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Two initial thoughts: 1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the eco

Two initial thoughts: 1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer. 2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.

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pizlonator 11mo ago
> His resume is designed poorly. Yeah. OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
- ttoinou 11mo ago
  He is driven by project based learning, which to me helps me a lot understand his CV right from the beginning
- alyxya 11mo ago
  There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.
  - pizlonator 11mo ago
    Ha, you’re right. And I missed it when skimming The people looking at your resumes will skim because they have a lot of resumes to look at
  - windowshopping 11mo ago
    It is less about the content and more about the design. It is hard to skim. Recruiters receive thousands of resumes and need to be able to get the key points at a glance, and I just don't feel this design effectively works toward that goal. Everything's there if you spend the time to read all of it, yes, but a resume's goal is often to get someone to notice it fast - not to convince someone after a long leisurely read.
    - foobarian 11mo ago
      It's like the old progressive JPEGs or GIFs where the first few kilobytes were enough to render the whole image at a lower resolution and the rest just filled in the detail.
    - alyxya 11mo ago
      If someone wants to use keywords as a screening mechanism for resumes, they don't need a human recruiter to do that, and some automated tool is perfectly able to parse keywords. You could over-index your resume on the prospect that there's a human recruiter as the first screening mechanism and that recruiter is going through every resume and skimming for keywords, yet isn't very good at identifying relevant keywords quickly, but it's a relatively meaningless micro-optimization overall. Keep in mind they were able to get multiple internships before with presumably the same resume structure, so it's already proven to work well enough.
    - Aeolun 11mo ago
      Something like bottom line up front would work for resumes as well.
nhaehnle 11mo ago
I agree on the first point. I clicked through to the previous blog entry which I also found to be really good.
ghostpepper 11mo ago
Agreed; uncommonly good writing, especially for someone with a CS degree.
- aryonoco 11mo ago
  20 odd years ago when I went to do a CS degree, I discovered that the university had these beautiful buildings called “libraries” and they were filled with all sorts of amazing books! I ended up splitting my time roughly evenly between learning C, SQL and Java and devouring every 19th century English literature book I could get my hands on. I can’t claim to write as well, but weirdos like us do exist.
anonymous_343 11mo ago
It's a good enough resume. But half as many words would make it better.
bern4444 11mo ago
He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary. In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
- windowshopping 11mo ago
  True, but I don't see a separate resume on the site. Correct me if I missed it but my understanding is that he is using that CV as a resume.
  - hansvm 11mo ago
    Resumes are normally tailored for the role. The CV is the raw source you use to tailor them. It's a little strange to have a blanket "resume" available for public perusal.
    - pempem 11mo ago
      It would be weirder for that blanket resume to be accompanied by posts about how much your wedding taught you about b2b saas sales with your photo, location, and a list of all the people you met through work and are willing to say you're connected to.
alyxya 11mo ago
I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences. My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content. https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf
- devnullbrain 11mo ago
  As a candidate, it can be confusing to read application advice. You'll often see people say that they look for x-y-z when hiring, which conflicts with when you saw someone say they look for a-b-c the week before. How can both be true? Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date. If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
  - MikeNotThePope 11mo ago
    Hey, I’ve done recruiting since 2005. Here’s the most basic advice I can give you. It’s much more important to have stuff to put on your resume than is it to obsess over how the resume is formatted. Showing what you’ve done and what you can do in the goal. What I typically do for myself is focus on quality over quantity, and then stuff in a few extra keywords relevant to the kind of job I’m targeting.
atonse 11mo ago
I had a similar thought. “I was never this articulate as a fresh grad” I don’t know enough about the job market apart from anecdotes. But I also know there are a lot of shortages in the trades. So SOME job markets are slow for sure. But others are still desperate.
poopiokaka 11mo ago
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devnullbrain 11mo ago
That's a really standard CV
mvdtnz 11mo ago
His writing is good but he's speaking with such authority for someone with virtually no experience. Dismissing the explanations from those of us who have been around the block several times because he believes he has some special insight. I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess. It might pay for him to listen for a bit.
