What I Learnt From Reviewing 22 CVs | Hacker News Reader

What I Learnt From Reviewing 22 CVs

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>And although I’m not particularly a big fan of LinkedIn, I always quite like it when I see people who are at the early stages of their career making connections with everyone they met at last night’s Meetup.

To me this shows people who are more concerned about networking than learning. I want co-workers who are passionate about technology and not about how to hack their careers.

edit: More broadly the best engineers I've worked with had horrible social profiles because they were concerned about making things and learning rather than social credits.

>> To me this shows people who are more concerned about networking than learning.

I've always thought of a conference as something to plant the seeds of ideas in your head. There isn't a lot of detail and you might be one of 100 other people in the room so you can't really ask about details.

Following up with the speaker or other attendees after the fact is where the benefits are.

I don't mind a developer that says "I'm not sure how to do that, but _____ said they did something similar, let's give them a call."

Lurking the ten minute post-talk scrum at the front of the room is the best part of conferences for me. 'Ah damn, they are running into the exact same issue we are'...trade some ideas and contact info.

I agree that priorities are important. But these things aren’t mutually exclusive, right? I was equal parts networker and learner in my early career and it definitely paid off.

I remember being accused of being “too social” at times. And I’m sure I overdid it now and then (as we do in our youth).

But my personal network has been very valuable over time, especially in the tough times. And I’ve come through for them too. I’m not saying “it’s not what you know, but who.” I am saying it’s what you know AND who.

That's the distinction between being good for you and being good for your co-workers/company. When I'm hiring someone I care about them being good for co-workers and the company.

I guess we can agree to disagree, because in my opinion people who are connected to a group, and participate in the "give and take" that goes with it, bring additional value to the job. I don't see how that wouldn't be good for co-workers and the company.

Maybe I should clarify that these aren't things I would do on the job. I engaged with co-workers through volunteer work, at those goofy socials at the Chamber (which I refuse to do now), going out for lunch or drinks with folks I met in the halls, etc.

Either way, to me work isn't just going in, punching a clock, and cranking out canooter valves and cagibilt rings. As a program manager, I've always had an appreciation for the relationships and motivations of others. I do the canooter valve thing too, but I always enjoyed the brainstorming sessions and mind maps, and solving problems and making deals happen. I dunno, networking is part of the job if you ask me.

I'd say it depends on the types of social networking, the author of the article talked about very shallow networking (people you met at a meetup, stack overflow, etc.). That's different than building deeper relationships with co-workers. I've found that the two are not necessarily correlated and people who go for numbers will often sacrifice depth. I've seen this on LinkedIn with juniors who I'd never met that randomly connect with me (often bootcampers) and I can see that they've done the same with hundreds of others in the field (they never message me if I accept).

Good point, those are definitely different types of relationships. I agree completely that the shallow networking is a waste of time for everyone involved.

There's room for a middle ground there somewhere. Some of the most skillful engineers I've known in my career were stuck in a local maxima and not particularly happy. I've also known some very successful engineers that mostly got there through 'career hacking'. Something in the middle is reasonable.

Relatively speaking, the time someone would need to spend keeping their LinkedIn profile reflective of their career vs. learning/coding/solving is negligible. I've spent 10 minutes in the last year, for example, entering a promotion.

LinkedIn's value, and arguably it is aging, but that's also the point, is retaining opportunities for future endeavors. This is for me a much larger value than advertising my CV. To wit: LinkedIn literally saved my company during the housing crisis. It was during the act of connecting with former colleagues that I got a lead for a major project that wound up being 50% of our revenue in 2009.

Moreover, as time goes on, the folks connected with gain promotions and grow their careers as well and you can wind up with a rather impressive Rolodex[0] of contacts.

It's worthwhile to keep your profile up to date, and does not take a material amount of time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolodex

I think you’re all reading way too much into people’s LinkedIn habits.

LinkedIn is a tool. Everyone uses it differently. You can’t draw deep conclusions about a person by trying to interpret nuances of their LinkedIn usage behaviors.

People like to draw specific conclusions about LinkedIn behavior that they think is a proxy for a good candidate, but 90% of the time it boils down to people selecting for others who use LinkedIn the same way they do. We all like to assume our way of using tools is the “right” way, and we all subconsciously like to hire people who validate our feelings and behave like ourselves.

Use LinkedIn as an online resume. An additional source of information. Don’t try to draw narrowly specific conclusions about things like their number of connections.

> I've worked with had horrible social profiles because they were concerned about making things and learning rather than social credits.

Having an up-to-date LinkedIn profile isn’t mutually exclusive with “making things and learning”. The amount of time it takes to write a few lines on your LinkedIn profile once or twice per year is trivial. I know it’s popular to be anti-LinkedIn right now, but it really is trivially easy to write a short profile in 10 minutes (30 if you’re a perfectionist) and be done with it. Recruiters and business contacts really do use it as an online resume.

I presently don't use LinkedIn at all, but am thinking of joining it just to create an anti-necktie group and see what sort of people I can collect together. Profile picture with necktie = no membership. 85% for fun, 15% serious.

