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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

So if you've been in and out of management and technical roles (like myself), how do you make those gaps between two resumes not look like gaps? Or, do you simply address it in interviews when asked?

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I try to highlight the technical aspect of the work. Sometimes it’s just word play. For example, we’re you a “senior project manager” Or “senior technical lead” but primarily I create bullet points for each role. 8 bullet points, 4 are technology focused “customer facing web application using Python...” 4 are management focused “managed a team of 6 developers to achieve” and I simply remove 4 for each role depending on what I think they are looking for. The objective of the resume is to get a interview.

Explain the role in management/development centric terms. Project management can be "lead a team of devs" or "managed a project". Think of it more like translating to two different languages, rather than being selective with the information you are sharing.

In some management roles sometimes you hop between technical tasks and have more managerial months interleaved, specially in startups or mid to small firms. Sometimes they are not really gaps.

He said not to put dates on degrees, but could you also not put dates on jobs, just durations?

You need dates on jobs because they want to identify gaps in employment. The only exception would be if you are a contractor and all of the engagements were under your company. You would list the start and end of your consulting practice in that case.

I've screened thousands of resumes and I've never searched for gaps in employment. Some companies may do this but I haven't witnessed it. The things I search for all things obviously within a person's control: consistent formatting, sane file format & filename, and flawless grammar.

It's a common HR tactic to identify people that might bring their employee retention time numbers down. Leaving off dates seems like a good idea, but may upset such people.

I've never searched for gaps in employment.

Several companies I’ve worked for have had a checkbox on the HR paperwork for interviews, have all gaps in the candidates CV been explained Y/N?

I want to see if someone had five jobs over the last five years. Clear sign of a shit developer.

It's not really a clear sign of anything. Many other things could cause that, such as a desire to learn new things often or changing jobs to increase pay after gaining experience. Technical work can be interesting and exciting at first, but become tiresome after a year of repeating the same shit.

And that's likely not somebody that I want to hire. Hiring and oboarding is incredibly expensive. If you are going to get bored in a year and move on I'd much rather hire somebody else.

Or someone who lives in SF and likes doing startups, or someone who is terrible at finding a position that is the right fit for them, or someone who is terrible at recognizing terrible working environments, or someone who...

How so? As a feelancer, I enjoy coming for a specific task rather than getting allocated to a "pool" of developers, though I also get offers from big customers to join into another project after completing one. If I only consider long-term projects from banks etc. my skill set would be much smaller. When working for start-ups, you often have dedicated budgets for a particular customer project of theirs or other time limitations, but the scope of your work can be much broader.

Edit: also want to point out that if you only have worked in greenfield projects where you could grow with the particular tools and practices of that project, you don't know anything about writing maintainable code

I have a 3 year gap on my resume and every job I've gone for has asked about it. It's there because I was studying full time as an adult, and when I tell people that they usually laugh and say they were making sure it wasn't a stint in prison.

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