He was going to transfer to a different company and was told that company rules meant he had to go through HR "as a formality".

He was blocked by his HR interviewer on the grounds that he was too successful and therefore wouldn't be "hungry" enough for such a competitive position.

He couldn't believe it. They didn't want someone with a proven record of repeated long-term success?

The person who was trying to recruit him was furious, but as my brother said, this was indicative of a wider problem, and so he declined to move there. Instead he won his Industry Award for the following year at the company he did move to....

In the end, I'd say that HR person did your brother a solid.

To be clear, not all of the jobs I've hired for sucked. But there was one project that was designed to chew up your soul (mine included), and we had very specific requirements- and people that had "extra" skills weren't qualified. I learned A LOT from that project.

In our area, we had 2 teams racing VERY FAST to 2 different objectives:

1) migrate ALL code and data to the new system (because it needs to be available on the new system) AND

2) archive everything (because we might sell all of our stuff and be unemployeed)

It was gut wrenching to look at code that I put my heart and soul into and know it would never run again. Or to look at code with comments like "I just threw this garbage together - it needs to be fixed, circa 5 years ago" and know it would never be fixed.

Or those automated gun turrets?

Then remove them? It says “Minimum Requirements”. It’s already proven that women, minorities and others on the outside don’t apply when they don’t meet these qualifications. You thinking that recruiters know what they’re doing at these companies, then we can only conclude they’re doing it on purpose.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/117/48/30303.full.pdf

I found it interesting to read, having gone down a small rabbit-hole after your comment :)

On the other hand, taking jobs that are a bit outside your comfort zone is how you grow. I agree that more realistic requirements would helps (especially if they're called "minimum"), but you also have to teach to people how to be ambitious.

You need to train people to leave their ethics at the door and lie until they make it?

They say these are "minimum requirements". You called them "qualifications". They're not suggested capabilities that you should have to feel comfortable in the job. They have a separate section for "Preferred Qualifications", so these aren't just preferences, they're requirements if you're not willing to break the rules.

A certain subset of the population is willing to check the box that says "I meet these requirements" and then later push around the interviewer and say they don't actually meet them but that they ought to be considered anyways. This brash, often narcissistic, overconfident group is over-represented in management circles not because they're "more ambitious" than others but because they're willing to sacrifice their morals to cheat the system.

Nearly all business interaction is a form of negotiation. If you look at a job description and feel that you'd be able to succeed at it, that's usually enough to get started. Clicking "Apply" doesn't mean you are certifying that you meet the minimum requirements. It simply means you'd like to be considered for the job. The worst that could happen is you've wasted somebody's time (which is true of probably 90% or more of all interviews anyway).

In my 15 years in software, I've interviewed at probably a couple dozen different places. Not once have I been asked to promise that I meet the listed minimum qualifications prior to submitting an application.

Although, I do not engage in judging others much, I would feel a strong disdain toward disregarding the minimum requirements because it supposes that I suppose that the other person is not 100% honest/clear in their intention and certain set of values may forbid some people in what I guess may be called ''bad faith'' i.e. presupposing that people are dishonest without having a viable reason for thinking so.

Well these are just some thoughts but I have a huge mental block in going against requirements, rules etc based upon the idea that the you presuppose that the other person is dishonest because then it would follow that one lives by the presupposition that everyone is being dishonest until otherwise.

Of course, for more utilitarian oriented people there may be more room for flexibility. However, in a pluralistic society I would value a wide array of ethics compatible in a free and fair market which respects fundamental human rights.

It's an application. You're applying. It's one thing to say the job description is misleading. It's quite another to presume someone applying while not technically qualified is being dishonest.

Is your conclusion still that I'm suggesting to "train people to leave their ethics at the door and lie until they make it?"? Are there any points that I can clarify for you? Do you have any suggestions to protect the systems from people that exploit it by sacrificing their morals?

