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Comment by terranstyler | Hacker News Reader

Are you hiring right now?

I wrote exactly these two tags "fast thinker" / "quick learner" in my CV / cover letter / LinkedIn profile and I removed them a few months later because from my experience it looks like they drive recruiters away or scare them.

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I can only speak for myself but terms like that set off my BS meter and probably make me think at least marginally less of whoever sticks them on their resume. They're vague and unquantifiable. They're of a class with words like acclaimed, industry-leading, and so forth in copy describing products.

Yes, for that reason I took it off, still the question is how can one communicate that one is? Should you write "constantly programmed faster and leaner and with less errors that his colleagues?". I don't think there is a way to communicate this but I still think it matters.

You can easily determine if some one is a BS guy in a technical interview anyway, so I don't think, BSers are very frequent in IT and much less so in programming.

Results, achievements, accomplishments. Frankly I don't really care if you were better than the guy in the next cube. He might be an idiot or a complete slacker.

And I'm not sure I wouldn't get negative vibes from someone who felt they had to position themselves by de-positioning the people they worked with.

>You can easily determine if some one is a BS guy in a technical interview anyway, so I don't think, BSers are very frequent in IT and much less so in programming.

Of course they're frequent. They are everywhere.

Also, those terms don't contain a signal. Anyone can say they're a fast thinker or a quick learner.

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