24 ms·

The greatest resume I've ever seen

154 points by forrestbrazeal 5y ago

zohvek 5y ago
Was really hoping an article titled 'the greatest resume I've ever seen' would show me the resume... darn
- forrestbrazeal 5y ago
  It's linked in the post! https://dsresume.com https://dsresume.com
  - zohvek 5y ago
    whoops! my bad. Good eye and thank you
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  In fact, it doesn't look like anything is being resumed at all. He's switching to a different job sector, not resuming the old one.
  - jacurtis 5y ago
    This might be a confusion around a cultural translation. "The Greatest Resume I've Ever Seen" is referring to an American "Resume" which is what we call our CV (Curriculum Vitae). In the US we use the word "Resume" to describe this 1-2 page document that outlines our skills, job history, and qualifications in order to apply for a job. So for example in the post, this is the Resume/CV that they are referring to: https://dsresume.com/ https://dsresume.com/ So it isn't referencing the verb "to resume", but is instead referencing the noun "Resume", which is an American colloquialism for a CV, which is to be a piece of literature to describe qualifications for a job. While I am American, i lived in France and England for a while and over there, the term "Resume" was completely foreign, but CV was something everyone understood. So that is why I thought I would shine light on this. (Unless maybe you were meaning to make a joke, sorry I took the question literally)
jb1991 5y ago
It’s come full circle. I’ve often heard people (working developers) say over the years that software engineers are basically just digital plumbers. And the job often feels that way. Now we have proof that the skills do in fact overlap quite a bit with plumbing.
- josefresco 5y ago
  My old boss (web development) said in 2003ish that "we're just plumbers" and at the time (I was young) it offended me as I thought as "technologists" we were "special". When I went out on my own, I realized he was right.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Plumbers are technologists as well, really. Just a different kind of technology...
    - anamax 5y ago
      Plumbers are essential for civilization. Pretty much everyone else isn't.
      - paulryanrogers 5y ago
        If I had to pick one essential profession it would be farmers. Even with peak efficiency it's work that must be done to sustain modern population sizes.
        effingwewt 5y ago
        No, it's truly plumbing. We could not have any human gatherings close to what we have without plumbing. People could grow their own food, eat straight nutrients if we had to. Without plumbing you have no waste drain and no flowing water. I imagine you forgot about the irrigation aspect of farming. Discovering plumbing, waste disposal and aqueducts[1] allow society to live in close quarters. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
> His reasoning: "Wherever sewer odor can get in, so can smoke … except we can see smoke with a flashlight." Anyone else get the urge to build a smell detector machine with an arduino or rpi?
- dhosek 5y ago
  Not at all. Not everything needs a digital solution.
  - sleepysysadmin 5y ago
    >Not at all. Not everything needs a digital solution. Fair enough.
  - datameta 5y ago
    Not all things are made because they need to be made. But then those things can be adapted to solve a problem someone needs solved.
- datameta 5y ago
  Embedded ML smell detector: https://www.inputmag.com/tech/this-ai-nose-will-help-you-sniff-out-your-surroundings https://www.inputmag.com/tech/this-ai-nose-will-help-you-sni...
monster_group 5y ago
Interviewer - "That's impressive Daniel. Now can you invert a binary tree on the whiteboard?"
- arenaninja 5y ago
  Recently I went through a phone screen by a gentleman I imagine to be in his 50s or 60s and it was an immensely pleasant experience. No gotcha questions and any time I mentioned how his problem reminded me of so-and-so tech he would gush in excitement that he also worked in that tech Compare to a recent interview with the world's best employer (tm): the interviewer was young, was upset that my solution wasn't written in Java (???), and when I described my experience I talked about dashboards and he didn't know what that was. I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart!
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    > I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart! It’s at this point that I would end the interview and let them know it doesn’t feel like it would be a good fit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.
  - mcntsh 5y ago
