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Agreed on taking out high school. I'm 28 and recently began taking out all references to college as well a couple years ago (my resume lists my degrees). I ag
by sidsavara 18y ago
Agreed on taking out high school. I'm 28 and recently began taking out all references to college as well a couple years ago (my resume lists my degrees).
I agree dress like the job you want to have, but I disagree with the t-shirt bit. I've worked at 4 different companies, and always show up wearing professional, clean clothes to my interview (suit and tie the first time, since then just button down shirts and dress pants or khakis).
The t-shirt and jeans can wait until you've proven yourself for a few months. I go to work now in shorts and a t-shirt, so this isn't some sour grapes rant. Though I dress casual for work, given a choice between two identical, impeccably groomed, candidates one who came professionally dressed and one who came in shorts and a t-shirt (and that being the only difference), I would be likely to hire the one who came like he was here to interview.
Of course, I would hire someone casually dressed who knows their stuff over an idiot who happens to be wearing a suit, but I don't think there's any reason to put yourself at a disadvantage. Don't overdress, don't underdress - wear clothes appropriate for the interview.
- cperciva 18y agoThe t-shirt and jeans can wait until you've proven yourself for a few months. There's no contradiction between what I said and what you're saying -- we just happen to want different jobs. I don't want a job which has expectations for clothing beyond "yes please". It's up to the original poster to decide what sort of job he wants and dress appropriately for that -- odds are, the job he wants is one which neither of us would want.
- LPTS 18y agoI don't want employees that spend all that time fretting over what they wear. I want employees that would look at me funny if I asked them to dress nice. I'd want to see a funny, bewildered, slightly pained look on their face that said "I'm one of the best people at what I do, I'm doing important work, I could work anywhere, each second I waste on this is something that doesn't go into designing the future, and you want me to worry about wearing what?"
- gaius 18y agoUmm, yeah. And if a candidate had spelling mistakes on his resume, would you think "well, I'm hiring him to code, not to write documentation"? Or would you in fact not even bother to interview him at all?
- LPTS 18y agoWell a resume conveys useful information, which is important. Dress does not. It's a signal to noise ratio thing. Incidentally, bad spelling in an otherwise smart person is a good sign of creativity, because it's correlated with personality types that correlate with creative thinking (when intelligence is evidenced at all).
- gaius 18y agoI am not interested in someone who writes "creative" code that someone else has to debug.
- LPTS 18y agoThat's not what I mean. You are deliberately taking the worst possible interpretation of what I wrote. No one wants typos in code. But, a programmer who's written english is bad, but who is highly intelligent will probably not evidence the same typos in programming as in typing written english. It's the same sort of thing as dyslexia being different at a neurological level in chinese then in english. English dyslexics who learn chinese aren't dyslexic in chinese. Likewise, people who are messy in their english might be extremely good at code. People sure like to hang onto conventional wisdom even when there is plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that they are wrong.
- gaius 18y agoOK, every word processor these days can check your spelling for you. You don't even need to do anything; it will underline words it doesn't know by magic. Given that big a shove in the right direction PLUS the manual proof-reading that ought to be done, it is incomprehensible that typos get through. It can only be carelessness. This isn't an IRC conversation; it's a professional document. Clumsy use of English from someone for whom it isn't their native language is a completely different matter, I don't care about that.
- aswanson 18y agoReferences to high school after any time in college is suspect; at the adult stage you should be referencing adult accomplishments and activities.