Live data from Hacker News

The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

blog.stackoverflow.com

91–100 of 147 posts

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. The shortest resume is just your last name "Zuckerberg" or "Snowden". If you've achieved something impressive (sold a company, started a well known web framework, fixed some large horrible government or organizational process) it speaks for itself and the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle.

> the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle I would have thought that if there was one thing an interview was not suited to do, it would be detecting con artists. Isn't passing interviews their only core skill?

Not for a useful interview. If you tell me you founded and sold a machine learning company but can't explain the pros and cons of using variance versus standard deviation then you didn't sell a machine learning company.

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#92
post #78

I'm trying to get hired as a junior front end developer. Suck at writing resumes. This is my worst one so far. Also I've been applying but no responses, I have a defeatist mentality and also I think I do accept that I don't meet the requirements. http://m.imgur.com/a/oCdvU I have changed the format some as the bullets as titles doesn't make sense. Still I have to condense and overall my "achievements" are pretty basi…

That is a terrible resume :-( Why would you start with negative sentences about your projects? "not complete". "at best what I have...". "decided to abandon". The second page is much more promising. Instead of story-telling and editorializing "This was a basic job, and quick", focus on what techniques you used: - started from a broken Bootstrap prototype - rewrote email sending using package xyz etc. Show me that you…

Right unfortunately I haven't used many tools. This one site was built with bootstrap and since I don't use/know bootstrap I wrote it from scratch the scrolling, menu, animations, etc...

Yeah it is a work in progress.

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#93
post #78

I'm trying to get hired as a junior front end developer. Suck at writing resumes. This is my worst one so far. Also I've been applying but no responses, I have a defeatist mentality and also I think I do accept that I don't meet the requirements. http://m.imgur.com/a/oCdvU I have changed the format some as the bullets as titles doesn't make sense. Still I have to condense and overall my "achievements" are pretty basi…

In case you're not trolling, google for "example resumes".

I did look at some. My previous resume see below:

https://m.imgur.com/7FU3bew

I was told lacked content so I gathered all my projects.

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#94
post #86
post #36

My recent job search lead me to the idea that the traditional resume is broken. Temporal view only gives recruiters and hiring managers the bullet points to qualify you in whatever bucket that they need. Instead of a traditional CV/Resume, I went with a single page narrative approach with a link to the temporal view on my LinkedIn profile. Initially there was some pushback as the recruiters were bellyaching over the…

I would take a step further and just make a 1-2 page project/product recommendation for their company based on the role that you're applying for. It takes more time, but the last time I was job hunting, I did it with several startups and got interviews with all of them (no referral). The resume + cover letter converted much worse for the other companies I applied to at the time.

Could you expand on this? It sounds interesting but I'm not sure I follow what you mean.

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While he did get called out once, almost all engineers/non-tech hr didn't bother calling his bluff. I see plenty of GitHub profiles that are filled with forked/starred projects from other people, and nothing of substance. I don't bring it to the candidate because it is worthless and there are more interesting things to talk about. But that doesn't mean I didn't see it ;) Actually I have never once in my life see a…

I don't like this notion of having a "good" GitHub profile. GitHub started off as an easy place for me to dump code, no matter how crappy. Dumb ideas, samples from learning, incomplete experiments, whatevs. Then I noticed that I had started censoring my code krapola. I was sepf conscious about the code I was making visible, as I didn't want to be judged. Then I decided that lame. Now I shamelessly put garbage on GitH…

I'm the same way. I removed a lot of old stuff from my early days because I was afraid I was going to be judged on it. Now I don't care. GitHub is my dumping ground for everything. I start a new project almost every time I want to learn a specific thing so I have lots of incomplete projects on there simply because I move on once I learned the goal task.

Unfortunately like most people all the clean and polished code lives in private work repos. All those things I learned from the unfinished repos is being used in work code. Oh well.

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#96
post #9

Weren't GitHub profiles the new technical resume? How well did that work in practice, and how would this Stack Overflow approach be different? I was under the impression (from reading HN/Reddit) that while engineers do read GitHub profiles if explicitly linked in a resume, nontechnical recruiters do not. And they are the gatekeeper to said engineers.

Not every programmer likes to share his side-project code on public places like GitHub - for many reasons. Or pullrequest to some opensource mess. Code you write and problems you solve at work usually can't be shown on GitHub either. So, this "show me your GitHub" thing for me is no different from "show me your Facebook, wait what, no FB account??" experience with non-technical HRs ;) Conventional resume is totally O…

I have years and years of experience in software, I have a half dozen or more non-work projects I've contributed to or solely developed, some involving hundreds of hours of dev work, most of them on github. None of those projects are public though. And I suspect a lot of other developers are in similar situations. Public contributions on github usually fall into one of two categories: contributions to big open source projects (rare) or pet projects of little substance (common). These are just some of the reasons why using github as a resume is extremely fraught with difficulty. If you're lucky then it works well, but chances are you won't be lucky.

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#97
post #52

As someone who reads and writes thousands of developer resumes a year, the major problem I see is that people have a difficult time separating what is important from what isn't, and separating day-to-day responsibilities (which are typically understood from a job title) from unique and novel achievements. I don't know if this kind of tool solves that problem. Much of my work with resume clients is extracting what the…

That sounds like issues of content more than form.

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle I would have thought that if there was one thing an interview was not suited to do, it would be detecting con artists. Isn't passing interviews their only core skill?

Not for a useful interview. If you tell me you founded and sold a machine learning company but can't explain the pros and cons of using variance versus standard deviation then you didn't sell a machine learning company.

Hm. I have not founded or sold a machine learning company, or even studied the field. But either of those quantities fully determines the other, so I'd really hope that, if they're part of the model, they'd be exactly equivalent to a learning system.

Do you mean for measuring goodness of fit between a prediction and the known truth in training data?

If you want to assess the presence of knowledge, give a test rather than an interview. The interview is just a way to make it easier for the con artist to snow you.

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#99
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience. As someone who recently did some job hunting I will tell you that while I agree on an idealism level with your comment it's just simply not true in practice. I had many, many companie…

For CVs for monster/linked in I have a buzzword bullet list where not everything even gets it's own bullet so it doesn't take up much space. So as a dev one ends up with bullets like (exaggerated here for effect): * C# / .Net (ASP.Net webforms, MVC, WCF, Entity framework) * SQL ( T-SQL, stored procedures, sql-server management) * Python (Django, Flask, south, numpy, scipy) * Javascript (jQuery, ES5, ES2016, webpack,…

> box ticking buzzword finding recruiters

Sums it up well

Re: The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

#100
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. The shortest resume is just your last name "Zuckerberg" or "Snowden". If you've achieved something impressive (sold a company, started a well known web framework, fixed some large horrible government or organizational process) it speaks for itself and the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle.

>As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. That's refreshing to hear. I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience. Many people do get emotionally attached to the work they've done. I've worked with people transitioning…

When I see a 10-page resume, I sense stupidity. And usually it turns out that, indeed, it would not matter if every single statement in said resume were true or not.
Post reply on HN