    > shouldn't have to do no learnin' Expecting engineers to develop skills they don't learn/use in their actual professions to prove they're capable of working a job makes no sense. If these leetcode puzzles were actually relevant, why do so many engineers have to spend time outside of work "grinding" in order to get better at them?
user_named 5y ago
This is so heavily editorialized. No mention of how he actually learnt to program. But they did smear some stuff on his face before taking that photo.
- dominojab 5y ago
  they need to sell those 49$ books somehow.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
engmgrmgr 5y ago
It’s a small sample size, but highly motivated self taught folks who come from tough blue collar careers that I’ve seen have been pretty reliable and committed. I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.
- wpietri 5y ago
  For sure. My summer jobs were in restaurants and factories. It deeply shaped my notion of what work is. It's been a long time, and I'm still excited I get to work from my house basically solving puzzles. It has downsides, though. One thing you learn in blue-collar businesses is that the direct work is primary, with other stuff secondary. In a restaurant, nobody shuts down during the lunch rush to talk with everybody. In a factory, everybody understands that the machines keep going; any administration is done very much on the margins. So it's maddening to me that in most office contexts, my schedule fills up with meetings and I'm expected to get my work done around them. And that nobody sees that as a problem, because that's just office culture.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    Oh wow. Thanks for the distinction. This cleared up something for me that was knocking in the back of my mind. I had the same feeling having had a lot of blue collar jobs while studying. Discussions/management was scheduled around getting work done. I was working as a cook once and the real chef (I was studying literature and history at that time) and I were doing reviews of the evening after the kitchen was closed, cleaned and we were sitting at the bar drinking our one final drink of the evening. It was a little bit like a sprint review with the sprint being just an evening long. Sprint planning so to speak happened before guests arrived and the restaurant opened. We prepared the kitchen, chopped stuff for salads, prepared sauces and stuff and were discussing who would do what when the rush started. So even without knowing the actual ordering of dishes and the amount of every specific dish we roughly knew what to expect (how many orders aka tickets we would have in the sprint/evening). So we had a sprint planning, a sprint and a (internal) review. And our service people would give us feedback on what went well and what went wrong also, because they had the direct guest feedback.
wpietri 5y ago
This is great. Occasionally I wonder what I'd be doing if I weren't a software developer. I suspect I'd be a mediocre car mechanic. I'd be great at the weird and interesting problems, but bored to tears by the standard, unchallenging work. And crabby about it, of course.
- riekus 5y ago
  That was exactly me as a car mechanic, finding the problem that no one couldn't find? Awesome, but even doing the work to fix it after diagnosed it was boring for me, not to mention the thousands of tire changes, oil changes... So boring. Sold everything and travelled for 4 years where I worked on projects of my own (programming) and being self taught I planned to be a programmer when I came back (now) but thinking about it... I don't think I would like the day to day work, typing code like a monkey on the que of a superior, it honestly feels like programmers are the new factory workers of the industrial revolution. Also doesn't help that I am in the Netherlands, where it isn't paid as exceptional as in the US, it maybe would make it bearable. My big problem now, what am I going to do...
  - askonomm 5y ago
    I recommend joining a smaller company or start-up, that way you have plenty of interesting things to work on, and won't be bogged down to being a "code monkey", as you can influence architectural decisions, and so on. It's the bigger companies with a very routine "process" that usually makes you feel like a line worker.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Plenty of dev jobs are as you describe, but not all of them! For example, right now I'm working for a non-profit. Meaningful work, smart colleagues, and a fair bit of agency. It doesn't pay as well as a fancy tech company, but I get by. You should also check out groups that are more niche. For example, a friend of mine is part of the Copenhagen user group for Extreme Programming. That's a method that's focused on a good developer experience. And in my experience, niche methods and languages tend to be used more at non-awful companies. So stay away from the big, boring companies, or at least the boring parts of them. Look for small, independent groups with clear purposes and close connections to the users.
