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Things that disqualify CVs straight away for us: * Unclear if have right to work in country. This needs to be stated up front! Our company can't sponsor visas,

Things that disqualify CVs straight away for us: * Unclear if have right to work in country. This needs to be stated up front! Our company can't sponsor visas, so if based in another country unless it says something about the visa status, we basically have to throw it away. * Poor grammar, spelling, attention to detail on CV. I get some CVs through that are almost unreadable. I'm not saying if there's a single typo then we'd disqualify, but if it's littered with them it shows poor attention to detail and that's quite important professionally! Things that would make me think twice about interviewing: * Too much emphasis on stuff that's not relevant. * Big gaps in employment * Working for weird companies that show poor judgement in itself. For e.g. - Crypto exchanges, predatory companies, etc.

Tao3300 3y ago
> Big gaps in employment Really curious what you suggest as a remedy for this one. It seems to boil down to "sorry, you're screwed now" or "lie but don't get caught"
- physicsguy 3y ago
  If you've got 300 CVs to review, much of them with similar experience, do you interview the people who've had 2 years off, or the people that haven't?
  - Tao3300 3y ago
    I'd probably take a mix. Those people were probably doing some interesting stuff in those 2 years. Generally among our hires, those applicants have been much more eager to get down to business than the ones that are burned out from working the same job as the one they're applying for at a place they hate that isn't paying them enough. And before you think you dodged it, I'm still wondering what you're suggestions are.
  - robga 3y ago
    At least in my field, it would be an absolute complete irrelevance. You’ve said 2 years here. What sort of gap wouldn’t be a factor to you? 3mo? 9mo?
  - haspok 3y ago
    Why does this make any difference to you? Are you afraid that they secretly joined a terrorist organisation and were in a training camp in a Middle-Eastern country?
    - bzzzt 3y ago
      That suspicion will surely be a problem for people of certain nationalities. (here in the EU there have been a few cases in the news which tends to make people more suspicious)
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    What if you been running a freelance consultancy for 15 years or so, but have very few references from clients available due to seldom interacting with anyone on the client side with meaningful technical experience. Let's say for example your consultancy works with primarily physicians directly, or wealth managers, or attorneys - people who are not incapable of understanding technology, but have hired you precisely because they don't have the spare bandwidth to get into the weeds of another complex technical domain in addition to their own, and would have absolutely no idea how to comment on your understanding of algorithms or ability to function a small develepemt team as an IC, etc. I've never seriously considered trying to parlay my experience into a mainstream developer role because I assume that in a sea of 100 applications all having a similarly recognizable list of roles and references, anything that doesn't fit this model is ignored because it's too much trouble to to make a side by side comparison with the rest of the candidates.
  - oreally 3y ago
    On one hand you're saying you want evidence of the candidate's work in recent years, but on the other hand you're also saying fuck people who take breaks to recharge, they should be on the rat race like the rest of us. I'd interview both of them so long as they pass the requirements. The second guy I'd want to see recent projects, not employment.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  I once took 3 years off to play an MMO game (not joking). After that had to restart from the bottom of the salary ladder, but climbed back pretty quickly. This is a universal secret weapon - drop your salary requirements, like, a lot, to get hired. You can usually climb back.
  - exikyut 3y ago
    EVE Online? :P
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
      No, a Korean one, which, in complexity, makes EO seem like kindergarten. Enough to say, you can code your own bot companions in LUA.
  - oreally 3y ago
    > climbed back pretty quickly How quick is 'quickly'? Going through the similar motions here, nearing towards the end of the MMO's current cycle of content.
stonks 3y ago
Why working in crypto exchanges would show poor judgment? There are still technical problems to solve. I knew a principal engineer who heavily disliked blockchain because it uses a lot of energy for proof of work, but with proof of stake this should be better now.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  > still technical problems Namely: - what schemes are still left for us to pull a lot of money into before they get recognized as scams - how do we get out in time to leave someone else holding the bag
  - trhr 3y ago
    I spent about three months consulting for some crypto company as a distributed systems engineer. They paid me to design an eventually consistent, self-healing data store with a cache layer / write ahead log, with peers determined by paxos consensus, transfers metered by finops and govered with kademlia, and a storage layer capable of byzantine fault tolerance, which we implemented via signature chains. See, they had this crazy idea that they'd make a cryptocurrency that they could sell to western digital, who could offer hard drives that "filled themselves up" with other people's data when idle. WD would obv make a buck and maybe sell these drives for much cheaper than the component cost. I'm not exactly sure of the economics. I think the idea was to have half the drives be "receivers" and half be "senders" and actually sell the "senders" for way more than component cost, but provide trivial effort file backup. I think they're still building it. I dunno if it'll be a scam or not. I had fun though.
  - shakow 3y ago
    I mean... morally speaking, how is it worse than working for Meta or Google?
    - Tao3300 3y ago
      Asking the important rhetorical questions o7
grumple 3y ago
As someone who has been on both ends of hiring, why do you care about gaps in employment? People can either do the job or they can't, I don't see why their personal life (or whatever they took off for, willing or not) is relevant.

