Some free advice: Don't lie on your resume

http://www.davenicolette.net/agile/index.blog/2063934/some-free-advice-dont-lie-on-your-reacutesumeacute/

4 3 16 years ago

pseudonym• 16 years ago

>I favor letting candidates for programming or testing jobs show what they can do.

As nice as it is to see a company that actually does this, the hard truth is that the first line of resume-readers aren't the people who can separate the tech from the cruft. It's the HR drones who see the buzzwords and squeal in delight. Or, before them, the automated resume parsers that count the occurrence rate of buzzwords and top-tier colleges and allow/deny based on that.

Is it any wonder why the tech-minded gravitate towards (or create their own) startups? I don't know how it is for everyone else, but for me personally, if I wanted to go into marketing, I'd be in marketing. And getting a job in most companies these days is all about marketing.

nikosdimopoulos• 16 years ago

A lot of people tend to go to where the hype is. For instance if the money is in real estate, you will see them there. The same with IT. Some people think that they are going to get a lot of money for doing little work in IT and unfortunately in a lot of cases they get away with it.

In one of my interviews for a job, the code I was asked to write was a table in HTML. That shows intent by the company (which is awesome) but also ignorance by the person that was taking the interview. For whatever reason that person was there, getting paid a lot of money and there I was, to report or work with that person (should I accept the job).

Close to the year 2000, there was a survey conducted in London, which revealed that 10% of the IT personnel at the time was supporting the remaining 90%.

Sad but I have seen it and it all stems from managers not having the guts to keep the knowledgeable people and fire the ignorant ones.

blahblahblah• 16 years ago

I'm curious how the candidate who claimed 18 years experience with Java got past the phone screen. Unless the candidate is a former employee of Sun Microsystems who worked on the team that invented Java, a claim of 18 years experience with Java is already a big fat obvious whopper of a lie.

Some free advice: Don't lie on your resume

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