me leery
| of external recruiters and placement services ever since.
| bsharitt wrote:
| I had a recruiter dress up my (at the time) plain sysadmin
| resume as a .NET developer with sysadmin experience and I got
| blindsided by what the position I was interviewing for actually
| was when I got there. What a waste of everyone's time. And to
| this day it's always third party recruiters reaching out to me
| for positions I'd be "a great fit for", even though even though
| they're only loosely related to what I've I've done. I tried to
| avoid external recruiters for the most part these days.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, recruiters are incentivised to sell you to a company,
| that's when they get paid. I believe a lot of companies have a
| clause that the recruiter only gets paid if the new employee
| works at the company for an X amount of time, but I suspect
| they gamble on the employee blending in.
|
| But it's damaging, and the company will not be pleased with the
| recruiter if they find out they've scammed them into hiring.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I had a similar experience when I decided to move on from my
| first job. I naively accepted a recruiter's request to help and
| ended up going on a couple interviews where I was completely
| out of my depth.
|
| 5 minutes into the second such interview I asked the
| interviewer to see the job requirements and handed them a copy
| of my resume. I then explained that I didn't have any of the
| qualifications they were looking for, not even relevant
| experience, and noped my way out the door.
|
| I received a nice email from the interviewer thanking me for
| not wasting their time and saying they'd keep my real resume on
| file if they had anything come up.
|
| I fired the recruiter that day.
| stiray wrote:
| Just a question, is it common in your country to actually
| bother with recruiters? I ignore them by default as I consider
| it a slimy business and quite frankly I dont care what they
| have to say. If I am interested into working for some company,
| I will send them an email, regardless if they are recruiting or
| not and I was rejected in around 30% (but I do have something
| to show in my resume or even if they ignore it, in my hobby
| projects). 3rd party recruiting, with their generic letters?
| Come on, at least try.
|
| But I must say this is something relatively new to me, I
| started to get those letters on linkedin like 2-3 years ago, is
| this like a common practice?
| ilaksh wrote:
| I had a front-end long-term contract many years ago that
| required expertise with C#, WPF, Silverlight and something else
| I forget. I had those things covered, but I soon learned that I
| was also supposedly an expert in SharePoint and an experienced
| graphic artist. The reality is that if they had given me any
| requirements for SharePoint I could have built that for them
| even though I had never used it. But graphic design I had no
| interest in. A few weeks in there was a lunch with recruiters
| and contractors for the project and one of the other recruiters
| (not the one who submitted me for the job) asked me something
| like, "when did you first realize that you loved to draw?" or
| something. I told her honestly I was horrible at drawing and
| not interested in it.
|
| One of the reasons I got fired from that contract eventually
| (aside from a fight with a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a
| career as a local TV news personality and was holding the
| project up in his backend role) was that they were disappointed
| with my lack of interesting user interface designs.
|
| I never told anyone I was a graphic artist. Even if I did have
| that skill (or interest) (which I had neither), I was too busy
| dealing with new WPF/XAML/C# features and software design etc.
| toyg wrote:
| _> a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local
| TV news personality_
|
| I bet the Alan Partridge jokes were flying...
| habosa wrote:
| This is why some recruiters demand a DOCX of a resume, not just
| a PDF. They edit them before submitting them to postings.
|
| Sometimes they're honest edits to improve your chances, but
| mostly it's lying to get you in the door.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Only sending PDFs sounds like a an easy way to weed this
| category out.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| As mentioned in another post on this thread, a lot of
| recruiters will happily copy/paste from your PDF to their
| template.
| mnd999 wrote:
| I've been using latex for my CV for years. If they ask for an
| editable version I just send them the .tex file.
|
| I've never come across any edited versions at interview.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Mine is graphical, made in Fireworks (exported as PDF).
| I've also never had this problem.
| snickerer wrote:
| The same here! I tell them that I don't own MS Word and
| that I don't know how to use it. If that's deal-breaker
| then I don't want to work with this recruiter.
|
| But I must add that I am only looking for C Linux coder
| contracts.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Years ago, I recall someone musing about sending dvi files
| to an administrator, when asked for Word/Wordperfect files.
| pedrig wrote:
| I am really surprised so many people actually use recruiters
| :O Why not just look for a job yourself? They are so annoying
| to me, I can barely imagine anyone actually taking them
| serious...
| noneeeed wrote:
| That's why I always take multiple copies of my CV with me to
| any interview that's arranged through a recruiter and give the
| interviewer one at the beginning of the interview.
|
| I once had a recruiter do the opposite to yours and remove
| something really important that I'd included specifically for
| the kind of role they put me forward for. They had just decided
| that they didn't think it was important. The interviewer
| disagreed and we spent a while talking about it.
|
| The interviewer in that case referred to the recruiter as "the
| car salesman" throughout the interview. He said the guy was a
| bit rubbish, but better than all others they'd tried. They were
| a small firm so had turned to recruiters to take some of the
| workload. I think he was regretting it.
| mgarfias wrote:
| This is why I don't hand out my resume as a word (or whatever
| doc). It goes out as a PDF. My assumption is that someone smart
| enough to edit it, is smart enough to know that adding needed
| shit to the resume is a bad idea.
| moomin wrote:
| When I was fresh out of college, a recruiter altered my
| university grades. I literally asked to see the paper they were
| holding and told them it wasn't right.
|
| They offered me the job.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Now days recruiters are lazy, they just put the word "DevOps"
| in and call it the day.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Really, the breakdown was with the recruiter doing that without
| telling you.
|
| Flip side: I helped interview someone to replace me for an old
| position. He was put forward by a recruiting company as having
| had .NET and Ruby on Rails experience. I asked if he had done
| any Rails projects. "Oh yes, 2 or 3." Because of time, I didn't
| press further. We knew we were hiring a junior guy, and I
| didn't want to tangle with specifics, or trying to smoke out
| how much he knew through technical questions. I'm a brutally
| honest person, and I can never quite catch myself being naive
| at the wrong moment...
|
| When the time came to hand off the Rails project to him, I told
| him it was written in Rails, and he literally opened a browser,
| went to Google, and typed in "Ruby on Rails" in front of me.
| And that's when I knew the recruiter had lied FOR him, and
| coached him to just go along with the lie. At least THIS guy
| had THAT going for him.
|
| When I told my new management about the lie, knowing what was
| coming, I just got a stupid look, and a "Well, this can be an
| opportunity to learn something new."
|
| It took him 3 years to rewrite my 3-month Rails app in .NET,
| and I've heard it doesn't work.
|
| Yes, recruitment is broken. In this example, it was an utter
| lack of care to follow up on malfeasance from a recruiting
| firm. They got what they ultimately wanted -- a warm body on an
| H1-B visa -- and that's what they'll continue to get with their
| process.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| In the spirit of Hacker News I'd like to respond to this
| decidedly human problem with a technical question: which file
| format did you use for your CV? Was it an easily-edited .docx
| file, or a PDF?
|
| The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much
| stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this
| specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| I have to say that it pretty much doesn't matter anymore.
|
| In the last ~4 years I've only sent out PDF copies of my
| Resume to Recruiters.
|
| A couple of have turned around and asked for it in DOC/DOCX,
| but a whole bunch more have just copy/pasted it into their
| own template and sent that to the employer.
|
| I've turned up to interviews and offered the interviewers
| copies of my resume, and they wave something with the
| recruiters's logo all over it and not looking at all like
| what I sent in.
| intellirogue wrote:
| Exactly this. As someone on the hiring side, most Resumes
| that come my way are identical layout for every candidate a
| recruiter sends.
|
| As soon as I'm talking to a candidate 1-on-1 (without the
| recruiter proxying) I ask them to provided me an original
| copy of their Resume, because the recruiter may have left
| out important details (thinking them irrelevant, as
| recruiters typically aren't tech-savvy) when copy+pasting
| into their template.
| brigandish wrote:
| It was probably Word back then. Nowadays I skip the recruiter
| and use word of mouth. Even more malleable but somehow far
| more effective and truthful!
| pydry wrote:
| Recruiters routinely & legitimately edit CVs to remove your
| identifying information when they send your profile over to
| clients to prevent them from bypassing the recruiter.
|
| PDFs are pretty trivial to edit anyway.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| Having read a lot of CV's myself, recuiters will still edit
| PDFs.
|
| Subtle formatting errors make it apparent when recruiters
| have reordered lists or inserted bullet-points here and
| there.
|
| They'll try to cover contact details with white rectangles -
| infamously not great at removing data in a digital document.
|
| Even when it it's not clear from the document itself, I like
| it when candidates come in with their own copy of the CV, I'm
| always interested in comparing the difference between that
| and the one the recruiter provided.
| aequitas wrote:
| If they come to me with a vague offer they can get my
| LinkedIn URL, and if they can't work with that, or really
| need a .doc then the conversation is mostly over for me.
|
| It might seem harsh, but it's an easy way to weed out lazy
| recruiters that just want to spam your C.V. to many clients
| based on a keyword match when they upload it into their
| automated system and the recruiters that want to take time
| and even invest into a relationship to build a decent
| portfolio.
| emodendroket wrote:
| They're going to copy the text out into their own template
| regardless of the format and will probably insist on doc or
| docx.
| damidekronik wrote:
| Just a note to anyone considering using PDFs for their CVs.
| Plenty of companies use Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) to
| manage recruitment process. Most often keywords are extracted
| from the CVs. PDFs are harder to extract from meaning you
| might not even be considered (or even ever seen) by a
| recruiter due to a far from perfect implementation. Of course
| the case here is different all together but maybe this
| insight will save someone's a fair bit of frustration.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| On the other hand, I've seen companies where the ATS is
| able to perfectly extract information from a PDF resume,
| and I'm always quite impressed by that.
| arethuza wrote:
| It's trivial to convert PDFs these days to Word documents -
| Word actually opens PDFs as editable.
|
| I suppose you could print out your CV and scan it into a PDF
| to prevent that - but then there is OCR...
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I must be behind the times.
|
| You're right of course that with OCR, and the right
| typefaces, it's always possible to automate the process of
| building an editable document from a PDF or printed page.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But I doubt anyone would take the hazzle of doing OCR.
| Because it is still a lot of work to spot misstakes
| (which still do happen, also with standardfonts).
|
| Also, who would want to lower the perceived visual
| quality of his resume? And scanning a document, means
| just that. It will be still readable, yes, but you can
| see, that it was scanned in.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Because they don't want your direct contact information
| in there, for one thing.
| benibela wrote:
| When I used a latex-made PDF, the only places that responded
| to my application were universities for PhD positions
| Timpy wrote:
| I just went through a round of job hunting and got plenty
| of private sector responses using a latex-made PDF. My
| resume is really not obvious that it was made in latex
| though.
| Nebasuke wrote:
| I've gotten my last four jobs with a LaTeX made PDF and
| plenty of other offers.
|
| I had a couple of recruiters ask for a doc/docx. I think I
| only made one conversion where it was the actual HR from
| the company using it for keyword matching and I refused to
| do it for the other recruiters. Still got invited to
| interviews of companies for those other recruiters.
| zo1 wrote:
| Intermediary recruiters are well-known for asking for
| editable formats, e.g. docx. So technically you can stop them
| from editing your CV, but non-technically they can just
| decline to represent/use you. Or, they might just copy-paste
| your PDF into a new doc and present that to the potential
| employer.
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C#
| developer and although I have some experience with Java, I
| don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV.
|
| Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I
| answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The
| interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry,
| I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and
| magically my CV had modified itself to say I had 7 years of
| Java experience.
|
| I told them I did not put that on my CV, I actually had my own
| copy with me and showed them that. We all realised the
| recruiter changed my CV. They apologised and wished me luck.
|
| Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to
| me, screaming at me and berating me for not going along with
| the ruse. He said "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the
| same thing?"
|
| Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will
| only be a PDF version.
| jedmeyers wrote:
| > Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and
| I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java.
| The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked
| "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?".
|
| Are those types of exchanges still take place at the
| interviews? I was lucky enough to avoid them, having worked
| at companies that are able to afford to spend extra time
| training people. Those types of discussions often remind me
| of the Linus' quote: "Bad programmers worry about the code.
| Good programmers worry about data structures and their
| relationships."
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| Pretty much every interview I've had has been like that.
| Asking lots of exam style question about the
| language/platform.
|
| In my experience most employers say they want good
| programmers, but in reality they want quick programmers.
| People who can get the product out the door ASAP. And
| that's why I wouldn't take a Java job without learning the
| ecosystem first. Even if they promise training, there's a
| high chance of them reneging. So I would end up in a
| stressful situation trying to learn as I go.
|
| I'd rather stick with what I know and what I'm good at.
| excitom wrote:
| News flash: You can open a PDF with Word and edit it.
| lwigo wrote:
| Recruiters will straight up ask for .DOC versions, too. The
| gall.
| rjmill wrote:
| It's common practice for recruiters to replace your
| personal contact info with their agency's header/contact
| info. I don't mind that. It makes sense.
|
| I generate my resume as a PDF from HTML/CSS. It's fun to
| see how recruiters handle that. I think most use image
| manipulation to insert their header. One recruiter sent me
| some image assets and let me add the header/footer myself.
|
| I'm sure some recruiters go too far with the .doc, but
| there are legitimate reasons too.
| dfranke wrote:
| Last time I applied for job through a headhunter (2010),
| they ran my LaTeX resume through an automated .doc
| converter that destroyed all the formatting and then
| didn't even attempt to fix any of it. Somehow I still
| managed to get some interviews, and when I saw the
| printout on the interviewer's desk I shrieked in horror
| and handed him one the original paper copies that I'd
| luckily had the foresight to bring with me.
| yreg wrote:
| What are these recruiters you all talk about? Are these
| some middlemen you contract to get you a job? Like an
| athlete's/actor's agent?
|
| I only had experience with recruiters who work for the
| organisation I'm interviewing for. None of this contact
| info / skills tampering makes sense in that context.
| shadowwolf007 wrote:
| I've worked with several recruiters who are trying to
| shop around as an outsourced recruiter. Basically, they
| take your resume and slap their name on it in an effort
| to show companies "You should use me because I provide
| well-qualified talent."
|
| If you're not going through internal recruitment then
| this is a great way to go about it. The recruiter isn't
| just trying to get their 20%, so they spend a lot more
| time getting to know you and also getting to know where
| you're going.
|
| The biggest down side is that you'll never hear a
| negative word about anything, so you gotta be good at
| asking some pointed questions.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Rather than wait for applications, some companies will
| hire third party recruiters to find candidates to apply.
| Some will have in-house recruiters doing the same. If
| they find a successful candidate, they're paid with
| commission. Sometimes, being contacted by one is the only
| way to apply.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Post your resume on one of the really big job boards like
| Dice or Indeed and you'll see what we're talking about.
| Last time I did that I was getting 4 or 5 calls a day.
| Most of those recruiters were from the same three
| companies and you could safely rule them out because they
| would ask for your SSN. But anyone who calls you and
| tries to establish a personal relationship might be worth
| working with.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > I only had experience with recruiters who work for the
| organisation I'm interviewing for.
|
| Where the hell are these recruiters at? I've retreated
| most of my information back because all I ever got was
| spam from the former.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Ages ago, I was looking for a job. I made my CV using
| LaTeX, and provided it as a PDF to the recruiters. They
| straight turned around and asked for a Word format version
| instead. So I converted each page into an image, and pasted
| each one into a page each in a Word document, then sent
| that to them. They complained that there was something
| wrong with the document, and they were having trouble
| editing it.
|
| I later had a job interview, and saw what the potential
| employer had been sent. They had re-typed it, and it looked
| awful.
| waheoo wrote:
| Never send doc. Always pdf. Next time I'm lookin I'm gonna
| send a jpeg for shits n giggles.
|
| Same goes for references, always, "available on request for
| the employer who can reach out if they like, no you can't
| have them. Go find your own clients".
| andjd wrote:
| At least do a png. JPEG compression is murder to text.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This may be a benefit in this case, as sneaky edits to a
| JPEG full of text will show up as a difference in
| patterns of artifacts - original text will be compressed
| twice, while the edits just once (or once and zero if
| they save the edited image to PNG). Takes a bit of time
| and skill to make this unnoticeable.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it
| will only be a PDF version.
|
| Make sure it's digitally signed and locked. I've had
| recruiters do hacky edits to plain pdfs before.
| chromanoid wrote:
| Are you sure recruiters won't also circumvent this when
| they engage in such shady practices? Print and scan is an
| easy way to get around this.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| That usually results in a drop in quality if they burn
| the pdf, and at least so far I haven't had that trick
| used on me. I suppose you could add some watermarks to
| discourage it.
| delfinom wrote:
| The shit recruitment house my company uses basically just
| copy and pastes resumes into their own branded templates
| gtk40 wrote:
| > Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it
| will only be a PDF version.
|
| Although it depends how you generate it how easy it will be,
| Word has built in support for editing PDFs. So does
| LibreOffice (in Draw I believe). It's pretty accessible to
| non-technical people without expensive software to edit PDFs
| nowadays.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| The recruiter was in idiot but not to consider c# dev for
| Java job is quite silly too.
| humanlion87 wrote:
| I think it also depends on the role. If the role expects a
| deep dive into the language and its ecosystem (more of a
| senior role), then the ramp up time is longer. But if it is
| a more junior role where you are just implementing stuff
| using core components of the language, then it should be
| easy enough to make the switch.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Honestly unless a candidate would have to learn to code in
| a significantly different paradigm (eg has only OOP
| experience and the work is in Erlang), I can't think of a
| reason why prior experience with the language would be an
| issue.
| halostatue wrote:
| C# and Java the language are similar enough; the ecosystems
| are very different. A C# developer would mostly be
| expecting to develop Windows programs or possibly Windows
| server / IIS applications. A Java developer could be
| working on all kinds of different things.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I do most of my development in a what looks like a
| watered down version of JAVA. Last year I had to dive
| into C# and asp.bet for a bit. I felt like at home. The
| language makes sense,there are hardly any surprises and
| most of its features are excellent. You are right,
| however, that the ecosystem itself is different and it
| will take some time to get used to it. However, unless a
| company hires a contractor on a short term basis,the
| expectations are that he'd be there for at least a year
| or two. That's plenty of time to get going and adjust to
| the ecosystem,which,I think any competent developer would
| do in a month or two. There are also arguments when it
| comes to some very niche types of jobs,e.g. deep
| optimization all the way to the compiler,some esoteric
| use cases,etc. Yes,in those cases it's better to hire
| language native,but for most jobs that won't be the case.
| msla wrote:
| > JAVA
|
| Keyword-happy business HR: "Sorry, we're looking for
| Java. Case-insensitivity? No, we have to be sensitive to
| everyone. Being insensitive is not what HR does."
