30 ms·

Lying on your resume

• wtvanhest 14y ago
  I guess the question then would be; what if he didn't have the ability to put Mensa on the resume? I don’t intend to be rhetorical; it would be great to hear some other suggestions.
  • veyron 14y ago
    The fact that they had to bring someone else in means that they thought it necessary to evaluate him differently. Had nothing to do with Mensa.
  • gridaphobe 14y ago
    My impression was that he wasn't actually a member of Mensa. That was his lie, but he didn't try to cover it up.
    • troels 14y ago
      That's odd. That's not my impression at all. I figure he would have put anything that would draw some attention - Had he been a boyscout, he could have put that down, but since he happened to be a mensa member, he put that instead. I definitely don't think it was a lie, as that would have undermined the entire point.
      • patrickambron 14y ago
        My impression was since he didn't have any college degrees, he was being turned away from jobs. He contemplated the idea of simply lying, but instead, thought of another way to draw attention to his credentials that would help people overlook the fact he hadn't gone to college. Rather than make up a degree, he highlighted the fact that he was in Mensa, which ended up working
• angry-hacker 14y ago
  It's difficult to start if you don't have a formal paper or don't want to lie about it... if you have proven yourself somewhere already, it's not a problem anymore. I had very slow start because I didn't want (or know how) to lie about my education, I'm doing great now don't care about it anymore.
• veyron 14y ago
  In many industries they won't consider you without a degree. And if you lie, you will be caught (there's a clearinghouse specifically for this)
  • guard-of-terra 14y ago
    In many industries you actually need a degree: you need knowledge and skills to do anything useful while not being a walking disaster. Not the case in most of the IT.
• justin_hancock 14y ago
  I have had the joy of interviewing people who've lied on their CVs (Resumes). One particular pearl was a guy claiming he'd worked on a particular project I had lead, I proceeded to ask him about the project who ran it, what it was about etc, he gave some vague answers, needless to say he didn't get the job. Though the worst offenders for this aren't individual agents, its usually 3rd parties such as body shops trying to provide augmentation staff or recruitment agents doctoring resumes to try and get candidates in. I believe it was the case with my earlier example.
  • crusso 14y ago
    I consider even small lies on a resume to be red flags. The worst ones are lies that don't have to be told to get the job. They expose character flaws that I don't want in anyone working with or for me. For example, I had a software development candidate who put "Fluent in Spanish" on his resume. Spanish wasn't a requirement for the job in any way, but unfortunately for him there were several native Spanish speakers in my office. I pulled a co-worker into the interview room and asked her to speak with the candidate in Spanish. I understand a little Spanish and was able to follow as she asked him about where he was from and what his hobbies were. The candidate could barely converse with her. I guess he had a couple of courses at school and called himself "fluent". You never know everything that is true and isn't true on a resume, so interviewing someone is a process of building up a web of trust. I'm going to validate whatever I can in an interview from software design and pattern knowledge to whether or not you really were an Eagle Scout. It's all fair game if you put it on your resume.
    • toomuchcoffee 14y ago
      I guess he had a couple of courses at school and called himself "fluent". Umm, another possibility is that he learned Castilian, and the people in your office grew up speaking some Latin American version. Just the other day a native speaker from Spain told me of his being completely flummoxed by the border guards trying to casually chat him up on his entry to the U.S.
      • 14y ago
• snorkel 14y ago
  I've seen good candidates get turned away for not finishing college, and to that I have to ask would you turn away Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs? Many professions need to change their attitude about requiring college degrees.
  • EliRivers 14y ago
    Is Zuckerberg a particularly skilled programmer? Is he some kind of business genius, churning out an endless string of sure-fire hits? Or did he get insanely lucky and cash in before it all fell apart?
    • lincolnq 14y ago
      You ask this question in a way that suggests that you think he got insanely lucky, and that's it. Whereas I actually think he is a great businessman. (I also think he got lucky) He could have sold Facebook for billions of dollars at any point. If he felt like he was riding on luck, he should have expected his luck to run out at any moment in the last five years or so, and thus have a strong incentive to sell. So he was either being exceptionally irrational (stubborn, stupid, etc.) or he knows something you don't about the business he's in.
      • _delirium 14y ago
        I don't think the latter part follows: even if Facebook got big (and became worth billions) primarily through luck, it doesn't mean that the rational decision would be to assume it was only luck keeping it afloat thereafter. Once something's already big, it's a whole different game; now you're managing a large company with considerable assets and brand. Presumably at that point he also had lots of paid lawyers and staff advising him.
      • veyron 14y ago
        The "insanely lucky" part focuses more in initial traction and less on future actions. He got in at the right time in the right milieu. THAT part is luck. You take it as a foregone conclusion that the social revolution would happen, but its not clear when or how it would manifest. Later on, even if he made a misstep Facebook wouldn't blow up. If he tried deploying Beacon earlier on, for example, FB might not have proliferated. "He could have sold Facebook for billions of dollars at any point. If he felt like he was riding on luck, he should have expected his luck to run out at any moment in the last five years or so, and thus have a strong incentive to sell." That's true of many people, including the Digg people.
