Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

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I applaud that you give this comment. Your comment seems indeed controversial, but you gave it in a thoughtful manner and you dared to give it. This is what I like about HN: thoughtful comments that may be controversial but are relevant even at the risk of one's own reputation.

From my own limited interview experience: companies reject you for the silliest things, in my opinion and I have decided that I need to deceive in order for my value to be seen in the right manner. It might be the case I'm arrogant, but I also notice that people who had a computer science education at the same uni as I went to are the only ones to actually evaluate in the right way. Whenever I get interviewed by non CS people at startups they just evaluate it as I did some rote learning psychology-esque degree[1], which is next to useless according to them.

So yes, I should deceive those people in that I have more working experience than I do, because uni gave me part of that working experience but there is no chance in hell that they would believe that. I know this to be true because the jobs that I did get, I performed well at, according to the people who hired me.

And somehow people always seem to be a bit surprised. People always seem to be a bit surprised when a CS graduate in general works out. I just find it silly, CS in Amsterdam is not that math heavy and it is programming heavy, what do you expect?

[1] 50% of my psych. degree (2nd bachelor, I'm Dutch) required a lot of rote learning. One third of the degree was statistics / academic writing, the rest were electives.

What are you even talking about? His opinion is not remotely controversial. Every populist hivemind drone on this site contends some form of this argument. Not a single person is (at least, getting upvoted) DEFENDING high or reasonable hiring bars - that is a controversial opinion.

That seems like a misreading of the question. The bar is high, and he cleared it, but was invited to try because of his fraudulent credential.

I'm not misreading it at all.

The two parent comments fall under the general umbrella of complaining about job listings requiring too much experience which is a standard point of contention against employers on HN. Leaving "20 years required low latency python experience with executive level leadership experience to manage our old undocumented report writing application" listings written by incompetent HR people out of the picture, there is plenty of valid monetary reasoning why a company would try to minimize its Type I error (that is hard to do, and nobody complaining seems to have any cogent solution). There are more than plenty of jobs an overconfident new grad who is good at interviewing and fibbing on his resume will fail at where a developer with several years of experience bringing projects into production is a much safer option. That is not disproved by singular anecdotal evidence of "I lied on my resume but I did do a good job so their hiring bar filtered out most of the good candidates and it isn't fair!".

However, most people reading this are employees, not employers, and have been burned by this in some way or another, so I'm going to get downvoted.

And then we also hear entreaties from employers that there is a shortage of programmers and policy changes are needed, a position that looks less sympathetic in light of a tendency to only hire experienced candidates.

There are no doubt hypocrisies and fallacies on both sides, employers included. I am certainly not arguing against that. That's a different debate, though.

Employees want to get rich, employers want free work from overqualified candidates so they get rich. People usually try to pick what they think at the time is the best option available to them, job or candidate.

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