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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

#531

Post by blandflakes »

jimmaswell wrote: post #364
dist1ll wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many problems with your resume, and lack of fancy design is not one of them. - Half of your CV is empty space - Dates are formatted really badly, no one would be able to get a good grasp on your project and work timeline quickly - You have a game project that spans several years, and you sum it up into one sentence. Why are you doing that? It's one of your main selling points, and you don't expand enough on…

If I got this resume from a junior I would hire them assuming the interview went decently. Half is empty - just graduated, can't expect that much stuff to put there. Maybe I should have expanded more on the game but I was getting the impression nobody cared that much about personal projects. The very first two things you do with a resume are match up the list of technical skills with the list of tech in your position…

I'm not sure I'd even interview this person; I'd at least have to find reasons to. It definitely doesn't give me anything to ask about. Quotes like "Save a lot of time by automating an email process" are so vague and ambiguous that the bullet point may as well be omitted.

Education on the top is a waste of most anybody's time, let it be on the top only if you have no work experience (and if that's the case, yikes).

I don't care about language/skillset checklists, because that's not what I hire for. Especially with no indication of relative strength or accomplishments with them - if I need a specific skill I'll happily scroll to see if it's there or not, but I want to see an actual story about this person's career and interests, not a set of "fill in the blank" stuff that every graduate has:

* woo high school and a college degree great, that's not something we're going to talk about

* version control, editors, etc are table stakes

Why is all of the experience effectively unscanable (by eye)? Prose-first, no easy way to separate by date, by project, or position held?

A resume doesn't have to be a thesis in print design, but I think you'd do well to consider the feedback you're receiving in this thread and that you alluded to receiving before - this resume isn't advertising anything to me and it's work for me to construct a coherent story about why this candidate is a strong fit for hiring.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#532

Post by Jolter »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #332
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.

Yeah, I usually move on from these recruiters. "Can you send it to me as a Word file?"-style recruiters have always been correlated with a poor experience for me.

My experience has been that great workplaces sometimes have Whitt luck with recruiters, so you’ll end up judging a book by its cover. But one only has time to make so many applications, and you gotta filter them somehow, so why not by recruiter skill?

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#533

Post by SCUSKU »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #429
ianlevesque wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I suppose what it really does is finds you people who are willing to put in the time to study all the hundreds of questions. Yes, this is it.

As opposed to putting in the time to learn how to write and release ship software. I won't study LC, because I'm waaaaaayyyy too busy, learning Swift, UIKit, AppKit, WatchKit, SwiftUI, DocC, MapKit, SiriKit, device SDKs, networking, USB, etc. I literally work every single day (like seven days a week), and learn something new every single day, yet I am barely keeping up. I would be nuts to sacrifice any of this time,…

I'm seeing this comment as a result of this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/ydiu...

But overall I agree with you. While I don't have the results to back it up, I do believe that ultimately Leetcode isn't that useful outside of recruiting people straight out of college. Otherwise, I think there are more domain specific methods to assess candidate fitness to a role.

Also, my giving my unsolicited opinion, I do agree with one of the Reddit posters saying that you are currently on your way to burnout. While I can sympathize with you being super interested in learning programming all the time (because it is very interesting!) be sure to not ignore your other needs, and also to take a mandatory break at least one day a week. Speaking from experience, if you don't do this you will burn out and you will have to pick up the pieces.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#534

Post by Kamq »

LtWorf wrote: post #254
dkurth wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Seymour Cray said, "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late." It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know whether a hire is likely to work out. I think it makes sense to invest more effort in screening applicants in this case.

But I don't think there is research showing that those strange hiring processes actually do work.

Of course there is. You can generate studies that show roughly anything.

It may not be the majority, but if the research is all done in-house by various firms, there's no way for anyone to know that.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#535

Post by LtWorf »

Kamq wrote: post #534
LtWorf wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don't think there is research showing that those strange hiring processes actually do work.

Of course there is. You can generate studies that show roughly anything. It may not be the majority, but if the research is all done in-house by various firms, there's no way for anyone to know that.

By research I mean of course properly done research.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#536

Post by lambdasquirrel »

hnlmorg wrote: post #280
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far." I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be s…

Universities are always several years behind the curve. At college in the 90s they were still teaching token ring networking despite Ethernet already being common place. The same college told me that programmers didn’t design any of the code they write; they only transcribe code from flow charts. Just yesterday I was talking to a grad about DevOps. He said the field sounded boring from what he was taught at uni. Then…

The bit on "DevOps" is pretty egregious. There's two key things at stake here.

