The Resume Is Dead

Apparently, in 2011, HR departments make fun of bad resumes and toss them in the trash, rather than interviewing people with good resumes?

If you put this kind of effort in, opportunities will come to you. People will recognize you and your work. Your well earned reputation will precede you before you even walk in the door.

So the advice boils down to "be famous"? That's great, if you can manage it, but there's a finite amount of fame out there: it's a zero sum game.

Perhaps this is atypical, but I just have a bog-standard resume, no twitter account, and a blog that probably averages 2 hits per week. Despite that, I haven't had a problem getting interviews by submitting my resume through company job websites. As this guy would say, there's nothing that makes my resume stand out from all the others they have on file: I got a BS from a state school, an MS from another state school, and have a job at a small startup no one's ever heard of. And when I interview, just knowing algorithms 101 seems to be sufficient to get a job offer (and not even necessary unless I'm interviewing at a place like MS or Google).

This guy makes landing a job sound a lot harder than it actually is.

sigh This works for high flying traders, it works for rockstar coders, or people applying at "indie" companies (i.e. ones with renegade hiring styles). And so on.

And, typically, someone in that high flying arena misconstrues what he is seeing around him as the future.

It could well be.

But it ignores the fact that the vast majority of people still submit a CV, then wait and hope for an interview. CV's are far from dead (should they be? who knows).

If you want to work at the top, you can't do what the rest of us do. If you don't want to work there, well, it's a waste of time.

I don't think that's fair. Why is "be famous" a better decoding than "be awesome?" Are you seriously telling me that you know of no one who, while they don't have celebrity status, isn't known in your community or subfield as someone awesome?

there's a finite amount of fame out there: it's a zero sum game.

I'm calling bullsh#t on this one. How in the world can you justify there's a finite amount of fame? Fame is basically the garnering of attention. Are you implying there's a finite amount of attention? How is this so in the face of increasing population and wealth? Not only are there more people, more of the people have more free time and access to information resources. There's more and more people able to pay more and more attention. Even if this were not true, fame still wouldn't be a zero sum game unless you've shown that everyone's attention is saturated. I posit that there's still room for growth.

I'm hard on myself and while I take pride in my work and what I've accomplished I always focus on the things I'm not great at. That sounds negative, and it probably is, but I think it has its plus side, and I'm not sure I can be, or want to be, any other way. But apparently I've done enough good things, and handled myself in a way that really good people want to recommend me.

Gratifying, but also a little scary. I'm comfortable with the pressure I put on myself, but the prospect of letting other people down, people I think a lot of, is unsettling.

A recommendation is, and the more vocal it is (and the more of them there are) the more it becomes -- a very generous gift, and with it comes a lot of responsibility of a different kind.

The resume route might be harder, but it has its positives. Easier to exceed expectations.