• patdennis 14y ago
  I stopped attending college with one semester left until graduation. It's on my resume and it's never held me back in any way. The key is that I was able to prove myself early on in my industry (before even leaving college). That set me up with the connections I needed to get my foot in the door. edit: I guess I should clarify that I left college to take a job, not because I was failing or anything like that.
  • overshard 14y ago
    I'm in the exact same, comfortable, spot. I left college with a year, maybe a hard semester, until I graduated. Took a great job, had lots of work experience even before college and have never had a problem. If you have no experience they look for a degree. If you have no degree they look for experience. Just make sure you have 1 of 2.
  • georgemcbay 14y ago
    Similar situation here. I went to a 5 year school with co-operative education (Northeastern University) and ended up quitting and going to work for the company I was interning in a previous semester prior to starting my final year. I have the school listed on my resume but I do not claim to have a degree.
• Peroni 14y ago
  UK based experience here so my experience may not apply outside that. As some of you know, I worked as a successful technical recruiter for a number of years and I only ever came across one organisation that requires proof of your educational qualifications. The rest simply assume you're telling the truth. It's a risky strategy but in software development at least, someone with a few years of development experience under their belt who lies about having a CS degree will struggle to maintain the lie once they are given tasks that require a fundamental understanding of programming theory. The more experience you have, the easier it is to pull it off. On a side note, we interview tech directors and CTO's on a regular basis and ask each of them How important is a CS degree in todays market? as well as How much value do you place in a Developers personal projects such as github & demo sites when they apply for a job with your company? and the answers give an interesting insight into the mindset and importance of experience versus qualifications. Link: http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog
  • adam-a 14y ago
    As a UK based programmer I've had 3 jobs since leaving University. Out of those, 2 I recall asked to see proof of my degree (photo copy of my graduation certificate). The other I can't remember but I think they did too. This is probably because I am a more recent graduate, if I had 10 years experience I imagine that would be more important to companies than my education. However, I think plenty of places do take it quite seriously.
    • Peroni 14y ago
      I'm sure most companies would require proof for a recently graduated programmer but as your experience grows, the quality checking decreases.
• debacle 14y ago
  My degree was a formality. It's a footnote on my resume, for HR's eyes only. When I get into the interview, I'm completely candid - All college taught me was how to pay off debt. I'm still learning.
  • cheez 14y ago
    Then maybe you didn't take advantage of the things college offered you. For people who just want to follow the beaten path, college is just another footnote. For those who want to explore, there is a lot of opportunity.
    • debacle 14y ago
      I worked full-time in my industry for five (six?) years before finishing college. College for software engineering/comp sci lacks depth and applicability. They try to pander too much to people who don't have the discipline to learn what a computer is.
      • cheez 14y ago
        So you're not the average comp sci college grad, congrats... For me, there were a lot of learning opportunities because I am naturally a curious person.
        • debacle 14y ago
          In my opinion, the average comp sci college grad (BS or MS) is a bad programmer.
          • DannyBee 14y ago
            I've interviewed (either on-site or phone-screen) ~110 new grads over the past 6 years, for a company that theoretically gets the best of the best (though in practice, it turns out more like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXRi28W-ENY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXRi28W-ENY). I'd agree with the BS part. The best BS students can write programs that accomplish the goal they want to accomplish, but aren't "good" at it. The MS students are hit and miss,in the sense that most (let's say 70%?) are not significantly better than the BS programmers at programming, though they are often have better at algorithm understanding. However, there are some MS students who are really good at programming. I don't know why there is such a stark difference from the BS folks, who are uniformly bad, but it does exist.
• rm999 14y ago
  Recently I interviewed a candidate for a fairly niche but high demand field. I generally liked him - he had skills that would have been useful to the team, and he was a very bright person. But a couple of us felt he exaggerated aspects of his resume by sprinkling in a couple of bullet points he knew we were interested in (from the posting) but didn't understand well. He would have fit well on our team, but ultimately we decided we couldn't trust him. If he lied about being "proficient" in skill #2, how did we know he wasn't lying about certain achievements or even jobs from the past? I realize his lie was less severe than making up an education (and ironically much easier to catch), but it's a good example of how small lies can do a lot of damage.
  • learc83 14y ago
    Would you have interviewed him if he'd left off all those relevant bullet points?
    • rm999 14y ago
      Great question, that's something I specifically thought about. We probably would have interviewed him if he had said "some knowledge of" etc for those bullet points (which would have been truthful). He actually had quite an impressive resume without the fibs.
      • toomuchcoffee 14y ago
        We probably would have interviewed him if he had said "some knowledge of"... But as everyone "knows", you just can't use weak language on your resume. And if it just so happens that you were let go of from your last job for some petty, grossly unfair reason, heavens, no one wants to hear the truth behind that! So people face a lot of pressure to burnish things up, here and there. I'm not saying there absolved of responsibility, when they get caught at having fibbed. But there is something of a Catch-22 at play, here.
  • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >how did we know he wasn't lying about certain achievements or even jobs from the past // Why would it matter if he could demonstrate the right level of proficiency for the tasks you wished him to perform?
• vorg 14y ago
  At one stage it seemed it was easier to get an IT job if there was an obvious lie on your CV. The manager interviewing you would more likely employ you if they thought they could bump you anytime simply by doing a CV checkup.
