Ask HN: How much do you lie/exaggerate in your CV? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much do you lie/exaggerate in your CV?

3 pointspresent7 comments

I'm currently applying for jobs and I'm wondering how much people on HN lie or exaggerate on their CV.

I'll admit I've exaggerated how much experience I have using some technologies, but only because I believe I should be able to learn quickly enough for it to not be obvious if I got the position.

Is this a bad strategy? Some roles seem to ask for experience in technologies that would take a few hours to learn at best. I feel like in these situations it can't hurt too much, but could help a lot with pre-selection of my application.

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If it takes a few hours to learn it, learn it. If I interview you and you say you're an expert in X, and you have a blank look when I ask you about X, you've lost the job, even if you're otherwise brilliant.

> [...] I'm wondering how much people on HN lie or exaggerate on their CV.

Not even the slightiest bit. If anything, I tend to leave things out, the ones that are unimportant compared to rest, that are very old, or that I don't want to admit I know.

> Is this a bad strategy?

It is. It can very easily backfire. You don't know in advance which parts of the requirements are critical (and thus they'll ask you about them), and if you'll get caught lying, you're done immediately.

> Some roles seem to ask for experience in technologies that would take a few hours to learn at best.

You either look at the wrong job posts or heavily underestimate what does it take to be competent with those technologies.

As pixeloution said, if you think it only takes few hours to get proficient with a tool, try doing so. If it was easy, then you have some justification to put some knowledge about the tool in CV.

> You either look at the wrong job posts or heavily underestimate what does it take to be competent with those technologies.

I disagree, a job "requirement" may not really be one. the people who write the requirements sometimes don't understand them and what the context is to their business. someone just says, they better know python. but when you talk to them, you find out that one dude ten years ago wrote a python script that we need to continue to support. you don't need to be an expert to handle that.

I don't lie. I make sure my resume speaks the lingo though. W

What's the lingo?

At the highest level, it's corporate speak. Slightly below that it's industry specific terminology, below that it's position specific concepts/terminology.

I customize my resume to the job, i make sure to mention concrete, quantifiable, and relevant achievements [1]. I make sure to mention typical problems for the position and how i've solved them [1]

[1] Knowing what these and having them ready is the hard part. I built an app to help me do it. https://jobrudder.com

I think this is a pointless survey. People are going to claim to be honest and will encourage you to be honest, even if they aren't actually honest themselves. You are basically asking people to publicly admit to wrongdoing and out themselves as frauds in a forum that can potentially make or break their career.

I would not lie on my resume. But I also seem incapable of getting anywhere professionally -- for a variety of reasons. So, I wouldn't extrapolate anything from that about what works or doesn't work.

i wouldn't lie, but rather i try to balance it towards what the company says they need. it's not an exact science, because companies sometimes have no idea what they need and or have misleading posts about what they are looking for. (ie: we want a senior developer, oh you don't know how to run .net api from aws lambda which posts to mailgun which emails my mom and then she forwards the message to pete who then prints it and runs it over to gloria who then scans it and emails it back to the me so that i can print it out and recycle it)

it's a crap shoot at best, but truth is your biggest weapon as you can bank on being comfortable when you talk about what you know. you can always tailor in the cover letter if you want to high light silly "requirements" such as "gmail" or "outlook".

Whether it's a good strategy or not, it's a matter of integrity, which I consider to be something much more than just another stat on your character sheet used to get a job.

From my experience, most people lie at least a little bit.

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