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As someone who gets to participate in the hiring process more than I'd like to, I look for balance on resumes. If you bring nothing but J2EE 1.4 experience I'm

As someone who gets to participate in the hiring process more than I'd like to, I look for balance on resumes. If you bring nothing but J2EE 1.4 experience I'm going to assume you've carved out a focused niche. I'll steer the interview towards broad, modern practices and technologies. If your resume talks about nothing but modern technologies, I'll try to dive deep to be sure you aren't a dilettante with surface knowledge in a ton of things but no deep capabilities where it matters to $company. In general the best resumes show a balance of deep expertise in foundational tech and exposure to new technologies. A dev might have done Python for a decade but has started poking at Elixir, an ops person knows Linux like the back of their hand before they start talking about Kube, etc.

Frazmatazz 6y ago
Do you have hard data demonstrating that your method actually has greater predictive power for job performance than other methods?
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
  Absolutely not. It's one more approach riddled with bias, human foibles and questionable correlation to results - just like all hiring. All I can say: in my experience, the engineers I've hired with deep (but potentially old) experience and with balanced resumes have been better performers and more likely to stick around than those who bounce around tech to tech.
  - Frazmatazz 6y ago
    I mean, I'm in the same boat as you. I just hate that I have to rely on this type of information, subject to all the flaws and biases of relying on personal experience. In my experience, it's useful to have a couple 'jack-of-all-trades' types on the team, but you wouldn't want all your engineers to be broad but shallow. I did a stint in the military to pay for college, and something we'd point out was that it was better to have something 'good enough' right now than something perfect a thousand miles away. Breadth of experience is also handy when trying to innovate a novel solution. But I don't have any better evidence than you. I've never worked anywhere large enough to have that sort of data where we could demonstrate quantitatively that one method works better than another, and of course the metrics are all fairly arbitrary themselves.

Frazmatazz 6y ago

Do you have hard data demonstrating that your method actually has greater predictive power for job performance than other methods?

35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
Absolutely not. It's one more approach riddled with bias, human foibles and questionable correlation to results - just like all hiring. All I can say: in my experience, the engineers I've hired with deep (but potentially old) experience and with balanced resumes have been better performers and more likely to stick around than those who bounce around tech to tech.
- Frazmatazz 6y ago
  I mean, I'm in the same boat as you. I just hate that I have to rely on this type of information, subject to all the flaws and biases of relying on personal experience. In my experience, it's useful to have a couple 'jack-of-all-trades' types on the team, but you wouldn't want all your engineers to be broad but shallow. I did a stint in the military to pay for college, and something we'd point out was that it was better to have something 'good enough' right now than something perfect a thousand miles away. Breadth of experience is also handy when trying to innovate a novel solution. But I don't have any better evidence than you. I've never worked anywhere large enough to have that sort of data where we could demonstrate quantitatively that one method works better than another, and of course the metrics are all fairly arbitrary themselves.