Lying on your resume - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2012/07/30/lying-on-your-resume/ <comment><USER2> There is a general rule of thumb. People who don't cheat, tend to strongly dislike people who do. People who do cheat, convince themselves that everyone does it, and it isn't a big detail.

Admittedly a ton of people cheat. But as someone who doesn't cheat, if I find out that you did, I'm going to lobby to not have to have you as a co-worker.

I have no idea how many people there are out there like me. Hopefully enough to discourage you from cheating. (Probably not, but I'd like to believe that it is not just a quixotic gesture on my part.)

<comment><USER3> In general, I don't cheat, but I don't find any problem with other people cheating, either. I think the difference is that you find the axis on which you are or aren't cheating (in this conversation, a degree) important and worth ranking and measuring people against. I don't. It's a silly game and people can have whatever numbers they like if they (or, perhaps, their parents) really want them.

I like knowing that the number I got was the one I honestly deserved (this is the same reason I never, say, crammed before tests in school--the grade I got wouldn't have reflected my lasting knowledge of the subject), but I know that I can't trust anyone _else's_ degrees/certifications/previous employments and commendations et al. to represent their honest talent/skill/dedication, so it's a bit silly to consider them any kind of useful _comparative_ (rather than self-evaluative) measure.

Like that other poster keeps pointing out in the job threads: if you want to hire good knowledge workers, an IQ test and a work-sample test will get you further than any set of expensive status-signalling criteria ever could.

<comment><USER2> _...if you want to hire good knowledge workers, an IQ test and a work-sample test will get you further than any set of expensive status-signalling criteria ever could._

I have seen data supporting that. However it could also land you in court for discrimination, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.>.

Most companies are risk adverse, and hence an IQ test as an admission criteria is verboten.

<comment> daniel-cussen I believe only the army is still allowed to do it.

<comment><USER4> My understanding is that anyone can do it if they provide a validation study showing that the IQ test directly correlates to job performance and doesn't discriminate on other protected statuses. My understanding is also that the number of companies that have done this is as close to 0 as makes no odds.

<comment><USER5> No, it _can_ discriminate on other protected statuses as long as you can prove that the test has a direct correlation to work performance. (Actually, the decisions require 'a strong basis in evidence' of 'business necessity', which you would demonstrate by showing a strong correlation.)

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano> for the state of the art in I/O psych/job placement/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seinfeld Moment:

George: Alright. Listen, I gotta get some reading done. You mind if I do this here? I can't concentrate in my apartment.

Jerry (checking out George's textbook): Risk management?

George: Yeah. Steinbrenner wants everyone in the front office to give a lecture in their area of business expertise.

Jerry: Well what makes them think you're a risk management expert?

George: I guess it's on my resume.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the real features of not lying is that you don't have to remember it. But if you lie you have to tell the same exact lie to everyone or get caught up in it. Why add to the stress of an already stressful process (interviewing) by adding a bunch of untruths you have to keep track of?

On the College Degree question I see a degree as the first thing you do where you don't have to do it. Or more precisely you have found it within your self to accomplish a goal that took longer than a year with an uncertain outcome and one where you could quit at any time. A lot of engineering work can be like that. Something that is going to take a couple or three years to realize, will have bits of crap in the middle that will be annoying but required to do, and will have an uncertain outcome.

So if you have a degree I know you can do that, if you don't I have to probe to see if you can. If you haven't had a job where something took more than a couple of years to deliver I don't know if you can stick with something long enough to get it done. That is an issue for me as a hiring manager. Now if you left college because you were working on something _else_ and that took you a few years to get right and shipped, well that works just fine for me.

<comment><USER8> You're placing too much emphasis on completing things. The vast majority of startups won't be around for the length of time you're suggesting. The vast majority of BigCos have plenty of people who can finish projects and maintain the status quo.

Both kinds of companies need people who can _start_ major projects and get results quickly.

<comment><USER7> "You're placing too much emphasis on completing things."

Probably, I try not to hire folks who can't complete things. I think you're off on your startup timing through. I know lots of startups that took a year to get to their MVP and then another to get to something they were willing to call 1.0. But by the same token I don't think of things you could do in a weekend and ship as being 'startups'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My degree was a formality. It's a footnote on my resume, for HR's eyes only.

When I get into the interview, I'm completely candid - All college taught me was how to pay off debt. I'm still learning.

<comment><USER10> College taught me something about lying on a resume. I was applying for a job and took my resume to the school's career services person to look it over. She asked me a couple questions about hobbies and classes and said she'd get back to me with an updated resume. A couple days later, I really needed to get my resume in, and she finally sent it back to me. I forwarded it off with just a slight once-over.

During the interview, the man uttered a phrase that stopped my heart: "So, tell me about your electrical engineering experience." As it turned out, the career services woman understood my basic PC building skills as electrical engineering skills. Much like you, I was up-front in the interview and told him that it was a mistake on the resume. I got the job.

<comment><USER11> You: That's a mistake on my resume.

Him: Oh why is that?

You: Because I had someone else do my resume.

(odd pause)

Him: You're hired!

<comment><USER12> The resumes of people straight out of college/university are often horrible, so this is more likely than you think.

I don't know why that is though, it's obviously important. Maybe these, err, kids, think that as they have no working experience, employers aren't likely to look at it a lot?

<comment><USER10> It's really hard to build a resume without having experience (in both your career and in creating a resume). When your main accomplishments consist of taking classes in your field of study, what do you put down that is both relevant and not too much information? How do you predict what the company wants to see on a resume when many job postings flat-out lie to you, puffing up the job and inventing requirements that don't actually exist? How do you emphasize that you know these skills but don't have any concrete evidence beyond a degree to prove it?

It can be done, obviously. But making a good resume is a skill that generally take time to master. If you do it right the first time, you may never need a resume again. These difficulties are why career services exist at colleges. And even they can't get it right sometimes.

<comment><USER12> I agree with all your points.

My exasperation comes from the CS field interviewing recent CS graduates. Many don't put the personal/hobby programming/adminning/etc projects they have done on their resume. The result is a resume of less than half a page that lists their name, study and hobbies (outside CS!). And sometimes with sloppy formatting & layout.

They presume "it wasn't real work" so it "doesn't count". _I_ 'll be the judge of what counts!

<comment><USER13> Who puts their hobbies on their resume?

<comment><USER10> If your hobby (programming, Arduino, security research) is relevant to your industry, it's a great way to tell people that you know and are interested in something without making it the main focus of your resume.

If I'm applying for a network administration job, knowing the Linux source code wouldn't be required but you'd better believe putting "hobbyist Linux programmer" would do nothing to hurt your chances of being hired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> UK based experience here so my experience may not apply outside that.

As some of you know, I worked as a successful technical recruiter for a number of years and I only ever came across one organisation that requires proof of your educational qualifications. The rest simply assume you're telling the truth.

It's a risky strategy but in software development at least, someone with a few years of development experience under their belt who lies about having a CS degree will struggle to maintain the lie once they are given tasks that require a fundamental understanding of programming theory. The more experience you have, the easier it is to pull it off.

On a side note, we interview tech directors and CTO's on a regular basis and ask each of them _How important is a CS degree in todays market?_ as well as _How much value do you place in a Developers personal projects such as github & demo sites when they apply for a job with your company?_ and the answers give an interesting insight into the mindset and importance of experience versus qualifications.

Link: <http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog>

<comment> adam-a As a UK based programmer I've had 3 jobs since leaving University. Out of those, 2 I recall asked to see proof of my degree (photo copy of my graduation certificate). The other I can't remember but I think they did too.

This is probably because I am a more recent graduate, if I had 10 years experience I imagine that would be more important to companies than my education. However, I think plenty of places do take it quite seriously.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure most companies would require proof for a recently graduated programmer but as your experience grows, the quality checking decreases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who hires if I find a lie on your CV, even a relatively small one, I have to make the assumption that you're untrustworthy and I won't hire you. It may be the only one but I have limited exposure to you and limited time to build a view so one lie is a big deal.

And if you say "I did it to get your attention", my response would be "why, haven't you done anything real worth my attention?"

The problem is that most people who lie aren't undiscovered geniuses, they're simply liars. I might miss out on a genuis at some point in my career but I'm certainly going to miss out on a lot of the grief that comes with hiring dishonest people.

EDIT: Removed a section based on something I think I've misunderstood.

<comment><USER16> Hold on. I might have misread, but I thought the point was he -didn't lie-. He put 'Mensa' because he was in Mensa. It stood out because so many other people had an 'education' section at that spot on their resumes.

<comment><USER17> There's a lot of confusion about that. I thought that was the point, too, but enough other people thought differently that I searched for him.

