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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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I don't think it's dishonest to apply for a job you don't meet the listed qualifications for. As long as you don't represent yourself via your résumé or in your other communication as having experience or qualifications that you don't have, it's the equivalent of saying, "I know you want AAA, but would you take AA instead?" It's the same as offering a lower-than-asking-price bid on a car or house.

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.

It may be that de facto these are not requirements, but for some of us who take things at face value and feel dishonest if we apply to something that has requirements, it is not that simple. It becomes more complex when you are of deontological preferences where you may have a universal rule forbidding you to do anything that you may deem misleading or dishonest.

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.

> they're requirements if you're not willing to break the rules

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.

I don't know precisely how that job platform works specifically, but in general, I don't see anything wrong with it as long as you're honest. In the comment chain I was replying too, people are saying that John Carmack is saying that you should not take the requirements as a strict pass/fail: "That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position.". The comment I replied to proposed to removed them completly because they cause discrimination based on confidence. I added that even if you remove discimination in the applying process, the same exact problem will manifest itself everywhere on the job, which is why removing the requirements is not a complete solution to discimination.

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?

My conclusions remains that a nuanced flexibility between honesty and fraud is advantageous for competitive job seekers.

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.

> 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

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"?

I would still apply for it if I had most of the requirement but not all. They are not dumb and would see that on my resume and on a cover letter I would write explaining how I'm really eager to join them and that I would dedicate my time to catching up with whatever tech I'm lacking.

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.

>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.

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.

If you equate "be ambitious" with lying, that says more about you than it says about resumes or HR.

I’d agree with @LeifCarrotson on this. If an app says “minimum requirements: 8 GB RAM” any PC which reports that it meets the minimum requirements but actually has 4 GB RAM is making a false claim.

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 an app says “minimum requirements: 8 GB RAM” any PC which reports that it meets the minimum requirements but actually has 4 GB RAM is making a false claim

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?"

Whether or not it's "moral" to apply to the job, this whole argument shows the problem with listing minimum requirements like that: in this very thread, you've got people saying "I'm not going to bother," so you've shrunk your candidate pool.

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?

Applying for a job isn't claiming that you meet the requirements, it's testing whether you meet the requirements. So the closer analogy would be installing an app that claims to require 8 GB RAM, just to see if it'll run anyway on your PC with only 4 GB RAM. Maybe the installer will block you, or maybe not, as long as you aren't tweaking your PC to report to the installer that it has more RAM when queried.

> “I don’t tick all your boxes, but I still think I’d be a good fit because XYZ”

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.

If the app works with 8GB, the app's requirements are stupid and should be ignored.

You are correct, of course, but the context of this thread is applying to a job without meeting the minimum "requirements". Arguably the lie is the "requirements".

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...

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