How AI Ruins Students' Resumes

Nowadays, students universally write resumes with the help of AI, and AI universally does them an interesting dirty trick: it inserts SVA among their work skills, i.e., SystemVerilog Assertions (I'll tell you what this is below). Upon seeing SVA in the resume, I immediately ask the candidate to write some simplest SVA in three lines, and the snake wriggling on the pan begins:

Student: Well, I don't remember the exact syntax.

Me: But you just said that you debugged 100 bugs in practice at Big Electronics Company. How many of those bugs were caught with SVA?

Student: Well, around 20, but I didn't write them. Other engineers wrote them. I only helped analyze and debug them.

Me: So you saw SVA about 20 times in tools like Jasper Gold or Synopsys Verdi - and didn't remember the exact syntax? Well, write an approximate one.

Next, the student tries to write something very approximate.

Me: Alright, never mind. SVA is an auxiliary skill, and you don't necessarily have to know it. I just saw it on your resume and thought: wow, another university has started teaching SVA to students. So far, I've only seen it at the University of North Carolina in the USA and MIET in Russian Zelenograd. Well, if you don't know, you don't know. Let's move on to more key skills, i.e., microarchitecture tasks.

So what exactly is SVA? It's a subset of temporal logic expressions used in dynamic and formal verification (a kind of QA) for blocks of chips designed using synthesis from the hardware description language SystemVerilog at the Register Transfer Level (RTL). Very few people actually know it, perhaps only in formal verification groups within large electronics companies, and even then not on all projects. You should only include SVA on your resume if you're an expert on the subject or if a very specific position requires it, like a local guru for Jasper Gold. Otherwise, you risk running into exactly the situation I described above.

I generally don't understand people who use AI to write their resumes. Here's a rare chance to express your creative abilities and showcase your individual personality! How would you feel about a girl who posts on a dating site not her own photos of frying eggs in an office in Moscow City or driving a tractor—but AI-generated pictures? In my opinion, that's worse than not posting any photos at all.

I recently saw a new level—a software-generated resume with completely made-up projects. Since AI lacks perspective, imagination, and common sense, it invented several projects that no normal student would ever undertake, simply because they've been done a hundred times already—like writing a stripped-down version of Microsoft Word, with notes about a completely innovative feature: drag-and-drop from Windows Explorer. But that's a topic for another post.