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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

How things are in Seth's world:

"A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, "oh, they're missing this or they're missing that," and boom, you're out."

How things are in the real world:

"No resume attached? Boom, you're out."

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So I guess then that Union Square Ventures doesn't count as a real company:

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2008/02/were_hiring.html

And neither does Blue Whale Labs:

http://www.socialtwister.com/2007/01/27/a-few-good-mammals-w...

And don't even get me started on these guys:

http://www.ycombinator.com/

I was talking big trends here.

I can find companies that only hire programmers that know cobol, but that doesn't mean that all companies do, and that you should emphasize your cobol experience in your resume.

He's not talking about average jobs OR average people:

Some say, "well, that's fine, but I don't have those."

Yeah, that's my point. If you don't have those, why do you think you are remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don't have those, you've been brainwashed into acting like you're sort of ordinary.

Good point Mr. Christensen...

Had to upmod you for that one, even though it may well be contradictory to my own point.

Oooh the humiliation...

It takes a bold, nay, an extraordinary man to admit that :)

I think that depends on the company. I'd say, especially in the software industry, that if a company rejects you simply because you don't have a traditional resume, then they probably aren't looking for exceptional people.

A "traditional" resume is simply a track record in a concise format. If you're exceptional enough to not need one the company will probably be approaching you. If you're too pretentious to bother making one because you think you're exceptional I would expect it to be rejected.

But... but... but.. don't you read my BLOG?

Give me a break. If Godin's argument is that the places that demand resumes are places that you don't want to work, the rest of his argument falls apart: what good is a defense mechanism that keeps you from getting screened out of a company lame enough to keyword-screen resumes? If Godin's premise is valid, then the conclusion should be exactly the opposite --- resumes are early-warning signals, attracting valuable early rejections from companies that would otherwise be a waste of your time.

All I can add is, refusing to provide a resume will make you sound like a douche. CEOs have resumes.

> CEOs have resumes.

You could have condensed your entire (quite good) post to this. Great pull quote, and it obliterates Godin's argument.

Good point, but not necessarily a defeater. Maybe that's because they are competing with other CEOs, whereas an uber hacker is already the top of their competition.

> an uber hacker is already the top of their competition.

Those guys are called CEOs. Or rockstars. If you're Bill Joy, you'll know it, and you won't be asking anyone for a job.

"Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for... those jobs don't get filled by people emailing in resumes."

To: board@ge.com

From: wannabeceo@gmail.com

Attachment: Resume.doc

Dear Board,

Being your CEO sounds like a great job. Please take me under consideration. I have attached my resume. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Wannabe

CEOs have resumes so their credentials can be reviewed, but that's not how they are chosen.

For what it's worth, I agree that mailing resumes is a dumb way to try to get a job. But then, you can read that same advice in "What Color Is Your Parachute?", which outdates Seth Godin by about eight hundred years.

But then what on anyone's blog hasn't ever been said by anyone before?

I disagree.

It depends on the company and the applicants career maturity though.

Someone just coming out of college probably needs a resume to list the basic stats, because they're still 1 of 1,000,000 people out there. But once you've been around a bit and have contributed something to the area in which you're looking to be employed, letting "others" speak for you is highly efficient. By "others", I mean blogs, the web, colleagues, professional profiles, etc.

You can put almost anything you want on a resume and it's hard to really know how accurate it is. Saying "Google my_name + some_project" is way more "real", as is saying "check out my blog on scaling fortran applications running on TI-83's configured as webservers", or saying "check out my project on _foo.com, which implements a fully-compliant webserver on a PCjr."

I guess it doesn't even work if you are applying somewhere. Rather, to get by without a resume, you have to be so great that people approach you, instead of you approaching them.

For once I think he has a point.

Seth's response to "Boom you're out" is that you probably don't want to work there anyway.

From my experience, I'd say that he's correct.

How things are. How things should be.

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