Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#71

Post by bigiain » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:52 AM UTC

viuadi wrote: post #68

BurritoAlPastor wrote: post #46

I see a lot of resumes from people who talk a lot about the techs they've used, but talk not at all about what they used them for. I no longer give these people phone screens. Also, be kind about formatting because HR software is rarely kind to it, but some formatting errors can't be attributed there. The text on the third of someone's four bullet points has extra leading space? They're not going to be able to find w…

Some of us do this because we signed a nondisclosure agreement, not because we don't care about the product. As a developer, I would love to talk about the context of my work. It's just that I can't, because my company told me to keep it a secret. I would consider it more of a red flag if the candidate volunteered too much information about projects on their resume. Let's say you write that you increased revenue by 1…

So explain that. An occasional believable "details under NDA" actually looks good (it send me a message you aren't about to tell your _next_ recruiter or employer all _my_ internal secrets).

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#72

Post by notyourwork » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:52 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #22

notyourwork wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how many jobs you've had and how old you are. If you have 3 jobs each being 1 year that would be a red flag. If you have 10 years of experience, 1 job for a year and the other 2 split across 9 years I would be less concerned. An outlier versus a pattern is where I see a bad situation versus a concern for hire. Personally, spending <18 months in a company or on a team doesn't yield enough time to accompl…

It also highly depends on where you were working. Bouncing between Google and Amazon and Cisco and IBM at 9 month intervals is a pretty big WTF. Going between a few series A startups in the same period of time might be perfectly explainable.

I would agree with that, my point of reference is from working the last 3 years at one of those and finding lots of mediocre engineers who bounce from team to team or company to company every 12-18 months. They deliver, leave technical debt and move on. Its a facade of a good engineer and its hard to catch until you are the one cleaning up the mess or replacing the mess.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#73

Post by viraptor » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:57 AM UTC

sgillen wrote: post #67

viraptor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no consistent theme in jobs, (...) one in e-commerce, one in gaming Not sure why that's a bad thing. I've done telco, cloud provider, ecommerce, embedded systems. I'm happy with that - it gave me much better experience on a path towards an architect position than any one industry on its own could.

I don’t think it’s terrible either. But if I’m reading your resume for a non architect position, I might be thinking that your going to come in, learn the field for a year, and then leave. That’s not the most attractive hire.

I guess the company's response is also interesting for me. It could be yours. Or it could be: this is a person who can fill in another role in the future and will already have a lot of company experience. (I get that this is not possible under some reasonable company size)

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#74

Post by candiodari » Thu, May 03, 2018, 2:57 AM UTC

ganashaw wrote: post #41

I've written about a few things on my blog ( http://blog.debugmyresume.com/2018/04/11/quality_over_quanti... ), but any time someone lists more than 3-4 programming languages, I'm immediately skeptical.

Why ? I've worked on compilers and theoretical programming languages and as such, I have notions of a dozen programming languages. I don't claim to be good/expert on more than 3 though.

But if someone does this on occassion as a hobby, how is it weird to know, or have some projects in 10 or even 20 programming languages ?

Also many projects are programming languages in themselves (Greenspun's 10th law). Tensorflow, most scheduling packages I've seen, prolog, several things I've written ... Once a project grows beyond a certain large size, it tends to become a programming language in itself.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#75

Post by spyckie2 » Thu, May 03, 2018, 3:25 AM UTC

Disclaimer: I work at a recruiting company.

Resumes should be good enough to get you in the door, no more. The typical recruiter/hr scans a resume for 5 seconds. Two things stick out in a bad way - typos and jumpiness. Anything else is usually forgiven, or subjective based on the person reading it. This is coming from someone who sees anywhere from 10-50 resumes a day.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#76

Post by Orthodoxy » Thu, May 03, 2018, 3:29 AM UTC

> "many short stints of employment"

I change jobs all the time because I work on what is interesting or highly paying for as long as it entertains me or makes me a killing.

Startups go bankrupt all the time, and big companies will fire tens of thousands of people at the drop of a hat. Pensions will be canceled, jobs restructured, and bonuses occasionally distributed in lieu of raises.

The company has no loyalty to you, they only want you to make them money -- so why should your goals be any different? It's hilarious of them to ask for that when for 50 years the business schools have been teaching them that people are cogs. Milk them and move on when it becomes boring or someone else has a bigger carrot, since job security no longer exists outside of the government.