I'm aware that the world isn't black and white, someone who submits a truthful resume to a job posting where they don't technically meet the qualifications has only made a little white lie that's almost universally forgiven, you're correct that they'll likely look ambitious and confident if they tell the interviewer "if you want to be super technical about it I don't meet this one little qualification but I think you should ignore that because factors X and Y make me a great candidate".

It's this culture of pervasive little white lies which is harmful. Be brutally correct, not just sufficiently honest to brush off these occasional inconsistencies. When someone does make a little white lie, call them on the lie and take the mandated action. Otherwise people who are most flexible with what's acceptable will advance more than those who require correctness.

They haven't lied at all. Where is the lie in saying, "I don't meet your requirements but I think you should hire me anyway"?

It's crazy to assume people would be stuffing their resumes instead of they making it clear the position is exciting to them and they would work hard to get up to standards.

Yeah, I'm honest in interviews. Getting past Automated Resume Sorting Equations (ARSE) is tough. As soon as I talk to a real human, I'm honest and explain what I know and don't know.

Ambition is what you can become, not what you are.

The only way of applying without dishonesty would be to do so while openly saying “I don’t tick all your boxes, but I still think I’d be a good fit because XYZ”. I might like this if I saw it in a job application, because it means the applicant was paying attention and not just applying to everything… but that doesn’t work so well when there’s already a “Preferred Qualifications” section, and might even have the opposite effect.

If a job says you need 8 years of experience and you say you have 8 when you have 4, that is lying. If you apply to a job that says you need 8 years of experience and you only have 4, that isn't lying. It isn't dishonest. It would be like the person selling that PC asking, "hey, might 4GB work if we throw in a better processor?"

Is "doesn't want to waste our time when we tell them not to waste our time" really an important attribute for you to reject candidates on? Or would more accurate "minimum" requirements be better?

That's exactly what I meant by being ambitious. I think you shouldn't lie when applying for a job, but on the other hand there is a shortage of applicants in tech. You could recognize this as an opportunity if you're confident that you can "grow to the desired level" of the job offer.

But what is a candidate to do? Skip the job, because they don't have the required qualifications? Assume the requirements aren't real? Dress up the resume with some fake barely there qualifications to fit?

Different cultural backgrounds will have different responses, and very few will really be lying.

The worst thing, though? The knee-jerk response to the ones that dress up the resume is often to want to add even more requirements...

There is usually little correlation between the job requirements and what you're actually going to do on the job.

As someone from a rural background where the best case was usually HVAC repair and the not-too-uncommon case was addiction and stagnation, and who came into tech from far outside the normal path, this is the problem to fix, and tech company job requirements are way too late in the pipeline to exert much leverage there. This needs to be solved culturally, across years and generations.

That would be great, but if we can substantially reduce the impact of the difference in confidence by being honest about minimal job requirements right now, shouldn't we also do that?

This reverse-sexism/racism reads as if you believe on an ideological level that women and minorities have inferior character defects and need special accommodations.

> you also have to teach to people how to be ambitious

This is a jobspec, not a carrer coaching session.

Filtering out people who feel self-conscious or experience impostor syndrome ends up disproportionally hurting minorities.

If you didn't know ahead what your options were, and you were willing to accept someone who isn't an actual surgeon, maybe you would have preferred the person who whittles, has a biology degree, also is great with DIY videos, was a combat medic, AND isn't squeamish at the sight of blood, unlike me? Because she was turned off by the fact she didn't meet your listed minimum requirements; all you got applying are me and your nephew.

No idea if that's true. I heard it claimed by many. I guess it sounds kinda implausible for a large company, they would need to create possibly thousands of fake job listings.

What if we helped minorities, women, and others on the outside meet the qualifications instead of lowering the standards? And yes that also includes rewriting some of the qualifications to be more realistic, I am not discounting that.

This comment is coming off as incendiary, judging by the quick clapback style of response to simply the first clause. I want to emphasis I also believe requirements should be rewritten to be more realistic and pertinent to the job. The solution in my view is to cater to the people who do take job requirements seriously (which to my understanding is the reason why women for example are excluded more) rather than just throw your hands up and say "job requirements are a joke"

John Carmack is arguably one of the most qualified people in the industry for this role, and he doesn't meet the requirements.

