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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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