He doesn't seem to be a current member of Mensa. That doesn't mean he wasn't a member at the time, though. So far as I know, there's no way to look up records of past members. (Except maybe by a Mensa employee, which I'm not.)

Still, I don't think he meant that it was a lie. If someone asked me about it on my resume, my answer would be much the same as his. I usually have a second reason, though: If it bothers anyone that I'm a member, I don't want to work there. In my experience, people who have a beef against Mensans tend to make life very hard for smart people in general. They seem to make it their life goal to bring them down a notch. I don't need the extra stress, so I just avoid those companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Recently I interviewed a candidate for a fairly niche but high demand field. I generally liked him - he had skills that would have been useful to the team, and he was a very bright person. But a couple of us felt he exaggerated aspects of his resume by sprinkling in a couple of bullet points he knew we were interested in (from the posting) but didn't understand well. He would have fit well on our team, but ultimately we decided we couldn't trust him. If he lied about being "proficient" in skill #2, how did we know he wasn't lying about certain achievements or even jobs from the past?

I realize his lie was less severe than making up an education (and ironically much easier to catch), but it's a good example of how small lies can do a lot of damage.

<comment><USER19> > If he lied about being "proficient" in skill #2, how did we know he wasn't > lying about certain achievements or even jobs from the past?

I think you can tell if someone is lying about specific job experience in technical areas; when you drill down, the detail won't be there.

But there's a more general issue here (though I think you're only slightly guilty, because your leap is quite small). It's about a kind of intuition about dishonesty being an aspect of a person's character, rather than a mode of behaviour in a particular scenario. A lot of people make wild jumps from single actions to an inference about behaviour in lots of different situations. I think behaviour is heavily dependent on the situation, and much of what we think of as "character" is unwarranted.

People generalize from small incidents (of honorable or dishonorable behaviour) to a character classification, and then specialize these labels back down to predictions of behaviour elsewhere. But the guy who would never cheat a shopkeeper out of mistaken change may actually be a tax fraud, not because of "character", but because of wholly different frames of reference, possibly even resentment of government.

It's the same with people who judge "attention to detail" by spelling or grammar errors. I label them narrow-minded myself :)

<comment><USER20> I'm with you 100% right up to your last point, which sounds just wrong to me. The whole idea of "attention to detail" is that it's a personality trait that allows a person to see small details and defects _even in areas where they aren't expert_. And most of us believe it exists.

So yes: if you submit a resume with clear spelling errors (i.e. ones caught by a spel chkr) most of us would take that as evidence of a lack of attention to detail. And we'd generalize to you skipping a test case before pushing code, or making sure all your stock photos are licensed before deploying the site, or...

<comment><USER19> I'll agree with you on spelling errors on a CV, but not when generalizing from e.g. forum posts or random emails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _When I got my first job in Silicon Valley it was through serendipity (my part) and desperation (on the part of my first employer.) I really didn't have much of a resume – four years in the Air Force, building a scram system for a nuclear reactor, a startup in Ann Arbor Michigan but not much else._

Statements like that make me think most of the HN crowd live in a different stratosphere. That's a pretty good resume by normal standards.

<comment><USER12> I fully agree here. Either Silicon Valley was a much more exclusive place in the 80's, I'm fooled by the 30 year technology difference, or this is needless self-depreciation.

The resume looks _stellar_ to me.

<comment><USER22> I have a strong feeling that standards of rigor have dropped considerably since the 50's, but I have no data to back it up.

<comment><USER12> Maybe it's simple demand vs supply economics? The Valley has had a chronic shortage of engineers, hasn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I stopped attending college with one semester left until graduation. It's on my resume and it's never held me back in any way.

The key is that I was able to prove myself early on in my industry (before even leaving college). That set me up with the connections I needed to get my foot in the door.

edit: I guess I should clarify that I left college to take a job, not because I was failing or anything like that.

<comment><USER24> I'm in the exact same, comfortable, spot. I left college with a year, maybe a hard semester, until I graduated. Took a great job, had lots of work experience even before college and have never had a problem. If you have no experience they look for a degree. If you have no degree they look for experience. Just make sure you have 1 of 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Why don't you make something up."

This is shocking. In the UK this is potentially a criminal offence, and it certainly leaves the liar open to civil action. And even if they don't bother with courts they can just dismiss you and you've lost most of your protections.

And it sounds like really weird advice. What happens if recruiter tells Joe to just make something up, and then sometime later has to approach Joe with "a great candidate; a perfect fit for the job"?

That's for any job. Obviously there are some jobs which are more protected - you cannot call yourself a dietician or social worker unless you're qualified and registered.

<comment><USER26> Well for the recruiter it is probably no risk. They get paid if the person gets hired, nothing happens to the recruiter if the candidate gets fired/arrested a year down the line for lying on their CV.

<comment><USER17> We had recruiters do this to us. We clearly told those recruiters that if we catch them at it again, we'll stop using them.

They stopped.

It's not 'no risk' for them, but only if they company calls them on it. If more companies put their foot down, this problem would largely disappear.

<comment><USER27> Why give them a second chance at all? It is essentially a "no risk" situation for them if the only consequence for them is a slap on the wrist for a first offence.

<comment><USER17> Because like it or not, we needed them. We were willing to take the pain of dropping them if it was the only way to get them to stop causing us extra pain.

Since they stopped when forced to, the pain was gone and we continued.

We used a couple other recruiting companies, too, and none of them produced enough viable candidates to keep the desks filled. (That sounds worse than it was. It was a growing company.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is a great piece from SB and one I can totally relate to. Since I've started working for other people, I've never found myself in a serious ethical quandry with interviewers regarding my dropping out of school. Maybe because in most cases, I haven't been asked about it as there are lots of folks in my field (SEO & search marketing in general) who learned on the fly through their own sites, etc. But if asked, I tell them the path I've taken to get to where I am, although I try not to go into my life story.

It's usually more of a challenge when speaking socially with co-workers, especially when you're dealing with real "job people," who follow the school- career-40-years-of misery path to a tee. Frankly, I try to avoid talking about it as you're usually subject to one of two diametrically opposing viewpoints. Usually, they don't say anything that would make it outwardly identifiable but you can pick it up through body language etc. It's either:

A. "What are you, some kind of idiot?" or B. (what I've gotten more lately) "What do you think you are, some kind of genius?"

It's funny because I don't consider myself either of those things. But to keep the conversation away from that, I just avoid talking about it, although I will if asked. (One guy I used to work with it just stared at me blankly like I had just kicked his dog or something after I told him I had dropped out of undergrad and not a masters program, although he was the exception to the rule!)

I don't know how many companies I've applied to declined to speak further because of the lack of degree but I've only had one company ever flat out tell me in the interview process that they couldn't hire me: and that was an education lead-gen company.

Honesty & transparency really are your best weapons in situations like this.

<comment><USER29> Dealing with people who do not like those that do something else than (what the listener expects) the "default" thing happens in so many contexts. Not going to college is just one of many. Some simply have a difficult time with those who "live intentionally" - they seem dangerous, subversive, maybe even untrustworthy to said listener. Try explaining to certain people that you're over 30 and not married (and never will be), don't have children (and don't want them), live alone, don't own a house or a car (and take public transport) and watch as their faces change to shock, confusion, or abject terror. It's a particularly odd reaction as these things (like not getting married, living alone, etc.) become more common in places, but some groups/cultures/subcultures simply have not caught up with that reality.

It's perhaps a ubiquitous reaction to those perceived as "purposeful" outsiders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have zero college experience, I've never lied about it, and I've never had a problem getting a job. In fairness, my specific area of expertise (front-end design/development) is one where you can make a real name for yourself simply by building something awesome, but I'm still of the opinion that moxy and gusto will take you farther in many fields than a degree. Especially in technology.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have had the joy of interviewing people who've lied on their CVs (Resumes). One particular pearl was a guy claiming he'd worked on a particular project I had lead, I proceeded to ask him about the project who ran it, what it was about etc, he gave some vague answers, needless to say he didn't get the job.

Though the worst offenders for this aren't individual agents, its usually 3rd parties such as body shops trying to provide augmentation staff or recruitment agents doctoring resumes to try and get candidates in. I believe it was the case with my earlier example.

<comment><USER32> I consider even small lies on a resume to be red flags. The worst ones are lies that don't have to be told to get the job. They expose character flaws that I don't want in anyone working with or for me.

For example, I had a software development candidate who put "Fluent in Spanish" on his resume. Spanish wasn't a requirement for the job in any way, but unfortunately for him there were several native Spanish speakers in my office. I pulled a co-worker into the interview room and asked her to speak with the candidate in Spanish. I understand a little Spanish and was able to follow as she asked him about where he was from and what his hobbies were. The candidate could barely converse with her. I guess he had a couple of courses at school and called himself "fluent".

