Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and magically my CV had modified itself to say I had 7 years of Java experience.

I told them I did not put that on my CV, I actually had my own copy with me and showed them that. We all realised the recruiter changed my CV. They apologised and wished me luck.

Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me and berating me for not going along with the ruse. He said "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?"

Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.

This doesn't always help either though. I have only ever sent PDFs to recruiters for this reason. Yet I have still had a recruiter completely rewrite my resume and add false information.

I generally keep a resume on me when I go to an interview just in case an interviewer had not seen it. I'm glad I do that.

Turns out it was a different resume that the recruiters would send us. They were garbage in quality and I hate them.

Fuck recruiters.

At a past role we were looking for a contract Tableau person and one of the agencies that was approved by HR sent me 20+ resumes. All of them were 5+ pages, with things like "Made a Bar Chart in Tableau," "Made a Pie Chart Tableau", etc.

After looking at 10 of these, I told our HR exec these resumes all looked the same and I thought they were fake. I had a meeting with the agency rep and they said they smiled when I said these resumes were BS. Their response was "Usually we send resumes to a manager and they have a 30 minute phone conversation with some of them. After that they sign a contract with one of them."

The point is, a lot of hiring managers want a person to do X on a contract basis, but they don't understand X or have anybody in their group that does X. For all they know, connecting to a SQL database and making a bar chart is rocket science. These agencies target these managers.

I did end up interviewing 2 people from that agency, both of which were actually quite good with Tableau. Of course, those people were curated by the agency after I made my comment.

I'm an immigrant to the US, and in my home country resumes are all really long. Even people who have never had a job and just finished their bachelors somehow find a way to have 5 page resumes. I think immigrants to the US in IT/Tech roles figure out fairly quickly that they need to drastically reduce the lengths of the resumes.

I'm actually in Australia myself. Guess my choice of reference for "nearby offices of competent tech companies" had unintended geographic connotations, woops

Apparently everyone keeps forgetting that PDFs are editable.

Certain tools, such as Word and LibreOffice, make it a bit easier as most of the source text is in the document, others like LaTeX end up looking like garbage through machine processing.

I once refused to let a recruiter send my resume to this company because I thought the company was slimey (it looked like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking for a free government service to use their paid service instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not affiliated with the government)

The recuriter started getting angry at me, so I made it clear I would not work with someone who didn't respect me, and hung up. A recruiter who views you as simply a product to sell is not worth keeping. There's a million recruiters.

He called me once screaming at me because he thought I was not being exclusive to him with regards to a particular job. I told him quickly where to go, it was him who called me, grow up and stop wasting my time. To this day I have no idea what he was smoking that day cause I'm as bewildered now as I was then about what he was on about.

healthcare.org? (the real one is healthcare.gov)

>Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?

Yea, hear that from the other side:

I went for interview at Amazon (~2017?) for Java backend engineer. During the interview they were asking me only JavaScript questions from what looked like a standardized form to filter out phonies. I obviously failed the interview. Was told if this isn't the job I wanted I should apply for a different job and come back when I get some more experience in... Java. The recruiter had absolutely no idea that Java isn't JS and was interrupting me when I tried to explain the situation. I really should have applied for a job I wanted. One of the worst interviews I event went to.

Java devs with wide recruiters network got such emails weekly, calls monthly, until TypeScript came to rescue.

There's almost a dangerous level of knowledge among some recruiters where they think they know enough to do crap like this.

All those new terms like React, Vue, SaaS, Azure, AWS etc. They don't really know what they mean.

I was asked if I could code in Azure. This led to a weird conversation where I was trying to explain what Azure was, whilst he wouldn't listen to me and was adamant that it was a programming language.

I'm so lucky, I think I found the best recruiter in all Vancouver. He helped me get my ideal role and was generally kind and competent. Just to offset the horror stories.

“Sure, can I pay you in ATM?”

"5+ years experience in using Fastapi"

The position seemed right up my alley. The directions part explained he was the recruiter for this position, and to reach out on LinkedIn first. So, I did that. I guess it was a pre-screen to see if I read directions.

He accepted the request but didn't respond to my message for a few days. I'm really not good at self promotion, but I also really wanted to get his attention. I saw that he posted regularly to LinkedIn and also engaged with a lot of posts. So I posted a cool side project[0] to LinkedIn that I had recently done. I was feeling pretty exasperated, I think I wrote something like "if i will do this just for fun, imagine what I will do if you hire me." I don't necessarily recommend that exact approach, but he did notice it and that is what got the ball rolling. Thankfully he thought it was cool, because it is a little bit edgy. I was looking for a smaller company that valued a hacker mindset, so it was a bit of a filter as well I suppose.

We immediately hit it off. He seemed to understand what I was all about, which is cool. I'm an aspie and a lot of ppl just don't get me. He has over 20 years experience so he really knows his stuff and he was just nice and down to earth.

I got extra lucky because he was friends with the hiring manager for 20 years, they worked in the game industry together in the 90s.

I'm not capable of generating any takeaways currently, as I am real tired, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Hopefully my response was vaguely coherent and at least tangentially related to your question. Sleep time!

