Rant: Generation Y: Please stop lying on your resumes

[sourceninja]

I just realized I've been a php developer dating back to php3 and I still don't know what php stands for LOL.

 

[PingSpike]

What's the cutoff for generation X? I'm trying to join the team.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

There is no hard end or beginning really. The latest date used is generally not later than 1982. I remember looking this up when I read an article that said Gen X ended in 1979 and Gen Y started in 1983...meaning apparently no babies were born in the US during a 4 year time span and I some how did not actually exist.

 

[Rage187]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

There is no hard end or beginning really. The latest date used is generally not later than 1982. I remember looking this up when I read an article that said Gen X ended in 1979 and Gen Y started in 1983...meaning apparently no babies were born in the US during a 4 year time span and I some how did not actually exist.

Your generation XXX

 

[PingSpike]

Any group that would disqualify someone based on that is NOT one I would ever want to work with. Jeez, get a sense of humor.

Agreed. An ill advised joke in an unknown environment for sure...but have you ever actually been on an interview? I think I've said at least as foolish of things because of nerves.

Edit: I see it wasn't the only reason...

 

[timosyy]

Are these professionals you're hiring or college noobs? If it's the latter, you need to cut them some slack.

Agreed again, speaking as someone who just came out of college (and has a job). There's only so much practical experience school can give you, and sometimes it's hard to get internships (for example, I switched from engineering into IT, and had to take a lot of classes over my last two summers to make up for it. I did have internships my freshman/sophomore year but I mean...). A single course on Project Management isn't going to make me a PMP. A course on networks doesn't make me a CCNA/CCNP. I took a course on web-based decision-support-systems (mySQL, Apache, PHP, ASP), but hell if I can code any of that on the spot right now. Took an entire course on Linux but still have to look up vi commands sometimes.

I see a college degree as "hey this guy isn't a retard, we can teach him and he'll learn." Also the broad base of knowledge means you can familiarize yourself quickly with whatever tools they actually need you to use. Heck, most of my interviews didn't even focus much on the technical side of things (this includes the Big 4, IBM, etc.). They wanted to see that you were a good at working with people and assumed they could teach you anything you needed to know on the job.

My current position (my company does a rotation program for new college hires), I had absolutely zero experience in, not even classroom. Five months later, my manager (also a director at the company) thinks I'm a freaking superstar.

Also, to be honest, I look around at some of the Baby Boomers around here and... you're not all that

 

[yllus]

Are these professionals you're hiring or college noobs? If it's the latter, you need to cut them some slack.

We had a career fair and the recruiter, not knowing herself, asked me what PHP stood for. It was a way to validate items on my resume... but come on... that has nothing to do with knowing how to code. I stood there dumbfounded, then told her I never actually looked into it (and I still hadn't up until this post - probably what you guys will be doing now). She told me she'd put my resume on file and I thought well there goes that company. 2 months later I got a call anyway and went for a real interview. This was 1999 and I'm still working for them. They never asked me to code on the spot... it was more about job experiences back then rather than "prove this and that". I even learned my primary coding language from scratch WHILE ON THE JOB. Today's generation has it tougher, none of it their fault.

I just realized I've been a php developer dating back to php3 and I still don't know what php stands for LOL.

I'll have to join the club. Been writing code in PHP for 9 years and I'd at best only be able to guess at the meaning. Dumb, dumb question. And I refuse to look up what the answer is.

 

[Kev]

I ain't what you call book smart, I am more of a DO SMART. I won't be able to recall all the OSI layers, but I will fix yo shit. And as a result, I work for one of the best companies in the world, fixing shit.

same here, seems the OP is a bit myopic in his judgement of skills. Not everyone is going to memorize every random detail you may choose to throw at them. Problem solving skills are much more important than memorization skills.

 

[Rage187]

Out of college, we don't expect you to have a lot of experience. Your resume should include "I know this, this and this" but we also want to see what projects and teams you were on in college.

If one of your class projects was working with a team to write a simple program. Excellent, tell me about the project, what kind of challenges did you have and how did you work through them. That's what we expect from college hires. You don't have to lie, you have done something while you were in college that shows that can you work with a team to accomplish a task. Share that experience with us.

That type of stuff goes further than you just putting SQL under skills.

