9 ms·

So, if I saw a job description like that I would smell BS and never apply. Maybe handing off a resume like that gives the same smell. You don't give resumes li

by gexla 13y ago

So, if I saw a job description like that I would smell BS and never apply. Maybe handing off a resume like that gives the same smell. You don't give resumes like this, you tailor your pitch to the company which is hiring. If you are applying to a PHP job, then remove all the fluff and tell the employer that you are a PHP developer. Generalists dont' get hired, then don't be a generalist. Touching up your PHP skills should take a couple of weeks. ;)

weland 13y ago
> You don't give resumes like this, you tailor your pitch to the company which is hiring. [...] Generalists dont' get hired, then don't be a generalist. IMO this is stupid, self-destructive for companies and likely the result of cargo cult management. My "generalist" palette is exactly what got me hired at each one of my previous jobs. I learned programming as a hobby long before going to university, and I got a degree in Instrumentation Engineering with what essentially amounts to a minor in Power Electronics. During the last two of my undergrad years I worked in a research team at my university and did a fairly good job (papers and all) in a third field, computational electromagnetism, mainly with applications in microelectronics. This means, on one hand, that I can be very helpful to anyone in my team. I can help those of my colleagues who lean more towards software than hardware troubleshoot their instruments and development boards, and I can serve as a buffer between the hardware designers and the programmers. I can make good trade-offs between circuit-level design and high-level programming abstractions and I can design applications for low-power operation instead of writing something and tweaking it until it has decent battery life. What this also means, though, is that people in management are ecstatic about how they can give me pretty much anything to work on, and I'll munch it, or stick me in the same room with people who think JS is the best thing and people who think computers are evil and still understand what each of them says. This enthusiasm comes from precisely the same people who whine about candidates who are "miles wide, inches deep", and I know of at least one instance when the lead developer who interviewed me had to kick and scream to get me hired because my CV painted me "undecided" and "not having a good career discipline". It's even more ironic considering that the people who whine about it are typically millimeters wide and deep. I often hear this kind of discussion in the middle management circles. Our people are way too specialized and it makes communication and collaboration difficult; we could use people with a more diverse range of skills; we depend too much on one or two people doing this thing, but they're the only ones in the team who can do it. This is especially problematic in teams of people who have been in the company since they were juniors. Well no shit it is, since they just spent four out of the six years of their careers doing precisely the same thing. And no, "side projects" are not a good solution to this, and I've walked out of interviews because of HR folks strongly implying that my side projects are for learning skills the company needs. Fuck off. Thinking and learning aren't free. You want it, you pay me.
- codygman 13y ago
  I concur, my generalist resume listing 10+ technologies is what interested my current company in hiring me. It turns out they hire polyglots/generalists.
- danielweber 13y ago
  I think the generalists will beat the specialists in the long run, but if the current fashion is for assembling the perfect team of specialists, a job seeker has to (unfortunately for everyone) adapt to it. I've walked out of interviews because of HR folks strongly implying that my side projects are for learning skills the company needs. Could you explain what you mean here a little more? Did a company, at the interview phase, tell you they wanted you to work on side projects for free?
  - weland 13y ago
    > Could you explain what you mean here a little more? Did a company, at the interview phase, tell you they wanted you to work on side projects for free? What they told me is that it's a good thing that I am familiar with so many technologies, since that probably indicates that I spend a lot of my own time perfecting my skills. Which is actually true. But then they began to rant about how that's a good thing because this is a competitive field and it's really hard to keep up with all the new technologies popping up, so I might have to put up some of my own time to learn the technologies we'll use. I actually raised an eyebrow and said that no, I'm not willing to do that. This opened up a discussion about dedication and loving one's job beyond the matters of workhours and payment, which are true signs of a professional programmer, at which point I really just told them I'm not interested in their offer anymore and left. At that point, I'd have left even if they'd have sworn I wouldn't have to do that and that they were just checking. It's really impolite. I don't presumptuously boast about how I know what really makes the difference between a professional medic and one who just has a license to practice. It's also manipulative in a really poor way, implying that if you don't do all that stuff, you're "just" a programmer, rather than a "professional" programmer. Yeah, no shit I'm a "professional programmer" -- I don't have kids, I live close to work, my girlfriend works from home so her schedule is more flexible than mine, everyone in my family is in good health and back in college I fucked up my sleep schedule so hard that the occasional all-nighter doesn't do much damage anymore. But I'm exactly as professional as the dude who comes in at 9 and leaves at 5 because his kids want their father, not his toys.
300bps 13y ago
