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This is not the right attitude to bring in to the workplace. You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who do

This is not the right attitude to bring in to the workplace. You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who don't know what UNIX, APIs and POSIX are. If you can't communicate technical matters nicely then you have not yet developed the right attitude for a professional working environment. It's the same thing with doctors when they create metaphors to explain complicated problems. You need to speak in the layperson's terminology, and if all they know is UNIX then call it UNIX and leave it at that.

muglug 9y ago
Nah, they were pretty patient - updating their resumé so that they weren't lying, yet still giving the recruiter what they thought the recruiter wanted. Presumably they were worried that the resumé wouldn't just be seen by a recruiter, and a more knowledgeable person might flag it.
mquander 9y ago
Verbatim exchange: Thanks for the quick response and clarifications. Experience with Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems is largely transferrable thanks to the standardization that resulted from the POSIX specification. As a result, the terms "POSIX" and "UNIX-like" by-and-large refer to the same thing. My experiences are in particular with developing software for Linux platforms, which are the most popular of the UNIX-like operating systems. I also have experience using POSIX-specified APIs to ensure consistency and portability. Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS, and I would find it hard to believe that such outdated technologies are underpinning Facebook's advanced innovations. I've updated my resume to indicate my familiarity with Linux, POSIX, and UNIX-like systems. Please let me know if there is anything else you need. Thanks for your time and consideration, Stanley Zhang. Response: Hi Stanley, Thank you for the tutorial. We're looking for experience working on Linux and Unix. If you do not meet the above, please let me know if there are other roles you'd like to rank. Best, ________ I'd love to see you defend why the guy who wrote the first half is bad at technical communication and needs to develop a professional attitude, and the recruiter -- who copies and pastes the same incorrect response over and over, showing no indication that they read a single word -- is a professional communicator with a good attitude.
- zhanwei 9y ago
  The guy writes well. The recruiter is the one with bad attitude. But I would say that a practical communicator knows his audience, and in this case might want to give up explaining POSIX, change his resume, and move on.
- Denzel 9y ago
  Stanley might change his tune if he broaden his experiences a bit. A close friend of mine is a 20-something, now, Chief Engineer at a defense contractor working with the big private names and USAF. He was a hardcore Linux guy before taking this position 5 or so years ago. He'll tell you himself, there's little transfer between deep Linux knowledge and deep Unix knowledge. They're two different beasts. Trust me, Unix is not limited to programmers from the 1970s, it's very much alive, and it's not outdated. There's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff going on outside of Silicon Valley. I wish I could talk about it.
  - erikbye 9y ago
    Yep, still use AIX here.
- eridius 9y ago
  A professional communicator tailors their communication to their audience. Stanley's initial explanation was pretty good, but since the recruiter didn't seem to understand it, Stanley should have adjusted his approach instead of doubling down.
  - mquander 9y ago
    I'm sure he could have done a better job communicating to the recruiter. You could tell he was slightly irritated, and maybe somehow he could have figured out a different framing that the recruiter would understand. (But note that at the end, he changed his strategy and said simply that he had experience with Linux and UNIX, and the recruiter still didn't care. It really isn't clear whether there was any approach that would have worked.) He did like a 75% good job. But the recruiter did a 0% good job. It's not easy to personally take it upon yourself to make every interaction work perfectly when the other party is trying their hardest to make it fail.
cracell 9y ago
The problem here is the that person thinks they are talking to a technical person when they are actually talking to a non-technical recruiter. IMO the recruiter should have basic understanding of the technologies they are recruiting for. But it's the norm for them to have no idea.
majormajor 9y ago
It's unclear to me if the recruiter meant "experience" in the "professional experience" sense vs just "have used personally," I'd say there was a definite failure on both sides to figure out if that was the expectation. Both parties in this are basically just repeating the same stuff back and forth at each other "you need Unix experience" "I have Unix on the skills section" and repeat...
cellularmitosis 9y ago
I'm not sure I agree. You bring up an important point -- that specialists will always encounter slight errors when interacting with laypeople. There's a tricky balance to be struck there -- how do you communicate with them without adopting the same errors yourself, but also without bruising their ego, while hopefully educating them at the same time? The best mix seems to be the "correct by agreeing" approach. "Is the tumor beniggun?" "Yes, that's correct, the tumor is benign".
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  This is a broader concept that I've had to get used to recently: I don't think this is a specialist/layman thing as much as a smart/dumb thing. I know plenty of very smart people who are happy to show their ignorance about a topic that they don't know about when talking to someone with that knowledge (including examples like the benign/bennigun thing). For the first time in my life, I'm working with people who aren't particularly intelligent[1]. The lack of intelligence doesn't bother me much per se, but I was absolutely not prepared for how incredibly childish their psyche is when it comes to making mistakes and learning from them, admitting they don't know things, asking questions, etc. It was absolutely shocking how routinely people would read all kinds of ulterior motives into every possible question: "the only reason you would ask X is because you're trying to put me down" and stuff like that. I've learned to heavily sugarcoat things, stroke egos with compliments before describing things that need improvement or fixing, etc etc. Goddam is it an exhausting waste of time. My plan at this point is to steer my career as far away as possible from people who are this stupid and immature; I spent a long time at the start of my career surrounded by very smart people and I just got used to the idea that everyone is secure in their intelligence and everyone can focus on being productive together without needing to keep stopping and feeding the egos of infants. [1] Just to forestall the complaints: this isn't a value judgment of who they are as people, it's just a single weakness. A comparable weakness of my own is that I have to exert quite a bit of effort to maintain a strong work ethic when being hardworking comes more easily to some.
gargarplex 9y ago
There is an extremely fine line between speaking the layperson's terminology and lying. Wrong: "Yep, I have UNIX experience!" Right: "These days, the phrases 'UNIX' and 'UNIX-like systems' are used interchangeably. Please double check this with your hiring manager to confirm that we're on the same page."
