The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume | Hacker News Reader

The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume

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175 pointssklivvz1971142 comments

As someone who reads and writes thousands of developer resumes a year, the major problem I see is that people have a difficult time separating what is important from what isn't, and separating day-to-day responsibilities (which are typically understood from a job title) from unique and novel achievements. I don't know if this kind of tool solves that problem.

Much of my work with resume clients is extracting what they do from them and then putting it into efficient words. Many people struggle with just explaining what they do.

The other problem is that you have to understand that your reader often isn't someone with a highly technical background (or even a recruiting background), so you have to define yourself quickly in order to prevent the reader from misinterpreting who you are. If a reader is looking for a "Python Developer", it's best to refer to yourself that way on the resume.

For senior level people length is often the issue - it's a highlight reel - not a biography. Anyone can get to 1-2 pages max.

This is why the resume endures despite it's many flaws (talked about this in some other comments). There needs to be a summarized, editorialized version of your "history" and that's what the resume does in a (semi) standardized format.

The big thing for me is that this summarized/editorialized version shouldn't be what you (the one with the career) manage on a regular basis. You should have a source of truth that is far more comprehensive (and manageable) and which allows you to create this summary version easily.

On another note...I've been writing a lot of web copy lately and I've started seeing a lot of similarities between good web copy and good resume copy. Resumes are marketing tools, and don't you forget it.

It's all marketing really. Many of the devs who struggle the most have some difficulty giving themselves credit for things they've done - they're modest perhaps. I think when I write some of these resumes they are more accepting of them because it's me bragging about their accomplishments.

Unfortunately in the resume writing game, there are lots of failed writers that were never involved in hiring. They are good writers but don't know the audience, so people end up paying substantial amounts for a nicely worded resume that doesn't result in interviews.

> Many of the devs who struggle the most have some difficulty giving themselves credit for things they've done

Ain't that the truth. I've been an engineer for a decade, I built a career app, I blog about career management, and i definitely still struggle with this.

And you're right. It's not only about good writing. Writing a good resume is a specific skill. There are so many career specific factors that come into play (industry lingo/keywords, being able to quantify value etc), you can't just make it pretty.

I've just realised that I relate to this a lot. After 10 years in the industry I still have a hard time coming up with accomplishments for my CV as I really think most of them are team efforts, even when some of them have been designed or pushed by myself I can't view "me" as the sole responsible for something.

I think being modest is a good trait overall just not so good for writing your own CVs.

As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. The shortest resume is just your last name "Zuckerberg" or "Snowden". If you've achieved something impressive (sold a company, started a well known web framework, fixed some large horrible government or organizational process) it speaks for itself and the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle.

>As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter.

That's refreshing to hear. I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience.

Many people do get emotionally attached to the work they've done. I've worked with people transitioning into tech from other fields, and it is hard for them to swallow the thought of distilling their 10 years as a litigator and law school into maybe 2 lines on a resume. If you can detach yourself from the work, are efficient with words, and you know what employers are looking for, it's not difficult to create a one or two page resume even with lots of experience.

> I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience.

As someone who recently did some job hunting I will tell you that while I agree on an idealism level with your comment it's just simply not true in practice.

I had many, many companies outright reject my truncated resume even though it provided an outline of years of experience and some top accomplishments simply because it didn't include enough of the buzzwords they were looking for. Resubmitting with my longer, 5 page resume (which I absolutely hate doing)? Accepted. Every time.

I will say, however, that if you can apply directly to a person via email (the "Who's Hiring" HN posts are perfect for this, typically) then the shorter resume will work just fine.

For CVs for monster/linked in I have a buzzword bullet list where not everything even gets it's own bullet so it doesn't take up much space.

So as a dev one ends up with bullets like (exaggerated here for effect):

* C# / .Net (ASP.Net webforms, MVC, WCF, Entity framework)

* SQL ( T-SQL, stored procedures, sql-server management)

* Python (Django, Flask, south, numpy, scipy)

* Javascript (jQuery, ES5, ES2016, webpack, bower, npm)

* Front-end frameworks (angular, react, knockout)

* Unit testing (mocha, jasmine, chai, nunit, xunit, junit)

* sourcesafe, bamboo, trello, docker

Yes, there's a danger it can look a bit redundant but it's mostly just there for the box ticking buzzword finding recruiters and prospective employers should understand that too and really be reading the other parts to try to get a better picture of your depth of those and the relevance at your more recent roles.

> box ticking buzzword finding recruiters

Sums it up well

The 'in practice' part might have some non-human readers involved, but even an ATS scoring a resume isn't likely searching for a huge number of buzzwords that couldn't be contained in the average skills section - a list of maybe 3-4 lines of an entire page.

