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Comment by peterburkimsher | Hacker News Reader

Siver’s ‘Law of Financial Viability’: “When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, seek evidence of whether people are willing to pay for it. If you find this evidence, continue. If not, move on.”

I keep being moved on, and nothing I've tried has ever made real money. That's why I haven't developed mastery of any specific skill (a Masters degree doesn't count). HR departments now hate me because I had too many short internships. I tried to fix that by settling into a job for 4 years, but now that contract's not being renewed, I'm unemployed. I keep trying to throw side projects onto Show HN, but they haven't turned into job offers. How far should I keep moving on before I give up?

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When I was in the same situation, I compiled a list of all high-paying fields, and tried to see if I liked any of them enough to go all in. Law: definitely no. Medicine: maybe, but too much competition and strain. Finance: no, but maybe there's something I can learn to love given my skills and inclinations... Yes, electronic trading!

So I went all-in into trading technology, and was happy enough and well-paid ever since.

HFT? Don't you need a PhD for that?

Some words of advice from looking at your site and resume

UK is well known for having a 2 page resume. But America, this is not the case, its a one pager. You blog & resume speaks of a very european mindset as well,you should know that European Companies =/= American companies in terms of cultural fit. Many european computer science jobs are more B2B than America, which has a large amount of B2C as well

I've done a lot of hiring, your resume has some serious red flags. It shows you jumped around too much, and there is just way too much irrelevant information. You should spend a bit of money and get resume critiquement / career critiques, this would be highly beneficial to you. Learn what your call to action is to both HR and to technical recruiters. Just put down the last 3 jobs you worked on

You would gain a alot by instead focusing on learning UX design, both document and website wise. I have a short attention spam, I could not read your resume. I went as far as measuring the fonts for you.

You put things at 10pt font... that's insane. 8pt font is as small as it goes, 14 to 16 pt is the preferred size for web-font readability.

You would also learn a lot by taking better photos of yourself too. Your photo looks like MySpace Tom is in his prime.

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You need to think in a companies' hiring shoes. What is their first impressions of you? If I were a recruiter for a big firm, this is how I would interpret you resume

- 2 pager -> You can't figure what matters in our company. There is way too many things listed that are irrelevant to the job position, what is it you are looking for in the job

- Blog -> it shows you don't have the best communication standards out there. It shows you have poor design aesthetics

- Hobbies / couchsurfing -> This shows you don't know what matters in XYZ company. Companies could not care less about your hobbies, unless its related to work

- "• Entrepreneurship: Buying, refurbishing and reselling a class set of iBooks in 2005; iPod repair at ", " Took online training courses in big data processing with ElasticSearch and Tensorfow machine learning. ",...etc → it shows you think a bit too highly of yourself, ego might be an issue. Reading through your writing on your blog suggests the same. I do not know you personally, I am only relaying what every HR person would think. I don't see any perspectives other than your own in your blogs, it suggests you might have issues acclimating to different cultures

Your blog is not a blog. Its a journal. Know the difference.

I am giving you 100% honest feedback on everything I've seen, you have a lot room for improvement not on the technical side of things. I'm not any better though, I recognize my weaknesses, my writing sucks and I tend to repeat myself. But I make strides of improving it everyday

Would you be so kind as to look at my resume and give some feedback? I know I'm an internet stranger asking for your time - I'd understand if you don't want to do it, but I'll be very grateful if you did! :)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n41w2zja8au26wp/shankar_resume_cto...

Looks great, even though its 2 pages long, since you have lots of experience. Top 1% on kaggle is seriously impressive though

I see a few grammatical errors, "i". The "Subnero" link is broken by the way, might want to point it to the correct spot. If you use google link, I would suggest doing analytics tracking to see how many times its clicked (this gives you a good indication fo how many people read your resume)

I imagine this is for datascience jobs, the things that stood out to me the most were

- youtube links to actual talks is very good

- 1% kaggle is really hard to get

- actual publications

otherwise it looks perfectly fine. Make sure the PDF is OCR readable, and make sure there is an accompaning .docx format as well

Thank you so much, I appreciate it!

>> I see a few grammatical errors, "i"

Do you mean I'm using small-letter "i" somewhere? I triple-checked, but can't seem to find that anywhere?

>> If you use google link, I would suggest doing analytics tracking to see how many times its clicked

That's a great idea!

>> The "Subnero" link is broken by the way

Thanks for catching that!

>> Make sure the PDF is OCR readable, and make sure there is an accompaning .docx format as well

I suspect its not OCR readable, and there is no .docx version either - the disadvantages of making your resume with Latex!