- f1notformula1 9y ago
  Agreed there's a fine line. I somehow find myself a little further along the spectrum - Perhaps I'm jaded from dealing with too many recruiters who are trying to check boxes. If I really thought this job was worth my time, I would've updated my resume to say UNIX and Linux, and then clarified during the first interview with a technical person.
  - Aeolun 9y ago
    Which incidentally is why so many actually technical people are tired of all these resumes that say an applicant has a skill they don't actually have.
- foo101 9y ago
  Wrong: "Yep, I have UNIX experience!" Right: "Yep, I have Unix experience! I have worked on Solaris which is a bonafide Unix system. I also have experience with Unix-like systems like FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux."
  - tristor 9y ago
    Solaris and AIX /are/ UNIX. Solaris is derived from SunOS, which is derived from 4.2BSD, which was directly licensed by Sun from AT&T via a UNIX source license. Solaris and SunOS were both certified as UNIX. Similarly IBM licensed AT&T UNIX and derived AIX. It is still certified as UNIX. The Open Group holds the UNIX trademark and copyrights and conducts the certification and licensing process these days. See here: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ You've posted functionally the same comment multiple times in this thread. No matter how many times you say it, you are technically incorrect. UNIX is a valid piece of terminology when referring to commercial Unix OSes.
dave_sullivan 9y ago
> You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who don't know what UNIX, APIs and POSIX are. Yes, but if a recruiter is attempting to convince the smartest people at top universities to come be an intern at their company, they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix. Or at least they should be smart enough to not triple-down on that difference when they clearly don't know wtf they're talking about. Bottom line is OP is a candidate that should have gotten through to the next stage and should not have been disqualified because the front-line recruiter was being an idiot. It's a missed opportunity and there are probably many more like it.
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  > Yes, but if a recruiter is attempting to convince the smartest people at top universities to come be an intern at their company aaand now I understand why he is how he is.
- cakedoggie 9y ago
  > they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix. I hate this attitude. How can a recruiter know all the intricacies for the roles he is hiring, he would need to be an expert. He has to know everything he they have to learn a whole pile of new terms.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    That’s why you pay a technical recruiter. It’s their job to know all the terms and their relationships. They don’t need to know how to program them, just what fits what. Think the difference between a athlete and a sports reporter. The best sports reporters know the intricacies but no one expects them to play the sports they cover. Generic recruiters are not very useful.
    - cakedoggie 9y ago
      It is stupid to expect a technical recruiter to know everything, especially in this ever changing world of languages and frameworks. I like how easy it is for people to blame someone else here, rather than try to understand it from the recruiters position. I understand, we all hate recruiters.
Aeolun 9y ago
How about recruiters that recruit for a role at Facebook of all things just learn what the hell they are recruiting for instead? I don't think the onus is on developers here to explain why Unix and Posix are interchangable. It's like the carpenter telling the recruiter that yes, his skills in building a chair transfer to building a table.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  if you're not autistic you just say "yes im an expert in unix" and move on your with your life. it isn't worth it to do anything else.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    He may have assumed that at some point someone in the hiring pipeline would _not_ be an idiot (or in your words, "would be autistic") and may notice his false claim. Especially for a college student applying for an internship, it's a little much to expect him to know exactly where lying on your resume is appropriate. (At some point he said "I have experience in Linux and UNIX" and the moron on the other end still referred to his resume saying Unix-like). I think you may be extrapolating your own experience of "not being autistic" (by your definition) a little too widely.
    - oculusthrift 9y ago
      I think it's silly and demeaning to think of college students as being that naive. I was one very recently and believe it or not we aren't that way. Especially ones who study engineering at top schools like CMU. Everyday I talk to someone who isn't informed about one subject or another. It should be a common skill for people to put their selves in the other person's shoes and explain it at their level. When a non-cs person asks me about what exactly my job is I don't start going into details about Hadoop and Spark etc, I talk at a level they could understand about data. As far as the autism comment, it was a little offensive but I meant it in terms of ability to read the social situation, not cs knowledge. I may be a little harsh here, because everyone makes mistakes, especially in college. And there is nothing wrong with that. I've done embarrassing things with recruiters too, believe me. I just want to make sure people realize it's a mistake and learn from it.
monktastic1 9y ago
Recruiter: "We're looking for students with experience working on Linux and Unix. If you do not meet the above ..." Stanley: "As per my previous email, I have experience working on Linux and Unix ..." Recruiter: "Your email and resume say Unix-like systems, which is not exactly Unix." What is the point of the recruiter's last email, claiming that the email doesn't say Unix, when it clearly does? It looks to me as though Stanley was crystal clear at this point, and the recruiter still wouldn't have any of it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bshanks 9y ago
(this comment is a dup of one that i submitted elsewhere in this thread) As a tutorial for those of us like me who sometimes stumble in situations like this, could someone who found the OP's responses to the recruiter unprofessional please post example phrasing of what the OP should have said? Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie (so they won't just change their resume to 'Unix' instead of 'Unix-like'). This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase things and I think an example would be educational.
TheMagicHorsey 9y ago
Nothing in that guy's email was rude or unprofessional. Is just communicating a fact politely, "not nice"?
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  Irrelevant that you are "right". You have to guess what the recruiter wanted and just say yes.
jrs95 9y ago
A technical recruiter should definitely know, especially after you've explained it in exceedingly obvious language. It's not like just updating your resume to say different words is necessarily going to work. He more or less did that at the end by being specific about Linux, and yet the recruiter was like "oh it still doesn't say Unix". My grandmother, who didn't even graduate from high school, is less clueless than this guy.