I definitely agree on the benefit of sending a short resume direct to a human like those on a "Who's Hiring" post, but I don't think a human reader went through your entire 5 pages, and I'm pretty sure you could have achieved the same positive result with 1-2 pages if optimized properly. Maybe not though.

> I don't think a human reader went through your entire 5 pages, and I'm pretty sure you could have achieved the same positive result with 1-2 pages if optimized properly. Maybe not though.

Possibly. I didn't take a ton of time testing different scenarios. And yeah most of the ones that rejected me were within minutes even applying late at night so I assumed an automated system.

I don't know if I've ever read my own 5 page resume all in one sitting, heh. I use it as more of a career / professional catalog of just about everything so I can pick and choose when I update / tweak my truncated resume depending on the employer.

When I see a 10-page resume, I sense stupidity. And usually it turns out that, indeed, it would not matter if every single statement in said resume were true or not.

This is cultural too. In some regions it is normal to list absolutely everything to the extent of "Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook)". If you did that in other regions they would bin your CV for what looks like mere padding.

My resume includes articles I wrote in 2007 and the tutoring I've done; why? Because very few software devs have done that sort of thing.

It's funny though because in general I could pare it all down to maybe two paragraphs, I've done all sorts of tech work and can do everything but if you wanna get past the HR filters and have something to talk about in the interview, you pile on more details in the resume.

So true.

Some years ago, I changed my career from Linux System Engineer to Web Developer (Rails and JS). I know that the fact that I was building HA clusters some back then has 0 relevance with the job I am doing now, but it is hard for me to just delete this from my résumé, to leave more room to explain what I am doing now.

When I'm writing my resume, I generally chop off all but the last 10 or so years of my career, and then chop off anything else that gets me down to one page. When I'm reading them, I simply toss all but the first page into the trash. Nobody reads past the first page anyway. If you can't fit your resume onto one page, that's a communication red flag--you're not skilled at summarizing. It indicates you may have trouble doing senior-y things like presenting to execs and discussing your work cross-functionally, both of which require the ability to distill the main points from the details.

> the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle

I would have thought that if there was one thing an interview was not suited to do, it would be detecting con artists. Isn't passing interviews their only core skill?

Not for a useful interview. If you tell me you founded and sold a machine learning company but can't explain the pros and cons of using variance versus standard deviation then you didn't sell a machine learning company.

Hm. I have not founded or sold a machine learning company, or even studied the field. But either of those quantities fully determines the other, so I'd really hope that, if they're part of the model, they'd be exactly equivalent to a learning system.

Do you mean for measuring goodness of fit between a prediction and the known truth in training data?

If you want to assess the presence of knowledge, give a test rather than an interview. The interview is just a way to make it easier for the con artist to snow you.

One (stddev) is in the same units as the quantity being measured, while the other isn't. I know nothing about machine learning and suck at math and statistics. Did I pass?

if I was recruiter, math knowledge would make the difference, it helps even unconsciously for problem solving, logic reasoning, algorithms

math... helps even unconsciously for problem solving, logic reasoning, algorithms

What makes you think this? Anything aside from intuition?

at least one point that helps math minds is that a lot of math notions are present in programming languages

Yeah, I don't know why I was downvoted, it's a completely legitimate question to ask a data scientist.

But anyway, you'd get enough for a follow up question, but not really enough to pass. The key is that the sum of uncorrelated distributions has a variance that is the sum of the variance of those distributions. This isn't true for standard deviation. This is useful so we use variance when we think we're dealing with random variables. Standard deviation isn't as useful for intermediary processes.

Another follow up question - actually the first question in my head, but by a mental slip-up I typed out the wrong thing: Why do we use square error when absolute error would do?

The answer to this is actually quite illuminating because there are multiple valid but contradictory positions on it, much like the Bayes vs Frequentist debate.

I'd be surprised if there weren't somewhere out there who didn't understand additivity of variance (and linear combination with the covariance terms, or that it is a more natural parameter for the normal distrovution, or some other reason) but had founded and sold a machine learning company. Further, this seems a bit like asking someone with several years of development experience if he knows what a compiler is.

That sounds like issues of content more than form.

Right. My point was that a new form of delivery doesn't help if the content isn't "right".

Although I'm not intending to derail the thread, I'm curious what resources or techniques would you recommend to get better at this?

If you're writing your own resume, I'd maybe sit down every six months to a year and think about things you accomplished, and write then down (problem solved, how it was solved, data if possible, impact, etc.). At some point you'll have a list of accomplishments, and you can select the more impressive of them to put on the resume.

(As an aside - this also helps with career stagnation. If you're having a hard time deciding what to write, it's time to move on.

Once you've got some accomplishments, refactor to the most efficient use of words. How can I say everything necessary is as few words as possible? This is where a professional might come in handy if you're not a good writer.

