Bluffing or what?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alvin Bruney
  • Start date Start date
A

Alvin Bruney

I'm looking at this guy's resume to call him in for an interview and he
lists
VisualStudio.Net 2003 5 years.

C'mon. Is that really possible? He hasn't worked or consulted for MS either.
 
Hi,

Maybe he mixed all the versions of VS on a single line :)

Or just a honest mistake ;)

Cheers,
 
Hi Alvin,

Alvin Bruney said:
I'm looking at this guy's resume to call him in for an interview and he
lists
VisualStudio.Net 2003 5 years.

C'mon. Is that really possible? He hasn't worked or consulted for MS
Click to expand...
either.

I'd say bluffing. Not only is it impossible to have 5 years experience
with .NET (unless you worked/consulted for MS), but to me it seems very
suspicious that this person referenced the tool (VS.NET) rather than the
technology (.NET).

Regards,
Dan
 
Just ask him "Why are manhole covers round" or "How would you move mt. Fuji"
that should weed out the rif raff.
 
Hey Alvin,

If he truly means .NET, probably. It's possible he means he's trying very
hard to keep his resume short and been working with VS for five years, much
of which has been .NET. Now whether you want to applaud him for his attempt
at being concise or discount him for his inaccuracy, of course, up to you.
<g>

- John
 
Looks impossible, but my guess it would be quite easy to check with him/her.
Writing candidates off just for a possible mistake could be costly.... It
looks so silly a statement to me I'd never suspect him/her of cheating. Most
cheats I ran into in my short career life were way smarter than that. An
excellent chance to test your candidate for social skills ! I love openings
like those, I never start with the standard hooplah, the best way to get a
dead conversation in notime imho.

Be interested to hear btw what comes out, it would be a great anecdote...

Best!
Stu
 
I would suspect that he is a time traveling programming from about five
years in the future. The economy has gotten worse in the future so he
resorted to traveling back to this time to get a job. I guess someone
forgot to give him a copy of the Temporal Prime Directive. :)
 
I'm looking forward to the interview to, along with that, he got 3 years
asp.net.
I'm thinking this guy must be a heavy heavy hitter. Maybe we switch roles
and he interviews me to point out the crap that i been writing for so long.
:-)
 
The manhole covers are round because the manholes themselves are round.
=)

And yes, I am playing with the semantics.
 
Alvin Bruney said:
I'm looking at this guy's resume to call him in for an interview and he
lists
VisualStudio.Net 2003 5 years.

C'mon. Is that really possible? He hasn't worked or consulted for MS
Click to expand...
either.

It's not unusual to see a job requirment of "five years experience in a
2-year-old technology," so perhaps he's just being prepared:-)

My guess is he's abbreviating

Visual Studio 5 years, most recently VS.NET.

Or the headhunter is doing so (assuming he has one.)
 
I'm curious to see how this comes out as well. I love catching
interviewees in their own lies and then enjoying the awkward silence (for
them) that ensues afterwards.

Sometimes you get some stuttering as well, which is equally as soothing.
 
See you guys got it all wrong, He's sort of like me. He has 5 years of
experience all wrapped up into 6 months.
only I've got 6yrs in 5 months...Hirer me
 
Hi Nicholas,

Nicholas Paldino said:
I'm curious to see how this comes out as well. I love catching
interviewees in their own lies and then enjoying the awkward silence (for
them) that ensues afterwards.

Sometimes you get some stuttering as well, which is equally as
Click to expand...
soothing.

Not that I'm one to lie, but I'm glad I'm not your interviewee ;-) It's
sounds like you enjoy putting the screws to your "victims" a little too much
:-)

You know, this whole phenomenon of applicants exaggerating or outright
lying on resumes surprises me a bit. The idea of getting in over my head
scares me to death. As such, I think my tendency is to underplay my skills,
rather than exaggerate them. Should anyone reading this chance to receive a
resume from me, keep this in mind ;-)

Regards,
Dan
 
Daniel,

Nah, if you are honest, then I'm pretty fun to interview with.

When I am the one being interviewed, I basically will give an answer to
a question. If I am making an educated guess, then I will say "I'm just
guessing, but I think..." or if I don't know, I will say "I don't know."
It's really that simple. I don't want to waste their time, and I think that
it will show them that I am trustworthy, and know my limitations.

The best is when you can answer the person's questions before they ask
them. That's particularly fun.

=)
 
How is this any different than the job requirement calling for, "5+ years of
..NET"?

I have been seeing this in job listings, in ever increasing numbers, for 2
years. And it's not just from headhunters trying to impress their clients
either; some are from hiring managers.

Who knows why these outlandish requirements are written this way. Maybe it's
used as justification to get more low-wage, over-worked H1-B workers.
Perhaps it's justification to ship to work overseas.

Perhaps an over-zealous headhunter, trying to 1-up his competition, changed
the resume before sending to you...It sure wouldn't be the first time one
has done this.

I also know that I have had headhunters and hiring managers both tell me
that, ".NET is just COM/DCOM and all the other MS technologies rolled
together and renamed and new languages. So if you've been doing these for
'N' years, you have been doing .NET for 'N' years."

