Subj : Re: Categories? resume references? (was: How much should I charge f...) To : comp.lang.lisp,comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer From : rem642b Date : Sun Sep 04 2005 03:46 am > From: "David" > It is good to have specialized resumes, but don't show them all to a > prospective employer. They just get confused. I'm not sure what you're talking about here. When I apply for a job, I send one resume, either a specialized resume if one is appropriate, or my general resume customized for the particular job. When people offer to help me write a better resume, I show them the work I've already done so they have a starting point for suggesting improvements. If a prospective employer happens to witness this thread, there's nothing I can do to stop that person from seeing everything that anyone else in the thread can see. When I set up a Web site that explains my entire attempt to find employment, I have different sections for people offering me help with the general process and for people searching for some particular specialized resume I might have. Again I can't prevent some prospective employer from browsing inappropriate parts of my Web site. > Have a general one that whets there [sic] appetite to learn more > aobut [sic] you and contact you. Both my pre-school children knew the difference between "their" and "there". What's your excuse for not knowing that?? How do I get any prospective employer to actually see my resume, when there are several thousand resumes submitted for each job ad? > I prefer people that give an accurate objective statement Other advice was that objective statements are of negative value, unless they are almost exactly a match for the particular job offered. Obviously that's not possible in a general resume posted for many potential employers to browse. > some indication of familiar technologies and an accurate indication > of expertise, but mostly this information comes in the form of > desciptions about past experience. There's no room for descriptions on a one-page resume, so what are you trying to recommend in regard to my resume?? Somebody else suggested that an online resume should have links from each item in the resume to a more complete explanation elsewhere on the Web, and I suggested in response that I make a HTML resume with links, and then use lynx's print command to create a plain text rendering which I could send as my print/FAX resume. Is that what you're suggesting, or something else I can't guess? > It helps me get to know what you've done to help others and what you > might to [sic] for me. My helping others includes a lot of areas not included on my programming resume, such as my years of helping people on news.newusers.questions, tutoring, peer counseling including saving a few lives, ... I find it difficult to believe you really want to know about such things when considering me specifically for a computer programming job, and even more difficult to consider including such items on my already-crowded computer-programming resume. > I also do a phone interview with those that seem worth learning more > about. It is a huge turn off for me if the person indicated some > level of expertise in a couple subjects and can't answer simple > questions or say anything more than the resume already did. How would you feel if you asked me for more information about something I'd done and I spent the next ten minutes telling you about it? > A good description is quite enough. What your responsibility was, > perhaps the major technologies, and what you accomplished for the > employer. That would take a whole page for each job, far too much to include in a one-page resume. Where should I put that info? > You listed C++ exactly once on the multipage resume you published > a web link to. Please cite the URL so I know which resume you're talking about. > A resume is only suppose tease you into cantacting me for more info. Did you in fact try to contact me, by e-mail or telephone, or even by my Web application for sending me instant short-messages/alerts? > It was pretty much trial and error finding what your recent > activities and accomplishments were. I don't understand your difficulty. I have a chronology of many of my accomplishments of the past few years. Were you looking at it or not? http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/SeekJobAccom.html If that's what you were browsing, you know what I was accomplishing during each particular time period, often during a single month. So what do you mean trial and error? You select the time period you are interested in, click on that link, and there you are. > I'd suggest listing C++ only if you could be useful to an employer > in that language. I believe I could be useful for some C++ tasks, so if I leave it out I'm stupidly cutting myself off from jobs I can do. > A recent applicant claimed to be a C++ expert and could only list > six years experience using computers. If all six years he was not just using computers, and not even just programming computers, but programming computers using C++, then it's quite possible he is an expert at using C++ for programming. > Anyway the applicant couldn't complete "strcpy" given the function > definition and asking him not to use any