You never know everything that is true and isn't true on a resume, so interviewing someone is a process of building up a web of trust. I'm going to validate whatever I can in an interview from software design and pattern knowledge to whether or not you really were an Eagle Scout. It's all fair game if you put it on your resume.

<comment><USER33> _I guess he had a couple of courses at school and called himself "fluent"._

Umm, another possibility is that he learned Castilian, and the people in your office grew up speaking some Latin American version. Just the other day a native speaker from Spain told me of his being completely flummoxed by the border guards trying to casually chat him up on his entry to the U.S.

<comment><USER32> Nope. The people I worked with were almost all from Spain. They spoke Castilian. My main exposure before them was always from Latin American sources. I LOVE the way Castilian people speak since it's so clear.

We had Latin American folks in the office too. They never had a problem speaking with each other. Maybe a border guard speaking broken Spanish confused someone, but this woman was just trying to ask basic Spanish 101 type questions.

The follow-up to the story is that I came across the same candidate's resume 6 months later. He had changed the "fluent in Spanish" to something like "basic Spanish".

<comment><USER12> I had a very similar experience when I was much younger, fooling myself that by not specifying how fluent I was, I wasn't lying when claiming knowledge of language X. Then I had an interview much like the one you described and learned that "misleading statement" and "lying" are close relatives.

No job, but life lesson learned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Years back I was a consultant and was interviewed for a telecom assignment. The meeting was nice and later he called me just to clear some things up. He kept talking about Erlang and then asking me about my experience level with Erlang and I told him I had none, but that I love programming languages and probably would learn it quick.

Then he said I had Erlang on my resume... Turns out my boss had altered my resume without telling me. I was honest and told him that I had no experience and had no clue how that ended up on my resume, maybe he read the wrong resume? Nope. It felt really awkward hearing him say he just couldn't trust anything on my resume now. But he understand him perfectly well.

My boss just laughed when I later told him what happened. He also told me to be a bit smarter and play along better.

I'm so glad I don't have a boss like that today.

<comment><USER35> How / why did your boss have access to your resume? That's not something you should have on a company computer.

<comment><USER12> Consultancy. His boss is selling his skills (and resume) to this customer (employer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> In many industries they won't consider you without a degree. And if you lie, you will be caught (there's a clearinghouse specifically for this)

<comment> guard-of-terra In many industries you actually need a degree: you need knowledge and skills to do anything useful while not being a walking disaster.

Not the case in most of the IT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For clarity.

I was in Mensa ~1969-1982.

In high school I was a terrible student and therefore I didn't think I was that smart. My sister, much older and much wiser, thought otherwise and had me take a Mensa test when I was a junior.

The numbers confirmed her suspicion.

Being a Mensa member didn't make school any easier but it gave me comfort that I wasn't a complete idiot, just that I learned differently. Convergent was the only time I put Mensa on a resume because of how the recruiter described the intellectual horsepower of the hiring exec and the rest of the team. I thought I needed something to wave to get in the door.

It worked. After that I just let my resume and accomplishments speak for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER38> contrast that with advice from Neil Gaiman <http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman- keynote-address>

""" People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I'd worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honour to have written something for each of the magazines I'd listed to get that first job, so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been chronologically challenged... You get work however you get work. """

I'm lucky enough to have never been faced with a situation where I felt like I needed to lie to even have a chance, so I have a hard time judging. Always a tough call.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've seen good candidates get turned away for not finishing college, and to that I have to ask would you turn away Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs? Many professions need to change their attitude about requiring college degrees.

<comment><USER40> Is Zuckerberg a particularly skilled programmer? Is he some kind of business genius, churning out an endless string of sure-fire hits? Or did he get insanely lucky and cash in before it all fell apart?

<comment><USER41> You ask this question in a way that suggests that you think he got insanely lucky, and that's it. Whereas I actually think he is a great businessman. (I also think he got lucky)

He could have sold Facebook for billions of dollars at any point. If he felt like he was riding on luck, he should have expected his luck to run out at any moment in the last five years or so, and thus have a strong incentive to sell. So he was either being exceptionally irrational (stubborn, stupid, etc.) or he knows something you don't about the business he's in.

<comment><USER36> The "insanely lucky" part focuses more in initial traction and less on future actions. He got in at the right time in the right milieu. THAT part is luck. You take it as a foregone conclusion that the social revolution would happen, but its not clear when or how it would manifest.

Later on, even if he made a misstep Facebook wouldn't blow up. If he tried deploying Beacon earlier on, for example, FB might not have proliferated.

"He could have sold Facebook for billions of dollars at any point. If he felt like he was riding on luck, he should have expected his luck to run out at any moment in the last five years or so, and thus have a strong incentive to sell."

That's true of many people, including the Digg people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The beauty of the software industry is it truly is merit-based. The degree might get you in the door but they will test you immediately to see if you are capable of handling the position. So don't lie. Tell them the truth, because there is nothing to be ashamed of. I'm going on my 17th year in this industry without a degree. If you have "it", whatever that may be, they will take notice. And if they don't then it's just a bad fit, no big deal. There's another one down the street.

</comment><comment><USER43> As a computer engineering undergrad with a < 3.0 GPA at a top 5 CompE school with 1 more semester to go, I've felt a lot of pressure to lie about my GPA on my resume just to be above the 3.0/3.3/3.5 cutoffs that so many jobs have. It's a little tougher to score an interview without a GPA on my resume, but I feel that once I'm in an interview, I'm at little to no disadvantage compared to anyone else since I think most places will prioritize actual problem solving skills over a number with 3 significant figures...

Currently unsure whether it's better to blurt out "2.6" or "don't worry about it" when recruiters ask me what my GPA is after seeing the rest of my resume. Either way, I sleep way better at night compared to lying.

<comment><USER12> Round it to 3. You did say engineering, right?

<comment><USER44> My school has a one page policy document in acceptable ways to format the significant figures (up to 4) and rounding (down only). Violations can lead to excommunication from career services office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> At one stage it seemed it was easier to get an IT job if there was an obvious lie on your CV. The manager interviewing you would more likely employ you if they thought they could bump you anytime simply by doing a CV checkup.

</comment><comment><USER33> Oh I agree, "honesty is the best policy."

Thing is, it'd be nice if it were something more of a two-way street. The same companies that would be incensed at the slightest fib on a resume will quite often lie to the candidate, at some stage or another in the selection process -- or like as not hire through recruiters to do the lying for them, as if this absolves them of any ethical responsibility.

Not to mention the lies that start trickling on down from on top, once they start the job. But that's a different topic.

</comment><comment><USER46> I just want a little bit of a reality check. How many of you that are dismissing CS degrees or saying if you go to college don't study CS because you already know it .... How many of you really know what you're talking about? I don't mean that in a derogatory, you may be the foremost experts on things for all I know. I just don't think either a) this phenomenon is that common or 2) it is a very deep knowledge, if it is common.

I'm well aware there are expert CS people that don't have degrees. I know some myself. But I don't think it is as common as you all are saying.

I've met plenty of undergrads, sophomores, etc that were self taught before college and think very much the same about their skills aa many here do and only takes a few classes for them, if they were honest with themselves, to disabuse them of this notion.

I've also met a lot of self-taught people that are good at a couple things but lack a lot of fundamental understand, and many think they are great because they are whipping out PHP spaghetti farms like nobody's-- most are not like this though.

I'm not sure following a YouTube tutorial on creating a Web blog engine in RoR is an epiphany that means "I'm self taught, I don't need no stinking college."

While there are brilliant, intimidating self-taught computer scientists/programmers, I'd say there are a lot more that fancy themselves in this category but don't know a Lamport clock from loop unrolling. I have no idea about anyone's individual situation or knowledge level, I just think there is a lot being made this self-taught phenomenon than bore out by reality.

</comment><comment><USER47> No degree here, but never lied on a resume either. It was very difficult landing my first job (in my teenage years), but eventually I got into the industry by starting a company and going bankrupt two years later. Frankly it was a wonderful way to get going, and nobody has significantly questioned my credentials since then, and especially not now that I have 20 years of professional expertise. Seriously, just start a company, and if you fail at age 16, nobody really cares, and you've got something on your resume. To get a few hundred (or thousand) bucks, get out MS Word (or Google Docs), type out several dozen pages of detailed business plan, and show it to all family, friends, and ex-teachers (but stay away from banks and VC, because they don't care and you're wasting their time). Now that it's 2012 and all, you only have to beg (or mow lawns for) $500 to land an iOS developer license. Then you can write a resume, show your first year of experience, and talk about your app in the App Store.

