Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by webjprgm 3752 days ago
Misrepresenting abilities ... yes, I did that in my first job interview. The job posting said PHP, HTML, MySQL skills. Well, I knew HTML well enough but my PHP and MySQL skills were from a few side projects doing copy-paste-modify with PHP BB's code base to make my own web app, which I never did finish. So I only kinda/sorta knew those languages.

But then at the end of the interview I was given a coding challenge to do at home over the next few days. PHP and MySQL have good online documentation so I was able to knock it out quickly and I got the job. So, yes I misrepresented my skills, but I also knew I could live up to what I was claiming I could do.
3 comments
shawn-furyan 3752 days ago
Yes, it seems that most companies misrepresent their requirements in job postings. It also seems that most candidates misrepresent their skills in responding to those job postings. There's a certain symmetry there.

Employer: First job out of school pay, requires four years of experience in our exact tech stack.

Candidate: Sure I'm willing to take first job out of school pay (BTW, just graduated in May). Yeah, totally have 4 years of experience, and what do you know, it covers exactly your tech stack!

link
Tenhundfeld 3752 days ago
I actually really like the take-home coding challenge, ideally something a qualified candidate could do in 1-2 hours and inspired by a real on-the-job problem (perhaps distilled a bit). It gives me much more insight into your coding style and is a much more low key, realistic test – especially since my team is fully remote anyway.
link
GFischer 3751 days ago
OTOH, for example, at a certain (non-IT) company, they overblow requirements for the most junior IT posts in such a way that the ONLY people they're able to hire are people that lie about their experience/abilities on their interviews (and there's no technical interview, so they can do so at will). They're optimizing their recruiting process in a very, well, weird way.

Edit: exactly the point shawn-furyan is making.

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11224427&goto=item%3Fi...

link