Damn, the top comment on the article is about how you need to lie in tech interviews. How far have we fallen if we don't even have enough dignity to walk away from garbage tier companies who can't even put any real effort into hiring. Lying is not a solution, letting companies like Databricks die a slow painful death because they create toxic environments and all their programmers keep quitting is the solution.
A common way of avoiding having to lie is registering your own consulting company after getting laid off. No resume gap! As far as if it fools recruiters, no idea. It's got to sometimes, right? I see it too often on LinkedIn for it to be useless.
Perhaps in a very narrow sense, but I think it's more complicated than that.
Let's assume that there are facts that a person has a legitimate right to conceal in a particular context. What if the only way to conceal such a fact is to create a false impression?
I would hesitate to call that lying, because the word lying ususally implies that it is not legitimate, which contradicts the assumption.
Just actually register the company. In my country you don't even need to register, you just do business as a contractor. As long as you're under certain revenue limits, there's no registration necessary.
I mean as long as you have done some degree of contracting or consulting with the corp you made or at least can reasonably say that you planned to, it's not really lying.
When pressed it can be as simple as "maintaining a corporation for any work I do (when not working as a FTE/salaried employee) is preferable for accounting purposes". Of course if they press further you should probably have your accounting in order/understand the topic so you can explain this without looking like an idiot but it's unlikely they'd press you much further than that.
Some people think, "he says he was consulting, whatever, he's got the skills and seems like a good guy". Are they really fooled? Or do they just not care?
The real question is, will "consulting" fool the people who would reject you for a resume gap?
You would obviously need to give an overview of the types of customers and assignments and you had while consulting. And provide references on request.
At the very least it seems like it's useful for fooling the first tier recruiters who filter people out based on things like resume gaps or not having a particular keyword. It keeps your resume out of the wastebin, at least until you get to chat with the next tier recruiter.
I've had plenty of employers tell me something in the interview that was technically true but very misleading. They seem to think that's quite different from lying.
It’s a lie if you get caught and are in a position to be punished. You cannot do anything against a recruiter, ergo they cannot lie. Or rather, even if they lie they can give as many bad faith explanations or further lies as necessary and there is nothing you can do about it. Unless it is so egregious that you can sue them, in which case you have either a fat settlement or a court that demonstrates that they did in fact lie.
If you can't do anything against them, but they can do many things against you, there's not much hope for a fair agreement/outcome. I don't know what the fix would be, but it sure seems like there's something fundamental that needs fixing to make it so that when a would-be employer and a would-be employee meet to decide if they want to work together they meet on equal ground.
> If you can't do anything against them, but they can do many things against you, there's not much hope for a fair agreement/outcome.
Yeah, I tend to agree. It is depressing, but we are where we are. That said, I might be naive but I think things are fair most of the time. But mostly because people tend to do the right thing, often nudged by laws and regulations and not because they cannot get away with figurative murder, which some employers do.
> I don't know what the fix would be, but it sure seems like there's something fundamental that needs fixing to make it so that when a would-be employer and a would-be employee meet to decide if they want to work together they meet on equal ground.
I am not sure either. A good step would be to increase the bargaining power of the employees, which implies strong trade unions and a working social safety net. Employers have no qualm making informal agreements and coordinating hiring policies. Otherwise employees or would-be employees have intrinsically the lower hand: if they don’t work, they starve but employers don’t lose sleep over a worker’s life.
In an ideal world, this would be unnecessary because a bad employer would soon have trouble finding workers and an equilibrium could get established. We are not in an ideal world, and the equilibrium is unstable.
>A common way of avoiding having to lie is registering your own consulting company after getting laid off. No resume gap! As far as if it fools recruiters, no idea. It's got to sometimes, right? I see it too often on LinkedIn for it to be useless.
"Consulting" is the programmer equivalent of claiming "Entrepreneur" as a job title. Sure it exists, but it generally translates to "Unemployed".
Maybe for you, but tell that to the bank that gladly gave me a mortgage thanks to all the income I've made consulting in the past years. This web site is teeming with successful consultants and contractors.
When Silicon Valley was less toxic, less exploitive, and not so riddled with useless frat boy brogrammers, there generally didn't used to be any stigma attached to being laid off.
I was loyally working at Kaleida (a joint venture of Apple and IBM) for a long time, and then applied for my dream job at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation, but they took a while getting back to me with an offer. But in the meantime Kaleida announced they were shutting down and laying off all employees (after having been steamrolled over by the Java Juggernaut).
Apple and IBM allowed Kaleida to pay out generous layoff packages (even converting worthless "KVAR" virtual stock options to cash) and gave job offers to most of the technical staff (which I turned down, because Interval was much more fun and interesting to me).