muglug 9y ago

Nah, they were pretty patient - updating their resumé so that they weren't lying, yet still giving the recruiter what they thought the recruiter wanted. Presumably they were worried that the resumé wouldn't just be seen by a recruiter, and a more knowledgeable person might flag it.

mquander 9y ago

Verbatim exchange: Thanks for the quick response and clarifications. Experience with Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems is largely transferrable thanks to the standardization that resulted from the POSIX specification. As a result, the terms "POSIX" and "UNIX-like" by-and-large refer to the same thing. My experiences are in particular with developing software for Linux platforms, which are the most popular of the UNIX-like operating systems. I also have experience using POSIX-specified APIs to ensure consistency and portability. Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS, and I would find it hard to believe that such outdated technologies are underpinning Facebook's advanced innovations. I've updated my resume to indicate my familiarity with Linux, POSIX, and UNIX-like systems. Please let me know if there is anything else you need. Thanks for your time and consideration, Stanley Zhang. Response: Hi Stanley, Thank you for the tutorial. We're looking for experience working on Linux and Unix. If you do not meet the above, please let me know if there are other roles you'd like to rank. Best, ________ I'd love to see you defend why the guy who wrote the first half is bad at technical communication and needs to develop a professional attitude, and the recruiter -- who copies and pastes the same incorrect response over and over, showing no indication that they read a single word -- is a professional communicator with a good attitude.