You can run your accomplishments by a friend and say "which two or three are most worthy of a resume inclusion?" - gives insight into what is impressive.

I think that covers most of it. The rest is mostly formatting and summarizing (if you choose to write a summary).

Good advice. I use my filed email threads to jog my memory, see whom I worked with or who's questions I answered.

Neat, thanks it's very much appreciated. I did some digging and except from re-posted articles and CV builders it seems like there are not many tools to help with this. Which surprises me a bit given that I'd think many struggle to be effective in something I consider crucial to be successful in your chosen field.

I was skeptical of this when they first launched the earlier versions, but I actually quite like the way they've done it in the final version.

My favorite resume of all time is Matt Hall's stratigraphic column resume: https://static.squarespace.com/static/549dcda5e4b0a47d0ae1db... (His blog post about it is here: http://www.agilegeoscience.com/blog/2010/12/17/resume-20.htm...)

I'm a geologist, so I'm rather fond of the puns, etc that he's made here, but the point is that a straigraphic column is a great way to lay out a resume. It gives a vertical visual depiction of what the person has been doing from most recent to longest ago.

That's exactly what the developer story is. I really like that they've used that visual layout. It's a very effective way to convey activities and employment history.

My recent job search lead me to the idea that the traditional resume is broken. Temporal view only gives recruiters and hiring managers the bullet points to qualify you in whatever bucket that they need.

Instead of a traditional CV/Resume, I went with a single page narrative approach with a link to the temporal view on my LinkedIn profile. Initially there was some pushback as the recruiters were bellyaching over the fact that they needed to actually read my essay, but as time progressed I discovered that this format became a tool.

By forcing the hiring manager/recruiter to actually read and understand your background, inbound leads were much higher quality and the initial phone screen was extremely easy. Out of 100+ job applications, i got 20 or so responses, and of those 20 responses, 10 offers.

Out of the 20 responses, 19 were good fits and had good hiring managers with a company that had a decent culture.

I am definitely using the narrative approach again for my next job hunt.

I'm always excited when alternatives to the resume work. Glad it did for you.

Did you happen to post about this anywhere (on a blog maybe?). I'd love to see the narrative version and hopefully learn a thing or two.

My email is listed in my profile, drop me an email and I am happy to shoot you a slightly redacted copy of what I wrote up.

I haven't sent a resume in a while. Usually I just give a "cover letter" of sorts that says a) why I'm interested in the job b) what I can offer/why they "need" me, c) why I think so (usually just talk about experience).

I have a website that lists my workplaces and my main projects and of course my GitHub, both of which I link. I guess that's my "resume".

Didn't send a cover letter in a while. I am surprised this practise still exists.

Mine's not a cover letter in the usual sense but that's the closest analogy I can think of... I just write an email saying those three things and links to my stuff.

Right. The separate full blown cover letter is dead. We just put a short text in the initial email to go along the resume.

That's also what I do and recommend.

> The separate full blown cover letter is dead.

Out of curiosity, in which country are you? AFAIK, here in Australia, not having a cover letter would pretty much prevent you from getting a job.

UK at the moment.

We always have to fill a message when posting a resume. Write a short paragraph and that replaces the cover letter.

I wouldnt call that having 'no cover letter at all'

Plenty of public sector institutions have cover letters/supporting statements.

They give you the criteria they recruit based on, you write about how you meet them. It's a cover letter +

I would take a step further and just make a 1-2 page project/product recommendation for their company based on the role that you're applying for.

It takes more time, but the last time I was job hunting, I did it with several startups and got interviews with all of them (no referral). The resume + cover letter converted much worse for the other companies I applied to at the time.

Could you expand on this? It sounds interesting but I'm not sure I follow what you mean.

Looks like you made your CV your cover letter and your LinkedIn your CV.

The effect is that you used the mindspace otherwise occupied by the CV to tell your story - to brand yourself. There's only one you, but there's thousands of CVs indistinguishable from yours (and mine), so it makes sense that this worked better.

Weren't GitHub profiles the new technical resume? How well did that work in practice, and how would this Stack Overflow approach be different?

I was under the impression (from reading HN/Reddit) that while engineers do read GitHub profiles if explicitly linked in a resume, nontechnical recruiters do not. And they are the gatekeeper to said engineers.

Not every programmer likes to share his side-project code on public places like GitHub - for many reasons. Or pullrequest to some opensource mess. Code you write and problems you solve at work usually can't be shown on GitHub either.

So, this "show me your GitHub" thing for me is no different from "show me your Facebook, wait what, no FB account??" experience with non-technical HRs ;)

Conventional resume is totally OK for a first step in recruitment, I don't understand the need for extra fanfare.