Edit: Forgot link! [0] https://jeremypoole.ca/posts/evofinder/

Writes in resume: 10 years coding in API, expert level.

paraphrased from a rejection phone call - swap the acronym with the word "interface" if you want to get closer to the original

Sure!

But your comment is the pithiest most succinct one here. Throw away the OP's tweet and all these comments, especially mine, and just put your comment on a blank page and let's call it's the succintestist summary possible.

If I told you I once had a recruiter assume MVS and TSO were the same, you'd pretty much be able to guess my age from that.

Keyword-happy business HR: "Sorry, we're looking for Java. Case-insensitivity? No, we have to be sensitive to everyone. Being insensitive is not what HR does."

That is, unless the company in question has made a complete mess of their pipeline and aren't aware or unwilling to admit it.

Also, rejecting someone because they can't rote memorize ecosystem specific incantations is... a pretty big red flag.

Arguably, I'm more valuable because I have the capacity to eventually figure this out, rather than having already memorized it. But if this were a crisis rather than a minor bug, it would be much, much better to have somebody who'd already spent that decade learning all of the many, many, many incantations that Spring Boot requires.

(I'd also argue that Spring Boot in particular is much, much, much too dependent on incantations, and the main lessons I've learned could be put on my resume as "Expert in Spring, and you can be too in one lesson: Don't.")

That really applies to all ecosystems. Hiring somebody smart is better. But there really is something to be said for having somebody with X years experience, who can therefore do some things in 10 minutes because they've already done the painful part on somebody else's dime.

That's when I realized 1) how much Spring and Angular were NOT doing for me (compared to Rails), and 2) how much knowledge lies buried in BOTH stacks. I feel that Rails is by far the better tool for creating CRUD simple web apps, but the ability to be quick with it comes from years and years of living with it, and understanding how 3 or 4 lines of configuration work together to produce the effect of several hundred lines of explicit Java and JS in Spring and Angular.

Disclaimers: YMMV. TACMA. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Et cetera. Et alia. Ad nauseam. E Pluribus Unum. QED.

That is, unless I use Spring. The stupid Spring-related errors only appear at runtime.

Ok, honestly, after a year, using Spring is more convenient than not using it. (Basically, there are two or three types of stupid errors I usually do, and I learned how to decipher the intimidating error messages.) But the first experience is quite a shock. You write something with algorithmic complexity of Hello World, then you run the program, it throws a screenful of error messages, and you want to scream.

It reminds me of my childhood experience with Turbo Pascal, where you had to wait until the compiler told you that you missed a semicolon... and then it pointed at the wrong place -- not the place where the semicolon should have been, but usually the beginning of the next line. After some time, it becomes obvious, but the first time it's definitely not.

Inversion of control means you have no control.

At least Spring has switched mostly to annotations, which are sorta like Java. The IDE can spot some errors.

C++ template expansion and linker errors come to mind. First time you encounter those it's typically either very short and cryptic or at least 500 errors and the compiler hitting an internal limit of how many of them to display.

I find that most of my business logic ends up being really compact and powerful, but the tradeoff is that one chunk of the project is really dense.

I know exactly the difference between having to deal with the Java ecosystem for SOAP and the Microsoft ecosystem for SOAP—I had to deal with both at the same time at one job a decade ago. At that job, I worked with a lot of really smart people, but it was a Windows shop. Most of the people I worked with _could NOT_ work with the non-Windows platforms we had to deal with (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, VMware, and HP-UX). They would _constantly_ break code that was written to be cross-platform safe because it wasn’t what they were used to. On the other hand, at least I didn’t have to become familiar with how Exchange worked in order to integrate with _that_.

The number of people who can make the level of context switch you’re referring to, or working with multiple contexts like this, is vanishingly small in our industry. It can be done, but I think that you deeply underestimate the surface area of those ecosystems and the _willingness_ of people to put themselves in uncomfortable positions. The OP who talked about knowing C# but being interviewed for a Java position would have been _deeply_ uncomfortable writing Java because the tools they were used to weren’t available.

I would not make the same judgement you’ve made here. That said, if someone _wants_ to learn a new ecosystem, I’m happy to have them explore that (I prefer ability to learn over proven experience when I’m in a hiring position).

‡ Shipped: made it so that others could use, not just myself. This would include a project that I ported from Ruby to IO so that I could learn IO and a project that I ported to Elm in order to learn Elm. It does not necessarily indicate pickup. If we restricted this to stuff that I know that other people used, I might lose a couple more than the two I just mentioned.

° Languages: I include variants of languages that are _sufficiently different_ from their predecessors so as to require translation. This mostly affects the shell scripting variants (Posix sh, ksh, bash, and zsh are all _similar_ but sufficiently different that I count them; I have shipped substantial scripts in each). I don’t count gawk vs awk. Regardless, I vary between 3–4 languages and ecosystems weekly at my current job.

Where there’s time for new developers to get up to speed with a new tech stack, I completely agree with you.

If we're talking about a lead or solo dev position, it would cause issues though.