zhanwei 9y ago
The guy writes well. The recruiter is the one with bad attitude. But I would say that a practical communicator knows his audience, and in this case might want to give up explaining POSIX, change his resume, and move on.
Denzel 9y ago
Stanley might change his tune if he broaden his experiences a bit. A close friend of mine is a 20-something, now, Chief Engineer at a defense contractor working with the big private names and USAF. He was a hardcore Linux guy before taking this position 5 or so years ago. He'll tell you himself, there's little transfer between deep Linux knowledge and deep Unix knowledge. They're two different beasts. Trust me, Unix is not limited to programmers from the 1970s, it's very much alive, and it's not outdated. There's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff going on outside of Silicon Valley. I wish I could talk about it.
- erikbye 9y ago
  Yep, still use AIX here.
eridius 9y ago
A professional communicator tailors their communication to their audience. Stanley's initial explanation was pretty good, but since the recruiter didn't seem to understand it, Stanley should have adjusted his approach instead of doubling down.
- mquander 9y ago
  I'm sure he could have done a better job communicating to the recruiter. You could tell he was slightly irritated, and maybe somehow he could have figured out a different framing that the recruiter would understand. (But note that at the end, he changed his strategy and said simply that he had experience with Linux and UNIX, and the recruiter still didn't care. It really isn't clear whether there was any approach that would have worked.) He did like a 75% good job. But the recruiter did a 0% good job. It's not easy to personally take it upon yourself to make every interaction work perfectly when the other party is trying their hardest to make it fail.

cracell 9y ago

The problem here is the that person thinks they are talking to a technical person when they are actually talking to a non-technical recruiter. IMO the recruiter should have basic understanding of the technologies they are recruiting for. But it's the norm for them to have no idea.

majormajor 9y ago

It's unclear to me if the recruiter meant "experience" in the "professional experience" sense vs just "have used personally," I'd say there was a definite failure on both sides to figure out if that was the expectation. Both parties in this are basically just repeating the same stuff back and forth at each other "you need Unix experience" "I have Unix on the skills section" and repeat...

cellularmitosis 9y ago

I'm not sure I agree. You bring up an important point -- that specialists will always encounter slight errors when interacting with laypeople. There's a tricky balance to be struck there -- how do you communicate with them without adopting the same errors yourself, but also without bruising their ego, while hopefully educating them at the same time? The best mix seems to be the "correct by agreeing" approach. "Is the tumor beniggun?" "Yes, that's correct, the tumor is benign".

wutbrodo 9y ago
This is a broader concept that I've had to get used to recently: I don't think this is a specialist/layman thing as much as a smart/dumb thing. I know plenty of very smart people who are happy to show their ignorance about a topic that they don't know about when talking to someone with that knowledge (including examples like the benign/bennigun thing). For the first time in my life, I'm working with people who aren't particularly intelligent[1]. The lack of intelligence doesn't bother me much per se, but I was absolutely not prepared for how incredibly childish their psyche is when it comes to making mistakes and learning from them, admitting they don't know things, asking questions, etc. It was absolutely shocking how routinely people would read all kinds of ulterior motives into every possible question: "the only reason you would ask X is because you're trying to put me down" and stuff like that. I've learned to heavily sugarcoat things, stroke egos with compliments before describing things that need improvement or fixing, etc etc. Goddam is it an exhausting waste of time. My plan at this point is to steer my career as far away as possible from people who are this stupid and immature; I spent a long time at the start of my career surrounded by very smart people and I just got used to the idea that everyone is secure in their intelligence and everyone can focus on being productive together without needing to keep stopping and feeding the egos of infants. [1] Just to forestall the complaints: this isn't a value judgment of who they are as people, it's just a single weakness. A comparable weakness of my own is that I have to exert quite a bit of effort to maintain a strong work ethic when being hardworking comes more easily to some.

gargarplex 9y ago

There is an extremely fine line between speaking the layperson's terminology and lying. Wrong: "Yep, I have UNIX experience!" Right: "These days, the phrases 'UNIX' and 'UNIX-like systems' are used interchangeably. Please double check this with your hiring manager to confirm that we're on the same page."

f1notformula1 9y ago
Agreed there's a fine line. I somehow find myself a little further along the spectrum - Perhaps I'm jaded from dealing with too many recruiters who are trying to check boxes. If I really thought this job was worth my time, I would've updated my resume to say UNIX and Linux, and then clarified during the first interview with a technical person.
- Aeolun 9y ago
  Which incidentally is why so many actually technical people are tired of all these resumes that say an applicant has a skill they don't actually have.
foo101 9y ago
Wrong: "Yep, I have UNIX experience!" Right: "Yep, I have Unix experience! I have worked on Solaris which is a bonafide Unix system. I also have experience with Unix-like systems like FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux."
- tristor 9y ago
  Solaris and AIX /are/ UNIX. Solaris is derived from SunOS, which is derived from 4.2BSD, which was directly licensed by Sun from AT&T via a UNIX source license. Solaris and SunOS were both certified as UNIX. Similarly IBM licensed AT&T UNIX and derived AIX. It is still certified as UNIX. The Open Group holds the UNIX trademark and copyrights and conducts the certification and licensing process these days. See here: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ You've posted functionally the same comment multiple times in this thread. No matter how many times you say it, you are technically incorrect. UNIX is a valid piece of terminology when referring to commercial Unix OSes.