mettamage 5y ago
I've seen carpenters at work. I'm not a carpenter myself. Whenever a carpenter would explain their thought process to me it felt like two things: * I don't understand their technical terms. * The way they explain their thought process when something goes wrong, feels very much like software engineers fixing a bug. There are differences but this, to me, was the most striking similarity.
- packetlost 5y ago
  Problem solving is problem solving
stuff4ben 5y ago
So... smart and gets things done. Honestly that's all I look for on a resume. You also have to talk about it in an interview. I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tell me the first thing about programming but I could tell he had the chops to figure things out and that he had a passion for things getting done.
- sdoering 5y ago
  I just came of a call with a a potential hire. I recommended her to a second round because of three things: * She would culturally fit while still bringing something new to the tam * She doesn't know Web Analytics, but has done market research, built html prototypes and has basic knowledge in JS, python, html, SPSS and some other things * She is self motivated and shows this because she actually learned all these skills in her last job because she wanted to and it made her job more easy. I strongly believe she would learn the technical ins and outs of Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics quite fast. The rest is not important. I don't care that she has not worked with AA oder GA. If it were my decision I would have hired her on the spot.
  - stuff4ben 5y ago
    The self-motivation aspect you mentioned is also critical. It's these soft questions that reveal so much about a person's character that speak to me as much as or sometimes greater than certifications or degrees do. It's also why resume screening done by HR drones or worse, AI, are so problematic. Unless I need someone to do an exact thing extremely fast, I'd much prefer a generalist with a sharp mind, proven "gets shit done" attitude and experience, and is motivated to do the right thing.
  - jasonpeacock 5y ago
    > She would culturally fit What does this mean? This is a very loaded term, and without qualitative data it results in biased hiring. Usually, it means "she's young, white, and college educated, just like the rest of us". People don't need to culturally fit to excel at a role.
jeffrallen 5y ago
> One minute he was wrangling sewer pipelines - the next minute, CI/CD pipelines I've seen CI/CD configs where you couldn't tell the difference! :)
- t-writescode 5y ago
  Hey now, that’s an insult to indoor plumbing xD I wish some CI/CD pipelines were as good as sewers
drcode 5y ago
The best college application is still from Clyde Tombaugh, who was able to put in "discovered Pluto" when he applied.
- Imnimo 5y ago
  Best grad school application is maybe John Nash. His recommendation later just said that "he is a mathematical genius".
- ableal 5y ago
  I heard that Sakharov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov ) just used two lines: - Hero of the Soviet Union - Nobel Prize
  - mosselman 5y ago
    I think I'll do that as well next time I apply for a job. See where it lands me. If they actually check if I've won a Nobel Prize and find out I haven't, I'll just call it a career hack, that should resonate enough in today's world. The meanings "Hero" and "Soviet Union" are both up for discussion, so I think I could bluf my way into being believed about that part at least.
    - ableal 5y ago
      It's actually a decoration, like the Medal of Freedom or the Legion d'honneur
taneq 5y ago
> He didn't know he was drawing a cloud architecture diagram. No, cloud architects don’t know they’re drawing engineered prints.
JshWright 5y ago
"Until I met Daniel, I actually didn't know that "smoke testing" was a term with a literal smoke-related meaning. I'd always heard it used in the context of software tests. Daniel used a tracing technique to follow a problem to its source, instead of just making random guesses." I've always known "smoke testing" to refer to the mythical magic smoke that makes all electronics work. Smoke testing is turning something on for the first time to see if you're going to let the magic smoke out.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  This- I knew the electrical sense that early software engineers working on hobby computers probably got it from, where it refers to wiring something up, plugging it in for the first time and seeing if it lights on fire / creates smoke. I guess there is a dual origin though https://medium.com/@AikoPath/about-the-origin-of-smoke-testing-and-the-confusion-it-comes-with-dfa18eb8ce0 https://medium.com/@AikoPath/about-the-origin-of-smoke-testi...
