"Preparing with AI" sounds like an issue here, and it's not. The issue is lying about your experiences, which people have done since the beginning of time. I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful. Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful.
This shouldn't be surreal at all. A candidate just wasn't able to make up relevant experiences on the spot.
Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt. This promotes lying because the liars are the ones that are rewarded with an initial interview. I was talking to a fresh graduate with some volunteer experience who was having difficulty getting a job, and all I could hesitatingly recommenced was to tell him lie on his resume so that his resume could get past the screening.
My compromise here is invisible words in the PDF. I pack it with every freaking keyword I can think of because I have absolutely no issues with lying to a robot and don't feel the need to a respect a hiring process where they can't be bothered to so much as read my resume. Funny enough I often get offers after that even when I don't have some specific technology.
That said, my personal ethics don't let me lie to an actual person.
Nope, that's just rather bland justification of cheating. Not sure how US corporations work, but in Europe any big company would flag you internally so you won't be able to work there for a decade, and the mark still remains in their hiring system afterwards. Just a stupid thing to do, as lying always is.
This are not school exams, company wants to hire the best candidate. If all fail then best failing is still the best candidate, and this can be measured and/or perceived by skilled interviewers.
Its up to interviewers but discussed matters can be checked quickly (ah you claim 10 years java backend integration experience? Ok lets dig deep. If reality is (almost) 0 thats lying in plain view).
Also not sure you understand english language, greatly exaggerating or making up stuff is still same lying, details are irrelevant.
No it’s not the same. But at this point I’m pretty sure you don’t understand the concept of nuance.
Sure, 10 vs 0 years is obvious. Why even bring up such an example?
What about 7 vs 10 or 3 vs 5? Maybe it’s technically lying but who cares if it works out at the end? What do these numbers even mean? A person who has 3 years of experience in Java can be better than someone who technically has 5..
Especially when those N years requirements are not necessarily put in there by the people who you’re actually going to work in.
Reneging on an offer means revoking it after it has been accepted, and that's poor form.
Turning down an offer puts you into a small category of "people we would hire if we had the chance" and the recruiters or hiring managers will follow up with you for some set period of time just in case something changes on your side. They already have decided you would be a good fit, after all.
But here's what I don't understand about this: wouldn't that be the company revoking the offer, not the employee? If the company revokes the offer or has "exploding offers" or whatever, that's a corporate thing, not an employee issue.
2. Company B says "we'd like to hire you at $X/year"
3. Person A says "that sounds good, I'll start in a month." Company B stops trying to fill the job.
4. Up to a month passes.
5. Person A tells company B "lol nevermind" and doesn't actually start work. Normally this is because company C is offering to pay $Y and $Y >> $X.
It's an employee issue because the employee is not following through on what they said they'd do. Because employment is at-will in the US they're legally in the clear, but the company that was planning on hiring them is still kind of screwed.
> Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt.
Really? That's the bigger issue?
Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?
I don't think that unreasonable expectations should be rewarded. But an unreasonable expectation is just "being stupid and harming yourself."
Deceiving others in order to take their money under false pretences (which is fraud) is immoral and harms others.
The two are not remotely comparable.
> This promotes lying
No it doesn't. If someone feels "encouraged" to lie and defraud others because they want something from them (even if the "someone else" is objectively stupid), that is no one's fault but their own. And their wishes and desires are just as unreasonable as the company's. [The wish/desire on the part of the applicant is wishing that the company had reasonable expectations]
The problem is that if everybody lies and you're the one not lying, you're worse off. In that scenario, the choice is between lying and being on even footing with everybody else, versus staying honest and getting an unfair disadvantage for it.
If enough participants lie, some of the honest participants get pushed out of the system, which makes lying more socially acceptable, which causes even more participants to lie... and so the feedback loop goes.
Not everyone lies. To say everyone does is just lying to yourself in an attempt at rationalisation.
Tell the truth. If you perform poorly in an interview, you now know where your weaknesses are. Work on them. Do a hobby project that lets you gain experience in that area. Use that as an example in your interview. Not only can you be truthful, you'll be more confident as you'll actually understand what you're talking about and can turn it into a positive - "I was weak in this area, so I went off an studied it myself" reveals more about your character than just the specific thing you learned.
Half the issue is companies where you won't even get to an interview without a juiced-up CV, and the rest is a interviewing and hiring decision process that doesn't penalize liars. If people felt your advice was the best way to get ahead, then they'd follow it, but when they see people who are just good bullshitters rocket past them in the system, they're not gonna feel good about it.
