Not a software development post, but an interesting one in the general topic of recruitment.

I think the idea of a reference letter is a good one, but in reality, can it really work? If a new employer asks your old employer about you, why should they respond, and how much detail can they even provide for you?

I suppose if it is a legal requirement, then they have to provide one, but if they write disparaging remarks then you may never be able to get a job.

I don’t work in HR so I only know what people tell me, but my colleagues have said that in the UK, references these days are basically “I confirm the said employee worked here as a developer between the years 2015-2022“. So they confirm that the former employee isn’t lying to the new employer about working there for X years with Y job title. But how well they actually performed is a mystery…but maybe could be guessed by the length of service. I suppose simply confirming this basic info means applicants cannot lie about former employment, or at least the last place they worked (they could lie about the day-to-day role, responsibilities, and performance).

A couple of months ago, I came across this post on stack overflow:

Should I tell my prospective employer that I drafted my own reference letter?

It is a very interesting thing that happens in Germany. The original poster says that he has been writing his own reference letters, then gets his employer to make minor edits before signing off on it. It seems they get the reference letter before they actually start a new job so it is ready for when they go to job interviews. There, the original poster has said interviewers have questioned if he wrote it.

It is becoming increasingly common that employers ask you to draft your own reference letter. Some people consider this practice ethically wrong, some consider it illegal. I usually agree to draft my own letter, on company time because it’s the company’s responsibility to produce the letter. Then I get my boss to edit and sign it. For jobs that play no significant role on my CV, I tend to just go without the letter.

For various reasons a prospective employer might ask if I wrote my own reference letter. Maybe it’s something about the style, I slipped in details the employer wouldn’t emphasize (or even know of), or the letter is too good, or too bad, or matches my self-image too closely, or I don’t know what.

The top answer made me laugh at how there’s a secret language employers use to communicate to get around the legal restrictions: 

As you probably know, German reference letters are a highly coded thing. While it looks like proper German sentences, it is actually code, wrapped into a natural language.

German courts ruled that those reference letters have to be “constructive and not detrimental to finding new employment”. So basically what happened is that German HR departments invented a code, so that they can have a positive sounding sentence that have a negative meaning. So they can still express the fact someone was not that good at their job, without being sued.

This code is far from secret. You can buy fistfuls of books from Amazon. You can even buy programs, where you can enter school grades for different parts of the employees job and the generator will generate nice and positive German sentences from it. Even if you entered all “F”s (or “6”s in the German school system’s grading system) it will read like the employee of the year to someone unaware of the code.

Obviously, any HR department worth it’s salt also has the magic decoder ring, to know, when reading those sentences, what they actually mean.

I’m always joking that “very social and good with rescue equipment” in such a reference letter means “was fired because they attacked their boss with an axe when showing up totally drunk the fifth day in a row”. So yes, this is an art form.

However… once in a while, something unexpected happens. Someone actually writes those references. With the best intentions. They write it without knowing too much about that code and they find nice sounding sentences. And they mean those sentences at face value. “good employee” actually means that it was a pretty good employee. While in HR terms, “good employee” ranks maybe second to last on their scale.

As you probably speak German, an example in German: “zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit” (to our full satisfaction) for example sounds like a great phrase. Completely satisfied with their behaviour. Great. Until you realize, in HR speak that is barely a “c”. “zu unserer vollsten Zufriedenheit” (to our fullest satisfaction) is one better and “immer zu unserer vollsten Zufriedenheit” (always to our fullest satisfaction) is another one-up.

So when people ask whether you wrote the reference yourself, what they probably want to know is: was this written in codified HR language, or did you wing it?

Because references that someone without HR knowledge writes to the best of their abilities and well-meaning, when read with the magic HR decoder ring, sound like that person is maybe vaguely qualified to stand in for a potted plant. Temporarily, until you get a real potted plant that might do a better job.

So as for many questions here, the answer is simple: tell the truth.

If someone from HR wrote it or you wrote it and you consulted one of those books with the “secret” (as in “sold on Amazon for 5.99”) knowledge, then tell them. If someone wrote it with no knowledge of that and just wrote what should be taken at face value, tell them, too.

Because if you read one of those things with the wrong expectations, it will be about the exact opposite of what the writer wanted to say.

https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/186190

This codified language reminds me of how medical staff apparently write disparaging remarks on your medical documents as an in-joke between staff. It’s all fun-and-games until recent software programs and data protection laws have enabled patients to review their records.

I don’t recall specific examples of what was quoted, but these sound roughly what I was told. It was on the topic of how attractive you look, or what your attitude was.

8 Medical Terms Your Doctor Uses to Insult You | Cracked.com

The secret codes doctors use to insult their patients | Daily Mail Online

Doctors’ Humor and Secret Language Revealed (medicaldaily.com)