The polygraph and the résumé arms race

The anecdote sounds invented and isn’t: a programmer friend’s job interview included a polygraph, with questions like have you ever stolen, do you have terrorist or narco friends ▸ 40:28. The absurdity compounds in the details: what exactly would a programmer be doing with narcos ▸ 40:53, and the machine’s rules are unwinnable, you may not answer plain yes or no, but elaborate too much and you’re told to stay on topic ▸ 41:22. All of this for roughly 4 million pesos, on-site, two hours from Chía each way ▸ 41:55.

The Reddit companion piece completes the genre: five rounds of interviews and tests, and only then the confession that the advertised 4 million is really 2.8 plus performance targets ▸ 42:25, a week of a candidate’s life spent to discover the listing was bait, the same move a recruiter once ran on him.

cuando los dos lados automatizan la confianza, lo único que escala es la desconfianza →

His diagnosis is structural: the line between reality and fiction in a résumé is thinning, because with AI anyone can look more crack than they are, fake images, bots, portfolios that write themselves ▸ 43:05. So employers escalate, polygraphs, five-stage gauntlets, and candidates escalate back: he’d just seen someone on LinkedIn wire up n8n to auto-apply to every matching job posting ▸ 43:51. The equilibrium is the meme that’s stopped being one: “utilizo IA para enviar currículos, utilizo IA para calificar, nadie es contratado” ▸ 45:16, with HR left panning for gold in a river of machine-generated dirt ▸ 45:28. Each side’s rational move makes the loop worse for both, an arms race where the weapon is volume and the casualty is the signal. Filed, implicitly, under reasons they’d rather build their own thing than pass another polygraph…