Subj : Re: Software Job Market Myths To : comp.programming,comp.software-eng From : rem642b Date : Mon Aug 22 2005 01:29 am > From: "Phlip" > >> Your tinyurl does not point to a single, clear, one-sheet, resume in > >> the normal format. > > Why should I do a dumb thing like that? > Uh, to get hired? Well that's not a valid answer, because I have six different attempts at a general resume, none of which anybody says is any good at all, plus several specialized resumes for areas where I've done a lot of work and could fill many pages (Lisp language, Macintosh platform, and several application areas), none of which are appropriate for any job except in each of those specialized areas. To put just one resume up as "the only resume of mine" would preclude employment in any area not best represented by that particular resume. It would be better to point to my index of resumes by topic, but since nobody likes *any* of them, I decided to wait until at least one of them is acceptable before I preferentially point to it. I'm in a multiple bind where nothing I do is acceptable to anyone. > Comparing resumes again, I have the generic stuff at the top, > specifics down below or hidden. You seem to have a maze. Are you comparing one of my resumes with one of yours? If so, which one of mine? Cite the URL of the one you're looking at, so I can know what you're referring to. It does me no good if you make a specific complaint about one resume, but I think you're talking about another resume, or I don't have any idea which resume you're talking about. Most of my resumes are written in neat sections (after the header with geography and contact info), each covering one topic (such as skills, experience, education, etc.), with the most important or less foot-shooting section first, then the second most important or second less foot-shooting second, etc. Sections are in different order in different resumes because each was trying to conform to one batch of advice that I was getting at the time I wrote them. For example, at one time I was told sternly that I absolutely must list my paid work experience first, even though I haven't had any for several years, because that's what employers expect. But at other times i was told to ignore standard format, show my skills first, to get the person interested, and put my experience later when the person is already interested and impressed and won't toss my resume in the trash just because I've been unemployed a while, i.e. put my best foot forward first and put lame foot at the end. Other people say not to include chronological work history at all because no matter where it's located it shoots me in the foot, but instead to just list skills and experience in non-chronological sequence to fill one page so there's no room for work history, i.e. but all best feet forward and never put lame foot in at all. I'm pretty sure none of my resumes are like a maze, but if you can cite which one gives you that impression I'll take a more careful look and try to understand what would make you feel that way. No I'm not going to try to guess which of my dozen resumes is the one you feel looks like a maze. If you have a bug to report, at least tell me which program you were running when you encountered the bug. Same when offering critique of one of my dozen resumes. > > I have experience a lot of different areas. > Me too. > > I have special resumes in each area where I have a lot > > of experience > Hence, my resume adapts to the reader. Those curious about testing may see > it in action doing games, computer science, and linguistics. Those curious > about linguistics may see me skinning applications, testing machine > translation, etc. That seems to contradict what you said earlier that I should post just a link to a single resume, not a bunch of different resumes customzed for different major types of experience. Please explain this discrepancy. > > plus several attempts at a general resume for only jobs > > in areas where I don't have a lot of specific experience. > Note: When you say "attempts at", you are saying a variation on > "try", which is a very sad word that engineers should try to avoid. I know how to write software to perform tasks. This is something I can say up front "I'll do that". I know how to design software systems to solve problems, providing that I understand in principle how to solve the problem in the first place, and providing that the known algorithm for solving the problem is efficient enough to make it practical to implement. I can't factor 200-digit numbers unless by chance they are easy. I can't solve a traveling-salesman optimization for six thousand nodes with path lengths deliberately chosen to be hard to find. But most any regular practical problem, I have an idea how to solve it, and can estimate how long it'd take for a program to run, usually "faster than you can see the display blink between clicking the submit button and seeing the result start to display" or "faster than you can run to the drinking fountain to snatch a quick drink before the program finishes". If the program needs to consult various sources over the net to collect data needed to come up with a solution, it make a few seconds for each network transaction, and maybe a half minute or so total for getting an answer, or maybe even a little longer. In all those cases I can state in advance "I'll do it" in regard to designing the overall software system and implementing it. But I don't know how to write stuff that impresses hiring managers to hire me, which is involved in writing a "good" resume, so especially after a dozen attempts that you say are still all crap, it would be dishonest to say in advance that the next attempt will be a total success. You like to work with liars who promise the moon then fail to keep their promises, right? You won't like me because I'm honest about what I