So it's not the case that there's piles of white men who _do_ meet the requirements that get it instead, and we just need to help minorities get to that level, it's that there's piles of white men that recognise the requirements are nonsense, so apply and get it without meeting them. Setting the requirements to what the recruiters actually require isn't lowering the bar as a result.

You know how peoples used to have folklores and stories that got passed down? Well, we still do, but the culturally transmitted information is now stuff like "Oh, yeah, those requirement lists are bullshit".

I really think it's as simple as having friends/peers in the know-how or not. Some people have family members, classmates, maybe even majority of their social circle working in IT which obviously exposes them to inner workings including this issue with job requirements. And then there are people whose social circle is far from IT so they just don't have confidence to (pretty much) lie on resume.

I actually think this _worse_, let alone _much harder_ than simply telling HR to chill with that shit.

It's commonly talked about in a lot of places online, including here.

It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job. If you take minimum requirements at face value, there's almost no jobs anyone straight out of school would qualify for.

It is definitely cultural knowledge that not all people have, and, more to the point, an understanding of what parts of a particular job ad that are stated as MQs are likely to be nice-to-haves and which are real MQs and which are nice to haves behind which are hiding real MQs (such as “Ph.D. in <field>” really meaning something like “a Ph.D. would be nice but a Masters is a hard minimum”), and therefore, how to evaluate whether it is worth expending effort applying for a job is non-universal cultural knowledge.

This often requires understanding of the hiring cultures of the particular job-field, industry, employer, and sometimes organizational subunit. Which is, for people just starting out (or looking outside of their past experience), highly network dependent. And equally substantively qualified people from underrepresented demographics arr likely to have weaker, in terms relevant to the task at hand, networks and therefore less access to this cultural knowledge.

> It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job.

Or not, in part because there are lots of places where its not true and if you act like it is you will learn hard.

Lying about requirements in hiring may be common, but it is not a universal norm, and calling it out and denormalizing it is a good thing, even outside of discriminatory impact, but its also very much a practice that has particular adverse impact on underrepresented minorities.

If John Carmack doesn't meet the standards, then you probably shouldn't worry about 'lowering them.' As if making tech more accessible requires lowering any standards, anyways.

Because you're not losing out on imaginary "significantly more qualified than John Carmack" applicants.

shouldn't worry about -> don't think there is a problem with

How are those the same?

You should worry about the requirements because they're bad and need fixing.

You shouldn't worry about the consequences of lowering the requirements because you weren't enforcing them anyway.

"shouldn't worry about about 'lowering them.'" -> don't think there is a problem with lowering them.

"probably SHOULD think about 'lowering them.'" -> should think about lowering them.

Is this an acceptable way to convey that you should evacuate the building without worrying?

> acceptable

It's a gratuitously ambiguous way to convey that you should evacuate the building without worrying.

No one, anywhere has said we shouldn’t be doing more. This conversation is around gatekeeping by listing unrealistic minimum requirements.

Why do we need this doublespeak and a wink and a nod for these roles?

Are they not able to reason through the fact that the requirements must logically be not realistic? Are women known to not question authority to the same degree as men? Why not endeavor to fix that about women.

All you're doing is filtering for people who are willing to bullshit their way into a job.

I was interviewed by MedTronics in 2015 by a HR fellow who asked me if I used 'C++11'. He had trouble believing that the 'C++11' was a language standard (adding features to the language) & not a language by itself.

Are you looking at the same Facebook job advert as me?

The key word here is tech company. There are many other sectors that employee below average labor for HR recruitment but the work an engineer can do there can be quite amazing, especially when the engineer realizes there is lots of room to innovate and optimize their workforce and what/how they output.

Then they are mislabeled as "minimum requirements." They must be relabeled as "preferred requirements."

Like using Leetcode popular at these top places you mentioned.