• 54mf 14y ago
  I have zero college experience, I've never lied about it, and I've never had a problem getting a job. In fairness, my specific area of expertise (front-end design/development) is one where you can make a real name for yourself simply by building something awesome, but I'm still of the opinion that moxy and gusto will take you farther in many fields than a degree. Especially in technology.
• DanBC 14y ago
  > Why don’t you make something up.” This is shocking. In the UK this is potentially a criminal offence, and it certainly leaves the liar open to civil action. And even if they don't bother with courts they can just dismiss you and you've lost most of your protections. And it sounds like really weird advice. What happens if recruiter tells Joe to just make something up, and then sometime later has to approach Joe with "a great candidate; a perfect fit for the job"? That's for any job. Obviously there are some jobs which are more protected - you cannot call yourself a dietician or social worker unless you're qualified and registered.
  • adambyrtek 14y ago
    Please don't take this the wrong way – I'm not trying to judge whether it's good or bad – but it sounds like this might be cultural, maybe associated with the American "fake it till you make it" approach.
  • shawabawa3 14y ago
    Well for the recruiter it is probably no risk. They get paid if the person gets hired, nothing happens to the recruiter if the candidate gets fired/arrested a year down the line for lying on their CV.
    • wccrawford 14y ago
      We had recruiters do this to us. We clearly told those recruiters that if we catch them at it again, we'll stop using them. They stopped. It's not 'no risk' for them, but only if they company calls them on it. If more companies put their foot down, this problem would largely disappear.
      • randlet 14y ago
        Why give them a second chance at all? It is essentially a "no risk" situation for them if the only consequence for them is a slap on the wrist for a first offence.
        • 14y ago
• Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  As someone who hires if I find a lie on your CV, even a relatively small one, I have to make the assumption that you're untrustworthy and I won't hire you. It may be the only one but I have limited exposure to you and limited time to build a view so one lie is a big deal. And if you say "I did it to get your attention", my response would be "why, haven't you done anything real worth my attention?" The problem is that most people who lie aren't undiscovered geniuses, they're simply liars. I might miss out on a genuis at some point in my career but I'm certainly going to miss out on a lot of the grief that comes with hiring dishonest people. EDIT: Removed a section based on something I think I've misunderstood.
  • cgmorton 14y ago
    Hold on. I might have misread, but I thought the point was he -didn't lie-. He put 'Mensa' because he was in Mensa. It stood out because so many other people had an 'education' section at that spot on their resumes.
    • wccrawford 14y ago
      There's a lot of confusion about that. I thought that was the point, too, but enough other people thought differently that I searched for him. He doesn't seem to be a current member of Mensa. That doesn't mean he wasn't a member at the time, though. So far as I know, there's no way to look up records of past members. (Except maybe by a Mensa employee, which I'm not.) Still, I don't think he meant that it was a lie. If someone asked me about it on my resume, my answer would be much the same as his. I usually have a second reason, though: If it bothers anyone that I'm a member, I don't want to work there. In my experience, people who have a beef against Mensans tend to make life very hard for smart people in general. They seem to make it their life goal to bring them down a notch. I don't need the extra stress, so I just avoid those companies.
  • 3pt14159 14y ago
    But he didn't lie... He was part of Mensa.
    • deleted 14y ago
• emmelaich 14y ago
  I've had the recent experience of interviewing for a Java programmer with some devops experience. In all the interviews academic achievements were neither considered nor mentioned. However, it was astonishing to me how much the candidates own opinion of their programming skills differed from the actuality as evidenced by their performance on a skills test. No trick questions, just Java basics like the immutability of strings and some basic inheritance questions.
• kevhsu 14y ago
  As a computer engineering undergrad with a < 3.0 GPA at a top 5 CompE school with 1 more semester to go, I've felt a lot of pressure to lie about my GPA on my resume just to be above the 3.0/3.3/3.5 cutoffs that so many jobs have. It's a little tougher to score an interview without a GPA on my resume, but I feel that once I'm in an interview, I'm at little to no disadvantage compared to anyone else since I think most places will prioritize actual problem solving skills over a number with 3 significant figures... Currently unsure whether it's better to blurt out "2.6" or "don't worry about it" when recruiters ask me what my GPA is after seeing the rest of my resume. Either way, I sleep way better at night compared to lying.
  • gcp 14y ago
    Round it to 3. You did say engineering, right?
    • Evbn 14y ago
      My school has a one page policy document in acceptable ways to format the significant figures (up to 4) and rounding (down only). Violations can lead to excommunication from career services office.
  • Mahh 14y ago
    Most of the mainstream tech companies that the other students are going after don't ask for GPA. The only company who did go out of their way to ask for it is Google. I don't list my GPA on my resume at all, and it's worked out pretty well (as long as you can fill the space with side projects or other experiences). I tend to apply solely to those companies and startups, so I definitely can't say anything about the whole field. Just one anecdotal data point for you.
  • SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    I graduated with a 2.8 from a top 15 school (actually, I believe it was 16, now that I think about). I never felt the need to put my GPA on my resume. The few times I was asked, I explained I was working nearly full time while attending school full time. If a recruiter asked, I would respond with, "Is there a minimum GPA?" If so, tell her. If not, I would say its not important. The important thing is you have a degree from a top 5 school.
