[HN Gopher] What we look for in a resume
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What we look for in a resume
Author : sebg
Score : 239 points
Date : 2023-01-25 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (huyenchip.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (huyenchip.com)
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Sorry, I prefer a concise one page resume that tells me just
| enough that makes interested to want to learn more. Anyone can
| claim outcomes and metrics on a resume that can never be
| validated.
| kube-system wrote:
| You don't need to "validate" the outcomes and metrics on a
| resume. The usefulness of this content (or anything on a
| resume) is not in its utility as a test of character.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Who said it was? I'm just saying I don't need a bunch of
| useless fluff on a resume.
| kube-system wrote:
| I like when people list outcomes and metrics. It gives me a
| starting point for something to ask questions about.
| Projects make for a lot better interview discussion topic
| than "skills: HTML, JavaScript, CSS [...]"
| renewiltord wrote:
| Right. We each have different candidate fit models. I think
| this article is well-written, but I think she should post this
| on her job listing as a note somewhere in the JD e.g.
| https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00...
|
| And it's good for people to post those things so you know what
| each group is looking for.
| rogers12 wrote:
| This is an ad for a startup that is hiring a "founding engineer"
| with a "competitive compensation package". Are you so excited
| about the mission that you'll work toward it for free, anon?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| There's a lot of bad advice here. Like you can dismiss this
| article right when the author says they read every resume and
| don't use a scanner. Unless this is a tiny shop with no recruiter
| anywhere in the process, this simply isnt true. The recruiter is
| going to screen some of them, even before the hiring manager gets
| to them.
|
| Now don't get me wrong. Some of the stuff in the article is good,
| if tailored for new grads and junior people, but some is just bad
| and wrong.
|
| I'd say pretty much anything everything billeted in this article
| is trash. The insights in the prose.
|
| TL;DNR Don't skip the keywords folks.
|
| No one gives a fuck about your social media (eg StackOverflow,
| GitHub, Kaggle, etc). I don't have time to read some rando's
| code, and all it does it show me that you don't have a hobby
| outside of promoting yourself on social media.
| zwieback wrote:
| Wow, so much venom. I wonder what your cover letter/resume
| looks like.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I'm easy to find. :)
| SoylentYellow wrote:
| > No one gives a fuck about your social media (eg
| StackOverflow, GitHub, Kaggle, etc)
|
| This is just plain wrong. When doing interviews at my previous
| company, we always looked at their github repo if provided.
| physicsguy wrote:
| Do you not find that 95% of the time it's just a blank GitHub
| though? The only people I've seen without that are either in
| academia or work on OSS in their day job in some way.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Or bootcamp grads.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Same thing with GitHub activity grid. I don't even know
| what it's supposed to tell. Even if I'm writing code
| everyday, that doesn't mean I'm checking it in, and even if
| I was, I'm not doing it on a _public repo_ or even on a
| GitHub hosted repo.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Let's be honest here. What are you getting out of GitHub? My
| experience has found exactly two cases:
|
| 1) It's a toy. There are like two files and and ~100 lines in
| total. In which case, the repo is meaningless.
|
| 2) There's a fuckton of code. In which case, you are
| absolutely not reading it. You can't. You have no context,
| nor do you have the time. Reading code is Hard. You
| absolutely are not going to spend several hours inspecting
| some rando's code. So what's the point?
|
| You can get the same amount of information from reading the
| resume and a 30 minute phone screen.
| twitchard wrote:
| Wrong. I've been a hiring manager at a place with >100
| engineers and a recruiting team and
|
| - I still read every resume
|
| - I ignored the keywords
|
| - I pretty much valued exactly what the author does.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| If you're not using the recruiting team to screen the resumes
| what's the recruiting team even for? Or are you simply not
| getting resumes?
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| This is very interesting, it appears to be catering to devs who
| love to work on own project and see help on SO. It also helps a
| competent manager to see the code structure and such.
|
| Nothing wrong with that, but! ask yourself, if all the SO profile
| is all questions and no or no correct answers, what does this
| tell you?
|
| How would you know if the repos are not forks or copy paste jobs?
|
| And what kinda projects will be in the repos?
|
| For sure nothing proprietary, hence private projects.
|
| Have these projects been done during work time or during time
| off? Both are bad, if the dev worked on private projects during
| work or if they go and code 5 hrs a day after work, or any
| unhealthy amount.
|
| I used to do many projects outside of work,things like sign up,
| log in features from scratch in node because I thought I need to
| learn the next new thing, but once I moved positions into a more
| product ownerish role, ie, much more work, I had literally no
| time any more to spin up a personal project.
|
| But yes, all in all, this is much better than applying at the
| typical company where hr is writing nonsense job requirements
| like 15 years experience in golang and such.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Regarding resume length, I'm a huge fan of the "collapsible"
| approach: if when reviewing your resume I somehow print out only
| page 1, is it still great? Is everything I need to be interested
| in you there? If so then you can have all the pages you want.
|
| The origin of this test is that I do not actually _want_ to read
| your resume. I 'm not going to look at the other pages if page 1
| is boring! So tell me who you are first and if I'm interested, I
| will follow along.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| [dead]
| ddmichael wrote:
| We don't care.
| jedberg wrote:
| I've read a lot of resumes in my time, and here is my advice:
|
| No one reads resumes. At best they skim them. They look at the
| shortest lines, which are usually where you worked and the job
| title. Name recognition makes a difference here, no matter how
| many people tell you otherwise. This applies to your college as
| well. But don't let it discourage you, it's more of a "if you
| have a big name there you get a boost but it's not a negative if
| you don't".
|
| They skim for key technologies and then read the text around
| them.
|
| They most likely will read the full text of the most recent job,
| so make sure that is the most detailed and interesting.
|
| Your resume should talk about results. Don't say "Created a new
| CMS for the company". Say "Created a new CMS for the company in
| Python that resulted in an ~70% reduction in website update
| times, from 1 hour to 18 minutes."
|
| If you do put a "skills cloud" on it, be ready to talk about them
| all. If someone had a skills cloud I would immediately look for
| the most esoteric skills and dive deep on it in the interview
| (after Googling it myself) to see if you were BSing or not. If
| you really know that skill, you should know more than what I
| learned in five minutes of searching.
|
| All this applies to your LinkedIn as well, which you should keep
| up to date, so that if there is a job you want but don't want to
| spend the time applying, you can just send them your LinkedIn. :)
|
| Edit: Forgot to mention, as pointed out below, that your resume
| also drives the interview, so while some of what you write won't
| be read to get the interview, you still want it there as a place
| to jump off during an interview. Always better if you can drive
| the conversation towards your most positive qualities, which is
| easier if they are in your resume and the interviewer asks about
| them.
| stcroixx wrote:
| I've been hiring for 15 years maybe and always read resumes.
| The skills bubble is critical for me personally - they need to
| have some stuff in there that matches what tech we use. I also
| don't look at LinkedIn - doesn't add anything to me not already
| on the resume.
|
| Currently hiring Java devs.
| dijit wrote:
| if you're hiring senior and above the number of _radically
| different_ technologies is extremely small.
|
| what I mean is, a good Java dev will be able to code in Go in
| under a month.
|
| A developer who knows MySQL will learn postgresql just fine.
|
| I don't tend to put much weight into specific technologies,
| more I try to figure out how exposed you've been to paradigms
| that are important (OOP, RDBMS).
| confidantlake wrote:
| For the skills, I feel for every interviewer that grills you
| about them there are five that would have never bothered to
| interview you if you hadn't listed them. If the job posting has
| Kubernetes, data science, Angular, React, Ember, Java, linux,
| apache, python, postgres... for a junior dev role, I am damn
| sure going to list them even if I only have a general idea
| about them. I highly doubt they are going to start grilling me
| on the inner workings of postgres, they just want to know I
| have worked with an sql database.
|
| Most of the time it feels like a performance from both sides.
| We only want to hire the best! We need all 30 of these skills!
| Oh yes sir I am the best I absolutely know all those things!
| user5678 wrote:
| I know that most people don't read resumes because I'm always
| asked a lot of questions that would have been answered if the
| interviewer had read my resume.
|
| But when I've been on the opposite side of the table, I've
| always read every word of the resumes of the candidates. I
| think the hiring process would go better if more people did
| this.
| jedberg wrote:
| I read the entire resume before an interview. I skim them
| when I'm deciding if I should offer one or not. Also I will
| ask about things that are in your resume because I want more
| details.
| thrwawy74 wrote:
| My thought here is to pay reviewers to read resumes and use eye
| tracking to train a diffusion model so you can issue resume
| prompts that will produce the most eye-catching resumes.
|
| "resume for a 20-something who travels abroad and knows the
| rust"
| doix wrote:
| > If you do put a "skills cloud" on it, be ready to talk about
| them all. If someone had a skills cloud I would immediately
| look for the most esoteric skills and dive deep on it in the
| interview (after Googling it myself) to see if you were BSing
| or not. If you really know that skill, you should know more
| than what I learned in five minutes of searching.
|
| That's super important in my opinion. I try and write as little
| as possible on my resume because I don't want to get asked
| about stuff I don't remember. I keep it to 1 page, write as
| little as possible and hope that people recognize the default
| LaTeX font and interview me because my super concise CV makes
| me look interesting/mysterious.
|
| It's worked well enough for me, but it's a small sample size
| and luck plays a huge role of course.
| Sodman wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. Not even just in the skills cloud
| section, don't put _anything_ on your resume that you 're not
| ready to talk about in an interview. It's baffling the amount
| of candidates that answer questions about their resumes with
| "Oh it was so long ago I don't remember" or "Oh it was just a
| quick 2 week R&D spike that was never shipped".
