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The reverse job applicant

reversejobapplication.com

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Re: The reverse job applicant

#181

Post by codyrobbins »

danhak wrote: post #162
randomtask wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know nothing of his situation and yet are willing to cast aspersions on his character. Before you go tarring a whole generation with the "entitled" label perhaps a little context from the generation that lacks humility might be in order. Friends of mine are in the same position as this guy. They recently graduated with good degrees from a decent university with no allusions that finding a job was going to be anyt…

I cannot explain how much you have hit the nail on the head. I graduated from college in May and have been having the exact experience you describe. My generation has been described as entitled. Quite frankly, I do feel as if I am owed something, and that society at large has failed to keep its end of the bargain. For my entire life, I was told that if I work hard in school, bust my ass to go to a good university and…

Ugh. I can’t wrap my head around the concept of expecting some mechanical path to success and subsequently being flabbergasted at the realization that, even if it ever did exist at one point, it doesn’t anymore. Who cares if anyone told you things are that easy? Everyone telling you that was wrong—get over it. For your own good, get off your ass and do something worthwhile to distinguish yourself. Instead of doing the old spray-and-pray with your résumé, find a job you want and then do absolutely anything it takes to get that job.

Re: The reverse job applicant

#182

Post by run4yourlives »

jules wrote: post #175
run4yourlives wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't think you can discuss this particular topic without making gross over generalizations and employing some type of bias. We're talking about generations of people after all. Gen X'ers will see the world the way we see it. It may be ridiculous, but keep in mind that we've lived through both yours and our own experiences, when you have not. That doesn't mean we're right, but it does mean we have a lot more…

> We wouldn't have had this discussion had this been written in 1990. Right, and why would that be? Perhaps because the 1990s were golden economic years?

Except that to new grads, they weren't.

All the gold was going to your parents. :-)

Re: The reverse job applicant

#183

Post by run4yourlives »

jules wrote: post #173
run4yourlives wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It IS when you graduate. If there are no jobs, there are no jobs, regardless of how serene and abundant or oppresive and anxiety inducing your childhood was. But I'm not arguing about who actually has it worse. Hell, I think anyone graduating this year wins that hands down. Humility is an action based on perception, not reality. If you forever had it easy, yet land in a world of shit come graduation day, you become f…

So you're arguing "My generation is humbler than yours!" What a pointless debate.

Ah, no. I'm saying your generation is having a harder time because your expectations are so ridiculously high.

Re: The reverse job applicant

#184

Post by clevercode »

hop wrote: post #77

Your resume could be part of the problem - http://www.andrewhorner.com/documents/AndrewHorner.Resume.pd... Some constructive criticism: Thats a lot of ink to print that out, drop the black and grey banners. Try using a resume theme from Pages or Word for a start and just use black fonts on a white background. Use Myriad Pro or something more modern than Arial. Make it one page. Your first entry shouldn't be that you…

Agreed. Also, sentences like "I mastered the ability to combine several strategies, each with varying strengths and weaknesses, highlighting the strengths and nullifying the weaknesses" are no good. What strengths? What weaknesses? When I read something like that, it says to me (or perhaps screams?) that nothing substantial was actually accomplished. Definitely in need of rewording to make things far more concrete.

Re: The reverse job applicant

#185

Post by dripton »

micheljansen wrote: post #160

With the risk of sounding redundant: I would never wish to reverse the job seeking process for myself. I prefer to keep my destiny in my own hands and seek out the job I feel best fits my skills and interests. I don't trust potential employers to just magically find me, a single person, and appreciate me for what I am worth. Too many times already I have been approached by recruiters that get triggered by a line in m…

Of course the company is the customer and you are the product. They pay; you don't. Follow the money.

Re: The reverse job applicant

#186

Post by djhworld »

tlrobinson wrote: post #104
flipper wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if I was an employer (and I have been from time to time) I'd probably read this, smile wryly, and move on. But someone else might not. I don't have a problem with the guy asserting that he can pick up new technologies quickly, as long as he expects he will only be offered entry-level positions. You do not write Python the way Shakespeare wrote prose after six months. I do however have problem with him not provi…

This stunt is an attention catcher but he can't seriously expect to get a job without at least an interview. And not some bullshit where he interviews the company. There's no way in hell I'd hire him without first checking his competency.

He says in his pros/cons list at the end that he'll wear trousers to the interview.

I don't think he 'expects to walk in to a job' because of this, heck from the sounds of it his attempts to get a job have been largely fruitless.

This is just his way of standing out from the crowd and getting himself noticed enough for an employer to ask him in for an interview.