Ruby/Rails in particular became this. Javascript rocketed to this complexity level, with the added chaos of seemingly reinventing the entire toolchains every 2 years.

The testing framework I saw in a React app were almost straight from java, but somehow (despite JS being more flexible and script) MUCH uglier.

On top of that comes SQL backends, Web and occasional C++ for some native libraries to plug on.

At previous jobs the employer followed similar development approach.

I never got the Developer X mantra.

I wouldn't have gotten my first .net job without this line of thought. Sure enough, I picked up enough c# to be effective in the first week.

While it was extremely unethical for him to change your CV, Java and C# are indeed very similar, to the point that most organizations use devs with that background interchangeably.

If that company really ruled you out because you had 7 years of C# experience, and not 7 years of Java experience, you likely dodged a bullet.

Respectfully, I disagree. Things that you should learn over 7 years of experience go far beyond learning the language itself or the fundamentals of its standard library. We're talking about two very different ecosystems.

Are we talking about the vast differences between Akka and Akka.NET? ;-)

Honestly, to the extent the ecosystems are different, it is probably more valuable to add someone to a team with experience with a different ecosystem unless there is literally no one on the team with experience with the current one (and in that case, you might question your commitment). Yes, it takes a while to learn a given ecosystem thoroughly, but that's not really what is going to drive the productivity of your team.

Would I hire a bright candidate that require retraining given absence of those that do not? Quite likely yes.

Would I be pissed at false advertising? Again, yes.

Now, I tell people to look at my LinkedIn profile as that is the only resume that I keep. I’ll download the PDF of it if they want, but I haven’t maintained an actual resume in at least ten years.

I generate my resume as a PDF from HTML/CSS. It's fun to see how recruiters handle that. I think most use image manipulation to insert their header. One recruiter sent me some image assets and let me add the header/footer myself.

I'm sure some recruiters go too far with the .doc, but there are legitimate reasons too.

I only had experience with recruiters who work for the organisation I'm interviewing for. None of this contact info / skills tampering makes sense in that context.

Where the hell are these recruiters at? I’ve retreated most of my information back because all I ever got was spam from the former.

If you're not going through internal recruitment then this is a great way to go about it. The recruiter isn't just trying to get their 20%, so they spend a lot more time getting to know you and also getting to know where you're going.

The biggest down side is that you'll never hear a negative word about anything, so you gotta be good at asking some pointed questions.

Same goes for references, always, "available on request for the employer who can reach out if they like, no you can't have them. Go find your own clients".

I'll also take a copy along with me just in case.

I later had a job interview, and saw what the potential employer had been sent. They had re-typed it, and it looked awful.

I keep remembering everyone that thinks PDFs are magically safer than Word.

Are those types of exchanges still take place at the interviews? I was lucky enough to avoid them, having worked at companies that are able to afford to spend extra time training people. Those types of discussions often remind me of the Linus' quote: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

In my experience most employers say they want good programmers, but in reality they want quick programmers. People who can get the product out the door ASAP. And that's why I wouldn't take a Java job without learning the ecosystem first. Even if they promise training, there's a high chance of them reneging. So I would end up in a stressful situation trying to learn as I go.

I'd rather stick with what I know and what I'm good at.

+1 to the PDF resume, if for no other reason than you don't have to deal with format issues on windows/mac.

Make sure it's digitally signed and locked. I've had recruiters do hacky edits to plain pdfs before.

Although it depends how you generate it how easy it will be, Word has built in support for editing PDFs. So does LibreOffice (in Draw I believe). It's pretty accessible to non-technical people without expensive software to edit PDFs nowadays.

But the ecosystem is way different, i think the recruiter mimicked someone else and thought c# is equivalent to java, while it's not.

The IT market is pretty good compared to other fields but in the and, the market might have collapsed already.

""The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known[1][2] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

So most good candidates and most good companies have long exited the official job market and work with referrals or whatever. And all what is left is that now shitty companies are receiving shitty applications. And if a non shitty company offers a job in this market or a good applicant applies to a job, the other side will never believe it.

Can you expand on the quote from Gulliver's Travels? It's been decades since I read it and I can't think of where in the book it could have been from, I don't remember much economics being in the book...

[330] An act of parliament has been since passed by which some breaches of trust have been made capital.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm

Worth a read?

In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired or quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job through references they made at their last one. If they happen to not have any references who can get them a new job and enter the general recruiting market, they usually get snapped up quickly.

Bad Developers tend to get fired or forced to quit a lot. Nobody who has experience working with them wants to hire them. They spend a lot of time on the general market applying for tons of companies that reject them. They keep doing this until they either finally learn some skills or figure out that development just isn't for them and find another line of work.

Ditto for terrible companies to work for.

They will also get snapped even before they end-up on the open market. For college hires, might be more than a year before they graduate or accepting a full time position at the end of an internship.

I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're just bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for middle/upper-middle class people. Two, there are signalling to and chasing people with access to lots of money, who for reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out on LinkedIn.

I think the "middle-class" comes from the fact that such people have cash savings to weather a job hunt, whereas people without savings have to start working pronto on whatever if they're going to be eating and roofed in two weeks.