I don't think there is a single thing right with his resume. Let's take the first line of his overview: Software developer since the 1970s. First of all, any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental. Try teaching a Cobol programmer OOP and you'll find that they learn it slower than someone without that procedural coding experience. Second of all, the first line of your resume should not be to announce what protected class(es) you are in. Your resume shouldn't have "senior citizen" on it anymore than it should have your race, creed, religion or any other irrelevant facts on it. Linux work started with the first kernel releases and continued through Slackware So what? I used Slackware extensively in 1996 but the experience is meaningless. If I had that on my resume now it would tell anyone reading it that I'm probably resting on my laurels and probably have for decades. Experience includes: Agile, Assembly, Back-End, BSD, C, CSS, Debian, FOSS, GIMP, HTTP, Java, Linux, Mathematics, Mint, MySQL, Octave (similar to Matlab), Open Source, Parser, Perl, PHP5, Python, Recruiting, Regex, Shell, SQLite3, Support, TCP/IP, Ubuntu, UNIX, Tcl/Tk, Teaching, Training, Transcoding, VPS, Writing, XML, XSLT I've seen dozens of resumes that list dozens of technologies like this. Not even so much as a bold font weight to say the things they are masters of as opposed to "experience with". Early in my management career I hired a developer that had TCP/IP programming listed as a skill on her resume. After hiring her, I gave her the IP address of the server to do some TCP/IP programming. She asked, "What is IP address?" As someone who is in their 40s, my advice to to someone without a job later in life is to drop all the extraneous things and focus on what you've done lately. Lose the moniker "old coder". Lose any technologies older than a decade from your resume. Lose any references to "35 years of experience with...". Take off your hobbies. Take off your reasons for leaving your past employment. There are too many other fixes needed to go into.
- ccozan 13y ago
  also, quite important to the style: leave that 1st person "I" away. Every time when I read a resume like this I see a much overrated person, full of him/herself, former glory seeking new validation, etc. A big sign DON'T HIRE. Hints: make it simple, objective, no complex sentence structures, just information to the job and assignment. Use nice fonts and do not clutter the information, structure it with max 2 headings.
ivanhoe 13y ago
I would always hire an experienced generalist first. Being generalist means being smart and fast learner, and those are IMHO the crucial skills for any small or medium sized team. You will end up in new and unexpected situations here and there and the "specialist" mindset is not very good in dealing with this. You need a generalist to come up with the best hack, simply because he has a much wider perspective...
- orkoden 13y ago
  You might also end up with a jack of all trades - master of none. They often appear competent at first, but will fail once stackoverflow and their $LANG cookbook doesn't have a copy and paste answer. This does probably not apply to OP obviously.
  - djKianoosh 13y ago
    not all generalists fit this stereotype. it is possible to be a generalist and not be a copy/paste drone
    - phaer 13y ago
      Of course, but who do you tell which is which just from a resume of an otherwise unknown person?
      - djKianoosh 13y ago
        It's tough; when I was doing tons of tech screens a few years ago working for a consulting firm, I got pretty decent at picking out good resumes more than half the time. Mind you this was not my full time job. But you really need to do quite a bit of resume reading and phone screens before you get a good feel for it. so, experience will get you so far.
      - OldCoder 13y ago
        Excellent point. And, conversely, how do I demonstrate, on my resume, that I'm proficient as a generalist without listing the things that specialist-oriented readers here suggest that I omit?
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Maybe not BS, but in either case it doesn't tell me who you are and what you want. And that sets off all kinds of alarm bells, be it on a resume or on a job description. If I get a resume like that, I'm assuming the applicant doesn't really want to work with us, they just want any job, and other than a paycheck they don't give a fuck about what we're offering.
_pmf_ 13y ago
> Maybe handing off a resume like that gives the same smell. And taking 2 minutes to actually look up the references is obviously too much work for a very hard working and responsible HR specialist.
- thenipper 13y ago
  It is. I do some recruiting work for my job. When you're looking over 100+ resumes for a position you don't have time to research every little acronym that you don't know. Sure ideally you'd know exactly what they're talking about, but in the real world that often doesn't work out.
- DougWebb 13y ago
  That's 2 minutes for each of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of resumes that the hard working and responsible HR specialist has to sift through. It's triage. If you're in the stack, make sure you obviously belong in the next, smaller, stack. Repeat until you get an interview.
  - wolfgke 13y ago
    If you get hundreds of resumes as a HR specialist for the programming jobs you offer, any claim that there is a shortage of programmers for your company is a big lie.
    - thenipper 13y ago
      Could be a shortage of qualified candidates. Just cause hundreds of people apply doesn't mean that even 10s of good candidates apply.
      - pyre 13y ago
        If you're passing over qualified candidates because you fail at sorting the wheat from the chaff, then the 'shortage' is not due to the market...
      - wolfgke 13y ago
rbanffy 13y ago
> you tailor your pitch to the company which is hiring. This specific point is very important. Design your resume to save time for the recruiter. The recruiter has hundreds of resumes to parse. If you make the case you are a great match for the job opening in the first paragraph your chances of being noticed increase enormously. You are not telling who you are - you are selling a solution to a specific problem. > If you are applying to a PHP job There is little point in mentioning you wrote key parts of MVS/370 because the recruiter will have no idea what it is. If the company uses Ruby on Rails a demonstration of your expertise with JBOSS will be (correctly) treated as noise. I think knowing C makes me a better Python programmer, but unless the job asks for it, I wouldn't mention it before the first technical interview with someone who agrees knowing C makes someone a better programmer. Tip: using a spreadsheet to keep CV parts saves a ton of time. Tip 2: find out who the recruiter is. If you can understand more about the person and his/her expectations and background, you may fine tune your CV even more perfectly.