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    That reminds me of a story[0] my digital electronics instructor once told me. He was on a team working on satellite[1] electronics and had the whole thing laid out on breadboard. It wasn't working, and they suspected it was a short, but with so many connections everywhere it would take forever to find. So they decided to crank up the input current until the short started burning and locate it that way. It apparently didn't cause anything to smoke, but eventually someone did notice the orange-hot wire that was causing the problem. [0] I have a terrible memory so details may be incorrect. [1] IIRC this guy had worked on geostar satellites and the hubble, but I'm not sure if this story was about either.
    - JshWright 5y ago
      Yeah, this is not uncommon as a testing technique. Fuse keeps blowing? Replace it with a bigger fuse (or a heavy gauge wire) and eventually something else will pop (hopefully the bad component).
throwaway212135 5y ago
When viewing the resume, Safari crashes when the browser is minimized/scaled down.
jasonladuke0311 5y ago
If companies truly care about diversity of thought as they say they do, there is a massive untapped group who really bring fresh perspectives: older career-changers. I might be biased as I belong to that group, but I have met some fantastic people from that group.
- cvhashim 5y ago
  I had a tech lead who was once a chef before he switched careers into tech.
0des 5y ago
Honestly who hasn't ended a day of cloud work tired, sweating, and covered in shit?
sly010 5y ago
Inspiring story if you don't already work "in cloud" but as someone with a decade of experience, it somehow has an opposite effect on me. This story highlights how un-glamorous our job can be: tracking down (memory) leaks, fixing (bit) rotten hardware and obsessing over (code) smells, etc. It makes me want to quit.
eps 5y ago
tl;dr - It's a promo post for a book (at 50% off no less) and its author. The direct link to the greatest resume on question is this - https://dsresume.com https://dsresume.com
- riffic 5y ago
  you know the book itself is highly overpriced. It'd be much more worthwhile at the $5 to $10 price point. someone who just bought a copy to skim through.
  - JBlue42 5y ago
    Agreed. It's 133 pages. Content is good for those like myself trying to answer "Where to start" with cloud stuff. Still cheaper than LinuxAcademy/ACloudGuru. If it leads to a six-figure career, a $24 investment is worth it I guess.
    - forrestbrazeal 5y ago
      Like with any info product, a lot of the value here comes from what you put into it (the book contains dozens if not hundreds of hours worth of project ideas) - but I'll just add for posterity that part of the value of that sticker price is an included biweekly newsletter that provides inside referrals to hand-curated cloud jobs. We've seen great response to this newsletter so far, including multiple folks getting job offers: https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/newsletter https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/newsletter
      - JBlue42 5y ago
        Yes, I should've brought up the newsletter as an additional resource. The $24 is still the 50% off price. I didn't have any issues dropping that amount on it despite being unemployed because I already knew you from your newsletter and as a guest on Last Week in AWS / Screaming in the Cloud. For someone outside of tech, whose not used to those prices for an ebook, it might be prohibitive. Especially when they'll want to spend $40 on a course by Adrian Cantrill (I would warn them away from ACG) then the $150 for exams. Brand new Kindle books go for $14.99 typically then settle to around $9.99 and can go lower depending on what publishers want to do. It seems things are going well at your price point though and that's something for anyone doing self-publishing to consider. It's ok to still throw out an opinion that at face value it 'seems' expensive. :) I'm glad so many people are getting traction out of it. I look forward to diving in further myself over the course of the next year. The thing about the tech world I appreciate are all the efforts of people to give back, including yours.
nicwolff 5y ago
Between "Amazon Web Services" and "Plumbing" he lists "Backflow Prevention and Cross Connection Control Inspector/Tester" and... I'm not quite sure if that's a cloud architecture skill or a plumbing skill!
kerblang 5y ago
Just to be clear, running smoke through a sewer line is not a genius move, just standard practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IpLABJw2KU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IpLABJw2KU But certainly finding problems in old systems is a valuable skill, and it requires a willingness to do dirty work that many folks turn their nose up at, so to speak.