• btilly 14y ago
  There is a general rule of thumb. People who don't cheat, tend to strongly dislike people who do. People who do cheat, convince themselves that everyone does it, and it isn't a big detail. Admittedly a ton of people cheat. But as someone who doesn't cheat, if I find out that you did, I'm going to lobby to not have to have you as a co-worker. I have no idea how many people there are out there like me. Hopefully enough to discourage you from cheating. (Probably not, but I'd like to believe that it is not just a quixotic gesture on my part.)
  • loceng 14y ago
    I agree. It's about honesty and expectations, and trust of course. If you have set your character around being okay with lying, that's not cool to me.
    • gcp 14y ago
      If you have set your character around being okay with lying, that's not cool to me. Obligatory Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/10000/3000/000/113039/113039.strip.sunday.gif http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/...
      • supercanuck 14y ago
        It isn't a lying if you believe it.
        • loup-vaillant 14y ago
          That's more complicated. Often our beliefs aren't even coherent. (The canonical example is the "I have a Dragon in my garage", where any experiment you can come up with will fail to show the presence of my Dragon, and I know it, even though I still "believe" there is a Dragon.) So it is possible to lie to yourself. Rationalization, wishful thinking, motivated cognition… As we are on average terrible liars, it's often easier to first convince ourselves of the lie, then repeat it with a straight face.
• rickdale 14y ago
  Seinfeld Moment: George: Alright. Listen, I gotta get some reading done. You mind if I do this here? I can't concentrate in my apartment. Jerry (checking out George's textbook): Risk management? George: Yeah. Steinbrenner wants everyone in the front office to give a lecture in their area of business expertise. Jerry: Well what makes them think you're a risk management expert? George: I guess it's on my resume.
• gggggg 14y ago
  I do lie on my resume. I write that I have a master in engineering which is also true except for never doing the thesis. At the interview I tell the interviewer straight up as the first thing that I lied and don't have a formal degree but it was a necessity to get the interview in the first place. I then tell them that I completely understand if they want to turn me away and I apologize. I have never been turned away. No one have ever really questioned why. I am very skilled at what I do and the rest of my resume reflects that. I am far better than most people I met who program with or without a degree in my field. Never having finish my degree makes this a necessary evil for me - I wish I could go back (life at this point does not allow me to). However I feel no remorse for lying and frankly it's the loss of the company if they assess my entire character based on this.
  • Evbn 14y ago
    Why not be honest and have your resume say you did masters coursework? That worked for me.
    • gggggg 14y ago
      Such a distinction does not exist in my country. If it did I'm not sure recruiters would know the difference anyway - but I will try it out. How do you phrase it?
      • thrill 14y ago
        On my resume I list my BS-ECE and then masters _classes_ in AI, Supercomputing, and Robotics. When (usually) asked why I didn't complete the degree I then give 'em the reason, which is valid enough that it generates conversation.
      • rprasad 14y ago
        "Masters pending dissertation". Leave out from the resume that you do not currently plan on completing the dissertation...
  • gcp 14y ago
    If you clarify it as the first thing you do in the interview I'd expect most people to not consider this lying, but as a safeguard against silly HR/recruiting. Some countries have a "master without dissertation". It doesn't technically exist here either, but you could just put that...
• nirvana 14y ago
  I think the college degree hiring issue is all about confusing a symbol- the diploma- with reality- having the skills. So, Steve's anecdote is about getting hired by someone smart enough to test him to find the reality. I have similar situation as Steve. I was studying physics, working for a nationally recognized lab under a guy who should have gotten a nobel, when I got a job as a software developer and realized that was what I really wanted to do with my life. I used to put down that I studied physics, but eventually, I just dropped it. My resume now is one page, with a summary at top of my skills and a list of the places I've worked taking up the rest. I find that this is a really good filter. If someone won't hire you because you didn't go to college, you know that this is someone you don't want to work for. They are expressing a prejudice-- assuming you lack a skill based on their own assumptions, because they probably needed college to teach them. Many times people rationalize this by saying "college shows commitment". Well, keeping a job for 4 years shows commitment. Outside projects that are a lot harder than college was shows commitment. The real reason I didn't finish college is that it didn't make mathematical sense. It costs a lot, delays your career and doesn't deliver sufficient value to cover these costs. I think that situation has gotten a lot worse.[1] So, the right thing to do is look at the education section skeptically. Did they work their way thru college? Why did they go? Did they think they were getting more value than the cost? I hear companies won't hire people without degrees. I see "BS requires, Master preferred" a lot. I never let that stop me from sending my resume, and back when I was willing to work for others (rather than myself) I tended to get interviews, and 4/5 of those interviews would result in an offer or another step in interviewing (for companies that had a multi-step process.) I learned quickly to send all my resumes out on one single day, and have interviews scheduled close to each other, lest I get offers from some companies before I'd had a chance to interview at others. None of these companies cared whether I had a degree. (And the ones who did, probably never called me in for an interview, but there's no way to tell which jobs have already been filled vs. which ones were at companies with that prejudice.) But I consider that a blessing-- this filters out companies that confuse the symbol (eg: the diploma) for the reality (eg: having the skills.)[2] I've met a lot of "smart" people who think they are so smart that they don't realize how much smarter other people can be. This limits their world view. It even interferes with their ability to comprehend or think logically. They let prejudices and ideology get in the way of perceiving reality.