- danielweber 13y ago
  I used to think that the cover letter was where I could point to the parts of my resume that were very specific for the job. But I've done more than a few online applications recently that simply didn't have a place for a cover letter.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    The cover letter also should be designed to save time for the recruiter. Make space for some very targeted items (name, company, position) so it doesn't look like you are sending exactly the same to every recruiter, but don't make the mistake of spending more than 15 minutes on each letter. Since you don't know which one, the letter or the CV, will be read first, you should optimize both.
    - danielweber 13y ago
      They don't even give me a place to put a cover letter. Last week I spent a half-hour writing a cover letter, and then went through the application and there was no place to put it.
danielweber 13y ago
What made me excise all PHP work from my resume (except for PHP security work, which honestly is like shooting fish in a barrel) was when a company looking for "PHP experts" asked "how much of your last job was PHP?" and "about half" was considered too little. Because using Ruby makes your PHP knowledge rot or something. So I'd tell him to lie to get that PHP job. It sucks for lots of reasons, but so many employers in the PHP space all have their heads up their garbage collectors.
yiedyie 13y ago
So HR skips this kind of resumes from the start to save them trouble, very professional.
rayiner 13y ago
I agree that you should tailor your pitch to the company that is hiring, but bullshit like "generalists don't get hired" is one of the reasons I left software development. People who have the fluidity of thinking to be able to grok say Ruby as well as assembly are an asset, not a liability. They can see the forest rather than the trees. There are times when you need a specialist, usually because you need some domain specific expertise, but to penalize generalists is totally insane.
jfb 13y ago
Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. You don't have a single resume; you have a collection of data points that you coalesce into specific resumes for specific positions. The "vomit everything" resume is invariably a sign of: 1. a new graduate, in which case we need to be having a different sort of conversation than with an experienced hire, or; 2. a graybeard who hasn't looked for a while and doesn't realize how many more layers there are now between his initial resume and the hiring manager. In the former case, the resume is going to be useless and I'd really rather there were a common format specifically for someone with very little work experience. And no, a transcript isn't useful, either, although it has strengths that a standard resume format doesn't. In the latter case, these guys (and at 42, this is my cohort now) need to learn about the volume of incoming data, and how useless for decision purposes a 30 year large pile of acronyms is.
tolmasky 13y ago
Disclaimer: Every employer is different. My advice may be completely out of phase with someone else. But during my career I've had to unfortunately interview a lot of people (as I think anyone in this field has), and frankly this is a really bad resume. Even in non-tailored format. I don't mean that in a bad way, I just think this person could really improve his prospects with some changes. To nitpick one example, I've always felt that after your first job you should drastically cut down the importance of your degree on your resume. As far as I'm concerned your degree/major/whatever is a poor indicator of the kind of developer you're going to be, to be used only as a last resort when you are young and haven't had the chance to demonstrate yourself in the workforce. After that, your previous job titles/accomplishments are way more telling. This guy is in his 50s and he's still got individual line items for honors and high honors. I don't care. I don't even know what that means back when he got his degree. He points out he has a double major. Then tells me his majors individually. Then tells me how he did in each major separately. This after the fact that he's already told me all this in his overview. This reads like a recent grad's section (look at me, I graduated!!!!). I half expected him to list projects he did in school (hell, maybe some of those projects at the bottom WERE school projects -- that's the mindset I'm put in by the schooling section). Then he tells me his hobbies. This isn't as bad as telling me he likes to ride his bike or something, but "working on a couple of books" sounds so "I've been working on that big idea in my spare time for 10 years..." It conveys zero useful information to me. Clearly he has no finished books (because then he would have listed them, but somehow he is working on more than one at once). The ONLY thing interesting to me here is "Open Source projects". But thats lost in a bunch of stuff I don't care about. This should be ONE LINE which has specific github projects where I can go check out what he's done. "MS-DOS, Win 3.1 through 7" Ugh. Unless your goal is to maintain old systems or something this just seems ridiculous. Then you've got gems like "Voting Software; 50% of U.S. market" LOST in the stockpile of buzz words. Something like that should be a bullet point under the employer you did it under in the top section. People go through hundreds of these things. This thing is visually exhausting. It doesn't read like a list, its jam-packed with information in different styles: top looks like an essay, then a list of short answers, then "how can I maximize information per square inch" at the bottom. I'm intimidated to read it. Your overview should MAYBE be 3 sentences. Then immediately drop into the jobs you've had, with bullet points about interesting standout things done in them. Then ONE LINE with your degree to prove you have one, then maybe "skills" or whatever to fill out the bottom. If you've done your job right no one will be reading by then, you'll already have been placed in the "follow up" pile.