 

[SP33Demon]

Also, to be honest, I look around at some of the Baby Boomers around here and... you're not all that

Yup, I blow Boomers out of the water in productivity. Many of them are just waiting to retire and some of them still 1-finger type. It takes them forever to process an email and some of the higher bosses even have trouble making decisions. Most of them are just there because of their congenial personalities and seniority.

Luckily most of my team is comprised of very good Gen-Xers like me + a couple of superstar Gen-Yers. I'd go insane if I had to work with some of these Boomers all day.

 

[ShawnD1]

Page 2 on my description wasn't actually resume but references, which you never provide in the real world until you're asked for them. Every college teaches 1 page resume, which is usually a good idea for college students.

However, career offices are WAY too married to the 1 page idea. They'll force an experienced person down to 1 page (I saw this recently for a friend who went back to law school with 6 years of SAP consulting under his belt) and they drill 1 page so far into their students that later after they have experience, people still trim all the relevant content out of their resume to stay on 1 page.

People trim everything down to 1 page because 99% of the time HR only reads and prints 1 page. I've had quite a few job interviews where the HR people only have page 1 of my resume printed.

 

[magomago]

Agreed again, speaking as someone who just came out of college (and has a job). There's only so much practical experience school can give you, and sometimes it's hard to get internships (for example, I switched from engineering into IT, and had to take a lot of classes over my last two summers to make up for it. I did have internships my freshman/sophomore year but I mean...). A single course on Project Management isn't going to make me a PMP. A course on networks doesn't make me a CCNA/CCNP. I took a course on web-based decision-support-systems (mySQL, Apache, PHP, ASP), but hell if I can code any of that on the spot right now. Took an entire course on Linux but still have to look up vi commands sometimes.

I see a college degree as "hey this guy isn't a retard, we can teach him and he'll learn." Also the broad base of knowledge means you can familiarize yourself quickly with whatever tools they actually need you to use. Heck, most of my interviews didn't even focus much on the technical side of things (this includes the Big 4, IBM, etc.). They wanted to see that you were a good at working with people and assumed they could teach you anything you needed to know on the job.

My current position (my company does a rotation program for new college hires), I had absolutely zero experience in, not even classroom. Five months later, my manager (also a director at the company) thinks I'm a freaking superstar.

Also, to be honest, I look around at some of the Baby Boomers around here and... you're not all that

Geez that sounds like a breath of fresh air because its SOOOOOO true.



IMO if you are dealing with new hires you need to look at the potential and capacity to learn.

I would only ask general technical questions and nothing in detail unless I knew that person had just completed a class (ie: within the past few weeks tops) on the topic, or it was actually reallly necessary for the position and listed as a clear requirement.

My idea of a test (since this is full of CS majors) would be to open up a commonly used program and make them comfortable as I ask simple questions using a for loop, or whatever. Make them step through several of these because it gets them back in the groove.

Then I'd pop a more difficult question whose difficulty is related to a specific command or function that isn't readily known. If you know the comand, then its super easy. If they already knew it, great - they get kudos without any extra consideration because it just means that they have slightly more memorized then I expected.
What I would be waiting to see is as follows: Will they open up the help file or open up that web browser and find an online manual? If they do, then I would consider it a 'pass' on that part. Showing a capacity to learn and working around difficulty is way more important than answering a slew of technical questions on the spot.

IMO a slightly bad joke isn't grounds for not hiring someone, nor is them suggesting that they play a game (i wouldn't be impressed if WOW was listed there, but i sure wouldn't really care. It just means that they have something that they enjoy to do outside of work). You aren't going to truly know if they fit well in the group even if you give them 8 one hour interviews with a team. All you are trying to do at that stage is weed out those with serious social issues - and sometimes those are the ones that really shine technically

 

[ShawnD1]

How about following instructions and send me a mother fucking PDF resume when I ask for it instead of *.txt, *.doc, *.docx, *.rtf, *.html, some web URL, *.JPG (yes, I have gotten a JPEG photo of a resume).

I'm glad to read this post. I always send my resume out in PDF because it's sort a standard for documentation and it's specifically designed to be printed; things like .doc don't always work the same on windows vs mac or computer A vs computer B.