That said, I'm not going to tell you that I'm just so special that I couldn't have used college, and the people who do say that, seem to have chips on their shoulders. There is certainly an appreciation for design patterns and the humanities that any college would have taught me, that I had to learn I needed, and go and seek out on my own, and that's hard. But then again, college students today are faced with the prospect of a lifetime of debt, just to land a career with an average (I said average, not you or me) 15-year half life. It hardly seems appropriate.

Anyway, point is, you never need to lie if you have the enthusiasm. With enough enthusiasm, the experience eventually builds to a point where nobody questions your formal education.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've had the recent experience of interviewing for a Java programmer with some devops experience.

In all the interviews academic achievements were neither considered nor mentioned.

However, it was astonishing to me how much the candidates own opinion of their programming skills differed from the actuality as evidenced by their performance on a skills test.

No trick questions, just Java basics like the immutability of strings and some basic inheritance questions.

</comment><comment><USER49> I hated time wasted on college, but I did it. I did it via distance education course to save a lot of time and now I have diploma saying I am masters. It is not A grades, but rather just above pass level. This adds zero to my knowledge or my abilities, but I pass all these stupid filters put in place by HR people.

</comment><comment><USER50> I do lie on my resume. I write that I have a master in engineering which is also true except for never doing the thesis. At the interview I tell the interviewer straight up as the first thing that I lied and don't have a formal degree but it was a necessity to get the interview in the first place. I then tell them that I completely understand if they want to turn me away and I apologize.

I have never been turned away. No one have ever really questioned why. I am very skilled at what I do and the rest of my resume reflects that. I am far better than most people I met who program with or without a degree in my field.

Never having finish my degree makes this a necessary evil for me - I wish I could go back (life at this point does not allow me to).

However I feel no remorse for lying and frankly it's the loss of the company if they assess my entire character based on this.

<comment><USER33> _I have never been turned away._

I don't believe you.

<comment><USER12> Once he's in the interview? Of course nobody does that, it's too confrontational. He might not have gotten hired because of it but there's no way to know.

<comment><USER33> Just that when he starts off his post by saying "I do lie..." then the question becomes "so what is he _not_ lying about?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I only recently got an MSc in Computer Science, I'm in my late 30s.

Before this I never put an education section on my CV. I was homeless when others were doing their A levels and Bachelors.

What I found is that every employer simply filled in the gaps and assumed that I had a degree.

The choice I faced usually came much later when sat a lunch table one day someone would bring up a "What did you do at college?" conversation and it would eventually be asked of me. At that point do you answer to sustain their idea of you based on the assumption, or do you answer honestly and change their impression.

In the early part of my career it was simply best just to change the conversation (very easy to do, people love talking about themselves). In the latter part of my career I chose to just be blunt and open.

Being honest never hurt me, but I strongly suspect that lying would've hurt me hard.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm really skeptical of the "honesty is the best policy" lesson being taught here. The reality is that being dishonest (on a resume or otherwise) can be very advantageous. Why else would people lie?

Be honest because you believe it's the moral thing to do, not because you expect to be rewarded for it.

<comment><USER12> Might be because the benefit of lying is immediate, but the drawback much more distant (getting fired in the future). People aren't always very good long- term thinkers.

You might be right that pathetically lying on resumes in the end provides a career with a higher average income or whatever. Given that many of us here are probably honest and/or having to hire off resumes, I'd guess we're all collectively hoping that's not true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> _"Why don't you make something up."_

Aren't recruiters precious.

</comment><comment><USER53> Our company hired a promising recruit who as it turns out had 'embellished" their resume and it caused a lot of friction and general bad feeling for both parties when they couldn't complete some relatively simple tasks. I took responsibly as I had hired them - although next time I will probably implement the obligatory whiteboard! As it is a basic web dev shop I don't place too much value in a prospective employee with college degree(s) for the work involved - it would almost be overkill! However working effectively in the respective domain is what I would consider important (for this particular job anyway).

</comment><comment><USER54> I guess the question then would be; what if he didn't have the ability to put Mensa on the resume?

I don't intend to be rhetorical; it would be great to hear some other suggestions.

<comment><USER55> My impression was that he wasn't actually a member of Mensa. That was his lie, but he didn't try to cover it up.

<comment><USER56> That's odd. That's not my impression at all. I figure he would have put anything that would draw some attention - Had he been a boyscout, he could have put that down, but since he happened to be a mensa member, he put that instead. I definitely don't think it was a lie, as that would have undermined the entire point.

<comment><USER57> My impression was since he didn't have any college degrees, he was being turned away from jobs. He contemplated the idea of simply lying, but instead, thought of another way to draw attention to his credentials that would help people overlook the fact he hadn't gone to college. Rather than make up a degree, he highlighted the fact that he was in Mensa, which ended up working

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> What this post really brought home for me was the importance of 'knowing your shit'. Steve didn't have the degree, but he had the knowledge and could basically prove it. Lots of graduates with the paper couldn't do that.

If you have gaps in your knowledge that should not be a life-ruining situation but it needs to be corrected, hence Udemy, Coursera, and the new wave of ed. startups coming down the line.

<comment><USER59> _Steve didn't have the degree, but he had the knowledge and could basically prove it._

That's not really what happened. Steve had specific technical knowledge and experience that he wouldn't have gotten in school anyway. Also it sounded like most of that technical knowledge was irrelevant to the new position.

I imagine most of what happened is that the interviewer decided to trust his own judgement and gut about Steve's raw brainpower and ability to learn. And there's the issue of not having a degree - you rely on people sizing you up to be competent at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> There's another element that hasn't been covered in this discussion. I've you've been out of school for more than, say, five years, it is quite possible that quite a bit of what was taught and covered in college is outdated in today's marketplace. That's certainly the case if you go further back, say, ten or fifteen years. Under that scenario, you definitely want people who are very comfortable shifting gears and learning on their own. I can safely say that virtually none of what I do today I learned in college. The basics, yes, but not the specifics. The languages are different, the technology is different, the patterns are different, project management is different, etc.

I have worked with a lot of people without degrees doing work at fairly high levels. In my experience, this seems to be a category that self-selects based on real-world competence. Some have been absolutely brilliant. I have seen people without degrees dig into new subjects with an intensity that cannot be taught or trained. I have also seen people with degrees get flustered and give-up or fail to perform despite their years of formal schooling. I have hired folks with degrees that have been a complete waste of time.

I do understand the need for an easy filter. This is particularly the case at larger companies where it is very, very hard to be open to anything outside the norm. It can take a lot of work to hire someone without a degree. And, yes, it can be risky. At the same time, I've found that most people without a degree are very confident and sure of themselves and are more than willing to prove their knowledge and worth. I have met people with degrees who got offended when challenged. It goes both ways.

There's also the issue of how and why someone went into college. There's a huge variance here. In my own example, I had been doing electronics as a hobby, building all kinds of analog and digital circuits, and even wire- wrapping my own microprocessor boards way before I hit college. In sharp contrast to this, once in college, I met a lot of people who had never touched a soldering iron yet somehow decided to go into electrical engineering. You could tell the difference between hackers and students. Those of us who had been hacking the stuff for years before college had a very different understanding and attitude about things. The kind of thing that connects calculus class with physics lab in your mind instantly whereas others are just good test takers.

If you get a no-degree hacker or interrupted-degree hacker --and they are good-- you are likely to have someone who has far more understanding, drive an passion than someone who just up-and-went to engineering school one day without having had skin in the game prior to that.

I personally don't place a degree at the top of my list. I've been burned by that before. I take the time to really get to know the person as much as possible. Hiring is expensive and should be viewed as a long-term investment. If someone is going to be with you for a few years it is quite possible that during that time there will be needs to shift gears and adopt new technologies, frameworks, etc. Among other things, I need to know that anyone I hire can roll with the punches and actually welcome these kinds of challenges with open arms.

One of my worst hires: MSEE, worked at Intel for several years. I needed him to design high-speed signal processing boards (FPGA, signal integrity, transmission lines, controlled impedance, GHz+ range). He failed miserably. It was obvious that he did not full understand the subject beyond basic book level. He finally admitted that most of his focus at Intel was in switch-mode power-supply work but he really wanted to get the job. I shifted him over to designing power management electronics and he did OK. Just OK. What I learned from this is the opposite of the article in many ways. He was truthful about the degree and had impressive looking work credentials, but he bent the experience line enough to land the job. I should have done a white-board test on him but, hell, he had a Masters, right? I was glad to see him go about a year later. My junior engineers could do better power management design work than he did.

