I am one of those people who just won't exaggerate or lie on my CV or during an interview. I say "i'm not sure, i'd google it the first couple times it came up". I'm not a programmer though. I have a weird skillset that doesn't mesh or gel with what recruiters are looking for, so on the rare occasion i get a recruiter on the phone, i tend to get a job offer at the end of the sequence.
I've had a few startup jobs, a couple megacorp jobs (not Apple), and a handful of mom and pop and defunct business jobs as well.
My least favorite interview questions involve regex or deep internals of BSD or Linux, my favorite interview questions are off the cuff solutions to problems presented, and then backtracking the explanation.
I've also been asked to perform job interviews for positions that i probably ought know enough about to interview a candidate for, but I went off my gut feeling about how the person acted in what i consider a stressful situation (a slew of interviewers asking asinine questions). I don't like interviewing, i am not very good at finding candidates that are "in for the long haul" but every time we were tasked with finding someone who can do X before end of Q3, my hired candidate recommendations always nailed it in that time
frame.
All this is to say, i find the whole process ridiculous. My CV apparently looks like a train wreck. I refuse to wear a tie or get a haircut. I'm eerily relaxed in interview situations.
My trick? one time i hung out with a CEO of an IT company from the PNW, and they basically told me everything i thought i knew was trash, my resume was trash, my attitude was trash, and the only thing i was good at was solving problems in a hurry. We did, in fact, get coffee for our meetup. I scrapped every idea of what a resume should look like - what i envisioned a perfect professional resume looked like - and started fresh. I learned to say no to most recruiters in a way that made them ask me about different "opportunities" more aligned with my personal ethics and values in the future.
I have 4 FPGAs, and i've never done anything with them, because the bitstream is proprietary on all of them. I wouldn't hesitate to tell an interviewer that i am interested in FPGAs and custom ASICs, because i am. I'm also interested in bacteria, but i won't be applying to a bioscience lab anytime soon. I certainly wouldn't say "yeah i can program an FPGA", or C, or do front end development, or any of that.
From my reading of these sorts of comments, in aggregate, most people try to impress the interviewers. I want them to impress me.
I have been developing in embedded systems for 38 years, and I have the shortest skill set you will ever see on a resume. I only put down the things I know.
On the other hand, I have reviewed resumes from people with five years of experience that are 'experts' at twenty five unrelated technologies. As soon as I see that, I think, 'yeah..... no'. I worked with some genius level folk at Bell Labs back in the mid 1990s, ten years into my career, and they were each really good at two or three things. I took note of that. Yes, they could figure other stuff out, they could move on to new technology, updating the three things that they were good at, but that list always seemed to be short.
You have to laugh at 'experienced' or 'expert at' followed by JS, JAVA, Full Stack, Python, Linux, BSD, C#, AWS, C, C++, MySQL, PostGRES, Lisp, Lua, Azure, MathCAD, DSP, AI, Excel, SystemC, Perl, regex, Bash, git, assembly, Verilog, ...
I've had a few startup jobs, a couple megacorp jobs (not Apple), and a handful of mom and pop and defunct business jobs as well.
My least favorite interview questions involve regex or deep internals of BSD or Linux, my favorite interview questions are off the cuff solutions to problems presented, and then backtracking the explanation.
I've also been asked to perform job interviews for positions that i probably ought know enough about to interview a candidate for, but I went off my gut feeling about how the person acted in what i consider a stressful situation (a slew of interviewers asking asinine questions). I don't like interviewing, i am not very good at finding candidates that are "in for the long haul" but every time we were tasked with finding someone who can do X before end of Q3, my hired candidate recommendations always nailed it in that time frame. All this is to say, i find the whole process ridiculous. My CV apparently looks like a train wreck. I refuse to wear a tie or get a haircut. I'm eerily relaxed in interview situations.
My trick? one time i hung out with a CEO of an IT company from the PNW, and they basically told me everything i thought i knew was trash, my resume was trash, my attitude was trash, and the only thing i was good at was solving problems in a hurry. We did, in fact, get coffee for our meetup. I scrapped every idea of what a resume should look like - what i envisioned a perfect professional resume looked like - and started fresh. I learned to say no to most recruiters in a way that made them ask me about different "opportunities" more aligned with my personal ethics and values in the future.
I have 4 FPGAs, and i've never done anything with them, because the bitstream is proprietary on all of them. I wouldn't hesitate to tell an interviewer that i am interested in FPGAs and custom ASICs, because i am. I'm also interested in bacteria, but i won't be applying to a bioscience lab anytime soon. I certainly wouldn't say "yeah i can program an FPGA", or C, or do front end development, or any of that.
From my reading of these sorts of comments, in aggregate, most people try to impress the interviewers. I want them to impress me.
Does this make me privileged? Probably. <sigh>