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Even one month - two months is a long time for any non-
| esoteric language except _maybe_ C++ (even that one I
| doubt) for any developer with experience picking up
| multiple languages. Most teams are actively working on
| making their ecosystems easy to pick up for beginners.
|
| That is, unless the company in question has made a
| complete mess of their pipeline and aren't aware or
| unwilling to admit it.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| If someone can't learn a new ecosystem, I have bad news
| for them in this industry.
|
| Also, rejecting someone because they can't rote memorize
| ecosystem specific incantations is... a pretty big red
| flag.
| jfengel wrote:
| The trick isn't memorizing them. The trick is discovering
| them. I've been emitting various versions of Wingardium
| Leviosa at Spring Boot for days now, with no effect. Once
| I've learned the incantation I'll have it and can repeat
| it in ten seconds, but until I have it I'm producing no
| actual work.
|
| Arguably, I'm more valuable because I have the capacity
| to eventually figure this out, rather than having already
| memorized it. But if this were a crisis rather than a
| minor bug, it would be much, much better to have somebody
| who'd already spent that decade learning all of the many,
| many, many incantations that Spring Boot requires.
|
| (I'd also argue that Spring Boot in particular is much,
| much, much too dependent on incantations, and the main
| lessons I've learned could be put on my resume as "Expert
| in Spring, and you can be too in one lesson: Don't.")
|
| That really applies to all ecosystems. Hiring somebody
| smart is better. But there really is something to be said
| for having somebody with X years experience, who can
| therefore do some things in 10 minutes because they've
| already done the painful part on somebody else's dime.
| chrisdalke wrote:
| I reach for Spring Boot as my tool of choice for most
| APIs, but I feel your pain. There's always a particular
| corner, the dreaded "configuration" folder, filled with a
| collection of random annotations, single-purpose beans,
| filter chain setup, etc.
|
| I find that most of my business logic ends up being
| really compact and powerful, but the tradeoff is that one
| chunk of the project is really dense.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| From my perspective, a great advantage of Java over non-
| statically-typed languages is that when I make a stupid
| error, most likely the IDE will notice it and underline
| it _immediately_. Thus I don 't waste my time hunting for
| stupid errors.
|
| That is, unless I use Spring. The stupid Spring-related
| errors only appear at runtime.
|
| Ok, honestly, after a year, using Spring is more
| convenient than not using it. (Basically, there are two
| or three types of stupid errors I usually do, and I
| learned how to decipher the intimidating error messages.)
| But the first experience is quite a shock. You write
| something with algorithmic complexity of Hello World,
| then you run the program, it throws a screenful of error
| messages, and you want to scream.
|
| It reminds me of my childhood experience with Turbo
| Pascal, where you had to wait until the compiler told you
| that you missed a semicolon... and then it pointed at the
| wrong place -- not the place where the semicolon should
| have been, but usually the beginning of the next line.
| After some time, it becomes obvious, but the first time
| it's definitely not.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > It reminds me of my childhood experience with Turbo
| Pascal, where you had to wait until the compiler told you
| that you missed a semicolon... and then it pointed at the
| wrong place -- not the place where the semicolon should
| have been, but usually the beginning of the next line.
| After some time, it becomes obvious, but the first time
| it's definitely not.
|
| C++ template expansion and linker errors come to mind.
| First time you encounter those it's typically either very
| short and cryptic or at least 500 errors and the compiler
| hitting an internal limit of how many of them to display.
| jfengel wrote:
| Oh, if only you get error messages. My most common mode
| of failure in Spring is "nothing happened". Which there's
| no way to debug, or Google. At least error messages show
| up in Stack Overflow. You missed an annotation, or
| provided the wrong kind of annotation, and Spring just
| said, "Well, apparently that code doesn't matter."
|
| Inversion of control means you have no control.
|
| At least Spring has switched mostly to annotations, which
| are sorta like Java. The IDE can spot some errors.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I was once backed into a corner to write a web app in
| some form of Java. So I chose Spring and Angular. After
| months of frustration, trying to find examples, and put
| something together, I had gotten just one "show" page and
| an "edit" form worked out (but not the "update" function
| side). I put it all aside one day, and wrote what I was
| working on in Rails. It took me 1 afternoon, including
| authentication with SAML.
|
| That's when I realized 1) how much Spring and Angular
| were NOT doing for me (compared to Rails), and 2) how
| much knowledge lies buried in BOTH stacks. I feel that
| Rails is by far the better tool for creating CRUD simple
| web apps, but the ability to be quick with it comes from
| years and years of living with it, and understanding how
| 3 or 4 lines of configuration work together to produce
| the effect of several hundred lines of explicit Java and
| JS in Spring and Angular.
|
| Disclaimers: YMMV. TACMA. Past performance is not
| indicative of future results. Et cetera. Et alia. Ad
| nauseam. E Pluribus Unum. QED.
| spacekitcat wrote:
| I think an important factor is how fast the team need you
| to hit the ground running.
|
| Where there's time for new developers to get up to speed
| with a new tech stack, I completely agree with you.
| halostatue wrote:
| To qualify the anecdote below, let me be clear that I'm
| an outlier: I have shipped++ software on _lots_ of
| different stacks and 35+ different languagesdeg.
|
| I know exactly the difference between having to deal with
| the Java ecosystem for SOAP and the Microsoft ecosystem
| for SOAP--I had to deal with both at the same time at one
| job a decade ago. At that job, I worked with a lot of
| really smart people, but it was a Windows shop. Most of
| the people I worked with _could NOT_ work with the non-
| Windows platforms we had to deal with (HP-UX, AIX,
| Solaris, Linux, VMware, and HP-UX). They would
| _constantly_ break code that was written to be cross-
| platform safe because it wasn't what they were used to.
| On the other hand, at least I didn't have to become
| familiar with how Exchange worked in order to integrate
| with _that_.
|
| The number of people who can make the level of context
| switch you're referring to, or working with multiple
| contexts like this, is vanishingly small in our industry.
| It can be done, but I think that you deeply underestimate
| the surface area of those ecosystems and the
| _willingness_ of people to put themselves in
| uncomfortable positions. The OP who talked about knowing
| C# but being interviewed for a Java position would have
| been _deeply_ uncomfortable writing Java because the
| tools they were used to weren't available.
|
| I would not make the same judgement you've made here.
| That said, if someone _wants_ to learn a new ecosystem,
| I'm happy to have them explore that (I prefer ability to
| learn over proven experience when I'm in a hiring
| position).
|
| ++ Shipped: made it so that others could use, not just
| myself. This would include a project that I ported from
| Ruby to IO so that I could learn IO and a project that I
| ported to Elm in order to learn Elm. It does not
| necessarily indicate pickup. If we restricted this to
| stuff that I know that other people used, I might lose a
| couple more than the two I just mentioned.
|
| deg Languages: I include variants of languages that are
| _sufficiently different_ from their predecessors so as to
| require translation. This mostly affects the shell
| scripting variants (Posix sh, ksh, bash, and zsh are all
| _similar_ but sufficiently different that I count them; I
| have shipped substantial scripts in each). I don't count
| gawk vs awk. Regardless, I vary between 3-4 languages and
| ecosystems weekly at my current job.
| bluGill wrote:
| The problem isn't can I learn, the problem is do you want
| to wait. You need a few great developers who have a lot
| of experience to ensure that a mess that is hard to clean
| up isn't main. If you have a 10 great developers who know
| how to do whatever right, then 100 other great developers
| who no nothing about the whatever can learn. However
| without those 10 experts in the domain to start with
| nobody knows what the right decisions are in the first
| place - in 3 years they will realize their mistakes but
| by then it is too hard to fix them.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| This. I can do programming problems in Java, but I
| definitely can't lead a team doing a Java project. I
| don't what Gradle/Maven/etc really are. I don't have
| years of experience with how libraries, the API request
| pipeline, middleware, etc work. I don't know little
| tricks / nuanaces, like the fact that Visual Studio has
| to be restarted for local code to pick up new environment
| variables, why String and string are the same thing, etc,
| etc, etc.
| soperj wrote:
| Gradle & Maven are just build tools. They can be used for
| other stuff, but that's what they're mostly used for in
| my experience.
| faceplanted wrote:
| I actually find the things _around_ the languages like
| build tools and ansible and such by far the more
| confusing parts of dev work just because I never know
| which of them I should spend time trying to understand
| and if I just want a runthrough for someone who can
| already program I never know where to look.
| mike00632 wrote:
| Gradle, CMake, Python virtual environments...
| soperj wrote:
| When I started developing I felt the same way. One day I
| finally decided that maven was going to be around long
| enough (and I was going to be a java dev long enough) to
| spend some time learning. It didn't take long, couple
| days at most, man has it saved me a lot of grief over the
| years. CSS was the same, although it took longer than a
| couple of days, it has been more than worth it.
| [deleted]
| ufmace wrote:
| Yup. Very similar language, but good luck going from
| ASP.NET MVC to Spring Boot without missing a beat. Or
| from WinForms and WPF to Swing and whatever else is new
| and hot in Java-land. Not to mention NuGet vs Maven,
| EntityFramework vs Hibernate, etc.
| jayd16 wrote:
| No one said there wouldn't be some ramp up time.
| Especially if there is another senior Java dev on the
| team that can "show the ropes", I don't think its that
| bad.
|
| If we're talking about a lead or solo dev position, it
| would cause issues though.
| 3np wrote:
| "Actually, you know what, I think this is not a great
| match"
| twodave wrote:
| I think this hides/hints at a greater point, though. C#
| or Java is a technology choice (among many, such as which
| ORM to use or even whether to use an ORM at all). All
| technology choices have an impact, and, in my experience
| working with both of these and other languages, it's just
| as likely for two shops that chose the same programming
| language to have made enough other different technology
| choices to make the transition challenging.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In many agencies, like where I work, everyone is
| .NET/Java polyglot, one hops between platforms, depending
| on the project.
|
| On top of that comes SQL backends, Web and occasional C++
| for some native libraries to plug on.
|
| At previous jobs the employer followed similar
| development approach.
|
| I never got the Developer X mantra.
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| That's the case for me. I'm Okay with the Java language,
| but everything else about it's ecosystem is different
| from the .net world.
| sumnole wrote:
| > sure aren't Java and c# the same thing?
|
| I wouldn't have gotten my first .net job without this line
| of thought. Sure enough, I picked up enough c# to be
| effective in the first week.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Ironically, going the other way seems to be more
| difficult. C# has more features to learn, but simply not
| using them until you learn them won't really hurt you.
| Going from C# to Java, on the other hand, has some traps.
| You can get yourself into hot water if you don't know,
| for example, that the boxed and unboxed numeric types
| have different equality semantics.
| spacekitcat wrote:
| I think the biggest hurdle going from Java to C# is how you
| think about asynchronous code, more so for desktop
| software. My last role was C# with me coming from Java and
| I got a few rude awakenings.
| toolslive wrote:
| just ask the interviewer the sha of the CV pdf first ;)
| sli wrote:
| If I felt like I wouldn't get blank stares a lot of the
| time, I would absolutely love to use this. I'm at a
| completely different level of the industry than most of HN,
| so I don't get the benefit of (sometimes) interviewing with
| someone who is technically inclined rather than just a
| manager.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| The syntax of c# and java are quite similar.
|
| But the ecosystem is way different, i think the recruiter
| mimicked someone else and thought c# is equivalent to java,
| while it's not.
| swalsh wrote:
| > Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone
| to me, screaming at me
|
| I once refused to let a recruiter send my resume to this
| company because I thought the company was slimey (it looked
| like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking
| for a free government service to use their paid service
| instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not
| affiliated with the government)
|
| The recuriter started getting angry at me, so I made it clear
| I would not work with someone who didn't respect me, and hung
| up. A recruiter who views you as simply a product to sell is
| not worth keeping. There's a million recruiters.
| mickotron wrote:
| A recruiter called me out of the blue years ago when I was
| looking for a job, probably from LinkedIn. I didn't know
| much about contracting so I was just curious as to what he
| could do for me.
|
| He called me once screaming at me because he thought I was
| not being exclusive to him with regards to a particular
| job. I told him quickly where to go, it was him who called
| me, grow up and stop wasting my time. To this day I have no
| idea what he was smoking that day cause I'm as bewildered
| now as I was then about what he was on about.
| [deleted]
| pjmlp wrote:
| PDFs are as easy to change as any word processing format, it
| is only a matter of having the right software packages
| installed.
|
| I keep remembering everyone that thinks PDFs are magically
| safer than Word.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Not as easy, no. OCR is needed if the PDF wasn't saved with
| embedded text/a document file.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Might be, yet I bet Acrobat can handle most of the ones
| that get sent around.
| Ankhers wrote:
| > Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it
| will only be a PDF version.
|
| This doesn't always help either though. I have only ever sent
| PDFs to recruiters for this reason. Yet I have still had a
| recruiter completely rewrite my resume and add false
| information.
|
| I generally keep a resume on me when I go to an interview
| just in case an interviewer had not seen it. I'm glad I do
| that.
| dhosek wrote:
| I've had them re-type the resume and add typos and errors.
| I don't need a recruiter for that. I can put typos and
| errors on my resume by myself just fine.
| mysterydip wrote:
| would digitally signing and marking as no changes possible
| after signing work?
| jmah wrote:
| No, because when companies receive an unsigned resume
| (after modification), it will look like every other
| unsigned resume they receive
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Some companies want resumes submitted as text or .DOC,
| for easier keyword searching perhaps. Or to avoid
| viruses? So the recruiter may OCR the PDF, then "improve"
| on it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Why bother?
|
| Apparently everyone keeps forgetting that PDFs are
| editable.
| chungy wrote:
| It's really not made to be and with the exception of an
| embedded file that's actually editable (eg: LibreOffice
| optionally keeping an ODT version inside the PDF),
| "editing" a PDF tends to be a disaster of trying to match
| the layout with whatever text you are attempting to edit.
|
| Certain tools, such as Word and LibreOffice, make it a
| bit easier as most of the source text is in the document,
| others like LaTeX end up looking like garbage through
| machine processing.
| tempestn wrote:
| Although if you're just trying to add a bullet point to
| the end of a list that would often be fairly
| straightforward.
| 1-more wrote:
| Does the PDF contain the whole font in such a way that
| anyone can add text in that font? I ask because I use uw-
| garamond from the Mathdesign package.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| I was doing some interviews and the resumes we were getting
| were like 5+ pages long. Maybe it was some cultural
| difference or something but I'd always been told to keep my
| resume to 1 page front & back at the absolute longest.
|
| Turns out it was a different resume that the recruiters
| would send us. They were garbage in quality and I hate
| them.
|
| Fuck recruiters.
| apohn wrote:
| It's not cultural. I think the agencies are trying to put
| in every single keyword and "skill" to get past
| algorithmic filters and also make sure non-technical
| managers see the words they are looking for.
|
| At a past role we were looking for a contract Tableau
| person and one of the agencies that was approved by HR
| sent me 20+ resumes. All of them were 5+ pages, with
| things like "Made a Bar Chart in Tableau," "Made a Pie
| Chart Tableau", etc.
|
| After looking at 10 of these, I told our HR exec these
| resumes all looked the same and I thought they were fake.
| I had a meeting with the agency rep and they said they
| smiled when I said these resumes were BS. Their response
| was "Usually we send resumes to a manager and they have a
| 30 minute phone conversation with some of them. After
| that they sign a contract with one of them."
|
| The point is, a lot of hiring managers want a person to
| do X on a contract basis, but they don't understand X or
| have anybody in their group that does X. For all they
| know, connecting to a SQL database and making a bar chart
| is rocket science. These agencies target these managers.