Resumes are extremely easy to exaggerate or fabricate. I haven't seen fake github profiles yet (and I suspect they would be more trouble than they are worth).

I am often brought in on the hiring process to vet peoples technical skills. I used to just try to ask questions in the hour or two I got with the person, this seemed no better than flipping a coin. Even if the person was honest and we were both talking about the same skill, but how do I know that their experience with that skill is applicable? Now I insist on seeing a portfolio of some kind for coders. A Github, Bitbucket, Sourceforge or any other publicly viewable body of source will do.

15 minutes with someones code is a much better predictor of skill than even several hours of discussion. It costs a lot less too.

Very recently, a close friend was looking for a job (as a junior dev - focused on web). After applying and getting rejected, we decided to try a different approach - he basically gave up and decided to the following:

1) added buzz keywords in his resume

2) hosted an instance of gitlab and took various open source projects (stuff that was not popular, but had enough polish), modified them and uploaded them.

After a week, he was able to land multiple interviews. While he did get called out once, almost all engineers/non-tech hr didn't bother calling his bluff.

I am not suggesting that you should lie on your resume or steal open source projects, just that depending on one factor (like github, or resume, or white boards) is futile and that tech hiring in general is broken.

> While he did get called out once, almost all engineers/non-tech hr didn't bother calling his bluff.

I see plenty of GitHub profiles that are filled with forked/starred projects from other people, and nothing of substance.

I don't bring it to the candidate because it is worthless and there are more interesting things to talk about. But that doesn't mean I didn't see it ;)

Actually I have never once in my life see a good github profile.

I don't like this notion of having a "good" GitHub profile. GitHub started off as an easy place for me to dump code, no matter how crappy. Dumb ideas, samples from learning, incomplete experiments, whatevs.

Then I noticed that I had started censoring my code krapola. I was sepf conscious about the code I was making visible, as I didn't want to be judged. Then I decided that lame. Now I shamelessly put garbage on GitHub, too.

Coding poorly & having fun trumps curating a collection fancy schmancy artisinal repos. And I've also learned that my good code often lives at work, and never makes it to GitHub.

I'm the same way. I removed a lot of old stuff from my early days because I was afraid I was going to be judged on it. Now I don't care. GitHub is my dumping ground for everything. I start a new project almost every time I want to learn a specific thing so I have lots of incomplete projects on there simply because I move on once I learned the goal task.

Unfortunately like most people all the clean and polished code lives in private work repos. All those things I learned from the unfinished repos is being used in work code. Oh well.

I wonder if it's worth maintaining two accounts. A professional-oriented curated one could be valuable in some job hunts.

I have a self-hosted Gogs instance for all the stuff that I want private (either because it's shit or because it's really personal information that I don't want to put on anyone else's computer, including GitHub's).

To explain to both of you:

Noone gives a f* about the code you have in your github. Noone will read it ever.

When I say a "good" profile. That means you put a link in your resume to ONE project you want to show. The landing page is a README with a paragraph to explain what is the app, a quick start, and a few screenshots.

If you've got a link to the website (or desktop installer) AND there are a few icons of external integrations in travis-ci/appveyor/unittestthing/packager then your repo is absolute perfection. =)

> I see plenty of GitHub profiles that are filled with forked/starred projects from other people, and nothing of substance.

Though I haven't interviewed candidates for a long time, I happen to be curious about somebody from time to time. The very first thing I do watching their GitHub profiles is to filter-out all the forks, only leaving "sources" (how GitHub calls them).

haven't seen fake github profiles yet (and I suspect they would be more trouble than they are worth).

There are loads, usually with a fork of a couple of popular JS libraries, maybe a couple of commits but no PRs. Once word leaked out that having a Github was "a thing".

I wonder if you would think that about my github profile. I don't have any JS, but I have forked a few C and C++ repos to make minor changes and hold them until upstream accepted them. I don't think I have deleted any of them. Then I have a few experiments answering questions I wanted answered.

It is not particularly hard to determine if fork n` fix is the reason for the repo. A search for the name of a project will find out if it is a truly lazy copy. Then asking a few questions about why some class or function deep in the code does a thing can determine at least the level of motivation of the copier.

If I can ask an unlimited number of questions about the code and the copier can answer them competently does it matter if they copied? They are competent in the code they pointed me at.

It is hardly a perfect system, it is just better in every way than only an interview.

Sure, but these ones are definitely box-ticking exercises, I guess some "thought leader" on LinkedIn said all the best companies only hire people with Github, and off the masses went. There are loads of placeholder "tech blogs" too.

If a company is asking for code from a person then not checking the code, doesn't that indicate something is really wrong with the company?

Why would someone with real skill and therefore a real profile work there? Let all the fakers go work at shitty companies.

All it's actually done is made Github no longer a signal that would make you pick a CV out of the pile.

