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The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't sent a resume in a while. Usually I just give a "cover letter" of sorts that says a) why I'm interested in the job b) what I can offer/why they "need" me, c) why I think so (usually just talk about experience). I have a website that lists my workplaces and my main projects and of course my GitHub, both of which I link. I guess that's my "resume".

Didn't send a cover letter in a while. I am surprised this practise still exists.

Plenty of public sector institutions have cover letters/supporting statements.

They give you the criteria they recruit based on, you write about how you meet them. It's a cover letter +

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

I wonder if it's worth maintaining two accounts. A professional-oriented curated one could be valuable in some job hunts.

I have a self-hosted Gogs instance for all the stuff that I want private (either because it's shit or because it's really personal information that I don't want to put on anyone else's computer, including GitHub's).

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

#123

So I got the notice this morning that my info had been changed to this new developer story on SO. I go check, it's literally > 10 screens before a single useful piece of info appears. 70 or so open source projects I contributed to or run followed by my job experience > "your Developer Story is the best way to share whatever it is that you take pride in. It’s your story; tell it your way." Um, no, that's not my way. M…

This is a result of the fact that your projects most likely don't have dates assigned to them (not even sure that was an option in the old system) so they all end up crammed at the top of the timeline. Once you fill in an approximate launch date for each project (or whatever you feel is most appropriate), the timeline should start to look a little more sensible.

That said, I'm still not a big fan of the new look. I also prefer the apps section at the end rather than mixed in with my employment history.

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

#124
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…

Although I'm not intending to derail the thread, I'm curious what resources or techniques would you recommend to get better at this?

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

#125
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…

> Probably will have to find another menial job. Oh well Don't take this the wrong way, but you need to change the way you project yourself. Even just from this resume, you're talking yourself down. Who would you hire? "I wanted to keep track of who/what was visiting my websites. Turns out they were mostly crawlers for search engines. I keep track of IPs and URLs requested, I store them in a MySQL database using PHP"…

Thanks for your tips

I do have a rough portfolio but it's just projects stacked on top of each other, images... thought about a language sorting thing you know click Javascript to view javascript files, etc...

I see your point about the wording.

I don't know, yeah I unfortunately am plagued with negativity

Portfolio:

https://www.cunninghamwebdd.com/portfolio/

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

#126
post #113
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…

Hey, we've all been there! I'm more than happy to help you polish this up. Feel free to shoot me an email hn@awadsayeed.com

Thanks I'll take you up on that.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very recently, a close friend was looking for a job (as a junior dev - focused on web). After applying and getting rejected, we decided to try a different approach - he basically gave up and decided to the following: 1) added buzz keywords in his resume 2) hosted an instance of gitlab and took various open source projects (stuff that was not popular, but had enough polish), modified them and uploaded them. After a we…

> 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 see plenty of GitHub profiles that are filled with forked/starred projects from other people, and nothing of substance.

Though I haven't interviewed candidates for a long time, I happen to be curious about somebody from time to time. The very first thing I do watching their GitHub profiles is to filter-out all the forks, only leaving "sources" (how GitHub calls them).

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One (stddev) is in the same units as the quantity being measured, while the other isn't. I know nothing about machine learning and suck at math and statistics. Did I pass?

Yeah, I don't know why I was downvoted, it's a completely legitimate question to ask a data scientist.

But anyway, you'd get enough for a follow up question, but not really enough to pass. The key is that the sum of uncorrelated distributions has a variance that is the sum of the variance of those distributions. This isn't true for standard deviation. This is useful so we use variance when we think we're dealing with random variables. Standard deviation isn't as useful for intermediary processes.

Another follow up question - actually the first question in my head, but by a mental slip-up I typed out the wrong thing: Why do we use square error when absolute error would do?

The answer to this is actually quite illuminating because there are multiple valid but contradictory positions on it, much like the Bayes vs Frequentist debate.

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

#129
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…

This is cultural too. In some regions it is normal to list absolutely everything to the extent of "Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook)". If you did that in other regions they would bin your CV for what looks like mere padding.

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

#130
post #43
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Resumes are extremely easy to exaggerate or fabricate. I haven't seen fake github profiles yet (and I suspect they would be more trouble than they are worth). I am often brought in on the hiring process to vet peoples technical skills. I used to just try to ask questions in the hour or two I got with the person, this seemed no better than flipping a coin. Even if the person was honest and we were both talking about t…

haven't seen fake github profiles yet (and I suspect they would be more trouble than they are worth).

There are loads, usually with a fork of a couple of popular JS libraries, maybe a couple of commits but no PRs. Once word leaked out that having a Github was "a thing".

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