1. "DevOps" is an absolutely critical part of automation. It's the reason why we can start tech companies with such small engineering staff compared to 20 years ago. It's as important as all the high-level languages we use. This stuff is the logistics of how software gets deployed. It's the same in business as it is in war. Coding chops is like tactical strategy, and being able to ambush a tank column. It matters, and you won't have an engineering org without it, but the whole chain of how stuff gets deployed and iterated is what keeps the ammo flowing and the fuel pumping.

2. Universities want to teach stuff that'll still be relevant in 50 years. Given their proclivities, that means stuff like algorithms.

On one hand, I think that universities and academics can be somewhat forgiven for their ignorance on this matter. In fact I think we ourselves don't know what's going to be needed in our field in ten, twenty, thirty years. If the folks in industry didn't predict infrastructure-as-code 20 years ago, then the universities couldn't have taught it.

But what I know now is that:

- After all these years, no one is getting rid of shell scripting.

- Old school (i.e. 2nd generation) config management still has its place in many companies. Ansible is great for provisioning an AMI, if you need one, but if you need static infrastructure, puppet and chef are actually better because they track state, which allows you to better manage config drift.

- k8s may be hot and all, but a lot of the underlying "ops" stuff still translates. You average resource usage over pods instead of hosts, for example.

- Put together, there is an "instinct" for ops that is not unlike the "instinct" people learn for math, algorithms, and code. They are completely separate and an engineering org needs both. I think that universities don't "get" ops because computer science is more like math, whereas ops is more like history.

- On one hand, being stuck in an older ops paradigm is pretty awful – if you missed the transition to infrastructure-as-code, then it may be really, really hard to get out of that rut. But the field itself can be pretty bad with being stuck – it took us forever to give up our own datacenter racks.

- But otherwise, the old knowledge about old tools didn't necessarily just go away, in fact it's oftentimes still quite relevant. Linux internals (e.g. iptables) are still useful.

- When I was at CMU, a lot of folks learned some of that ops instinct in the dorm room, and in the computer clusters. But the universities pretty much made it optional. Looking back, I think this was a mistake. Ops is pretty much entirely transmitted through osmosis, whereas we at least try to teach people to code in official uni classes.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#537

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

SCUSKU wrote: post #533
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to putting in the time to learn how to write and release ship software. I won't study LC, because I'm waaaaaayyyy too busy, learning Swift, UIKit, AppKit, WatchKit, SwiftUI, DocC, MapKit, SiriKit, device SDKs, networking, USB, etc. I literally work every single day (like seven days a week), and learn something new every single day, yet I am barely keeping up. I would be nuts to sacrifice any of this time,…

I'm seeing this comment as a result of this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/ydiu... But overall I agree with you. While I don't have the results to back it up, I do believe that ultimately Leetcode isn't that useful outside of recruiting people straight out of college. Otherwise, I think there are more domain specific methods to assess candidate fitness to a role. Also, my giving…

Well, I have been doing this for over 30 years, and going at my current pace for probably ten years (I noticed the comment about me being an enthusiastic youngster. That was cute).

But I also take breaks (and naps) whenever I want. No one wants to hire old folks, so I don’t work for anyone. I do this, because I want to.

What’s that saying? “It’s not work, if you love what you do?” For me, coding (designing solutions, in particular) is relaxing. I have some fairly serious family and extracurricular obligations that bring their own stressors. Coding is how I get away.

I’ll tell you when I was actually in danger of burning out; it was when I was a manager (which I did for 25 years). I spent a hell of a lot of time, sitting on my ass. I coded on the side, so I wouldn’t burn out. This is like Disneyland, compared to that horrible grind.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#538

Post by Maursault »

User23 wrote: post #526
Maursault wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s You missed, by a few years at least, the opportunity to study and earn a degree that is no longer available from CMU, the B.S. in Cognitive Linguistics. I got an early acceptance from CMU in late 1988, my first choice of education because I wanted that degree in particular, but I could not afford CMU tuition let alone housing, and I was ineligible fo…

The backdoor into CMU back then was and maybe still is Pitt. Pitt students had the privilege of signing up for any CMU course and it just meant a slightly longer walk to class.

The Cognitive Linguistics degree at CMU in the 90's was an interdisciplinary combination of cognitive science, neurology, computer science and linguistics, and disappeared when the faculty member that created and sponsored it passed away in the mid-1990s. While Pitt is a quality university, I don't think they offer degrees from CMU. Pitt was on my radar and one of the few places I was accepted to, but out of state tuition at the time iirc was $7K/semester, more reasonable than CMU's ~$12K/semester, but I had moved to Virginia the year before, and Virginia Tech's in-state tuition was about $2K/semester with housing (though I was required to purchase $4500 worth of Mac and A/UX license). Today, Virginia Tech's instate tuition is as much as Pitt's out of state tuition was then, which is now about the same as CMU's private tuition was in 1989, and CMU's annual private tuition today costs a little more than an Audi Q5 Prestige.
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