If the company had been proven, over decades, not to fire people simply because the profit margin wasn't high enough, I would have more incentive for loyalty. But even then, any new CEO can change everything. Employment is now an adversarial game.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#77

Post by bowlich » Thu, May 03, 2018, 3:30 AM UTC

pm wrote: post #16

nickthemagicman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to ask that as well! What's the HN community's view of a reasonable amount of time at an employer? Given that startups are way crazier, require way longer hours, and are less stable financially and politically than normally established companies. Asking because I've worked for several startups and tech management has changed several times in a year for both of them, they loose and gain huge streams of rev…

This is highly contextual. I've got a series of 3 month stints on my CV as I'm a contractor. I usually come in to fix things, but by the time they call me in most of the money has been spent on shitty agencies.

If you're a contractor wouldn't your resume show continuous employment for one company (yourself) with each 3-month stint listed as a client?

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#78

Post by bcbrown » Thu, May 03, 2018, 3:46 AM UTC

noarchy wrote: post #37

Fsp2WFuH wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but some of my github activity is best be kept private.

I think Github profiles can now show activity in private repos (without showing the actual code, obviously), if you choose to turn this feature on. This is potentially useful for those of us who have 99% of their commits in private repos.

However, it gets removed when you're removed from that private repo, I believe. A prior employer used Github, and my worked showed up on that activity graph thing, but when I left, it all disappeared.

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#79

Post by bb88 » Thu, May 03, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

matt_the_bass wrote: post #25

bb88 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lots of short stints employment. It costs a lot to find, hire and on board someone. Ideally I’d like them to stick around for a while. This is a self inflicted problem across all companies. As long as companies are not willing to pay the market salary, people will move elsewhere. > - poor formatting. If they don’t care enough to make their resume look clean and neat, why would I expect them to care enough to be tho…

> This is a self inflicted problem across all companies. As long as companies are not willing to pay the market salary, people will move elsewhere. Why do you say this? Surely underpaying people is one way to make them leave but not the only reason. Some people think “the grass is always greener” elsewhere. Others don’t last long because they are not easy to work with. Others are not great employees and so are encour…

> Why do you say this?

I say it because I keep seeing articles like this one [1] all the time: "Workers who stay with a company longer than two years are said to get paid 50% less."

And that matches my personal experience. After spending 14 years at a company giving me 3 percent raises year after year, I've switched jobs frequently, but usually with large pay raises with every job. 8 years out and 4 jobs later now I'm making double the salary I was at the long term job I held.

> Some people think “the grass is always greener” elsewhere. Others don’t last long because they are not easy to work with. Others are not great employees and so are encouraged to move along sooner rather than later. Lots of possible reasons. Most do not signal the type of person I want to hire.

Sure, much of what you say is true. I think it may have been valid maybe 20 years ago.

Lately, though, I think people want to stay relevant in a field with so much churn it makes your head spin. So they see the leading edge of where tech is going, and want to get there first. And if a company has tagged someone as the "Java engineer", it can be hard for that person if they want to switch to ruby on rails, or they want to expand into machine learning but their company doesn't need the skill (or they already have experts doing that work.)

As for me, I've learned to let a technology get established before jumping into it, but even at that rate, the tech I learned 5 years ago, is not relevant today. In college, what I learned lasted maybe 15 years. (Yeah, I'm old).

So yeah, my resume would surely hit your circular file. But I'm in good company I suppose.

The mean job length at google is only 1.1 years even though 84% of people are highly satisfied. [2] Compare this with Eastman Kodak where the median is 20 years, and only 45% of the employees are highly satisfied.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3055035/you-should-plan-on-switc...

[2] https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/full...

Re: Ask HN: What do you consider resume red flags?

#80

Post by flukus » Thu, May 03, 2018, 3:52 AM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #14

matt_the_bass wrote: post #3

- lots of short stints employment. It costs a lot to find, hire and on board someone. Ideally I’d like them to stick around for a while. - lists of buzzwords without clear descriptions of what they actually did. I don’t care about “fashionable” terms. I wanted heard about concrete things they’ve done. - poor formatting. If they don’t care enough to make their resume look clean and neat, why would I expect them to car…

> lots of short stints employment. It costs a lot to find, hire and on board someone. Ideally I’d like them to stick around for a while. This is a self inflicted problem across all companies. As long as companies are not willing to pay the market salary, people will move elsewhere. > - poor formatting. If they don’t care enough to make their resume look clean and neat, why would I expect them to care enough to be tho…

> This is a self inflicted problem across all companies. As long as companies are not willing to pay the market salary, people will move elsewhere.

Back when I was on the short term merry-go-round it was because companies hiring were only offering 3 month contracts. After a few of these in a row places offering full time won't look at you and even interviews for 3 month contracts ask "so why so many short term contracts?".

I was well into this career trap before lucking out on one of the 3 month contract that forgot to stop paying me. Eventually they "fixed the glitch" but it still got me back on track career wise.