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Comment by travisjungroth | Hacker News Reader

I penalize people slightly for an empty GitHub if they put it on their resume, just out of annoyance. Why did you put this url for me to follow if there's nothing here but a half started React tutorial from 3 years ago?

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Agree on this. If you don't have a useful GitHub portfolio that's fine.

But anything on your resume or linked from your resume is fair game.

If you haven't been able to meaningfully participate in open-source work there's no penalty, but don't link to an empty GitHub page on your resume.

In the rare case that they have an empty GitHub, save for a fork of https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode, I hire them immediately.

Yeah, this is just like any other thing you call out by putting on your resume.

Nobody is a expert in everything, of course, but if you specifically put "TCP/IP" or "OOP" on your resume, you better be able to explain TCP vs UDP or class vs interface (both real examples from real phone screens I've done).

As a former recruiter, I just assume all resumes are complete shit. I never saw much of a correlation between a quality resume and a quality candidate. Screening for the stuff one uses on the job is what I prefer to do. It's also nice to focus on the job requirements, too, because it removes any need for someone to impress me with what the have done. When you can walk into an interview with "hey, I really want you to get this job, but we need to find a way for both of us to envision a scenario in which we're working together successfully", it's amazing how well that usually turns out.

Agreed, I think a resume with just yoe, last 10 years of companies worked at/positions/years, education, and 4 our 5 technologies/areas currently interested in working on is enough.

You could probably drop education from it if you have 5 or more yoe.

Frankly you could do this in one 5 or 6 line paragraph without a resume

I never read them anymore. It’s such a waste of time. Totally useless compared to our phone screen templates.

If recruiting software didn't penalize for keywords I think it would be less of an issue. Its a struggle trying to figure out what to put in the "list of technologies" type section. I have to put them somewhere to get past crappy HR screening software since explaining every tech in a job description would create paragraphs but just listing it doesn't represent the level of aptitude.

For example, I might use Chef daily. If I put it in a list of other tools I use it can mean I know how to use it for my very specific use case, but usually it is taken as "this guy thinks he contributes to the Chef source code and knows every bizarre scenario involving it" by some tech screener trying to get his rocks off.

I 100% blame every tech recruiter for furthering this mess.

The secret is don’t base your job search on blindly submitting resumes to applicant tracking systems.

When I am looking for a job, I send my resume to my curated list of local recruiters followed up by a phone call. We talk about what they have available and what I am looking for. I have enough of a history with them that they make sure that my resume shows up on top of the hiring managers stack.

My success rate from submitting my resume to being invited to an in person interview is 100% unless the req was closed. My non rejection rate is close to 100% (I’ve taken myself out of the running because I found a job.)

This is interesting. How did you build your list of local recruiters - through trial and error? And did you use services other than LinkedIn?

It happened over many years. But basically, I respond to every recruiter if I don’t already have a contact with the recruiting company and they have local offices.

Mostly LinkedIn these days. I only got really serious about my career about 10 years ago. Before that I was your typical “dark matter developer” working at one job for almost a decade.

Good to know, this is useful info, especially with respect to working with every recruiter and sticking to LinkedIn. Thanks.

On that note. My ususl response when a recruiter reaches out to me has been.

“Hey, I am not looking to make a move right now/I’m looking to make a move in $x months. What are the trends you are currently seeing and what are the salary ranges? Send me a list of open reqs. I might know some people who are looking”.

This will also let me stay up on market trends and know which projects to focus on and what to emphasize on my resume.

That's quite neat, shifting from being passive to engaging actively with them, I like that, thank you.

I’ll go even further. Don’t put any language, framework, technology on your resume that you don’t want to talk about or that you don’t want to do.

I took C and C++ off of my resume years ago even though I did both for 12 years and I still know all of the ends and outs of C. There is going to be that one old geek (I’m 45) who wants to ask me some obscure question just to prove how smart he is. I definitely leave PHP and Perl off. I don’t want to show up on recruiters search results looking for WordPress developers (I never did WP).

I want to keep the conversation and the interview focused.

Just scanned a resume touting IBM 370 assembly, along with a dozen web frameworks.

>>> class vs interface

This is java specific, that's not OOP.

Interface is a means to achieve OOP. 2 more languages pops off my head:

C#: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe... TypeScript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/interfaces.html

So many places seem to require a github profile in their form.

There is never anything wrong with writing "n/a" in any kind of form. There was a long overlap during which any form that took contact details already had fields for email address and mobile phone number, but before either of those were as ubiquitous as they are today; nobody processing those forms ever ignored one with "n/a" for email address.

Granted, it might be less prudent to skip some fields than others, of course.

"error: n/a is not a valid URL"

how about www.idonthaveaninterestinggithub.com

URL must start from https://github.com/

Use this: https://github.com/idonthaveaninterestinggithub

But it's empty! You'll get penalized

Nice username.

Good job. All projects vacuously have clean READMEs and concise commit history.

https://github.com/IUseGitlab/ItHasDockerBasedCi/AndBetterIs...

Seems https://idonthaveaninterestinggithub.com is up now

Disable their client side validations and find out if they bothered with server side validations...

n://a?

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