[nomel]

> Meh. Claiming you know Perl, because you're super familiar with other scripting languages and can learn quickly?

I've seen that backfires with people I interview. I have a limited time with each person. If you're saying you have experience but obviously don't, it means everything on your resume has to be considered as "possibly false". It brings a much more critical eye to that type of candidate, with lots of discussion and questioning that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.

[bpodgursky]

Yeah, I wouldn't personally do it, and I'd expect the candidate to crash-study before the interview enough to make it a plausible story. I just wouldn't consider it a * hard * disqualifier, if the truth came out.

[codeflo]

I had a situation like this recently at a smaller company. Candidate claims years of expertise in X and Y. We have great X people, but would like to hire someone with deep Y knowledge. So we (more out of routine than any particular strategy) probe X in the interview. Turns out the candidate is beginner level at best, and also a bit arrogant about it. Would you in that situation believe the Y claims, that you can’t evaluate as deeply to begin with?

[PhillyG]

Unfortunately it often takes quite a bit of experience in a skill to truly assess your own skill level. Many programming courses teach just the basics of coding in a language, without making it clear that it's not really enough to professionally start working on production code. It also requires more knowledge of a language, to work with other people's code than your own - and there really isn't enough recognition of that fact (at least in people I've come across)