Was really hoping an article titled 'the greatest resume I've ever seen' would show me the resume... darn

forrestbrazeal 5y ago
It's linked in the post! https://dsresume.com https://dsresume.com
- zohvek 5y ago
  whoops! my bad. Good eye and thank you
mnw21cam 5y ago
In fact, it doesn't look like anything is being resumed at all. He's switching to a different job sector, not resuming the old one.
- jacurtis 5y ago
  This might be a confusion around a cultural translation. "The Greatest Resume I've Ever Seen" is referring to an American "Resume" which is what we call our CV (Curriculum Vitae). In the US we use the word "Resume" to describe this 1-2 page document that outlines our skills, job history, and qualifications in order to apply for a job. So for example in the post, this is the Resume/CV that they are referring to: https://dsresume.com/ https://dsresume.com/ So it isn't referencing the verb "to resume", but is instead referencing the noun "Resume", which is an American colloquialism for a CV, which is to be a piece of literature to describe qualifications for a job. While I am American, i lived in France and England for a while and over there, the term "Resume" was completely foreign, but CV was something everyone understood. So that is why I thought I would shine light on this. (Unless maybe you were meaning to make a joke, sorry I took the question literally)

jb1991 5y ago

It’s come full circle. I’ve often heard people (working developers) say over the years that software engineers are basically just digital plumbers. And the job often feels that way. Now we have proof that the skills do in fact overlap quite a bit with plumbing.

josefresco 5y ago
My old boss (web development) said in 2003ish that "we're just plumbers" and at the time (I was young) it offended me as I thought as "technologists" we were "special". When I went out on my own, I realized he was right.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Plumbers are technologists as well, really. Just a different kind of technology...
  - anamax 5y ago
    Plumbers are essential for civilization. Pretty much everyone else isn't.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      If I had to pick one essential profession it would be farmers. Even with peak efficiency it's work that must be done to sustain modern population sizes.
      - effingwewt 5y ago
        No, it's truly plumbing. We could not have any human gatherings close to what we have without plumbing. People could grow their own food, eat straight nutrients if we had to. Without plumbing you have no waste drain and no flowing water. I imagine you forgot about the irrigation aspect of farming. Discovering plumbing, waste disposal and aqueducts[1] allow society to live in close quarters. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

> His reasoning: "Wherever sewer odor can get in, so can smoke … except we can see smoke with a flashlight." Anyone else get the urge to build a smell detector machine with an arduino or rpi?

dhosek 5y ago
Not at all. Not everything needs a digital solution.
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >Not at all. Not everything needs a digital solution. Fair enough.
- datameta 5y ago
  Not all things are made because they need to be made. But then those things can be adapted to solve a problem someone needs solved.
datameta 5y ago
Embedded ML smell detector: https://www.inputmag.com/tech/this-ai-nose-will-help-you-sniff-out-your-surroundings https://www.inputmag.com/tech/this-ai-nose-will-help-you-sni...

monster_group 5y ago

Interviewer - "That's impressive Daniel. Now can you invert a binary tree on the whiteboard?"

arenaninja 5y ago
Recently I went through a phone screen by a gentleman I imagine to be in his 50s or 60s and it was an immensely pleasant experience. No gotcha questions and any time I mentioned how his problem reminded me of so-and-so tech he would gush in excitement that he also worked in that tech Compare to a recent interview with the world's best employer (tm): the interviewer was young, was upset that my solution wasn't written in Java (???), and when I described my experience I talked about dashboards and he didn't know what that was. I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart!
- vxNsr 5y ago
  > I described it as charts and he didn't know what that was. I described it as graphs and he also didn't know what that was. The interviewer had a bit of an accent so maybe it was a language issue but I had never run into someone who hasn't heard of a chart! It’s at this point that I would end the interview and let them know it doesn’t feel like it would be a good fit.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
moron4hire 5y ago
Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.
- mcntsh 5y ago
  > shouldn't have to do no learnin' Expecting engineers to develop skills they don't learn/use in their actual professions to prove they're capable of working a job makes no sense. If these leetcode puzzles were actually relevant, why do so many engineers have to spend time outside of work "grinding" in order to get better at them?