|
| If something was a long time ago, just summarize it and keep
| it short and sweet. Nobody needs to read 8 bullet points on
| an internship you had 7 gigs ago which has no relevance to
| the job you're applying for. Contractors are particularly bad
| offenders here in my experience. No hiring manager will read
| through a 13 page resume for somebody with 6 years
| experience. As the TFA mentions, use that valuable space to
| highlight more recent, relevant experience and put your best
| foot forward. Everything else is just noise.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _Your resume should talk about results. Don 't say "Created a
| new CMS for the company". Say "Created a new CMS for the
| company in Python that resulted in an ~70% reduction in website
| update times, from 1 hour to 18 minutes."_
|
| You do exactly the thing the author discusses, and without
| addressing _any_ of the author 's (very valid, IMO) criticism
| of the problems with trying to do this.
| z3t4 wrote:
| > Your resume should talk about results
|
| I find this very difficult because I think all great results
| are due to team work, and a bit of luck. Like the software we
| specialized on happened to become a very fast growing market.
| And we captured a big chunk of that marked with only a team of
| 5 people, but we could probably not have done it without each
| other. All our work was very intertwined.
| vkou wrote:
| > I find this very difficult because I think all great
| results are due to team work, and a bit of luck.
|
| Correct, but North American hiring culture expects you to
| sell yourself, in the STAR format. Situation (Your job) ->
| Task (Your project) -> Action (Your role) -> Result (Numbers
| go up). So, if you want a job, you have to play the game.
|
| You obviously didn't move mountains all by yourself - you
| were an employee, not a solo self-contained business unit. If
| the hiring manager wants more details about what exactly your
| role was in moving the mountain, they can ask in the
| interview. Be honest, but don't sell yourself short.
| jwilber wrote:
| At first you say: "No one reads resumes"
|
| Then follow up with the age-old advice:
|
| Your resume should talk about results. Don't say "Created a new
| CMS for the company". Say "Created a new CMS for the company in
| Python that resulted in an ~70% reduction in website update
| times, from 1 hour to 18 minutes."
|
| My take: I'm actually not convinced anyone cares too much about
| those numbers in a resume. Great topics to probe in an
| interview, but not much of a signal on a resume. Reason being:
| they're easy to fluff and are almost always inflated bs.
|
| I do agree with all of your other points
| jedberg wrote:
| Further down I said "they skim for technologies and read
| around that". So in my example, I'd be skimming and see
| "Python" and then read around it.
|
| And also, as you said, the resume drives the interview, so
| they are good jumping off points and that's why they are
| there.
| cableshaft wrote:
| > Reason being: they're easy to fluff and are almost always
| inflated bs.
|
| Not only that, but how would engineers, for example, know how
| much money was saved or earned from blah feature or project
| unless that was explicitly shared with them? Time saved or
| usage can usually be measured by the engineer, but money is a
| lot trickier.
|
| Like I'm able to say a speech application I made was used in
| over a million calls, because I looked at the database and
| saw that many call records in there. And I'm able to say that
| I set up an one-click 30 minute devops process for deployment
| that was previously done over the span of 4-8 hours manually
| with multiple engineers onhand in case things went wrong (and
| they often did due to user error), because I was physically
| present during those manual processes and could directly
| compare and contrast the time difference.
|
| But I can't say it "saved the company X million dollars" or
| whatever because I wasn't in management and didn't have those
| figures shared with me.
|
| At least not honestly. I could make some bullshit up (I
| don't, but I could), like you said, and how are you going to
| verify it? Do you think a past employer will confirm or deny
| those figures if you call? You'd be lucky to get much more
| than confirmation that I worked for them and what dates at
| this point, thanks to all the liability around it. Also
| there's no guarantee that they know (or remember offhand)
| themselves, maybe they weren't on that project.
| jedberg wrote:
| Not all of them have to be money related.
|
| > Like I'm able to say a speech application I made was used
| in over a million calls, because I looked at the database
| and saw that many call records in there. And I'm able to
| say that I set up an one-click 30 minute devops process for
| deployment that was previously done over the span of 4-8
| hours manually with multiple engineers onhand in case
| things went wrong (and they often did due to user error),
| because I was physically present during those manual
| processes and could directly compare and contrast the time
| difference.
|
| These are both perfect for a resume. They are quantified
| and measurable and would be interesting to talk about in an
| interview. For example, I'd probably ask you what tools you
| used to set up your 30 minute deployment process and what
| they were using before and how you managed such a huge
| gain. I would ask you how you built your voice application
| to scale to a million calls.
|
| These are both great for a resume. They don't all have to
| involve money.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yeah, they are both bullet points on my resume, actually.
| But there are several jobs where I can't quite say this.
|
| Like I worked on several games that didn't do well in the
| market (for various non-technical reasons), so I know I
| can't brag about saving money or time or usage for the
| company, but I learned a lot of skills by being on those
| projects, so I benefitted personally in ways that could
| help the prospective company out.
|
| In fact I might have gotten more skills from those
| projects than that speech application, for example,
| despite that one being used a ton.
|
| So I don't really have anything better I can say there
| than "did this this and this on the project, lead X
| number of people, etc", which are basically the
| 'responsible for...' bullets that everyone advises
| against including on a resume.
|
| Also in case you're curious, I set up the process by
| using Octopus Deploy and several custom Powershell
| scripts after an audit of their existing processes and
| all the various information for all the servers, firewall
| settings, windows services, database snapshots and schema
| migrations, etc (there was a lot, each major system had
| like 40+ steps to it by the time they were done) etc.
|
| Before the engineering director of the department would
| lock himself in his office and execute .BAT scripts one
| by one from a terminal and copy files and other things
| manually, while everyone else chilled in the main office,
| waiting (usually around 4-5 people). If anything ever
| went wrong, and usually it did, it would take several
| engineers to investigate and help revert things if
| necessary.
|
| It was a mess. They knew it was a bad process, and had
| previously had another developer start investigating how
| to make things better using Octopus Deploy, and he gave
| up and quit the company and KT'd to me that it was
| impossible, no one was cooperating with him, he couldn't
| get the information needed, and well... I didn't have his
| experience and think he just didn't want to do it.
|
| I had everything working for several processes (and we
| set up more and more over time after we had things
| working) in about the same time as he spent accomplishing
| very little (I started with his setup), and I didn't know
| anything about Octopus Deploy and barely anything about
| DevOps beforehand.
| razzimatazz wrote:
| Great anecdote that, a real classic - previous
| experienced engineer couldn't get the cooperation and
| information he knew he needed to do it properly so barely
| started. Newer inexperienced engineer wasn't quite sure
| what was needed but built something to get several
| processes working and used that to convince everyone to
| provide the support to complete it.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I've closed $100k worth of consulting by opening with "My
| name is Zwayhowder and I've spent years making every
| cloud transformation mistake possible so you don't have
| to".
|
| Mistakes can be golden.
| john_fushi wrote:
| Let's say that, hypothetically, I lead a project for a
| very big customer that ended up being used to commit a
| (arguably) crime against humanity.
|
| Should I put this on resume and would it be in poor taste
| to quantify the results?
| blowski wrote:
| I'm not sure why you'd be willing to work on such a
| project but then be concerned about putting it on a CV.
| Assuming something I don't understand, you could talk
| about the impact it had on your employer without going
| into details of what it allowed them to do.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| You can come up with decent figures. And i think it is
| worth it not just for a resume but monthly lookbacks
|
| So multiple engineers on hand for 8 hours - let's say 5
| engineers. That's 5 person days. A deployment a month (cos
| anything that painful gets done _less often_ ) gives 60
| person days, at something like 2x daily salary of engineer
| (assume 500pd for easy maths) and you saved company 60,000
| usd a year whilst increasing reliablity and speed.
|
| Nice one
| keskival wrote:
| Getting the numbers in the first place is one challenge,
| but if you do metrics and measurement, you get hundreds of
| numbers and improvements, different each week. It's not
| like you're working on a single goal and target, and then
| wave goodbye when you're done. Who remembers all those
| numbers and improvements? What did they come down to
| cumulatively over the years? No one can know. But
| crucially, one also works in teams. There's no way one
| person can claim credit on one measured improvement unless
| it's something very trivial and isolated, a single-person
| project. There are many people saying that they read
| negative things between the lines about people who don't
| put quantifiable metrics to their CV items. I don't mind
| missing metrics, it's much better than having some fudged
| up bullshit metrics in there. The CV is there to establish
| trust between two people who don't know each other. Don't
| fill it up with stuff which shines with fabrication and
| misrepresentation.
| parkersweb wrote:
| I recently saw a CV with a very specific claim about
| developer efficiency improvements brought about by their
| introduction of a design system to the product.
|
| I was instantly put off - because while it might be true
| there's just way too many variables to claim a 68%
| improvement was down to your design system.
| mym1990 wrote:
| On top of results(or even rather than), it can be more useful
| to talk about scale. Often times the end result is not really
| in your control. One could say 'deployed a pilot project to a
| group of 10,000 users to see the effect of X on Y' or 'worked
| on a project that had a throughput of 50k transactions per
| hour', etc...
| delaynomore wrote:
| >Created a new CMS for the company in Python that resulted in
| an ~70% reduction in website update times, from 1 hour to 18
| minutes
|
| Personally, I don't put too much emphasis on these numbers
| because most of them are probably BS. Don't get me wrong, it's
| still probably in a candidate's best interest to quantify their
| accomplishments since it's recommended everywhere but don't
| over do it.
| jedberg wrote:
| They might be, but they are a good jumping off point for a
| discussion during an interview. But also if you say something
| interesting, it will pique my interest enough that I at least
| want to talk to you about it in an interview.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Was going to say this. You need your resume to cover both
| types of people who will be looking at it. HR/Managers for
| initial screening and then developers for the real
| interview. For a startup where I know the dev or founder
| are seeing my resume right away, I wouldn't include those
| types of quantifications. If I'm applying at ${bigcorp}
| then it helps get you through round 1.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| They are absolutely BS because 99% of programming is
| unquantifiable. There are too many variables. I added 5
| features this quarter and sales went up 5%. Is it because of
| the features, or better sales techniques, or dumb luck?