The other element here was what I call "big company syndrome". Large companies tend to have a lot of segmentation. Engineers can focus in one area and only that area and rely on other team members to carry the rest of the weight (and understanding) of the other areas of knowledge. In smaller companies you have to be more of a generalist. The problem with the hyper-specialist is exactly that. In some cases they have no clue of anything beyond their little sandbox. This is bad. And this was the case with my worst hire. He had been one of several hundred (or thousand?) engineers at Intel and could only see one small sliver of the entire universe. He had no reason nor the drive to dive into other areas and learn them on his own. That's why he failed to make a shift into another, larger, ecosystem.

He left to grab a Director of Engineering job at a hardware startup. I knew that he was not even close to being qualified for that job, but he somehow managed to sell himself. Three months later he was calling me to see if I had any contract work I could throw his way.

<comment><USER61> ___I've you've been out of school for more than, say, five years, it is quite possible that quite a bit of what was taught and covered in college is outdated in today's marketplace._ __

Perhaps for people who went to vocational school, but not for liberal arts and sciences majors. The math behind much of Computer Science, for instance, has been around for decades and it does not change. Sets, hash tables, queues, etc.

<comment><USER62> On the other hand I took a network course that spent most of the time covering the OSI networking model. Some parts of CS are timeless, some are not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Would adding Mensa to your resume really help you get a job? I talked to a hiring manager friend about this a while ago and he felt adding things like that don't make sense unless you have some achievement related to Mensa. One caveat - he wasn't in the tech industry.

<comment><USER64> IQ is strongly correlated with job performance, so yeah, providing evidence that you're in the top 2% by IQ is a really valuable indicator.

My Dad was in Mensa, and reading their national magazine as a kid I was not exactly ever inclined to join, but as a quantifiable, generally useful piece of evidence about a candidate it's pretty hard to beat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> In contrast, Neil Gaiman's famous commencement speech in which he admitted lying about his resume to get work early in his career: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikAb-NYkseI>

</comment><comment><USER66> In Israel jobs usually ask for a BSc degree OR service in the army's intelligence unit. People go out of the army here with 3 to 5 years of experience in highly difficult subjects so tech companies usually care less about your degree.

</comment><comment><USER67> My first thought on reading this is that it should be probably be called "Breaking NDA" rather than "Lying on your Resume." That said, businesses to vary on what they consider confidential.

</comment><comment><USER68> I dropped out of community college and I have no problem getting offers in the valley for six figures.

It's what and who you know, not where you studied.

</comment><comment><USER69> Anyone stupid enough to lie in writing deserves what they get.

</comment><comment><USER70> Doesn't every salesman lie?

</comment><comment><USER71> I have experience of interviewers routinely either lying or not knowing what they're talking about, and _expecting_ the candidates to lie and be as dishonest as they are.

One interviewer even got _offended_ when I was truthful about one of my weaknesses - a skill I believed not to be a requirement because the company - a large, reputable French bank - had lied about the job description.

In fact I had previously _specifically_ asked his boss (the hiring manager) in person about that area of work, and he had lied with such a straight face that he deserved an Oscar.

</comment><comment><USER72> I think the college degree hiring issue is all about confusing a symbol- the diploma- with reality- having the skills. So, Steve's anecdote is about getting hired by someone smart enough to test him to find the reality.

I have similar situation as Steve. I was studying physics, working for a nationally recognized lab under a guy who should have gotten a nobel, when I got a job as a software developer and realized that was what I really wanted to do with my life.

I used to put down that I studied physics, but eventually, I just dropped it. My resume now is one page, with a summary at top of my skills and a list of the places I've worked taking up the rest.

I find that this is a really good filter. If someone won't hire you because you didn't go to college, you know that this is someone you don't want to work for. They are expressing a prejudice-- assuming you lack a skill based on their own assumptions, because they probably _needed_ college to teach them. Many times people rationalize this by saying "college shows commitment". Well, keeping a job for 4 years shows commitment. Outside projects that are a lot harder than college was shows commitment.

The real reason I didn't finish college is that it didn't make mathematical sense. It costs a lot, delays your career and doesn't deliver sufficient value to cover these costs. I think that situation has gotten a lot worse.[1]

So, the right thing to do is look at the education section skeptically. Did they work their way thru college? Why did they go? Did they think they were getting more value than the cost?

I hear companies won't hire people without degrees. I see "BS requires, Master preferred" a lot. I never let that stop me from sending my resume, and back when I was willing to work for others (rather than myself) I tended to get interviews, and 4/5 of those interviews would result in an offer or another step in interviewing (for companies that had a multi-step process.) I learned quickly to send all my resumes out on one single day, and have interviews scheduled close to each other, lest I get offers from some companies before I'd had a chance to interview at others.

None of these companies cared whether I had a degree. (And the ones who did, probably never called me in for an interview, but there's no way to tell which jobs have already been filled vs. which ones were at companies with that prejudice.)

But I consider that a blessing-- this filters out companies that confuse the _symbol_ (eg: the diploma) for the _reality_ (eg: having the skills.)[2]

I've met a lot of "smart" people who think they are so smart that they don't realize how much smarter other people can be. This limits their world view. It even interferes with their ability to comprehend or think logically. They let prejudices and ideology get in the way of perceiving reality.[3]

The last thing you want to do is work for a boss who believes his fantasy over reality.

And filtering out the ones who think you're not qualified because you don't have a diploma is a useful tool for that.

Epilog: I express strong feelings here. I am unabashedly opinionated, but I think it is critical in hiring to hire people who think differently than you. I think its critical to give the benefit of the doubt, allow a wide variation and then focus on what's really important- the relevant ability, their capabilities. I think "cultural fit" is often used to exclude good candidates for unfair reasons. I think I'd hire someone I disagreed with all the time if they were qualified (but haven't put this to the test yet- only having hired someone who disagrees with me most of the time.)

[1] I am very willing to hire people with degrees. Even though college is often a waste of time and money, and _could_ show bad judgement, they can also show other things-- like the need to spend a couple years finding yourself outside the overwhelming influence of your parents, or the need to figure out what it is you really want to do with your life, etc. Some do it out of a commitment to their parents because it means so much to their parents, and I respect that. I don't think that someone turning 18 magically means they've figured everything out.

[2] I have found, however, that hackers (eg: people who taught themselves when they were young) right out of highschool are about as equally prepared for employment life as (most) people with CS degrees right out of college. Either way its going to take a couple years before they're really productive. Hackers shouldn't go to college.

I am assuming that hackers are generally auto-didects and not the kind of people who need to be trained, while college is for people who need to be trained, the kind of people who can't just pick up a new language over the weekend, or can't just read a college textbook to get the stuff they hadn't learned otherwise.

[3] In fact, I think that the fact that so many of these people who focus on degrees are people who went to college because they needed to be _Trained_ , means that they are people who generally simply don't understand that some people self train. They don't see the advantage of the auto-didact who will learn things that seem ancillary (eg: economics) or irrelevant to someone who has been trained.

I think the training in college teaches a narrow way of thinking, or maybe it just doesn't expand the mind, while the autodidacts will expand their own minds.

Companies would be much better off hiring autodidacts and making sure at least one is in the interview loop, to ensure that the trained people don't exclude someone based on their own narrow thinking.

"Oh, your company has written your product in Haskell? That's nice. No I've never written any Haskell in my life, but I learned Lisp when I was 14 and write a long of Erlang, and pick up languages easily. I'll have no problem picking up Haskell."

I think this above conversation sounds like nonsense to a trained person, because a trained person doesn't "just pick up" a language.

<comment><USER73> Actually, it's not about just showing "commitment" -- a university computer science education shows me (1) how you deal with a hard problem that you've never seen before, (2) how you deal with being around people smarter than you are and (3) how you perform under deadline pressure. Your four years at an employer doesn't necessarily show me any of these things, at least not without a ton of hard, specific questions from me -- indeed, I think that that's what Ben was trying to drive at in his interview at Steve. In my experience, it also happens to be true that top software engineers have learned quite a bit from a computer science education (especially when coupled with several years of practice), and when I find bright people who have dropped out of school or studied other disciplines and ask them tough, direct technical questions, I often find that they have wild misconceptions about the way computers actually work.

Now, you might very well be the exception to that rule, but the cost of a mis- hire is so astronomically high to me that you can expect that if I ever interviewed you, I would expect you to greatly outperform a top new computer science graduate -- and I would interview accordingly. This is possible, but not likely: a top computer science graduate not only has the same intelligence and aptitude that you had at 22, but also four years of formal computer science education and some top internships to really send the principles home. Of course, it would be a mistake to imply that you'd actually want to work for me: after all, I'm the kind of employer that won't hire a software engineer who doesn't have a university degree in computer science...

