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Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

arstechnica.com

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Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#2
I work for a company that makes recruiting products to fortune 500 companies. They don't offer online courses to cashiers working for big retailers, or to truck drivers working for transportation companies.

Jobs at technology companies might be what ArsTechnica and Hacker News readers go for, but those jobs are such a small percentage of the jobs filled every day in the US.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#3
As one data point: a resume has never been relevant to my career. I've never gotten a job or a contract through a resume.

Completed live projects instantly visible on any browser or smartphone with a quick technical explanation have always been far more valuable for me.

You don't need to ask anyone's permission to build amazing software.

(Unfortunately, you continue to need permission to build many other things.)

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#4
All my work is on code I don't own and isn't public facing. I can't take our proprietary code, wrap it up, and put it on GitHub. I also can't provide logins to our proprietary systems for employers to look at.

I certainly hope a resume remains relevant for people in my position, because it's really all I have.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#5
A resume is a listing of what you have done in your life that could be relevant to the job you are applying for. If that is an online course and a couple of open source projects, then this can be just as helpful to your future employer as a list of companies you have worked for.

To resume means to summarize. Your GitHub profile is not a summary, it is a raw dump of everything that you have done without weighting.

So, of course a resume is still relevant today. And it is still up to the applicant to present himself to the employer, because most of the time the applicant is looking for a specific job when the company is not looking for a specific employee.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#6
For what its worth, one of the last hardware devs we hired happened exclusively online. We were adding some biometric hardware to our current software stack and came across a small project online of someone who wrote a java library for the hardware in question.

After a series of emails, we proposed that we should pay him a few months consulting fee - to help us integrate. As a bonus of course, he could take the improvements and fold them back into his his open-source project.

Things continued like this and eventually he proved useful in other ways, so he is permanent hire now.

In this day and age, there really is no excuse for having "no experience" (in the software world at least). Moreover, who really cares about what university you went to if you can prove your immediate usefulness in other ways?

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#7
This is exactly why we started Entelo. We felt that online sources are quickly becoming the "new resume" and that if you draw the trend lines on the data, if it's not obvious now, it will be very soon. Remember, none of the sites referenced in the post (Github, Stack, Coursera, etc.) existed five years ago. What will exist five years from now?

Also, an emerging trend is "Github for X". You have sites like Grabcad (Github for Mechanical Engineers), Dribbble and Behance (Github for Designers), Benchling (Github for Biology), Proformative (Github for Accountants), etc. As these professional communities grow they'll increasingly be looking at by employers.

It's early for this trend but we believe deeply in it.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#8
post #4

All my work is on code I don't own and isn't public facing. I can't take our proprietary code, wrap it up, and put it on GitHub. I also can't provide logins to our proprietary systems for employers to look at. I certainly hope a resume remains relevant for people in my position, because it's really all I have.

Yes, "show me the github" is one of the worst trends for software developers' careers.

I'll always ask for live code from people at interviews, if only to filter out the total posers.

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#9
post #4

All my work is on code I don't own and isn't public facing. I can't take our proprietary code, wrap it up, and put it on GitHub. I also can't provide logins to our proprietary systems for employers to look at. I certainly hope a resume remains relevant for people in my position, because it's really all I have.

Yes, "show me the github" is one of the worst trends for software developers' careers. I'll always ask for live code from people at interviews, if only to filter out the total posers.

[deleted]

Re: Is a resume relevant in the age of online courses and open source projects?

#10
post #4

All my work is on code I don't own and isn't public facing. I can't take our proprietary code, wrap it up, and put it on GitHub. I also can't provide logins to our proprietary systems for employers to look at. I certainly hope a resume remains relevant for people in my position, because it's really all I have.

Yes, "show me the github" is one of the worst trends for software developers' careers. I'll always ask for live code from people at interviews, if only to filter out the total posers.

> Yes, "show me the github" is one of the worst trends for software developers' careers.

On the other hand, there are benefits to posting code online that they can review. Instead of spending hours writing code for each company that you're interviewing with, you can just write code that you're actually interested in and throw it online.

Say you're talking with 20 companies. Each of those 20 interviews have an associated overhead of 3 hours (if you're lucky): 1 hour screening call, 1 hour technical call, 1 hour live coding call. So 60 hours of screening, versus writing some code that might actually be usable by others in the future.

Don't be afraid to say no to live coding interviews. Unless you have nothing to show :-).

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