[3] The last thing you want to do is work for a boss who believes his fantasy over reality. And filtering out the ones who think you're not qualified because you don't have a diploma is a useful tool for that. Epilog: I express strong feelings here. I am unabashedly opinionated, but I think it is critical in hiring to hire people who think differently than you. I think its critical to give the benefit of the doubt, allow a wide variation and then focus on what's really important- the relevant ability, their capabilities. I think "cultural fit" is often used to exclude good candidates for unfair reasons. I think I'd hire someone I disagreed with all the time if they were qualified (but haven't put this to the test yet- only having hired someone who disagrees with me most of the time.) [1] I am very willing to hire people with degrees. Even though college is often a waste of time and money, and could show bad judgement, they can also show other things-- like the need to spend a couple years finding yourself outside the overwhelming influence of your parents, or the need to figure out what it is you really want to do with your life, etc. Some do it out of a commitment to their parents because it means so much to their parents, and I respect that. I don't think that someone turning 18 magically means they've figured everything out. [2] I have found, however, that hackers (eg: people who taught themselves when they were young) right out of highschool are about as equally prepared for employment life as (most) people with CS degrees right out of college. Either way its going to take a couple years before they're really productive. Hackers shouldn't go to college. I am assuming that hackers are generally auto-didects and not the kind of people who need to be trained, while college is for people who need to be trained, the kind of people who can't just pick up a new language over the weekend, or can't just read a college textbook to get the stuff they hadn't learned otherwise. [3] In fact, I think that the fact that so many of these people who focus on degrees are people who went to college because they needed to be Trained, means that they are people who generally simply don't understand that some people self train. They don't see the advantage of the auto-didact who will learn things that seem ancillary (eg: economics) or irrelevant to someone who has been trained. I think the training in college teaches a narrow way of thinking, or maybe it just doesn't expand the mind, while the autodidacts will expand their own minds. Companies would be much better off hiring autodidacts and making sure at least one is in the interview loop, to ensure that the trained people don't exclude someone based on their own narrow thinking. "Oh, your company has written your product in Haskell? That's nice. No I've never written any Haskell in my life, but I learned Lisp when I was 14 and write a long of Erlang, and pick up languages easily. I'll have no problem picking up Haskell." I think this above conversation sounds like nonsense to a trained person, because a trained person doesn't "just pick up" a language.
• Tycho 14y ago
  When I got my first job in Silicon Valley it was through serendipity (my part) and desperation (on the part of my first employer.) I really didn’t have much of a resume – four years in the Air Force, building a scram system for a nuclear reactor, a startup in Ann Arbor Michigan but not much else. Statements like that make me think most of the HN crowd live in a different stratosphere. That's a pretty good resume by normal standards.
  • gcp 14y ago
    I fully agree here. Either Silicon Valley was a much more exclusive place in the 80's, I'm fooled by the 30 year technology difference, or this is needless self-depreciation. The resume looks stellar to me.
    • msutherl 14y ago
      I have a strong feeling that standards of rigor have dropped considerably since the 50's, but I have no data to back it up.
      • gcp 14y ago
        Maybe it's simple demand vs supply economics? The Valley has had a chronic shortage of engineers, hasn't it?
• krosaen 14y ago
  contrast that with advice from Neil Gaiman http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address """ People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I'd worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honour to have written something for each of the magazines I'd listed to get that first job, so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been chronologically challenged... You get work however you get work. """ I'm lucky enough to have never been faced with a situation where I felt like I needed to lie to even have a chance, so I have a hard time judging. Always a tough call.
• ucee054 14y ago
  I have experience of interviewers routinely either lying or not knowing what they're talking about, and expecting the candidates to lie and be as dishonest as they are. One interviewer even got offended when I was truthful about one of my weaknesses - a skill I believed not to be a requirement because the company - a large, reputable French bank - had lied about the job description. In fact I had previously specifically asked his boss (the hiring manager) in person about that area of work, and he had lied with such a straight face that he deserved an Oscar.
• toomuchcoffee 14y ago
  "Why don’t you make something up." Aren't recruiters precious.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  One of the real features of not lying is that you don't have to remember it. But if you lie you have to tell the same exact lie to everyone or get caught up in it. Why add to the stress of an already stressful process (interviewing) by adding a bunch of untruths you have to keep track of? On the College Degree question I see a degree as the first thing you do where you don't have to do it. Or more precisely you have found it within your self to accomplish a goal that took longer than a year with an uncertain outcome and one where you could quit at any time. A lot of engineering work can be like that. Something that is going to take a couple or three years to realize, will have bits of crap in the middle that will be annoying but required to do, and will have an uncertain outcome. So if you have a degree I know you can do that, if you don't I have to probe to see if you can. If you haven't had a job where something took more than a couple of years to deliver I don't know if you can stick with something long enough to get it done. That is an issue for me as a hiring manager. Now if you left college because you were working on something else and that took you a few years to get right and shipped, well that works just fine for me.
  • gruseom 14y ago
    But if you lie you have to tell the same exact lie to everyone or get caught up in it. The writer Anais Nin kept track of which lies she had told to whom in a notebook. She had two husbands. It was complicated. Eventually she upgraded the notebook to a system of index cards in a file box.