dave_sullivan 9y ago

> You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who don't know what UNIX, APIs and POSIX are. Yes, but if a recruiter is attempting to convince the smartest people at top universities to come be an intern at their company, they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix. Or at least they should be smart enough to not triple-down on that difference when they clearly don't know wtf they're talking about. Bottom line is OP is a candidate that should have gotten through to the next stage and should not have been disqualified because the front-line recruiter was being an idiot. It's a missed opportunity and there are probably many more like it.

akhilcacharya 9y ago
> Yes, but if a recruiter is attempting to convince the smartest people at top universities to come be an intern at their company aaand now I understand why he is how he is.
cakedoggie 9y ago
> they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix. I hate this attitude. How can a recruiter know all the intricacies for the roles he is hiring, he would need to be an expert. He has to know everything he they have to learn a whole pile of new terms.
- protomyth 9y ago
  That’s why you pay a technical recruiter. It’s their job to know all the terms and their relationships. They don’t need to know how to program them, just what fits what. Think the difference between a athlete and a sports reporter. The best sports reporters know the intricacies but no one expects them to play the sports they cover. Generic recruiters are not very useful.
  - cakedoggie 9y ago
    It is stupid to expect a technical recruiter to know everything, especially in this ever changing world of languages and frameworks. I like how easy it is for people to blame someone else here, rather than try to understand it from the recruiters position. I understand, we all hate recruiters.

Aeolun 9y ago

How about recruiters that recruit for a role at Facebook of all things just learn what the hell they are recruiting for instead? I don't think the onus is on developers here to explain why Unix and Posix are interchangable. It's like the carpenter telling the recruiter that yes, his skills in building a chair transfer to building a table.

oculusthrift 9y ago
if you're not autistic you just say "yes im an expert in unix" and move on your with your life. it isn't worth it to do anything else.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  He may have assumed that at some point someone in the hiring pipeline would _not_ be an idiot (or in your words, "would be autistic") and may notice his false claim. Especially for a college student applying for an internship, it's a little much to expect him to know exactly where lying on your resume is appropriate. (At some point he said "I have experience in Linux and UNIX" and the moron on the other end still referred to his resume saying Unix-like). I think you may be extrapolating your own experience of "not being autistic" (by your definition) a little too widely.
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    I think it's silly and demeaning to think of college students as being that naive. I was one very recently and believe it or not we aren't that way. Especially ones who study engineering at top schools like CMU. Everyday I talk to someone who isn't informed about one subject or another. It should be a common skill for people to put their selves in the other person's shoes and explain it at their level. When a non-cs person asks me about what exactly my job is I don't start going into details about Hadoop and Spark etc, I talk at a level they could understand about data. As far as the autism comment, it was a little offensive but I meant it in terms of ability to read the social situation, not cs knowledge. I may be a little harsh here, because everyone makes mistakes, especially in college. And there is nothing wrong with that. I've done embarrassing things with recruiters too, believe me. I just want to make sure people realize it's a mistake and learn from it.

monktastic1 9y ago

Recruiter: "We're looking for students with experience working on Linux and Unix. If you do not meet the above ..." Stanley: "As per my previous email, I have experience working on Linux and Unix ..." Recruiter: "Your email and resume say Unix-like systems, which is not exactly Unix." What is the point of the recruiter's last email, claiming that the email doesn't say Unix, when it clearly does? It looks to me as though Stanley was crystal clear at this point, and the recruiter still wouldn't have any of it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bshanks 9y ago

(this comment is a dup of one that i submitted elsewhere in this thread) As a tutorial for those of us like me who sometimes stumble in situations like this, could someone who found the OP's responses to the recruiter unprofessional please post example phrasing of what the OP should have said? Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie (so they won't just change their resume to 'Unix' instead of 'Unix-like'). This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase things and I think an example would be educational.

TheMagicHorsey 9y ago

Nothing in that guy's email was rude or unprofessional. Is just communicating a fact politely, "not nice"?

kowdermeister 9y ago
Irrelevant that you are "right". You have to guess what the recruiter wanted and just say yes.

jrs95 9y ago

A technical recruiter should definitely know, especially after you've explained it in exceedingly obvious language. It's not like just updating your resume to say different words is necessarily going to work. He more or less did that at the end by being specific about Linux, and yet the recruiter was like "oh it still doesn't say Unix". My grandmother, who didn't even graduate from high school, is less clueless than this guy.