user_named 5y ago

This is so heavily editorialized. No mention of how he actually learnt to program. But they did smear some stuff on his face before taking that photo.

dominojab 5y ago
they need to sell those 49$ books somehow.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

engmgrmgr 5y ago

It’s a small sample size, but highly motivated self taught folks who come from tough blue collar careers that I’ve seen have been pretty reliable and committed. I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.

wpietri 5y ago
For sure. My summer jobs were in restaurants and factories. It deeply shaped my notion of what work is. It's been a long time, and I'm still excited I get to work from my house basically solving puzzles. It has downsides, though. One thing you learn in blue-collar businesses is that the direct work is primary, with other stuff secondary. In a restaurant, nobody shuts down during the lunch rush to talk with everybody. In a factory, everybody understands that the machines keep going; any administration is done very much on the margins. So it's maddening to me that in most office contexts, my schedule fills up with meetings and I'm expected to get my work done around them. And that nobody sees that as a problem, because that's just office culture.
- sdoering 5y ago
  Oh wow. Thanks for the distinction. This cleared up something for me that was knocking in the back of my mind. I had the same feeling having had a lot of blue collar jobs while studying. Discussions/management was scheduled around getting work done. I was working as a cook once and the real chef (I was studying literature and history at that time) and I were doing reviews of the evening after the kitchen was closed, cleaned and we were sitting at the bar drinking our one final drink of the evening. It was a little bit like a sprint review with the sprint being just an evening long. Sprint planning so to speak happened before guests arrived and the restaurant opened. We prepared the kitchen, chopped stuff for salads, prepared sauces and stuff and were discussing who would do what when the rush started. So even without knowing the actual ordering of dishes and the amount of every specific dish we roughly knew what to expect (how many orders aka tickets we would have in the sprint/evening). So we had a sprint planning, a sprint and a (internal) review. And our service people would give us feedback on what went well and what went wrong also, because they had the direct guest feedback.

wpietri 5y ago

This is great. Occasionally I wonder what I'd be doing if I weren't a software developer. I suspect I'd be a mediocre car mechanic. I'd be great at the weird and interesting problems, but bored to tears by the standard, unchallenging work. And crabby about it, of course.

riekus 5y ago
That was exactly me as a car mechanic, finding the problem that no one couldn't find? Awesome, but even doing the work to fix it after diagnosed it was boring for me, not to mention the thousands of tire changes, oil changes... So boring. Sold everything and travelled for 4 years where I worked on projects of my own (programming) and being self taught I planned to be a programmer when I came back (now) but thinking about it... I don't think I would like the day to day work, typing code like a monkey on the que of a superior, it honestly feels like programmers are the new factory workers of the industrial revolution. Also doesn't help that I am in the Netherlands, where it isn't paid as exceptional as in the US, it maybe would make it bearable. My big problem now, what am I going to do...
- askonomm 5y ago
  I recommend joining a smaller company or start-up, that way you have plenty of interesting things to work on, and won't be bogged down to being a "code monkey", as you can influence architectural decisions, and so on. It's the bigger companies with a very routine "process" that usually makes you feel like a line worker.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Plenty of dev jobs are as you describe, but not all of them! For example, right now I'm working for a non-profit. Meaningful work, smart colleagues, and a fair bit of agency. It doesn't pay as well as a fancy tech company, but I get by. You should also check out groups that are more niche. For example, a friend of mine is part of the Copenhagen user group for Extreme Programming. That's a method that's focused on a good developer experience. And in my experience, niche methods and languages tend to be used more at non-awful companies. So stay away from the big, boring companies, or at least the boring parts of them. Look for small, independent groups with clear purposes and close connections to the users.