  • j_baker 14y ago
    You're placing too much emphasis on completing things. The vast majority of startups won't be around for the length of time you're suggesting. The vast majority of BigCos have plenty of people who can finish projects and maintain the status quo. Both kinds of companies need people who can start major projects and get results quickly.
    • ChuckMcM 14y ago
      "You're placing too much emphasis on completing things." Probably, I try not to hire folks who can't complete things. I think you're off on your startup timing through. I know lots of startups that took a year to get to their MVP and then another to get to something they were willing to call 1.0. But by the same token I don't think of things you could do in a weekend and ship as being 'startups'.
• Flow 14y ago
  Years back I was a consultant and was interviewed for a telecom assignment. The meeting was nice and later he called me just to clear some things up. He kept talking about Erlang and then asking me about my experience level with Erlang and I told him I had none, but that I love programming languages and probably would learn it quick. Then he said I had Erlang on my resume... Turns out my boss had altered my resume without telling me. I was honest and told him that I had no experience and had no clue how that ended up on my resume, maybe he read the wrong resume? Nope. It felt really awkward hearing him say he just couldn't trust anything on my resume now. But he understand him perfectly well. My boss just laughed when I later told him what happened. He also told me to be a bit smarter and play along better. I'm so glad I don't have a boss like that today.
  • driverdan 14y ago
    How / why did your boss have access to your resume? That's not something you should have on a company computer.
    • gcp 14y ago
      Consultancy. His boss is selling his skills (and resume) to this customer (employer).
• ianstallings 14y ago
  The beauty of the software industry is it truly is merit-based. The degree might get you in the door but they will test you immediately to see if you are capable of handling the position. So don't lie. Tell them the truth, because there is nothing to be ashamed of. I'm going on my 17th year in this industry without a degree. If you have "it", whatever that may be, they will take notice. And if they don't then it's just a bad fit, no big deal. There's another one down the street.
• toomuchcoffee 14y ago
  Oh I agree, "honesty is the best policy." Thing is, it'd be nice if it were something more of a two-way street. The same companies that would be incensed at the slightest fib on a resume will quite often lie to the candidate, at some stage or another in the selection process -- or like as not hire through recruiters to do the lying for them, as if this absolves them of any ethical responsibility. Not to mention the lies that start trickling on down from on top, once they start the job. But that's a different topic.
• radagaisus 14y ago
  In Israel jobs usually ask for a BSc degree OR service in the army's intelligence unit. People go out of the army here with 3 to 5 years of experience in highly difficult subjects so tech companies usually care less about your degree.
• bmac27 14y ago
  This is a great piece from SB and one I can totally relate to. Since I've started working for other people, I've never found myself in a serious ethical quandry with interviewers regarding my dropping out of school. Maybe because in most cases, I haven't been asked about it as there are lots of folks in my field (SEO & search marketing in general) who learned on the fly through their own sites, etc. But if asked, I tell them the path I've taken to get to where I am, although I try not to go into my life story. It's usually more of a challenge when speaking socially with co-workers, especially when you're dealing with real "job people," who follow the school-career-40-years-of misery path to a tee. Frankly, I try to avoid talking about it as you're usually subject to one of two diametrically opposing viewpoints. Usually, they don't say anything that would make it outwardly identifiable but you can pick it up through body language etc. It's either: A. "What are you, some kind of idiot?" or B. (what I've gotten more lately) "What do you think you are, some kind of genius?" It's funny because I don't consider myself either of those things. But to keep the conversation away from that, I just avoid talking about it, although I will if asked. (One guy I used to work with it just stared at me blankly like I had just kicked his dog or something after I told him I had dropped out of undergrad and not a masters program, although he was the exception to the rule!) I don't know how many companies I've applied to declined to speak further because of the lack of degree but I've only had one company ever flat out tell me in the interview process that they couldn't hire me: and that was an education lead-gen company. Honesty & transparency really are your best weapons in situations like this.
  • Futurebot 14y ago
    Dealing with people who do not like those that do something else than (what the listener expects) the "default" thing happens in so many contexts. Not going to college is just one of many. Some simply have a difficult time with those who "live intentionally" - they seem dangerous, subversive, maybe even untrustworthy to said listener. Try explaining to certain people that you're over 30 and not married (and never will be), don't have children (and don't want them), live alone, don't own a house or a car (and take public transport) and watch as their faces change to shock, confusion, or abject terror. It's a particularly odd reaction as these things (like not getting married, living alone, etc.) become more common in places, but some groups/cultures/subcultures simply have not caught up with that reality. It's perhaps a ubiquitous reaction to those perceived as "purposeful" outsiders.
• hippich 14y ago
  I hated time wasted on college, but I did it. I did it via distance education course to save a lot of time and now I have diploma saying I am masters. It is not A grades, but rather just above pass level. This adds zero to my knowledge or my abilities, but I pass all these stupid filters put in place by HR people.
• jsjohns2 14y ago
  I'm really skeptical of the "honesty is the best policy" lesson being taught here. The reality is that being dishonest (on a resume or otherwise) can be very advantageous. Why else would people lie? Be honest because you believe it's the moral thing to do, not because you expect to be rewarded for it.
