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As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. The shortest resume is just your last name "Zuckerberg" or "Snowden". If you've achieved something impressi

As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. The shortest resume is just your last name "Zuckerberg" or "Snowden". If you've achieved something impressive (sold a company, started a well known web framework, fixed some large horrible government or organizational process) it speaks for itself and the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle.

ryandrake 10y ago
When I'm writing my resume, I generally chop off all but the last 10 or so years of my career, and then chop off anything else that gets me down to one page. When I'm reading them, I simply toss all but the first page into the trash. Nobody reads past the first page anyway. If you can't fit your resume onto one page, that's a communication red flag--you're not skilled at summarizing. It indicates you may have trouble doing senior-y things like presenting to execs and discussing your work cross-functionally, both of which require the ability to distill the main points from the details.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle I would have thought that if there was one thing an interview was not suited to do, it would be detecting con artists. Isn't passing interviews their only core skill?
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  Not for a useful interview. If you tell me you founded and sold a machine learning company but can't explain the pros and cons of using variance versus standard deviation then you didn't sell a machine learning company.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Hm. I have not founded or sold a machine learning company, or even studied the field. But either of those quantities fully determines the other, so I'd really hope that, if they're part of the model, they'd be exactly equivalent to a learning system. Do you mean for measuring goodness of fit between a prediction and the known truth in training data? If you want to assess the presence of knowledge, give a test rather than an interview. The interview is just a way to make it easier for the con artist to snow you.
  - solipsism 10y ago
    One (stddev) is in the same units as the quantity being measured, while the other isn't. I know nothing about machine learning and suck at math and statistics. Did I pass?
    - caub 10y ago
      if I was recruiter, math knowledge would make the difference, it helps even unconsciously for problem solving, logic reasoning, algorithms
      - solipsism 10y ago
        math... helps even unconsciously for problem solving, logic reasoning, algorithms What makes you think this? Anything aside from intuition?
        caub 10y ago
        at least one point that helps math minds is that a lot of math notions are present in programming languages
    - 3pt14159 10y ago
      Yeah, I don't know why I was downvoted, it's a completely legitimate question to ask a data scientist. But anyway, you'd get enough for a follow up question, but not really enough to pass. The key is that the sum of uncorrelated distributions has a variance that is the sum of the variance of those distributions. This isn't true for standard deviation. This is useful so we use variance when we think we're dealing with random variables. Standard deviation isn't as useful for intermediary processes. Another follow up question - actually the first question in my head, but by a mental slip-up I typed out the wrong thing: Why do we use square error when absolute error would do? The answer to this is actually quite illuminating because there are multiple valid but contradictory positions on it, much like the Bayes vs Frequentist debate.
  - BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
    I'd be surprised if there weren't somewhere out there who didn't understand additivity of variance (and linear combination with the covariance terms, or that it is a more natural parameter for the normal distrovution, or some other reason) but had founded and sold a machine learning company. Further, this seems a bit like asking someone with several years of development experience if he knows what a compiler is.
fecak 10y ago
>As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. That's refreshing to hear. I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience. Many people do get emotionally attached to the work they've done. I've worked with people transitioning into tech from other fields, and it is hard for them to swallow the thought of distilling their 10 years as a litigator and law school into maybe 2 lines on a resume. If you can detach yourself from the work, are efficient with words, and you know what employers are looking for, it's not difficult to create a one or two page resume even with lots of experience.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience. As someone who recently did some job hunting I will tell you that while I agree on an idealism level with your comment it's just simply not true in practice. I had many, many companies outright reject my truncated resume even though it provided an outline of years of experience and some top accomplishments simply because it didn't include enough of the buzzwords they were looking for. Resubmitting with my longer, 5 page resume (which I absolutely hate doing)? Accepted. Every time. I will say, however, that if you can apply directly to a person via email (the "Who's Hiring" HN posts are perfect for this, typically) then the shorter resume will work just fine.
  - eterm 10y ago
    For CVs for monster/linked in I have a buzzword bullet list where not everything even gets it's own bullet so it doesn't take up much space. So as a dev one ends up with bullets like (exaggerated here for effect): * C# / .Net (ASP.Net webforms, MVC, WCF, Entity framework) * SQL ( T-SQL, stored procedures, sql-server management) * Python (Django, Flask, south, numpy, scipy) * Javascript (jQuery, ES5, ES2016, webpack, bower, npm) * Front-end frameworks (angular, react, knockout) * Unit testing (mocha, jasmine, chai, nunit, xunit, junit) * sourcesafe, bamboo, trello, docker Yes, there's a danger it can look a bit redundant but it's mostly just there for the box ticking buzzword finding recruiters and prospective employers should understand that too and really be reading the other parts to try to get a better picture of your depth of those and the relevance at your more recent roles.

ryandrake 10y ago

When I'm writing my resume, I generally chop off all but the last 10 or so years of my career, and then chop off anything else that gets me down to one page. When I'm reading them, I simply toss all but the first page into the trash. Nobody reads past the first page anyway. If you can't fit your resume onto one page, that's a communication red flag--you're not skilled at summarizing. It indicates you may have trouble doing senior-y things like presenting to execs and discussing your work cross-functionally, both of which require the ability to distill the main points from the details.