|
| "Redesigned the web pages and user satisfaction went up 10%"
| - but also you hired 5 more customer support agents and a
| backend engineer improved the slow pages by 30%.
| razzimatazz wrote:
| "Created a new CMS in python (Based on the old CMS) (With a
| team of 2 others and one guru who did the design but I
| wrote his code) resulting in 70% reduction in update times
| (after we ran it in a cluster with twice the resources but
| I never could understand clustering so guess it was my
| coding)" "And didn't have time to write tests, and that
| project was canned because it took too long actually"
| matwood wrote:
| As engineers we're measuring everything, all the time right?
| The point is 'wrote a web api' is worse than saying 'wrote a
| web api that handled 1M tx/hour' or some such. Even if the
| number in this case was exaggerated, it stands out and we
| have something to discuss in the interview phase.
|
| And if the software you write works with money at all, put
| the amounts in there. Moving around large amounts of money
| shows trust from your existing company, and attention to
| detail.
| legerdemain wrote:
| > As engineers we're measuring everything, all the time
| right?
|
| Is this mostly a joke? I've written plenty of APIs, but I
| have never load-tested them in isolation, never had to
| respond to underperforming latency or throughput metrics,
| or even face any feedback on software performance. In most
| cases, I don't know who uses the code I wrote, and no
| metrics from them ever make it back to me personally. For
| exactly 95.2% of what I've delivered, I couldn't tell you
| that I improved Foo by Bar units even if you held a gun to
| my head.
|
| This is after years of delivering LOB software to clients
| in banking, manufacturing, and oil & gas industries.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The value is as a hook in a conversation. e.g. if you have:
|
| - moved from Kafka to Flume
|
| - installed Kubernetes and Dockerized our code
|
| - binary serialized our data
|
| Then this is going to happen:
|
| 1. I will assume you don't care about the outcomes of what
| you do, only the task
|
| 2. I will assume you don't know how to communicate why
| something matters
|
| 3. I am going to have to pick at random and hope it's
| interesting
|
| On the other hand, if each one has the outcomes listed, not
| only is it clear that you know why, but perhaps more
| importantly, it is a conversation hook that I can use to
| enter the discussion. Well, why was it important that the
| size of the data be small? Couldn't you just zstd your JSON
| instead of binary serializing some processed version? etc.
| etc. and then you get to show off why and what that thing you
| made does and I get to enjoy that and we're both happy.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Get over yourself.
|
| How about we start with you not making 2 massive
| assumptions off of a sentence in a document that summarizes
| anywhere from 1-30+ years of someone's work.
|
| Then how about we move away from you thinking that
| interviews are for your entertainment and the interviewee
| is a circus animal where 'you get to enjoy that' as they
| 'show off'.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Isn't it preferable to you that I continue to be like
| this so overtly? Since you dislike how I am and you may
| well dislike working with me, you can instantly reject me
| and my org. This is good for both of us.
| friedman23 wrote:
| Most developers don't have agency to choose what they work
| on within a company. Expecting the developer to have any
| influence on the outcome of what they produce other than
| the implementation quality shows a lack of understanding in
| how actual software development works.
|
| And to be fair to you, almost all management two steps
| removed from actual coding does not understand how actual
| software development works. If you are interviewing a PM
| you should care about the outcome, for engineers focus on
| quality, timeliness and skill.
| Haegin wrote:
| > for engineers focus on quality, timeliness and skill.
|
| So put that in the resume. Say how you delivered it
| better, faster or cheaper than the next candidate in the
| pile would have.
| legerdemain wrote:
| This is also garbage.
|
| Does your company put you head to head with another
| developer to see who can develop the same feature the
| fastest?
|
| Or maybe you secretly keep tabs on all of your teammates
| and their delivery speed, so that you can calculate how
| much faster than your teammates you are at delivering and
| how many fewer bugs you ship?
| ebiester wrote:
| As a manager, that's half true. We have business needs,
| but I am hiring for the ability to think past "what is
| being asked of me" and into "What do we really need, and
| how can we deliver it?"
|
| That isn't rewarded in all jobs, mind you, but it is
| something to look for when you have a choice.
| friedman23 wrote:
| I've been a software engineer at a few highly regarded
| companies for a decade now, at none of them did I have
| the ability to make large product or design decisions as
| a software engineer. I was able to suggest things, I was
| able to call out issues in the design and I was able to
| propose ideas but I was never able to unilaterally make
| any decisions and a lot of the time any ideas I had were
| put on the backlog because the company was in focus mode
| on one specific goal (and I'm not criticizing this idea
| of having focus).
|
| So my point is, if leadership and product are bad and ask
| engineers to produce turds. The engineers don't really
| have control over the fact that they are producing turds
| but they have control over the quality, how buggy, and
| the shinyness of the turds.
| razzimatazz wrote:
| Key point: quantify the shinyness of the turds, so that
| HR screen likes the look of the CV, and be prepared to
| talk about turd shinyness and why it would matter.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| im my experience this sort of stuff grabs the attention of HR
| people/recruiters doing phone screens, but not actual
| engineering managers.
| ptrhvns wrote:
| What failure modes, biases, or false negatives does this method
| suffer from?
| jedberg wrote:
| I'm not saying this is a method, I'm saying this is reality.
| From my experience, this is how most hiring managers read
| resumes.
|
| It has many biases and false negatives. But the point is that
| you should know this going in and adapt accordingly.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > If you do put a "skills cloud" on it, be ready to talk about
| them all.
|
| Go a step further.
|
| Only put items in your "skills" cloud that WANT to be asked
| about and can deep dive. These skills should be things you hope
| the interviewer will ask you about.
|
| If you can spend the whole interview talking about points in
| your skills cloud then it should be a slam dunk.
| revskill wrote:
| Wait, a ML expert should somehow have a AI bot to automate resume
| screening for her ? So what did really she teach at all ?
| TrackerFF wrote:
| If we assume that
|
| S = Passing the software screening stage
|
| A = Concise and short CV, made to be read by humans.
|
| B = Bloated and keyword-riddled CV, made to be read by machines.
|
| I = successfully landing an interview
|
| To me, it seems that P(I | A) > P(I | A). That is, if a human
| reads CV "A", you have a greater probability of landing an
| interview, than using CV "B".
|
| But then, P(S | B) > P(S | A), because the screening software can
| filter out candidates that lack the correct keywords, etc. And in
| order to get to the interview stage, you need to pass the initial
| screening stage. You could have the best CV in the world, but if
| its rejected at step 0, then that doesn't help you. So it seems
| to me that its better to maximize your CV for S. This all of
| course assumed that there's no alternative ways around /
| bypassing the screening stage.
|
| I think the fundamental problem is that once a company crosse a
| certain threshold on the number of applicants, using humans goes
| out the window for the screening stage.
|
| 150 for one person seems tough, but what if the company gets
| 15000 applicants a month? And most of these are junk anyway?
| snozolli wrote:
| _For example, if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook
| and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include
| them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have
| no other competitive advantage._
|
| What an insane take. Different teams use different tools, and a
| team may or may not have time to bring someone up to speed on a
| tool they haven't used.
|
| Listing git isn't a statement that it's your "competitive
| advantage". It's simply stating that you have experience with it.
| tester756 wrote:
| >Metrics that we'd love to see
|
| ehh, metrics oriented CVs feel like bullshitting
|
| >If you've been working for 2+ years, remove your GPA and
| coursework. I care more about your work experience.
|
| I do believe in this too, yet I've been told a few times that in
| some countries or corpos people tend to care about this and I do
| wonder whether I should have "targeted CVs"
| dysoco wrote:
| > if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git
| your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in
| your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other
| competitive advantage
|
| I get this, yet, at the same time, I've been asked by recruiters
| if I was comfortable working with "git flow with Gitlab and Jira"
| since I did not name any of those in my Resume.
|
| I wonder if I've ever been filtered at first instance for small
| annoyances like this, it's hard to build a good resume when
| everyone is looking for something different so I would appreciate
| if things like adding keywords would not count as a deterrent.
| plugin-baby wrote:
| > I've been asked by recruiters if I was comfortable working
| with "...Jira"
|
| Great question - I might start asking this, and shitcanning
| anyone who claims to be both experienced and comfortable with
| the idea of working with Jira.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| Now I thinking how I can put that I've been the unofficial git
| guru in several jobs in the resume without sounding like I'm
| just playing the keyword game.
|
| Maybe under "Skills" I'll add something like "git is my bitch
| and I eat merges and shit rebases". Or is it too formal? XD
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| I honestly don't like the tone of how our industry treat us. They
| are trying to find skilled workers to help companies or finding
| beggars who please them the most?
