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I never read the cover letters, nor the "objective" on a resume. I do invest a lot of time finding the right people to join our team, but in a resume, my choice

I never read the cover letters, nor the "objective" on a resume. I do invest a lot of time finding the right people to join our team, but in a resume, my choice to move you to a phone screen will never hinge on those details, and nothing in your resume matters much once we start actually talking. I don't mean to detract from your overall assessment -- i think you've made good points. Edit: My resume advice? Give me your work history with a few sentences for each one, and if you have a "skills summary" section, list only the skills that you've fully mastered. Include only the relevant jobs. This is a resume, not a CV, and it's only goal is to get you to the hiring manager who can make a decision to give you a phone screen.

p4wnc6 10y ago
I could not disagree more about listing only skills you've mastered. As long as you're honest about your proficiency, you should absolutely list skills apart from just what you've mastered. In every job I've ever had, skills that fell way outside the core areas that I have mastered have been critical for success, and skills that were huge parts of the job description, hazing interviews, and smack in the middle of my core areas ended up literally never being used and having no impact on the work whatsoever. This has even occurred in jobs with highly specific needs. I got grilled on GPU programming, then never wrote or read a single line of GPU code. I got grilled on how the Buffer Protocol works in Python, then never implemented an extension class making use of it and never touched anyone else's class that did either -- even though it was "critical" for someone to have "significant experience" in these technologies when I was interviewed. As it turned out, my limited exposure to Python's setuptools and distribution/package management, and my (very limited) experience with an open-source optimization library called CVXOPT ended up dwarfing the usefulness of GPU or Buffer Protocol experience, and neither package management nor quadratic programming were even mentioned anywhere in either of those job listings, nor spoken about at all during interviews. Employers, generally, are utterly terrible at communication or understanding what they need in their next hire, and they revert to simple heuristics, like algorithm or programming language trivia, just to avoid that hard work. There has always seemed to be this silly and inexplicable emphasis in hiring on acting like candidates need to be perfect. They can't say they have a skill unless they are the world fucking grandmaster of that skill. Any honest admission of weakness means you're garbage, instant rejection. It's the same with performance during an interview. Someone clearly articulated an O(N^2) solution under time pressure? Firing squad. If they can't rattle off the optimal solution without hints then omg how did they ever get a college degree? It's just nuts. People don't seem to think much at all about the person's aggregated productivity over time, what they can learn on the job, how their performance in a real-life, low-pressure situation will be different than a gimmicky interview. It's just all of this "we only hire the best" nonsense that leads to an arms race for candidates to overfit to interview processes and creates a whole generation of vapid engineers with no substance beyond looking pretty on paper.
- encoderer 10y ago
  For me, it's simply about signal to noise. Adding every technology you've ever touched doesn't add much value for me. The resume is not a document I'm making a hiring decision from. I want to learn about your skill-set during our interview process, not upfront in long form.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    Big difference between adding the kitchen sink buzzwords vs. adding things you have some notable knowledge or experience with, but not mastery. Also, since you represent about 0.000001% of the people who might make decisions based on what's on my resume, it's not really optimized just for you. It's unfortunately optimized for something like the average, and I'd expect you to be mature enough to understand candidates really can't afford to do otherwise, even if they also don't like trying to do SEO on their own background and experience.
- tcannon 10y ago
  Ding ding ding! Exactly this.
jghn 10y ago
I explicitly don't include a skills summary section because it is a no win proposition. Everyone has a different idea of what it means to list a skill there and invariably at least one interviewer in a loop will ding you for however you decided to lay it out. I might get dinged for not having one, but at least I don't have to worry about it.
mizchief2 10y ago
Yea big thing I look for is that any skills listed are backed up for how they were applied in the work history. And no I don't care that you have used Windows 95,98,XP,NT,Windows 7, etc.

p4wnc6 10y ago

I could not disagree more about listing only skills you've mastered. As long as you're honest about your proficiency, you should absolutely list skills apart from just what you've mastered. In every job I've ever had, skills that fell way outside the core areas that I have mastered have been critical for success, and skills that were huge parts of the job description, hazing interviews, and smack in the middle of my core areas ended up literally never being used and having no impact on the work whatsoever. This has even occurred in jobs with highly specific needs. I got grilled on GPU programming, then never wrote or read a single line of GPU code. I got grilled on how the Buffer Protocol works in Python, then never implemented an extension class making use of it and never touched anyone else's class that did either -- even though it was "critical" for someone to have "significant experience" in these technologies when I was interviewed. As it turned out, my limited exposure to Python's setuptools and distribution/package management, and my (very limited) experience with an open-source optimization library called CVXOPT ended up dwarfing the usefulness of GPU or Buffer Protocol experience, and neither package management nor quadratic programming were even mentioned anywhere in either of those job listings, nor spoken about at all during interviews. Employers, generally, are utterly terrible at communication or understanding what they need in their next hire, and they revert to simple heuristics, like algorithm or programming language trivia, just to avoid that hard work. There has always seemed to be this silly and inexplicable emphasis in hiring on acting like candidates need to be perfect. They can't say they have a skill unless they are the world fucking grandmaster of that skill. Any honest admission of weakness means you're garbage, instant rejection. It's the same with performance during an interview. Someone clearly articulated an O(N^2) solution under time pressure? Firing squad. If they can't rattle off the optimal solution without hints then omg how did they ever get a college degree? It's just nuts. People don't seem to think much at all about the person's aggregated productivity over time, what they can learn on the job, how their performance in a real-life, low-pressure situation will be different than a gimmicky interview. It's just all of this "we only hire the best" nonsense that leads to an arms race for candidates to overfit to interview processes and creates a whole generation of vapid engineers with no substance beyond looking pretty on paper.

encoderer 10y ago
For me, it's simply about signal to noise. Adding every technology you've ever touched doesn't add much value for me. The resume is not a document I'm making a hiring decision from. I want to learn about your skill-set during our interview process, not upfront in long form.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  Big difference between adding the kitchen sink buzzwords vs. adding things you have some notable knowledge or experience with, but not mastery. Also, since you represent about 0.000001% of the people who might make decisions based on what's on my resume, it's not really optimized just for you. It's unfortunately optimized for something like the average, and I'd expect you to be mature enough to understand candidates really can't afford to do otherwise, even if they also don't like trying to do SEO on their own background and experience.
tcannon 10y ago
Ding ding ding! Exactly this.

jghn 10y ago

I explicitly don't include a skills summary section because it is a no win proposition. Everyone has a different idea of what it means to list a skill there and invariably at least one interviewer in a loop will ding you for however you decided to lay it out. I might get dinged for not having one, but at least I don't have to worry about it.

mizchief2 10y ago

Yea big thing I look for is that any skills listed are backed up for how they were applied in the work history. And no I don't care that you have used Windows 95,98,XP,NT,Windows 7, etc.