When you are starting out in an hiring environment like this, you pretty much have to do this, but you should also be prepared to back it up.

25 years ago during a major tech downturn I said I had experience with C for my first programming job (I didn’t, but I knew others). Before I started I studied my ass off and learned it so I wouldn’t look like a fool on the job.

End result was that when I started, I knew C.

Don’t lie about stuff that is easy to verify like a degree from Harvard. That is just asking to be blackballed.

Maybe yours doesn’t, but plenty do.

Source: have worked at multiple companies interviewing people who would have been promising candidates, but got bounced during the screening process.

Believe it or not but I’ve seen the mobile apps be required to use totally different abstraction layers than websites, usually due to different authentication and access management methods.

“Back-end” is often relative when talking about these old systems. There are sometimes multiple layers of abstraction with different business logic built into each layer.

It’s fixable of course, but it is costly to unwind 30-40 years of bad technical decisions made by business people who never understood the systems they were making decisions for.

I might know the answer to your last point. I have experience working with financial services and large old institutions.

In short the front end is likely lighting fast and lightweight but the services it relies are incredibly old and outdated. Like mainframes running COBOL old. There is likely some abstraction but there are also likely literal decades of technical debt. Sometimes a call to understand what should be simple like what accounts does this client have might need to call multiple legacy systems that were integrated over the course of multiple acquisitions.

Slackware in 1998 I think, from a cd that came in a book I bought while in university.

It didn’t stick, but it demystified it and I’ve used a lot of flavours of *nix since then.

I remember not being able to get sound to work at all on my pentium computer.