Show HN: CV Boilerplate – Easing the Process of Building a CV Using LaTeX | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CV Boilerplate – Easing the Process of Building a CV Using LaTeX

github.com

53 pointsmrzool31 comments

I consider LaTeX resumes to be a secret handshake of sorts, something that makes me significantly more likely to be inclined-to-hire a candidate.

If you're preparing formatted text, LaTeX is the best tool for the job. It also has a steep learning curve. Preparing a resume with it says "I have the technical judgement to use the best tool for this job, even if I had to learn an arcane new programming language[0] to do it."

0: The best description I've ever read of TeX in general is that it's a Turing-complete programming language with a compiler that outputs printer assembly code (Postscript) rather than computer assembly.

I can't agree. Having used LaTeX for about a year now, it's got all the fragmentation and design-by-committee flaws of Linux, but much worse. There are so many packages, and many are completely incompatible with each other. And while TeX itself is pretty simple, LaTeX is much bigger, and using any libraries on top of it pretty much requires hours of searching tex.so for obscure fixes and workarounds, which are often counter-intuitive.

I'd rather hire someone who would have the sense to pay $20 for a month's worth of InDesign, learn how to use it (which also has a steep learning curve), and make what they need. This shows me they have prudence and can prioritize and manage their time properly, and aren't swayed by public opinion on what the best tool for the job is, but make unbiased comparisons for themselves.

Personally I've had more success after switching to a résumé based on this article:

http://practicaltypography.com/resumes.html

> Preparing a resume with it says "I have the technical judgement to use the best tool for this job, even if I had to learn an arcane new programming language[0] to do it."

In my experience with my classmates, it means "I know how to download a template and edit it".

"Preparing a resume with it says "I have the technical judgement to use the best tool for this job, even if I had to learn an arcane new programming language[0] to do it.""

As a dude who wasted uncounted hours tweaking his LaTeX config at university a decade ago and who considers it the best tool for technical reports of any length...

I have to strongly disagree. I would not hold it against the person but wasting time on an arcane layout language is like smashing bricks with ones body. Impressive, but not very practical.

Best tool... for a single page CV? I would call that massive overengineering.

LaTeX is great for long technical documents but preparing careful layouts - especially single page - is an effort in frustration (unless one is actually proficient in it in which case salutations to you!).

I would advice people to try anything else for CV before LaTeX.

For example? What are the alternatives?

The only other option I can think of to get a good result that stands out is inDesign, which also require a fair amount of fiddling, it's expensive (unless you download it illegally, which means more fiddling plus, you know, breaking the law), and removes all possibility for automation and version control.

If, on the other side, you're suggesting to use MS Word or LibreOffice or similar, then I'm afraid we have dramatically different standards...

"If, on the other side, you're suggesting to use MS Word or LibreOffice or similar, then I'm afraid we have dramatically different standards..."

Well, honestly, it's way worse than that. Personally?

I've used them all, Word, LaTeX, InDesign... I believe I did one even in Illustrator once.

Now?

I have grown tired. I use Google Docs.

I use Verdana, with judiciously placed bolded words to highlight pertinent items, red color to highlight positions, and headers for a few places for structure. I export a PDF which I offer publicly.

And I love it. It's easy to tweak, easy to update, and most of all, I have a recipe that does exactly what I want my CV to perform most of all - convey the information for which kind of tasks I kick ass and can prove it.

Yes, it's more functional than pretty - I have changed the graphical razzle dazzle of my youth (which was a vain attempt to hide inexperience) for bullet points about professional experience.

I think we might have different standards, sure. I see nothing wrong if one writes his CV in Word. I know several academically pretty kick-ass professors who do. Like I said, it's not efficient use of time to learn LaTeX just for ones CV unless one really wants to and it would be unfair to judge a person just because he chooses to use a tool that is faster to use for him just as long as he takes care that the document comes out as brief and informative.

Are you making hiring decisions at the company you're at now? Can you share the name of that company either here, or via e-mail? I, and I'm sure others, would like to avoid applying there.

I liked your first sentence so much that I've put it as opening quote in the readme.

I did mine in LaTeX back in <checks files> 2001, using basically just

  \documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{report}
  \usepackage{url,a4wide,pslatex,times}
  \section*{Experience}
  \subsection* ...

As an academic, I have to reformat my CV for almost every grant I apply to. I created a Jinja2/Pandoc pipeline to ease this process:

https://bitbucket.org/hoffman/cv/

There's a site that I've been using for a while called https://www.sharelatex.com/ which has the ModernCV template which I use for my resume.

This sample CV doesn't look all that nice to me - bullet list, italic, small caps, three or four different font sizes on one page... effects overload.

Maybe it's just because it's supposed to be a showcase, anyway it looks cluttered

Thank you for the precious feedback. I'll probably revise it.

I should really learn latex

I wouldn't consider myself an expert in any way, but it takes less than an hour to get up to speed with the Latex necessary to compose a nice CV/resume. Most people spend far more time wrangling with a word processor to get a much uglier result.

I learned basic Latex, just the minimum necessary to get started. And now I just Google what I want and use the code verbatim, never bothering to understand the internals. I thought I was the only one who did this until I saw that most other people in my university did the same.

Honestly, that's what makes LaTeX great. Formatting is decoupled from content. If you want to make a formatting change, you can Google it and chances are that somebody else has done the same thing.

In Latex usually get nice results with the result settings, but if you don't you can spend hours getting it to look the way you want.

It is pretty awesome for what it does, but honestly it isn't worth learning it for a CV when you can surely find some markdown -> latex -> pdf translator.

LaTeX is worth it when you have a group writing project or you need to typeset more than a couple equations, at which point there really isn't any substitute.

I've used https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv#.Vi6Bz2SrReU in the past for my wife. I haven't really looked at any other apps but I like how I can just export PDF directly and not having to deal with exporting/creating the PDF on my own.

I'd like to learn LaTeX at some point but at this point, CVs are the only thing I use it for...

Looks nice! I use this one: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex

I use moderncv: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/moderncv?lang=en

Me too!

Me too! It's even on GitHub and has forks. :)

https://github.com/alanorth/cv

I'm working on a small Open Source web based generator for it, writing it in Go. :) It'll be done in a few days, I'll show it on HN.

https://github.com/tpiha/barecv

Forking someone else's CV... that's interesting :D

I have it in my Dropbox just in case I need it, but I don't feel like having it publicly available...

According to the README, that is what the posted templating system is based on.

Thanks! The boilerplate contains a revised version of the same template. I've ported it to Pandoc and added the possibility of including a series of urls near the contact informations.

Hmm, seems to require Pandoc? I'd like a nice LaTeX CV template as I can't find the one I used 15 years ago so therefore can't make changes, but don't fancy working with (the entirely appropriately named in this case) YAML.

I've never seen anything easy about using LaTeX.

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