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Back in school, I remember mentioning to a friend that "Don't the Microsoft Research CS papers look a bit different? Whenever I feel like a paper looks a bit o
by KMag 4y ago
Back in school, I remember mentioning to a friend that "Don't the Microsoft Research CS papers look a bit different? Whenever I feel like a paper looks a bit off, I look up and see the authors have Microsoft email addresses." and he pointed out to me that MS creates their papers in Word and pretty much all of the other papers I read were in LaTeX.
If your CV is generated from LaTeX -> PDF and all of the others are Word -> PDF, your CV will subtly stand out. Depending on the reader, the subconscious/conscious connection with CS papers may be a plus or a minus.
It's hard to say if having my CV in LaTeX has actually helped me, but this is the reason I use LaTeX for my CV.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoI worked for MSR for ~7 years and all of the papers I worked on were in LaTeX, all the papers I saw from my colleagues were written in LaTeX as well. The only people who wrote papers in Word were from academic communities where that already happened often (e.g. lots of Word papers in HCI conferences; I was in the PL and OS communities where it was very rare to see papers written in Word). But yes, a paper written in MS Word is glaring by how it handles kerning and hyphenation. You'd be surprised how much products teams don't care about type setting (and Google Docs at Google where I work now is about the same).
- mixmastamyk 4y ago> kerning and hyphenation So these are still broken in modern word-processors? Or expected to be manually tweaked? Seems odd decades later.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoYou can’t manually tweak it. Actually, I spend a non trivial amount of time fixing under and over flows in LaTeX papers. In Word, it’s just “go ugly early.” The appeal is that a good looking doc is impossible, so don’t even bother.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoInteresting but odd. Seems like this would be right in the wheelhouse of the expensive word processor.
- SnooSux 4y agoI've handed my resume at career fairs and I twice they noticed and pointed out that it was LaTeX and it impressed them a little bit. But I was a EE student so maybe it'd be different in another field.
- canada2us 4y agoI would have to agree with this. But I'd like to point out that recruiters should evaluate whether the job candidate is capable of doing their job rather than what format their CV is in.
- Shish2k 4y agoI agree we should be evaluating “this candidate is a good engineer” and ignoring “this candidate has various attributes which often correlate with being a good engineer” - but how do you propose measuring the former? Bear in mind that even factors like “does well in a coding interview” is actually an example of the latter, not the former
- jahewson 4y ago> MS creates their papers in Word I used to collaborate with MSR and never saw anything but LaTeX being used. If you look at the level of sophistication in many of their papers it’s not something Word can even begin to achieve.
- KMag 4y agoHmm... most of my exposure to Microsoft CS papers was in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Perhaps things have changed, or maybe it was just the set of authors that I read. In any case, the layout was markedly different, and once my friend pointed out that it wasn't just in my head, that they weren't using LaTeX, it was hard for me to un-see.
- UltimateEdge 4y agoI use Calibri in my LaTeX resume for this reason.
- johnwalkr 4y agoI can’t put my finger on why but I’ve found Pages on MacOS good for maintaining a resume that fits precisely in two pages.
- ndiddy 4y agoWith a little bit of effort, it's easy to bridge the gap without having to switch to LaTeX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8
- lrem 4y agoI've known a team in INRIA writing their papers in Word. It felt so weird...
- actually_a_dog 4y agoRelated to this, I swear that once I started writing my homework solutions in LaTeX in grad school, I suddenly just started getting better grades. I don't think I was actually any more convincing; it just seems like turning in a paper that looked like it was written in LaTeX primed my profs to think was more convincing than I was.