Tao3300 3y ago

> Big gaps in employment Really curious what you suggest as a remedy for this one. It seems to boil down to "sorry, you're screwed now" or "lie but don't get caught"

physicsguy 3y ago
If you've got 300 CVs to review, much of them with similar experience, do you interview the people who've had 2 years off, or the people that haven't?
- Tao3300 3y ago
  I'd probably take a mix. Those people were probably doing some interesting stuff in those 2 years. Generally among our hires, those applicants have been much more eager to get down to business than the ones that are burned out from working the same job as the one they're applying for at a place they hate that isn't paying them enough. And before you think you dodged it, I'm still wondering what you're suggestions are.
- robga 3y ago
  At least in my field, it would be an absolute complete irrelevance. You’ve said 2 years here. What sort of gap wouldn’t be a factor to you? 3mo? 9mo?
- haspok 3y ago
  Why does this make any difference to you? Are you afraid that they secretly joined a terrorist organisation and were in a training camp in a Middle-Eastern country?
  - bzzzt 3y ago
    That suspicion will surely be a problem for people of certain nationalities. (here in the EU there have been a few cases in the news which tends to make people more suspicious)
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  What if you been running a freelance consultancy for 15 years or so, but have very few references from clients available due to seldom interacting with anyone on the client side with meaningful technical experience. Let's say for example your consultancy works with primarily physicians directly, or wealth managers, or attorneys - people who are not incapable of understanding technology, but have hired you precisely because they don't have the spare bandwidth to get into the weeds of another complex technical domain in addition to their own, and would have absolutely no idea how to comment on your understanding of algorithms or ability to function a small develepemt team as an IC, etc. I've never seriously considered trying to parlay my experience into a mainstream developer role because I assume that in a sea of 100 applications all having a similarly recognizable list of roles and references, anything that doesn't fit this model is ignored because it's too much trouble to to make a side by side comparison with the rest of the candidates.
- oreally 3y ago
  On one hand you're saying you want evidence of the candidate's work in recent years, but on the other hand you're also saying fuck people who take breaks to recharge, they should be on the rat race like the rest of us. I'd interview both of them so long as they pass the requirements. The second guy I'd want to see recent projects, not employment.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
I once took 3 years off to play an MMO game (not joking). After that had to restart from the bottom of the salary ladder, but climbed back pretty quickly. This is a universal secret weapon - drop your salary requirements, like, a lot, to get hired. You can usually climb back.
- exikyut 3y ago
  EVE Online? :P
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    No, a Korean one, which, in complexity, makes EO seem like kindergarten. Enough to say, you can code your own bot companions in LUA.
- oreally 3y ago
  > climbed back pretty quickly How quick is 'quickly'? Going through the similar motions here, nearing towards the end of the MMO's current cycle of content.

stonks 3y ago

Why working in crypto exchanges would show poor judgment? There are still technical problems to solve. I knew a principal engineer who heavily disliked blockchain because it uses a lot of energy for proof of work, but with proof of stake this should be better now.

Tao3300 3y ago
> still technical problems Namely: - what schemes are still left for us to pull a lot of money into before they get recognized as scams - how do we get out in time to leave someone else holding the bag
- trhr 3y ago
  I spent about three months consulting for some crypto company as a distributed systems engineer. They paid me to design an eventually consistent, self-healing data store with a cache layer / write ahead log, with peers determined by paxos consensus, transfers metered by finops and govered with kademlia, and a storage layer capable of byzantine fault tolerance, which we implemented via signature chains. See, they had this crazy idea that they'd make a cryptocurrency that they could sell to western digital, who could offer hard drives that "filled themselves up" with other people's data when idle. WD would obv make a buck and maybe sell these drives for much cheaper than the component cost. I'm not exactly sure of the economics. I think the idea was to have half the drives be "receivers" and half be "senders" and actually sell the "senders" for way more than component cost, but provide trivial effort file backup. I think they're still building it. I dunno if it'll be a scam or not. I had fun though.
- shakow 3y ago
  I mean... morally speaking, how is it worse than working for Meta or Google?
  - Tao3300 3y ago
    Asking the important rhetorical questions o7

grumple 3y ago

As someone who has been on both ends of hiring, why do you care about gaps in employment? People can either do the job or they can't, I don't see why their personal life (or whatever they took off for, willing or not) is relevant.