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > These articles claim that at large companies that receive an
| influx of resumes, recruiters set rules to surface resumes that
| contain certain keywords... That is a bad strategy for applying
| at startups like ours. We're not looking for keywords. We look
| for demonstrated expertise. Here are a couple of ways to
| demonstrate your expertise.
|
| I'm always a bit surprised when startups, whose leadership
| doesn't even seem to understand the dominant hiring patterns for
| large, mainstream corporations, expect candidates to cater
| specifically to them.
|
| If you're trying to get me to work for an "AI/ML platform"
| startup in this market right now, you'd better spend more time
| convincing me that you'll still exist in 2 years than telling me
| how I can tweak my resume for this specific company.
|
| Honestly, a startup looking to hire founding positions should
| probably be searching their own networks rather than screening
| hundreds of resumes a month.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Startups and inflated ego go hand in hand.
| ye-olde-sysrq wrote:
| I think the well is really poisoned here. Resumes either hardly
| matter, or are just for SEO.
|
| - If you're shooting resumes off into the void of companies
| "apply now!" pages, it's HIGHLY unusual for them to be looked at
| by a human. And when they are, they'll probably be considering
| more data points (looking at your LinkedIn and GitHub). So here
| it's best to make them "machine readable, human-tolerable".
|
| - If you're handing out resumes at an event, you are going to
| want to make it terse and punchy. Sell your impact and skills. I
| think this is the least degenerate form of resume. Also, I've
| never done this outside of my career fair in college, where your
| resume is basically just your GPA and expected graduation year.
|
| - If you're being referred, your resume is mostly for talking
| points when you're chatting with someone. So making it like a
| powerpoint is best for this.
|
| Plus, for the first one, most of the time you just get ghosted.
| So forget overly tailoring your resume to the company, unless
| it's one you really really want into. In which case you're
| probably better off poking around and trying to either find a
| recruiter or find a referral even if it's just a "I talked to
| this person once and they didn't punch me in the face at all, you
| should interview them" referral.
|
| I'm honestly kind of passionate about resumes, in theory? "Here
| is a 1-pager of my professional career" is an interesting
| problem. Unfortunately, that's typically not the problem you
| actually need to solve when you're sitting down at your doc
| titled "Resume".
| zwieback wrote:
| Not sure about the first one. I work for a big company and when
| we hire we definitely human-read lots of resumes, which isn't
| to say that machine readable is not a plus. I agree that
| tailoring may not be worth it.
|
| I'm surprised nobody mentions hobbies etc. Maybe I'm just an
| old fart but I like to get an idea of the person as well.
| ye-olde-sysrq wrote:
| The main problem of hobbies is that I typically don't think
| they matter enough to deserve space on the single page of
| your resume. I'm not even a decade into my career and I'm
| already considering cutting my college stuff down to "COLLEGE
| NAME YEARS ATTENDED DEGREE GPA HONORS" in a single crammed
| line. I think I'd put down my in-major GPA and emphasis
| courses before I'd put down that I like video games and my
| cats (.....which let's be real, you can probably just assume
| is in the hobbies for software engineers).
| pertique wrote:
| It'd depend on the field (and region), I imagine, but after
| the first job or two I feel like all that matters with
| respect to schooling is that you went. Five or ten years
| into a career I'd be surprised if coursework that hadn't
| been used on the job was relevant, and GPA wouldn't even be
| considered.
|
| Hobbies are probably not that useful either, but I could
| see them catching a hiring manager's eye. Coursework
| probably won't have the same effect, although I suppose it
| could help you get through ATS.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not that I think anyone's really looked at my resume for
| over 20 years (jobs through network), but I think the
| idea of a hobbies line is that it can be a conversation
| ice-breaker. That said, I don't think I have one on mine.
| If theey Google me they'll turn up more than enough to
| talk about.
| TheCleric wrote:
| As a hiring manager, your college GPA doesn't even factor
| into the equation.
| ye-olde-sysrq wrote:
| It varies significantly, as these things do. My first job
| out of college ~didn't accept people with below a 3.8, so
| they'd explicitly ask if you left it off (or worse, would
| assume it was <3.8 if you didn't bother to add it).
| chriskanan wrote:
| At least when I was a hiring manager at an AI start-up, I
| looked at just about every resume submitted, and I thought the
| advice was pretty spot-on for what I was looking for. That
| said, I've never worked at a very large tech company, so I
| could believe that humans aren't reviewing them at those
| institutions.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > - If you're shooting resumes off into the void of companies
| "apply now!" pages, it's HIGHLY unusual for them to be looked
| at by a human. And when they are, they'll probably be
| considering more data points (looking at your LinkedIn and
| GitHub). So here it's best to make them "machine readable,
| human-tolerable".
|
| I wish companies would just keep it real and admit this, and
| instead of asking for a resume, specifically ask for a simple
| text or XML file with a machine-readable list of keywords.
| Because, let's be honest: That's all the machinery at the top
| of their funnel does. Once you get past the keyword filter,
| they can ask you to craft a real resume for them. It would cut
| down on everyone's work: the candidate's and the hiring
| company's.
|
| I'm firing off resumes to hundreds, maybe a thousand companies
| anyway. It would be nice to have a standard, structured format
| for communicating with their AI screening machinery, that I
| could use for all of them.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| I don't know how I feel about this post. On one hand, if I were
| running a company, I would want a hiring process similar to this.
|
| On the other hand, the company I work for has draconian
| publishing policies. I can't have a technical blog, can't have
| GitHub repos of hobby projects I work on my own time, can't write
| about any of the work I do on my resume. If I want to contribute
| to other repos, I need an approval for legal which takes forever
| and if you're lucky enough to get it, you have to write "not a
| contribution" in the submission. When asked about what to write
| in the resume, they say to copy the job posting (or parts of it)
| I was initially hired for.
|
| Aside from these crazy policies, I love working at my current
| workplace but sometimes I wonder if I'm hurting my future by
| staying on and letting my resume for these years spin into a
| black hole.
| bvirb wrote:
| Maybe I missed it in the article but it looks to me like
| they're hiring more junior candidates. For more experienced
| candidates (which it sounds like you are) I think years of
| experience doing similar things in a similar field/organization
| would be the most likely thing to lead to a phone call.
| smallerfish wrote:
| One very small tip - don't overdo it in selling your
| accomplishments. I see surprisingly many resumes with the words
| "vast experience", and they're usually obvious bullshit.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| OTOH I've got a close-ish relative who's had a _very_
| successful career in HR in multiple large orgs and now does
| some resume consulting on the side, and she always re-writes
| things way beyond what I 'm comfortable actually claiming and
| insists that's for-sure the right thing to do when applying to
| most bigcos--just part of playing the game, and if you don't
| play, you can't win.
|
| You'll tell her you did X and she'll be like "well it sounds to
| me like that was Y, so write that down" and you're like
| "well... kind of? But not really" and she's like "yes, it's Y,
| you're cutting yourself off at the kneecaps if you don't put
| Y". Where Y is usually something to do with leading or managing
| or "architecting" something, and it's maybe _technically_ true
| but I 'd never have characterized it that way and would be
| struggle to talk about it as if it were that.
| smallerfish wrote:
| That may be fine for getting past recruiters, but if you get
| to competent tech interviewers who decide to ask you about
| technical things you are "expert" in, and you flounder, then
| your credibility is shot.
| memling wrote:
| I've had the luxury, perhaps outside of the first job, of looking
| for work while I have work. This makes it a bit easier to be
| targeted in my approach, so it might not work for everyone. But I
| use a resume to apply for a job, so every job gets a different
| resume.
|
| At the top of every resume is a job description: a table that
| lists the company needs and my skills with respect to the
| requirements--even if I don't have any. Typically it's one page
| for a hiring manager to compare against the JD and decide whether
| she wants to look at the canned bullets of my work experience.
|
| My current and prior jobs had a formal application process post
| offer: I did not go through an online application process or
| submit a resume to an electronic system until after we'd gone
| through interviews, etc.
|
| If I find a place I want to work, I make some effort to find out
| who the hiring manager is for a given position. If I can find an
| email address, I'll reach out; if not, I look for a mailing
| address. If I'm really motivated, I'll try to find a phone
| number.
|
| My experience with this approach has generally been positive: it
| helps identify good employers, makes, I think, a good impression,
| and ensures that we don't waste each others' time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I do care about metrics. I especially appreciate metrics that
| are presented with two components: > How they can be tied to
| business objectives. > Your contribution in achieving that
| metric.
|
| I think this one is often tough for junior ICs and even senior
| ICs in big companies. It's still tough for me after decades. A
| lot of us are far down on the totem pole, 8 managers away from
| anyone who knows anything about business objectives. If your job
| is to turn protobufs from one API into json on the other API,
| it's going to be difficult to turn this into a description of
| adding business value.
|
| Projects in tech companies are gigantic. "Impact" is always super
| hard to quantify. Down at the bottom of the totem pole, you're
| working on a tiny 0.01% piece of the product. That's my impact?!
| Not very impressive. Higher up on in management, or off to the
| side in product management / project management, you're not
| really physically doing any of the actual product, but are making
| architectural decisions, serving as tech lead, herding cats,
| submitting status reports and so on. How do you quantify that?
| Some people just punt and focus on the product's performance: say
| [PRODUCT] earned the company [$X] and won [Y] awards. But you're
| still not quantifying your own impact. I think for the last 10
| years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my
| impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of
| gargantuan projects.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| I think business process perf profiling is a thing but micro
| managing seems to be their debugging. It's going to be nice if
| they can profile any part of process without messing with us
| (hey how's going?)
| pwm wrote:
| > I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I
| can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they
| were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.
|
| Honestly, this would make me depressed rather quickly. I can't
| imagine not knowing/experiencing my impact via the work I do.
| Maybe it is one of the personality differences between people
| choosing to work for startups/scaleups vs. big tech (no
| judgement either direction, just my conjecture).
| malwrar wrote:
| It's a trade-off. I don't get to implement the cool ideas I
| feel might greatly help my current employer, but their
| expectations of me are generally low and I get paid enough
| that I can retire a little over 40. Works for me, its not
| like I'd actually get paid more if I did something cool
| anyways. That energy is better spent on my own projects.
|
| I've generally noticed attaboys and prestige aren't really
| personally fulfilling anyways, no one cares and my work will
| probably be irrelevant in a year or two regardless. A bit
| nihilists, but it helps one detach after a long day and deal
| with the occasional failure.
| reset2023 wrote:
| Absolute bs. It's all about connections, the whole resume thing
| is bs. People in high positions are there because someone got
| them in. You need to be top 5% smart to make it there, and with
| SO MUCH effort and sacrifice to to achieve the same. Capitalism
| rewards entrepreneurship.
| stevev wrote:
| A resume should only be considered a template or an overview of
| the person's experience and skills.
|
| Anyone can put keywords, metrics and effective processes.
|
| I've never found a comp sci undergrad to have any trouble
| learning. Lack of passion, yes but this doesn't translate to poor
| work performance.
|
| Ultimately it boils down to how well the individual will work
| with the team and management. It's more of a personality
| question.
|
| A great resume and the person could be a dick despite being
| technically able.