I told Interval that I wanted to delay accepting their job offer by a month or so, until after the Kaleida layoff, so I could qualify for the financial compensation in the Kaleida layoff package, and they understood completely and were just fine with it.
During that time period and before, Apple would even lay off batches of employees for a while to downsize, then eventually hire some of them back again, restoring all of their accumulated benefits and seniority.
I’ve seen consultants make around £30,000 a month. Including at least one case where the person in question did that after being let go, consulting for the same people who were her customers when she was employed. Not too bad for unemployed people.
When my last employer went through a technical bankruptcy and had to fire some people, I volunteered because it would enable me to start my own business. I've been doing pretty well since then. Not 30k/month, but good enough.
Congratulations! It is not for everyone, but I have friends thriving in this role. Now, to be clear they did not make £30,000 pcm year after year. Ups and downs average out over the long term, and the average certainly is lower than that. Still, they do complain about stress and such, but not really about the money.
In the company I'm currently working with, 60% of employees are contractors/consultants. On average they make 30% more than fulltime employees (but they don't have benefits so it washes out).
Myself, I've been either an entrepreneur (had a company with up to 12 employees for a few years) or doing consulting pretty much exclusively in the last 16 years.
So no consulting/contracting doesn't mean unemployed.
Well, my “unemployed” compensation was much higher in some years, compared to when I was employed. Consulting is great, if you can tolerate uncertainty (which is kind of your profession now).
I've been led to believe that there are brokers who have information on your employment history and that it will likely show up in a background check. Famously, employment dates are the only thing a typical HR department will give out when cold called by a potential new employer. Basically, it's not something I'd fluff beyond a month or two. I'd find something else to fill a big gap on a resume if needed (sabbatical, volunteering, consulting, whatever) just in case it's something that an automated filter is tossing out.
Yes if it gets to filling out background check documents, I don't fudge dates. I have though typically only needed to do those after offer has been made, etc.
Indeed. This is not a categorical issue since, as noted elsewhere in the thread, employers lie and obfuscate all the time.
Would I judge someone for fudging the dates of their last employment to get around a ridiculous recruiter screen like this? Absolutely not. Would I judge someone for directly lying about their experience or knowledge? Yes, that’s unethical.
> is about how you need to lie in tech interviews.
Doing recruiting rounds as a candidate in the early 00's taught me that you have to lie in interviews. All the questions were "give an example of a time when ... " - everyone displayed leadership when they were captain of the national championship winning football team, and overcame adversity when they climbed the three mountains taller than everest in the same day. At the end of the day ... it worked.
Much like social media etc today - real life cant compete with the fantasy of the 100x coder who added $50mil of sales to the bottom line of their last employer.
You should also consider lying to your doctor when they ask how much you drink / smoke / exercise. They will just assume that you are so 2x whatever you say for drinking and 1/10th the amount of exercise you self report - because everybody lies.
> letting companies like Databricks die a slow painful death because they create toxic environments and all their programmers keep quitting is the solution.
True, these places eventually fall away, whether it takes 2,4,6 10+ years. They eventually perish.
And sometimes the company really does prefer people who know how to package uncomfortable facts in a more diplomatic manner. Nobody wants blatant liars, but giving a positive spin on things is a surprisingly valued skill.
Other than questionable ethics, it can lead to immediate termination.
But as always, there's lying and "lying". Saying you quit when you were laid off, I would consider lying. Telling you needed new challenges when in fact your boss was so toxic you wanted to quit the universe, not lying.
In the end, a job interview is a courting dance and you'd want to put your colorful feathers on, but at least they should reflect your reality.
Sure, some people would claim "It's just about putting your best foot forward and presenting yourself in the best possible light," but those people are such liars they lie about lying. Lying by admission is still lying.
God that's cynical. In the final round of my last FAANG interview after bumbling through part of it, at a very senior level, the interviewer flat out asked me "so uh, how long has it been since you did Android?", presumably due to my poor performance. I admitted I'd spent the majority of the last 2 years on iOS even though I'd done Android in the past too, and lo and behold, hired. Honesty and respect are valued where it counts, and if they're not, find another employer.
Congratulations on finding an empathetic and wise interviewer among the legions of smug know-it-alls who are enthused to watch you twist in the wind with their trick questions.
I admitted I'd spent the majority of the last 2 years on iOS even though I'd done Android in the past too
How would it be any different if you had simply lied about Android experience? As in, you simply were never remotely competent at it and you just said it had been awhile?
Fake it until you make it is age-old advice and you being lucky enough to have an interviewer who cared isn't really an argument against it.
I like to quite Dave Barry: A resume is not just a piece of paper, it’s a piece of paper covered in lies. And it can be the difference between not getting a job, and not even coming close