(How accurate this perception is is an important point: I'm inclined to believe that this nihilistic "everything is bullshit" philosophy is incorrect and self-defeating, but it's hard to deny many high-profile examples that show that bullshitting can be stunningly successful, while honesty and hard work can fail horribly)
This still doesn't justify lying to a potential employer. If your CV won't get you to an interview, then you don't have the skills they are looking for.
Aside from lying, you have other choices - spend some time working on personal projects to get the skills you need, obtain a recognised qualification in the skills you need, or try to find some way to obtain those skills in your current job. All of those will increase your real value to the potential employers, and gain you the opportunity to get the interview you want.
If a company catches you lying in an interview, they're absolutely right to blacklist you forever. How do you expect them to ever trust you to be telling the truth in the future if your very first contact with them is built on a lie?
You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted.
I'll note I generally have not been desperate enough to try this, firstly because I'm the kind of person who tends to have a pretty big list of skills in the first place (jack of all trades, master of none), and secondly there's generally enough companies I can apply to which have vaguely functioning hiring processes. But I can't say I look at the way some companies hire and say "Well, candidates lying is entirely a problem with them". People respond to incentives and consequences, and when you have a system with a strong incentive to lie and not much risk of consequences, don't be surprised when people do, even if it's not right.
> It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against.
This is still based on a false assumption, because you want to justify it to yourself.
If the company had lots of CVs being submitted but not a single person made it through their screening, they'd realise their screening bar was either too high (as you assume) or that their bar was correct but they couldn't find the candidate they wanted. Maybe their standards are too high, in which case they might then re-evaluate their expectations are repeat their hiring process with a lower acceptance criteria.
If they're only looking to fill a single role, it doesn't matter if the process screens out 99.9% of the candidates as long as they get through at least one candidate that fulfills the requirement. Of course, if the situation is as you describe, for such a rare talent, the candidate is possibly looking for money than they're prepared to pay, at which point they can again calibrate their expectations lower or decide to pay more. But that's a business decision for the company to decide, not you as a jobseeker.
But the people who know what the company is looking for, and how many people get through their filtering is the company themselves, not you. Just because you don't have the skills required and you extrapolate that to "no-one has these skills", it doesn't mean you're correct and it doesn't mean you're justified in lying.
You then say that you haven't "been desperate enough to try this". In that case, you shouldn't be defending this behaviour either - it will be hurting you when the jobs you are qualified for and have a legitimate shot at getting end up getting filled by a candidate who's not actually up to the task and managed to lie and BS their way through the interview. How is that a good outcome for you or for the company?
You're really missing the point here. It isn't about the idea world, it's about things as they actually are. Mental gymnastics to justifying something is not the same as a sober assessment of the incentives and dynamics of a system.
Perhaps you could reread GP? You seem to have misunderstood what he wrote. Surely discussing the motivations of those who act deceitfully is not itself deceit.
I think maybe you should re-read my posts too, because it seems you misunderstood what I wrote. "Surely discussing the motivations of those who act deceitfully is not itself deceit." suggests that you are arguing about a totally different thing to me. I've never once suggested that it's deceitful to discuss their motivations, I was arguing that the actions caused by those motivations are deceitful.
To be clear, I understand their motivations - essentially "I want this job whether I'm qualified for it or not", but lying about their experience is never acceptable IMHO.
Going further, to me it's not clear which specific post you mean by GP here, as this is now many levels deep and my argument hasn't changed since the my first post on this topic and the argument I've been responding to hasn't changed. Do you mean the GP of that or the GP of the post you replied to? I'll quote them both.
The GP of my original reply was: "Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?" which was answered by somebody justifying that behaviour.
The GP of your reply was: "You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted."
The view expressed by both of these, and that I am fundamentally in disagreement with, is that the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.
The problem with this view is that it's the candidate who's making this assessment. They have no idea if there are any suitable candidates, only that they are not suitable and they aren't prepared to accept that perhaps there is someone more qualified than themselves who is suitable.
Perhaps such a person who's more qualified wouldn't want to work in this job. Perhaps the company's requirements are in fact unrealistically high and they don't get any applicants. None of this is the candidate's concern. What is their concern is that they are not qualified for the role, and so should not be applying. Perhaps they think they're close to the requirements, and apply anyway with a letter such as "my skills aren't an exact match, but maybe you would consider me anyway".