Here's a third one: It's curated to folks with similar professional interests and isn't political.

People receive a lot of BS on Linkedin but for some people it works. This being said, the people I know whit 8-9 fig net worth, you wont find on linkedin.

The first interviewer laughed and walked out. I explained things to the recruiter, he cursed, said he would "visit the Ruby team upstairs". He actually managed to setup an impromptu on-site interview with the Ruby team on that same day. I got the job.

The external recruiter has absolutely no incentive to send you for an interview you will bomb out of.

That said, it's a bit absurd there aren't separate classes of users on Linkedin. Do I need to know a recruiter's work history?

And unlike candidates, recruiters can potentially get paid to fill a lot of a company's vacancies, provided they don't get blacklisted by them...

Isn't this called 'consulting'?

- (your point) no incentive to send you for an interview if not a good fit.

- "I make more money if you make your money" often said to spin the "what is your salary requirement" question

Most recruiters work for an agency. Agencies have accounts with businesses. The account is central. You are in no position whatsoever to make determination as to what incentives drive the recruiter's business.

Recruiters also routinely b.s. young developers by "I get more if you get more money" when pressuring them into agreeing to a "salary expectation" right at the beginning of the employment negotiation.

However, I think we all know that closing the deal is far more important to the recruiter than negotiating small changes to the salary, so your point stands.

You’re an engineer with a certain degree of experience and the recruiter will have an idea of how much that’s worth when they start the conversation with you, so they know up front how much money they stand to make as a ballpark figure, and how much work is worth putting into getting you an offer.

Once they get you to the offer stage, and most of the work is done, they want to close the deal as soon as possible for as much money as possible. They know the band for the position so, if you’re lowballing your ask, they have every incentive to bump that up.

On the flip side, if you’re asking for something on the top end of the range, and it looks like a long negotiation, they’re looking to spend a lot of incremental time for not a lot of incremental money, so it’s better to get you to accept an offer - any offer.

Almost every recruiter will constantly ask you if you're interviewing anywhere else or working with any other recruiters. They do this so they can be sure nobody else has the right to represent you to a client but also to gauge how much effort to put into presenting you to any of their clients. If you're not working with a a single recruiter exclusively, you'll often find that the amount of work they put in to get you in front of their clients drops dramatically to the point they no longer return your calls/emails.

Negotiating $10k more for a candidate might see them get some percentage of that. But if they place you now, they can move on to another candidate and get a percentage of $100k or more.

Churn is far more important than min-maxing any single candidate.

For them to pay lots of attention on a single deal it has to be rather large, so that's why head hunters exist for top CxO type personnel, but not really for rank and file positions.

My god, how patronising.

My view on his comes from speaking to several hundred recruiters and owners of recruitment agencies as part of research for a product targeted at those businesses.

I also have close friends who worked or have worked in that industry and we have had very frank conversations about what their incentives are.

Maybe they all lied to me, but none of them wanted to put anybody forward for an interview who would make them look incompetent.

Their ideal flow for a deal was as follows:

- Receive brief from client.

- Find about 3 good candidates and get them booked for interviews. Could be more or less, depending on the role.

- Interviews take place and the client considers all candidates to be at least somewhat suitable, but decides to pull the trigger on one of them.

- The recruiter manages the candidate's salary expectations within a range based on their experience of placing other people in similar positions so that the deal gets done. Generally this means that they will try to get it closed within one or at most two offer-counteroffer loops. That may mean disabusing candidates of unrealistic salary expectations. It may also mean convincing clients to increase the previously agreed salary range to accommodate a candidate who is significantly more attractive than the average.

- The recruiter receives a placement fee equivalent to a percentage of yearly salary in most cases.

This does not mean that individual recruiters or agencies may not have other incentives. I know that sometimes interviews of external candidates are a procedural requirement and are conducted just for show so that a preferred internal candidate may be offered the position.

But in general, I am quite sure that the above is a reasonably accurate account of what the usual incentives are.

After I got hired, I showed up the first day and one of the managers asks me, "So I heard you know functional programming, right?"

I said "yes" and was immediately whisked off to the backend division that worked entirely in Scala, a language I had literally never spent more than 5 minutes on before dismissing because the online tutorial I was using broke about two chapters in.

What was the rest of your experience like there? Sounds like a place that thinks at a deeper level than most.

And I'm 100% with you there, learning a new place's codebase can often take as much or more time than learning a new language (at least if you've got experience with a couple of languages already). There's at least tutorials and guides for a new language, and there's rarely good docs and resources for the codebase.

All the controls in the world mean bugger all when ultimately the deciding factor is a human.

No one ever wants to admit that the world runs on trust and respect :).

In the end I didn't get the job, but their response said I didn't get it because the found that my experience didn`t match my CV. Go figure.

Quite a lot of competition for that particular prize!

Edit:

There should be a Razzies for Recruiters!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Raspberry_Awards

We hired him (interview went on discussing the job, his actual background, etc.) and he was really good, but I don't know what my bosses did with that recruiting agency, if anything. Above my pay grade, that.

This was early 1990's, so this charlatanery is not new.