by gexla 13y ago

weland 13y ago

> You don't give resumes like this, you tailor your pitch to the company which is hiring. [...] Generalists dont' get hired, then don't be a generalist. IMO this is stupid, self-destructive for companies and likely the result of cargo cult management. My "generalist" palette is exactly what got me hired at each one of my previous jobs. I learned programming as a hobby long before going to university, and I got a degree in Instrumentation Engineering with what essentially amounts to a minor in Power Electronics. During the last two of my undergrad years I worked in a research team at my university and did a fairly good job (papers and all) in a third field, computational electromagnetism, mainly with applications in microelectronics. This means, on one hand, that I can be very helpful to anyone in my team. I can help those of my colleagues who lean more towards software than hardware troubleshoot their instruments and development boards, and I can serve as a buffer between the hardware designers and the programmers. I can make good trade-offs between circuit-level design and high-level programming abstractions and I can design applications for low-power operation instead of writing something and tweaking it until it has decent battery life. What this also means, though, is that people in management are ecstatic about how they can give me pretty much anything to work on, and I'll munch it, or stick me in the same room with people who think JS is the best thing and people who think computers are evil and still understand what each of them says. This enthusiasm comes from precisely the same people who whine about candidates who are "miles wide, inches deep", and I know of at least one instance when the lead developer who interviewed me had to kick and scream to get me hired because my CV painted me "undecided" and "not having a good career discipline". It's even more ironic considering that the people who whine about it are typically millimeters wide and deep. I often hear this kind of discussion in the middle management circles. Our people are way too specialized and it makes communication and collaboration difficult; we could use people with a more diverse range of skills; we depend too much on one or two people doing this thing, but they're the only ones in the team who can do it. This is especially problematic in teams of people who have been in the company since they were juniors. Well no shit it is, since they just spent four out of the six years of their careers doing precisely the same thing. And no, "side projects" are not a good solution to this, and I've walked out of interviews because of HR folks strongly implying that my side projects are for learning skills the company needs. Fuck off. Thinking and learning aren't free. You want it, you pay me.