If the company's requirements turn out to be unrealistic, they will realise that soon enough, and decide what alternatives they have. It might be that they re-advertise the role with requirements that the potential candidate now meets, in which case they can and should apply at that point.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the motivations are, the issue just boils down to "is it acceptable to lie so you can the outcome you want while negatively impacting the other party?" I'd argue no.
GP of my initial comment. I think I spotted the misunderstanding. I read you to be accusing GP but perhaps that wasn't your intent. The rest follows from there.
> the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.
The claim isn't that it's acceptable. It's not "this is ideal and good and you should aspire to it" but rather responding to your idealism by examining the dynamics.
I doubt anyone disagrees with you in principle. However in practice if you leave something valuable out in a bad part of town it's getting stolen. You can preach that theft is wrong until you're blue in the face but it doesn't change the reality.
A virtuous refusal to compromise your ethics means you lose out yet the situation is expected to remain the same. That's fine if you have plenty of other options but you can't realistically expect everyone to be in that position. It's not a matter of ethics but rather human behavior. The scenario where the company is forced to acknowledge that their hiring process is broken will almost certainly never come to pass.
So what would be your advise to a fresh graduate (or even an experienced person) whose resume says experience in ".NET 3.0" where as the job posting says experience needed in ".NET 3.1" ? Remember it's HR or some automated system that does the screening.
Well if the idea is that the lying (to a sane degree) is only necessary to pass the “filter” and that it has limited impact on the candidate’s ability to perform the actual work its not necessarily that straightforward.
> They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".
If recruiters only pick up your resumes based on keyword matching themselves, what is one to do, if not adapt their resumes to said keywords so they can at least try to get to a human interview?
Not talking about India specifically, but in general. Hiring is broken, so everyone tries to fix it in their own ways to maximize their chances.
It's also the perfect excuse if you get caught lying. “Oh shit, I ran it through ChatGPT one last time after proof-reading, and forgot to review the output carefully. Sorry!”
What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?
We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.
> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?
If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of course I should, as far as brain surgery goes, but there are other jobs out there I can do while I train.
> We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.
SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
So the real answer to your question depends on how much you value other people and your principles, compared to valuing yourself and getting what you want. If you don't want to wrestle with that, just add some personal projects to your personal studying.
>If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work.
Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will judge your knowledge less superficially.
>What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified?
Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a different tech stack is not the same as switching to doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position of privilege who never had to endure poverty and unemployment.
So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part. As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview and both parties are happy and getting their expected value out of it, who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not?
> who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not
Just being blunt: that's called Fraud. Making false representations for personal gain (employment, in this case) is one of the classic examples.
It doesn't matter if nobody checks in the moment, or if you usually get away with it, dishonesty is dishonesty. If I were to discover that someone joined my team under false pretenses, you can bet I'll have very little faith in their credibility going forward.
> The Fourth Circuit, reviewing a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 2314, also noted that "fraud is a broad term, which includes false representations, dishonesty and deceit." See United States v. Grainger, 701 F.2d 308, 311 (4th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 947 (1983).
Outright lies? Perhaps but even then it’s not clear if it meets the legal definition in all cases.
Exaggerating, misinterpreting the requirements and not telling the full story with all the details? Well that’s entirely subjective.
> under false pretenses
Like if a person has only has 2 years of professional experience in tech X but the job ad required 5 and he didn’t explicitly declare that during the interview without being bc prompted?
Or claiming that he has experience with technology Y (but it’s non-“professional” experience since he learnt it pn his own and again.. didn’t disclose that during the interview?
Even if that person turns out to be great at his job and you somehow find out he wasn’t 100% honest about some finer points in the interview (who tracks or remembers that stuff anyway?) you’d still feel the same way?
Not the case in my jurisdiction, exaggerating in your resume is not illegal. And I really don't care, call it whatever you want if that makes you feel better. Companies are dishonest all the time to their customers and to their workers and especially to their candidates. Been screwed 3 times by dishonest employers, I'm only reciprocating their attitude.
I'm just playing the game so that I come up on top the same way they are doing it to us. That's capitalism for you, our current system doesn't reward honesty, it rewards those who are unscrupulous, as they end up at the top. Companies aren't religious holier than though, they're unscrupulous chasing profits, and then if that's the case, I can play the same game.
> Switching to a tech stack is not the same as switching to brain surgery.
SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
> Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching with "year of on the job experience".
