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Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

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Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#111

Post by elzbardico »

keiferski wrote: post #91
fuzzythinker wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read resumes and that "bs" gets one negative point. Another negative point and resume goes to trash bin.

Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.

Because the relationship between individual things in what a developer do and financial results is not so easily measured.

There are for example a couple of projects where I worked, that should I failed to do my part, the company could be fined, and even maybe arrested. Thing is, I don't fucking have idea of what those fines could be, and of course it was a multiple team effort and it would be hilarious for me to claim credit alone.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#112

Post by a2code »

Did any of you laid of web devs try making a CV site for laid off software engineers? Seems like the time is now. Here is an example. The frontpage contains a form to fill out (a CV template), and a login registration interface (similar to Hacker News). Once the form is filled out, website/your-username.pdf is the generated CV, that you can share only by linking.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#113

Post by brianwawok »

elzbardico wrote: post #105

As someone else said, forget the one-page rule, you're cutting content that it takes some experience and good will to infer from what you wrote. Screeners receive a lot of resumes, and you don't want them to be left wondering if your experience is relevant or not, at least not on this market. 2 to 3 pages for someone with a few years of experience is perfectly acceptable in software development.

When I’m hiring if still prefer 1, and give negative points to anyone that goes longer.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#115

Post by Volundr »

lowercased wrote: post #108
Volundr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to marketing :-). But in all seriousness, in the scenario you describe above, I'd question if X belongs on your resume at all. If you did it, and it was worthless, is it something to brag about? There are no doubt exceptions to this, where something is really technically interesting, but honestly, 99% of the time, what you did is just not that novel; you are better off leaving it off your resume and instead d…

The OP may not be constitutionally capable of finding little nuggets of positivity from the midst of huge failures. Already responded to someone else, but the OP was told to add the outcomes, not just what they did. Sometimes there are no positive outcomes to list, and listing negative ones just drags everyone down. Putting "implemented $FOO" may be all you can reasonably put in writing.

Sure, I have one 6 month job where all I can reasonably list is "implemented audit logging across all our projects to ensure HIPAA compliance."

It was the most demoralizing job I've ever had, and I'm grateful that I WAS laid off (easy to say now that I have a new job). Making every line on your resume a banger may be impossible. But if you've got job after job of "implemented SAAS app in Django", it starts to say something about you. Looking at it from a hiring manager's perspective, why would I want to talk to the guy who "built data analytics tools with SQL Server", vs the guy who "reduced the processing time on our main data warehouse from 24 to 2 hours, allowing us to provide real-time analytics to our customers". I've got 100 resumes with SQL Server experience. The first one had a job; maybe they were good at it, perhaps they weren't, I don't know. I have literally nothing to go on. The second at least accomplished something (or is a liar; yes, I'm aware of this possibility). If you don't give me a reason to speak to you, specifically, you are just hoping you win the lottery and happen to be one of the ones I call in.

> but the OP was told to add the outcomes

Outcomes don't have to be the final outcome of the whole project. The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#116

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

freedomben wrote: post #99

I do hiring in the US not the UK, but I'm only (I'm guessing) a few years older than you so you probably had the "keep it to one page" rule pounded into your head. I get a lot of resumes, and that is definitely not the case anymore. Two to three pages is perfectly fine. I would suggest: 1. Add a list of skills and/or technologies you're particularly good in. You can include stuff you've used but aren't current in, bu…

This is good advice no matter what country you're in. Best advice I ever got is two things:

1. Make it easy for someone reading your CV to quickly know your core skills and experience (i.e. your points 1 and 2).

2. Don't just say you did the job, that's a given. Talk about specific points for each role you are particularly proud of. These will become talking points in an interview.

Saying something like "worked on front end and back end systems" tells me almost nothing about you. What did you do on them? Anything interesting about it, any tricky technical or business problems you solved?

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#118

Post by fuzzythinker »

keiferski wrote: post #91
fuzzythinker wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read resumes and that "bs" gets one negative point. Another negative point and resume goes to trash bin.

Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.

How do you prove that X and only X cause the company's revenue or some other metrics increased by Y? And let's say you can just for sake of it, how does that metric gives you any idea how good an engineer is? When I read a resume, anything that is beyond his skills (soft & tech) and experience is just sugar coating. A little is acceptable, too much and it gives me a bad feel for the candidate.

Re: Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

#120

Post by araes »

General advice, make at least a slightly different resume for each group / organization / company that you're applying to that are targeted to their hiring spiel and filtering forms.

The concept is not that bad, as you can break up the resume into blocks of info, and then just rearrange based on whatever the job posting really wants to emphasize.

Even just rearranging the primary skills (languages, frameworks, ect..) around into a feature block targeted toward the specific recruiter may help. Some people are diligent about reading through resumes and trying to give each a chance. However, when the tragedy of the commons gets bad enough, and people can just LLM-spam responses, the interest in "give each a chance" probably goes down.

Ex: UK.Indeed has 3100 software engineer jobs in the last 2 weeks listed. https://uk.indeed.com/jobs?q=software+engineer&fromage=14&vj...

A GitHub, Inc job has: "React experience on a senior level. 3+ years of hands-on experience in modern web stacks." Your resume has a listing for React, yet its not clear if that was a major component, or just some minor detail. "Worked on backend and frontend systems for this fashion retailer" And the description sounds like a lazy highschooler. To get the job you would have to tell them why you actually have web-stack skill GitHub would care about.

J.P. Morgan job has: "Proficient in coding in React, TypeScript, JavaScript" You have those, they're just mostly buried and not emphasized. The job also has "Familiarity with Investment Banking, FinTech, or Financial Markets" You (appear) to have those. "Worked on industry-leading tools used by cinema chains to manage their estates." However, it is in no way emphasized and if it was just sent out shotgun, would probably be ignored in favor of a resume that emphasized the React, Typescript and FinTech work.

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