definitely can do and what I'm not sure I can do. > Say, "I will do it." I'm not going to start lying just because some person I never met in person who is not paying me one penny of salary tells me to start lying. If you offer to pay me a thousand dollars, I still won't lie for you. If you offer to pay me a million dollars to lie to you or for you, I won't believe you until I see the money, and have the head operations officer at a local bank inspect the money to see if it's real. After all if you want me to lie for you, you probably are lying to me also. Even if you pay me a hundred thousand dollars in advance, and promise me the rest of the million if I lie for you, I'm not sure I could do that and live with myself. > > Do you really > > believe that one size fits all, that I should shoehorn all jobs into a > > single resume? If so, which of the nearly dozen different resumes is > > the one size that you believe fits all? > No, I believe in not pissing headhunters off at the first link. OK, that part I understand. Do you actually know that any headhunter would want me? Headhunters raid other villages to murder their fighters to capture their women to take them prisoner, and they cut off the heads of their victims and shrink them. Employment headhunters do the analagous thing with other companies, offering high incomes to steal employess away from other companies, but never paying any attention whatsoever to unemployed people who are available at a much lower cost. All they care about is raiding other companies to find already-employeed people with confidential information about that other company's products. A regular employment recruiter, not a headhunter, on the other hand, might consider an unemployed person, and might possibly look at my online resume if I haven't yet sent him/her my resume directly. So can you forget about headhunters and advice me not to piss off that rare employment recruiter who by chance looks at what I have online? > That's a very wide envelop; you may fill it how you like. It's not > one-size-fits-all because it's not a very small envelop. There are > room for many inside. I have no idea what you mean by this metaphor. Maybe you mean that if I had an extensive Web site with lots of data about me, just about anyone could find something interesting in it if they had time to spend browsing it? I don't know what you mean, that or something I can't even guess. > When I have a job lead that needs me to push up some topic, I read > the One True resume, and make sure that path is obvious and accessible. > I have multiple paths through my resume, _not_ multiple paths _to_ > multiple resumes. It's not possible to have that in a resume, which is a single-page document. So I have no idea what you're talking about. You sound like Humpty Dumpty. > Hirers care about esthetics and formatting. There are common ways > that simple HTML makes pages beautiful. Your obstinance to push > perfectly well-formed HTML in the opposite direction is confounding. I have no such obstinance. If I were to ever write a resume in HTML, I'd use unnumbered lists with list items, or whatever it took to make the formatting automatically appropriate for all Web browsers. In the past I've generally edited my resume on my local Macintosh, which doesn't have any way to render HTML as nicely-formatted ASCII text, so I do all the formatting manually with a simple text editor. If there's some case where lynx could format it better than I could do manually, I might try editing the HTML, uploading to Unix, running Lynx on it, printing the Lynx rendered text to file, then downloading that back to Macintosh, and FAXing that. But I'd have to be really really convinced that's a good idea before I bother with all that extra hassle compared to editing and immediately FAXing directly from my Mac. > I still have no idea what the WAP was supposed to be for. The first appearance of the word WAP, here: ... I tried WAP. ... is an anchor-href to a nice glossy-style political-advocation for WAP. Did you follow that link and read all that material and still not understand the point as to what use there might be for WAP or why anybody would bother trying to set up services using WAP? > Now you know where to head too. Well I need to know where the starting point is, i.e. which of my dozen resumes you were complaining about, before a direction of motion is of any value. If somebody tells you that the way to get to Kansas City is to start driving North, it helps if the person tells you whether the assumed starting point is Houston (correct) or Los Angeles (nope) or NYC (nope) or Miami (nope) or London (definitely not!!) or Siagon (no chance!!). If somebody tells a road crew to start fixing potholes in the road, heading North for a half mile, that instruction is no use if they don't also tell the road crew which location on which road to start with. If somebody tells me to move the third paragraph up to the top, sliding the former first and second paragraph downward, that's of no value without knowing which file they are talking about. You said my resume seemed like a maze, but didn't say which resume you were talking about. I would like your advice if you care to tell me which starting point you're talking about. At this point I'm not sure you even were looking at any of my resumes when you complained my resume looked like a maze. > Any luck paying $75 ... You can stop right there. I don't have $75, or even $10. If and when I get a job, I'll need to start paying off $50,000 of credit-card debts before I can consider spending my money on anything not absolutely needed to assist my job, such as food which I can't afford presently. If you want to contract me for a job whereby you pay me $50,000 for the first year of work, that would be really nice. Even $25,000 per year for two or three years would be nice if the job is part-time 20hr/wk. .