Like Lord of the Flies in shiny suits.

She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets (obviously wrong.) She is very much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got fired.

Recruitment companies will literally push their employees to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or they break you and fire you.

Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common and frequent.

Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)

This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....

Hourly rates:

$30 $60 if you watch $120 if you help

A good project manager will be confident in their position and in doing whatever they can to help the project and won't mind. But that type of person wouldn't be looking over your shoulder unless invited.

This is an example of what universal basic income is intended to prevent.

Basic income has many of the same upsides, but the downsides are mostly about the dollar cost.

It's not unreasonable that some people prefer to pay (eg) higher taxes than suffer various forms of corruption.

I will take UBI or negative income tax every day of the week over unions.

In fact, if they were championed by - shall we call them economic liberals? - then they might be a damned sight harder to subvert and be a whole lot more effective and palatable. I know Sweden has strong unions and workers on boards (something I learnt from the very readable though still arguable book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism[1]), with restricted power (the employees can never become a majority in any vote on the board) and it seems to me to be an obviously good idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Things_They_Don%27t_Tell_Yo...

But what have they done to deserve the truth?

More or less this is how we get thinga like Chernobyl, when the entire chain is lying because the cost of tellong the truth is too high and there is no incentive to do so.

Still, after the accident some of the engineers went for a literal suicide mission to open some ventil to make it all less catastrophic. And unlike the poor construction workers, who died, too, they knew what they were doing.

I doubt they did it just for the postmortal fame. Some people have actually moral standards and can stand by it, even if it means disadvantages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

Entries like "received fatal dose of radiation during attempt to manually lower the control rods as he looked directly to the open reactor core."

— Mark Twain in Eruption

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHrVlyU3suk&t=132s

Edit: Everyone at the time probably thought that they were being sent to their deaths so they were staggeringly brave - but that's not how things turned out.

I am talking about actual voluntary suicide missions in chernobyl, like Lelechenko, Aleksandr Grigoryevich:

"in order to spare his younger colleagues from radiation exposure, he went through radioactive water and debris three times to switch off the electrolyzers and the feed of hydrogen to the generators, then tried to supply voltage to the feedwater pumps. "

And he and others did pretty much die right away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

Some organisations are just run like that.

Sales is especially harsh in some environments.

I knew someone who ran the business side of a small company. They thought they were really good at sales. But they were really just handling client service, billing, etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through their own relationships. They ended up going on to do "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't pretty.

It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when you first start so you can "get better" every year and get a bigger bonus.

What made it worse was that each year, they would "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went down while expectations on sales went up.

I've been playing with Duolingo. The main incentive is seeing your "streak" increase (the number of days in a row you complete a lesson). You are allowed to make five mistakes total every day on the free version. If you struggle with a lesson, you might use up all five of them, in which case your streak will die. Duolingo allows you to spend points to buy a new thing of five "hearts" (the traditional video game lives). So you have a fairly strong incentive to make sure you always have a cache of points.

Once you blow through some easy incentives in the first few weeks, there aren't that many ways to get points (besides completing more lessons, which you can't do if you run out of hearts). One of the main ways to get points is to do well in the bracketed competition system, where you are compared to 49 other users you are grouped with every week.

Unless you're in the top 3 (hard, because there are a handful of people who treat Duolingo like a full time job), you don't earn any points from your bracket placement. You only earn points from going up a bracket at the end of a week (top 10). Once you reach the top bracket, you don't get any more points. So the system is actually incentivizing you to repeatedly drop down one bracket so that you can climb it again.

(Interestingly, there's a very easy time-zone based trick to get yourself much easier competition because their matchmaking algorithm is unintelligent. All weekly competitions start at midnight UTC on Monday morning, which is what allows the trick to work. I managed to get top three finishes in a pretty high bracket without much work. Been meaning to write this up...)

At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.

I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!

It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for more senior hires. The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher pay

No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a repeat customer their incentives are to get decent candidates quickly into a role without causing any issues.

Not really. Like realters, "Real estate agents do not generally represent the buyer," says Florida real-estate attorney Barry Ansbacher. "But buyers think they do."

On a global scale? Sadly no.

I rather suspect the tech sector is a very safe space, in that regard. Because of demand and supply. But overall life is cheap on this planet.

At one interview they told me they thought I would be a good fit, but couldn't hire me at my requested salary.

I hadn't put down a requested salary, the recruiter had put down an unreasonably high salary and almost cost me the job

Flip side: I helped interview someone to replace me for an old position. He was put forward by a recruiting company as having had .NET and Ruby on Rails experience. I asked if he had done any Rails projects. "Oh yes, 2 or 3." Because of time, I didn't press further. We knew we were hiring a junior guy, and I didn't want to tangle with specifics, or trying to smoke out how much he knew through technical questions. I'm a brutally honest person, and I can never quite catch myself being naive at the wrong moment...

When the time came to hand off the Rails project to him, I told him it was written in Rails, and he literally opened a browser, went to Google, and typed in "Ruby on Rails" in front of me. And that's when I knew the recruiter had lied FOR him, and coached him to just go along with the lie. At least THIS guy had THAT going for him.