(skip this paragraph if you dont want to read my ranting)
Shouldn't get too upset over RTF documents. That's actually a really great document type. It's like watered down .doc in that it allows formatting and auto wrap around, but it doesn't have any of the .doc overhead. Here at work, I always save instructions or memos as RTF files. Word .doc files are 30kb even if there's literally no text, but the RTF change log I just wrote for some files had lots of words and the thing was still only 2kb
It's also a standard document type supported by Wordpad. PDF and DOC require extra installed software. DOCX is the worst; my workstation was just assembled about 3 months ago and it still uses Office 2003. Assuming the person receiving that can even open a DOCX file is just retarded. (there's a service pack that is supposed to allow docx compatibility but it doesn't seem to work on this computer).


In any event, asking for PDF is a good test. Does the person applying for a job know enough about Microsoft Word or Open Office to know how to export to PDF? It's a pretty standard task that they might need to do, but can they do it? Not everyone knows how

 

[Saint Nick]

My last interview, the interviewer was keeping track of the number of questions I was asking him...I ended up asking about ten questions about the job and for some reason I feel that like disqualified me. He was joking about how someone he interviewed in the past asked eight questions and it was a record or something? What the fuck? I couldn't figure out if he thought it was funny or was trying to make me not ask that many questions? Huh???

Didn't get the job.

 

[alkemyst]

If you say you design webpages, be prepared to show pages you have designed.
If you say you type 100 WPM, you will get a typing test just for my amusement.
If you say you code, great get ready to code during the interview.
If you bring code samples, don't look like a deer in the headlights when I wipe the comments out of your code and ask you what the code is written to do.

I don't know what it is with this generation, but outright lying on resumes and looking surprised when you get called to the mat; it's ridiculous.

Oh yeah, I don't care about your GPA. And running a guild in WoW is not something you should put as a "skill".

Also, don't ask me if I play fantasy football. I don't and I now know what you will be doing most of your day if hired.

/rant

I don't think many here are going for the Lead Fry Guy you'd be interviewing for.

cool story though.

 

[ShawnD1]

This girl was incredibly bad.
........
Because of her, we instituted mandatory phone screens for ALL candidates before bringing them in for interviews.

So that's why you guys do that. I remember I had a phone "interview" which I thought was going to be a real interview since the job position was about a 3 hour drive away. The guy just talked to me for maybe 10 minutes and that was it. It was an HR person, didn't ask anything technical, just generic talk you might do on the bus or something. Why did you go into engineering, what are your long term goals, what part of engineering would you ultimately like to be in (ie design, review, consulting, purchasing equipment, picking parts, managing a team, etc).

Since the economy was bad at that time is it is now, I asked the in-person HR person how many people applied for this job. He didn't really know how many people applied, but he said he was interviewing 22 people for this bottom-ladder opening in the company. I guess it's good to filter out the crazy ones over the phone so you don't need to deal with them face to face.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

My last interview, the interviewer was keeping track of the number of questions I was asking him...I ended up asking about ten questions about the job and for some reason I feel that like disqualified me. He was joking about how someone he interviewed in the past asked eight questions and it was a record or something? What the fuck? I couldn't figure out if he thought it was funny or was trying to make me not ask that many questions? Huh???

Didn't get the job.

The other side of the fence (as you mention above) is when interviewers are complete jerks to prospective candidates. I'll repost a story I've told in this forum before for the laughs:

"Several years ago, I interviewed for a network engineer position with a very well known manufacturer of computer cables, peripherals, wireless products, etc. The first 3 or 4 rounds were a breeze. They finally flew in the IT manager and director from their HQ for the final interviews. They were condescending and rude and asked stupid questions and the director, who was very impressed with himself, always had to tell me what the "correct" answer was even though his questions made no sense and by his own definition, weren't solved by his answer. The IT manager mentioned some of the Active Directory issues they were having and I told him how to fix it and he argued with me over the solution! Keep in mind I designed an AD infrastructure for a Fortune 500 company with 40+ global sites, so I knew what I was talking about and had seen my solution work.