| karaterobot wrote:
| If you are applying to work at this company, this is probably
| good advice. If you're applying to work at most companies, ignore
| this advice. Everything he writes here makes sense, which is why
| you know that in our nonsensical industry, it is a waste of your
| time to put it into practice.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's how things work at small companies or early stage startups
| that don't have non-technical layers of bureaucracy reading
| your resume.
| ThaDood wrote:
| Any advice you would give for brushing up a resume? I'm not a
| dev but work in IT and do a lot of admin work, networking and a
| lot of security work. I am having a super hard time fitting all
| of the skills and tools I use on a one page resume. I had
| considered using like a GitHub Pages resume but haven't had a
| solid reason to do so.
| looping8 wrote:
| It's remarkable that, for an industry that prides itself on
| having individualist approaches and everyone doing things their
| own way, everyone somehow also keeps trying to give universally
| true advice.
|
| That said, the title is, explicitly, "What WE Look for in a
| Resume". The intro makes it clear this is about them and them
| only and is more of a transparency report, an encouragement for
| others to be more open too. So I wouldn't blame this particular
| post of trying to be too general.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I don't agree with a lot of the things1, but by and large, it's
| good advice to apply for us as well. Not sure what exactly the
| "nonsensical" things are that you say we need to waste time on
| to put into practice instead.
|
| 1 like those "good metrics" examples such as having picked a
| store location using <magic> and the location worked out
| doesn't mean as much as the "bad metric" example of how many
| code reviews you've done (tells me you've seen a lot of code
| and collaborated, even if "you could have done it in just one
| year" as the post argues)
| pyb wrote:
| I think "he"'s actually a "she".
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Honestly, having spent half of my career at small companies and
| occasionally screening resumes... I'd say this is great advice
| for joining a small company.
|
| More importantly, if you're directly applying to a role, or
| you're applying through a recruiter, it's useful advice.
|
| I generally follow these practices, too, and I'm quite happy
| where I've landed.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I worked at 7 small companies total. All CVs are read. There
| may be some screening if recruitment agencies are used. Which
| is sad.
|
| Aside: if using an agency you might need a CV for them and
| then when you talk about the job switch to the role-facing
| CV. I got burned by this in the past presenting a microsoft
| heavy story to a non microsoft using company they didn't want
| to talk.
| [deleted]
| rcurry wrote:
| You folks are probably going to skewer me for this, but here
| goes:
|
| I've been a hiring manager for many years and hired a lot of
| people.
|
| It starts with reviewing resumes just to see if someone has a few
| years of experience in similar technologies as what we are
| working with.
|
| If it looks good, I just pick up the phone and spend half an hour
| or so shooting the shit - an intelligent person will realize this
| is an opportunity to talk about their experience and they'll do
| that.
|
| If that goes well, they come in for a face to face chat with me
| and maybe one or two of our developers, totally free form and
| absolutely no coding challenges or nothing.
|
| If they seem like they have their shit together, we hire them.
|
| I'd say I have about a 90% success rate with this model. Yea,
| sometimes you get a good bullshitter and it doesn't work out, but
| that's easily remedied...
|
| I have a lot of faith in casual conversational interviews and
| don't worry about grilling people on whiteboards. I just go with
| my gut and that's it.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Anyone who can bullshit so well they can survive this really
| ought to be in sales or something. They'd make way more money
| with their evidently _incredibly good_ social skills, working
| in a field where it 's directly applicable.
|
| I'm convinced most of the "bullshitters" people "catch" with
| programming puzzles, who "can't even write a for loop" are just
| choking under interview pressure, _or_ are for-real
| bullshitters but never would have made it through the process
| you describe anyway, because they 're not _that_ good at
| bullshitting.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a great write-up!
|
| I'm not sure that it's representative of the industry, as a
| whole, but it's excellent.
|
| For myself, I read every resume that I got; sometimes, not
| completely. If I saw that it wasn't a fit, early on, I'd abort
| the process.
|
| But, for the most part, I enjoyed long, complete resumes, and
| would have _killed_ for things like GH repos (they weren 't
| really a thing, when I was a hiring manager). I tended to look
| for "orthogonal thinking," and "diamonds in the rough." Very few
| folks would come in the door, with the skills we needed, so I
| expected to invest a lot of training.
| waterfirezero wrote:
| This is just for this specific company or this person alone.
| Usually, they or HR only spend around 15-20 secs on each resume
| to decide. Github or others don't matter
| andrew_ wrote:
| > Show how you acquired and use that skill in your job
|
| This can be difficult to do especially as the years of experience
| add up. I have 20, and can only put so much on 1-2 pages. I
| typically limit short story telling to the most recent gig.
|
| > Share your expertise on public channels such as: StackOverflow
| answers, open source contributions, papers, blog posts
|
| I share stints and short responsibilities for the open source
| work/projects I'm involves in. Again, towards a reasonably-sized
| resume, listing any more than that could easily bump my resume to
| 3+ pages.
|
| > Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year.
|
| Terrible metric. Perhaps this wasn't well-written. _Consistent_
| contribution is more important than vanity metrics like daily
| contribution. And even then, it doesn 't represent what someone
| has been up to. A month's worth of work can be squashed into a
| single commit that is pushed. Not to mention this can be easily
| faked. This reflects poorly on the person writing this as a form
| of measure.
|
| > Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck
| around.
|
| Bad signal. Startups are fickle, and many don't last more than a
| few years. I've joined several that shut down a year or so after
| I started. And I get asked about it all the time during
| interviews.
|
| > I'm a bit hesitant when I see candidates who change jobs too
| frequently, e.g. 5 different companies in 5 years. I understand
| that not all jobs work out, so it's okay, sometimes necessary, to
| move on. However, consistent job jumping can imply that you get
| bored or give up easily. A year at a job is hardly enough to get
| deep into a problem space and make significant contributions.
|
| I don't think the author fully understands the startup ecosystem,
| or hasn't considered the range of nuance that exists.
|
| > We look for people who can bring a unique perspective to the
| table.
|
| I like this, but they don't mention critical thinking, which goes
| hand in hand.
|
| > 5. We care about impact, not meaningless metrics
|
| Odd assertion, since they clearly care about meaningless metrics
| like github contribution frequency.
|
| > If you're applying to a small startup, say, of less than 20
| people, spend some time researching who works at that startup and
| email them directly.
|
| Careful here. This can quickly get you blocked if you're pasting
| the same message to multiple people. A better practice is to
| choose one person and reach out, wait, and try again. But write
| the message organically, don't just copy and paste.
|
| > Don't include a link to your GitHub link if it's empty.
|
| False. Include it _with context_. e.g. if contributions are
| hidden by a private project that you 've been involved in. State
| why it may be sparse. A long-standing github account is a good
| signal.
|
| Another point of concern: The word "references" appears only
| once, at the top. References are under utilized, and I include a
| line at the end of my resume that states references are available
| upon request. As I don't provide them by default so their contact
| info cannot be farmed.
|
| Based on this article, I personally wouldn't bother submitting an
| application to this company.
| kilgnad wrote:
| >We read every resume
|
| The attitude that this post conveys is that the advice she
| presents is universal. No. It's just her company and for her
| circumstance only. If you tailor your resume to fit her advice
| you'd be tailoring it for her company.
|
| Many startups don't read resumes. For my company the resume is
| screened for buzz words by a recruiter. The candidate is fed into
| the interview pipeline before ANY interviewer reads it. I read
| the resume 10 minutes before the interview starts. My company IS
| a startup, her advice Does not Apply to My company.
| aqme28 wrote:
| > To get anything done, you need to start it.
|
| This is... not true? Also not necessarily something to even
| select for in a corporate environment (even if you want to tell
| yourself that it is).
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| What im seeking in a company, i can datamine in a day from linked
| in. Your tech department churns through people? Dying from tech
| debt. People vannish from the job market after quitting you?
| Toxic culture and burnout stake.
|
| Why cant a company be expected to put in similar effort to
| background crawling? Why cant there recruiters be not expected to
| properly vet the jobs they contact me with? Why is the effort
| expected so low, from those who have the biggest ressource pool?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I would actually not apply to this company.
|
| All of the advice sounds great, but not at all practical for some
| of the best engineers in I've met.
|
| >Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year,
|
| well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has
| private git repos
|
| > open source contributions, or stackoverflow answers
|
| Well too bad that I don't want to work opensource or use stack
| overflow (I don't for work because we have our own internal one
| for years)
|
| > show measurable impact
|
| Well too bad, whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000
| employee company is probably not going to be enough for you.
|
| How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being
| done with it, instead of expecting me to cure cancer for a job
| position that has me change colors of a button every few days?
|
| Edit: to be clear, I do agree with some of the things said like
| "look for a reason to say yes". This is generally good advice
| outside of hiring. It brings new opportunities and when it goes
| wrong, lessons.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I would love to work on a company that allows time to
| contribute to opensource or answering questions on SO. 15 hours
| a day sounds like modern slavery.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| No one really knows how to hire so they chuck in random filters
| that sound good.
|
| That said I get the impression overall that the OP preponders
| each CV and tries to evaluate it on its merits. Small companies
| can't afford to turn good people away because of silly reasons
| like you haven't produced code on an open license and uploaded
| it to Azure.
|
| Impact is about understanding the impact. Which talks to then
| getting jobs where you can write a good story about them after.
| Which you might do. I don't. I optimise for joy and teamwork so
| I take the hit in bragging rights. However there is usually a
| story to tell of how you helped the company be better.
|
| All this said I am curious if the "no cv" approach of fly.io
| will catch on. They have an interesting sounding application
| process.
| irrational wrote:
| > well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that
| has private git repos
|
| Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have
| written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of
| thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| If you want to play the game:
| https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history
| kube-system wrote:
| If I am considering a candidate enough to look at their
| GitHub, I will actually look at the content.
|
| If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant
| work, I'd disqualify them for being dishonest. They'd be
| 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Not if it's in a private repo... you won't be looking at
| anything. Are you going to outright reject a candidate
| because you can't see contributions to their current
| employers private org/repo? I believe this is the point
| the poster is trying to drive home. You can't see their
| contributions because they're private.
