A former coworker once caught someone whose claimed PostScript experience consisted of clicking "Print to File". I consider that nothing short of fraud. If a skill is on my résumé, I am offering to rent it to you for substantial money, which means at a minimum that I have already developed it to the point of being commercially useful. If there is no honest way for me to claim I've dabbled a little and I hope to be useless for less time than some others, it's because nobody has much reason to believe my uninformed self-assessment or care very much even when it's true.
That said, we once hired a guy who didn't know any Java (actually it was the same guy as above), because the interview made it perfectly obvious that given his intelligence and fluency in similar languages, picking up Java was not going to be a problem for him. He did not try to find an excuse to smuggle Java into his résumé, he was honest and let us make the call, and it worked out fine for both of us. If he had cram-studied Java and tried to pass himself off as experienced, we would have caught him being incompetent or dishonest or both, and that would have ended the interview.
A former coworker once caught someone whose claimed PostScript experience consisted of clicking "Print to File"
Was that deceit, or tremendous ignorance?
It seems to me that there's a huge problem with resumes and interviewing regarding unknown unknowns. 1-10 ratings, for example, vary wildly depending on how much you don't know that you don't know. When I graduated college, I was a 9/10 in C++. Now I'm about a 6, even though I'm ten times the C++ programmer that I was. :-) But I don't dare tell a recruiter that...
I do agree entirely with this statement of yours:
at a minimum that I have already developed it to the point of being commercially useful
Which is sort of my point. You can have employed a language or technology, professionally, to solve a problem, gaining very meaningful experience, without coming anywhere close to being an expert, or even meeting most people's requirements for 'knowing' something. I'm certainly not saying that people should list anything technology they can conceive, on the most tenuous bases they can rationalize.
That said, we once hired a guy who didn't know any Java (actually it was the same guy as above), because the interview made it perfectly obvious that given his intelligence and fluency in similar languages, picking up Java was not going to be a problem for him. He did not try to find an excuse to smuggle Java into his résumé, he was honest and let us make the call, and it worked out fine for both of us. If he had cram-studied Java and tried to pass himself off as experienced, we would have caught him being incompetent or dishonest or both, and that would have ended the interview.