So, I was fed up -- I knew I wasn't going to get the job, so I decided to have fun with it. At the end, when they asked me for questions, I nailed them to the wall and completely embarrassed and humiliated them. One thing they were bragging about earlier in the interview was their customer satisfaction scores for their help desk -- it was 80%. So when it got to my turn to ask questions, I actually said this:

"You mentioned that your help desk customer satisfaction score was 80%. Quite frankly, that is a terrible score and wouldn't be tolerated anywhere I've worked in the past. People would be fired or reassigned. How do you plan to remedy the situation?"

Their jaws hit the floor -- it was GREAT! I just kept nailing them with stuff like that. I figured if they didn't have respect for me, I didn't need to have it for them. I think at the end, I also recommended to the manager that they hire a consulting firm to help with their AD issue since they couldn't solve it on their own.

The funny part is that these guys were hiring these positions because the previous people they hired were an absolute disaster. So yeah, these guys REALLY had the right to act like they knew how to pick employees. "

I had a job at the time and didn't need another, so I had nothing to lose and these guys were such major assholes that I had no problem doing this to them. One guy argued with me over branding of one of their products and was rude about it -- I was just mentioning something that the HR person and I had discussed and he told me I was wrong. I said "Oh, well I'm sorry, that's just what the HR person told me. Maybe I misunderstood." When he was persistently rude after that, I decided the branding argument wasn't an isolated incident and I wasn't going to take their shit.

One of his actual questions was: "If you interviewed twins and they had EXACTLY the same qualifications (even exactly the same personality), which ONE (my emphasis) would you hire?"

I told him that would never happen and I would hire the one that meshed the best with my team in the interviews. "Well, it HAS happened to us before! Which ONE (again, my emphasis) would you hire?"

He finally said "The correct answer is to hire both!" Uh, no dipshit, you said I could only hire ONE. This ignores the fact, of course, that I wasn't even interviewing for a management position. To this day, I refuse to buy their products and this interview was 7 years ago.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

So that's why you guys do that. I remember I had a phone "interview" which I thought was going to be a real interview since the job position was about a 3 hour drive away. The guy just talked to me for maybe 10 minutes and that was it. It was an HR person, didn't ask anything technical, just generic talk you might do on the bus or something.

We asked a few technical questions on our phone screen. Typically they were fairly basic, but we also asked candidates to talk about the projects they had listed on their resumes. 99% of the time, you could immediately tell how involved they were in the project from their description, so it made it easy to weed them out.

 

[puffff]

And one more thing. Some of the positions I interview people for, require you taking a proficiency test. Google.com is not an answer to a technical question. I totally get you can find the answer to anything online, but that also means you are useless without Internet access.

At one interview for an entry level position, the interviewer asked me a simple perl question. I had written on my resume that I knew perl, and had worked with it several years ago in school. I just couldnt recall the syntax at the time.

I basically answered that it had been a while since I did perl, but put me in front of a computer, and I'll figure it out. They ended up calling me back for a second interview and asked me similar questions again. Thankfully I had gone home that night and brushed up on it. I ended up getting the job.


Nowadays when I interview people, I give them a lot of leeway. As long as they have the right idea and pick the right datastructures, and their code looks like they've actually written in the language before, that's enough for me.

And yes, most candidates still fail.

 

[sjwaste]

I don't interview technical positions anymore, but when I did, my focus was always on the candidate's ability to learn anyway. I wanted to talk about past projects, their involvement, try to get a feel for ability to work with others. I'm not going to ask a specific technical question, because it's low value to have that stuff memorized. I'm more interested in how someone would approach a problem than the specific code they'd write to do it. Technology changes, the need to think analytically and solve problems does not.

 

[ShawnD1]

99% of the time, you could immediately tell how involved they were in the project from their description, so it made it easy to weed them out.

That's a pretty good point. Ask someone who sat back and did nothing and they might think the whole project went smoothly without any problems.

My chemistry final project was a disaster. The first month was wasted trying to synthesize something, 2 people left the team, one of those people took the project journal with them, and we changed the scope of the project to more of an analytical project. It worked out good in the end, but we had to completely overhaul the entire project.
My EE final project was more of a social experiment and deciding how to work with someone else. I'm very theoretical and technical while my partner was very social and hands-on git-r-dun. Rather than focus on just one of them, we split the project down the middle, did our own things, then combined it at the end to give a demonstration of how to use a piece of equipment as well as how the equipment works and why it has things like 3 wires and why it's shielded here and not there. Fun project

People always want to know what goes on behind the scenes. Not just what you did and how good your mark was, but how did you make this thing from start to finish. Where did you get the ideas for it. Was the final result anything like the original concept.