<comment><USER74> You only hire people with degrees? I couldn't afford a degree, that's why I never got one, but have tons of experience. You still wouldn't consider hiring someone like me? Why?

This just seems like you're limiting yourself from hiring people that couldn't afford college, but that are still extraordinarily valuable to your company. Which is just wrong.

<comment><USER75> I don't know what country you are in, but in the US, they will extend all kinds of loans to you. (That really is the problem). In fact, the less money you have, the better the deal for the loans. At some point in college my girlfriend and I wished our parents had less money because it would have made our cost (which we were paying) so much lower.

Do 1-2 years at a community college, 1-2 at a state college, and you have a 4 year degree at a reasonable price.

I got a merit scholarship, that lowered prices for me quite a bit. Others have noted that although advertised tuition has gone up, the average price paid by students hasn't changed nearly as fast. I.e. the rich people are paying sticker price and the poor are getting subsidized 'need' based loans. The only people getting screwed are those in the middle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> angry-hacker It's difficult to start if you don't have a formal paper or don't want to lie about it... if you have proven yourself somewhere already, it's not a problem anymore.

I had very slow start because I didn't want (or know how) to lie about my education, I'm doing great now don't care about it anymore.</comment>


Tech Giants, Gorging on AI Professors Is Bad for You - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-07/tech-giants-gorging-on-ai-professors-is-bad-for-you <comment><USER2> But that's not entirely tech giant's fault.

Former AI professor "gorged" by the "evil tech giants". Salary is twice less than the first salary a uni dropout gets in industry (mid-level assistant prof gets roughly 1k EUR/month after taxes). I live in a lovely post-communistic country in Europe.

There are two choices: work for X% of your time in the private sector or fund a startup with grant money. I chose to leave academia.

If academician's compensation went up to at least match a livable standard, people would stay.</comment>


I'm a terrorist (and so are you) - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/I+am+a++terrorist%2C+and+so+are+you. <comment><USER2> Favorite quote: "a society based on fear is just another way to spell 'Afghanistan'"</comment>


Rubinius X, an experiment in modernizing Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://x.rubini.us/

<comment><USER2> While this sounds interesting and a lot of the features are laudable, it seems to me that such a language will no longer be "Ruby". All non-trivial Ruby code (like any library or gem) will not work in Rubinius X.

So why base this on Ruby? Because the syntax is nice? Perhaps it would be better to start with something like elixir, which has a syntax based on Ruby, works with existing Erlang libraries and has good (perhaps excellent) support for concurrency and immutability.

<comment><USER3> It's not the point to fork, but to experiment and see which features are worth porting back into Ruby core.

I think it's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I do not disagree with any of the proposed features, I am not sure, what they would accomplish. Could someone point out, what kind of applications would benefit from those changes?

Is this just about making ruby more like node (substituting callbacks for promises)?

Also, do all of these features really need to be implemented on the interpreter level?

<comment><USER5> It is, at least, about making Ruby more concurrent. Rubinius eliminates the global interpreter lock, which helps, but Ruby's execution model is still very much thread-oriented; Ruby's fibers are very slow, and are not good enough for Node-style concurrency.

It is also about wiping the slate clean. Ruby still has some ugly stuff inherited from Perl (globals for regex results, or the use of unreadable "magical" globals such as $:). There are many areas where years of experience can help us design a better language.

<comment><USER6> > _Ruby still has some ugly stuff inherited from Perl (globals for regex > results, or the use of unreadable "magical" globals such as $:)_

And Ruby also has some pretty stuff inherited from Perl like postfix statements & first class regex so it wouldn't be good to strip out all of Perl's influences! Gosh even Ruby's _blocks_ are (partly) inspired by Perl's _list block functions_...

      array.map {|n| n * 2}

      map {$_ * 2} @array;

However I do agree that Ruby's _magical_ global variables should be removed because they're not dynamically scoped like in Perl.

NB. It should be noted that not all Ruby magical variables even come from Perl. For eg. _$:_ doesn't and thankfully Perls _$=_ does something quite different to Rubys! - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072925)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More activity in the other thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6553767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6553767)

</comment><comment><USER7> why break regex support just because it's not what one person wants to use; the philosophy of more than one way to do it goes back to the beginning of computer science. I like Rubinius for the fact that it has educational value to see ruby implemented in ruby but feel breaking unix system programming features sounds more like turing it into someones personal DSL than actually modernizing it.

<comment><USER8> Because that's what Rubinius non-X is for. This is about an experimental Ruby- based language that has the freedom to make breaking changes. It's not just another implementation of Ruby, it's about creating a new language that learns from Ruby and other languages. I expect that we'll see some of these ideas percolate back to Ruby proper, and others will be created and/or wither on their merits within Rubinius X, so long as it remains experimental.

All that said, this simplifies the language spec and implementation by eliminating features that have long been on-the-outs in the Ruby community. Note that the proposals on that page don't break _regexes_ , they just break code that uses the old Perl-esque $1, etc. magic variables. This is almost mechanically trivial to port to use Regexp methods, MatchData, etc. IME, it's rare to see this used in Ruby code in the wild. I find it kind of startling when it does show up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Global Variables

> Gone. Period.

That's pretty extreme. What is supposed to replace them?

<comment><USER5> It's not really extreme. You can, and should, easily provide globals through attributes on classes and modules (which are globals themselves):

        module Foot
          @size = 10
          class << self
            attr_accessor :size
          end
        end

        Foot.size = 8

ActiveSupport gives you "mattr_accessor" and "class_attribute" to accomplish the same thing with less code.

In my opinion, class/module-level attributes are useful enough that it ought to be provided by the language itself.

Edit: Come to think of it, _most_ people, that I have seen, use globals to set constants. That currently has perfectly good syntax:

        module Foot
          SIZE = 10
        end

        print Foot::SIZE

<comment><USER10> Sans ActiveSupport, you can achieve the same things by just opening class/module eigenclass:

        module Foo
          class << self
            attr_accessor :bar
          end
        end

        Foo.bar = "baz"

<comment><USER5> Sure, but wasn't that exactly what I wrote in my first example?

<comment><USER10> Oy, it is. Sorry; my brain is apparently missing its reading comprehension hat today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any word on the progress of this / who is behind it?

<comment><USER5> As far as I can see, this is all Brian Shirai (aka brixen), who is the current maintainer of Rubinius.

<comment><USER12> i m also curious why rubinius failed to gain traction, how it all started and why EY abandoned their support?

<comment><USER5> I don't think Engine Yard has abandoned support. Back in April they added funding for a Rubinius developer [1]. But they did lay/move off the full-time Rubinius team, back in 2008-2009, which, as far as I know, was due to financial constraints [2] [3], not a lack of interest.

[1] [https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/engine-yard-expands- support...](https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/engine-yard-expands-support-for- rubinius)

[2] [http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/11/18/a-sad- day/](http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/11/18/a-sad-day/)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424000)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought all the hipster Brogrammers moved onto Node and JS? Didn't they get the memo?

<comment><USER5> Most of us rubyists aren't actually "hipster broprogrammers", but hard-working devs who like to get things done -- just like everyone else. It's unfortunate that the Ruby world is being painted with that kind of brush, when it's really down to just a few bad apples.

<comment><USER3> It's not the bad apples, it's the impression others get due to relativity.

To some guy slamming out Java in a bank where you have to wear a suit and tie or PHP in some chop shop where version control is on the distant TO-DO list, Ruby programmers do look like brogrammers with their fancy tools and fancy computers.</comment></comment></comment>


Mercedes-Benz onboard logic unit (OLU) source code leaks online - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/mercedes-benz-onboard-logic-unit-olu-source-code-leaks-online/ <comment><USER2> "The researcher says he downloaded more than 580 Git repositories from the company's server, which he made publicly available over the weekend, uploading the files in several locations such as file-hosting service MEGA, the Internet Archive, and on his own GitLab server."

Good luck in the court.

<comment><USER3> > On the other hand, the GitLab server allowed anyone to register an account, > which some could interpret as being an open system. Furthermore, source code > that ZDNet reviewed earlier today did not contain warnings that this was > proprietary technology.

We'll see.

<comment><USER2> Definitely. If it's not prohibited, that does not mean it is allowed. If the repos had licenses, he must have knew what he was downloading. If the repos had no licenses, one has to assume no attribution - proprietary.

It would be reasonable if he downloaded one repo and notified the server maintainers that something is off. But he downloaded 580 repos and posted the files to mega and others. That's criminal.</comment></comment></comment>


NASA e-Book Features - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/index.html#.U9P3VNYc2Bs

<comment><USER2> Oh my gosh, thanks for this! This is invaluable for an aspiring aero engineer. Can't wait to read about the aeroelastic wing project on my flight to japan. And the X-29. And the Oblique wing! I love the cheesy titles.