I don't think this is always the case, as long as it's on the resume (skills + personal projects + YoE). Then, the technical person can judge your knowledge less superficially. It worked for me!
> So white lies are the only way.
It's actually just a regular lie: You'd be harming people by telling it.
> No offense, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes from a position of privilege
This is actually an offensive thing for you to say, because you are claiming I have attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy, all of which are false. Please focus on substance over name-calling.
> [added later] ...never had to endure poverty and unemployment...
I encourage you to explore empathy regarding the poverty and unemployment you'd be causing for a better-qualified applicant who was passed over due to lies, and not just towards yourself.
We are all people, you are not more important than them, and poverty and unemployment is no worse for you than it is for them.
> [added later] As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview...
We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.
> critical component of both medicine and rocket science
Do you know a lot people who ended up having to write software for rockets or medical devices after applying for a generic web development job?
> from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified
That’s all very nice. Unless you end up being that someone yourself.
> and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
That’s highly debatable. It’s possible a lot of them did the same thing and unless you outright lied (instead of exaggerating etc.) and are still able to do the job is it really “deception”?
Anyway.. there is a lot of nuance and lying vs not lying is not even remotely a binary thing.
I consider unjustly harming others to be bad, whether you're exploding a rocket or not. That's why I added this part:
> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
You're not harming anyone with grooming and pump up your resume to give yourself the best possible chance. Jobs aren't assigned and reserved to people from birth based on fate in order to be something you can steal from them with this. You don't deserve a job just because, you have to compete and interview for it like everyone else, and if you can get it and do the job, then good for you.
If you're better prepared or better at selling yourself at the interview, then you're the one who's gonna get the job. If someone with less/no experience takes your job then maybe you suck at interviewing and need to get better, or maybe the interview process is bad at judging top candidates, but either way it's your responsibility to adapt to the variable interview process and prove yourself versus the other candidates using whichever way you can: work, practice, connections, insider knowledge, cheating, etc. Nothing in life is fair, everyone tries to play their best hand all the time and honesty is not always rewarded, which you'll find out the hard way.
Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".
I refer you to the below lines in the post to which you replied:
> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
> We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.
----
>> Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".
In other words, might makes right. If you manage to scam an old lady out of her retirement savings, you deserve to have it! There's no such thing as "she deserves", only "she competed and she lost", etc etc etc.
It's a good thing there are people in this world that don't subscribe to this "fark you, anything goes, as long as I got mine" style of "ethics".
Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market. All that money devs were getting this last decade has the dual side that tech is an aggressively capitalist industry. Competition is getting much more heated and, having been brought up in the dotcom bust, no not everyone who "wants" to be a software engineers gets to be one. I saw many, many people leave tech for lesser paying but at least hiring careers back in the early 2000s.
I feel that a lot of people that got into tech during this decade long boom period have never really experienced competition. In the last few years companies were often adding positions faster then they could fill them. If you passed the test, you got the job.
When I was getting started, virtually all hiring involved first building a pool of applicants, which could easily take weeks or months if the hiring team/manager wasn't happy with the quality of the pool. Then you had to interview with 5-10 other candidates that the team felt where at a similar strength to you. So even if you did your best, all it took was one other candidate that was better or even simply got a long better with the team to mean you didn't get the job.
You also had to wear a suit to an interview, even if it was for a role making a bit more than minimum wage.
> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then?
I had some trouble finding a sw position after leaving mechanical engineering, but I went to the interview prepared to show I could do it, and it worked.
But you still had to get an interview first, which is often the most difficult part. Not everyone is so lucky to get such a chance. What then? Go homeless or lie till you get an interview?
The funny thing is I'm not even a mechanical engineer, but a a CS engineer, just mostly experienced in a stack that's not used much anymore but it's not like I can't learn another stack, I just refuse to put up with discriminatory hiring practices that treat you as a checkbox list, and so I have to work around the employers'/recruiters' bullshit hiring practices.
What do you think happens when you lie through the interview ? I recently had this in my team - we were hiring fast and hired someone we shouldn't have - fired after two weeks. So your best case is receiving 6 weeks income after getting lucky and scamming someone through an interview ?
I dunno, I managed to get stellar reviews form my boss and colleagues after getting the job. Maybe not everyone is incompetent.
Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.
You touched on an important topic: if a candidate has potential but HR has no way to tell if that candidate is any good, should they hire him?
How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?