 

[vi edit]

I don't interview technical positions anymore, but when I did, my focus was always on the candidate's ability to learn anyway. I wanted to talk about past projects, their involvement, try to get a feel for ability to work with others. I'm not going to ask a specific technical question, because it's low value to have that stuff memorized. I'm more interested in how someone would approach a problem than the specific code they'd write to do it. Technology changes, the need to think analytically and solve problems does not.

I got my first job out of college because I was the only person who interviewed that passed the "pencil test". The interviewer said that she broke her pencil and needed it sharpened.

I walked through the basics like find a sharpener (didn't have one), get another pencil(couldn't find one), ect and finally asked her if she had a pocket knife...which oddly enough she did. And then walked her through how to whittle down the pencil to get it to the point of writing.

They told me that if I could successfully walk somebody through sharpening a pencil then I could support their users.



And that's what I try to look for in candidates that apply for our positions. We are mostly support based. I try to focus on problem solving and their troubleshooting progression.

 

[Koing]

In my industry it's easy to get a job if your good. I have recruiters calling me fairly often...

I interviewed people with:
Spelling mistakes on the cv - piss poor
Ridiculous 5 page cv
Stupid hobbies, something about loving it or something, can't remember now
Blatantly lying, you have excellent European market knowledge, you've done some Reuters courses but can't name 5 eu equity exchanges?! WTF?
Poor company research, can't name our main product or name our custom algos...
People not listening to me in the interviews
People interrupting me, ffs don't do that!!!
Not wearing a suit, no bonus points but nothing taken against you mate
Bailing under pressure, I set them up by asking what their day to day job is them u rudely cut in and ask them what's 30% of 8 is, 8 candidates 8 wrong answers WTF?! Most gave up after 2-3 attempts

But it may have pissed some of them off that a relatively young guy, 26 is interviewing them with my boss or a team leader lol.

I always go technical in the first, we don't want to waste time. If you can't answer te basics we won't ask harder stuff and drag it out.

This guy said he had great abilities to win conversations! WTF?! Did you read what you out on your cv?

This one guys cv was simply put amazing. He was very average and had huge issues at the interview! He couldn't tell us what he did day to day, kept going about the French people and coffee!

I dd feel a bit bad as some really wanted the role & were very keen but needed too much training or lacked too much knowledge.

I didn't fully realise how many sub par candidates exist and how much the 'team fit' mattered when I had only been interviewed and never interviewed others.

I have on my cv that I was on Gladiators and every single interviewer asks me about it and it's made me stand out.

Koing

 

[SagaLore]

If you bring code samples, don't look like a deer in the headlights when I wipe the comments out of your code and ask you what the code is written to do.

That's awesome. :biggrin::thumbsup:

 

[SagaLore]

Boomers also don't have daycare costs which are a mortgage in themselves. My daughter cost me $1200 a month when she was an infant.

Yes but how much was your SO making instead of being a stay at home parent? If it was more than $1200, then actually your daughter cost you nothing, and daycare made you (so_monthly_salary-1200). The women of the boomer generation tend to either not work or not have very high paying jobs like the current generations.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Dear Generation Y Critics,

Please don't group those of us born in the early to mid '80s with the rest of Generation Y. If we graduated high school before every single kid had a cellphone (or smartphone, for that matter), before "WoW" and "epic" were common words used in everyday teen language, and before Facebook and Myspace became popular, there's still a chance of salvation for us. In fact, I propose that we rename those of us born between ~1983 and ~1987 to "Generation XY."

Sincerely,
Born in '86, before everything in our generation went to Hell

P.S.: I DO have a portfolio of professional website that I've designed or worked as a team on, I can decipher several languages of code without comments or digging through a book or online references, I won't check my Facebook or other social networking site on company time (as I have no desire to check them on my own time anyway), you won't catch me blasting My Chemical Romance or Fall Out Boy (as I can't stand either band; I do, however, reserve the right to blast Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Nightwish, Pantera, and Sevendust, among others), and I don't drive a car that sounds like an army of angry hamsters with digestive issues and looks like it was a Fast & the Furious reject.