How Not to Lie on Your Resume, Part 1

The other day we were interviewing a prospective Senior QA Analyst. I noted with satisfaction that at his present job (going back two years), he listed Perl under "Programming Languages". This makes me happy because I use Perl regularly to automate testing tasks.

When it came time for me to ask questions, I posed a simple task: Write a function in Perl which takes a multiline string as input, and returns an array of strings consisting of each valid IP address from the input.

He didn't know where to start. When I tried to jog his memory by asking whether a regexp would be a good way to extract the IPs, he admitted being completely unaware of the term Regular Expression. Oh my.

He finally took a stab at it by walking the input string one character at a time, looking for the first period and then backtracking to see if the previous char was a numeral. And then capturing subsequent periods and digits, until finally counting the number of captured periods and digits. A truly terrible solution.

So, tip #1 for job seekers who don't want to look like a fraud in your interview:

Under the description for your current job, only list programming languages you actually do know.