  • gcp 14y ago
    Might be because the benefit of lying is immediate, but the drawback much more distant (getting fired in the future). People aren't always very good long-term thinkers. You might be right that pathetically lying on resumes in the end provides a career with a higher average income or whatever. Given that many of us here are probably honest and/or having to hire off resumes, I'd guess we're all collectively hoping that's not true.
• known 14y ago
  Doesn't every salesman lie?
• bithive123 14y ago
  Anyone stupid enough to lie in writing deserves what they get.
• calydon 14y ago
  What this post really brought home for me was the importance of 'knowing your shit'. Steve didn't have the degree, but he had the knowledge and could basically prove it. Lots of graduates with the paper couldn't do that. If you have gaps in your knowledge that should not be a life-ruining situation but it needs to be corrected, hence Udemy, Coursera, and the new wave of ed. startups coming down the line.
  • herdrick 14y ago
    Steve didn't have the degree, but he had the knowledge and could basically prove it. That's not really what happened. Steve had specific technical knowledge and experience that he wouldn't have gotten in school anyway. Also it sounded like most of that technical knowledge was irrelevant to the new position. I imagine most of what happened is that the interviewer decided to trust his own judgement and gut about Steve's raw brainpower and ability to learn. And there's the issue of not having a degree - you rely on people sizing you up to be competent at it.
• jonbishop 14y ago
  Would adding Mensa to your resume really help you get a job? I talked to a hiring manager friend about this a while ago and he felt adding things like that don't make sense unless you have some achievement related to Mensa. One caveat - he wasn't in the tech industry.
  • mquander 14y ago
    IQ is strongly correlated with job performance, so yeah, providing evidence that you're in the top 2% by IQ is a really valuable indicator. My Dad was in Mensa, and reading their national magazine as a kid I was not exactly ever inclined to join, but as a quantifiable, generally useful piece of evidence about a candidate it's pretty hard to beat.
• robomartin 14y ago
  There's another element that hasn't been covered in this discussion. I've you've been out of school for more than, say, five years, it is quite possible that quite a bit of what was taught and covered in college is outdated in today's marketplace. That's certainly the case if you go further back, say, ten or fifteen years. Under that scenario, you definitely want people who are very comfortable shifting gears and learning on their own. I can safely say that virtually none of what I do today I learned in college. The basics, yes, but not the specifics. The languages are different, the technology is different, the patterns are different, project management is different, etc. I have worked with a lot of people without degrees doing work at fairly high levels. In my experience, this seems to be a category that self-selects based on real-world competence. Some have been absolutely brilliant. I have seen people without degrees dig into new subjects with an intensity that cannot be taught or trained. I have also seen people with degrees get flustered and give-up or fail to perform despite their years of formal schooling. I have hired folks with degrees that have been a complete waste of time. I do understand the need for an easy filter. This is particularly the case at larger companies where it is very, very hard to be open to anything outside the norm. It can take a lot of work to hire someone without a degree. And, yes, it can be risky. At the same time, I've found that most people without a degree are very confident and sure of themselves and are more than willing to prove their knowledge and worth. I have met people with degrees who got offended when challenged. It goes both ways. There's also the issue of how and why someone went into college. There's a huge variance here. In my own example, I had been doing electronics as a hobby, building all kinds of analog and digital circuits, and even wire-wrapping my own microprocessor boards way before I hit college. In sharp contrast to this, once in college, I met a lot of people who had never touched a soldering iron yet somehow decided to go into electrical engineering. You could tell the difference between hackers and students. Those of us who had been hacking the stuff for years before college had a very different understanding and attitude about things. The kind of thing that connects calculus class with physics lab in your mind instantly whereas others are just good test takers. If you get a no-degree hacker or interrupted-degree hacker --and they are good-- you are likely to have someone who has far more understanding, drive an passion than someone who just up-and-went to engineering school one day without having had skin in the game prior to that. I personally don't place a degree at the top of my list. I've been burned by that before. I take the time to really get to know the person as much as possible. Hiring is expensive and should be viewed as a long-term investment. If someone is going to be with you for a few years it is quite possible that during that time there will be needs to shift gears and adopt new technologies, frameworks, etc. Among other things, I need to know that anyone I hire can roll with the punches and actually welcome these kinds of challenges with open arms. One of my worst hires: MSEE, worked at Intel for several years. I needed him to design high-speed signal processing boards (FPGA, signal integrity, transmission lines, controlled impedance, GHz+ range). He failed miserably. It was obvious that he did not full understand the subject beyond basic book level. He finally admitted that most of his focus at Intel was in switch-mode power-supply work but he really wanted to get the job. I shifted him over to designing power management electronics and he did OK. Just OK. What I learned from this is the opposite of the article in many ways. He was truthful about the degree and had impressive looking work credentials, but he bent the experience line enough to land the job. I should have done a white-board test on him but, hell, he had a Masters, right? I was glad to see him go about a year later. My junior engineers could do better power management design work than he did. The other element here was what I call "big company syndrome". Large companies tend to have a lot of segmentation. Engineers can focus in one area and only that area and rely on other team members to carry the rest of the weight (and understanding) of the other areas of knowledge. In smaller companies you have to be more of a generalist. The problem with the hyper-specialist is exactly that. In some cases they have no clue of anything beyond their little sandbox. This is bad. And this was the case with my worst hire. He had been one of several hundred (or thousand?) engineers at Intel and could only see one small sliver of the entire universe. He had no reason nor the drive to dive into other areas and learn them on his own. That's why he failed to make a shift into another, larger, ecosystem. He left to grab a Director of Engineering job at a hardware startup. I knew that he was not even close to being qualified for that job, but he somehow managed to sell himself. Three months later he was calling me to see if I had any contract work I could throw his way.