|
| I did end up interviewing 2 people from that agency, both
| of which were actually quite good with Tableau. Of
| course, those people were curated by the agency after I
| made my comment.
| halostatue wrote:
| I fired a recruiter looking for jobs for me once when he
| created a .doc version of my resume (unmodified from what had
| been in the PDF, but it looked like _crap_). I told him that
| was completely unprofessional and I couldn't trust him to
| find jobs that suited my targets or skillsets.
|
| Now, I tell people to look at my LinkedIn profile as that is
| the only resume that I keep. I'll download the PDF of it if
| they want, but I haven't maintained an actual resume in at
| least ten years.
| dandersh wrote:
| Had this happen to me as well, only my background is
| JavaScript. I've had more than one conversation with a
| recruiter where they didn't understand the difference between
| Java and JavaScript, so I'm unsure whether this was done due
| to malice or incompetence.
|
| +1 to the PDF resume, if for no other reason than you don't
| have to deal with format issues on windows/mac.
| agilob wrote:
| > Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a
| C# developer and although I have some experience with Java
|
| >Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?
|
| Yea, hear that from the other side:
|
| I went for interview at Amazon (~2017?) for Java backend
| engineer. During the interview they were asking me only
| JavaScript questions from what looked like a standardized
| form to filter out phonies. I obviously failed the interview.
| Was told if this isn't the job I wanted I should apply for a
| different job and come back when I get some more experience
| in... Java. The recruiter had absolutely no idea that Java
| isn't JS and was interrupting me when I tried to explain the
| situation. I really should have applied for a job I wanted.
| One of the worst interviews I event went to.
|
| Java devs with wide recruiters network got such emails
| weekly, calls monthly, until TypeScript came to rescue.
| monoideism wrote:
| > "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?"
|
| While it was extremely unethical for him to change your CV,
| Java and C# are indeed very similar, to the point that most
| organizations use devs with that background interchangeably.
|
| If that company really ruled you out because you had 7 years
| of C# experience, and not 7 years of Java experience, you
| likely dodged a bullet.
| tener wrote:
| Meh, sure a C# dev can do Java and get up to speed with it
| pretty quickly, but certainly a proper Java dev will be
| more productive immediately. Knowledge of frameworks is a
| real skill for example.
| flukus wrote:
| The frameworks are typically very analogous between the
| two as well, it takes a while to learn them but in the
| meantime it's googling "how to do concept x in framework
| y". Apart from the initial project setup you're also
| generally spending a lot less time dealing with the
| framework and instead looking at other code.
| CodeMage wrote:
| > _If that company really ruled you out because you had 7
| years of C# experience, and not 7 years of Java experience,
| you likely dodged a bullet._
|
| Respectfully, I disagree. Things that you should learn over
| 7 years of experience go far beyond learning the language
| itself or the fundamentals of its standard library. We're
| talking about two very different ecosystems.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| Yeah, there's some truth to both your points. If you need
| to backfill someone for an existing production project
| that doesn't have the bandwidth to train them effectively
| you are setting that person up to fail. This is why tech
| interviewing is such a pain in the ass though as there
| are a lot of competent programmers who can pick up new
| languages quickly. When we decide on who to hire while at
| megacorp it is always - generalist or specialist. When we
| decided on who to hire while at a start up it was always
| - growth minded and quick learner.
| noneeeed wrote:
| I had a recruiter say "XML and UML are basically the same,
| right?".
|
| There's almost a dangerous level of knowledge among some
| recruiters where they think they know enough to do crap like
| this.
| protomyth wrote:
| I had one where "OWL is just like MFC, right?". At least
| she did listen while explained the differences. Sadly, I
| took a report writing gig to get out of one place. That was
| a hell of a bad call.
| agrippanux wrote:
| TBF the recruiter likely was parroting what a previous
| candidate they were repping told them. I frequently find I
| have to re-educate recruiters who were previously informed
| incorrectly.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Absolutely, but that was kind of my point. A lot of
| recruiters I've encountered are like talking to a markov
| chain trained from some job ads. It sounds right if you
| don't actually know what the words mean.
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| ..."maybe they are"... did you check for a pulse? I
| suppose there's nothing preventing walking Markov chains
| from having pulses...
|
| But your comment is the pithiest most succinct one here.
| Throw away the OP's tweet and all these comments,
| especially mine, and just put your comment on a blank
| page and let's call it's the succintestist summary
| possible.
| RichardCA wrote:
| That made me LOL.
|
| If I told you I once had a recruiter assume MVS and TSO
| were the same, you'd pretty much be able to guess my age
| from that.
| gjvr wrote:
| Ha Ha. Thats's even worse than the 'C Hashtag' that an HR
| dude was rambling on about.
| gtk40 wrote:
| It's funny how "hash" sort of became a mainstream way to
| pronounce "#" but not quite.
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| Twitter is most definitely the fastest C pre-processor
| out there.
| npsimons wrote:
| "Oh yeah, that C octothorp language, I've heard of it."
| Smithalicious wrote:
| I happen to be an expert in C Sink
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| But how are you in C Add Add?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Programs, like ships, sink in the C.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Wouldn't that be centaur sink?
| npsimons wrote:
| 'Charlie sink'
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| That's something I've noticed over the last 10 years or so
| as job descriptions get longer.
|
| All those new terms like React, Vue, SaaS, Azure, AWS etc.
| They don't really know what they mean.
|
| I was asked if I could code in Azure. This led to a weird
| conversation where I was trying to explain what Azure was,
| whilst he wouldn't listen to me and was adamant that it was
| a programming language.
| ysavir wrote:
| Seems like a wonderful red-flag system to me. I'd rather
| live in a world where bad recruiters make their values
| apparent than in one where they are well hidden.
| dliff wrote:
| Not a recruiter but a co-worker who asked me "Do you know
| what an algorithm is? We might need one."
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| "Get a bundle, they are cheaper."
| swirepe wrote:
| To be fair, my coworkers and I cyberbully each other all
| the time
| ficklepickle wrote:
| "But can you code in API? I don't want your life story,
| just answer me! Do you know API?!"
|
| I'm so lucky, I think I found the best recruiter in all
| Vancouver. He helped me get my ideal role and was
| generally kind and competent. Just to offset the horror
| stories.
| obmelvin wrote:
| How did you find your recruiter? Do you mind sharing the
| rough process that unfolded? Not asking for you to share
| them, just wondering if there are any takeaways you would
| have for others on the process.
| nightcracker wrote:
| API is web scale.
| developer92 wrote:
| "I can code _an_ API, yes. "
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| "Good."
|
| Writes in resume: 10 years coding in API, expert level.
| Kharvok wrote:
| This is so real it's painful.
| nucleardog wrote:
| If you don't mind I'd love to get in touch with that
| recruiter. I'm in Vancouver and would love to make a
| change. E-mail's in my profile. Cheers!
| teucris wrote:
| "But can you code in API?"
|
| "Sure, can I pay you in ATM?"
| throwaway743 wrote:
| "Sorry, I refuse favors for my work. It's inappropriate
| and unethical. Plus, ass-to-mouth isn't _really_ my thing
| : / "
| bluedino wrote:
| >> I was asked if I could code in Azure.
|
| Sure!
| jjeaff wrote:
| VS Code Remote is very nice. You can deploy your ide
| right inside a cloud vm and code all day long in Azure.
| rantwasp wrote:
| they're 66% the same thing. yes /s
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| the important part is that either makes you an expert on
| ML :)
| 1024core wrote:
| That's when you reply: no, "UML" was 3 versions before
| "XML"
| aaroninsf wrote:
| ACTUALLY it was 4 versions, although it was vendor
| specific most ML experts consider Wx a version unto
| itself, especially since it was MLXO compliant.
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| don't forget to rotate your carburator bearings.
| ndespres wrote:
| Had a similar experience when I showed up to an interview for a
| Windows sysadmin job that a recruiter had arranged. First thing
| they said was "so your resume says you have 5 years of AS/400
| system administration experience?"
|
| I think I was 22 years old at the time and had never seen
| AS/400 in my life, and told them so. They showed me a copy of
| my resume which had AS/400 and a few other skills falsely
| inserted by the recruiter. They appreciated my honesty and did
| call me back for another open position later, and told me
| they'd fired that recruiter.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Similar situation for me on the other side. Interviewing a guy
| that would be my colleague. Asked him a few things about his
| resume, he gave me an odd look then asked, "May I see that?"
| When I handed it to him he scanned it over, handed it back to
| me and said, "This is an utter fabrication."
|
| We hired him (interview went on discussing the job, his actual
| background, etc.) and he was really good, but I don't know what
| my bosses did with that recruiting agency, if anything. Above
| my pay grade, that.
|
| This was early 1990's, so this charlatanery is not new.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is a wonderful vignette. Efficient use of dialogue.
| jldugger wrote:
| Well, they did mention headhunters specifically, so maybe they
| knew the dynamic full well.
| pacman2 wrote:
| "The whole recruitment process seems broken "
|
| The IT market is pretty good compared to other fields but in
| the and, the market might have collapsed already.
|
| ""The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market
| Mechanism" is a well-known[1][2] 1970 paper by economist George
| Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a
| market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry
| between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In
| American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective
| after it has been bought."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
|
| So most good candidates and most good companies have long
| exited the official job market and work with referrals or
| whatever. And all what is left is that now shitty companies are
| receiving shitty applications. And if a non shitty company
| offers a job in this market or a good applicant applies to a
| job, the other side will never believe it.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Do you think this would explain the status of places like
| LinkedIn? Long ago, it was an OK place to have an online CV.
| Now it is a place people use show off with non-relevant
| _stuff_.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| LinkedIn is a weird place indeed. Every couple months or so
| I pop in to check something or somebody out, and my eyes
| briefly skim my "feed". What I've noticed over the past
| year or two is that people who I know personally that have
| _much_ more clout and much better network than I do,
| particularly the ones I know from the local startup culture
| - the people who have no reason to visit the site - they
| seem to be posting and reposting a lot of _stuff_ there
| recently.
|
| I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're just
| bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for middle/upper-
| middle class people. Two, there are signalling to and
| chasing people with access to lots of money, who for
| reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out on LinkedIn.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're
| just bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for
| middle/upper-middle class people. Two, there are
| signalling to and chasing people with access to lots of
| money, who for reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out
| on LinkedIn.
|
| Here's a third one: It's curated to folks with similar
| professional interests and isn't political.
| ghaff wrote:
| Though I don't really use it myself, it's apparently very
| effective for companies to use to post stuff. So there's
| a fairly systematic effort at a lot of places to get
| employees to post recommended articles/posts on LinkedIn.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Unemployed middle class people who suddenly have a lot of
| time on their hands -- more than job hunting can possibly
| consume -- not to mention that many people mope around a
| bit (dealing with a kind of minor depression) just after
| fired and take a couple of weeks to get their mojo going
| again.
|
| I think the "middle-class" comes from the fact that such
| people have cash savings to weather a job hunt, whereas
| people without savings have to start working pronto on
| whatever if they're going to be eating and roofed in two
| weeks.
| pacman2 wrote:
| I don't know. I deleted my Linkedin Account long time ago.
|
| People receive a lot of BS on Linkedin but for some people
| it works. This being said, the people I know whit 8-9 fig
| net worth, you wont find on linkedin.
| tempodox wrote:
| In Johnathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" (published 1726) it
| is stated that fraudulent behavior needs to be punished
| systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually
| destroy a market. Your comment describes a situation where
| exactly that happened. It is frustrating to see such an
| important (and simple) lesson, known literally for centuries,
| get forgotten or ignored.
| loosetypes wrote:
| That's the book from which the term endian comes, right?
|
| Worth a read?
| tempodox wrote:
| Yes, on both accounts.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically
| since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market
|
| Can you expand on the quote from Gulliver's Travels? It's
| been decades since I read it and I can't think of where in
| the book it could have been from, I don't remember much
| economics being in the book...
| miobrien wrote:
| They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and
| therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they
| allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common
| understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves,
| but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and,
| since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual
| intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon
| credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has
| no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone,
| and the knave gets the advantage. I remember, when I was
| once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had
| wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had
| received by order and ran away with; and happening to
| tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that it was only
| a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me
| to offer as a defence the greatest aggravation of the
| crime; and truly I had little to say in return, farther
| than the common answer, that different nations had
| different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily
| ashamed.[330]
|
| [330] An act of parliament has been since passed by which
| some breaches of trust have been made capital.
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm
| motohagiography wrote:
| What a gem this quote is. We index so much on punishing
| even fake violence in situations where there is real risk
| to both parties, and as a result, we incentivize fraud on
| a massive bubble scale level.
| snowflake_ptr wrote:
| Huh, this seems possibly relevant to politics in America
| right now...
| ufmace wrote:
| Probably some of that, plus the factors mentioned in Joel's
| old blog post:
|
| In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad
| Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired or
| quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job
| through references they made at their last one. If they
| happen to not have any references who can get them a new job
| and enter the general recruiting market, they usually get
| snapped up quickly.
|
| Bad Developers tend to get fired or forced to quit a lot.
| Nobody who has experience working with them wants to hire
| them. They spend a lot of time on the general market applying
| for tons of companies that reject them. They keep doing this
| until they either finally learn some skills or figure out
| that development just isn't for them and find another line of
| work.
|
| Ditto for terrible companies to work for.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad
| Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired
| or quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job
| through references they made at their last one. If they
| happen to not have any references who can get them a new
| job and enter the general recruiting market, they usually
| get snapped up quickly.
|
| They will also get snapped even before they end-up on the
| open market. For college hires, might be more than a year
| before they graduate or accepting a full time position at
| the end of an internship.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I've had the same job for 9 years, but I'm not marketable.
| I guess I fall into the bad developer category.
| slezyr wrote:
| > What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it
|
| They get a bonus for hire.
| gnicholas wrote:
| When I saw the domain of this post, I thought it was a trick that
| FB came up with to cull the wheat from the chaff. Apparently not!
| cycomanic wrote:
| I had the exact same thought. I was a bit surprised that they
| would advertise to use such a tactic.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| The Brown M&M's of resumes.
|
| I often put some variant of "great at copy and pasting from one
| document to another" on any portal that requires me to, well,
| copy and paste my resume in little parts. I've yet to get called
| out on it.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| There's something Kafka-esque about the largest distributor of
| fake news creating a fake programming language.
| sgerenser wrote:
| It was a posting on Facebook not FB itself that made up the
| fake language.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I'm a dolt, sorry. Please downvote my comment.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| Recruiter++
| alexwasserman wrote:
| A couple of jobs ago I was interviewing a candidate and the first
| item on his long list of "tech I know" was AFS.
|
| AFS is a pretty rare filesystem, but at the time we were one of
| the biggest users globally, and it underpinned all our servers.
| Finding someone with good knowledge would have been great.
|
| Me: "So, AFS is pretty rare - but, can you tell me about your
| experience with it" Them: "Sorry, never heard of it" Me: "It's
| the first technology you list on your resume" Them: "Sorry, still
| never heard of it".
|
| Not the best start they could have had in an interview, but have
| to give them credit for honesty.
| gnulinux wrote:
| I don't understand... Why would anyone do that? If you're gonna
| lie at least research enough so you can bullshit about it
| right? Why would you put something you don't know about in your
| resume?
| prophesi wrote:
| I would think FB is better off accepting liars, as their evident
| lack of a moral compass will make it easier to work on making a
| social media platform even more addictive and invasive.
| heywintermute wrote:
| The link is to a post on a Facebook group. The contents of the
| post has nothing to do with Facebook the company...
| prophesi wrote:
| D'oh, sorry about that. I have Little Snitch denying all
| connections to FB related domains so I didn't even bother to
| check the URL.
| bigtex wrote:
| I went to an interview that was something like 90% Adobe Flex/10%
| C# but in the interview all they asked was about C#. I think it
| was the other way around, 90/10 C#/Flex. Needless to say the
| interview did not go well because i was not expecting the
| emphasis on C#.
| unixhero wrote:
| Ah he olde Entrapment approach. That won't fare well in court.
| frob wrote:
| This reminds of of the time back in 2013 where someone posted a
| job asking for 5+ years of Node.js development experience. Node
| was released in 2009.
| mandown2308 wrote:
| Facebook innovation smh
| foota wrote:
| A company I applied to a couple years ago out of college did
| something similar. They sent out a pre interview survey to gauge
| your familiarity with technologies, but included a few fake ones.
| roland35 wrote:
| Dealing with applicants who don't know what they are doing is
| hard, but trying to trick people is disingenuous and I personally
| would avoid any application that involves any trickery.
|
| Also sometimes an internal or esoteric tool gets listed in the
| application, you never really know! The people who write the job
| description also sometimes make typos and mistakes.
| austincheney wrote:
| Why even bother with a fake language when so often the industry
| has devolved into some sick level of honest negligence?
|
| For example: rarely do candidates need to know JavaScript anymore
| or even some unnecessary framework. Now people trade in
| experience of some tool that says nothing of anything: React Flux
| Capacitor (or some other bullshit like they want to go back in
| time to make lots of money without any real skills).