- spookie 11mo ago
  Oh, I'm sure the person in question has heard this many times, coming in to the job market. Chicken and an egg problem, it is.
- deleted 11mo ago
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boznz 11mo ago
His CV is fine, better than most of the CV's I've seen recently which are just tech-wank-word bingo.
- zamalek 11mo ago
  That's what you need to get through ATS. Resumes are for HR. Unless specifically asked (or e.g. directly emailing someone around here) save the fireworks for the interview.
chis 11mo ago
I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something. Totally agree that this guy could write books though. On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
- lisbbb 11mo ago
  I don't see the point of applying for "hundreds of jobs." I think use the time to network with real people and forget about Indeed or whatever because those jobs are mostly fake anyways.
  - kjkjadksj 11mo ago
    The people you know aren’t always in a position to hire you.
    - adrianstoll 11mo ago
      If you expand your scope enough eventually you’ll find someone. For example, my first job was from someone who knew my dad.
      - tavavex 11mo ago
        That's not a scope expansion, a first-order relationship within your family is barely even networking at all. Giving preferential treatment to friends and relatives is an entirely different world from what's being suggested above. As one of those new grads, I'm frankly not seeing where I could expand my scope to. Most random tech workers, outside the people I know through a past job, wouldn't want to know me, a random person. Everyone always suggests networking and going to events in the vaguest possible ways, but I'm not seeing any results in terms of establishing actual, real, interesting connections through the watered-down LinkedIn version of interaction. I would have to either build something so profoundly interesting that they would come to me first, or get to know someone in the field via some different means (like an unrelated hobby). It feels like there's very little that can actually be done productively. If you already happened to know someone somehow, you have a shot at the golden ticket, otherwise it's pretty bleak.
calepayson 11mo ago
> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good. > 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous. I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
- ivape 11mo ago
  Why do you think any of that has to do with being a good programmer?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- windowshopping 11mo ago
  Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs. Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
  - coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
    It doesn't matter at all, if it's not enough that they have a DeepMind internship the rest are just trivia and details. People get hung up on details when they REALLY are just not interested in hiring. No one rejects candidates based on the color of their shirt if they really need said candidate.
    - vkou 11mo ago
      Which is, of course, the meat of the matter. Nobody 'needs' to hire a junior anymore.
hansvm 11mo ago
> his resume is designed poorly ... too long The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length. Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?
never_inline 11mo ago
To be honest, I dont think recruiters read the CV anyway.
lisbbb 11mo ago
It a bit too long to get the main points across. Also, a wall of text is becoming something people ignore, no matter how important it is. Make a video, bring these ideas to life.
- ghaff 11mo ago
  No one hiring is watching a video made by a recent grad.
burnt-resistor 11mo ago
In the US-centric perspective: Most forms of higher-education leave out fundamental job skills graduates need to be successful in the business world. Résumé writing, project management, time management, and team leadership should be covered. Moreover In terms of compulsory education like K-12, it should also include public service and life-work skills like customer service modeling behavior, personal financial management, civics, and media critical thinking skills because Common Core and NCLBA succeeded only at creating greater mass ignorance.
- DiscourseFan 11mo ago
  The last thing we need is to teach people how to do things as they are already done, instead of giving them something that can be used to generate something new. And management skills can’t be taught anyway.
anovikov 11mo ago
This. The guy should forget about the bullshit jobs he could get in the CS field and just do that same thing full time. He could be the next Cory Doctorow. He actually writes better.
terminalshort 11mo ago
It's not the world of tiktok. Resumes have always needed to be like that.
cush 11mo ago
Sorry but if people aren’t hiring new grads then that new grad resume isn’t getting read. All the formatting in the world can’t fix the situation.
ludicrousdispla 11mo ago
a good first step would be just formatting it to a standard page size
barrenko 11mo ago