When I told my new management about the lie, knowing what was coming, I just got a stupid look, and a "Well, this can be an opportunity to learn something new."

It took him 3 years to rewrite my 3-month Rails app in .NET, and I've heard it doesn't work.

Yes, recruitment is broken. In this example, it was an utter lack of care to follow up on malfeasance from a recruiting firm. They got what they ultimately wanted -- a warm body on an H1-B visa -- and that's what they'll continue to get with their process.

I think I was 22 years old at the time and had never seen AS/400 in my life, and told them so. They showed me a copy of my resume which had AS/400 and a few other skills falsely inserted by the recruiter. They appreciated my honesty and did call me back for another open position later, and told me they'd fired that recruiter.

The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.

Subtle formatting errors make it apparent when recruiters have reordered lists or inserted bullet-points here and there.

They'll try to cover contact details with white rectangles - infamously not great at removing data in a digital document.

Even when it it's not clear from the document itself, I like it when candidates come in with their own copy of the CV, I'm always interested in comparing the difference between that and the one the recruiter provided.

In the last ~4 years I've only sent out PDF copies of my Resume to Recruiters.

A couple of have turned around and asked for it in DOC/DOCX, but a whole bunch more have just copy/pasted it into their own template and sent that to the employer.

I've turned up to interviews and offered the interviewers copies of my resume, and they wave something with the recruiters's logo all over it and not looking at all like what I sent in.

As soon as I'm talking to a candidate 1-on-1 (without the recruiter proxying) I ask them to provided me an original copy of their Resume, because the recruiter may have left out important details (thinking them irrelevant, as recruiters typically aren't tech-savvy) when copy+pasting into their template.

PDFs are pretty trivial to edit anyway.

I suppose you could print out your CV and scan it into a PDF to prevent that - but then there is OCR...

You're right of course that with OCR, and the right typefaces, it's always possible to automate the process of building an editable document from a PDF or printed page.

Also, who would want to lower the perceived visual quality of his resume? And scanning a document, means just that. It will be still readable, yes, but you can see, that it was scanned in.

I had a couple of recruiters ask for a doc/docx. I think I only made one conversion where it was the actual HR from the company using it for keyword matching and I refused to do it for the other recruiters. Still got invited to interviews of companies for those other recruiters.

It might seem harsh, but it's an easy way to weed out lazy recruiters that just want to spam your C.V. to many clients based on a keyword match when they upload it into their automated system and the recruiters that want to take time and even invest into a relationship to build a decent portfolio.

They offered me the job.

Sometimes they're honest edits to improve your chances, but mostly it's lying to get you in the door.

I’ve never come across any edited versions at interview.

But I must add that I am only looking for C Linux coder contracts.

I do technical interviews and I never look at CVs before doing the interview. I do this to avoid bias. I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their first job.

Also, people are adaptable, and soft skills matter a lot. So the error bars for recruiting even based on hard skills on a resume are really large.

I don't agree. If I'm interviewing someone straight out of college there are things I wouldn't expect them to really know and focus on whether they are focused and motivated enough to learn those things on the job. If the person at 15 years experience and doesn't know things which are a normal part of the kind of job I do, it would be a deal breaker.

It's useful to know what you're looking for when you go out in to the market...

In terms of bad recruiters: A recruitment agency will often get a fee of ~20% of an employee's first year's salary - meaning they are extremely motivated.

That high level of motivation has some benefits - for candidates, they'll happily take care of any BS like entering your details into different companies' candidate tracking systems, writing carefully customised cover letters for each job, following up with companies after interviews and so on. And for employers, recruiters will deal with grubby business like cold-calling candidates and will often have access to more candidates.

It also has a bunch of disadvantages - recruiters will happily post fake high-salary jobs to gather resumes, add lies to candidates' resumes, help candidates cheat on work-sample tests, send generous 'gifts' to hiring teams that take their candidates, apply high-pressure sales tactics to wavering candidates, call candidates they placed after a year or two and encourage them to move jobs, and copy the contact database any time they leave a job.

The thing is that there are big incentives for the recruiters. Where I live (Dublin) the recruiters finders fee would be around 30% of the candidates salary. In IT that could be a fair whack of money. That sort of incentive can cause some peoples morals to loosen a bit.

Here are some of my experiences...

Recruiters editing my CV to make me look more skilled or possessing skills I don't have.

Editing my CV so that it contains the right information, but the formatting has been destroyed and it looks terrible.

Costing me a job opportunity when I applied direct to a company and because I was on a recruiters system they demanded a fee when they learned I was made an offer. Because the recruiter threatened legal action, the company withdrew the offer.

Calling at me at work. Even on occasions calling me via the company switchboard.

Arranging interviews without my consent.

A recruiter shouting at me for cancelling an interview because I was running a 39 degree fever.

Taking my LinkedIn profile data and creating profiles on their own systems. I added a fake job to my profile to weed those ones out.

Individual recruiters taking my data from one company to the next when they themselves changed employers.

Refusing to delete my data from their systems forcing me to go to the Data Protection Commissioner.