|
| Now if you ask these candidates some junior developer question
| outside of React Flux Capacitor bullshit they are not only
| hopelessly lost, but expect to be treated as a senior principal.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Honestly, the thing I hate the most about IT is how bad it is
| while no one admits to it.
|
| These are problems I've encountered at several companies:
|
| * No budget for tooling. Be that software outside the ide or be
| it for hardware.
|
| * Cargo cult is so much bigger than anyone will ever admit.
|
| * The lack of caring about other departments. We're a team and
| we need to work as a team so the company can make money to pay
| our salaries. I've seen it to the point where one guy was
| willing to cause two departments weeks worth of work to avoid
| doing two days worth of work.
|
| * The amount of stuff that is just broken, people keep
| complaining about it being broken and it causes a pile of
| hassle for other people but just stays broken. Or it's point
| out it's broken and a big meeting is called to deal with it and
| then nothing is really done.
|
| * The amount of people who don't know what they're doing. So
| many people seem to have 1-year * x experience. They reach a
| certain level and they just stop.
|
| * The amount of people who don't even know what they're talking
| about - https://toggl.com/track/developer-methods-infographic/
| a prime example, kanban is literally how they make cars it's we
| work on one bit and the next area deals with the next part. The
| image should have a car manufactoring factory as is. But
| instead they have nonsense.
|
| * The amount of patting themselves on the back saying we're
| doing a great job while the system sucks and nothing is getting
| better and employee churn is sky high.
|
| Honestly, I think if people from other industries worked in IT
| for a year they would be completely shocked at how crap it is.
| I don't even think the hiring part is wrong, I think the entire
| management process of IT is wrong and causes more chaos so you
| end up with people who are heavily specilised in tools who are
| considered expert engineers but can't read UML.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| > The amount of people who don't know what they're doing. So
| many people seem to have 1-year * x experience. They reach a
| certain level and they just stop.
|
| Part of the problem is because people only look at years of
| experience at all, and recruitment often inflates the
| requirements. I don't need 5 years of _work_ experience in
| .NET to modify an existing application with very defined and
| clear boundaries: within a few months, I can easily read what
| is happening already and mutate the application within the
| set boundaries. 5 years of work experience is what I 'd need
| to set up an application the size of Stack Overflow from
| scratch in an acceptable timeframe.
|
| What we have now is a recruitment procedure within the
| industry which overemphasizes ticking boxes without looking
| whether they can actually deliver. We have so many quality
| online sources available, any half-competent person can read,
| copy what is happening, use it as a foundation and then
| change it to their specific needs, producing actual
| applications. You might not cover the edge cases (a specific
| cryptographic problem here, an suboptimal solution there,
| etc.), but that really isn't that different from most of the
| crap software that's getting shoveled out into the open
| today.
| austincheney wrote:
| The biggest problem is that there is no baseline of
| competency. Seriously, when somebody asks for minimally
| passable competency for employment as a software developer
| what do you point to in 5 words of less? Software doesn't
| have that so instead you get a bunch of posturing and smoke
| signals. Seriously think about how you would explain this
| to your non-developer uncle who is an educated professional
| of any other industry.
|
| Think about it like this:
|
| What is the minimal passable qualifier to be a lawyer: a
| law license. What is the minimal passable qualifier to be a
| truck driver: a CDL. It is illegal to do those, and many
| other, jobs without the minimum qualifier.
|
| Worse is this tooling bullshit. No carpenter or mechanic
| creates a resume detailing their job experience using a
| screw driver or a hammer. Those are just assumed. If a
| candidate felt the need to mention stupidity like that you
| don't hire them. For some reason software has that
| backwards which invites and encourages incompetent people
| to apply and degrades competent people to compete with
| unnecessary stupidity.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| I can expect this experience in tooling if the tools were
| remotely difficult. They aren't. What's more, teams are
| documenting their tools much better than before, and many
| are putting strong emphasis on being able to search the
| right terms and implementing it before the end of the
| week. Whatever topic or problem I had on ASP.NET Core,
| the problem was usually solved and documented by
| Microsoft. At that point, expecting this much experience
| over such trivial matters, is just being disrespectful to
| the teams investing all that time documenting and
| polishing their tools.
|
| Maybe that's the part which annoys me the most. The
| entire practice devalues everything, no matter who, what
| or how old you are.
| mtberatwork wrote:
| > The lack of caring about other departments.
|
| There's an entire cottage industry of expensive consultants
| that are happy to give your management team fancy but useless
| PowerPoint decks on how to "break down silos".
| wheybags wrote:
| I have not once encountered UML since starting my actual
| career. It sits solidly in the "Java silliness we did in
| college" category.
| arethuza wrote:
| In my experience proficiency in UML almost always indicates
| that someone is _not_ what I would regard as an "expert
| engineer".
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| In my experience if someone can't read UML and know how to
| write a decorator pattern something is up. Honestly, I've
| never used it in depth but for design patterns I expect
| people who are "seniors" to understand it. And I expect any
| expert to be able to look at UML and get the gist of it.
|
| On a side note about design patterns, once as a junior I
| was at a digital agency and they were doing an in-house
| tech talk where one of the leads was giving an explaination
| and he was showing the singleton pattern but what they had
| allowed for two instances and when I tried to make it
| clearer to the intern that normally there is only one
| instance per singleton. The two leads were "Yea but it's
| still a valid singleton" - it was not but I wasn't point
| that out directly but continued to make it clear that most
| people would expect a single instance when talking about a
| Singleton.
| arethuza wrote:
| What about all the different types of diagrams?
|
| Use cases, activity diagrams, deployment diagrams etc.
|
| Yeah - 'informal' UML use a lot of people are happy with
| but some things like exactly what some of the features of
| activity diagrams mean is amazingly badly understood by a
| lot of people.
|
| I'm ok with the 'UML as sketch' approach, but 'UML as
| blueprint' is a nightmare that I've never seen work:
|
| https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UmlAsSketch.html
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Honestly, most of the time I use these diagrams just to
| give people the gist of what I'm talking about. And my
| diagrams are super low effort. Think low effort
| whiteboard diagrams during a meeting style.
|
| > Yeah - 'informal' UML use a lot of people are happy
| with but some things like exactly what some of the
| features of activity diagrams mean is amazingly badly
| understood by a lot of people.
|
| I'm talking super basic stuff like https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Decorator_pattern#/media/File:...
|
| > I'm ok with the 'UML as sketch' approach, but 'UML as
| blueprint' is a nightmare that I've never seen work:
|
| I agree, I would hate that.
| dmix wrote:
| Same with frontend, I give a very rough wireframe trying
| to translate wtf they are telling me. The end result
| usually looks very different because once you flesh stuff
| out IRL there is always a bunch of hills to climb that
| were unanticipated. And that's why it always takes 2-3x
| longer than we first thought.
|
| Especially in a large application with lots of moving and
| breakable critical parts.
|
| The only solution is constant feedback loops and not
| being bummed out when your code goes in the dustbin.
| Kneecaps07 wrote:
| I had a boss who would put one simple instruction at the end of
| the job posting - "Please send your resume as a PDF". This was
| for a technician job at an MSP. He would immediately delete any
| applications that didn't have a PDF attached. If I recall, it was
| something like 60% of the applications he got that he deleted
| immediately.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I made an open application for someone to receive feee weekly
| mentorship to become a software engineer. I asked for a < 1
| minute video. 18/20 applications didn't include it. Made
| picking someone really easy.
| matsemann wrote:
| That heavily biases what kind of people you select. It's not
| about following instructions, it's about not caring for the
| weird requirement.
| sdoering wrote:
| This reminded me of a talk [1] at pyData Berlin some years ago.
|
| Vincent demonstrated how he used some ML techniques to create
| fake pokemon sounding names to put into his LinkedIn resume. So
| that he could filter out headhunters without any real knowledge.
|
| To quote from my notes [2] of the conference:
|
| > There is a striking phonetic similarity between big data
| technology and pokemon names. Can you create a service that
| generates strings that sound like potential pokemon names? And
| what might be the simplest possible way to make that into a
| service? Also, would it be possible to generate pokemon names
| that start with three random characters and end with 'base'
| (KREBASE, MONBASE would be appropriate but IEYBASE would not be).
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hR4peP9V4A
|
| [2]:
| https://gist.github.com/sdoering/37203f3301c6f0b9f48f76a976a...
| ulucs wrote:
| For naming new projects, I like to use the random page function
| in Shin Megami Tensei wiki.
| karlding wrote:
| There's also a Pokemon or Big Data quiz [0].
|
| [0] http://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/
| justusthane wrote:
| That's excellent. I'm usually pretty good at these either-or
| things, but I was 2/10 on that.
| meepmorp wrote:
| I got 100%! Mostly because my 8 year old happened to ask what
| I was doing and identified all the pokemon for me.
| irjustin wrote:
| this was hilarious! if you're like me and don't know pokemon
| that well (only the most famous ones), this is pretty tough.
| maybenotafart wrote:
| Seems like a lot of time you are blaming the victim here. People
| put that shit on the resume because of NLP resume parsers
| filtering out good candidates.
|
| This is why you come to the game with a human readable resume
| knorker wrote:
| I've seen companies create fake technobabble documentation, so
| that they can ask "what do you know about FnordFubblers?". If
| they get an answer then they know the person is just googling the
| question.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Doing it in a real job listing is dangerous because some good
| candidates will decline to apply because they know nothing about
| MOVA and it looks like an important requirement. It might be
| better in open requests for CVs, where the company asks about
| knowledge of zillions of technologies.
|
| Honest candidates answer truthfully that they don't know MOVA
| with the expectation of being considered for non-MOVA jobs,
| without any incentive to lie, and moderate liars would choose
| what to exaggerate based on their actual know-how, not
| indiscriminately.
| squeakynick wrote:
| Years ago, when recruiting for a tech support position, I had an
| agency send a bunch of 'pre-screened and qualified' candidates
| through. Most were fine, and we could start straight away with
| conversations about debugging AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS (this
| probably dates the time period!) One candidate, however, looked
| like a deer-in-headlights, and was clearly out of his depth. In
| the end, I asked "There is a computer in this room, can you point
| to it?", and he sheepishly pointed to the fridge!
|
| I felt really bad for the poor guy; it was not his fault. We
| finished the interview early, had a friendly chat, and I sent him
| on his way with some bus fares.
|
| I then got on the phone and tore the agency a new one. They had
| wasted his time, and my time, by 'doctoring' the qualifications.
| I never used them again.
| lupire wrote:
| Why is the employer's lie OK but the candidate lie is not?
|
| Hubris.
| falcolas wrote:
| So, let me get this straight - you lie about your job
| requirements, but get all bent out of shape when the candidates
| lie right back at you?
|
| Brilliant.
|
| I can't think of a better example of why hiring is broken; of how
| unequal the power dynamic is between employers and employees.
| jefftk wrote:
| You don't list it as a requirement; list it as something that
| would be nice to have.
| falcolas wrote:
| Advertising a real job opening with a "nice to have" skill
| that _doesn 't actually exist_...
|
| It's still lying.
|
| EDIT: If it was listed as "Skills you shouldn't have", it
| would likely (sadly?) still be effective, without screwing
| with job applicants.
| johnjj257 wrote:
| Still super creepy and psycho
| jackTheMan wrote:
| I fall victim of this early in my carrier, if something is
| 'nice to have' they should say so. Requirement != nice to
| have
|
| i was naive that time, but still angers me.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Does the applicant get bonus points if the call out the BS
| "nice to have skill" in their cover letter?
| guenthert wrote:
| There are thousands of programming languages, how would you
| know that any given doesn't exist?
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you're the employer, you'd know that you put the non-
| sensical item in the job posting. If someone calls you
| out on it, then you know they at least are not
| bullshitting you. If you're the applicant and you feel
| strongly about it being bullshit, then the question is do
| you get bonus points for knowing that.
|
| The how would know it doesn't exist is what separates the
| chaff from the wheat.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| I was just thinking this. If it's labeled as an optional
| skill or something like that, I see nothing wrong with it.
| Applicant has no reason to lie about it. Have confidence in
| their other skills. At the same time, we have this new thing
| called search engines. If a language can't be found, they'll
| probably figure out that it's trap. Even better for the
| company. A person who won't lie and/or can research out BS
| for themselves. Pretty good candidate thus far. Devs are
| supposed to be self-reliant to a degree. A good question for
| the interviewee to ask the interviewer too.
|
| If it's labeled a "requirement", yea, they were inviting
| dishonesty. No one _should_ bother to apply since they don 't
| qualify instantly.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > If a language can't be found, they'll probably figure out
| that it's trap.
|
| Eh... _maybe_ , but there are obscure languages/platforms
| that don't search well.
| npsimons wrote:
| I consider myself fairly well versed (at least breadth-
| wise) in programming languages and general IT, and I'm
| _still_ surprised at least once every six months when
| something crops up I 've just never heard of before. The
| two most recent examples are Conan[0] and Slurm[1].
|
| [0] - https://conan.io/
|
| [1] - https://slurm.schedmd.com/
| wanderingstan wrote:
| > If a language can't be found, they'll probably figure out
| that it's trap.
|
| If you're a qualified dev, you'd more likely conclude that
| it's a mistake on the part of whoever wrote the listing.
| I've seen skills listed like "Microsoft UML" or "Python,
| PHD, Nodes", so wouldn't think much of seeing "MOVA".
| kirykl wrote:
| Job listing at old company once required COBALT
| experience.
| falcolas wrote:
| Good ol' Blue Iron (an old moniker for IBM mainframes,
| thanks to their coloring).
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Indeed, I often see jobs where listings include
| "Technologies in our stack" or "It would be nice if you
| also knew..." would be a good way to do it.
|
| IMO that's fair game for monkey business.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > No one should bother to apply since they don't qualify
| instantly.
|
| I never assume the "requirements" are actually hard
| requirements to an application, and I encourage others in
| the job market to do the same.
|
| Sure, if you miss 3 out of the 5 requirements listed you
| might pass on that application. But if you've got 4 out of
| the 5 requirements, and think you could accomplish the job
| as described, you should still strongly consider sending in
| an application. Don't lie on your CV that you submit, but
| you can still submit your CV.
|
| You never know which requirements are actually hard
| requirements for the org, and which were just listed that
| way on the job listing.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Be aware when you do this that there are a minority of
| companies for whom the requirements are actually
| requirements, and you may get yelled at by an interviewer
| for "wasting everybody's time." Yes, this has happened to
| me. On the up side I now have a list of a few companies I
| know I won't work for unless I'm desperate.
|
| The advice is still good; the requirements are really
| more of "strong desire" than actual requirements, and if
| you look at the typical requirements listing, its'
| unlikely that they will find enough people at the salary
| they offer to fit all of them anyways.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > and you may get yelled at by an interviewer for
| "wasting everybody's time."
|
| They had an opportunity to evaluate your resume or CV
| before inviting you in for an interview. If it was a hard
| requirement for them, they shouldn't have invited you in
| for an interview. The only time you're really wasting is
| the time of the person who is screening resumes.
|
| > Yes, this has happened to me. On the up side I now have
| a list of a few companies I know I won't work for unless
| I'm desperate.
|
| I'm sorry that happened to you! What a terrible
| experience. It's definitely good to keep that list of
| places you know you should avoid.
| delecti wrote:
| As long as you didn't list those requirements on your
| resume, then I don't see how it's your fault that the
| recruiting manager didn't filter you out.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Yeah it was weird:
|
| "Did you work with <technology in requirements> at
| company Y?"
|
| "No, I worked with <technologies listed on resume>"
|
| "Then where did you work with <technology in
| requirements>?"
|
| "I haven't"
|
| Cue rant about wasting everybody's time...
| theptip wrote:
| Welcome to game theory! In an iterated prisoner's dilemma where
| everyone is already defecting, then defecting is the optimal
| strategy.
| 3minus1 wrote:
| It's not that bad. Real hypocrisy would be lying about how
| great the job is to get better candidates, and then getting
| upset when the candidates lie about how qualified they are to
| get better jobs.
| knodi wrote:
| Haha, this!!
| cptskippy wrote:
| These are the games played when Recruiters and HR are involved
| in the solicitation of resumes. HR will demand 20 years Swift
| experience, and Recruiters will pad your resume with 30 years.
|
| Most experienced interviewees will show up to a face-to-face
| with copies of their resume in hand because of the way
| Recruiters fudge things.
| smoe wrote:
| Someone currently working on a new language should grab that
| name. Not bad to from the get go to be able to put a name like
| Facebook as a heavy user of your technology on the landing page
| ...
|
| Edit: and then go to an interview at Facebook and claim not
| just that you are an expert in this language but the creator
| foota wrote:
| The post is not by Facebook.
| smoe wrote:
| Argh, somehow I completely missed that skimming it on the
| phone during lunch :/
| Cd00d wrote:
| I made the same mistake on desktop.
| hashkb wrote:
| Agree with the first part, obviously, but: why shouldn't there
| be an unequal power dynamic between employers and candidates?
| Isn't that sort of true by definition in employment?
| jjk166 wrote:
| They can hire anyone, I can work anywhere. In a properly
| functioning market, neither side should have any problem
| walking away from the table if the other side is being
| unreasonable.