With this in mind, I'd like to propose an alternative to OP. E.g. he may be extremely unlucky in the following 7 months in his job hunt, and tech is not what it used to be. If the uses these 7 months to focus on his writing on the other hand... We'll need people with a soul and technical chops to cover this apocalypse (using it in the original sense of the word).
- dbspin 11mo ago
  As a writer myself... This comment is somewhat ironic, given that the 'job market' for writers is effectively non existent. Journalism has been whittled down to nothing. Quality fiction isn't read any more - and the remaining outlets are ideologically gatekept. Non fiction, outside of a few celebrity authors, or highly specialised topics, does not sell. The traditional unglamorous but well remunerated writing gigs - technical writing, specialist journals etc, have been GPT'd out of existence. A few legacy and celebrity authors are fine. Others are able to make a living through platforms like Substack - but these are primarily folks who managed to build a large following in traditional media or pre-oligarch twitter. Recommending a young person spend 7 months on their writing is to recommend they lose the guts of a year of their young life on a dead end.
  - RangerScience 11mo ago
    looks at Patreon Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream. “Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.
    - BobaFloutist 11mo ago
      I don't know the most polite way to tell you that you're demonstrating an almost textbook example of survivorship bias. There are 300 million people in the United States and 8 billion in the world, it's trivial to find individual examples of people making a solid living in almost any career you could conceivably imagine, and in many you couldn't. You're going on the "Writers getting paid" website and sorting by most paid. That's like looking at the top 10 NBA salaries and saying "Basketball players seem to be making money, and if they're good at the game they seem to be wildly successful" And, notably, a wildly successful writer makes $120,000 a year. So, you know, the same as any employed coder with more than like a year or two of experience. And that's the very highest echelons of a famously incredibly competitive, rapidly shrinking field, with fewer real jobs than probably anything else not also considered an "art" of some sort.
PeterStuer 11mo ago
I'd prefer an editor went over this post and condenced this by at least 50%, and then demanded factual references be added.
darkwater 11mo ago
> 2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels. I disagree. He just needs some nicer-looking template and that would be a perfectly valid CV [1]. Perhaps reducing a bit some paragraph, but not by 70% at all (nor 50 or 40). [1] https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf
- sehansen 11mo ago
  Yeah, just increasing the font size of the section headers 4 pts and the lines with the job titles 2 pts would do wonders. Maybe also put the locations in italic and decrease the line spacing around the location lines. But even with the current resume I'd still call this guy in for an interview if I were hiring for an ML position.
watwut 11mo ago
Ad 2.): I finished college in a good economy and got a job with less then perfect resume. When we have been hiring in good economy, again, we hired people with bad resumes. We gave them a chance cause we needed people and everyone was hiring. They seemed ok during interview and turned out to be good employees. My point is, this nitpicking about whether CV is too long or tiktok like is just result of a bed economy and companies having 20 applicants for one position. And if this guy perfectly hits random set of signals to get hired, it is just that someone else will be unemployed. When you have 30 grands on 3 positions, the overall employment situation wont be solved by them writing better CV. That is just the game of musical chairs we are playing to get jobs.
martindbp 11mo ago
I almost get an existential crisis from the fact that this was written by someone in their early 20s
fxtentacle 11mo ago
Yeah, that CV could also use some colors, spacing, and typography to visually highlight key facts.
sevenseacat 11mo ago
I don't believe for a second that an intern did all of that stuff.
dubeye 11mo ago
It seems suspiciously over punctuated to my eyes.
kelipso 11mo ago
The resume design is incredibly poor. It’s a 90% likely instant reject from me just from the resume. It looks like a resume from someone who does not know what they are doing. How hard is it to copy a resume template from google, seriously…
soerxpso 11mo ago
> 2 I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's talking about.
- llbbdd 11mo ago
  It's not the formatting, it's the content. A resume that tells me what I need to know without a bunch of extra fluff vs an essay tells me about the author's priorities and it'll be a deciding factor when you have hundreds of applications to go through.
- x0x0 11mo ago
  People should deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it were. As it is, open job reqs get hammered. A hiring manager needs to rapidly discard 95% or more of resumes to get down to a manageable number to directly review. The last time I had an open job req I closed it at 500 applications that came in between Thursday afternoon when I opened it and Tuesday morning when I closed it.
adammarples 11mo ago
I see the problem, he went to UWE. You were not told to do that! You were told to go to Bristol!

