[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".