|
| In practice though, companies can survive for months or even
| years without filling a position and the hiring manager
| rarely suffers directly for any inefficiency created by not
| filling a position, while most people can go only for a short
| period of time without a job before their quality of life
| starts to suffer. At the same time, corporate consolidation
| means that in many areas (both geographic and technical)
| there are only a few major employers, meaning that being
| blacklisted by any one could be catastrophic for someone's
| career and meaning only a small number of individuals need to
| act in unison to manipulate the labor market (driving wages
| down, spreading bad hr practices, etc), basically all the
| problems of any other oligopoly. There is an asymmetry of
| information: the individual will only take on a few jobs over
| the course of their career and can not afford to experiment
| much as they go - for any given point in their lifetime,
| they're basically working with a sample size of 1; even a
| moderately sized employer on the other hand might hire dozens
| and interview thousands of people a year and have records of
| such recruiting data going back decades. Finally there is a
| social asymmetry - a company trying to poach an employee will
| likely not face any negative consequences for it, but an
| employee simply looking at what options are out there could
| potentially be viewed as disloyal and either be fired or
| removed from advancement tracks intended for long-term
| employees - a simple phone call to check a person's
| references could potentially put them into a much worse
| negotiating position. None of these issues are inherent, they
| pretty much all stem from weak labor laws and inadequate
| social safety nets.
| developer92 wrote:
| I've had the opposite, for example adding my boss to my
| linked in profile & updating just before pay negotiations
| has worked nicely for me. I've seen friends/colleagues go
| to their boss with a job offer and say I don't want to
| leave but with this rise I'm struggling to justify staying,
| and it's worked fine. I'm not in the US however.
| falcolas wrote:
| No. Employment is a trade between two entities. The employee
| gives labor, the employer compensates them. Ideally, the two
| negotiate a contract laying out the terms of employment, and
| move on.
|
| However, corporations typically don't offer any form of
| contract negotiations, at least in the US. An employee is
| often offered a take-it-or-leave-it contract with lots of
| non-compete and broad IP assignment riders, and their pay is
| usually based on their previous pay, not the value of their
| work.
|
| Some folk claim that they're able to negotiate around these,
| but I've personally never found negotiation to work. Two of
| my favorite answers I've received from negotiation are
| (paraphrased): "The IP assignment for 1 year post employment
| is not negotiable." and, "We know what you made at your last
| job, so we'll offer you that."
| badRNG wrote:
| The fact that individual employees have little negotiating
| power with a large business is one of the conditions that
| give rise to collective bargaining agreements and unions.
| hashkb wrote:
| Thank you. Other than unions, I don't see any other
| solution to the fundamental imbalance. It's (group +
| resources) vs (group + resources) until groups with the
| most resources decide they want to be nice. Until that
| becomes a reality, via regulation or epiphany or
| whatever, any expectation that it's not David vs Goliath
| is naive.
| rurp wrote:
| I totally agree with you on the general dynamics, but
| would add govt regulation as another potential balancer.
| The govt can require things like breaks, overtime pay,
| and safety conditions that would otherwise have to be
| negotiated (often unsuccessfully) by employees.
|
| Also, providing a stronger economic safety net gives
| employees more bargaining power, since it decreases their
| downside risk.
| falcolas wrote:
| Small note on this: Companies, especially large
| companies, spend an exorbant amount of money on lobbying
| lawmakers. That lobbying money works hard to limit
| workers' (and consumers', and competitions') rights.
|
| And ultimately, it's not the government alone which got
| us breaks, overtime pay, and safety conditions - it was
| the unions using their dues to push the government for
| those things.
| hinkley wrote:
| And this has been going on forever.
|
| I remember people asking for X years of Java experience and
| thinking, "Gosling was still calling it Oak X years ago and if
| you want any of his team members you're going to have to double
| your starting offer."
| Frost1x wrote:
| The entire hiring process is laughable. Few positions advertise
| correctly. Most claim they need diety level abilities for as
| little as they can get away with. Businesses post phantom
| advertisements to gauge the perceived market value of
| positions, keep talent pools of people in the wing to fill in
| what seem to be increasing turnover rates, and so on.
|
| Most of all of this is an artifact of businesses trying to
| commoditize human labor, including professional/specialized
| skills, and these are the sort of responses and gaming you see
| in such an artificial environment. Intelligent people are going
| to fight back and game your system when you try to game them.
|
| The side with leverage that dictates the rules of engagement is
| to blame here and that isn't the labor force at large since
| there is almost no organization from the labor force, it's the
| employers that create this mess yet they complain about it
| continuously.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| For an employee, doing this is nuts.
|
| I've worked with body shop contracts at big orgs where the
| subcontractors are pure scum and will send fake people, etc. if
| you're forced to deal with something like that, you need
| controls to detect deceit so you can take action.
| rkalla wrote:
| Is anyone surprised FB has this culture?
|
| This would be like me leaving little breadcrumbs of an affair
| for my SO to find and then have it all culminate in an "AH HA!
| I caught you snooping!" when they call me out on it.
|
| So... healthy...
| jefftk wrote:
| This isn't a post from Facebook Inc, this is a post from a
| random person on Facebook.
| mrits wrote:
| I am, seeing how it has nothing to do with FB
| dvtrn wrote:
| Is anyone surprised someone commented without reading the
| content?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Frost1X has seven years' experience reading that comment.
| csemaan wrote:
| Is anyone surprised people have the culture of bashing FB
| right or wrong?
| thrower123 wrote:
| We've all seen those job posts asking for five years experience
| in technology X which was only released three years ago.
| dmje wrote:
| Somewhat orthogonal but reminds me of the old map makers who used
| to insert made up islands / villages on their maps in order to
| prevent plagiarism. More here:
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry]
| jdhzzz wrote:
| A relative has a business publishing information about high
| school athletics. They created a fictitious school and used it
| to prove a company had infringed their copyright.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Thankfully the supreme court saved us from an epidemic of
| misinformation pollution with Feist v. Rural by making it not
| good for making them any money.
| noxvilleza wrote:
| Hah, even more orthogonally but - I run a small statistics site
| for a specific esports title, and very often large companies
| (who host tournaments with hundreds of thousands of dollars in
| production and prize money) just use data from the site in
| their production without even crediting it. I added a bunch of
| very innocuous and subtle changes to some data somewhat akin to
| trap streets - specific values rounding in key ways, slight
| ordering changes for lists, etc.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You could probably monetize that service with a public API.
| Then screw over companies that take advantage of your
| services by providing them data that makes them liable, e.g.
| if they use it in gambling and they award the wrong prizes.
| noxvilleza wrote:
| There is a public API, and yeah many gambling sites use it
| as a reference when paying out stakes. They sometimes even
| screenshot from it - and punters tag me because the
| bookmaker messed up (for example, including qualifiers in a
| specific tournament market).
| oblib wrote:
| This is hilarious!
|
| I've often wondered about how other's approach listing "skills"
| on resumes and interviews. Most of the tools we work with require
| working with it exclusively to become an expert.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Years ago I had in wasted interview because a well known
| financial institution had an internal system named after a
| particular type of financial product which it later became clear
| it had zero relation to.
|
| Despite flagging concerns regarding an apparent mismatch, the
| recruiter said my experience was perfect.
|
| I went along and within minutes of getting past the intros and
| onto the role specifics, it was clear it was a waste of time.
|
| Multiple red flags there for me: much as I back myself and have a
| strong CV, it was concerning my CV got past their basic screening
| for what they should have known was an inappropriate role. I
| blacklisted the recruiter and found another job through word of
| mouth soon after (a much better method where possible).
| noisy_boy wrote:
| This topic got me reading on how recruiters made unauthorized
| changes to people's CVs, then someone mentioned about managing
| their CV in LaTeX and 3 hours later, I have managed to migrate my
| CV to LaTeX (it is actually quite nice to use). And the quality
| and polish of the pdf generated is on a totally different level
| compared to the word document I was managing with.
| williesleg wrote:
| Nothing new, just doing the needful. All our H1B visa interviews
| are like that, they all lie and cheat.
| [deleted]
| A12-B wrote:
| I admire resume liars. The job market isn't fair and you should
| do anything you can to get ahead. (Employers are going to pull
| tricks like this, so why not? Just be smart about it)
| tasogare wrote:
| A relative works in a country where lying on CV and during
| interviews by hugely inflating one's skills is the norm. It
| only fools European expatriate managers with no knowledge of
| the country. Local HR and experienced expatriates know about it
| and adjust their accordingly. When everyone is lying, it
| doesn't make a difference anymore.
| skrebbel wrote:
| That's a fantastic way to keep getting hired by the kinds of
| employers who will screw you over and keep your world view
| intact.
| iwangulenko wrote:
| Tech recruiter here. Firms on average are more dishonest than
| jobseekers. The reason is simple: If you do something often
| enough, you get sloppy.
|
| For instance, if you start going to the gym, at first, your
| exercise execution is perfect but after some weeks you get
| sloppier and sloppier.
|
| Same here, firms that are hiring constantly tend to get
| fatigued. Jobseekers, however, are "active" for some weeks
| until they switch jobs; this is why you, as a jobseeker, need
| extra training during your jobhunt, to be on-par with them.
|
| I don't recommend lying but I do recommend tailoring your
| resume such that it reflects actually what you did in an
| adequate level of detail. Most job seekers are too honest on
| the CV and during interviews.
| znpy wrote:
| > Firms on average are more dishonest than jobseekers.
|
| This. It happened to me to receive CVs for a position and the
| actual candidate was completely clueless. Yet the recruiting
| firm was really pushing that as "a very good candidate albeit
| a bit junior".
|
| OTOH, it happened to me that I had an interview with a
| consulting firm. They would basically forward my CV to the
| actual client and only hire me if the client "accepted" to
| "hire me" through them. The thing is, this firm asked me for
| my cc in ms word format, so that they could add their own
| logos and stuff, make it appear like I was on their payroll
| and more importantly remove all the contacts (as if it was
| any meaningful in the age of LinkedIn). I have no way to tell
| if they inflated my CV in any way.
| surfingdino wrote:
| This is one of the standard practices at a lot of
| recruitment firms.
| yulaow wrote:
| I had few contacts with consulting firms because I actively
| try to avoid them, in particular the big ones. But each one
| with which I had an interview was clear they were going to
| modify my cv for their client and they even asked me to lie
| in the future meetings with those so that I could confirm
| whatever they were gonna write in the cv.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Most job seekers are too honest on the CV and during
| interviews._
|
| Interviews are structured as if candidates are doing fancy
| algorithms every day, whereas you're probably actually
| writing glue code 99% of the time and crammed CtCI just
| before the interview. The whole thing is fake, but companies
| started it.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Employers are going to pull tricks like this, so why not?
|
| Not every employer pulls tricks. Also, the employer is not the
| only one that gets affected by sending fabricated resumes; this
| makes the job search process more difficult for e.g. other
| applicants too.
| [deleted]
| Gigablah wrote:
| Well, being labeled a liar means that one is _bad_ at it.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| While I respect the virtue of selling yourself, I think the
| logic of "everyone is doing it" has been used by many people to
| do many bad things. I for one hold myself to a far higher
| standard than this, and I think I'd be far less happy in
| general if I let my dignity slip like this.
| xmprt wrote:
| I read something recently that said if you feel like you're
| "getting away with it" then you're probably doing something
| wrong.
| mrweasel wrote:
| While lying on your resume is often defended as: "Everyone
| does it, employers expects it", I don't think it's nearly as
| common as people think. It may be market/country specific,
| but simply assuming that it's something you do is idiotic.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Besides, it's a losing proposition: if you lie to get a job
| at a place that won't hire people with honest resumes, you
| end up working with a bunch of lying mercenaries for a
| company with unreasonable expectations. Even if you had no
| morals, it's against your interests.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| While I see your point, resume liars is also the reason why we
| have such draconian interviewing processes at the moment.
|
| You can go to pretty much _any_ tech company in the world, and
| somewhere, someone is going to have some horror story about
| hiring a seemingly competent (even perfect) candidate on paper,
| that turned out to be woefully incompetent. The types that are
| supposed to have a Masters degree + 5 years of industry
| experience, but can 't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| I guess you wouldn't be upset if a business lied to you about
| compensation, since you have no problem with a prospective
| employee lying about what they bring to the table.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _if a business lied to you about compensation_
|
| Exaggerating the possibility of a bonus or of the value of
| stock options is completely normal for employers.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Well people are saying its ok to lie to get the job too.
| Either both are wrong or both are ok.
| dagw wrote:
| While both are "wrong" in a more absolute sense, they are
| both so common and accepted that you really should assume
| it is happening and act accordingly.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| I agree. Assuming it is happening is different than
| approving of it or agreeing that it is 'ok' when the
| subject comes up.
| [deleted]
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I think there's merit to this... within reason. Stretching a
| couple years of Java experience into a decade? Meh. Claiming
| you know Perl, because you're super familiar with other
| scripting languages and can learn quickly? Meh, probably.
|
| But since MOVA is, definitionally, fake, it's not like you have
| any idea * what * you're claiming to know. There's a level of
| BS here that isn't calculated, and I think that makes for a
| truly dishonest employee (aka bad hire).
| dagw wrote:
| As long as you remember which lies you told. I remember one
| interview where I asked "So, how much X do you know" and the
| guy I was interviewing honestly answered "Sorry, I've never
| used X". At which point I had to point out that he'd claimed
| to know X on his resume.
| nomel wrote:
| > Meh. Claiming you know Perl, because you're super familiar
| with other scripting languages and can learn quickly?
|
| I've seen that backfires with people I interview. I have a
| limited time with each person. If you're saying you have
| experience but obviously don't, it means everything on your
| resume has to be considered as "possibly false". It brings a
| _much_ more critical eye to that type of candidate, with lots
| of discussion and questioning that probably wouldn 't have
| happened otherwise.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Yeah, I wouldn't personally do it, and I'd expect the
| candidate to crash-study before the interview enough to
| make it a plausible story. I just wouldn't consider it a *
| hard * disqualifier, if the truth came out.
| codeflo wrote:
| I had a situation like this recently at a smaller
| company. Candidate claims years of expertise in X and Y.
| We have great X people, but would like to hire someone
| with deep Y knowledge. So we (more out of routine than
| any particular strategy) probe X in the interview. Turns
| out the candidate is beginner level at best, and also a
| bit arrogant about it. Would you in that situation
| believe the Y claims, that you can't evaluate as deeply
| to begin with?
| PhillyG wrote:
| Unfortunately it often takes quite a bit of experience in
| a skill to truly assess your own skill level. Many
| programming courses teach just the basics of coding in a
| language, without making it clear that it's not really
| enough to professionally start working on production
| code. It also requires more knowledge of a language, to
| work with other people's code than your own - and there
| really isn't enough recognition of that fact (at least in
| people I've come across)
| rualca wrote:
| Please keep in mind that resume padding is often not done by
| the candidate but by headhunters who want to depict their
| square peg candidate as the most perfect round peg ever
| imagined.
| WesleyJohnson wrote:
| I've always had trouble with my worth as a developer. There are
| multiple reasons I won't get into, but the recruiter I used to
| get hired at my current employer helped me drive my salary
| request way North of what I was comfortable negotiating for on my
| own. I grappled with whether or not I deserved it, and still do
| at times, but I was obviously very appreciative - regardless of
| their reasoning.
|
| Now that I've been promoted to a manager position, we get
| recruiters presenting us candidates at the same, or higher,
| salaries than what I started at 4 years ago, and in many cases I
| don't feel the candidate's experience and skillset warrant the
| salary ask.
|
| I'm not sure what the take away is, except maybe I'm still
| undervalued, or recruiters are just padding salaries to earn that
| sweet, sweet commission. I'm thankful for recruiters in my own
| personal journey, but as a hiring manager, I'm skeptical.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| My guess is that salary is mostly unrelated to one's skills. It
| mostly depends on what company you work for, and your
| negotiation skills. Actual knowledge and skills are _maybe_ on
| the third place. There is also timing: if you join when the
| company desperately needs another developer, you may get better
| deal than the developers who are already there. Also, whom you
| know, who recommends you.
|
| I know a guy who is 10x smarter than me, but is paid 1/2 of
| what I am. It's because he works at a different company. (I
| used to work there, too, and then my salary was 1/2 of what it
| is now. I didn't get twice as smart when I changed jobs.)
|
| I know a gal who is 10x smarter than me, but is paid about as
| much as I am. It's because she works at the same company.
|
| In my opinion, software companies are unable to tell the
| difference between developers. The bad ones are overpaid, the
| good ones are underpaid. Smart developers learn to code;
| _smarter_ developers learn to network.
|
| From this perspective, it makes sense to contact a job agency
| and tell them you want 2x what you have now. Chances are, there
| is a company where people with your skills (or worse) are paid
| that much. It just takes lot of luck to _find_ that company.
| Call ten different job agencies, tell them that you only accept
| that much... and let them search the market. You may be
| surprised.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| Seems to me you might be in a good position to start
| calculating an appropriate salary.
