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My dad's resume and skills from 1980

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Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#81

Post by varjag »

deeblering4 wrote: post #48
lordnacho wrote: post #27

That job market seems like so long ago. See job ad, type out a letter with your CV, wait for them to write back, somehow organize a time to meet, more rounds, and so forth. At least it must have been hard to spam out CVs. The guy seems pretty hardcore from my perspective. University training for all those techs. Of course hardware back then cost a lot of money so you wanted people who knew what they were doing. What…

Up until the mid-late 2000s tech interviews consisted of a few conversations, followed by checking references. CS trivia interviews were largely introduced by Google, with other companies cargo culting that into their interview practices.

I had a test assignment at an interview in 1997.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#82

Post by AlbertCory »

jcadam wrote: post #41
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot... I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over-designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50. The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes based on a template they found. The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN or other social media is because they’re different, not beca…

I eventually gave up on Word templates and now keep my resume in LaTeX. Neat and organized - not unlike this example only with more detail and nicer fonts :) Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give recruiter a resume in an easily editable format.

I just downloaded the MS annual report (don't ask why) which is in Word, naturally, and it was marked "Final" just to discourage / prevent editing.

I have no idea how hard it is to get around that, but probably too hard for most headhunters.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#83

Post by gwbas1c »

My mom passed about a month ago, and when going through a closet, my dad handed me some papers she wrote for a college course.

Turns out she was the same age as me when her father died a similar death, and she wrote about similar feelings.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#84

Post by jcadam »

oslem wrote: post #52
jcadam wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I eventually gave up on Word templates and now keep my resume in LaTeX. Neat and organized - not unlike this example only with more detail and nicer fonts :) Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give recruiter a resume in an easily editable format.

I’m assuming you’re concerned with resume manipulation? Or is there another reason you prefer to submit your resume in a non-editable format?

Yep, I've been surprised by the contents of my resume at an interview set up by a recruiter once.

"It says on your resume you have extensive experience in X."

"I do not."

They also have a thing for stripping your name and contact details out and pasting their ugly letterhead over the top. Which I suppose they could still do with a PDF if they have Acrobat Pro.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#85

Post by arecurrence »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #50
jll29 wrote: post #22

The interesting bit about this post is that with that resume, you can still feed a family in 2022 (okay, you won't need any assembler, and one from the set { Fortran, COBOL } will do). I wonder if Python and JavaScript will get you that far 50 years from now?

Java probably will for application development. Python should to with all that ML code. I don’t see anyone in a hurry to move it to Julia. C++ also, if you’re in the embedded space. I know Rust is coming but I don’t think c++ is going anywhere for a while.

There's so much production code in C++ that it will have a long tail like Fortran even if people were to stop launching new products with it.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#87

Post by [deleted] »

j33zusjuice wrote: post #29
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot... I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over-designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50. The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes based on a template they found. The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN or other social media is because they’re different, not beca…

In my experience looking at résumés (mostly for entry-level tech roles), fancy formatting is 100% an attempt to cover for a lack of skill. I haven’t seen one that had good content. Intuitively, this makes sense to me, and seems to fit with the old adage, “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Imo, your experience should speak for itself.

[deleted]

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#88

Post by kypro »

rmnclmnt wrote: post #6

Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...

Something I was surprised by was the amount of white space and the straight to the point job descriptions. Whenever I send my CV to recruiter I'm always asked to add a little more about some language or skill.

Over the years my CV has become super dense with text, not because I have more experience to list but because I've been told repeatedly to list all the languages I've used and details of the projects I've worked on.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#89

Post by conductr »

j33zusjuice wrote: post #29
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot... I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over-designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50. The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes based on a template they found. The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN or other social media is because they’re different, not beca…

In my experience looking at résumés (mostly for entry-level tech roles), fancy formatting is 100% an attempt to cover for a lack of skill. I haven’t seen one that had good content. Intuitively, this makes sense to me, and seems to fit with the old adage, “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Imo, your experience should speak for itself.

> your experience should speak for itself.

When it does, you have trouble fitting it all on 1-2 page. You quickly go to text only, and organize things accordingly. When you lack experience, you try to make things look like an infographic so as to fill space with trivial information.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#90

Post by jcadam »

ryandrake wrote: post #32
rmnclmnt wrote: post #6

Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...

Also: I kind of like the concise wording when the writer doesn't feel they need to adhere to STAR. "Duties Included" is the only meat I want to see when I read a resume. I don't care what the specific challenge you faced was, or if your hard work transforming protobufs from one format to another resulted in "23% year over year revenue growth and 3 industry awards" for a product that uses your protobufs 5 layers up th…

I have an MBA, which I don't really use as a working software engineer, but nowhere else will you learn to take a clear, concise, one page paper (i.e., this is what we did and this is the result) and expand it to 10 pages of BS-laden corporate-speak nonsense.

It's a real skill, I tell you.

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