• sblank 14y ago
  For clarity. I was in Mensa ~1969-1982. In high school I was a terrible student and therefore I didn’t think I was that smart. My sister, much older and much wiser, thought otherwise and had me take a Mensa test when I was a junior. The numbers confirmed her suspicion. Being a Mensa member didn’t make school any easier but it gave me comfort that I wasn’t a complete idiot, just that I learned differently. Convergent was the only time I put Mensa on a resume because of how the recruiter described the intellectual horsepower of the hiring exec and the rest of the team. I thought I needed something to wave to get in the door. It worked. After that I just let my resume and accomplishments speak for themselves.
• buro9 14y ago
  I only recently got an MSc in Computer Science, I'm in my late 30s. Before this I never put an education section on my CV. I was homeless when others were doing their A levels and Bachelors. What I found is that every employer simply filled in the gaps and assumed that I had a degree. The choice I faced usually came much later when sat a lunch table one day someone would bring up a "What did you do at college?" conversation and it would eventually be asked of me. At that point do you answer to sustain their idea of you based on the assumption, or do you answer honestly and change their impression. In the early part of my career it was simply best just to change the conversation (very easy to do, people love talking about themselves). In the latter part of my career I chose to just be blunt and open. Being honest never hurt me, but I strongly suspect that lying would've hurt me hard.
• michaelfeathers 14y ago
  My first thought on reading this is that it should be probably be called "Breaking NDA" rather than "Lying on your Resume." That said, businesses to vary on what they consider confidential.
• justanother 14y ago
  No degree here, but never lied on a resume either. It was very difficult landing my first job (in my teenage years), but eventually I got into the industry by starting a company and going bankrupt two years later. Frankly it was a wonderful way to get going, and nobody has significantly questioned my credentials since then, and especially not now that I have 20 years of professional expertise. Seriously, just start a company, and if you fail at age 16, nobody really cares, and you've got something on your resume. To get a few hundred (or thousand) bucks, get out MS Word (or Google Docs), type out several dozen pages of detailed business plan, and show it to all family, friends, and ex-teachers (but stay away from banks and VC, because they don't care and you're wasting their time). Now that it's 2012 and all, you only have to beg (or mow lawns for) $500 to land an iOS developer license. Then you can write a resume, show your first year of experience, and talk about your app in the App Store. That said, I'm not going to tell you that I'm just so special that I couldn't have used college, and the people who do say that, seem to have chips on their shoulders. There is certainly an appreciation for design patterns and the humanities that any college would have taught me, that I had to learn I needed, and go and seek out on my own, and that's hard. But then again, college students today are faced with the prospect of a lifetime of debt, just to land a career with an average (I said average, not you or me) 15-year half life. It hardly seems appropriate. Anyway, point is, you never need to lie if you have the enthusiasm. With enough enthusiasm, the experience eventually builds to a point where nobody questions your formal education.
• dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I just want a little bit of a reality check. How many of you that are dismissing CS degrees or saying if you go to college don't study CS because you already know it .... How many of you really know what you're talking about? I don't mean that in a derogatory, you may be the foremost experts on things for all I know. I just don't think either a) this phenomenon is that common or 2) it is a very deep knowledge, if it is common. I'm well aware there are expert CS people that don't have degrees. I know some myself. But I don't think it is as common as you all are saying. I've met plenty of undergrads, sophomores, etc that were self taught before college and think very much the same about their skills aa many here do and only takes a few classes for them, if they were honest with themselves, to disabuse them of this notion. I've also met a lot of self-taught people that are good at a couple things but lack a lot of fundamental understand, and many think they are great because they are whipping out PHP spaghetti farms like nobody's-- most are not like this though. I'm not sure following a YouTube tutorial on creating a Web blog engine in RoR is an epiphany that means "I'm self taught, I don't need no stinking college." While there are brilliant, intimidating self-taught computer scientists/programmers, I'd say there are a lot more that fancy themselves in this category but don't know a Lamport clock from loop unrolling. I have no idea about anyone's individual situation or knowledge level, I just think there is a lot being made this self-taught phenomenon than bore out by reality.
• rebelnz 14y ago
  Our company hired a promising recruit who as it turns out had 'embellished" their resume and it caused a lot of friction and general bad feeling for both parties when they couldn't complete some relatively simple tasks. I took responsibly as I had hired them - although next time I will probably implement the obligatory whiteboard! As it is a basic web dev shop I don't place too much value in a prospective employee with college degree(s) for the work involved - it would almost be overkill! However working effectively in the respective domain is what I would consider important (for this particular job anyway).
• seanp2k2 14y ago
  I dropped out of community college and I have no problem getting offers in the valley for six figures. It's what and who you know, not where you studied.
• xiaoma 14y ago
  In contrast, Neil Gaiman's famous commencement speech in which he admitted lying about his resume to get work early in his career: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikAb-NYkseI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikAb-NYkseI