When I went self-employed they started calling me asking if I would hire one of their candidates. Even though I said I was a one man operation and would stay that way - they kept calling.

One recruiter calling my wife when I blocked their number.

Of course different peoples experiences may vary, but in my case I can honestly say I have never had a good experience with an IT recruiter.

Sounds like the employer is a shitty as the agency here, if I had had an offer like that withdrawn I would have sent a stiff letter from a lawyer wanting a "compromise agreement"

As for the offer withdrawal, until the contract is signed they had every right to do that. To be fair having seen it from the employers side, when an agency does something like that it can be messy. You may be the best candidate ever, but if the company has to drop a five-figure sum on solicitors and legal stuff then you may be more of a hindrance to them.

once a recruiter made me run trough 5 interviews. I had a full time job at a time, with a decent pay, and explicitly stated my requested salary upfront. after the whole charade, which burned a significant amount of my vacation days since I was working at another city at the moment, they just came out and said the budget for the position was less than the asking price, but feel convinced it would have been a great opportunity for me.

goddamn scum.

oh, and the "opportunity" went into bankruptcy forced liquidation two years later.

Many small companies use them anyways for some reason.

Recruiters who work for the company they are recruiting for are normally pretty good.

I once had a recruiter do the opposite to yours and remove something really important that I'd included specifically for the kind of role they put me forward for. They had just decided that they didn't think it was important. The interviewer disagreed and we spent a while talking about it.

The interviewer in that case referred to the recruiter as "the car salesman" throughout the interview. He said the guy was a bit rubbish, but better than all others they'd tried. They were a small firm so had turned to recruiters to take some of the workload. I think he was regretting it.

But I must say this is something relatively new to me, I started to get those letters on linkedin like 2-3 years ago, is this like a common practice?

It's been a while, but when I doing technical interviews I would give the candidate a copy of the resume that I had and ask them "Before we start, is this your resume? Is everything on it accurate?"

But a few of my more interesting experiences in the past in interviews regarding CV's have been:

1) Them having somebody else's CV content with my name attached - had that a few times 2) Them having 3 versions of your CV and first question is which one do I use and why I always carried a copies of my original printed out on nice paper. 3) Being interviewed for a different job than applied (my CV and experience covered wide area) for and not finding out until the offer came thru. 4) Turning up at an interview expected to speak Hungarian as I had Hungarian notation upon my CV. 5) Many instances of reused aberrations or when one letter be mistyped by agency making for much fun, maybe been bitrot/errors at play thinking about how some of those transpired.

But often my favourites would be when you turn up and the interviewer is down to earth and starts by glancing over the cv he got and pops it into the bin saying, we don't need that and gets into some technical questions and banter. Those always enjoyable and in a way often been a sign of a good boss - somebody who can cut thru the crud and get down to the issue at hand without the song and dance.

One of the reasons I got fired from that contract eventually (aside from a fight with a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality and was holding the project up in his backend role) was that they were disappointed with my lack of interesting user interface designs.

I never told anyone I was a graphic artist. Even if I did have that skill (or interest) (which I had neither), I was too busy dealing with new WPF/XAML/C# features and software design etc.

I bet the Alan Partridge jokes were flying...

I was a hiring manager for decades, and appreciated recruiters that acted as advocates for their prospects; even when I ended up not hiring the prospect.

Nowadays, it’s all tag searches and fake “personalized” emails. If I have “I once had a cup of coffee” in my CV, I’m a “Java guru.”

I regularly send people interested in working with me to things like my SO Story[0], and they regularly ignore it.

Nowadays, I have the rare luxury of choosing with whom I want to work. If folks don’t want to work with me, then let’s not waste each other’s time.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

5 minutes into the second such interview I asked the interviewer to see the job requirements and handed them a copy of my resume. I then explained that I didn't have any of the qualifications they were looking for, not even relevant experience, and noped my way out the door.

I received a nice email from the interviewer thanking me for not wasting their time and saying they'd keep my real resume on file if they had anything come up.

I fired the recruiter that day.

I don't know how common the practice is but it's made me leery of external recruiters and placement services ever since.

But it's damaging, and the company will not be pleased with the recruiter if they find out they've scammed them into hiring.

I feel you, but right now I am more concerned about quite some other broken processes to the point of ... what is actually working right?

And then after a while I realize again - actually quite a lot. It just works not by my high theoretical standards.

I have once been on an interview and interviewer pulled out my CV, obviously horribly mangled in Word. I told him that no, this isn't my CV and that I take too much pride in whatever I make including my CV to make such horribly looking document.

I have once met recruiter who insisted I rewrite my CV to include description of my experience with everything that was listed in the ad. I told them that this is my CV and it already lists a lot of stuff and it doesn't make sense for me to list obvious things (like knowledge of Excel) or things I have no experience with and that in general the CV is about me and not about the ad contents. I got no reply.

As for the latter. You don't have one CV you have a separate CV for each application and tune it to the ad. The ad is what the hiring firm is interested in and if you fit their needs and not does the firm fit your needs, that is for you to discover from the ad or from the interview process

I didn't do it, both still offered me interviews and the focus of the interview was those technologies. I pointed out that it wasn't on my resume and yup it wasn't, everyone seemed confused.