I have years and years of experience in software, I have a half dozen or more non-work projects I've contributed to or solely developed, some involving hundreds of hours of dev work, most of them on github. None of those projects are public though. And I suspect a lot of other developers are in similar situations. Public contributions on github usually fall into one of two categories: contributions to big open source projects (rare) or pet projects of little substance (common). These are just some of the reasons why using github as a resume is extremely fraught with difficulty. If you're lucky then it works well, but chances are you won't be lucky.

The difference between GitHub and StackOverflow/StackExchange ist that the latter is explicitly targeting the job market. They have done so since the early days, if I remember correctly:

https://business.stackoverflow.com/careers/

They don't look at github, no matter how much they talk about it. Just put a random link to github, you're fine.

Source: Me sending my resume to recruiters + watching the view statistics on github.

I wish employers cared about your github profile in lieu of puzzles, but they don't.

There are company/country combinations where publishing your own work done in your free time is possible -> but it takes weeks/months of stupid bureaucracy to be officially accepted. At some point it's just not worth it. So while it's an interesting data point when someone does have the GH profile, it doesn't really mean much if they don't.

Surprisingly, not many people know just how to write a good developer resume. The Developer Story is a good approach but even that is missing the key element that makes a resume work _when you are looking for a job_.

Imagine this scenario:

    - Farmer looking for horse to plough my fields and inspect my farm
    - Horse 1: "I am a stallion! My coat shines in the sun, my mane is dark and glossy, and the very earth trembles as I run. I have come from the stables of Arabia, have been in the armies of Alexander, the greeks, and the mighty Theseus! I have ploughed the fields of Asphodel, and won 'prettiest horse' in the Reading village fair"
    - Farmer: "Wow! You're...impressive"
    - Horse 2: "I enjoy ploughing fields and I'm pretty strong"
    - Farmer: "Great! I can offer you two apples, four sugar cubes, a nice warm barn..."

To be effective, Resume's shouldn't be all about how great we are (unless we are _really_ someone standout). Rather they should be tailored to the job we want.

The resume needs to get through the "hiring funnel". This means they must contain the keywords that the ATS and Recruiter need in addition to our technical accomplishments that the Hiring Manager and Interviewing Panel will want. This really is pretty simple but we get caught up looking inward and not paying attention to the actual audience of the resume. So most resume's end up hit or miss.

For anyone interested, I've written a book on how to do this. The book's description on Amazon contains the entire process so you don't need to buy it unless you want to. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KVVY9OA

>The book's description on Amazon contains the entire process so you don't need to buy it unless you want to.

Would you say this level of openness has an impact (positive or negative) on sales of your book? It's pretty refreshing but the cynic in me wonders if it hurts sales.

I'm not sure - maybe it does but the idea itself is pretty simple so I want to get it out there. I see a lot of people spending time making their resume's "look good" instead of being more result-oriented. I figured if I could explain how to write a resume well it would help.

The book itself has more detail and a step by step (chapter by chapter) process to get a great resume written out. So it's mostly helpful for the lazy ones! :-)

So I got the notice this morning that my info had been changed to this new developer story on SO. I go check, it's literally > 10 screens before a single useful piece of info appears. 70 or so open source projects I contributed to or run followed by my job experience

> "your Developer Story is the best way to share whatever it is that you take pride in. It’s your story; tell it your way."

Um, no, that's not my way. My way would be to list my professional accomplishments first and then list my open source projects just to show how much of a geek I am.

FWIW, there's a tab to switch to the old view which is probably what most recruiters will know to do. I hope they track what recruiters actually click on when checking your resume.

I honestly don't know which they'd prefer. As someone who occasionally interviews people, I do tend to find the cookie cutter descriptions of jobs to be moderately unhelpful. I would be interested in seeing more "what you take pride in," in many cases.

This is a result of the fact that your projects most likely don't have dates assigned to them (not even sure that was an option in the old system) so they all end up crammed at the top of the timeline. Once you fill in an approximate launch date for each project (or whatever you feel is most appropriate), the timeline should start to look a little more sensible.

That said, I'm still not a big fan of the new look. I also prefer the apps section at the end rather than mixed in with my employment history.

At some point years ago I must have asked SO not to show me any questions with "soap" tag.

Unfortunately my shiny new developer story now has "I dislike soap".

It's an interesting idea, but I prefer to take my experience and tell a story that specifically targets the role for which I am applying. From that perspective, having a single "story" out there for all potential employers isn't optimal for me.

I agree. I really like the move towards a better source of truth for our careers but I think it should be private.

Let me customize it easily (e.g. for a role or job) and present that customized view to different audiences.

They should let you tag items on the timeline for different roles, so that you can quickly filter it for employers and send out.