deleted 11mo ago

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pizlonator 11mo ago

> His resume is designed poorly. Yeah. OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.

ttoinou 11mo ago
He is driven by project based learning, which to me helps me a lot understand his CV right from the beginning
alyxya 11mo ago
There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.
- pizlonator 11mo ago
  Ha, you’re right. And I missed it when skimming The people looking at your resumes will skim because they have a lot of resumes to look at
- windowshopping 11mo ago
  It is less about the content and more about the design. It is hard to skim. Recruiters receive thousands of resumes and need to be able to get the key points at a glance, and I just don't feel this design effectively works toward that goal. Everything's there if you spend the time to read all of it, yes, but a resume's goal is often to get someone to notice it fast - not to convince someone after a long leisurely read.
  - foobarian 11mo ago
    It's like the old progressive JPEGs or GIFs where the first few kilobytes were enough to render the whole image at a lower resolution and the rest just filled in the detail.
  - alyxya 11mo ago
    If someone wants to use keywords as a screening mechanism for resumes, they don't need a human recruiter to do that, and some automated tool is perfectly able to parse keywords. You could over-index your resume on the prospect that there's a human recruiter as the first screening mechanism and that recruiter is going through every resume and skimming for keywords, yet isn't very good at identifying relevant keywords quickly, but it's a relatively meaningless micro-optimization overall. Keep in mind they were able to get multiple internships before with presumably the same resume structure, so it's already proven to work well enough.
  - Aeolun 11mo ago
    Something like bottom line up front would work for resumes as well.

nhaehnle 11mo ago

I agree on the first point. I clicked through to the previous blog entry which I also found to be really good.

ghostpepper 11mo ago

Agreed; uncommonly good writing, especially for someone with a CS degree.

aryonoco 11mo ago
20 odd years ago when I went to do a CS degree, I discovered that the university had these beautiful buildings called “libraries” and they were filled with all sorts of amazing books! I ended up splitting my time roughly evenly between learning C, SQL and Java and devouring every 19th century English literature book I could get my hands on. I can’t claim to write as well, but weirdos like us do exist.

anonymous_343 11mo ago

It's a good enough resume. But half as many words would make it better.

bern4444 11mo ago

He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary. In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.

windowshopping 11mo ago
True, but I don't see a separate resume on the site. Correct me if I missed it but my understanding is that he is using that CV as a resume.
- hansvm 11mo ago
  Resumes are normally tailored for the role. The CV is the raw source you use to tailor them. It's a little strange to have a blanket "resume" available for public perusal.
  - pempem 11mo ago
    It would be weirder for that blanket resume to be accompanied by posts about how much your wedding taught you about b2b saas sales with your photo, location, and a list of all the people you met through work and are willing to say you're connected to.

alyxya 11mo ago

I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences. My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content. https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf

devnullbrain 11mo ago
As a candidate, it can be confusing to read application advice. You'll often see people say that they look for x-y-z when hiring, which conflicts with when you saw someone say they look for a-b-c the week before. How can both be true? Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date. If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
- MikeNotThePope 11mo ago
  Hey, I’ve done recruiting since 2005. Here’s the most basic advice I can give you. It’s much more important to have stuff to put on your resume than is it to obsess over how the resume is formatted. Showing what you’ve done and what you can do in the goal. What I typically do for myself is focus on quality over quantity, and then stuff in a few extra keywords relevant to the kind of job I’m targeting.

atonse 11mo ago

I had a similar thought. “I was never this articulate as a fresh grad” I don’t know enough about the job market apart from anecdotes. But I also know there are a lot of shortages in the trades. So SOME job markets are slow for sure. But others are still desperate.

poopiokaka 11mo ago

[dead]

devnullbrain 11mo ago

That's a really standard CV

mvdtnz 11mo ago

His writing is good but he's speaking with such authority for someone with virtually no experience. Dismissing the explanations from those of us who have been around the block several times because he believes he has some special insight. I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess. It might pay for him to listen for a bit.

