University of Whiteness, America. Didn’t have classes or even buildings or teachers, but godamn it’s literally a gold ticket.
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But the connections usually come from actually having been there. At least in my experience, anyway.
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Well, yes. And trying to pull a fast one on someone as well liked and respected as Ladyada is just a terrible idea.
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I suspect it has more to do with his own insecurity than any actual need. The irony is that in his misbegotten quest to feel bona fide, he’s actually managed to injure his credibility. Granted a lot of people in the tech world won’t especially care, as many in that world don’t value honesty anyway. But integrity isn’t totally dead in Silicon Valley.
Another commenter mentioned the value of a degree from a prestigious American university, and I suspect that’s part of it. Although I can’t speak to Italy, a degree from MIT or the like carries a lot of cachet in Asia. The lie may have helped him when he was starting out in Italy. Not so much now.
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This is true. You can get away with most anything in the Valley – massive fuckups, failures, and mistakes are often forgiven and forgotten, but *insert deity here* help you if you’re caught lying or stealing. That’s a surefire way to get blackballed (which in a small and tight knit community like in SV can be extremely hard to overcome).
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With the caveat that it depends on what you’re lying about. Your degrees and certs, yes, you’re going to find it hard if you’re not already on top of the food chain. Skills and languages, if I had a payable for every time an interviewee or new hire bullshitted about their skill-set, I’d be Larry Ellison rich.
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Yeah – I should clarify. Overselling yourself is expected (oh, sure, I’m an expert in sendmail). Making shit up out of whole cloth (oh yeah, I invented sendmail… who’s Eric Allman?) is not.
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Apparently it’s okay if you sue everyone who says that you’re lying. One of those postfactual scholars.
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This has always been so weird to me. People routinely tell me they’ve lied or exaggerated on their resume, and that “everybody does it”.
It literally never occurred to me to lie on my resume. The first time I had the “everybody does it” conversation with someone we each thought the other was a liar! But I don’t lie on mine (other than to elide skills I don’t want to practice - I know nothing of COBOL, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!) and I always check people’s resumes before hiring someone.
So here’s my fake resume story. A lovely young lady of my acquaintance graduated high school the year she turned 18. She went to a giant company in Washington DC and told them she was 25 years old and had a Bachelor’s in Computer Science with a minor in Business Administration. She got hired, amazingly enough, and a year later she went to her boss and said “I lied on my resume because you wouldn’t have hired an 18 year old with no degree. Now that you know how good I am and how much value I bring to the company, I am confessing, and will take my punishment willingly from HR.” They gave her a raise!
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Aha! I knew it was something other than my atrocious soldering and crap-ass code that made all my Arduino projects not work!
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I’ve seen plenty of people say that but I’ve never seen it pan out. At best I am optimistic about my skills but I absolutely won’t lie on a resume. The closest I ever got was putting ‘experience with backup technologies’ and being quizzed on it.
As it turned out, they were expecting enterprise backup solutions. I had a tape drive and a shell script. shrug I at least explained it and I wasn’t wrong, but I’d never put anything on my resume I couldn’t talk about.
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Europeans are really into that shit. All kinds of politicians have fake degrees over there, too.
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She also has the distinction of being one of the more prominent vendors of actually-a-full-priced-arduino hardware, at least for US buyers. I doubt that any of the domestic outfits can touch random eBay vendors on number of AT-somethings shipped; but the Arduino people don’t make any money on that.
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Represent. One year in, then I realized, “what the hell am I doing here!?”
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That might be actionable. If you live your life one bullshit line at a time, be the special kind of rich lying brat that doesn’t have four law firms on retainer. Or do. Some fuckers make it work.
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I also have never lied nor exaggerated on a resume or CV. Like you, I leave plenty of stuff off (xslt lalalalalala can’t hear you!!!), But it would be career suicide for me to lie.
I’m currently going through a background check, and they are verifying everything. If I had exaggerated, I’d be done.
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Yeah. Lying on a CV or résumé - definite no-no.
As of late, I am considering a legal name change; I discovered I share a name with a rapist of similar age. Probably best if I just take out loans, omit work experience, and go to college. I can always pretend I spent gap-year travelling… Oh wait, I did.
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Yep, never lied at all on a CV. Honestly, it’d never occur to me to.
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I’ve actively steered some budding programmers away from college, or rather made them really question if it was what they wanted and in their best interest. For someone like me, for whom a PhD is as much a crackpot filter as it’s a pass into a particular scientific community, the academic route was indispensable. And though I learn primarily through reading, the exposure to others in my ever-narrowing field was personally valuable to me.
But coders learn most of what they need out in the wild. If universities taught more practical skills to CompSci majors, I’d be more of an advocate, but as it stands, I can’t in good conscience tell someone they need to know an asm or memorize the innumerable algorithms by class. For a lot of them, even many with bright futures as lead developers, it’s a colossal waste of money and time. It kind of pisses me off how much CS majors are getting sold a bill of goods.
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