That's an awesome idea! You should suggest it on meta.stackoverflow.com.

A lot of negativity here, but I really liked my profile on stackoverflow careers, and I really like this. I felt like it was pretty different from linkedin, here are some things I like/liked: - easy to list my favorite technologies and books. - easy to link to github to show projects, easy to link to stackexchange. - UI gave good guidance on how to write a better description

As someone who's hired hundreds of software engineers over the past 15 years, it did the best job generating the kind of resumes I like to see.

I like where this is going (i've built something similar, if private [1]).

Resumes in their current form don't work well as a source of truth about anyone's career. The main issue being that we put summarized/editorialized information in instead of details. It's like discarding the data you used to generate a chart and then updating the chart directly going forward.

[1] https://jobrudder.com

I've had success with the "T style" where I list the stated requirements verbatim from the job posting on one side and how specifically I meet those requirements on the other side. Combined with some narrative about relevant experience, it's way better than just a chronology.

Wait so hiring managers who didn't have more then 60 seconds to parse my resume now have the time to go through years of my stackoverflow activity? Sweet!

The SO story will allow them to scan the highlights quicker IMHO.

It will become even more important to include visuals such as popular company logos or hip cool images.

This is the only reason I created a logo for my open source project, so that it sticks out whenever someone posts about it.

Is it really now? That sucks as I don't really engage with SO that often; Hardly ever really. Sure, if I Google for something SO results come up, but normally I search YouTube for a talk/tutorial or search Github for snippets of code.

I guess I'm screwed...

That is why this is a good move on stack overflow's part. They wand developers to feel like they have to use SO.

In terms of vertical integration, this technical resume aligns more with SO's robust job platform than with the Q/A platform.

I barely even look at SO. It's pretty much like Quora, as far as I'm concerned.

Yes it is like Quora, just with domain specificity. I guess you see this as a bad thing, but both sites are tremendous fonts of information. What is preferable to you? Academic papers? Books? Conference Talks? Random Blog Posts? Man pages?

Whenever Quora pops up in my search results, it's generally garbage. You get opinion pieces that a bunch of other people happen to agree with.

Stack Overflow is certainly better. Probably 90% of the time you can dig up the correct answer somewhere on the page.

But it's incredible how much of the world's knowledge is still locked away in books. The internet is ok for computer programmers, but for basically everything else it feels like we're still decades away from the "information superhighway" dream.

Don't worry, there is no "new technical resume," and you'll be fine. The headline is clickbait.

(Stack Overflow would definitely love this to be true.)

This is authored by a Jay Hanlon, "VP of Community Growth". Apparently, the role includes publishing clickbait.

He squeezes in a humblebrag: "...if you're like me, and still just a little proud that you got off the waitlist and eked your way into a school above your intellectual weight class..."

And he uses scarcity to scare devs into creating a profile: "It only takes a few minutes, and you do NOT want some other joker snapping up the good URLs."

Yeah I also felt the scarcity quip was in bad taste.

I don't see anything on here that I couldn't do with my LinkedIn profile, TBH.

I do kinda wish I knew the secrets of how to get 2-3 recruiting emails a day though. Unless it's "have 5 more years of experience," I think my profile could use some help.

Live in a tech hub and fill your linkedin profile.

It doesn't guarantee 2-3 per emails per day, but a few per week is certainly achievable.

You do need a few years of experience + some buzzwords.

> Live in a tech hub and fill in your linkedin profile.

Done and done.

> You do need a few years of experience + some buzzwords.

3.5 years. What buzzwords do I need? I just want to be able to find a job in a few weeks the next time I am looking. I don't think that's too much to ask.

Edit: I misspoke; by "find a job in a few weeks," I meant "start getting interviews within a week or two." No amount of LinkedIn profile magic will help me get a job directly, obviously.

I was about to say you won't find a job with linkedin. At best, it just an indication of some potential companies in the area. Keep the list somewhere in your mind, you never know what could happen to your current job.

... and while I was writing this, I just received a message from a startup that raised 200M and want me to join one of their team of 3 known ex googlers on some hard industry problem. [How crazy. I applied there last year and they never replied]

Well nevermind, linkedin is awesome. Now that I think about it, I left my last job because of a lead from it. :D

If it doesn't work for you. You are not in a tech hub or you don't have a profile rare enough. What's your city? and link to your profile?

I currently work in San Francisco. Seems like the hubbiest hub currently hubbing, no? As for my profile, I don't know how rare I am. I'm an average developer who can actually program and write solid production code. I'm a widget... the kind of person companies claim they need but can't hire.

I don't blog, tweet, or use Facebook. Do I need to do those things to attract attention?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-miller-0383b741

One trick in Linkedin is to update your "Job Title" in your most recent job. That triggers something that premium recruiters can see. I cannot back this with certainty but have seen this work for my own profile a few times.

