> You see a job advert for an English / French translator. The advert says
> there will be a test during the interview. You don't know a single word
> of French, but you think to yourself "bah, nobody will notice. I'll just
> Google search of the words when I need to. It'll be fine."
>
> WHAT. THE. HELL.
>
> I'm sorry, IN WHICH UNIVERSE IS NOBODY GOING TO NOTICE?! What the HELL
> are you smoking?!!
>
> Nobody thinks this will work. Nobody ever tries this. Because nobody is
> that stupid. But replace being able to write French with being able to
> write C#, and suddenly everybody thinks that somehow "nobody will
> notice". Wuh?!

I assure you the sames happens for French and everything else. My gf 
works for a company that sells stuff mostly outside the UK, so they are 
always recruiting people for customer service that are fluent in German, 
French, Italian etc. People *do* apply for jobs that blatantly state 
"German speaker" that cannot speak more than the 3 words of German that 
everyone knows. Their reasoning is often along the lines of "well I can 
speak a bit of French and I thought you wouldn't notice, and if you did 
you would anyway see how uber cool I was and see I could learn German in 
a few weeks and hire me anyway". Err no, go away!

The same happened to me in Engineering in my last job too. A guy applied 
quoting 20 years experience in analogue electronic circuit design and 
test. We got a bit concerned when he couldn't even say what a simple 
2-component RC circuit was meant to do, let alone how to calculate any 
response. After a bit of drilling down we got to the question of "have 
you ever actually used an oscilloscope?". His answer was No. I mean come on!

> We started doing phone screenings rather than waste our time with
> hopeless people. We find a website where you can watch the other person
> type, in real-time, as they type it. Almost everybody who reaches this
> stage doesn't get to have a face-to-face interview. A few people got
> creative though:
>
> * While talking to one guy, we could *clearly* hear somebody else
> sitting next to him telling him what to type. Er, REJECT!
>
> * Another guy, we asked him to write some code. We can hear typey typey
> typey. Er, can you type into the window please? Typey, typey, typey,
> BAM! Suddenly a huge block of text appears all at once. In other
> words... you just Googled the answer and copy-pasted it, didn't you?
> REJECT!

LOL

> Seriously, how the **** do people think we're not gonna notice this
> stuff? Let us suppose, for argument's sake, that you somehow trick us
> into interviewing you... Do you REALLY THINK it won't instantly become
> EXTREMELY OBVIOUS that you're bluffing? How do you actually see this
> playing out? Are you mental?!

The scary thing is these people will probably be able to get a job 
somewhere and somehow blag there way along. If they're lucky they may 
even get to interview people at some point :-)

> I wonder... Does anybody have this much trouble hiring a carpenter?

Have you ever seen shows like "cowboy builders" or "rogue traders"...

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