mettamage 5y ago

I've seen carpenters at work. I'm not a carpenter myself. Whenever a carpenter would explain their thought process to me it felt like two things: * I don't understand their technical terms. * The way they explain their thought process when something goes wrong, feels very much like software engineers fixing a bug. There are differences but this, to me, was the most striking similarity.

packetlost 5y ago
Problem solving is problem solving

stuff4ben 5y ago

So... smart and gets things done. Honestly that's all I look for on a resume. You also have to talk about it in an interview. I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tell me the first thing about programming but I could tell he had the chops to figure things out and that he had a passion for things getting done.

sdoering 5y ago
I just came of a call with a a potential hire. I recommended her to a second round because of three things: * She would culturally fit while still bringing something new to the tam * She doesn't know Web Analytics, but has done market research, built html prototypes and has basic knowledge in JS, python, html, SPSS and some other things * She is self motivated and shows this because she actually learned all these skills in her last job because she wanted to and it made her job more easy. I strongly believe she would learn the technical ins and outs of Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics quite fast. The rest is not important. I don't care that she has not worked with AA oder GA. If it were my decision I would have hired her on the spot.
- stuff4ben 5y ago
  The self-motivation aspect you mentioned is also critical. It's these soft questions that reveal so much about a person's character that speak to me as much as or sometimes greater than certifications or degrees do. It's also why resume screening done by HR drones or worse, AI, are so problematic. Unless I need someone to do an exact thing extremely fast, I'd much prefer a generalist with a sharp mind, proven "gets shit done" attitude and experience, and is motivated to do the right thing.
- jasonpeacock 5y ago
  > She would culturally fit What does this mean? This is a very loaded term, and without qualitative data it results in biased hiring. Usually, it means "she's young, white, and college educated, just like the rest of us". People don't need to culturally fit to excel at a role.

jeffrallen 5y ago

> One minute he was wrangling sewer pipelines - the next minute, CI/CD pipelines I've seen CI/CD configs where you couldn't tell the difference! :)

t-writescode 5y ago
Hey now, that’s an insult to indoor plumbing xD I wish some CI/CD pipelines were as good as sewers

drcode 5y ago

The best college application is still from Clyde Tombaugh, who was able to put in "discovered Pluto" when he applied.

Imnimo 5y ago
Best grad school application is maybe John Nash. His recommendation later just said that "he is a mathematical genius".
ableal 5y ago
I heard that Sakharov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov ) just used two lines: - Hero of the Soviet Union - Nobel Prize
- mosselman 5y ago
  I think I'll do that as well next time I apply for a job. See where it lands me. If they actually check if I've won a Nobel Prize and find out I haven't, I'll just call it a career hack, that should resonate enough in today's world. The meanings "Hero" and "Soviet Union" are both up for discussion, so I think I could bluf my way into being believed about that part at least.
  - ableal 5y ago
    It's actually a decoration, like the Medal of Freedom or the Legion d'honneur

taneq 5y ago

> He didn't know he was drawing a cloud architecture diagram. No, cloud architects don’t know they’re drawing engineered prints.

JshWright 5y ago

"Until I met Daniel, I actually didn't know that "smoke testing" was a term with a literal smoke-related meaning. I'd always heard it used in the context of software tests. Daniel used a tracing technique to follow a problem to its source, instead of just making random guesses." I've always known "smoke testing" to refer to the mythical magic smoke that makes all electronics work. Smoke testing is turning something on for the first time to see if you're going to let the magic smoke out.