At the time I was trying to break into the industry and didn't feel like telling them.

I really just want to talk to some technical folks at the company, 10 minutes and if they're honest we probably both know if I'm a good fit or not... but rather it's recruiter and HR filters up the wazoo.

The whole thing is a stupid game where companies, recruiters, and etc don't know what they're talking about, play alphabet soup, ghost people ... and then get upset when it happens to them...

The whole process seems disconnected and shockingly dishonest.

I have a fake programming language on my resume, has been there for years. To top it off, I used a well known video game cheat code.

I've been hired several times with that on my resume, so far no one has ever mentioned it.

If I threw out every resume with some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem, etc. I’d probably never hire anyone

I don't dock points for layout issues (unless they say they have experience in front-end work...), but spelling and grammar is exactly what you should be getting right in an resume. I don't meant to say I would be unreasonable pedant about the use of prepositions, and I'd probably overlook an MS Office autocorrect (like how Excel always changes "HSA" to "HAS", grrr) - and small mistakes must never invalidate someone immediately - but it means I'm going to be in the session with a dim view of the candidate until and unless they demonstrate otherwise.

That said, recruiters and agencies do edit resumes - so if something seems off with a resume (e.g. "20 years experience with Rust") then I do have a policy of directly contacting the candidate with the resume attached and asking them to verify that this is the resume they wrote. It's also why I sign my own resume PDF with my AATL certificate and mention that fact when I get to contact the hiring manager (e.g. "oh hey, did you have a chance review my signed resume? if it wasn't a signed PDF please let me know, thanks!)

Edit: I recalled correctly, IDDQD was the cheat code for god mode in the original doom.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iddqd

On the Friday morning before the interview, the recruiter gave me a rough idea of what kind of technical questions they'd ask me.

They were nothing like my area of expertise.

If something like this happened to me today, I'd cancel the interview, apologise to all the parties, and wouldn't drive there on the day of the interview. But I was a poor student, I didn't drive, I'd already bought the train ticket and, with the limited funds I had, being able to go to any further interviews was contingent on me getting paid expenses for this interview.

So I spent the weekend dreading the interview, skipped Monday's lectures, and went to my ritual humiliation. During one excruciating question about AC motors, I came within seconds of telling the interviewers that it wasn't going to work out. But, to ensure I got the train fare back, I had to do appear to be trying my hardest.

Every person involved lost out that day.

Exactly this. The most depressing thing to me is that whenever I suggest to my colleagues that 99% of the work we'd hire someone for anyone with half a brain could learn in a few weeks (I work in an office for a big company), they still insist on listing all sorts of required skills. Even though the people we land with job adverts like that don't usually have the skills and then get hired anyway.

It is. Have you filled out an online job application lately? I've abandoned multiple opportunities when I was directed to an online application that looked like it was written in the 1990s and literally asked me to rekey every bit of info that is already on my CV. There's no reason for a job application to ask for anything other than name and email with a button to upload your CV in this day and age.

Are these "outsourced" recruiters that get paid regardless of the quality of the candidate? Is that a thing? (I genuinely don't know, I've only ever talked to in-house recruiters that had their incentives aligned with the company so there's no reason for them to lie about candidates)

All my offers came from applying direct. Always got the runaround from recruiters.

We'd asked him how proficient he was with a number of technologies he'd listed on his resume, and he didn't seem to know what any of them were.

Finally, frustrated, we asked him why he'd put these things on his resume. He said "my recruiter told me to". Sigh. I don't know for certain but I believe we didn't work with that recruiter again.

The recruiter had copy and pasted from my perfectly formatted LaTeX typeset resume and changed what I did and when. They were looking for someone to help them migrate from one system to another and I didn't have experience in the first to help with that.

1. Having interviewed otherwise similarly qualified recent graduates, those with PhDs absolutely were worse on average at writing code[A].

2. Having a PhD raises the salary you can get at other jobs (less true today then 25 years ago when it happened, but still somewhat true), so if the job isn't paying particularly high rates then they either worry about retention or quality (i.e. you can either get a better paying job elsewhere because of the PhD or you can't despite the PhD, neither of which bodes well for the company hiring).

#1 didn't really apply to my dad since he had over 10 years of industry experience at that point, but might be the reason for the policy.

A: I don't know why this is so. I suspect it's a combination of factors; those with good practical skills may be lured away from academia after one of their previous 2 degrees and never get a PhD; the PhDs looking for industry jobs are already those who were disqualified from academia for some reason? I never pursued any education after my B.S. so can really only speculate.

Was never once asked for a resume.

I assume everyone just looked at my LinkedIn profile, or just figured they'd learn everything they needed from talking to me.

I don't remember the year it happened but it could even have been 2001, even 6 months to a year at that time would count as "extensive", I suppose. Can't say I had extensive 5.5 experience at that point either, to be fair.

They were probably concerned about their upgrade path from NT to 2000 and active directory more than just the mail server. I'll never know!

They get a bonus for hire.