other functions. Let's see, you have two pointers, one of them to a block of data that consists of non-null characters terminated by one null character, and the other pointer into writable memory of sufficient size to hold a copy of the original block of data. What if the two blocks overlap? Do you assume this doesn't occur? Anyway, strcpy is not a C++ function, it's a C function, so to implement it (assuming no overlapping data areas) I'd just write a loop that incremented the two pointers in parallel, copying one byte at a time, and checking for null byte after each copy. (The null byte needs to be copied too.) So any beginner C programmer could easily write that. But a C++ programmer might be more comfortable with object oriented programming and might be dumbfounded by such an elementary question. (Or as you suspect, he might have lied about C++ expertise, and in fact might have had not a slightest bit of either C or C++ programming experience, not even elementary classwork.) Here's a more interesting, and C++ specific, riddle, which I managed to solve after both my current-at-the-time C++ instructor and my previous C instructor were both stumped by it (and I was stumped until I finally read the key information later in the textbook that gave me the clue I needed to solve the riddle and explain it to my instructors): How is it that cin can be chained, yet cin can be used as a boolean to test for EOF? Is the value of cin boolean, true or false depending on EOF or not, or iostream, *always* returns itself, never returns a false value?? The answer to the riddle is one of the reasons C++ is an inscrutably more perverse language than just about any other language, making it impossible to understand even one line of code sucn as a simple C-syntax IF statement without knowing the entire rest of the program simultaneously. Do you want me to tell you the answer now, or do you want to try guessing first? To avoid one person telling the answer and the other claiming to already know it when in fact he didn't, I suggest we use an incremental-info-exchange protocol. Are you familiar with the "tell me something I don't already know" problem with information barter, and the incremental-info-exchange solution? > If you can work in that you didn't know Java but picked it up to > complete a project that shows effort on your part. In the case of Java, I actually took three classes, beginning java, advanced java, and distributed java. But in the cases of Perl, PHP, HTML, CGI, awk, and sh I learned enough on my own to complete a project, and many years previously I learned a large number of other programming languages on my own in order to do work of my own desire. Prior to my recent classes in VB, Java and C++, the only time anybody gave me any help learning a programming language is when Hans Moravec explained the read-eval-print (of Lisp) to me. All my learning of Fortran, SAIL (Algol), the rest of Lisp, MainSail, MacSyma, Macintosh toolbox/OS traps, Forth, and a large number of machine/assembly languages, was me learning directly from a manual and practicing on my own. C is the primary crossover language, part self-teach and part class, where I taught myself the barebones, using a very crude compiler on my Mac for one project, then using a more complete compiler on Unix to write a major application, but never needing to learn about structs in all that work, finally using structs for the first time when I took a class only because it was required before taking C++ or Java. > It would be very helpful if you told the employer what it is you > wanted to do for them. In a general resume written for everyone to browse, there are an unlimited number of things I might want to do for various employers. Your advice would seem to be useful only after I already have a general resume perfected and I'm ready to use it as a base for preparing custom resumes for each new job that is advertised. > If you know so many languages, perhaps the language isn't important > and you can focus on what you want to do. It's very unlikely that what I really want to do, such as work with others to design an industry standard spec for interval arithmetic, would be of any interest to most employers. > I think that you would find much better employement opportunities by > determining what you want to do and address specific employers > one-by-one. I don't know any way to find even one employer that is interested in what I want to do. I already tried posting introductions to some of my ideas in comp.programming, but not a single employer responded by offering me a job or even just talking with me about what I had proposed. That was my only guess how to propose my ideas, and it fizzled, and I can't think of any other approach that would be likely to ferret out such an employer interested in my ideas for new projects. > Cold calling or appying [sic] to jobs that don't exist can work in > your favor too. I'm really uncomfortable cold-calling a receptionist at a big company trying to talk my way into a conversation with somebody who actually knows anything about programming but who is very busy and can't take time off work to talk with every bozo who calls. I hate spam, and I hate telemarketing even worse. Ever heard of the Golden Rule?? .