Its on the http://vanishingradient.net/ (now defunct), with the small "i"

ah okay you made it in latex. I always run my PDF's through Adobe Acrobat Pro X for OCR recognition. CTRL+F some words on there to see if it works. You want to ensure if it is OCR because it's going to be scraped for content through HR processors. That's why I recommended .docx format as well, granted that also let's headhunters delete your email address.

Pandoc has a latex to pdf converter, I imagine this is what you used

Also, you might want to change the resume name a bit differently. You wrote down "shankar_resume_cto.pdf". You might not be applying to a CTO position and might be taken as a threat to someone's existing CTO position.

By the way, you should really link your kaggle profile on there if you really are in the top 1%. Gives recruiters no doubt that you are actually what you say you are.

>> Its on the http://vanishingradient.net/ (now defunct), with the small "i"

Ah - thanks, its amazing how I tend to become "blind" to errors in my own writing!

Great point about the "cto" suffix! I once applied for a CTO position, and saved the tailored version of my resume at that time with a "cto" suffix. Since then I have been using modified versions of that resume, but I must get rid of the suffix now.

I held the top 1% rank in 2014. I'm not active on Kaggle anymore. They have since changed the way they calculate rankings, and you lose your rank if you don't stay active. As a result, while I still have my Kaggle profile, its now unranked. I figure its easier to explain this when asked, rather than link to a profile page that seems to contradict the claimed achievement.

if that's the case then omitting the link would make more sense.

Resume looks perfectly fine though,I didn't checkout your linkedin profile under your username but I assume it looks similar

I also looked at your resume. I'm from the USA and I don't know anything about how to write a European resume. That said, your skills, the work accomplishments in your 3-year most recent job, and your education are going to be the most relevant to employers but the majority of the words in your resume are used on other things. Seek some help from a resume writing expert.

This is fantastic advice. I'm a binational and ran into similar issues earlier in my career.

A one page resume is a foolish idea. It might make your job easier but a 6 page resume shows more details/depth and can separate you from the crowd. Some people will only read page one so making that into a summary page helps but also provides additional depth for those who want to read more.

You can have up to two pages - but ideally aim for one page. I wouldn't go any further than that. You can summarize everything important in 2 pages or less. I would just stick with 12 pt websafe fonts.

A resume is just a cheatsheet about a potential candidate. If you wanted a 6 pager, that's what blogs/youtube/github/stackoverflow you've made/portfolio URLs/etc are for. People don't have time to read a 6 page resume, you would be really surprised how many applications a company gets for 1 job posting (depends on job & company, but it goes into the hundreds and sometimes thousands, not all candidates are qualified though). It takes all but 5 seconds to apply to a company on indeed.com, for instance.

You should have an additional link(s) somewhere on every resume you put, if the person wanted to know more. And you should be using something like google analytics to track that as well. (either link to a specific url+query string and track that, or use bitly/google shortener url)

The density of information is definitely through the roof. Cutting it by 50% so it can be read should be the first goal, everything else secondary.

- It shows you jumped around too much, and there is just way too much irrelevant information

Agreed, some of those could be dropped. But some of those are internships or short contracts, I don't see a reason to remove all of those necessarily

- Blog/Hobbies

It's on his personal website, I don't see anything wrong with it. It shows that he's passionate about tech, he wouldn't just be some random work monkey if he got hired. Most of his posts are about tinkering with things. Looks like a standard blog to me. I saw your blog, and it definitely reads way more like a journal than his, which is good because it conveys your personality and that you have opinions (confidence)

I'd say this falls more into the 'irrelevant' category. His website or resume doesn't give me the impression of ego, if anything it gives the opposite impression: that he's a little shy, maybe desperate, and maybe thinks too little of himself

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There are really two key issues I see standing out by looking at his profile:

1. Non-comittal, he's moved to a lot of different places. While his portfolio shows that he's intellectually curious, it also shows that he isn't taking career as seriously as he should. All of those internships and none of them progressed into a job? That's a red flag for sure. Maybe this is what you're sensing. Get rid of this. Showing that you've travelled a lot and only worked short periods does not send out a good signal

Also this coupled with the hobbyist impression on the website might be even more of a red flag. You have intrinsic interest in a lot of tech but you're professional side doesn't reflect that. Do you hate business? it kind of implies that you aren't very business-oriented. If so, maybe think about grad school and going into academia, just my 2c

2. He might be a little too introverted and shy, and should probably take more initiative to network and meet people. Jobs are a seller's market, companies get tons of spammed applications that barely get read. Networking helps a lot

Alternative possibility: maybe you're moving on too quickly?

Obviously I don't know, but it might be the case that you've been too extreme in the "move on" part and enough in the "following an appealing pursuit".

Just my $.02 ...

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