| lolinder wrote:
| If it's in a private repo, there's no point. Your GitHub
| stats exclude private repos when viewed by anyone besides
| you.
| fsociety wrote:
| You can set it so it shows contribution stats from
| private repos. Also companies with healthy attitudes to
| devs can allow their enterprise GitHub instance to
| transfer contribution stats to dev's personal GitHub
| accounts.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| ^this
| kube-system wrote:
| If you commit only to private repos then you shouldn't be
| linking to your GitHub, as this article also says.
|
| Resumes are for communication. Communicate! Tell the
| reader what you do, and demonstrate it as much as you
| can. Everyone knows that private repos are a thing,
| that's okay. This can be articulated.
| Arainach wrote:
| My Github has projects I have worked on in the past. Most
| of them are stable and don't need anything more than a
| few npm dependency updates a year. Linking to it to see
| these projects is useful to the kind of company that
| wants to see some small things I've built. If fake
| contributions to a private repo will tick a box
| somewhere, so be it.
| kube-system wrote:
| > If fake contributions to a private repo will tick a box
| somewhere, so be it.
|
| In what scenario does it? I am suggesting that such a
| scenario does not exist.
|
| There are three types of people who might read your
| resume:
|
| * people who are technical and will look at your code.
| (Likely, the author is in this camp)
|
| * people who are technical and don't have the time to
| click on your GitHub link
|
| * people who don't know what a commit is
| Arainach wrote:
| The scenario is the author of this blogpost, who
| apparently wants to see that I'm dedicated enough to
| write code every day. I am, but it's for my employer, not
| the public. I'm not going to go home and waste even more
| hours of my life in front of a keyboard to prove that I'm
| doing something I already am.
| kube-system wrote:
| I am sure the author is aware that not all software is
| public. I think the authors point is that you should find
| the best way to demonstrate your dedication, not that you
| have to do it in any one particular way.
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| I've never linked to my GitHub, yet it sometimes still
| comes up in interviews.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The article says verbatim "Don't include a link to your
| GitHub link if it's empty." yet you're giving 1000x (your
| words) credence to an empty profile versus someone
| working privately. Private contributions show up on the
| graph, you just can't see the content of the commit. So
| it's not empty and to your point it can be articulated.
| Sounds like you just want to see some examples of work,
| just ask for that, but that's not a resume.
| [deleted]
| kube-system wrote:
| "A commit graph and nothing else" is approximately
| equivalent to empty as far as I am concerned. If I
| clicked such a link on a resume, I'd say "wtf am I
| supposed to be looking at here?" If your repos are
| private, just tell me they're private.
|
| It is well known that many engineers can't share their
| work. It isn't a requirement. But if you do share your
| GitHub, make sure it adds value to your resume and
| doesn't detract from it.
| vsareto wrote:
| >doesn't detract from it
|
| I don't know if that's truly obvious from a candidate's
| POV, especially if they don't know the person reviewing
| their stuff
| version_five wrote:
| I can see valuing _some_ clearly passion driven extracurricular
| activity. Like if someone is a top SO contributor, that 's
| cool. Or if they're part of a big open source project. Or also
| if they volunteer at a soup kitchen or charity. Stuff like that
| may be worth including on your cv to show what your interests
| are. I wouldn't weight it much differently than anything on the
| hobbies section, but it's still cool.
|
| Personally I'd be wary of hiring someone who had done just the
| right amount of all this stuff, and who appeared to be
| soulessly gaming metrics instead of actually being interested
| in stuff. Otoh, there are jobs and work environments that fit
| well for that kind of person, and screenings that optimize to
| make sure that's what they get. It's just as important for
| people that aren't that way to not get accidentally stuck in
| such an environment. Like a "17 pieces of flare is only the
| minimum" kind of vibe
| chriskanan wrote:
| I think the advice she has is mostly pretty spot-on for recent
| graduates looking for ML Engineer jobs, and I think her advice
| is consistent with what I was mostly looking for when I was a
| hiring manager for non-senior roles.
|
| That said, I agree that the advice is much less helpful for
| anyone who has significant industry experience as an ML
| engineer.
| johncessna wrote:
| And that's fine. I think there's confusion that every SWE can
| work at every company. Every place has bias in their hiring.
| It's literally the point of screening candidates. This place
| chooses to bias against folks who just want to code at work and
| want to use a traditional resume. Makes sense when every hire
| can make or break your company and you don't have the resources
| to put someone through a multi-month boot camp before letting
| them touch the code base.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| When every hire can make or break your company, then you are
| looking at this from a very wrong perspective. In that case
| you should be hiring in network, candidates you know, or are
| vetted by people you trust. Or hire people on contract and
| convert them to full time. Or work with trusted vendors in
| the field who can source great candidates.
|
| Not every SWE can work at every company, that is pretty much
| true. But creating arbitrary "signals" to figure out who will
| be a great fit will doom your company with a very specific
| type of people, which is not what you want when every
| candidate can make or break your company.
| chipsgithub wrote:
| >Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year,
|
| But what you quoted is _not_ what she wrote. What she wrote was
| Some signals of persistence that I've seen: * Daily
| contribution to GitHub for one whole year. * Being good
| at anything that requires consistent effort, e.g. a
| Kaggle master, a chess master, a professional athlete, etc.
| * Having previously joined another early startup before and
| stuck around.
|
| I get that the idea here is to look for positive signal but for
| someone talking about _daily_ github contributions her own
| https://github.com/chiphuyen?tab=repositories falls a bit
| short. Not a good look.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Startups tend to be shockingly ignorant of the culture at
| larger companies (or non-startups in general), and personally I
| find it a bit of a red flag when it seems like nobody at a
| startup has worked for a real business before. It's great to
| have fresh takes, but there should be a few people on the team
| who also know how normal companies operate.
|
| I remember interviewing for a startup that sounded pretty
| promising. The interview was going well and then I was asked
| for a presentation. I told them that I was more than happy to
| present on personal projects (of which I had plenty) but was
| not comfortable sharing details of work related projects while
| not explicitly representing that company.
|
| They basically said "too bad" and where shocked that I
| cancelled the rest of the interview. I've worked at plenty of a
| companies in the past where being _willing_ to share other
| companies ' internal work would be the red flag, and turning
| down such a request would be seen as a good sign.
|
| > I would actually not apply to this company.
|
| Sadly that was the same impression I've had, and this is from
| someone who has been following the author's writing for awhile.
| Especially in the current economic environment.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of companies are very uptight about external
| presentations without explicit approval. This is mostly about
| conferences and the the like but a private presentation to a
| competitor might well be looked at even less favorably.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Don't worry, pretty clear from this comment you'd be a terrible
| match for an early stage startup.
| geodel wrote:
| Totally agree. This all sounds like a impressive sounding
| bullshit.
| cosentiyes wrote:
| To be fair, they explicitly say that github/so/etc is optional:
|
| We understand that not everyone has time to contribute to
| public discourse, so #2 is optional.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Making something optional on an application is a waste of
| everyone's time.
|
| If it is optional, and it doesn't have bearing on the
| application process, then don't ask me to include it.
|
| If it is optional, but it does have bearing on the
| application process, then I assume that I'm not a good fit
| for you.
|
| If it is optional, and it _officially_ doesn 't have bearing,
| your screeners and interviewers may still have an internal
| bias that favors applications which "go the extra step" to do
| the optional work. Even if they don't, I'm going to assume
| that they do and that we're all wasting everyone's time in
| asking me to apply.
| renewiltord wrote:
| How interesting. The first two assertions would imply that
| you model candidate fit as a pure product of the dimensions
| you have. i.e. if any of the dimensions are absent then the
| candidate isn't a fit.
|
| Well, the difference is that my candidate fit model is not
| a pure product. It has some sums in it. Your teammates at
| my org will be people like that.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| This. Companies just like to make candidates go that extra
| mile to finally not even look at their resume. Job listings
| where they already are interviewing candidates or have
| hired one are still up. Imagine how much time is wasted
| with frivolous optional questions.
| cosentiyes wrote:
| They're literally flagging one "sanctioned" way to provide
| signal as an example in a resume advice post--how is that a
| waste of time? This lets people infer what other types of
| "optional" content might provide signal: publications, blog
| posts, etc. Transparency in the application process is
| fantastic and it's wild to me that people are upset about a
| company posting some ways that applicants can make
| themselves stand out. This is order of magnitudes better
| than VC, finance, etc.
| brookst wrote:
| Disagree. There can be multiple optional things, where
| nobody is expected to have all of them, but everybody
| should have some of them.
|
| It's a way to expand the pool. Startups especially need a
| lot of diversity of skills, so rather than specifying the
| one ideal set of skills/experiences, it's better to be open
| to a wider range and then use what you've gained from
| _this_ hire to inform what you need in the next.
|
| Rigid checkbox criteria makes sense in dinosaur companies,
| but not small ones.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| My interpretation of "optional" is _note: if someone else
| checks the box, you are doomed_.
| cosentiyes wrote:
| Slightly disagree, they're just providing one potential way
| to signal experience. I'm sure there are other ways not
| listed (firth author publications from tier 1 conferences
| or journals) that are more valuable. I think you're right
| that this could be used as a tie-breaker, all other things
| being equal.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Yeah, those bullets are really low point. A lot of off-
| guide in consideration going on (tbh, lots of bullshit)
| [deleted]
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder sales people trying to sell vs applicants
| chasing interview, whose job is more soul-crushing.
| azangru wrote:
| > How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and
| being done with it
|
| Which would bring us to another favorite Hacker News topic,
| i.e. venting about how tech interviews are terrible, and why
| don't interviewers just look at the candidate's resume and
| projects instead :-)
| brookst wrote:
| I don't think they were suggesting you have to do all of those
| things, but rather that those things are examples of resume
| content that demonstrates what they're looking for.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Also, I've heard a lot of people asking for github, so I made
| one. Recruiters all say "oh very nice" and no one reads a line.
