
Ask HN: How much do you lie/exaggerate in your CV? - present
I&#x27;m currently applying for jobs and I&#x27;m wondering how much people on HN lie or exaggerate on their CV.<p>I&#x27;ll admit I&#x27;ve exaggerated how much experience I have using some technologies, but only because I believe I should be able to learn quickly enough for it to not be obvious if I got the position.<p>Is this a bad strategy? Some roles seem to ask for experience in technologies that would take a few hours to learn at best. I feel like in these situations it can&#x27;t hurt too much, but could help a lot with pre-selection of my application.
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pixeloution
If it takes a few hours to learn it, learn it. If I interview you and you say
you're an expert in X, and you have a blank look when I ask you about X,
you've lost the job, even if you're otherwise brilliant.

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dozzie
> [...] I'm wondering how much people on HN lie or exaggerate on their CV.

Not even the slightiest bit. If anything, I tend to leave things out, the ones
that are unimportant compared to rest, that are very old, or that I don't want
to admit I know.

> Is this a bad strategy?

It is. It can very easily backfire. You don't know in advance which parts of
the requirements are critical (and thus they'll ask you about them), and if
you'll get caught lying, you're done immediately.

> Some roles seem to ask for experience in technologies that would take a few
> hours to learn at best.

You either look at the wrong job posts or heavily underestimate what does it
take to be competent with those technologies.

As pixeloution said, if you think it only takes few hours to get proficient
with a tool, try doing so. If it was easy, then you have some justification to
put some knowledge about the tool in CV.

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devhead
> You either look at the wrong job posts or heavily underestimate what does it
> take to be competent with those technologies.

I disagree, a job "requirement" may not really be one. the people who write
the requirements sometimes don't understand them and what the context is to
their business. someone just says, they better know python. but when you talk
to them, you find out that one dude ten years ago wrote a python script that
we need to continue to support. you don't need to be an expert to handle that.

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gentleteblor
I don't lie. I make sure my resume speaks the lingo though. W

What's the lingo?

At the highest level, it's corporate speak. Slightly below that it's industry
specific terminology, below that it's position specific concepts/terminology.

I customize my resume to the job, i make sure to mention concrete,
quantifiable, and relevant achievements [1]. I make sure to mention typical
problems for the position and how i've solved them [1]

[1] Knowing what these and having them ready is the hard part. I built an app
to help me do it. [https://jobrudder.com](https://jobrudder.com)

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Mz
I think this is a pointless survey. People are going to claim to be honest and
will encourage you to be honest, even if they aren't actually honest
themselves. You are basically asking people to publicly admit to wrongdoing
and out themselves as frauds in a forum that can potentially make or break
their career.

I would not lie on my resume. But I also seem incapable of getting anywhere
professionally -- for a variety of reasons. So, I wouldn't extrapolate
anything from that about what works or doesn't work.

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devhead
i wouldn't lie, but rather i try to balance it towards what the company says
they need. it's not an exact science, because companies sometimes have no idea
what they need and or have misleading posts about what they are looking for.
(ie: we want a senior developer, oh you don't know how to run .net api from
aws lambda which posts to mailgun which emails my mom and then she forwards
the message to pete who then prints it and runs it over to gloria who then
scans it and emails it back to the me so that i can print it out and recycle
it)

it's a crap shoot at best, but truth is your biggest weapon as you can bank on
being comfortable when you talk about what you know. you can always tailor in
the cover letter if you want to high light silly "requirements" such as
"gmail" or "outlook".

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DKnoll
Whether it's a good strategy or not, it's a matter of integrity, which I
consider to be something much more than just another stat on your character
sheet used to get a job.

From my experience, most people lie at least a little bit.