spookie 11mo ago
Oh, I'm sure the person in question has heard this many times, coming in to the job market. Chicken and an egg problem, it is.
deleted 11mo ago
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boznz 11mo ago

His CV is fine, better than most of the CV's I've seen recently which are just tech-wank-word bingo.

zamalek 11mo ago
That's what you need to get through ATS. Resumes are for HR. Unless specifically asked (or e.g. directly emailing someone around here) save the fireworks for the interview.

chis 11mo ago

I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something. Totally agree that this guy could write books though. On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.

lisbbb 11mo ago
I don't see the point of applying for "hundreds of jobs." I think use the time to network with real people and forget about Indeed or whatever because those jobs are mostly fake anyways.
- kjkjadksj 11mo ago
  The people you know aren’t always in a position to hire you.
  - adrianstoll 11mo ago
    If you expand your scope enough eventually you’ll find someone. For example, my first job was from someone who knew my dad.
    - tavavex 11mo ago
      That's not a scope expansion, a first-order relationship within your family is barely even networking at all. Giving preferential treatment to friends and relatives is an entirely different world from what's being suggested above. As one of those new grads, I'm frankly not seeing where I could expand my scope to. Most random tech workers, outside the people I know through a past job, wouldn't want to know me, a random person. Everyone always suggests networking and going to events in the vaguest possible ways, but I'm not seeing any results in terms of establishing actual, real, interesting connections through the watered-down LinkedIn version of interaction. I would have to either build something so profoundly interesting that they would come to me first, or get to know someone in the field via some different means (like an unrelated hobby). It feels like there's very little that can actually be done productively. If you already happened to know someone somehow, you have a shot at the golden ticket, otherwise it's pretty bleak.

calepayson 11mo ago

> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good. > 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous. I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?

ivape 11mo ago
Why do you think any of that has to do with being a good programmer?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
windowshopping 11mo ago
Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs. Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
- coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
  It doesn't matter at all, if it's not enough that they have a DeepMind internship the rest are just trivia and details. People get hung up on details when they REALLY are just not interested in hiring. No one rejects candidates based on the color of their shirt if they really need said candidate.
  - vkou 11mo ago
    Which is, of course, the meat of the matter. Nobody 'needs' to hire a junior anymore.

hansvm 11mo ago

> his resume is designed poorly ... too long The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length. Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?

never_inline 11mo ago

To be honest, I dont think recruiters read the CV anyway.

lisbbb 11mo ago

It a bit too long to get the main points across. Also, a wall of text is becoming something people ignore, no matter how important it is. Make a video, bring these ideas to life.

ghaff 11mo ago
No one hiring is watching a video made by a recent grad.

burnt-resistor 11mo ago

In the US-centric perspective: Most forms of higher-education leave out fundamental job skills graduates need to be successful in the business world. Résumé writing, project management, time management, and team leadership should be covered. Moreover In terms of compulsory education like K-12, it should also include public service and life-work skills like customer service modeling behavior, personal financial management, civics, and media critical thinking skills because Common Core and NCLBA succeeded only at creating greater mass ignorance.

DiscourseFan 11mo ago
The last thing we need is to teach people how to do things as they are already done, instead of giving them something that can be used to generate something new. And management skills can’t be taught anyway.

anovikov 11mo ago

This. The guy should forget about the bullshit jobs he could get in the CS field and just do that same thing full time. He could be the next Cory Doctorow. He actually writes better.

terminalshort 11mo ago

It's not the world of tiktok. Resumes have always needed to be like that.

cush 11mo ago

Sorry but if people aren’t hiring new grads then that new grad resume isn’t getting read. All the formatting in the world can’t fix the situation.

ludicrousdispla 11mo ago

a good first step would be just formatting it to a standard page size

barrenko 11mo ago

With this in mind, I'd like to propose an alternative to OP. E.g. he may be extremely unlucky in the following 7 months in his job hunt, and tech is not what it used to be. If the uses these 7 months to focus on his writing on the other hand... We'll need people with a soul and technical chops to cover this apocalypse (using it in the original sense of the word).