I'm not sure if it's just your most recent job title or any update that triggers that, but I did get significantly more views when I was actually looking and did trivial updates on my profile every couple of days. I wouldn't necessarily want to signal that I was looking to my current employer or coworkers though. I'm aware you can turn the "notify your network of profile changes" setting off, but I wonder if it's a wise thing to do.

And, all that twiddling of one's profile seems like a stupid thing that I'm reasonably sure people generally don't do. Maybe I just need to write a bot to automate it.

Sigh. I don't know how to LinkedIn. :P

No great company name. No special univerity. Starting with a slight handicap here.

Intro is too long. Make it shorter and to the point. After 5 or 10 lines, it get hidden automatically.

[Do you realize that you have the equivalent of "I am open totally to leave my current company" while you're working at your current company?]

You lack a lot of keywords. Only Python, DynamoDb, AWS. You must have touched other things. The titles are 4 times "software engineer [intern]". You NEED MORE KEYWORDS.

The short line on each company is good and well written, I love to get context. =)

The content is missing substance. Add business metrics, how many users? how many servers? how many dollars going through? how many mails send [at the mail company]?

Yeah. Can't do anything about my university or past companies. I do realize I have the equivalent of "I am totally open to leave my current company," because for the right offer, I would. Saying I'm "open to opportunities" means precisely that: offer me something that betters my current and future situation, and I might take it. If a company doesn't understand that, they're deluding themselves.

I have no visibility into these business metrics because they don't tell me.

What type of keywords do you suggest?

The university fades after a bit of experience (and regular switching to better companies :D).

I try but I cannot understand your situation. I couldn't work without business and user metrics. That's the only thing changing from a job to another.

Keywords: More technologies. More trendy job titles. [Don't know what's relevant to your past jobs. Can't help.]

What would be examples of trendy job titles? I can safely and ethically change my previous job title, as long as it doesn't imply I was an executive and accurately represents what I did. (They officially don't care about job titles. It's literally whatever you want as long as you don't claim to be an executive when you're not.)

Believe it or not, changing these job titles to what they are now actually got me far more attention than what I had before (which was just the "official" job title, which didn't necessarily reflect the things I was actually doing).

Software Engineer, Data Engineer, Systems Engineer, Software Architect...

There are endless variations referring to close jobs.

dice.com

Lol, I guess I should have specified emails written in good English that weren't asking me to move across the country for some shitty 3 month contract.

I've been a contributor and top 10-20% user on SO for the last 5 years or so, and I've never once received a single job offer, solicitation or point of contact. I'm doubtful this will change any of that.

I thought the "new resume" was Stack Overflow Careers, which I spent USD$29 for back in the day. To SO's credit at the time, they offered a full refund if one was ever not satisfied. I never took them up on it, though I should have considering that it was a waste of $29 for all the value I got out of it. I spent a fair bit of time sprucing up that profile, got very few hits, and the quality of the leads was no better or worse than what I'd get off LinkedIn. IOW, random recruiters spamming.

So when the recent email hit my inbox, it was with a healthy dose of skepticism that I just immediately deleted it.

This would probably not be the most proud feature shipped to date (if I worked at SO). - It looks just average and does make use of the white space - It has this section where you "DISLIKE" technology? wtf really? - Who cares what you recommend as a book to read? This is a resume right, not your blog. - I somehow feel this is too leaderboard-y and not something i would use for a resume - but sure, it IS a cool thing to have if you're into StackOverflow (like a LOT), just not a resume..

It's not the new resume by a long shot. But it does point to some large flaws resumes have.

You also can't manage the things you put on a resume. You can't easily search, tag, sort, view by company, position etc. You're doing all that in your head and then putting the result on paper.

There should be tools to help with this stuff (I built one [1]) and those tools should put the resume in it's proper place, as an output of some other more comprehensive source of truth.

[1] https://jobrudder.com

_ is the new resume

Oh please - not again.

My first thought too.

"What fresh hell is this?"

StackOverflow as a company may have grown a little too quickly; I wonder how much $$ they make from this and whether they should just focus on their core which is community and maintaining a decent community rather than these marketing-led stunts.

These aren't mutually exclusive goals. We have people dedicated to growing and maintaining the community (on Stack Overflow, as well as the other sites in the Stack Exchange network), people who work on large feature areas (e.g. Documentation), yet more people who are focused on the Jobs and hiring/recruiting experience for developers, etc.

I'm more curious to know how these affect the profits of StackOverflow and what gets more bang for the buck or if random ideas are being tried out seeing which one sticks.

I see some other comments about preferring other ways to tailor your application or have specific approaches when you apply for particular jobs and I definitely agree with both:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12687415

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12686741

But I don't think this is really aimed at supplanting that. It's really just trying to put a better face on the "passive" approach to things and I like it for that.