|
| You know what your staff are paid, how productive they are, and
| (potentially) how their salaries figure into your organization
| profit-and-loss numbers.
| cmckn wrote:
| Whether or not anyone "deserves" the money is probably not
| really your problem (in an org chart sense), and I think you
| should be happy with whatever "excess" you or the candidates
| are receiving. Don't internalize the capitalism too much, I
| guess is what I'm saying. If you think someone will do what you
| need them to do in a role, and the company is willing to pay
| them N dollars for it, all is well.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| A while back a few of us created a April fools 'Face Gestures'
| video for Opera software.
|
| For years after I would occasionally have people mention they
| were interviewing a candidate that said using our 'face gestures'
| was one of their favourite features of the browser.
|
| Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkNxbyp6thM
| gota wrote:
| The video is hilarious, congratulations
|
| A well implemented version of the idea would actually be useful
| for people with impaired mobility. Perhaps focusing more on
| eyes and blinking, or combining limited gesturing with eye
| movement/blinking...
|
| anything to avoid having to lick to bookmark or shake your
| tongue is a plus, really
| Cd00d wrote:
| Hilarious.
|
| I had forgotten gestures. I paid for Opera for years because I
| loved mouse gestures so much. Now I'm back to moving my cursor
| all the way back to the top left to hit a back button. I don't
| know what happened.
| mikelward wrote:
| Permalink seems to be
| https://m.facebook.com/groups/CFprogrammers/permalink/101581...
| kyberias wrote:
| If I would notice such a requirement, I would invent the language
| from scratch, fake a whole website documenting that, develop a
| compiler (probably LLVM frontend) and apply.
| claviska wrote:
| I got a cold email from someone looking for gig work. He said he
| had experience with web components, so I made up a JS library and
| asked him if he was familiar. [0] Thankfully, he already had
| experience with it!
|
| 0. https://twitter.com/claviska/status/1274844995300794371?s=20
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Hey OP,
|
| lots of us stay far away from the FB ecosystem.
|
| I would like to read this, but will not go to this link.
|
| Please prioritize alternatives. Thanks.
| brasten wrote:
| But did it have generics?
| Pick-A-Hill2019 wrote:
| I've been an IT consultant to 2x recruitment agencies in the past
| so can confirm with an n+2 confidence that at least some agencies
| mistreat their recruitment staff in ways that would shock even
| the most sociopathic sweat shop owner.
|
| Think high pressure sales tactics and the almost daily threat
| directly hurled across the office for recruiter X or Y to 'meet
| their targets or GTFO'. Fortunately I was a freelancer but I
| always used to feel so bad/sad for them, especially knowing the
| profits that the owners were making vs. that of their staffs'.
|
| On the other hand I once attended an interview at the early stage
| of my career for an extremely prestigious (pay, perks, prestige)
| role and sensed something was wrong when the interviewer asked me
| if I considered attention to detail an important part of the
| role......
|
| When I said 'Yes, of course' they then preceded to berate me
| about a typo on my CV (cringe)....
|
| When I asked to have a look at their copy I saw that the agency
| that had re-typed/reformatted my CV and introduced the typo.
|
| When I told the interviewer that they replied with 'We don't hire
| people that blame others' for their own mistakes'. Ouch.
|
| With steam coming out my ears I politely informed the interviewer
| that that was fortunate since I really didn't want to work for
| any company that immediately viewed me as a liar. We agreed to
| terminate the interview at that point.
|
| Funny thing was - in my briefcase I had an extra copy of my CV as
| submitted to the agency but I thought - Meh, why bother.
|
| I consider that one of my many dodged bullets (Sorry for going
| slighly off-topic, my bad).
| yowlingcat wrote:
| > I consider that one of my many dodged bullets (Sorry for
| going slighly off-topic, my bad).
|
| I don't think that's off topic at all. I agree that you really
| did dodge a bullet. For an interviewer to treat you with such
| disrespect over something which is so trivial and
| inconsequential is an immediate red flag. The purpose of an
| interview is not just to assess, but to sell the role to the
| candidate. "Negging" is an antagonistic interaction which is
| utterly inappropriate for the professional environment.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of
| MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it.
|
| hmm, I've found 3 jobs today I'm absolutely perfect for and this
| one that I'm nearly perfect for but wants some experience in
| something called Mova. Guess I just send a resume to the 3 jobs
| I'm perfect for.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| You could still send your resume to the company but not lie
| about having MOVA experience. They are called job
| "requirements" but companies often hire someone that is the
| best fit even if they miss out on one of the requirements. Of
| course, some companies also have a hard filter against
| requirements that you wouldn't get past, but you won't know
| unless you send your resume.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ok, most 'sending a resume' involves going through a job
| portal of some sort, doing some work to fill out some stuff,
| uploading your resume, making a cover letter etc.
|
| If they give me interviews for the 3 that I perfectly match,
| which most companies do for me, and take home assignments
| which often happen, I might have basically a full week of
| stuff to do. At that point I don't want to put out the effort
| to to go to an interview for a job that on the face of it
| looks less likely to hire me than one of the other three.
|
| If I see no jobs that perfectly match me then I drop to the
| close match jobs, but if I see jobs that perfectly match me I
| don't do the work for the close match jobs.
|
| on edit: and of course what if the company is already only a
| close match, there is one technology I don't match for the
| actual job, but then you add a fake tech on top, suddenly I
| don't match two things.
|
| basically this idea means that you help sort out some of the
| honest qualified people for your position because they will
| evaluate the job posting as being less relevant to them than
| otherwise.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I'm now going to claim 4 years of MOVA experience.
| k__ wrote:
| I'm always baffled how full of shit some companies are.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Serious question: if you're applying for positions you're not
| totally confident in your experience and skillset, do you inflate
| your resume?
|
| 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.
| throwawayzRUU6f wrote:
| I've interviewed ~50 people by now - being honest and admitting
| ignorance earns you minor plus points. Weaseling, dodging the
| questions or answering the question you wish you were asked
| instead of the question you were asked - those are _major_ red
| flags. Remember - you 're likely going to be interviewed by
| somebody more senior than you - the likelihood they'll find out
| is quite high.
|
| Your task as an interviewee is to provide an honest and
| accurate assessment of your skillset and competence level.
| throwanem wrote:
| I never have. But I've worked with people who did.
|
| 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.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| I never inflated my resume but I can understand that some
| *GOOD* candidates might inflate their years of experience out
| of a bad suggestion from recruiters, or because they see other
| candidates do the same, or because many companies greatly
| inflate the requirements.
|
| 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.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Rightly or wrongly, a lot of programmers trust in their ability
| to pick up a language on the fly.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I've only ever increased the amount of experience I have with a
| technology and only when I am already proficient in it. No
| sense not applying to a job demanding 2 years of xp when I have
| 1 year but can use the tools proficiently, especially given the
| X years metric is usually pulled out of thin air by a
| recruiter.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I leave a stuff off my resume because nobody would believe it
| all together. The whole story looks like I'm Forrest Gump. I
| can't imagine inflating it.
|
| 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.
| Deestan wrote:
| When hiring, we filter applications on what they claim on the
| CV but also actually dig into the required skills on interview.
|
| 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.
| thu2111 wrote:
| When I started interviewing I used to do that, until I
| realised it would eliminate about 20% of all useful
| candidates. The killer is c++. The industry is filled with
| people who have vague memories of trying to use C++ in the
| 90s before switching to Java or c# as quickly as possible,
| but still put C++ on their resume. In reality they can't even
| do basic tasks like reading a file into an array. Knocking
| them out because of this exaggeration would have just
| throttled the candidate stream unnecessarily and it didn't
| seem like a consequential exaggeration.
|
| 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.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| People also have different priorities. I never wrote an
| application in C++ and don't care about boring but
| practical stuff like the file API or syntax.
|
| 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++.
| JackFr wrote:
| I think you're spot on about C++. I am one of those people
| who wrote C for many years, worked exclusively in C++ for
| 4-5 years, but haven't touched it in about 10-12 years.
|
| 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.
| wccrawford wrote:
| We recently discovered that someone lied about their one of
| their skills during the interview.
|
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Fired as in you stopped the interview, or you had already
| hired them and then terminated them once this came to light?
| dmos62 wrote:
| I've heard hiring is not a cheap process. That must have been
| a critical skill if you chose to restart the process.
| justusthane wrote:
| Not necessarily. It might not be about the lack of the
| particular skill they lied about, but the fact that they
| lied at all and what that indicates about them as a
| person/employee.
| rimiform wrote:
| If you fired everyone who ever lied you'd have nobody in
| your company.
| genedan wrote:
| No, the lies will just snowball on day one when you find out
| you can't do the job.
| juangacovas wrote:
| I've interviewed on occasion (IT related). By far, the worst
| experience was about someone I approved and later discovered he
| clearly cheated/lied in the interview. Like, I set too high
| expectations and slowly but consistently realizing that "this
| guy just lied to me" in so many levels.
|
| I learnt from that so yes, for me, lying in an interview is the
| worst thing you can do.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup. I've had something similar where the interviewee was
| giving answers that felt very practiced. The recruiter was
| present in the room as well, taking notes (probably to prep
| applicants for the interview). We didn't hire the guy, and we
| no longer allowed the recruiter in the same room because of
| that.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Does anyone have a link to the mentioned Industry Standard
| Magazine profile article? Or was that made up too?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| When I was a recruiter, I'd rewrite the job descriptions.
| realjohng wrote:
| I will be adding Mova to my LinkedIn
| vagrantJin wrote:
| It baffles me why anyone would lie about the languages they know.
| Why.
|
| Always tell half truths, never whole lies. I live in a country
| where companies distrust former startup founders regardless of
| exit. So when a good opportunity cones around - people pretend to
| have been merely working for said startup instead of the guy
| running it. Thats a good lie.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Why does South Africa mistrust startup founders?
|
| Denmark mistrusts people who've been consultants applying for
| full time employment, in my experience.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Same reason, flight risk. You've shown independence already.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| It's a deep mistrust of enterprising individuals. A recruiter
| told me that companies want people with an employee mindset.
|
| I didn't know whether to be disgusted or roll on the floor
| laughing.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Denmark mistrusts people who 've been consultants applying
| for full time employment, in my experience_
|
| That is because of Janteloven
| dgellow wrote:
| Could you give more context?
| goatinaboat wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante#Definition
| dgellow wrote:
| That has a strong Fightclub vibe.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The 12th law of Jante is that you are not to think you
| are good enough to change the laws of Jante.
| prepend wrote:
| This is the opposite of the "you is special" scene from
| The Help [0].
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/192640-you-is-kind-
| you-is-s...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Because there's good money to be made, even if they don't do
| any productive work. Second, they can learn on the job.
|
| But, niceness and political correctness aside, there's a
| percentage of people working in IT who are simply incompetent.
| They do not have the 'knack', and will never get it. They
| struggle to make some code edits here and there, and somehow
| that's good enough for some employers.
|
| Someone at some point made a statement that you could probably
| make do with only 10% of the software engineering workforce if
| they're actually competent people. A lot of it is just overhead
| for mediocrity.
| bdcravens wrote:
| To be fair, there's not many more CF jobs than MOVA jobs these
| days :-)
|
| On a serious note, there was a moment when candidates were
| claiming to have 10+ years of Rails experience when DHH was
| literally the only person in existence who could make that claim
|
| https://www.strategic-options.com/insight/2019/06/13/you-can...
| prepend wrote:
| It's funny how I came across some posting that wanted 10 years
| of Java when that wasn't possible. I asked the recruiter what
| the deal was and they said they had to choose from a drop down
| of "1-3,3-10,10+" so they chose the highest one because Java
| was really important.
|
| They didn't even know what Java was or how old it was.
|
| This helped me understand how little misunderstandings can get
| amplified into things that seem really specific and set in
| stone. So the whole "question everything" approach really helps
| here as assuming that just because a number is specific that it
| was chosen for a specific reason is rarely true.
| SaintGhurka wrote:
| > To be fair, there's not many more CF jobs than MOVA jobs
| these days :-)
|
| 20-year CF dev here. It's a weird market. There aren't a lot of
| jobs, but there also aren't a lot of candidates. So interviews
| have an interesting power dynamic. Sometimes they're downright
| fun because you both know that the company doesn't have a lot
| of other options.
|
| On the other hand, if I'm ever unemployed, I know that power
| dynamic will be working against me.
| fergie wrote:
| I find it particularly ironic that it has fallen to a Facebook
| group of Cold Fusion programmers to call out poor choices.
|
| Those of us who actually worked at 1st generation dotcoms know
| that absolutely nobody had any idea what they were doing, even at
| the "proper" ones, and things were moving so fast that you
| absolutely _had_ to fake it until you made it.
| raverbashing wrote:
| It's funny, but if CF solved your problem and put money on your
| bank account then it did its job.
| sundvor wrote:
| Until they cooked up Spectra.
|
| :)
| dmje wrote:
| Ha, so true. Man, there were a few months back then when I was
| being phoned about 5 times a day with job offers. None of them
| were even vaguely related to the skillset I had (doing a bit of
| ropy HTML) but I could have tripled my salary without even
| breaking a sweat. I worked for Waterstone's Online at the time,
| glad I stayed put, we had fun.
|
| Cold Fusion though - I loved that. It was my first scripting
| language (apart from a brief foray into Perl), and it seemed
| like magic.
| prepend wrote:
| I really hated ColdFusion. It made PHP hacks seem like
| beautiful poetry.
|
| So it's funny that ColdFusion folks would complain about any
| stupid recruiter. But CF peeps are people too.
|
| My opinion is based on having to fix a lot of CF code from
| people who were "faking it until they could hire prepend to
| make it."
|
| It's funny that Allaire now runs RStudio and when I learned
| that I considered not using it anymore because of some lurking,
| unknown to me technical debt. But I'm sure he's a smart person
| and CF was not terrible due to him being bad. So I'm still
| using RStudio.
| itronitron wrote:
| Allaire can be bad while being a smart person, at least
| according to one of my former coworkers who worked at
| Allaire.
| e12e wrote:
| I used to hate CF until I came across the fusebox
| pattern/framework[1]. I think they were some of the first to
| draw up a sane architecture for "template" languages (cf,
| php, asp, jsp etc).
|
| Much like a book I picked up on sale about asp[2] - it really
| drove home the point that a programming language _really_
| needs to be terrible before it is the main problem - rather
| than how you use it. See also xmlhttprequest /Ajax and
| "Javascript - the good parts".
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180928051133/http://fusebox
| .or... and
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusebox_(programming)
|
| [2] "Designing Active Server Pages" 2000, O'Reilly Media
| prepend wrote:
| I didn't use CF professionally until 2000 and started with
| fusebox. I think fusebox was a good idea, but still CF
| sucked to use as a developer (me comparing it to cgi, php,
| asp, java).
|
| I stopped using CF in 2001, but the fusebox ideas stuck
| with me as I worked with other web frameworks like struts,
| spring, other mvc stuff.
| konjin wrote:
| Yes but how else will you kick down the ladder once you made
| it?
|
| FAAGs are where we put people who are really good at colouring
| within the box these days. It's pretty stunning how in 15 years
| it went from being a place where the best and brightest used to
| go a way to filter resumes.
| pestatije wrote:
| That doesn't make sense: if you root out resume liars, then you
| are left with zero (0) resumes.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Sounds like you haven't had much luck with hiring people.
| kwdc wrote:
| Is that -0 or +0?