The problem is that this is not a HR problem. This is a you problem. Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?
The problem with HR is not buzzwords. Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data. What are you giving them that allows them to say you are a safer hire than any other candidate around you? You are not giving them anything to work with. They can take a gamble on you, but they can also take a gamble on anyone else walking through their door. If they are going to take a gamble, wouldn't they bet on someone who on paper leads to better odds? What are you giving them to work with?
>Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?
Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector. They don't know what a Github is, they don't even know the difference between Java and Javascript, they only know to look for "5+ years of Java experience" because that's what the job description says, that's all they do.
I also couldn't believe that myself until a recruiter posted a video of herself on LinkedIn showing why "It's hard to find good SW engineers", and all she was doing was pattern matching and filtering based on buzzwords and years of experience.
How do you stand out in such cases? Are you gonna write a one extra page on your resume where you are explaining the value of transferable technical skills to a 20-somethign year old humanities graduate who has 30 seconds to review your resume?
>How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?
Easy. For example, if someone has good experience in Java, they most likely can be a good C# programmer. But that needs some technical knowledge, beyond matching keywords like a baboon. Even ChatGPT would be better at assessing resumes and potential of candidates than the clueless HR people.
>Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data.
Other than some officially signed credentials like accountants, doctors or lawyers have, there's no data on a resume that's instantly objectively verifiable on a quick glance since everything there could be a lie until further proven. I could say I was CTO of Google. When they get 50+ applications for one position, they're only gonna skim through resumes to pick the best fitting one, not start doing checks on all of them.
>What are you giving them to work with?
Just like lawyers and bean counters, HR's job is to protect the company and their careers and to minimize risks. I'm giving them a white lie that fits to their biases and covers their ass in order to pass to the technical stage. That's what I'm giving them. It's a constant cat and mouse game in this racket.
> Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector.
That's a cheap excuse. That's not their job. Their job is to hire someone, anyone, within the budget and that meets minimum requirements. Their responsibility is to get a butt on a seat that can do the work. Any candidate that passes that hiring bar is a safe choice.
You're talking as if their goal was to hire the absolute best based on rigorous objective criteria and crisp stack rankings. It is not. They look for someone, anyone, that is able to do the job, fit in, and not shit the bed. And they need to be able to defend their choice. That's why education matters, prior experience matters, certiciation matters, and even recommendations matter.
Why do you think internal recommendations are a fast track to hire? Do you have any excuse like corruption? Or do you understand that the goal is to find people who are able to do the job, fit within the organization, and not cause problems?
If you fail to understand the problem, you will never find it's solution.
These people all have cushy jobs already. You haven't seen how people optimize for TC in the Indian market. There's a certain scale after which petty dishonesty starts to have a bad impact on overall environment and turn it into low-trust.
There are many recruiters out there that will flat out reject someone if they aren't a perfect match for every single skill listed. I don't have a problem with lying to get past that gauntlet.
Just don't be surprised when you're passed over because someone else lied harder, and be aware that, like them, you're harming honest applicants by lying. After all, it's the same game.
That said, it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead. A few thousand years doesn't cover a lot of evolution away from "fark you, I got mine".
> it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead.
Recruiters are harming me by taking a cut of my salary and offering nothing of value other than screening some calls and adding my resume to a spam listing and robodialer. Do you think I care about harming them
I'm sorry you feel hurt or harmed by someone. I've felt that, too, and it really sucks. It's not a good feeling.
I avoid recruiters unless they can serve me well, too (increased salary, signing bonus, etc), instead preferring to applying directly to individual companies whose mission is interesting and whose culture matches mine.
That said, I don't think hurt is a valid justification for hurting someone else, like the innocent parties I mentioned (potential future coworkers, other job applicants). That perpetuates a chain of hurt. Break the chain.
> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them. [0]
> We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview. [0]
If you wish to reply, it'd be appreciated if you could reply in the referenced thread where you originally made your above claims, and where they were originally refuted. Arguing the same claim over multiple posts seems like it'd be a waste of your time.
Why would they take a percentage of your salary? You're the recruit. They're providing the business a service (good recruits who can fill a position), so they charge the business. You're providing the recruiter a service (being that good recruit), so they pay you in the form of a signing bonus. Additionally, since the employer pays the recruiter a percentage of one year's salary, the recruiter is incentivized to make that salary as high as possible, so they'll negotiate on your behalf in that regard.
And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well maybe they don’t.. but of if they manage to take your interview spot it hardly matters.
