Comment by yks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yks | Hacker News Reader

Slightly tangential but I believe the resume situation is another part of the "broken hiring in tech":

1. There is a whole cottage industry of resume writers. My CV got me mostly where I wanted and then some, but of course the professional "resume reviewers" told me it's awful and I need to pay them $50 to make it noticeable at all.

2. The "importance of results" makes people willing to bend the truth and then resumes start looking very sleazy. I saw CVs of interns from Silicon Valley darling companies who claim in every line how they saved millions of dollars here and there. Hard to believe frankly.

3. And what do those results even give us? If resume A says "Implemented ETL tool that improved customer acquisition 420%" and resume B says "Implemented ETL tool to work with customer data in Java", there is no reason to believe candidate A is at all better than candidate B. Well, they are better at resume writing or hiring resume writers. Or maybe they are good at office politics and were able to put themselves on impactful projects. But will they pass the FizzBuzz?

Re:3

Frankly, I think a lot of managers in some places (maybe places you wouldn’t like to work) would care more about their employee being good at inflating their accomplishments and engaging in low-scale office warfare with people outside the group than having really good technical skills.

At one of my employers I was hired at a probably bad time in my life where I was quite unskilled technically (spend a whole day or something to write a fairly simply SQL query), but I would start small office fights (and contribute to office fights of my manager) over any perceived slight, and always view anything my team, me, or my manager did as delusionally impactful and important and loudly proclaim it to everyone around. They bent over backwards to keep me on board. But the technical level of this group was extremely low, so if this was in a group where someone else could verify that I wasn’t that good it may have played out in a more normal manner.

As I invested a lot in my technical skills and got a lot better/more efficient at my actual work (while caring less about fighting office people about their choice of wording in an email or something) they all began to hate me, with my manager wondering aloud to me why I had become so much worse of an employee after a great start.

We hire interns and co-ops regularly. Often times, the local university forces them to redo their resumes in such a cookie-cutter way that they appear near identical to eachother. It's utter garbage to boot.

First question we ask: do you have a copy of your ORIGINAL resume? The ones who understand what we mean and actually have it are off to a great start.

In my resume writing business, I get a ton of kids who've taken their cues from the student books put together by university career centers. Everything possible is jammed onto one page in as small a type as can be minimally read. Real disservice to the applicant.

That’s funny, because although the 420% statement seems more appealing, it doesn’t give any idea whether things improved drastically or just from terrible to slightly less terrible.

420% of zero is still zero ;)

Resume A in case 3 shows that the person cares about delivering measurable value which is certainly a plus in my book.

What if they are a 10x programmer put on the project that was shut down after a year of development? Did they produce measurable value or not and more importantly, do you want them on your team or not?

What if they were just doing whatever was asked of them without caring about value and now are pulling up some measurements out of mostly thin air because the hired resume writer told them to do it? Do you want this person on your team or not?

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