codygman 13y ago
I concur, my generalist resume listing 10+ technologies is what interested my current company in hiring me. It turns out they hire polyglots/generalists.
danielweber 13y ago
I think the generalists will beat the specialists in the long run, but if the current fashion is for assembling the perfect team of specialists, a job seeker has to (unfortunately for everyone) adapt to it. I've walked out of interviews because of HR folks strongly implying that my side projects are for learning skills the company needs. Could you explain what you mean here a little more? Did a company, at the interview phase, tell you they wanted you to work on side projects for free?
- weland 13y ago
  > Could you explain what you mean here a little more? Did a company, at the interview phase, tell you they wanted you to work on side projects for free? What they told me is that it's a good thing that I am familiar with so many technologies, since that probably indicates that I spend a lot of my own time perfecting my skills. Which is actually true. But then they began to rant about how that's a good thing because this is a competitive field and it's really hard to keep up with all the new technologies popping up, so I might have to put up some of my own time to learn the technologies we'll use. I actually raised an eyebrow and said that no, I'm not willing to do that. This opened up a discussion about dedication and loving one's job beyond the matters of workhours and payment, which are true signs of a professional programmer, at which point I really just told them I'm not interested in their offer anymore and left. At that point, I'd have left even if they'd have sworn I wouldn't have to do that and that they were just checking. It's really impolite. I don't presumptuously boast about how I know what really makes the difference between a professional medic and one who just has a license to practice. It's also manipulative in a really poor way, implying that if you don't do all that stuff, you're "just" a programmer, rather than a "professional" programmer. Yeah, no shit I'm a "professional programmer" -- I don't have kids, I live close to work, my girlfriend works from home so her schedule is more flexible than mine, everyone in my family is in good health and back in college I fucked up my sleep schedule so hard that the occasional all-nighter doesn't do much damage anymore. But I'm exactly as professional as the dude who comes in at 9 and leaves at 5 because his kids want their father, not his toys.

300bps 13y ago

I don't think there is a single thing right with his resume. Let's take the first line of his overview: Software developer since the 1970s. First of all, any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental. Try teaching a Cobol programmer OOP and you'll find that they learn it slower than someone without that procedural coding experience. Second of all, the first line of your resume should not be to announce what protected class(es) you are in. Your resume shouldn't have "senior citizen" on it anymore than it should have your race, creed, religion or any other irrelevant facts on it. Linux work started with the first kernel releases and continued through Slackware So what? I used Slackware extensively in 1996 but the experience is meaningless. If I had that on my resume now it would tell anyone reading it that I'm probably resting on my laurels and probably have for decades. Experience includes: Agile, Assembly, Back-End, BSD, C, CSS, Debian, FOSS, GIMP, HTTP, Java, Linux, Mathematics, Mint, MySQL, Octave (similar to Matlab), Open Source, Parser, Perl, PHP5, Python, Recruiting, Regex, Shell, SQLite3, Support, TCP/IP, Ubuntu, UNIX, Tcl/Tk, Teaching, Training, Transcoding, VPS, Writing, XML, XSLT I've seen dozens of resumes that list dozens of technologies like this. Not even so much as a bold font weight to say the things they are masters of as opposed to "experience with". Early in my management career I hired a developer that had TCP/IP programming listed as a skill on her resume. After hiring her, I gave her the IP address of the server to do some TCP/IP programming. She asked, "What is IP address?" As someone who is in their 40s, my advice to to someone without a job later in life is to drop all the extraneous things and focus on what you've done lately. Lose the moniker "old coder". Lose any technologies older than a decade from your resume. Lose any references to "35 years of experience with...". Take off your hobbies. Take off your reasons for leaving your past employment. There are too many other fixes needed to go into.

ccozan 13y ago
also, quite important to the style: leave that 1st person "I" away. Every time when I read a resume like this I see a much overrated person, full of him/herself, former glory seeking new validation, etc. A big sign DON'T HIRE. Hints: make it simple, objective, no complex sentence structures, just information to the job and assignment. Use nice fonts and do not clutter the information, structure it with max 2 headings.