Indeed. I wish folks would stop pushing linked-in on the rest of us. They've proven themselves a bad actor, over and over, and should be left to wither.

> One final thing has just occurred to me…I didn’t consider the qualifications of anyone, which I imagine is down to the role that the CVs were for. You’d certainly be interested in degrees and PhDs if you were hiring a data scientist or someone to write an operating system; in these spaces theory is a major element. But for fast-moving technologies like front-end development, you can probably tell everything about a person from their experience.

This feels like a prime example of why applying for programming jobs as a new-grad is so frustrating. You spend five years getting an MSE degree and then the recruiters just ignore your application because you don't have any previous work experience.

edit: Parts of this blog post also reminded me of this awful tweet from a senior recruiter at Blizzard [1].

"I've asked this in interviews at Blizzard for 30 years: What do you program at home? Many answer they don't have time. Wrong. Program at home. Every day. If you don't have that passion, programming is not really for you. Write small games. Do game jams. #gamejobs"

The "you're not a real/good programmer unless you program as a hobby" sentiment really needs to die.

[1] https://i.redd.it/jgiy4rw2ug751.png

> This feels like a prime example of why applying for programming jobs as a new-grad is so frustrating.

Or how when you've a decade or two of experience and self-directed learning but no fancy degree. Apply to any coveted job and resume is in the first group sent straight to the trash.

It's as if we have no idea how to hire developers. ;-)

> It's as if we have no idea how to hire developers. ;-)

Indeed.

> I want to be with people [...] who have weekend projects, or who are contributing bug fixes back to open source projects.

These are two sides of the same problem. I happened to be in both kind of shoes in the past but this is why hiring is fucked up in tech, I believe. This sentence implies someone is expected to work more than they are paid for if they want to be recognized at something. That's ridiculous. The brightest and most talented engineers I ever worked with in the last 20 years had families with kids (I don't, for the record) and were many years in their careers already, who got offline during the weekend enjoying dinners, doing whatever non-tech stuff and posting only personal content online, sharing it with non-work friends.

If you want me to contribute with bug fixes to OSS while I am doing something else of personal value or have neat weekend projects to post on HN then pay me to do so or at least have the decency of not expectating my own life to revolve around what you think it should. These... "projects"... take time and, deities forbid it, I'm doomed in screenings if I don't share the same passion for engineering projects on late weekend nights as you because you are biased?

Hiring folks, through tech managers' perspectives, talk about freedom but they expect others to exercise their own liberty in accordance to what the company think is best, it seems. Bullshit.

Nobody every asks "so, how many sales gigs do you do on the sides, during weekends?" or "oh, how many teams do you lead/mentors, during the weekends?"

All this BS "weekend-extra-open-source-labour-tax" must be borne by the members opting for tech streams. The innate, simple truth is that all that "weekend extra effort" is a way to see if the person can take up more work off hours without so much of a complaint and not demand overtime pay - in the name of "passion".

Passion is overrated. There are many who play the passion card, while trying to showcase their role-playing fantasies in a very skewed way. Hiring based on such appearances is at best just a gamble. There are many such "social profiles" which are either crafted for befooling the spectators, or inane content which just about passes the "100 for effort! value, best left unsaid!" types.

> Passion is overrated

"Passionate employees" seems to be code for "compliant human robots willing to sacrifice their personal lives, health and sanity for the company's bottom line, and to work extensive overtime without compensation while we recruit their cheaper replacements."

I dunno, it doesn't always mean that (though I have encountered this kind of abuse).

Passion for what someone does is awesome, in that they'll actually notice (and speak up) when sh*t is messed up. I love working with people who care about this stuff.

It's entirely orthogonal to whether or not they have side-projects, so I would always try and get signal for this in the interview itself, rather than looking for a GitHub or whatnot (although I almost always look at someone's code when it's on their CV, which isn't all that common in data science).

> I love working with people who care about this stuff.

Yes, absolutely. However, when orgs start using that against the individual to drive down pay or eke out more from the person, is when that show starts becoming to cliched and downright exploitative.

A civil engineer who is good at what he does and loves construction will not (easily) let anyone in his team have wrong proportions of concrete and sand, cause he understands the ramifications. But that passion in him towards the trade should in no way be constitued by his employer as a notion indicating that he could work for lesser pay cause "he seems to be loving that work anyway, so that actually is a perk!" (IT IS NOT!)

Recently worked with someone who... gotta say, it was a bit strange after a while. We're all remote, but he had no picture of himself, ever. Now... granted - there may actually be some visual reason - some disfigurement, for example - that the person is self-conscious of (hadn't originally thought of it).

However - we had no social media profile at all for this person. No pics of the person, alone or with friends.

We had no programming profile - no bitbucket/github/etc. I did find, later, a couple of public bug fixes from 2014 (this was in 2020) attached to this person, but no pic or any other work to tie it to.

The person was no more than a voice on a phone/webex.

It was just a strange experience, because the rest of the team - probably another 6 people or so - all had some degree of personal whatever - picture, blog, repo, camera during Webex for facial expressions.