> And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those?
Perhaps the first step anyone should take is to arrive at the realization that the point of a hiring process from the perspective of a hiring manager is not to find the absolute best candidate. The goal is to pick anyone, anyone at all, from a pool of acceptable candidates. If they are able to get through the door and not shit the bed, they are a superb hire.
And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well maybe they don’t.. but if they manage to take your interview spot it hardly matters.
Personally, I think free software are really important, and I love the developers that I am hiring to be in this mindset as well.
So the first think I am doing is to check their gitlab / github profiles. If they love to write code and to share it, there obviously will be code there to check.
Of course this code could be written with help of an AI but, nothing is preventing the developer to use it while working as well. As long as the result if good, everything is fine.
I think the point is that LLMs makes it easier and cheaper to produce a large volume of convincing lies. The candidate likely would not have been able to produce convincing-enough lies to get through the resume screen without LLMs.
That's true. On the other hand I have tried ChatGPT to review programming concepts or language features and I have found it very convenient and more useful than Googling.
For instance if you want to prepare for a C dev interview and would like to review what 'static' means and does (one of the super usual interview questions) you can just ask and immediately get a pretty much perfect explanation without noise. It's not cheating, it's just a better tool.
How do you reconcile that opinion with the fact that LLMs trained on programming concepts generally give incorrect answers about 50% of the time?
Is it actually more useful than Googling, or is it just so convenient that you let it convince you that it was useful? Or, depressingly, is Google just becoming so useless that something wrong a solid half of the time is still better?
I have a young colleague who wanted a job at a FAANG company, and asked for advice. I said spend a couple weeks studying the leetcode books - it will be the best value for time spent you'll ever get.
Or you can open any good C book and review that way. Not to bash on the use of AI, but there's a lot of alternative ways that for me is more reliable to get knowledge from.
I'm not sure that it's a good thing if "ability to produce convincing lies" is something that a company requires in a job candidate. People getting into jobs who aren't exceptional liars when they couldn't have otherwise seems like win to me.
>I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful.
It would be better if we just stopped asking l33tc0d3 questions, since it's been shown over and over again it's a pointless waste of time on both side of the aisle.
I don’t employ leet code questions in my hiring process, but I do think they can provide value or signal.
If a candidate is taking the time to practice and master leetcode it does show the candidate is motivated, demonstrates their ability to learn and internalize knowledge, and to utilize that knowledge under pressure.
If those are things you want to screen for and have a high volume of talented candidates I can see a use for them.
And yet, ability to code — or actually ability to learn to think algorithmically — is elementary for IT positions, and on average an uncommon enough that it's very much worth it for companies to test for it. You're not trying to suggest just employing any competent middle manager or marketing person to code, after all.
> I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems
I've been really impressed with how much a of performance lift working on leetcode with AI is. It's so much easier to focus on developing rapid problem decomposition skills and working with an interviewer during the problem.
Unfortunately it's also necessary to improve this process because the current standards for the companies still doing leetcode interviews are getting pretty wild these days. Meta requires 2 med-hard question solved in 20 minutes or less each for the screen these days! Even if you have solid algorithmic thinking solving and implementing solutions that quickly requires you to be insanely prepped.
English is not my first language, and yet I'm fluent, but some of the questions I've been asked to solve are insanely confusingly worded and so I have a harder time because the interview process at some places is unrealistic.
The interviewer might be looking to see how you deal with bad specifications which, in my experience, are also often confusingly worded, vague and/or conflicting.
this candidates version of preparing with AI was a portion of the issue for sure though. he utilized it to attempt to optimize his dishonesty about his past experiences.
i totally agree otherwise, there are a ton of other good proper ways to prepare for an interview using AI. for example his resume, im sure he asked for some refinements about how he was wording certain things, and who cares at all that its not word for word grammatically from his mind. getting past the resume screening process is a huge part of the battle, and all the scam attempts and bad candidates will be optimizing their resume as well. The info within it should still be relevant about your ACTUAL technical skills or you are just also falling into the scam/bad candidates category.
Of course your example is a solid one, which ive done myself as well for leetcode stuff and plenty of other stuff.
IF his experiences where actually real and he used AI to simulate an interview based on them, thats a fine use case for AI, so i guess this article likely should have used a more clear way to condone this candidates preparation.
This shouldn't be surreal at all. A candidate just wasn't able to make up relevant experiences on the spot.