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle I would have thought that if there was one thing an interview was not suited to do, it would be detecting con artists. Isn't passing interviews their only core skill?

3pt14159 10y ago
Not for a useful interview. If you tell me you founded and sold a machine learning company but can't explain the pros and cons of using variance versus standard deviation then you didn't sell a machine learning company.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Hm. I have not founded or sold a machine learning company, or even studied the field. But either of those quantities fully determines the other, so I'd really hope that, if they're part of the model, they'd be exactly equivalent to a learning system. Do you mean for measuring goodness of fit between a prediction and the known truth in training data? If you want to assess the presence of knowledge, give a test rather than an interview. The interview is just a way to make it easier for the con artist to snow you.
- solipsism 10y ago
  One (stddev) is in the same units as the quantity being measured, while the other isn't. I know nothing about machine learning and suck at math and statistics. Did I pass?
  - caub 10y ago
    if I was recruiter, math knowledge would make the difference, it helps even unconsciously for problem solving, logic reasoning, algorithms
    - solipsism 10y ago
      math... helps even unconsciously for problem solving, logic reasoning, algorithms What makes you think this? Anything aside from intuition?
      - caub 10y ago
        at least one point that helps math minds is that a lot of math notions are present in programming languages
  - 3pt14159 10y ago
    Yeah, I don't know why I was downvoted, it's a completely legitimate question to ask a data scientist. But anyway, you'd get enough for a follow up question, but not really enough to pass. The key is that the sum of uncorrelated distributions has a variance that is the sum of the variance of those distributions. This isn't true for standard deviation. This is useful so we use variance when we think we're dealing with random variables. Standard deviation isn't as useful for intermediary processes. Another follow up question - actually the first question in my head, but by a mental slip-up I typed out the wrong thing: Why do we use square error when absolute error would do? The answer to this is actually quite illuminating because there are multiple valid but contradictory positions on it, much like the Bayes vs Frequentist debate.
- BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
  I'd be surprised if there weren't somewhere out there who didn't understand additivity of variance (and linear combination with the covariance terms, or that it is a more natural parameter for the normal distrovution, or some other reason) but had founded and sold a machine learning company. Further, this seems a bit like asking someone with several years of development experience if he knows what a compiler is.

fecak 10y ago

>As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. That's refreshing to hear. I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience. Many people do get emotionally attached to the work they've done. I've worked with people transitioning into tech from other fields, and it is hard for them to swallow the thought of distilling their 10 years as a litigator and law school into maybe 2 lines on a resume. If you can detach yourself from the work, are efficient with words, and you know what employers are looking for, it's not difficult to create a one or two page resume even with lots of experience.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
> I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience. As someone who recently did some job hunting I will tell you that while I agree on an idealism level with your comment it's just simply not true in practice. I had many, many companies outright reject my truncated resume even though it provided an outline of years of experience and some top accomplishments simply because it didn't include enough of the buzzwords they were looking for. Resubmitting with my longer, 5 page resume (which I absolutely hate doing)? Accepted. Every time. I will say, however, that if you can apply directly to a person via email (the "Who's Hiring" HN posts are perfect for this, typically) then the shorter resume will work just fine.
- eterm 10y ago
  For CVs for monster/linked in I have a buzzword bullet list where not everything even gets it's own bullet so it doesn't take up much space. So as a dev one ends up with bullets like (exaggerated here for effect): * C# / .Net (ASP.Net webforms, MVC, WCF, Entity framework) * SQL ( T-SQL, stored procedures, sql-server management) * Python (Django, Flask, south, numpy, scipy) * Javascript (jQuery, ES5, ES2016, webpack, bower, npm) * Front-end frameworks (angular, react, knockout) * Unit testing (mocha, jasmine, chai, nunit, xunit, junit) * sourcesafe, bamboo, trello, docker Yes, there's a danger it can look a bit redundant but it's mostly just there for the box ticking buzzword finding recruiters and prospective employers should understand that too and really be reading the other parts to try to get a better picture of your depth of those and the relevance at your more recent roles.