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0 pointsenraged_camel2y ago0 comments

I used to share your opinions, until I sat at the other end of the table and interviewed candidates. The problem is that people lie constantly about their credentials, experience and knowledge. They lie on their resumes, they make up fake references (sometimes going so far as to pay their friends to lie for them), they might even have someone create fake portfolio websites for them and showcase those as their own. There will never be a way to detect such deception without asking candidates basic questions as a way to at least "smoke test".

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scarface_742y ago· 2 in thread

I’ve been interviewing people as either just another person in the loop or the person who could give the thumbs up about whether I wanted someone on my team and the manager just rubber stamped it for over 20 years - no coding just conversations.

I’ve never regretted a single person I hired and they have always been able to do the simple CRUD work that most of the 2.7 million developers are doing.

And before the gate keeping starts. I’ve been through the “Making Great Hiring Decisions” training and have conducted behavioral and system design interviews at AWS.

lmm2y ago

> I’ve been interviewing people as either just another person in the loop or the person who could give the thumbs up about whether I wanted someone on my team and the manager just rubber stamped it for over 20 years - no coding just conversations.

Sounds like a good way to filter for the right class background. (Which, given how well that's correlated with intelligence, is probably as good a hiring method as any)

scarface_742y ago

What do you mean by the right class background? If you think I’m a white guy who graduated from a prestigious school, I can guarantee you that’s a far from accurate assumption.

Let’s just say when I walk through my neighborhood I’ve read comments about me in my own NextDoor group about someone “suspicious” and realized they were talking about me or my son…

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wombatpm2y ago

A resume is not just a piece of paper. It’s a piece of paper with lies on it. And it can be the difference between not getting a job and not even coming close.

-Dave Barry

aleph_minus_one2y ago

I ask myself whether this problem is also part of the US mentality: in Germany, one would rather be tempted to treat even white lies as fraud, and thus compare (culturally, though not legally) such liars with criminals.

On the other hand, in my experience such fraudsters are in most cases easy to detect: just ask them some hard questions (where the candidate will either know the answer or not, thus rhetorics or charisma won't help) about the topics that the candidate claims to have expertise in (choose the question in a way that even very capable candidates will only be able to answer a fraction of them - this is fine and intended).

Typically, after 30-45 minutes you are either sure that the candidate tells the truth about his capabilities or is a liar (hardly ever anything inbetween happens).

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