Of course these are the same headhunters that say, "If you've touched
something, put it on your resume."

Sorry, my 2.5 cents!

Brian W
 
Ok,
I'll fess up to this one. This was my one big lie, everybody got one. Here
is mine for an interview at Thomson Corporation.

Architect: What's the difference between COM and COM+?
Vapor
(eager to please and get the job, don't know the difference so I decide to
bluff):

COM is a microsoft technology which allows applications to talk to each
other. On the other hand, COM+ was invented by Sun Microsystems, to compete
against COM. COM+ is the underlying technology that powers the java engine,
but it is slow and awkward and difficult to use. But yes, that's the
difference.

Architect (not breaking a sweat or blinking, presses the issue): So if you
were to use one of them, which one would you use?

Vapor(no idea that they are on to my bluff):
Well COM for sure because COM+ has some memory management issues tied to
underlying Operating System. It's very difficult to reclaim the memory so
memory could leak and the application could crash later.

You know I actually got the job. I worked with them for two years, and we
got to laugh about it. The IT director took pitty on me and called me back
for a second interview - I was hiding in the manhole for the longest while
after I discovered the bull I was feeding them. In the second interview, the
IT director says to me, we are going to ask you some questions, if you don't
know, say you don't know. Don't feed us bullshit. You don't have to know the
answer to every question. 'Exact words, i swear'.

This was the late 90's when they were hiring masses of asses so I guess I
got in because of that. I still laugh about this with my friends today. Now,
if I don't know - I still bluff. Bad habits run deep. tehehehehehe

Nicholas Paldino said:
Daniel,

Nah, if you are honest, then I'm pretty fun to interview with.

When I am the one being interviewed, I basically will give an answer to
a question. If I am making an educated guess, then I will say "I'm just
guessing, but I think..." or if I don't know, I will say "I don't know."
It's really that simple. I don't want to waste their time, and I think that
it will show them that I am trustworthy, and know my limitations.

The best is when you can answer the person's questions before they ask
them. That's particularly fun.

=)

--
- Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]
- nick(dot)paldino=at=exisconsulting<dot>com

Daniel Pratt said:
Hi Nicholas,

in message news:%[email protected]...
soothing.

Not that I'm one to lie, but I'm glad I'm not your interviewee ;-) It's
sounds like you enjoy putting the screws to your "victims" a little too much
:-)

You know, this whole phenomenon of applicants exaggerating or outright
lying on resumes surprises me a bit. The idea of getting in over my head
scares me to death. As such, I think my tendency is to underplay my skills,
rather than exaggerate them. Should anyone reading this chance to
Click to expand...
receive
a
resume from me, keep this in mind ;-)

Regards,
Dan
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
You know, this whole phenomenon of applicants exaggerating or outright
lying on resumes surprises me a bit. The idea of getting in over my head
scares me to death. As such, I think my tendency is to underplay my skills,
rather than exaggerate them. Should anyone reading this chance to receive a
resume from me, keep this in mind ;-)
Click to expand...

It used to be the vogue a few years ago to list anywhere from a half-
dozen to a dozen computer languages on one's resume. I suppose it had
to do with the idiotic theory that one should examine the job at hand
and then use the computer language best suited to that particular job.
Sheesh, didn't we realize that it was hard enough to be proficient in
*one* language, let alone a half-dozen? But I digress.

My favorite interview technique was to stand them up at the blackboard
and ask them to write a "Hello, world" program in each language. I
never found a single applicant that could do it in more than two
languages. Hello world in SNOBOL. Heh.

-- Rick
 
[snap]
Of course these are the same headhunters that say, "If you've touched
something, put it on your resume."
Click to expand...

Gee, would I have to tell my future employer of all the interesting things I
touched ? Could be an embarrassing situation and a LOOOONG resume ;-)

But yes, I know the type of aggressive resume-building mediators like to
portray. My career at Unilever started with me being 'sold' to them as Lotus
CC-mail expert by my agent, where the actual cc:mail knowledge I had was I
knew where the icon for it on my laptop was... I had NEVER written an email
before I stepped in their building.... Haha...
It also proved a lesson to myself, I picked up all I needed for the job
within 2 months, and the same applied for other 'invented' fields of
expertise. Since then I never looked seriously at the Experience paragraph
in someone's resume once I got to be the interviewer/hirer, and instead
tried to get a glimpse of someone's personality, response to unexpected
situations and their real interests in life. I think I've hired many of the
people no other clients would have hired, and I can't say my business ran
worse then theirs....
 
Brian W said:
How is this any different than the job requirement calling for, "5+ years of
.NET"?
Click to expand...

I think the difference is that these days we pretty much expect
headhunters and managers not to know much about the field - but if
you're going to *work* in the field at the coal face, you should really
know what's going on.
 
I always work in an area that I am guranteed to be learning, I always do
something NEW somethink I have never done before, why do something that I
already know? I have done that every company i worked and I love it. Take
out the growing factor you take away alot of the reason to be there.

I learnt everything i do that way, do not cut anybody out just because they
dont have X number of years, that means jack all really. Its mindset thats
important. If they dont know, do they want to learn etc.
 
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