This is unbelievable technical insight I've always wanted. Gosh, it's things like this that we need to fund NASA more for.

<comment><USER3> You could ask the NSA for some money, their budget is larger.

<comment><USER4> In a slightly parallel universe, NASA is already sending colonies on a terraformed Venus due to typos on government cheques to the NSA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure if it's listed, but Far Travelers is really awesome

[http://history.nasa.gov/SP-480/contents.htm](http://history.nasa.gov/SP-480/contents.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> I highly recommend "Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication." I'm currently most of the way through this; it's dense, but very fascinating.

[http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/archaeology_anthropology_...](http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/archaeology_anthropology_and_interstellar_communication.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> This isn't showing anything :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure? I just checked. The link works for me.</comment></comment>


Long-Term Revenue Growth Is Harder Than Short-Term Revenue Growth - <AUTHOR> https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/sources_of_revenue_growth <comment><USER2> And water is wet.</comment>


Pijul 0.11 - <AUTHOR> https://pijul.org/posts/2018-11-20-pijul-0.11/ <comment><USER2> Excellent in theory, impossible to build in practice. The main app misses a simple use statement and the libsodium dependency is broken with the LIB_DIR set.</comment>


Countries that condemn China vs. those that support China on Uyghur crisis - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/indiainpixels/status/1300385912933642245 <comment><AUTHOR> In July 2019, 22 countries wrote a letter to UNHRC condemning China's atrocities against Uyghurs.

In response, 50 nations wrote a counter letter praising China for remarkable efforts in promoting human rights through development.

None of the 22 countries was a Muslim nation.</comment>


Strange warping geometry helps to push scientific boundaries - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-07-strange-warping-geometry-scientific-boundaries.html <comment><USER2> Fascinating and good to see analogue computing at play by any other name.</comment>


Corporate Hackathons: The Fine Line Between Engaging and Exploiting - <AUTHOR> http://jamiemsmyth.blogspot.com/2013/01/corporate-hackathons-fine-line-between.html

<comment><USER2> Jamie Smyth makes some very good points in his economic analysis. Having to pay your own airfare to New York to do a presentation, and then 30 teams building solutions, 29 that would not be paid for. That certainly is a good deal for Campbell, and it sounds like whatever solution they buy for the $25,000 prototype plus $25,000 on completion of the full system with all the changes they request would have cost them a lot more had they hired a design firm to attempt something of this nature, especially in that they get to keep the best of 30 working designs.

Despite all this, much more fascinating than Jamie's post was the following exchange between Campell's brand marketer Sam Niburg and Campell's Global Head of Digital Adam Kmiec.

<https://twitter.com/adamkmiec/status/292833747701731328>

Regarding Mr Smyth, Kmiec says "Don't sweat it. I shared my opinion about him & his company to every colleague I have client-side and agency-side."

So rather than respond to the very reasonable questions and issues Mr Smyth has brought up, Kmiec publicly brags about having launched a personal vendetta to destroy him and his company.

It's a fascinating exchange between a senior executive and someone tasked with presenting a positive image of the company's brand reputation.

Usually these sorts of open and candid comments between insiders are only seen in private emails. It's refreshing to see inner workings like this out in the open.

<comment><USER3> Just wow. That is amazingly clueless use of social media.

If I had read just Smyth's well-written post, I wouldn't have anything against Campbell per se. They organized a lame hackathon, but a lot of companies do that, and Smyth's post was about this corporate hackathon culture, it just happened to use Campbell's hackathon as an example.

But after reading that Twitter exchange, I now think they really are clueless assholes.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it kind of clashes with the careful Disney like feel good image Campbell has developed and doesn't really indicate a lot of public relations awareness, whether it was private or public.

Here's how I would have handled it if I was in charge of that thing. I'd have read that essay and thought, wow, OK, this does look like an attempt to get a lot of free engineering work and publicity. Then I'd either ignore it and hope it blows away if I had no authority, or if I did, talk to the other executives and point out that the particular issue of not paying travel and accommodations to New York is really not fair at all to the individual hackers and designers (since this is open to individuals and not design firms with a sales team and funding). I'd then publicly thank him for his insightful feedback, insist it was simply overlooked, and announce that OF COURSE Campbells is going to be paying airfare and accommodations to the 30 people that are selected to give presentations, and a family member if they like.

What I would definitely NOT do is pull out my rolodex and "contact every colleague I have client-side and agency-side" (this must be hundreds if not thousands of people) to inform them that a very mean and awful hacker has found my hackathon has some flaws with it in that I'm not paying people for the expenses necessary to comply with my demands, and so will they join in my pile on against him, the stupid annoying hacker, and his filthy company that has DARED, DARED I say to criticize the Almighty Campbells Soup company, which has been around need I remind him longer than he has even been alive the little piss ant!

Because that would be a really very stupid thing to do instead of just offer to pay the accommodations and airfare for these people who are doing free work for my company, and come out all roses having mastered such a minor PR challenge which has such an obvious solution to it.

It's not like Campbells isn't a Fortune 500 company (it is) who drops tens of millions on a Chunky Super Bowl XLVI Sweepstakes without blinking an eye at the cost. Their advertising and software development costs should not be subsidized by hackers. Given that most hackers are under IP contracts that prohibit them from entering something like this in their free time, most of the people legally able to enter are going to be hackers going through a spell of unemployment. Expecting them to do extensive free design work and fly out to meet clients for something that isn't even going to be all that much pay in the end if they do win the contract isn't a reasonable expectation. I expect though that a fair number of people will enter despite this. They might get better quality material though if they are at least willing to pay actual expenses of the finalists.

<comment><USER4> >What I would definitely NOT do is pull out my rolodex and "contact every colleague I have client-side and agency-side" (this must be hundreds if not thousands of people)

meh. In almost certain likelihood the guy didn't do that. It would make him look childish to his contacts and would waste a bunch of his time. Why do all that work when he can get the same effects (scaring the guy and telling him to fuck off) just writing a tweet?

Much more effective. Though it does tell me never to do business with Campbell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's strange that hackathons have become so high-stakes, just from the practical point that it's extremely easy to cheat and extremely hard to detect cheating. I don't want to be the "let's go back to the days when the winner got a t-shirt" guy, but it's getting ridiculous. I heard a story last week about a very substantial prize being won by a team who iterated on a previous hackathon's result without mentioning so.

It might work in the short term, but I can see talented developers getting turned off by the whole thing and not showing up at all, when it becomes clear they have no chance of winning if they stick to the rules and start from scratch. A better alternative, if someone wants to put out prizes like that, could be to announce the competition with a deadline, say 4 weeks out, and then host optional hacker spaces for the final weekend.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure that I understand all of the negativity around this. If Campbells had called this a contest instead of a hackathon, would it change your opinion on the details of the event? They seem to be pretty open about their intent and what happens if you win and/or make it to the finals.

Some positive things to keep in mind:

* submitting an idea costs you nothing except for your time to write up an idea

* the winner will receive $25,000 for a 3-week build prototype, NOT a market ready application

* there are no posted rules on the level of completeness required for your prototype. Can you win with a slide deck that shows how you use their API to execute your idea? maybe.)

* presenting your idea in the finals does not require you to travel to NY, they clearly state that you can video conference in for the event.

* if you do win you are then offered, not obligated to take, an additional $25k contract to complete it (likely not worth it)

For all of the folks that don't win, it's not an entire loss either:

* a well written idea is all that is needed to enter the contest, not much lost if you aren't selected as a finalist.

* if you make it to the finals, your only cost is 3 weeks of your time for a 1:30 chance of winning $25k or less for winning the $10k as a runner up.

* if you make it to the finals you walk away with something tangible to tack onto your resume. "Made it as a finalist in a nationally recognized brand's competition for my idea" sounds pretty good.

<comment><USER7> The "1:30 chance of winning $25k" means you work at around $1k per month as self managed develloper (in the US). It's just cheap.

It can be a goood deals for CS students that have some 3 weeks mandatory project to do for school.

<comment><USER6> Where do you get the $1k/month from?

Finalists are granted access to the API on Feb 11, 2013 and are required to submit their entries by March 1, 2013. Assuming that they also notify you as a finalist on Feb 11 and not before, that gives you 3 weeks to build and submit your prototype.