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| This is a misguided project with some moral failings (some have
| pointed out already).
|
| It is always easy to beat up the candidate at the bottom. They
| are persona non-grata. Not so with recruiters; let's be honest,
| most early in their career are afraid the recruiter might
| blackball you.
|
| That said, there is a huge difference between contingency and
| retained recruiters.
|
| In a very simplified explanation, contingency recruiters search
| for jobs, blanket potential candidates with the jobs, then try to
| sell the responding candidates to the company. The company pays a
| finder's fee to the recruiter. There is no agreement between the
| contingency recruiter and the company until the candidate is
| presented to the company.
|
| Retained recruiters are retained by the company to find the right
| candidate, and often get paid a baseline or retainer and a
| finder's fee. These openings are mostly for very senior roles.
|
| I have worked with contingency recruiters early in my career.
| They tend to use a quantity based or shotgun method, blanketing
| both companies and job seekers. They do not seek relationship
| with you or the company. It is a numbers game, and the candidate
| is just a number (sort of like spam).
|
| The retained recruiter wold is very different. Most are
| specialized by industry and are familiar with the top candidates.
| At this stage the candidates have leverage to demand a certain
| amount of respect, and proper treatment.
|
| And, that is where my contention lies. There is no reason
| candidates at any stage of their careers could not treated
| humanely. The notion that we should delight in trapping someone
| with a lie, is also ethically questionable.
| ljd wrote:
| As a counter example, a recruiter once called me asking if I
| could "put the angular in outlook," recognizing this as total
| nonsense I said, "Sure that's something I could do" knowing that
| I would be able to talk to the team looking to hire and ask them
| for clarification.
|
| It ended up being one of my favorite contracts; I was able to be
| part of an industry changing technology platform. Had I said that
| I didn't have any experience putting angular in outlook, its
| doubtful any of that would have come to fruition.
|
| The lesson I learned here is when I'm hiring to make sure I don't
| eliminate good candidates with bad requirements and as a
| candidate I'm inclined to say "yes" to non-technical recruiters
| even when I know 100% that its impossible.
| [deleted]
| npsimons wrote:
| Half the battle is "beating requirements out of users" as I
| like to put it. This bullshit of trying to bait people into
| lying is just wasting everyone's time. I hope it leads to them
| ruling out a lot of really good candidates (eg, honest people
| who won't answer the ad because they've never heard of 'MOVA').
|
| And before someone counters with "you should be flexible", I
| consider myself unfit for a position if I've never even _heard_
| of something they list on the want ad. If I found out they
| _intentionally_ made up something just to trip people up, that
| 's a big red flag for me. Who knows what other bullshit they'll
| try to pull once you're actually working for them.
| belval wrote:
| Until recently I was never part of the hiring process at any
| company because I was simply too new. I always thought how it was
| insane that people would say "I only spend 30 seconds on each
| resume", that I would somehow be better and do a more thoughtful
| analysis of the candidate.
|
| Boy was I wrong, the amount of resume you can get for a job is
| crazy and most candidates are absolutely not a good fit. I even
| had one person put the wrong LinkedIn profile link in their
| resume so it pointed to someone else with the same name but a lot
| more experience.
| jameshart wrote:
| Or they (or a recruiter) sent in an old resume...
| belval wrote:
| Frankly it's a one letter typo so I'd be inclined to believe
| the person just made a mistake, but at the same time the only
| way this resume got to me was because the LinkedIn profile on
| the resume was impressive, much more so than the resume
| itself.
| Tade0 wrote:
| On the other end of this I include "Staying Hydrated" as a skill
| in my CV so as to increase the chance of detecting whether the
| person who's interviewing me received the original version,
| something doctored or someone else's CV entirely.
|
| One time _they didn 't receive my CV at all_, because apparently
| this was the extent of paranoia the consultancy through which I
| was hired was exhibiting.
| tpaulin wrote:
| How do you distinguish between those who have and those who
| haven't received the original? I'm going to hazard a guess that
| "Staying hydrated" is sufficient obscure that they ask you
| about it.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I count on that, but last time I asked if they could find
| this phrase in the CV.
|
| Of course this gives no protection against inserting
| unauthorized entries, but my experience so far is that
| recruiters either send the original CV or go all out and
| change whatever they want.
| makach wrote:
| Someone will just make the "Mova" language now, out of spite
| #estoteric
|
| the basic requirements should be
|
| * it should be easy to have mandatory experience in the language
|
| * it should not be perceived as a joke
|
| * Turing complete
| TimBurr wrote:
| That's a similar spirit to Rockstar and Enterprise - they're
| joke languages to poke fun at employer requirements. Rockstar
| actually looks fun to play with, in a code-as-art sort of way.
| :)
|
| https://codewithrockstar.com/
|
| https://github.com/joaomilho/Enterprise
| Puts wrote:
| I would say any one using external recruiters are setting
| themself up to employing liars. Searching for jobs it's
| incredibly frustrating talking to a person who for once can't
| answer any technical questions of what the job is about, but also
| just crossing of a bucket list to see if you are qualified to
| talk to another recruiter with a bucket list. Instead of
| competing with liars I've just stopped applying for jobs going
| through external recruiters.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| One thing you have to watch out for is that sometimes it's not
| the candidate's fault.
|
| Sometimes the recruiter will "tune up" a candidate's resume
| without them knowing it.
|
| Yes, it's crazy.
| surfingdino wrote:
| That's why recruiters insist on receiving CVs in Word format.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| Recruiters are sales people. Selling your services is what you
| are doing when you look for a job. So many people try to sell
| themselves to an employer that it's a skill set to know how to
| navigate the process.
|
| Some recruiters ignore the hard work and do a spray and pray
| approach to finding people jobs. Those are bad recruiters but
| usually untrained.
|
| Good technical recruiters might even have an engineering
| background but like dealing with people more than machines.
|
| Good recruiters have no floor and no ceiling to earning. They
| work agency recruiting and often make it to the top 1% of
| earners in America.
|
| Recruiting is a big business.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I have never had this problem either being hired by external
| recruiters or working for places that utilized them. I know
| that the recruiter is a recruiter, and don't expect them to be
| an engineer.
|
| I have never been hired by a recruiter, they were just the
| first step. A company that requires engineers to filter
| applicants on the first pass probably isn't very fun.
| l0b0 wrote:
| "Pink box testing"[1] is my favourite variant of this.
|
| [1] https://neilbowers.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/pink-box-
| testing...
| goatforce5 wrote:
| My dotcom 1.0 employer did exactly the same thing, although I
| think ours was called 'Black Box'.
|
| If a recruiter said they had 'Black Box' candidates ready and
| waiting to come in for interviews we knew the recruiter would
| lie, cheat and steal to get candidates placed (and their fat
| commission cheque).
|
| If a recruiter said they hadn't heard of Black Box but would
| reach out to their pool of candidates, they'd be considered a bit
| more trustworthy and perhaps worth doing business with.
| peter_retief wrote:
| Why would anyone pretend to know a language they never heard of?
| I 'have' listed languages that I have very little experience in.
| Once I had a do an online test that didn't work, they told me I
| failed the test, this bothered me more than it should have.
| mrpetruccio wrote:
| Interesting fact MOVA in ukrainian means language. And as
| ukrainian I have more than 30 years of mova experience.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| This reminds me of an anecdote I read once, maybe in Liars Poker,
| about how lots of people applying to this hedge fund put "Chess"
| on their resume somewhere thinking it made them seem like a deep
| or strategic thinker. As it happened, at this hedge fund there
| worked a former Soviet master or grandmaster ranked player. And
| so, whenever interviewing any candidate who claimed great
| proficiency with chess on their resume, at the end of the
| interview they'd take the candidate to go play the master.
| mudita wrote:
| So, as a bonus, the ones who were not lying about being good at
| chess were probably really happy about the chance to play a
| grandmaster! :)
| georgiecasey wrote:
| James Damore must have read that book as well, he lied on his
| CV saying he was a FIDE master.
|
| I'm always fascinated at the esteem chess is held in for some
| reason. I don't have a high rating (lichess rapid ~1900) but to
| me, improving at chess is the same as improving at everything
| else: practice.
| lupire wrote:
| How high is high?
|
| That's 86%ile of weekly active players, with ~70K weekly
| active players above you.
|
| https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/rapid
| bambax wrote:
| "Knows (most of) the rules of chess" would be an accurate
| description of my level.
| matthucke wrote:
| Sorry, this job requires 9 years experience with en passant.
| josephg wrote:
| I used to do some work with a software consulting firm. There
| was a ping pong table in the office, and while talking about
| rates, our CEO liked to offer clients a 15% discount on our
| services if they could beat Joe from accounting at ping pong.
| He did it as a bit of a running joke, and to see how people
| reacted to the offer.
|
| What our clients didn't know was that Joe was terrible at ping
| pong. But that didn't matter - from memory he was only ever
| challenged once in the many years I was there.
| RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote:
| > [...] [H]e was only ever challenged once in the many years
| I was there.
|
| I suspect that's because your client's spending their
| company's money, and it made no difference if the rate were
| cheaper. They'd rather sign the deal quickly then GTFO.
| Challenging Joe would only prolong the process.
| dmos62 wrote:
| But it would be fun?
| dunefox wrote:
| Fun doesn't make money.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| You must never have heard of clowns
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| You could have almost 3X your money with FUN if you
| bought at the right time.
|
| https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/fun
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Relationships do, though, and people also tend to like
| having them. And having fun.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| If they are higher salary relative to the discount it could
| be a losing prospect monetarily just by wasting their time.
| rrmm wrote:
| I'm always wary of a Sir Gawain and Greenknight sort of
| situation. And sure you'll say it's only ping pong: But
| that's how they get you.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I'm intrigued. In the fable the game is a clever test of
| knightsmanship. What makes you wary of this sort of
| situation?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It's been a while since I've read it, but doesn't someone
| get decapitated in that clever test of knightsmanship?
| dmos62 wrote:
| Well yes, Greenknight gets his head lobed off, but he
| then puts it back on. The scary part is that in a year's
| time he'll get to return the favor (but doesn't, because
| it was a test of chivalry (and the protagonist was
| chivalrous)). Wikipedia has a synopsis.
| rrmm wrote:
| Sure, but Gawain only finds that it's a test after the
| fact (by surviving the test due to his virtuousness). So
| my take away was always something along the lines of
| don't play games whose stakes you may not fully
| understand against people whose power you may not fully
| appreciate _especially_ if it doesn 't seem like there is
| a downside.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > against people whose power you may not fully appreciate
| especially if it doesn't seem like there is a downside.
|
| But that's the part that makes it fun!
| Cd00d wrote:
| >Greenknight gets his head lobed off
|
| _Brilliant_ typo
| JimmyAustin wrote:
| A mate of mine's consulting company offers a 10% discount on
| any work if the client buys them a plant, any plant, for the
| office. Apparently they've only had two clients take them up
| on the offer.
| neolog wrote:
| Why do they offer that?
| prionassembly wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
| neolog wrote:
| Good answer.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| memorable marketing engagement that you'd tell your
| friends about
| jjk166 wrote:
| Or at least random people on the internet
| onion2k wrote:
| It demonstrates that the client actually read the
| contract.
| ballenf wrote:
| If they'd made the clause a kickback and they'd have
| gotten 100% uptake.
|
| Discounts after the contract is approved are actually a
| headache in some large orgs. You will have to answer
| multiple questions each quarter as to why your numbers
| are off. You won't get to spend the money elsewhere, but
| will have more work. Plus, you'll never get budget
| approval for buying or shipping a plant.
| EveYoung wrote:
| Does it? If someone from legal reads the contract, why
| would they bother dealing with this gimmicky clause? The
| budget has already been approved and sending someone a
| plant might cost another 30min of their time they rather
| spent on doing their job.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| If legal reads it you're at least gonna get an email to
| the tune of "hey WTF is this? did someone sneak a joke
| into the draft?" which is sufficient for proving they
| read it.
| onion2k wrote:
| "I can think of a hypothetical reason why you might be
| wrong in very specific circumstances, so I'll suggest
| that could be a reason why the general case is wrong" is
| such a dumb argument. Obviously there might be occasions
| where a client reads the clause and chooses to ignore it.
| Very rarely, someone in legal might decide to ignore the
| clause because they're a bit lazy and don't care about
| saving their employer some money. That isn't an argument
| against what I said though.
|
| Plus, if the budget has already been approved, someone
| didn't read the contract before signing it. That's the
| same as not reading it.
| EveYoung wrote:
| Fair enough. My experience is limited to large
| corporations with bloated, slow procurement processes. So
| I would be really surprised if legal would get back to me
| about something like this. That said, I don't think I've
| ever encoutered these type of jokes.
| tzs wrote:
| If they decide to actually send a plant and this is in
| the US, dealing with actually selecting and sending it
| won't take much time. You can order a plant online for
| delivery [1]. Plants at that site start at $35 for the
| plant and pot, and shipping is a flat $7 on orders under
| $75.
|
| [1] https://bloomscape.com/
| [deleted]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Brown M&M's clause, I like it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Was it brown or green?
| jamessun wrote:
| Brown M&Ms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck
| s314159265358 wrote:
| Because they want plants.
| pliny wrote:
| You can trade money for plants
| zelos wrote:
| Explain how?
| blackshaw wrote:
| Press F2 to go into "Buy Mode", then you can buy
| houseplants with your Simoleons.
| Spare_account wrote:
| Plants can be exchanged for goods and services
| antonvs wrote:
| Something to do with blockchain, I assume.
| prepend wrote:
| NFT for physical objects is the new hotness. That way
| they can just demonstrate ownership of the plant instead
| of having to move it around.
| mckirk wrote:
| Transparent OLED screens on window sills cycling through
| simulations of virtual plants, together with their NFT
| tags...
|
| I want the future back, we were promised hoverboards!
| prepend wrote:
| NFT is revoked when physical plant dies.
| justinclift wrote:
| Some plants are useful after they're cactus. ;)
| Gaelan wrote:
| Thanks, I audibly laughed.
| athenot wrote:
| I'm not them but I could see how, for some services,
| having a savvy client who pays attention to these details
| will result in a cheaper client to service. Perhaps that
| particular product/service costs more to deliver when
| clients are missing on some very elementary diligence.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| I wouldn't put "chess" onto my resume unless I was at least
| titled. Otherwise, what is a signal that it sends to the hedge
| fund crowd of overachievers? That you have a hobby that you
| managed to not get good at?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I have chess on my CV even though I stopped seriously playing
| at 15 and ~1700 OTB ELO - not to showcase my competitiveness
| but to add some flavour/personality to what is otherwise a
| very dry career oriented document and maybe get an anecdote
| in that I can use to break the ice or relate to somebody.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I have cycling on my CV but I have no intention of doing tour
| de france
| jameshart wrote:
| Is the objective of hobbies to 'get good' at them? That
| sounds exhausting.
|
| If someone lists 'skiing' as a hobby I'm not expecting them
| to have Olympic medals to back that up. 'It says here on your
| resume that you play guitar. Well, let's see how you fair in
| a guitar battle with Slash from accounting'
|
| This is just more of that hyper competitive 'well rounded
| college applicant' performative high school stuff, isn't it?
| It's not enough to just have an interest - you need evidence
| of performing at a competitive level.
| behringer wrote:
| I would _not_ list guitar playing on my resume unless I was
| prepared to entertain a crowd at my job interview.
|
| Likewise I wouldn't list chess unless I was good enough to
| at least entertain a grand master for a few minutes.
| lupire wrote:
| Nonsense. Entertaining a crowd is nothing like
| entertaining a grand master. A 1400 USCF player could
| organize a chess tournament as a company social event.
|
| Guitar is a performance art. Mediocre people are
| entertaining. Chess (and skiing) mostly isn't.
| jameshart wrote:
| I love this game.
|
| I wouldn't put down 'travel' as a hobby if I weren't
| prepared to take the interviewer on a quick day trip to
| Paris.
|
| I wouldn't list 'reading' as a hobby unless I could do a
| professional audiobook-level reading of a book for the
| interviewer, including doing all the voices.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| Hobbies don't _have_ to be maximally mastered, no. But what
| 's the point of putting something on your _resume_ if you
| 're not particularly good at it? In my opinion that's the
| only kind of thing that should be on a resume.
|
| I think if you put a hobby on a resume for the purpose of
| signaling some kind of orthogonal skillset ostensibly
| related to the job (like in this example, "strategy"), it
| stops being just about your personality and becomes
| explicitly performance-oriented. And I would even argue
| your resume is not the play to round out your personality,
| because it's such an overly subjective and bias-inducing
| thing.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Resumes are meant to be highly subjective and bias
| inducing things - you're trying to convince someone to
| hire you. Your resume is a brief summary of why you're a
| good fit for the company in general and the role in
| particular. An extremely large portion of that fit is
| your personality. Hobbies and interests are an excellent
| way to convey the type of person that you are. Putting
| down that you enjoy camping doesn't mean you are trying
| to convey that you will be useful in a survival
| situation, it means you'll probably get along well with
| Dan in accounting who is also quite the outdoorsman.
| There might be some jobs out there where you are highly
| siloed and your skillset is really the only thing that
| matters, but this is rare.
|
| It's dumb to lie and say you enjoy chess when you don't,
| just like it's dumb to put any other lie on a resume, but
| if you do enjoy it then there's nothing wrong with
| communicating that you're the type of person who enjoys
| chess, which means you are probably a person who enjoys
| somewhat adversarial situations where you need to win
| with your logic and you are comfortable with taking short
| term losses for long term gains, a personality which
| would likely be both comfortable and familiar in a hedge
| fund environment.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| _> which means you are probably a person who enjoys
| somewhat adversarial situations where you need to win
| with your logic and you are comfortable with taking short
| term losses for long term gains_
|
| Sure - to which my next question becomes, are you
| actually good at it? If you're not, I don't
| professionally care if you personally enjoy it.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It doesn't matter if you're good at it - there is no
| evidence that being good at chess makes you better at any
| hedge fund related tasks or vice versa. However you
| should most definitely care if your employees like what
| they do and the environments they are in. Those who
| dislike some critical element of the job may be perfectly
| capable of doing it, but will have a very low barrier to
| jumping to other opportunities compared to someone who
| genuinely likes the job.
|
| Let's say you're hiring people to work a fish market. One
| candidate loves going out on the boat and fishing in
| their spare time, the other hates the smell of fish. Both
| are fully capable of doing the job, which doesn't involve
| catching fish or being on a boat, but which does involve
| spending a lot of time with dead fish. Who do you think
| is more likely to stick with the job for an extended
| period of time and be pleasant to work alongside?
| isolli wrote:
| This anecdote was recounted by Nassim Taleb in one of his
| books, either Fooled by Randomness (which I recommend) or The
| Black Swan (which I don't).
|
| According to him, it was MBA courses that recommended adding
| chess to the CV, as it showed strategic thinking and would
| never be verified.