I'm trying to get hired as a junior front end developer. Suck at writing resumes.

This is my worst one so far. Also I've been applying but no responses, I have a defeatist mentality and also I think I do accept that I don't meet the requirements.

http://m.imgur.com/a/oCdvU

I have changed the format some as the bullets as titles doesn't make sense. Still I have to condense and overall my "achievements" are pretty basic. Probably will have to find another menial job. Oh well

That is a terrible resume :-(

Why would you start with negative sentences about your projects? "not complete". "at best what I have...". "decided to abandon".

The second page is much more promising. Instead of story-telling and editorializing "This was a basic job, and quick", focus on what techniques you used:

- started from a broken Bootstrap prototype - rewrote email sending using package xyz

etc. Show me that you know how to use a variety of technologies, packages and tools. Then I can judge whether I have a job for you.

Right unfortunately I haven't used many tools. This one site was built with bootstrap and since I don't use/know bootstrap I wrote it from scratch the scrolling, menu, animations, etc...

Yeah it is a work in progress.

In case you're not trolling, google for "example resumes".

I did look at some. My previous resume see below:

https://m.imgur.com/7FU3bew

I was told lacked content so I gathered all my projects.

Hey, we've all been there! I'm more than happy to help you polish this up. Feel free to shoot me an email hn@awadsayeed.com

Thanks I'll take you up on that.

> Probably will have to find another menial job. Oh well

Don't take this the wrong way, but you need to change the way you project yourself. Even just from this resume, you're talking yourself down. Who would you hire?

"I wanted to keep track of who/what was visiting my websites. Turns out they were mostly crawlers for search engines. I keep track of IPs and URLs requested, I store them in a MySQL database using PHP"

"Wrote an application to process and analyse logfiles across a collection of websites, using a common web application stack. Stores requested IPs and URLs for future analysis. Identified the split of automated search engine crawlers and other bots vs human visitors. Tools and languages used include PHP and MySQL"

Resumes are all about how you present what you've done.

On that point - if you're applying for frontend developer positions, use your skills! Build a cool website to present your resume rather than a plain piece of paper. You'll probably still need the paper, but the first line of it can be "View my resume online at example.com".

Thanks for your tips

I do have a rough portfolio but it's just projects stacked on top of each other, images... thought about a language sorting thing you know click Javascript to view javascript files, etc...

I see your point about the wording.

I don't know, yeah I unfortunately am plagued with negativity

Portfolio:

https://www.cunninghamwebdd.com/portfolio/

"your Developer Story is the best way to share whatever it is that you take pride in. It’s your story; tell it your way."

Are people still relying on third party companies marketing to both sides of the market, to attract employees? You don't really need them. The Internet and contributions to open source [0] is your developer story, use it. [1]

reference:

[0] I realise not everyone can/will want do this.

[1] offer from google engineering (SRE) on basis of newsgroup questions and code.

Does anyone have a security@ contact address for stackoverflow that they know is monitored?

Unfortunately there is no way to opt out of this service right now. (edit: I don't want to email security to ask for an opt-out, it would just be nice to opt out until they fix the actual security issue.)

Edit: Found a web form they use on security.stackexchange.

Not sure what issue you're referring to, but you can reach us through the contact form linked at the bottom of every page on our Q&A sites (like the one you found) or by email to team@. Mentioning something like "security vulnerability" in the subject or the body will help get it looked at faster.

Edit: checked internally, and this specific issue is being fixed as we speak.

Thanks, I've done that now, hopefully you can find my submission I did put 'security vulnerability' as the top line in the body. If that doesn't narrow it down search for 1635976 also in the body.

It's an either an information disclosure issue or an authorization issue (depending on your point of view), I won't say more on here.

I'm curious what you found - once they get it fixed, would you mind sharing in some form?

I have seen numerous versions of the "New Resume" in the last ten years or so. It's really hard to replace something universal that everyone understands, even if it's antiquated. I doubt this will fair much better.

The difference is that this is aimed at one market, whereas other "New Resumes" try to be a catch-all.

Why does everything need to be a stream? Is my resume a twitter feed now?

The length of a tweet would be a fantastic constraint on most resumes.

I agree. Sounds like a fun new product to disrupt the resume industry: Tweesume.

The traditional resume works because it's easy to scan visually quickly. It's easy to print out and share. This is not.

There is a 'print to pdf' option that saves it as the traditional view.

I like the use of 2 columns.

That lady's resume is very impressive. Is she looking?

Obviously this is marketing fake from stack overflow.

There is nothing more unreadable than a Stack Overflow resume. Well... except a project on github that doesn't have a readme.

Ugh.

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