[FirmwareBurner]

What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of course I should, as far as brain surgery goes, but there are other jobs out there I can do while I train.

> We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

So the real answer to your question depends on how much you value other people and your principles, compared to valuing yourself and getting what you want. If you don't want to wrestle with that, just add some personal projects to your personal studying.

[FirmwareBurner]

>If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work.

Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will judge your knowledge less superficially.

>What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified?

Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a different tech stack is not the same as switching to doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position of privilege who never had to endure poverty and unemployment.

So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part. As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview and both parties are happy and getting their expected value out of it, who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not?

[tyzoid]

> who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not

Just being blunt: that's called Fraud. Making false representations for personal gain (employment, in this case) is one of the classic examples.

It doesn't matter if nobody checks in the moment, or if you usually get away with it, dishonesty is dishonesty. If I were to discover that someone joined my team under false pretenses, you can bet I'll have very little faith in their credibility going forward.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... :

> The Fourth Circuit, reviewing a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 2314, also noted that "fraud is a broad term, which includes false representations, dishonesty and deceit." See United States v. Grainger, 701 F.2d 308, 311 (4th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 947 (1983).

[wqaatwt]

Outright lies? Perhaps but even then it’s not clear if it meets the legal definition in all cases.

Exaggerating, misinterpreting the requirements and not telling the full story with all the details? Well that’s entirely subjective.

> under false pretenses

Like if a person has only has 2 years of professional experience in tech X but the job ad required 5 and he didn’t explicitly declare that during the interview without being bc prompted?

Or claiming that he has experience with technology Y (but it’s non-“professional” experience since he learnt it pn his own and again.. didn’t disclose that during the interview?

Even if that person turns out to be great at his job and you somehow find out he wasn’t 100% honest about some finer points in the interview (who tracks or remembers that stuff anyway?) you’d still feel the same way?

[FirmwareBurner]

Not the case in my jurisdiction, exaggerating in your resume is not illegal. And I really don't care, call it whatever you want if that makes you feel better. Companies are dishonest all the time to their customers and to their workers and especially to their candidates. Been screwed 3 times by dishonest employers, I'm only reciprocating their attitude.

I'm just playing the game so that I come up on top the same way they are doing it to us. That's capitalism for you, our current system doesn't reward honesty, it rewards those who are unscrupulous, as they end up at the top. Companies aren't religious holier than though, they're unscrupulous chasing profits, and then if that's the case, I can play the same game.

[throwaway31131]

Are you former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson? Because that’s what he said too.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2012/05/08/yahoo-ceo...

[ImPostingOnHN]

> Switching to a tech stack is not the same as switching to brain surgery.

SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

> Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching with "year of on the job experience".

I don't think this is always the case, as long as it's on the resume (skills + personal projects + YoE). Then, the technical person can judge your knowledge less superficially. It worked for me!

> So white lies are the only way.

It's actually just a regular lie: You'd be harming people by telling it.

> No offense, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes from a position of privilege

This is actually an offensive thing for you to say, because you are claiming I have attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy, all of which are false. Please focus on substance over name-calling.

> [added later] ...never had to endure poverty and unemployment...

I encourage you to explore empathy regarding the poverty and unemployment you'd be causing for a better-qualified applicant who was passed over due to lies, and not just towards yourself.

We are all people, you are not more important than them, and poverty and unemployment is no worse for you than it is for them.

> [added later] As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview...

We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.

[wqaatwt]

> critical component of both medicine and rocket science

Do you know a lot people who ended up having to write software for rockets or medical devices after applying for a generic web development job?

> from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified

That’s all very nice. Unless you end up being that someone yourself.

> and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

That’s highly debatable. It’s possible a lot of them did the same thing and unless you outright lied (instead of exaggerating etc.) and are still able to do the job is it really “deception”?

Anyway.. there is a lot of nuance and lying vs not lying is not even remotely a binary thing.

[gyesxnuibh]

Not all jobs are created equal. I know the quality control for software written for Web is very very different than the software written for cloud.

You're arguing that the standards for medical device firmware should be the same for Pinterest which is honestly just a waste of and effort.

I can see both sides of this specific discussion but treating SW engineering generally as rocket science is lying to yourself ;)

[ImPostingOnHN]

I consider unjustly harming others to be bad, whether you're exploding a rocket or not. That's why I added this part:

> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

[FirmwareBurner]

You're not harming anyone with grooming and pump up your resume to give yourself the best possible chance. Jobs aren't assigned and reserved to people from birth based on fate in order to be something you can steal from them with this. You don't deserve a job just because, you have to compete and interview for it like everyone else, and if you can get it and do the job, then good for you.

If you're better prepared or better at selling yourself at the interview, then you're the one who's gonna get the job. If someone with less/no experience takes your job then maybe you suck at interviewing and need to get better, or maybe the interview process is bad at judging top candidates, but either way it's your responsibility to adapt to the variable interview process and prove yourself versus the other candidates using whichever way you can: work, practice, connections, insider knowledge, cheating, etc. Nothing in life is fair, everyone tries to play their best hand all the time and honesty is not always rewarded, which you'll find out the hard way.

Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".

[ImPostingOnHN]

>> You're not harming anyone

I refer you to the below lines in the post to which you replied:

> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

> We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.

----

>> Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".

In other words, might makes right. If you manage to scam an old lady out of her retirement savings, you deserve to have it! There's no such thing as "she deserves", only "she competed and she lost", etc etc etc.