| indy wrote:
| It was Fooled by Randomness. (Randomly enough I was reading
| that book for the first time yesterday)
| isolli wrote:
| Thanks. I hope you enjoy it :) And I really don't recommend
| reading the Black Swan, especially after reading Fooled by
| Randomness!
| mos_basik wrote:
| I'm interested in why you hold that opinion of Black
| Swan.
|
| I just read it a couple of months back because I figured
| I probably owed reading some Taleb as back table stakes
| for all the hours I've spent reading HN (and SSC). Picked
| Black Swan because it seemed to be the most well known
| and I've never liked jumping into a series with the most
| recent release. I enjoyed it, will read more of him, but
| haven't yet.
|
| Do you have an order recommendation?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Hmm, that's possibly where I read it. Unfortunately I'm not
| turning it up with Google and I don't have any of those books
| on kindle (so I can't search them). I feel like Google used
| to be good enough to get this...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| How is it usually written on the resume?
|
| I would expect someone to be actually good at chess to put down
| their Elo rating. For someone just putting it as a hobby, I
| wouldn't expect much, especially when it comes to the "boring"
| stuff like memorizing openings.
|
| In the same way that there is usually a difference between what
| high level athletes and hobbyist write. The former usually
| mention something concrete (champion of..., XXX league, a time
| or score, ...) while the latter just mention the sport, often
| among other things.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Putting an ELO is like putting your SAT when you're 25 and
| over: sort of aggressive and you better have a really high
| number!
| sokoloff wrote:
| I scored fairly well on the SAT. I can't think of anything
| short of a court order that would cause me to put it on my
| resume.
| jjk166 wrote:
| If someone had bad education credentials (bad school,
| dropout, etc) but they put a high SAT score on a resume
| that would be a pretty concise way of communicating "it
| wasn't because I'm dumb"
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's possible that the received signal would be "I test
| well, but I struggle to complete a structured, long-term
| course of action", which probably isn't that beneficial.
| jjk166 wrote:
| I'd still prefer that to "I both test poorly and struggle
| to complete a structured, long-term course of action"
| which is just as likely an interpretation if you left it
| off.
|
| At the end of the day, anything could be bad if viewed
| with sufficient cynicism, and you can't control how
| others will interpret what you present, you can only
| control the information which is presented.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I'd file an application just for that. And yes, (s)he would run
| circles around me.
|
| A Strategy that would backfire quickly.
| selcuka wrote:
| That's a bit unfair though. I wouldn't take "great proficiency
| with chess" on a resume as grandmaster level.
| hangonhn wrote:
| But how Dunning Kruger are you to put that down? Like chess
| has a pretty well known rating system that even a moderately
| interested player would know about. So in the case of chess
| you can't even claim that you didn't know you are not that
| great.
|
| You can put down you're decent at Java or C++ or Python and
| actually be not that great at it because you have nothing to
| measure against. But in chess there is a rating system. So
| you ought to know if you are truly remarkable or not. If you
| think you are remarkable enough to put it down and then suck
| at it, how ignorant must you be?! And more importantly, that
| ignorance is not at all tempered by humility.
| k4tz wrote:
| This is a good take. I like to play chess recreationally; I
| also know I'm terrible at chess. Never in a thousand years
| would I put it on my resume.
| prepend wrote:
| It depends where. Under skills seems silly, but under
| interests seems reasonable.
|
| I have a single line on my resume with interests. I don't
| list chess, but list cryptography. Because I'm interested
| in it.
|
| I just have that line to help with chitchat during the
| interview. If some interviewer interpreted that to mean I
| was a professional cryptographer and that I sucked at it,
| that would be dumb of them.
|
| I also list an interest in kayaking, even though I suck
| at it.
| k4tz wrote:
| Good point!
| woko wrote:
| Yes, interests is for chit-chat. If the interviewer
| assumes special qualities based on the interests of the
| interviewee, it is on the interviewer.
| ivalm wrote:
| To be fair, lots of people colloquially claim to be good at
| chess but can't even stumble though a proper opening. The
| difference between say a class-a player and a rando is
| massive and easy to tell.
| dnh44 wrote:
| Memorising openings is also a crutch for players who aren't
| that good so I'm not sure if I would use that as a
| benchmark for good players.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| Memorizing openings is not a crutch. It's the only path
| upward past a certain point. It is impossible to play
| competitively at, say, the 2000 level if you haven't
| mastered a few openings.
|
| If you want to play 800-level chess, you can have fun
| without knowing any set openings. Well, almost. You'd
| better be able to recognize and defend scholar's mate at
| a bare minimum.
|
| But that is a bit like being an amateur programmer who
| never learns what a function is. You can still enjoy
| programming at that level, but it's odd to describe
| functions as crutches.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I doubt if you can play competitively at the 1600 level
| without knowing some opening theory. That'd be like
| playing against a 3200 for the first six moves and then
| hoping you are not worse. GP has no idea what he is
| talking about; it is stronger players who study theory.
| Weak players may/learn a few tricks/gambits, but you have
| to learn at least enough of those to avoid them.
| ivalm wrote:
| There are bad players who know openings, but there an no
| good players who don't know openings.
|
| Without opening theory you will just get worse middle
| game against any competent opponent. Furthermore, if you
| could just calculate everything ab inito your play would
| be identical to "memorized opening," alpha zero did learn
| a lot of standard openings from self-play (without being
| shown these opening explicitly). If someone plays a "bad"
| opening in a serious game it's because not only they
| don't know theory but they also can't calculate well
| enough.
| nathancahill wrote:
| I feel personally attacked. But I didn't downvote you
| because you're not wrong.
| permo-w wrote:
| I wouldn't agree with that. Memorising openings is
| something you do so that you don't have to repeatedly
| calculate every tactic in a position, and to help you
| reach a favourable mid game
|
| Besides, once you get into the middlegame, you still need
| the tactical and positional skills that I suspect you
| consider opening knowledge a crutch for
|
| In chess (and life) it's far easier to pattern match a
| solution for a position rather than coming up with a
| brand new solution every time
|
| In my opinion, this makes memory and experience far more
| important than intellect in chess, especially in the
| faster time formats
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Memorising openings is also good for avoiding well known
| traps like the fried liver, fishing pole or Eric Rosen's
| favourite the Stafford gambit. Most strong players have a
| variety of book openings memorised.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Nobody would think that though, a GM would be able to tell
| how bad you are lying.
| alexf95 wrote:
| The GM would easily figure out at what chess level he is
| though. No one expecting him to beat the GM of course.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| The point is that that still is pretty meaningless. You can
| enjoy a game of chess even if you are not very good at it,
| much like you can enjoy a game of golf for the aspect of
| walking around in a well-kept park and having a chat, and
| see some improvement in your handicap over time.
|
| I would not expect someone who puts chess on a resume to
| play competitively, which is a whole different beast.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Sure, only like 100 top GMs can play competitively, but
| there are over 1000 GMs who do it as a hobby while they
| work at Google, Microsoft or any other company.
| bidirectional wrote:
| But it's impossible to play chess or golf at even the
| most leisurely level without improving at least a little,
| as you say with handicap. I'm sure an expert can tell the
| difference between an earnest hobbyist and someone who
| learnt the rules as a child but hasn't played since.
| elwell wrote:
| And if you beat the chess master you still don't get an offer
| because it means you must be too busy learning chess to be
| dedicated to the hedge fund.
| fredgrott wrote:
| I create fake stuff on my linked sort of root out lying
| recruiters, sales people, etc.. makes it so much easier to know
| which messages just to trash and not read.
| harel wrote:
| The actual story became irrelevant when I saw it's a ColdFusion
| developers group. I used to work on that platform in the 90s.
| That was the Django/Rails/Next/etc. of the day. It even packaged
| in some ExtJS components at some point (another java script
| relic). I'm surprised it's still a thing.
| wahern wrote:
| > I'm surprised it's still a thing.
|
| Because it was a good idea? The whole industry came full
| circle. Here's some ColdFusion that people now call "Mustache
| JS": <h1>{{Subject}}</h1> <ul>
| {{#names}} <li>{{name}}</li> {{/names}}
| </ul>
|
| The problem with ColdFusion was that it went in the wrong
| direction. It tried to copy the trends of the industry by
| inventing and emphasizing CFScript when it should have doubled-
| down on the templating strategies and evolved it. Also, it
| jumped on the Java bandwagon. And it was proprietary and lost
| mindshare to free PHP, which also had a strong template story,
| albeit one that was conceptually more limited.
|
| CFScript and the Java integration weren't bad, per se.
| ColdFusion did have a problem when it came to extending the
| core engine functionality using traditional software
| architectural approaches. CFML had the concept of modules, but
| ultimately to do anything remotely sophisticated you had to
| drop down into C or C++ (and then later Java, I presume). IIRC,
| CFScript was superficially similar to Javascript, and if they
| had evolved it in that direction or just adopted Javascript
| outright, I think ColdFusion would have had more staying power.
| But the switch to Java probably made that impractical. A
| template engine integrated with a Javascript runtime running
| atop the JVM comes with too much performance baggage, even
| today. And the Javascript would have felt second-class and the
| "wrong" way to do things, anyhow, even if people ditched CF for
| an ecosystem that was that--Javascript or similar dynamic, RAD
| language instead of a "proper" strongly typed language.
|
| I worked for a consulting shop that started with ColdFusion and
| _tried_ to make the switch to Java but they could never make it
| work. I think I was the only technical consultant in the whole
| company with the time and motivation to learn Java. Java
| (including runtime and tooling) was too complex and
| sophisticated for both the application developers and the
| client 's needs. That would still be true today. The technical
| leadership of that company, which at the time had also just
| became a subsidiary of ADP, drank the Java and then XML kool-
| aid and drove the whole thing into the ground. For similar
| reasons (including some similar leadership) ADP lost out to
| PeopleSoft (later acquired by Oracle) in the race to build and
| solidify their middleware and web-app positions.
| harel wrote:
| I had 2 startups in total that were CF based, and still have
| a business running on ColdFusion (or a legacy version of it
| that is still in use). And yes, at it's prime, when choice
| was limited and 1 core was plenty, it was the best way to get
| a web application going. I actually welcomed the Java days
| since the original had enough issues that were resolved and
| having access to the JVM and it's ecosystem was a great
| thing. At this point ColdFusion became a JSP tag library.
| However, I cannot compare it to today's tech. It's not apples
| to apples.
| danesparza wrote:
| So your defense of Coldfusion is a javascript templating
| language that is over a decade old and has implementations in
| 30+ other languages?
|
| And then you further defend it by admitting, "The problem
| with ColdFusion was that it went in the wrong direction"
|
| I'm confused.
|
| Yes. That's why it's terrible. Most things that go in the
| wrong direction usually are terrible.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Software development is cyclical in that regard. I mean
| another example is JSON, which has a subculture where they
| are trying to add structure and schemas to it. At the same
| time there's gRPC, which is more aimed at performance.
|
| But some really smart people already built all of this
| decades ago with XML and XSD. It's painful to write, but
| computers don't mind at all. And for transfering effectively,
| there's EXI which can move XML documents over the wire in a
| compressed binary format, instead of awkwardly converting it
| to a text-based format and gzipping it over http before
| converting it back to a digital format.
| wahern wrote:
| For a long while I felt oddly bitter that Apache AxKit, a
| pluggable XML transformation pipeline and web application
| framework, never enjoyed much attention. I always wanted to
| use it for serious work but could never justify it owing to
| lack of mindshare. I was never an XML advocate, but I never
| hated it either. Ditto for XSLT. AxKit just seemed so
| elegant and _practical_ , smoothing over some of the
| problems with XML and XSLT and complementing them in a way
| that made their promise seem more attainable.
|
| For a startup I vetoed Ruby on Rails in preference to an
| AxKit-like approach, extending the PoC I had originally
| cobbled together. In retrospect it was incredibly stupid.
| Most importantly, I should've just let our dedicated web
| developer use what he was comfortable with, even though I
| had strong opinions about the usefulness of that approach.
| (Object binding had like near zero utility in our
| particular case.)
|
| Like with ColdFusion is was a hard-earned lesson in
| understanding that the best tools are the ones that
| maximize the productivity of your actual and prospective
| staff, not some hypothetical 10x coder. It's a seemingly
| obvious principle, but not so obvious and easy in
| application. It turned out that Ruby on Rails would still
| be on the upswing for some time afterward, so vetoing it
| was especially dumb. But ColdFusion, which made sense in
| context for similar reasons, was doomed to flame out
| quickly and so even if I teleported my post-RoR-veto self
| to my first ColdFusion job, I would have made the wrong
| decision as I had actually successfully advocated moving
| away from ColdFusion, the accidentally correct decision.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to give credit to CF for templating.
| In that I think we'd have the exact use of templating today
| if CF never existed, due to the other templating approaches
| that existed before CF.
| harel wrote:
| As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and
| in particular the first "Application Server".
| wahern wrote:
| > As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts"
| and in particular the first "Application Server".
|
| Especially true for Windows. Interest in commercial web
| development exploded at a time when Windows NT still held
| a dominate position in the emerging small- and medium-
| sized business markets. Perl bootstrapped web development
| in the Unix world, but Windows didn't have anything like
| the Unix software ecosystem--Perl, Apache, mod_php, etc.
| ColdFusion was where it was at for dynamic page
| generation in the Windows world. (I was only ever a
| visitor in that world. I had originally discovered
| programming thanks to Slackware Linux and Perl.) In the
| beginning ColdFusion was all Windows, IIRC, with Solaris
| and Linux ports coming about the time ColdFusion seemed
| to peak.
|
| ColdFusion programmers also tended to use Allaire's
| HomeSite, one of the first web-oriented IDEs. Allaire
| being the creator of ColdFusion.
| prepend wrote:
| PHP templated before CF (94 v 95), but I feel like the
| concept was around long before.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "application server" but
| there were in memory modules for web servers earlier than
| CF (eg, CGI).
|
| I think CF was around before ASP, Java, and JSP. But it
| always seemed like a commercial version of PHP to me.
|
| Looking at Wikipedia's list of application servers [0]
| there's quite a few older than CF (Tuxedo in 1983, Maybe
| CF was the first to be web specific? They were windows
| only so they can't be that old.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers
| harel wrote:
| Maybe "First web specific application server" in the
| sense of a server specifically serving dynamic HTML
| output over the web" is better? I'm not vouching for the
| accuracy of this statement.
| prepend wrote:
| Maybe "first sold" as the CGI spec in C came out in 1993
| [0].
|
| But this seems more of a marketing spin as PHP was out
| earlier and was the first, I know of, to have that easy
| "scripts in a folder that are interpreted by the http
| server" thing going where there was no compile process
| needed.
|
| My memory of the time was that CF was one of the many
| commercial web software companies that were selling to
| companies.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
| wahern wrote:
| Yes, CF was hardly the first to provide a templating
| framework for output generation. But ColdFusion's
| competitive advantage was how it seamlessly integrated
| database access, in particular SQL SELECTs and INSERTs,
| into HTML-based template looping and HTML forms. For a
| ridiculous number of applications, especially business
| applications, that's all anybody really needs. It was
| abstract enough to support many kinds of data sources (e.g.
| CSV files), which IIRC was one of the most common ways to
| extend the engine. And it was simple enough that even
| people who struggled jumping from HTML to a proper
| programming language could crank out useful applications,
| especially if someone provided them a SQL query to
| copy+paste.
|
| Years later C# would be lauded for LINQ, which provided for
| C# what ColdFusion provided to markup transformations.
|
| These sorts of language integrations weren't new, either.
| Years later I would discover and dabble with Perl's format
| framework: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlform. I had
| actually learned Perl a few years before I was introduced
| to ColdFusion, though I don't think many Perl programmers
| were ever familiar with formats. (It _is_ rather
| frustrating for modern uses.) And while I didn 't make the
| connection at the time, I believe some older languages
| (Fortran? SPSS?) which I was briefly introduced to in
| college supported similar language-integrated data source
| and record processing capabilities, though like Perl
| formats they were designed for tabular text output.
|
| But this history only emphasizes how important of a
| competitive advantage this was for ColdFusion, which was
| completely squandered.
|
| Regarding the discussion of PHP elsethread, about a year
| after taking over maintenance of a ColdFusion website
| (where I was first introduced to ColdFusion), I advocated
| for and was allowed to migrate the site to PHP. That was
| about the time PHP made the switch from Perl (PHP 2) to C
| (PHP 3). Before then I actually didn't even know PHP
| existed, despite being an avid Linux and Perl user. At the
| time I was convinced ColdFusion sucked. It was only later
| in my career that I slowly began to appreciate what
| ColdFusion brought to the table technologically.
| keiferski wrote:
| Reading this made me think: if someone from 1900 were to see this
| paragraph, it would made absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's
| interesting how new slang and technology words develop so
| quickly.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| It works in reverse, too: slangy school-newspaper style writing
| from back then is almost incomprehensible now.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| My dizzy age afternoonified chuckaboo looks arf'arf'an'arf, I
| bet they want to bricky batty-fang that bag o' mystery, could
| be bow wow mutton.
|
| IDK I just googled 1900's slang.
| scollet wrote:
| Do you want fries with that?
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