dbspin 11mo ago
As a writer myself... This comment is somewhat ironic, given that the 'job market' for writers is effectively non existent. Journalism has been whittled down to nothing. Quality fiction isn't read any more - and the remaining outlets are ideologically gatekept. Non fiction, outside of a few celebrity authors, or highly specialised topics, does not sell. The traditional unglamorous but well remunerated writing gigs - technical writing, specialist journals etc, have been GPT'd out of existence. A few legacy and celebrity authors are fine. Others are able to make a living through platforms like Substack - but these are primarily folks who managed to build a large following in traditional media or pre-oligarch twitter. Recommending a young person spend 7 months on their writing is to recommend they lose the guts of a year of their young life on a dead end.
- RangerScience 11mo ago
  looks at Patreon Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream. “Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.
  - BobaFloutist 11mo ago
    I don't know the most polite way to tell you that you're demonstrating an almost textbook example of survivorship bias. There are 300 million people in the United States and 8 billion in the world, it's trivial to find individual examples of people making a solid living in almost any career you could conceivably imagine, and in many you couldn't. You're going on the "Writers getting paid" website and sorting by most paid. That's like looking at the top 10 NBA salaries and saying "Basketball players seem to be making money, and if they're good at the game they seem to be wildly successful" And, notably, a wildly successful writer makes $120,000 a year. So, you know, the same as any employed coder with more than like a year or two of experience. And that's the very highest echelons of a famously incredibly competitive, rapidly shrinking field, with fewer real jobs than probably anything else not also considered an "art" of some sort.

PeterStuer 11mo ago

I'd prefer an editor went over this post and condenced this by at least 50%, and then demanded factual references be added.

darkwater 11mo ago

> 2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels. I disagree. He just needs some nicer-looking template and that would be a perfectly valid CV [1]. Perhaps reducing a bit some paragraph, but not by 70% at all (nor 50 or 40). [1] https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf

sehansen 11mo ago
Yeah, just increasing the font size of the section headers 4 pts and the lines with the job titles 2 pts would do wonders. Maybe also put the locations in italic and decrease the line spacing around the location lines. But even with the current resume I'd still call this guy in for an interview if I were hiring for an ML position.

watwut 11mo ago

Ad 2.): I finished college in a good economy and got a job with less then perfect resume. When we have been hiring in good economy, again, we hired people with bad resumes. We gave them a chance cause we needed people and everyone was hiring. They seemed ok during interview and turned out to be good employees. My point is, this nitpicking about whether CV is too long or tiktok like is just result of a bed economy and companies having 20 applicants for one position. And if this guy perfectly hits random set of signals to get hired, it is just that someone else will be unemployed. When you have 30 grands on 3 positions, the overall employment situation wont be solved by them writing better CV. That is just the game of musical chairs we are playing to get jobs.

martindbp 11mo ago

I almost get an existential crisis from the fact that this was written by someone in their early 20s

fxtentacle 11mo ago

Yeah, that CV could also use some colors, spacing, and typography to visually highlight key facts.

sevenseacat 11mo ago

I don't believe for a second that an intern did all of that stuff.

dubeye 11mo ago

It seems suspiciously over punctuated to my eyes.

kelipso 11mo ago

The resume design is incredibly poor. It’s a 90% likely instant reject from me just from the resume. It looks like a resume from someone who does not know what they are doing. How hard is it to copy a resume template from google, seriously…

soerxpso 11mo ago

> 2 I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's talking about.

llbbdd 11mo ago
It's not the formatting, it's the content. A resume that tells me what I need to know without a bunch of extra fluff vs an essay tells me about the author's priorities and it'll be a deciding factor when you have hundreds of applications to go through.
x0x0 11mo ago
People should deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it were. As it is, open job reqs get hammered. A hiring manager needs to rapidly discard 95% or more of resumes to get down to a manageable number to directly review. The last time I had an open job req I closed it at 500 applications that came in between Thursday afternoon when I opened it and Tuesday morning when I closed it.

adammarples 11mo ago

I see the problem, he went to UWE. You were not told to do that! You were told to go to Bristol!