| ever.
| throwaway55780 wrote:
| It's also worth noting that many companies have policies
| against open-source contributions, the use of public forums
| (like stackoverflow), and so forth. This is obviously more
| common in big tech as opposed to startups. I know employees in
| those corps that love coding and do that stuff in their spare
| time - but because of the policies they do it under a screen
| name and certainly don't mention it in their resumes, etc.
|
| In some of those corps there actually is a "dont ask dont tell"
| kind of policy around personal projects/blog posts/oss
| contributions/etc. as the company forbids them unless you have
| special approval. However on the flip side managers know that
| the people with those projects and experiences often have a
| stronger drive than those simply treating coding as a 9-5 job.
|
| I also know of cases where the interviewers were very impressed
| by the candidate's Github repo/oss contributions but stated
| that the candidate would have to stop working on that stuff
| after being hired. I know people who upon graduation seperated
| their projects for this purpose, continuing some under a screen
| name and having other less important ones for resume purpose
| knowing that they may not be able to continue working on them
| under that name in the future.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Worth noting, yes. But it's also not unreasonable to prefer
| candidates that avoid such environments.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I actually did not know that was a thing, and I've been
| working in startups for over a decade now. I've never worked
| in big tech though, so maybe it's common there. If a company
| told me I couldn't work on side projects without approval,
| I'd tell them to fuck off.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I'd tell them to fuck off.
|
| I just tell them "this is something I do" and if that's a
| problem "I'm not giving that up". Leave it to them to end
| the interview, no need to get an attitude.
| passterby wrote:
| I understand the anger from the ancestor post... that
| this is "standard practice" in the purported "land of the
| free" is just fucked.
|
| but you do give a classier way to handle it which does
| leave the off chance that they'd make an 'exception' for
| some "special" candidate, still I wouldn't like to work
| in a place like that.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Sweeping assignment of all copyright--including for things
| done off-hours--to your employer are common features of
| employment contracts in the US, which means no open source
| work without requesting an exception. This is true even in
| many startups. Absence of that kind of provision is seen as
| risky by investors or acquiring companies, who fear current
| or past employees will try to claim parts of the company's
| IP as their own.
|
| Most are chill about adding exceptions (they don't actually
| want to claim copyright to that children's book you're
| writing in your free time) though. Still, sucks and
| probably ought to be illegal.
| kube-system wrote:
| As the article says, they're looking for reasons to say
| "yes", not reasons to say "no".
|
| If you say you don't have any open source contributions due
| to company policy, that's not a bad thing, it's a
| demonstration that you respect the policy.
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| Well said.
|
| Also, for professionals who have a life besides coding and
| work, they might prefer spending their time with family, kids
| etc.
|
| I spend my entire day at work in front of a screen coding,
| writing documents, meetings etc ... the last thing I wanna do
| in my non existent spare time is to spend more time indoor in
| front of screen working on side/open-source projects and stack
| overflow.
|
| You might use that as metric for junior/fresh out of college,
| but definitely not for experienced professionals.
|
| It would not work for me and I have built tons of staff.
| mypalmike wrote:
| They're not looking for experienced professionals. They're
| looking for cheap, young, enthusiastic laborers with no
| lives.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Well too bad that I don't want to work opensource or use
| stack overflow (I don't for work because we have our own
| internal one for years)
|
| Then communicate _that_. The point in the article is just to
| demonstrate that you deliver consistently. If you have
| meaningful contributions to an internal system, tell me about
| it.
|
| > whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee
| company is probably not going to be enough for you.
|
| Working at a large company is definitely different than working
| at a small company. The breadth and depth of the job
| responsibilities will be different.
|
| That's okay. Not every job is for everyone.
|
| > How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and
| being done with it
|
| What do you mean by "check"?
|
| Resumes are a place for the candidate to tell me about
| themselves, they're not some sort of background investigation.
| I presume they are honest unless the candidate gives me a
| reason otherwise. And if the candidate gives me a reason to
| believe they're not honest, I'm not wasting any time sleuthing
| about their background -- they're disqualified.
| indymike wrote:
| The author is on to something here: "look for reasons to say yes"
|
| The default in hiring is no. Confirming the default is a lot of
| work, and often, you miss a lot of great talent. Here are some
| situations where I've seen this play out:
|
| NO because of degree requirement. YES candidate wrote the CMS our
| product was built with. (candidate didn't get job because we
| found out two years later he had applied and the recruiter never
| forwarded the resume on)
|
| NO because of 3 years out of industry. YES to candidate because
| he had the same job at competitor that went public 3 years ago
| and had a 3 year non-compete (was a CFO, so it was real).
| (recruiter had a policy of I talk to every applicant, and the
| candidate told her who he was and why he applied... hired)
|
| NO because of multiple 1 year gaps in employment. YES because
| candidate had managed multiple five year construction projects on
| time, on budget. Turns out the gaps were where they guy took one
| year off and volunteered, helping build schools in Africa.
| (recruiter sent to hiring manager, and hiring manager passed
| because he thought the guy was a "job hopper")
| blowski wrote:
| Exactly. I don't want to spend weeks interviewing people, my
| boss doesn't want to pay me to interview people, and my PM
| wants someone who can work on their tickets ASAP. It will be
| much easier for me if I can just hire you.
|
| So "give me reasons to say yes" is great advice, along with
| "don't give me reasons to say no" (like lying or being an
| arrogant douchebag).
|
| Use things like degrees as a green flag, rather than the
| absence of one being a red flag.
| mbesto wrote:
| Friendly reminder:
|
| Resume's get you interviews and interviews get you jobs.
|
| Optimize as such.
| pojzon wrote:
| > Expertise takes time to acquire. I'm skeptical of people who
| claim to be experts in too many things.
|
| Someone does not like DevOps/Platform Engineers.
| suby wrote:
| > We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you've
| read about how to beat automated screening such as include
| certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat "hot"
| keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. not only
| doesn't work on us, but also hurts your chances.
|
| It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and
| attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces
| people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the
| dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they
| optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer
| screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I
| don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is
| likely the most common scenario.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Some people edit their resume for each job they apply to. It
| appears that we've stumbled across a good reason why.
|
| Remember, every hiring manager has different things they look
| for; and different criteria for accepting / rejecting a resume.
| thomasahle wrote:
| >> repeat "hot" keywords, fill your resumes up with random
| metrics, etc. not only doesn't work on us, but also hurts your
| chances.
|
| > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game
|
| Particularly when they started out by saying they're "looking
| for reasons to say yes", not for reasons to say no.
| iamwpj wrote:
| YES! I thought, well say "yes" to my list of technologies I'm
| familiar with. If you want to hear more about how I acquired
| those skills, you could ask...like with a process of engaging
| with applicants. Let's call it an interview.
| thrownawaydad wrote:
| There is no fairness in hiring (nor anywhere else). I once saw
| a hiring manager pull a resume out of the stack and throw it
| away because it was printed on cream-colored paper. I glanced
| at it--it was impressive in general. Certainly a plausible hire
| at a place like Google.
|
| That's okay. You're not writing a resume to get hired. You're
| writing a resume to interest the places you'd like to work and
| repel the places you'd be miserable at.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| This is a good point. Unless you are desperate for a job, you
| can be strategic. You could even list things that are a turn
| off for you. Companies that bin your CV because of honesty
| and trying to get a good fit are probably not a good fit.
|
| Unless you are going against an entire culture, for example
| you want Fridays off but applying to high frequency trading
| companies.
| cbhl wrote:
| My view of this: you're playing the wrong game. "Know your
| audience."
|
| If you're applying to megacorps, fine, optimize for searching
| in a resume database. An early/mid-stage startup doesn't want
| to select for people who have megacorp offers; that's a waste
| of time.
|
| Once upon a time I knew of a college job board that required
| resumes to be uploaded in HTML. I heard of multiple startups
| that would simply View Source and check if the resume's HTML
| appeared handwritten or if it contained the tell-tale meta tags
| set by Microsoft Word when it exports HTML. (Said job board was
| replaced by a new system that uses PDFs, sadly.)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Which one is the contraindication? Word converted to html or
| hand written?
|
| I personally wouldn't care. I can see good reasons for both.
| isametry wrote:
| Was it explicitly said that the HTML needs to be handwritten?
|
| Because otherwise, I don't really see the point of that
| approach. People using whatever tools allow them to produce
| an adequate result in an efficient manner, that's a _good_
| thing. For some people, that tool might be Microsoft Word.
|
| If the specification said "use HTML format" and the
| application was indeed in HTML, I don't see a problem.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and
| attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces
| people to make a choice where they 're effectively rolling the
| dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they
| optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer
| screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I
| don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is
| likely the most common scenario._
|
| At first, I disagreed with you because I assumed if Chip took
| the time to write this post, she must be linking it or at least
| making it clear from the job postings. I just checked the job
| postings[0, 1], and they never tell the candidate that a co-
| founder reads every application personally nor give any
| indication that they're handling applications with more care
| than the average company (and the average company treats
| candidates like garbage).
|
| So, I agree. If you don't tell candidates that you're unique in
| the way that you process applications, you can't expect
| candidates to approach you differently than they approach most
| employers, who reward keyword stuffing.
|
| I have a similar hiring process to the author, but I spell out
| in my job posting that I, the founder, am reading every
| application personally.[2]
|
| [0]
| https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/7b38b49f-baa4-42b6-a58f-bab653...
|
| [1]
| https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00...
|
| [2] https://tinypilotkvm.com/jobs/support-engineer
| TylerE wrote:
| Great way to filter for people who actually want to work
| _there_ and aren't just shotgunning resumes though.
| speeder wrote:
| I tried this in the past, it never worked. Resume spam is
| waaay better. That said it still is bad. In my whole life I
| got to technical interview stage only 8 times, and 2 of
| these were referrals...