$25k / 3 weeks == $8,333.34 USD per week. That's a pretty good payout for anyone in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is any actual software developer even considering entering? I mean a developer that has a full time day job developing software. I do sw development by day, so by night any sw project would have to be very very interesting for me to consider participating. Otherwise I would rather spend time on my own sw projects or interests. The soup hackathon is just a 'Please use our api for something since we can't think of any useful thing ourselves' so I doubt it would peak the interest of anyone who gets a salary doing sw develoment. So who is left? Well as far as I can see, the unemployed sw developer looking for a job and trying to spruse up his resume and make some money, and the independent freelance/self employed developer who pushes out an endless supply of small apps anyway. For those developers such a hackathon is just another opportunity and better than nothing I guess, even though you are most likely just working for free.

<comment><USER9> So think of it like this...

You have a day job. But you're on the look out for something to spend a bit of time on in your spare time.

You have a chance to spend a few hours putting together a prototype of something and winning $50,000 for your efforts. Even runners up could get $10,000. It doesn't require a full-time commitment to do. So the risk/reward ratio (a few hours vs $50K) is there for you to do this.

Let's say you have a clever idea and spend 10 hours during your spare time putting a prototype together.

Is 10 hours of your time worth a decent shot at $10K or $50K? That's $5,000 an hour or $1,000 an hour. And assume you are up against 10-15 other clever people, so rank your odds of that accordingly.

That's the question. Only you can answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most of all, it's just not an interesting way to spend your time, and it's not even a "hack", and therefore not even deserving of that title. If you want to play with technology at a "hackathon", hack on something interesting, not just the usual web 9.0 "plug this API into that platform and claim to be a disruptive innovator."

</comment><comment><USER11> I imagine some of my clients could have been in a similar situation to Campbell's: they want a site or mobile app for marketing purposes or whatever. Since it's not crucial for their business, they don't know what they want. Yeah, maybe they have a marketing department, even a digital/social media division. But that can only produce so many ideas, and there's too much internal feedback to guarantee that ideas for, e.g. a mobile app, would be effective or innovative. So maybe they decide to hire a design firm with experience designing innovative mobile apps. In most relationships, the process would only alleviate those problems slightly: they would get more ideas, from outside their own offices, but only a few which the firm considers "best" and they would be subject to the firm's biases anyhow. A 'hackathon' like this is clearly a much cleverer option for a corporation: they get _many_ ideas from diverse sources, they get to choose which ones to prototype—and they get _30 prototypes!_ And _then_ they pay up. This isn't really about hackathons, it's about efficient economics. "Exploiting" is in the original post's title, but it's really no different from the normal exploitation inherent in every economic interaction.

As a consultant, I am used to a certain level of inefficiency—paying me even as I brainstorm, for example—which hides the exploitation of my labor. I am upset about hackathons like this because they reveal the exploitation and how it is tipped in Campbell's favor.

In a somewhat different vein, being on a college campus, there are similar exploitative relationships, in a sense, at the hackathons I go to. hack@uchicago just had a really awesome hackathon. I was coding, and had an excellent time, but I didn't compete. I know a few other people didn't compete for the prizes either, but were still building cool stuff. We had three main sponsors: UChicago's Physical Science Collegiate Division, UChicago IT Services, and Inventables. All three were engaging in rational economic transactions, beyond charity, much like Campbell's, but nobody's pissed off about it because the economics aren't obvious and the exploitation is many levels of indirection away: nobody directly got a product out of it. The PSCD, however, got some marketing and something to put on their website which will help get them more grants, researchers, whatever. IT Services regularly hires students. I would be willing to bet that the folks from Inventables approached multiple hackathon participants with an eye toward hiring, and I bet the winner straight up got a job offer (which he deserves, for the record, if you're reading this Paul). Meanwhile, I got free food and an excuse to work on a weekend project. I'm not upset because I don't feel exploited by that exchange. I think everybody got what they wanted out of the hackathon.

tl;dr: The economics make perfect sense for Campbell's, not for developers. Chances are any time somebody sponsors a hackathon, it's also an economic exchange, but this one is exploitative (or, if you're a Marxist, this one makes the inherent exploitation of every economic interaction more obvious).

</comment><comment><USER12> "But for approximately 93% of the fortunate developers that "won" the chance to write code against the Campbell's soup API (!), they get… nothing." "If you want to go it alone, just pay $25 to Google (or $99 to Apple) and start writing and selling apps."

I don't think app developers have the best odds either: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/business/as-boom-lures- app...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/business/as-boom-lures-app-creators- tough-part-is-making-a-living.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404012,00.asp>

<comment><USER13> Having a working app on the Play Store is good for developers. Even if the app doesn't get a lot of downloads, they can at least show the app to prospective employers.

For the Campbell Hackathon, developer has nothing to show since API access is revoked at the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good thoughts but generally I'd consider (1) who owns the IP for the winning idea or product and even those that don't win? If a company is sponsoring a hackathon with hopes of attracting disruptive ideas but owns the IP, there must be other upside - maybe significant monetary prizes or marketing exposure - to make it worth your weekend's time. (2) And the grave reality that most larger companies cannot execute the winning app without internal support, necessary team resources and budget...which may require lots of change.

</comment><comment><USER15> I agree with the article, but if we say that Cambell is unethical then where do we draw the line in general? Eg. Is Kaggle unethical and exploitation as well ? Like the Cambell hackathon, in Kaggle competitions you work for free and only a limited number of people actually get paid for their work. Even if Kaggle promotes that everyone's work actually helps (indirectly) to pin down a good solution, not everyone is getting paid.

</comment><comment><USER16> This has been on my mind recently as I have been invited to "Barclay's Social Enterprise Weekend": <http://barclayssewnorth.eventbrite.co.uk/>

Two things kind of leave me undecided:

1) Narrow brief: Here they are very narrow and specific about what areas would be suitable and it is clearly very closely aligned with their own interests. (However a blog post from one of the companies on the judging panel gives a more open ended brief: <http://import.io/barclays-social-enterprise- hackathon-2013/>)

2) Outcome: There aren't any "prizes". I suppose this is social enterprise, so you could consider a monetary (or similar) prize as slightly against "the spirit", but really I was kind of expecting more of an incentive from a huge multinational bank?

Anyone else seen this or otherwise have any thoughts on this event?

<comment><USER17> The Barclays one is not exactly the same thing, but it doesn't appeal to me.

You have to pay £25 to donate 3 full days of your work time (likely more in terms of work days given 16 hr days not 8 are the norm at hackathons - so this is 6 work days of work.)

A big difference is the application is for charity rather than, as with Campbells, being something that directly and obviously benefits the business and would normally be something they would have to pay for.

Barclays does say "Each team will have access to at least one follow up meeting with technology experts that have been involved in the design, development or marketing of Barclays mobile applications." It's not clear what this means, perhaps this is to get a brainstorming session with some of Barclays developers, or perhaps Barclays might develop the "charity app" further themselves.

When I have a 3 day weekend there are a lot of things I would rather do than pay £25 for the privilege of doing 6 days of work without compensation beyond a sleeping bag rental and a few pizzas, donuts and sodas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can understand the motivations of those who do choose to participate...as a creative outlet, as a way to cement or learn new skills, to meet new people, and yes - it's incentivized. I appreciate his point but see no problem myself lol.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think Jamie Smyth should get over himself. I understand his point about it not being particularly fair to the developers, but guess what? It's a free market and if developers choose to spend their time working for free for Campbells then that is their business. All of his self-righteous posturing about developers "having the most sought-after skills in America" comes off as very oddly paternal. We're all adults and we can all make our own decisions about how we choose to spend our time. Nobody tricked or forced those developers to work for free.</comment>


SQL Server Error Handling Gotchas - <AUTHOR> http://www.nielsberglund.com/2016/12/31/sql-server-error-handling-gotchas/ <comment><AUTHOR> Error handling in SQL Server, how hard can it be? Quite hard as it turns out ...

<comment><USER2> If you want to trully know how thing works I suggest great blog:

[http://sommarskog.se/error_handling/Part1.html](http://sommarskog.se/error_handling/Part1.html) [http://sommarskog.se/error_handling/Part2.html](http://sommarskog.se/error_handling/Part2.html) [http://sommarskog.se/error_handling/Part3.html](http://sommarskog.se/error_handling/Part3.html)

More than 100 pages of technical knowledge.

And presentation: [http://www.sommarskog.se/present/WhenThingsGoWrong%20(SQLSat...](http://www.sommarskog.se/present/WhenThingsGoWrong%20\(SQLSat%20706\).zip)</comment></comment>


IBM Struggles to Turn Watson Computer into Big Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304887104579306881917668654 <comment><USER2> First they need to explain what Watson is to business and the like. Their use cases are never clear apart from giving out big saving numbers and improvements.

Then they need some more transparency on what Watson can really do; papers seldom talk about the data, the training sets or even provide sample questions and answers - there are some sample applications which very rarerly do something actually impressive on the corpus domain.</comment>