ivanhoe 13y ago

I would always hire an experienced generalist first. Being generalist means being smart and fast learner, and those are IMHO the crucial skills for any small or medium sized team. You will end up in new and unexpected situations here and there and the "specialist" mindset is not very good in dealing with this. You need a generalist to come up with the best hack, simply because he has a much wider perspective...

orkoden 13y ago
You might also end up with a jack of all trades - master of none. They often appear competent at first, but will fail once stackoverflow and their $LANG cookbook doesn't have a copy and paste answer. This does probably not apply to OP obviously.
- djKianoosh 13y ago
  not all generalists fit this stereotype. it is possible to be a generalist and not be a copy/paste drone
  - phaer 13y ago
    Of course, but who do you tell which is which just from a resume of an otherwise unknown person?
    - djKianoosh 13y ago
      It's tough; when I was doing tons of tech screens a few years ago working for a consulting firm, I got pretty decent at picking out good resumes more than half the time. Mind you this was not my full time job. But you really need to do quite a bit of resume reading and phone screens before you get a good feel for it. so, experience will get you so far.
    - OldCoder 13y ago
      Excellent point. And, conversely, how do I demonstrate, on my resume, that I'm proficient as a generalist without listing the things that specialist-oriented readers here suggest that I omit?

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Maybe not BS, but in either case it doesn't tell me who you are and what you want. And that sets off all kinds of alarm bells, be it on a resume or on a job description. If I get a resume like that, I'm assuming the applicant doesn't really want to work with us, they just want any job, and other than a paycheck they don't give a fuck about what we're offering.

_pmf_ 13y ago

> Maybe handing off a resume like that gives the same smell. And taking 2 minutes to actually look up the references is obviously too much work for a very hard working and responsible HR specialist.

thenipper 13y ago
It is. I do some recruiting work for my job. When you're looking over 100+ resumes for a position you don't have time to research every little acronym that you don't know. Sure ideally you'd know exactly what they're talking about, but in the real world that often doesn't work out.
DougWebb 13y ago
That's 2 minutes for each of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of resumes that the hard working and responsible HR specialist has to sift through. It's triage. If you're in the stack, make sure you obviously belong in the next, smaller, stack. Repeat until you get an interview.
- wolfgke 13y ago
  If you get hundreds of resumes as a HR specialist for the programming jobs you offer, any claim that there is a shortage of programmers for your company is a big lie.
  - thenipper 13y ago
    Could be a shortage of qualified candidates. Just cause hundreds of people apply doesn't mean that even 10s of good candidates apply.
    - pyre 13y ago
      If you're passing over qualified candidates because you fail at sorting the wheat from the chaff, then the 'shortage' is not due to the market...
    - wolfgke 13y ago

rbanffy 13y ago

> you tailor your pitch to the company which is hiring. This specific point is very important. Design your resume to save time for the recruiter. The recruiter has hundreds of resumes to parse. If you make the case you are a great match for the job opening in the first paragraph your chances of being noticed increase enormously. You are not telling who you are - you are selling a solution to a specific problem. > If you are applying to a PHP job There is little point in mentioning you wrote key parts of MVS/370 because the recruiter will have no idea what it is. If the company uses Ruby on Rails a demonstration of your expertise with JBOSS will be (correctly) treated as noise. I think knowing C makes me a better Python programmer, but unless the job asks for it, I wouldn't mention it before the first technical interview with someone who agrees knowing C makes someone a better programmer. Tip: using a spreadsheet to keep CV parts saves a ton of time. Tip 2: find out who the recruiter is. If you can understand more about the person and his/her expectations and background, you may fine tune your CV even more perfectly.

danielweber 13y ago
I used to think that the cover letter was where I could point to the parts of my resume that were very specific for the job. But I've done more than a few online applications recently that simply didn't have a place for a cover letter.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  The cover letter also should be designed to save time for the recruiter. Make space for some very targeted items (name, company, position) so it doesn't look like you are sending exactly the same to every recruiter, but don't make the mistake of spending more than 15 minutes on each letter. Since you don't know which one, the letter or the CV, will be read first, you should optimize both.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    They don't even give me a place to put a cover letter. Last week I spent a half-hour writing a cover letter, and then went through the application and there was no place to put it.

