[inertiatic]

I don't know how this is something related to AI - you could polish and embellish your resume before LLMs too, I'm fairly sure. I guess this gets the clicks.

Not being to remember small details about certain projects is also perfectly fine for people who have worked for more than a couple of years. Unless you can discover a pattern of lying like the author supposedly did then I would just be perfectly fine moving on to another topic.

[mathgeek]

Agreed, the “I used AI” part is just the 2025 version of “I did my research on your company and then lied about my experience to make me sound like a better fit”.

[madeofpalk]

The twist on “I used AI” to this though is that everyone comes out looking the same. They all have the same resume format, made by the same tool, stuffed with the same keywords.

[bravetraveler]

Doesn't seem to function all that differently from 'higher education'.

[mathgeek]

Fair for the ones who don’t put in any effort, but I don’t buy this generalization for the folks who are real people in the middle between “completely unqualified” and “telling the truth about their experience”.

[roguecoder]

Any effective screening strategy is going to catch the liars who do it only a little with some probability.

Not least because being willing to be dishonest during an interview is a strong signal the candidate will be dishonest while they are employed as well, and companies want very much to not hire those people.

[mathgeek]

Fair, but that’s different from everyone who uses AI ending up with the same keywords and content on their application (see GPP)

[foobahify]

My memory had held back my career I am sure. I can't regurgitate the minute details of impact I did even 12 months ago, just broad strokes... so I prep as best I can but it probably sounds like I am lying. Now with AI and everyone is suspicious it is worse. Got downleveled to 4yoe level yoe from where I am 20yoe but I needed a job so.

[alabastervlog]

I have what probably qualifies as the relatively-recently-named "severely deficient autobiographical memory".

Notes, notes, notes. Then review them before an interview. Not bullet-point notes of things that happened (that's fine too, but not just that) but make stories when they're very fresh, like, right after they happen. You won't be able to turn raw bullet points into a story later, you'll forget too much.

Then take some time to match stories to common interview questions. That's your prep document. Feel absolutely free to fill in gaps where needed, most folks' "real" memories of these things are half wrong anyway, and there may be times you literally couldn't have an acceptable answer to a common question without making some of it up, because you didn't take useful-enough notes. What are you going to do, fail every interview that asks that question forever? No, just make the story you need, connect it to reality as much as possible, and move on. But do it ahead of time. And you only need to do this once per such question. Perhaps you'll even manage to take notes on a less-invented story later (I've found that nearly all of these stories need a little invention, though, even if you have perfect notes, to fit into the acceptable range of responses)

[scarface_74]

It’s called a career document or a brag document. I update mine every quarter. It’s a detailed summary of the projects I worked on in STAR format including challenges I faced.

[Seattle3503]

A lot of folks (and good engineers) arent that career oriented.

[foobahify]

I have to do a bragsheet now anyway and yeah like gritting teeth. It is documenting your job basically!

[scarface_74]

It’s not about being careee oriented. It’s knowing that eventually you are going to need to interview for a job.

[neilv]

What might have happened is that AI tools helped them fabricate, maybe including one or more of:

* Generate/improve this resume to appear very experienced.

* Generate/improve this resume to be a good candidate for this job description.

* Ask typical interview questions about this resume, and provide good answers.

[myself248]

It sounded like the candidate froze mid-interview to ask the AI to provide more detail about the things it'd already fabricated.

[bee_rider]

I guess they will have to get the AI to listen in on the call next time.

[yojo]

I think in this case the candidate didn’t even know enough to embellish the resume unassisted. Their nonsense response on rate limiting showed that they had no idea why you would rate limit or under what circumstances. Ditto for paginating data.

AI allowed them to add plausible work to their resume that they couldn’t have come up with on their own.