Re: The reverse job applicant

#187

Post by moron4hire »

randomtask wrote: post #159
run4yourlives wrote: post #72

If you really care which programming languages I already know or which applications I have used before, I can only assume that you're overlooking my ability to quickly pick up new technologies and adjust to new ways of thinking. I would encourage you to correct this, as it is a mistake. I know it's tongue in cheek, but my god does the current generation not have any humility at all? This is going to ruin your world v…

You know nothing of his situation and yet are willing to cast aspersions on his character. Before you go tarring a whole generation with the "entitled" label perhaps a little context from the generation that lacks humility might be in order. Friends of mine are in the same position as this guy. They recently graduated with good degrees from a decent university with no allusions that finding a job was going to be anyt…

"They feel like they've done everything that was expected of them. They went to university and graduated with a good degree."

This is the problem. Just showing up isn't enough. This fill-in-the-blanks approach to careers is why the university degree doesn't mean anything anymore. It's never about being the norm, it's about exceeding the norm. Yes, that means more than 50%, by definition, won't cut it.

What did they do while they got their "good degrees from good universities"? If the answer is "the bare minimum to pass", as it seems most of my former classmates did, then it's no wonder they can't find work.

Re: The reverse job applicant

#188

Post by 83457 »

davidw wrote: post #126

How did this get twice as many upvotes as patio11's extensive, detailed notes from the Business of Software conference? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1795896

Brainstorm a few logical reasons this could happen and I'm sure the answer will come to you

Re: The reverse job applicant

#189

Post by inboulder »

jemfinch wrote: post #135
jbooth wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've taken your challenge and passed. Are you calling me a liar? I'm calling you not particularly self-aware. After a year of coding in that language, the code you wrote after 2 weeks will likely look like crap to you. Unless that language is so domain specific that there's no room for design or so derivative that you can apply another language's style 100%, you almost definitely still have more to learn after 2 wee…

> I'm calling you not particularly self-aware. Based on no real data except your prejudices. > Unless that language is so domain specific that there's no room for design or so derivative that you can apply another language's style 100%, you almost definitely still have more to learn after 2 weeks. There's a vast chasm between "understands the language's semantics" and "has no more to learn." I've been programming for…

>> For example, Java, can you tell me the difference between volatile and synchronized as it regards the memory model without looking it up? What's a happens-before relationship and how is it relevant to those keywords? What's the transient modifier do?

>I didn't claim to be a Java guru. Very few Java programmers actually need to know the answers to those questions in day-to-day programming; I could probably (if asked to, which I'm not, thankfully) write thousands or tens of thousands of lines of Java without ever needing to know the answer to those.

You're wrong, and this proves the point. This isn't 'guru' level, the workings of volatile and synchronized is even on the basic SCJP test. This may not come up in your domain, but if the project deals with threading, an experienced dev will be more productive than you right off the bat, after two weeks, and probably after a year.

In fact, threading is pretty tricky, so it's likely you will be counter-productive to the team until you've made all the Java threading mistakes you need to make in order to understand why your code is bad. And, you might never know your code is bad unless a domain experienced Java dev explains it to you.

Domain experience matters.

Re: The reverse job applicant

#190

Post by Natsu »

ramchip wrote: post #78
astrofinch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. 'Fraid I don't see what a sense of entitlement has to do with the difficulty of picking up new programming languages.

Programming languages can't all be picked up that quickly, since semantics may differ a lot. You can't say "Give me any programming task and I'll pick it up". What if you're a Web guy and the task is a C++ medical application? What if we're a finance company and the language is Haskell or ML? There's no way someone with no experience in a related language could become proficient without a fairly long training period…

> Programming languages can't all be picked up that quickly, since semantics may differ a lot. You can't say "Give me any programming task and I'll pick it up".

Speak for yourself. I learned AutoLisp with one bit of sample code someone left behind and a bit of Googling in about a week, starting from zero. Nobody else where I worked knows it at all. But from that, I coded a full set of functions that did everything we need.

I reverse-engineered the semantics of some crazy internal scripting language to some of our industrial machines. Nobody bothered to document that thing at all and it was custom to my employer.

I learned to use a different testing tool from nothing more than a bit of sample code and being told that it was based on VBS. I then improved the code I was given.

Some of us really can figure out the semantics of something just from reading a few examples. This also works with foreign languages. Particularly if I can get parallel translations (e.g. subtitles), I can start working backwards to extract meaning and solve for unknown words.

In short, you'd be surprised about how quickly we can figure out things, especially if we've seen something like it before. Sure, there are pitfalls, but anywhere where you have nice syntax aware IDEs and whatnot, it's not nearly as much of a barrier as you seem to think.

The more languages you've used, the easier it all is. This goes for both human and computer languages.

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