mattnewton 5y ago
This- I knew the electrical sense that early software engineers working on hobby computers probably got it from, where it refers to wiring something up, plugging it in for the first time and seeing if it lights on fire / creates smoke. I guess there is a dual origin though https://medium.com/@AikoPath/about-the-origin-of-smoke-testing-and-the-confusion-it-comes-with-dfa18eb8ce0 https://medium.com/@AikoPath/about-the-origin-of-smoke-testi...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  That reminds me of a story[0] my digital electronics instructor once told me. He was on a team working on satellite[1] electronics and had the whole thing laid out on breadboard. It wasn't working, and they suspected it was a short, but with so many connections everywhere it would take forever to find. So they decided to crank up the input current until the short started burning and locate it that way. It apparently didn't cause anything to smoke, but eventually someone did notice the orange-hot wire that was causing the problem. [0] I have a terrible memory so details may be incorrect. [1] IIRC this guy had worked on geostar satellites and the hubble, but I'm not sure if this story was about either.
  - JshWright 5y ago
    Yeah, this is not uncommon as a testing technique. Fuse keeps blowing? Replace it with a bigger fuse (or a heavy gauge wire) and eventually something else will pop (hopefully the bad component).

throwaway212135 5y ago

When viewing the resume, Safari crashes when the browser is minimized/scaled down.

jasonladuke0311 5y ago

If companies truly care about diversity of thought as they say they do, there is a massive untapped group who really bring fresh perspectives: older career-changers. I might be biased as I belong to that group, but I have met some fantastic people from that group.

cvhashim 5y ago
I had a tech lead who was once a chef before he switched careers into tech.

0des 5y ago

Honestly who hasn't ended a day of cloud work tired, sweating, and covered in shit?

sly010 5y ago

Inspiring story if you don't already work "in cloud" but as someone with a decade of experience, it somehow has an opposite effect on me. This story highlights how un-glamorous our job can be: tracking down (memory) leaks, fixing (bit) rotten hardware and obsessing over (code) smells, etc. It makes me want to quit.

eps 5y ago

tl;dr - It's a promo post for a book (at 50% off no less) and its author. The direct link to the greatest resume on question is this - https://dsresume.com https://dsresume.com

riffic 5y ago
you know the book itself is highly overpriced. It'd be much more worthwhile at the $5 to $10 price point. someone who just bought a copy to skim through.
- JBlue42 5y ago
  Agreed. It's 133 pages. Content is good for those like myself trying to answer "Where to start" with cloud stuff. Still cheaper than LinuxAcademy/ACloudGuru. If it leads to a six-figure career, a $24 investment is worth it I guess.
  - forrestbrazeal 5y ago
    Like with any info product, a lot of the value here comes from what you put into it (the book contains dozens if not hundreds of hours worth of project ideas) - but I'll just add for posterity that part of the value of that sticker price is an included biweekly newsletter that provides inside referrals to hand-curated cloud jobs. We've seen great response to this newsletter so far, including multiple folks getting job offers: https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/newsletter https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/newsletter
    - JBlue42 5y ago
      Yes, I should've brought up the newsletter as an additional resource. The $24 is still the 50% off price. I didn't have any issues dropping that amount on it despite being unemployed because I already knew you from your newsletter and as a guest on Last Week in AWS / Screaming in the Cloud. For someone outside of tech, whose not used to those prices for an ebook, it might be prohibitive. Especially when they'll want to spend $40 on a course by Adrian Cantrill (I would warn them away from ACG) then the $150 for exams. Brand new Kindle books go for $14.99 typically then settle to around $9.99 and can go lower depending on what publishers want to do. It seems things are going well at your price point though and that's something for anyone doing self-publishing to consider. It's ok to still throw out an opinion that at face value it 'seems' expensive. :) I'm glad so many people are getting traction out of it. I look forward to diving in further myself over the course of the next year. The thing about the tech world I appreciate are all the efforts of people to give back, including yours.

nicwolff 5y ago

Between "Amazon Web Services" and "Plumbing" he lists "Backflow Prevention and Cross Connection Control Inspector/Tester" and... I'm not quite sure if that's a cloud architecture skill or a plumbing skill!

kerblang 5y ago

Just to be clear, running smoke through a sewer line is not a genius move, just standard practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IpLABJw2KU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IpLABJw2KU But certainly finding problems in old systems is a valuable skill, and it requires a willingness to do dirty work that many folks turn their nose up at, so to speak.