danielweber 13y ago

What made me excise all PHP work from my resume (except for PHP security work, which honestly is like shooting fish in a barrel) was when a company looking for "PHP experts" asked "how much of your last job was PHP?" and "about half" was considered too little. Because using Ruby makes your PHP knowledge rot or something. So I'd tell him to lie to get that PHP job. It sucks for lots of reasons, but so many employers in the PHP space all have their heads up their garbage collectors.

yiedyie 13y ago

So HR skips this kind of resumes from the start to save them trouble, very professional.

rayiner 13y ago

I agree that you should tailor your pitch to the company that is hiring, but bullshit like "generalists don't get hired" is one of the reasons I left software development. People who have the fluidity of thinking to be able to grok say Ruby as well as assembly are an asset, not a liability. They can see the forest rather than the trees. There are times when you need a specialist, usually because you need some domain specific expertise, but to penalize generalists is totally insane.

jfb 13y ago

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. You don't have a single resume; you have a collection of data points that you coalesce into specific resumes for specific positions. The "vomit everything" resume is invariably a sign of: 1. a new graduate, in which case we need to be having a different sort of conversation than with an experienced hire, or; 2. a graybeard who hasn't looked for a while and doesn't realize how many more layers there are now between his initial resume and the hiring manager. In the former case, the resume is going to be useless and I'd really rather there were a common format specifically for someone with very little work experience. And no, a transcript isn't useful, either, although it has strengths that a standard resume format doesn't. In the latter case, these guys (and at 42, this is my cohort now) need to learn about the volume of incoming data, and how useless for decision purposes a 30 year large pile of acronyms is.

tolmasky 13y ago

Disclaimer: Every employer is different. My advice may be completely out of phase with someone else. But during my career I've had to unfortunately interview a lot of people (as I think anyone in this field has), and frankly this is a really bad resume. Even in non-tailored format. I don't mean that in a bad way, I just think this person could really improve his prospects with some changes. To nitpick one example, I've always felt that after your first job you should drastically cut down the importance of your degree on your resume. As far as I'm concerned your degree/major/whatever is a poor indicator of the kind of developer you're going to be, to be used only as a last resort when you are young and haven't had the chance to demonstrate yourself in the workforce. After that, your previous job titles/accomplishments are way more telling. This guy is in his 50s and he's still got individual line items for honors and high honors. I don't care. I don't even know what that means back when he got his degree. He points out he has a double major. Then tells me his majors individually. Then tells me how he did in each major separately. This after the fact that he's already told me all this in his overview. This reads like a recent grad's section (look at me, I graduated!!!!). I half expected him to list projects he did in school (hell, maybe some of those projects at the bottom WERE school projects -- that's the mindset I'm put in by the schooling section). Then he tells me his hobbies. This isn't as bad as telling me he likes to ride his bike or something, but "working on a couple of books" sounds so "I've been working on that big idea in my spare time for 10 years..." It conveys zero useful information to me. Clearly he has no finished books (because then he would have listed them, but somehow he is working on more than one at once). The ONLY thing interesting to me here is "Open Source projects". But thats lost in a bunch of stuff I don't care about. This should be ONE LINE which has specific github projects where I can go check out what he's done. "MS-DOS, Win 3.1 through 7" Ugh. Unless your goal is to maintain old systems or something this just seems ridiculous. Then you've got gems like "Voting Software; 50% of U.S. market" LOST in the stockpile of buzz words. Something like that should be a bullet point under the employer you did it under in the top section. People go through hundreds of these things. This thing is visually exhausting. It doesn't read like a list, its jam-packed with information in different styles: top looks like an essay, then a list of short answers, then "how can I maximize information per square inch" at the bottom. I'm intimidated to read it. Your overview should MAYBE be 3 sentences. Then immediately drop into the jobs you've had, with bullet points about interesting standout things done in them. Then ONE LINE with your degree to prove you have one, then maybe "skills" or whatever to fill out the bottom. If you've done your job right no one will be reading by then, you'll already have been placed in the "follow up" pile.