| idontpost wrote:
| Do you think the people who play the ATS game are doing it
| because they don't want to work at the place they're
| applying to?
|
| That's a pretty specious conclusion.
| burnished wrote:
| No, it means they want to work but definitionally when
| you are sending out ad many applications as you can you
| stop caring about the individual qualities of a company -
| that comes later, when it becomes relevant.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the company in question (Claypot)
| has <10 employees. How many people do you think have even
| heard of them, let alone want to specifically work for
| them? Approximately all of their applicants are going to
| fall into the other bucket.
| burnished wrote:
| This chain is about "people who play the ats game"
| specifically, not claypot.
| Balgair wrote:
| > I have a similar hiring process to the author, but I spell
| out in my job posting that I, the founder, am reading every
| application personally.
|
| I mean, the real question is if the job candidate will
| actually believe it.
|
| From personal experience, I put my website's URL into my CVs.
| When you bother to visit the website, I have a little
| shibboleth there that says to mention a certain thing in the
| job interview and I'll give you $50. I've only ever had one
| person ever mention that in ~20 years of the shibboleth being
| there, and I gave them the $50. I used to put the shibboleth
| in the CV, but it felt a bit crass after a while.
|
| Also, great note there at the end of the application. I would
| believe you in this case.
| mhb wrote:
| Just FYI, pretty sure that you're thinking of a word other
| than "shibboleth".
| Sebguer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I would get into a significant amount of
| trouble with my company's people team if I accepted $50
| from a candidate. I honestly would consider the presence of
| this offer on your website as a red flag.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, if I really wanted to know if someone had clicked
| through to my website, _maybe_ I 'd put something like
| "Ask me about the time $THING" But, really, an interview
| doesn't seem like the time to play cutesy games.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Everything is just signal, strong or weak. In my experience,
| those who are applying to both computer-screened jobs and
| human-screened jobs are not suitable to work with me.
|
| It's just like if you write that you are an expert at JAVA,
| GIT, and Python. Java is not an acronym. Neither is git. Is it
| unfair that I judge someone negatively for this? Perhaps you
| would consider that so. For me, it's just signal. If I'm wrong
| repeatedly, I will have a higher hiring cost and someone will
| beat me in the market. I am making those choices for the
| business on a hundred different axes constantly. I have no
| problem trusting my intuition here.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Don't worry, it sounds like you're an absolute nightmare to
| work with, so I doubt any of the candidates that didn't pass
| your filter are missing out on anything. Win win!
| lolinder wrote:
| > include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume
|
| Especially this one, because I do that for the _human_ reader,
| not just for the machines.
|
| The point of the resume is to show that you meet the
| requirements for the job--asking a candidate to rephrase the
| job requirements in their own words actually _obfuscates_ the
| parallels between their work history and your requirements,
| creating more work for everyone involved.
| lucb1e wrote:
| What game? If I send someone a document, I expect them to read
| it. If I send them a list of repeated keywords just to rank
| higher in a dumb algorithm that I'm hoping they use, and it
| turns out it's a human now staring at a page of repeated
| words... I don't find it surprising that the human is not
| impressed.
|
| > It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively
| rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is
|
| The best course of action is to make good resumes. If the
| scanner can't pick them out, the company will notice in any
| spot checks that it spits out only garbage. If you optimize for
| a computer, computer says yes, then a human opens it to see
| what your experience is and what to talk about in the (phone)
| interview, human would still see you're trying to cheat their
| system (which could be a good thing if you apply for a hacking
| company, perhaps).
| scott_s wrote:
| Strange, they may have changed their text since you read it,
| because this is what I see:
|
| > We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you've
| read about how to beat automated screening such as include
| certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat
| "hot" keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc.
| doesn't work on us. _They can even hurt when you apply to
| companies like us, because the resume space used for these
| tricks is the space you aren't using for things that are
| relevant to us._
|
| Emphasis mine. They're not penalizing folks for the alphabet
| soup, but pointing out it's a lost opportunity when you have
| finite space.
| suby wrote:
| Yes, it looks like they've edited the article within the last
| three hours. Not sure what else if anything changed, but the
| original is still up on archive.org
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230125042620/https://huyenchip.
| ..
|
| So they're apparently not counting it against someone, which
| is good.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and
| attempting to maximize their chances for success
|
| If you bring up the topic of attending _college_ on here, there
| will be at least five people who say "I make a point of never
| hiring college graduates, because I knew one once who was
| incompetent". Penalizing people who play the game is something
| of a sport in nerd circles.
| kube-system wrote:
| > It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and
| attempting to maximize their chances for success.
|
| If a resume just lists word soup, you've really given the
| reader no choice. What you should be doing (if you want to work
| somewhere where humans read resumes) is not keyword spamming,
| but using those key words in sentences that are also meaningful
| to humans.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| This seems like a strange asymmetric take. Aren't people who
| fill their resumes with word soup penalising people who don't
| play the games and instead fill their resume to actually be
| read, and convey actual meaningful information and projects to
| the reader?
|
| The discrimination is already built into the system, so if you
| have to discriminate, if i was hiring, i'd want to do so
| against the game players. At least in high skill data science-
| esque jobs, the ability to hire for people who aren't playing
| games and actually doing the task seems like a plus. and
| additionally, if you structure your resume in such a way, you
| filter for companies in such a way as to avoid the dystopian
| megacorps and managers who expect you to play games.
|
| that being said, I've yet to figure out a way other than
| networking or optimisation to reliably get past any institution
| big enough to have a significant HR presence professionally
| incapable of judging the things they're notionally hiring for.
| I've had the experience where I've found HR has culled resumes
| and chosen which ones go through to the decision maker, which
| is incredibly frustrating when they're by definition
| unqualified to be making such decisions.
|
| ps: I will read every resume I see. I despise word-
| soup/algorithmic/ business catchwords/someone told me to use
| active language resumes.
| physicsguy wrote:
| I interviewed about 40 people over the last year, and agree
| specifically with not listing every single possible technology
| you've touched in the last 10 years, especially things you're not
| comfortable talking about. Because I will pick ones we're using
| or that I have experience with, and will ask you questions about
| them, and if you can't answer really basic questions then I'm a
| lot less confident you're not bullshitting me about everything
| else you've written down.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I think (I'll have to touch it up soon) that my CV bundles
| skills by degree of familiarity. I wonder if that's
| appropriate?
|
| For instance, I have used lisp dialects to build useful
| functionality, but I'm not that comfortable with it. Does that
| kind of thing have a place on a CV?
|
| Most CV advice I could get seemed to be from non-technical
| people.
|
| I guess I primarily want to showcase adaptability, and making a
| laundry list of languages I have "notions" of could work. As
| long as it can be reasonably explained, one can probably put it
| on a CV, though it depends on the recruiter.
| irrational wrote:
| The one thing I don't see mentioned here is spelling and grammar.
| Probably the single most important thing you will ever write that
| absolutely must not have any spelling or grammar errors is your
| resume. When I am reading resumes, as soon as I see a spelling or
| grammar error I toss the resume. To me it indicates that you
| don't have an attention to detail and you really don't care
| enough about getting a job to make sure your resume is flawless.
| IYasha wrote:
| Especially in the age of spellcheckers... BUT! If a person
| clearly makes a typo, it indicates that he/she is not using
| one. And that's probably fine.
| activitypea wrote:
| On the topic of job hopping:
|
| I'm on my fourth job in four years. First company was a startup
| that went under, other two I immediately realized I wasn't a good
| fit but I stayed for about a year each, gave it my all, then
| resigned with peace of mind. Salary was never an issue. Now I'm
| at a startup again -- I'm happier than ever, wouldn't leave this
| job for the world, but we're on shaky ground and the recession
| might sink us despite our best efforts. So in 2023 that might be
| 5 jobs in 5 years.
|
| I don't think I'm the outlier. I've only met one person that does
| legitimate "job hopping", and you can tell from talking to them
| that something's off. Most of the time people switch jobs for
| good reason. Disqualifying someone based on that means you're
| either an Ivy League kid that never got their hands dirty, or you
| just think you're a rare enough exception that the rule still
| holds.
| JBlue42 wrote:
| I've been unlucky enough to have 'unintentional' job hopping,
| the gaps of which I think make me look like a poor candidate.
| If someone looked at my LinkedIn or resume, they might
| automatically move on because of a 4 month gap here or there.
| If I actually received an interview I could explain "Well, this
| was a small company and they couldn't pay me on time so let me
| go" or something similar. When you've been stuck towards the
| bottom end of the economy with companies that may not be run
| that well, it can make you look worse than you are vs
| circumstances beyond your control.
| rm445 wrote:
| I'm due to interview someone tomorrow who has had 20 jobs in 25
| years... a few 6-month contract positions but mostly 12-18
| months in 'permanent' roles. I'd estimate that most of the
| roles would have been on project-based work of >2yrs duration.
|
| I'm keeping an open mind - this person isn't ruled out but it's
| difficult not to read something into the possibility that
| they've never seen through a project.
| fatih-erikli wrote:
| Noone reads a resume. Linkedin page is enough.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| "Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year"
|
| hahaha
| oytis wrote:
| If every company provided such a guide for what they look for in
| a resume, job hunting would be a bit less frustrating
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| I think the result is the same and thus same frustration. A lot
| of off-guide factors in consideration.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Some good suggestions and tips in the post and if I may, I'd like
| to add a tip of my own: scan the CV/resume for spelling, grammar,
| formatting mistakes.
|
| I know it's not a very "scientific" and objective criterion, but
| it has never failed me :-)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Do... you invite people who've made those mistakes in to
| interview, at least? Else I'm not sure how you could have even
| a fairly unscientific sense of whether applying this criterion
| has failed you or not.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Definitely, and to be honest I've seen a few exceptions that
| confirm my unscientific rule. I try not to judge by the look,
| but in a CV for an engineering role I like a nice format
| without errors. Same goes for code reviews. I prefer clean &
| commented code over dirty/sloppy hacks.
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