It's a good thing there are people in this world that don't subscribe to this "fark you, anything goes, as long as I got mine" style of "ethics".

[before_the_law]

> What then? Should I be unemployed?

Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market. All that money devs were getting this last decade has the dual side that tech is an aggressively capitalist industry. Competition is getting much more heated and, having been brought up in the dotcom bust, no not everyone who "wants" to be a software engineers gets to be one. I saw many, many people leave tech for lesser paying but at least hiring careers back in the early 2000s.

I feel that a lot of people that got into tech during this decade long boom period have never really experienced competition. In the last few years companies were often adding positions faster then they could fill them. If you passed the test, you got the job.

When I was getting started, virtually all hiring involved first building a pool of applicants, which could easily take weeks or months if the hiring team/manager wasn't happy with the quality of the pool. Then you had to interview with 5-10 other candidates that the team felt where at a similar strength to you. So even if you did your best, all it took was one other candidate that was better or even simply got a long better with the team to mean you didn't get the job.

You also had to wear a suit to an interview, even if it was for a role making a bit more than minimum wage.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market.

In my comment, did you see me complain about the jobs market? Or about the broken hiring process?

[WalterBright]

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then?

I had some trouble finding a sw position after leaving mechanical engineering, but I went to the interview prepared to show I could do it, and it worked.

[FirmwareBurner]

But you still had to get an interview first, which is often the most difficult part. Not everyone is so lucky to get such a chance. What then? Go homeless or lie till you get an interview?

The funny thing is I'm not even a mechanical engineer, but a a CS engineer, just mostly experienced in a stack that's not used much anymore but it's not like I can't learn another stack, I just refuse to put up with discriminatory hiring practices that treat you as a checkbox list, and so I have to work around the employers'/recruiters' bullshit hiring practices.

[WalterBright]

When you're got a thousand resumes, it is not possible to interview them all. You'll pick the most promising handful.

[FirmwareBurner]

That's why you lie to make sure you get in the promising handful.

[WalterBright]

That's why there are leetcode interviews to detect the frauds.

[rafaelmn]

What do you think happens when you lie through the interview ? I recently had this in my team - we were hiring fast and hired someone we shouldn't have - fired after two weeks. So your best case is receiving 6 weeks income after getting lucky and scamming someone through an interview ?

[FirmwareBurner]

I dunno, I managed to get stellar reviews form my boss and colleagues after getting the job. Maybe not everyone is incompetent.

Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.

[motorest]

You touched on an important topic: if a candidate has potential but HR has no way to tell if that candidate is any good, should they hire him?

How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?

The problem is that this is not a HR problem. This is a you problem. Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?

The problem with HR is not buzzwords. Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data. What are you giving them that allows them to say you are a safer hire than any other candidate around you? You are not giving them anything to work with. They can take a gamble on you, but they can also take a gamble on anyone else walking through their door. If they are going to take a gamble, wouldn't they bet on someone who on paper leads to better odds? What are you giving them to work with?

[FirmwareBurner]

>Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?

Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector. They don't know what a Github is, they don't even know the difference between Java and Javascript, they only know to look for "5+ years of Java experience" because that's what the job description says, that's all they do.

I also couldn't believe that myself until a recruiter posted a video of herself on LinkedIn showing why "It's hard to find good SW engineers", and all she was doing was pattern matching and filtering based on buzzwords and years of experience.

How do you stand out in such cases? Are you gonna write a one extra page on your resume where you are explaining the value of transferable technical skills to a 20-somethign year old humanities graduate who has 30 seconds to review your resume?

>How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?

Easy. For example, if someone has good experience in Java, they most likely can be a good C# programmer. But that needs some technical knowledge, beyond matching keywords like a baboon. Even ChatGPT would be better at assessing resumes and potential of candidates than the clueless HR people.

>Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data.

Other than some officially signed credentials like accountants, doctors or lawyers have, there's no data on a resume that's instantly objectively verifiable on a quick glance since everything there could be a lie until further proven. I could say I was CTO of Google. When they get 50+ applications for one position, they're only gonna skim through resumes to pick the best fitting one, not start doing checks on all of them.

>What are you giving them to work with?

Just like lawyers and bean counters, HR's job is to protect the company and their careers and to minimize risks. I'm giving them a white lie that fits to their biases and covers their ass in order to pass to the technical stage. That's what I'm giving them. It's a constant cat and mouse game in this racket.

[motorest]

> Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector.

That's a cheap excuse. That's not their job. Their job is to hire someone, anyone, within the budget and that meets minimum requirements. Their responsibility is to get a butt on a seat that can do the work. Any candidate that passes that hiring bar is a safe choice.

You're talking as if their goal was to hire the absolute best based on rigorous objective criteria and crisp stack rankings. It is not. They look for someone, anyone, that is able to do the job, fit in, and not shit the bed. And they need to be able to defend their choice. That's why education matters, prior experience matters, certiciation matters, and even recommendations matter.

Why do you think internal recommendations are a fast track to hire? Do you have any excuse like corruption? Or do you understand that the goal is to find people who are able to do the job, fit within the organization, and not cause problems?

If you fail to understand the problem, you will never find it's solution.

[skydhash]

And there's the reputation loss if someone decided to do due diligence.

[never_inline]

These people all have cushy jobs already. You haven't seen how people optimize for TC in the Indian market. There's a certain scale after which petty dishonesty starts to have a bad impact on overall environment and turn it into low-trust.