Over time, it was just... odd. Then ... off. The person was recently let got from the project, but had communicated some weird stuff to me in private, which was troubling (moreso to have been told in the first place, because then I have to make a decision how to act on it).

I completely agree that we don't have to live online 24/7, people should have separation between work/life, we shouldn't judge people just based on a GitHub profile, and private life can (and should) be private. But taken to an extreme, where you end up just working with a faceless voice... had its drawbacks.

Honestly with what we know now, people who have a heavy social media profile and claim to know about computers would be concerning to me.

Did that person have any sort of avatar (cartoon etc.)? I've known a couple of people who have been reluctant to use photographs of themselves as avatars and I've later on found out that they've come out as trans. For those who are closeted (or perhaps haven't processed their dysphoria) it can be problematic (and I realise that in physical offices nobody can avoid being seen, but save the bathroom or perhaps lifts, one isn't usually confronted with the sight of oneself (and online profiles tend to be visible for the user))

> but he had no picture of himself, ever. Now... granted - there may actually be some visual reason - some disfigurement, for example - that the person is self-conscious of (hadn't originally thought of it).

> However - we had no social media profile at all for this person. No pics of the person, alone or with friends.

People who are fleeing domestic abuse or controlling parents may have very locked down social media profiles, and may even be using different names for different parts of their life.

I won't discount your experience, but this made me think of radio personalities I've known but not seen for years. Never thought of them as less than normal folks. Just a thought that, perhaps not seeing the person wasn't the primary problem.

Personally I don't link social media accounts with coworkers until I've known them for years. Github doesn't have my picture either.

The author says he would ignore a nice looking resume for c++ developers but not frontend developers. This is only because he's consciously aware of it.

When I used to look for jobs, I was one of the only to use LaTeX and it was most definitely a point of discussion when I was called in.

Sadly the LaTeX resume templates now look like something out of MS Word.

So whether or not you're a frontend Dev, every non cringy thing you can do to stand out is important.

I used to use a LaTeX resume until a recruiter told me their ATS couldn't scan it properly :(

Heard the same, still kept using it.

Don't know why but I've had much better luck with XeTeX and resume scanning.

Imagine, biases like "good formatting => better; no typos => better; social profiles => better;" etc being put within an AI/ML based resume parser, with an intent to mimic human behaviour of sourcing a resume out of a bundle of resumes, and scoring against a job description. Now, what might go wrong, when

- more such biases creep in to the models, thanks to groupthink, multiple developers/groups and their biases

- such systems end up gating the applicants before a human view is cast on the resume

This is happening now, at scale. And only a very few in the industry seem to be really tuned about such dangerous bias perpetuation engines.

I'm retired now, so thankfully don't have to look at CVs any more. I was a university/college instructor, so over the years I reviewed many, many CVs of applicants for computer science teaching positions. Some comments on the blog post and the other comments here.

a) If I saw a CV with a picture, I'd call up HR and ask why they let the picture through. Pictures, and even names, give information that can be (and has been) used to discriminate on racial and gender grounds, among others. I always wanted to hire the best candidate, based on track record. Pictures provide no useful information here.

b) When I got the CVs, I'd look primarily at what they say the applicant has done, rather than formal qualifications. CVs then went into 3 piles: worth interviewing, worth interviewing if nobody in the previous group pans out, not worth interviewing. I would tend to give each CV about 1 minute of attention in doing this, because in my experience the interview tells you a lot more than the CV.

A CV is primarily for getting one's foot in the door, and announcing interest in the position.

My alltime favorite CV was one I reviewed for hiring a successor when I was leaving a university teaching position. The job posting specified “Masters or PhD in computer science required”. The applicant's CV detailed some very low-level education in a field completely distant from computer science. The cover letter said “I recognize that I may not have all the background needed for this position. If so, could you please tell me where I could get it.”

All of the biases present in the article are why I avoid reading CVs (leaving it to recruiters) and focus on an interview process that demonstrates whether you have what we need.

the thing that I found interesting about it is he's a developer who was told to look over CVs, and these are the feelings he noticed himself having after looking over 22 of them.

Given that makes me wonder what it's like for HR looking over CVs, gotta be worse I figure, and if I wouldn't have the same reaction - I mean sure, I don't believe you need a LinkedIn account, GitHub account etc. but if I see a bunch of resumes and one doesn't have it will I be able to see that point as inessential or will it make me cautious.

We all like to talk a good game about how we would handle hiring, but maybe we wouldn't handle it as well as we hope.

Glad to see others bringing up concerns about the obsession with extracurricular learning in the industry. It’s pressure on people to do work at home, cleverly worded to not sound like a requirement. Yes, in depth learning takes a lot of time and is needed to become a better engineer, but that qualifies as WORK which should be compensated for, just like how delivering features is work. Throughout my career I have actively encouraged teammates to slow down and really understand problem domains, because the industry default they tend to be used to is to rush to completion.

All that being said, you just have to play the game a little bit too if you want to maximize your hireability. Find some dumb errors in doc sites for popular projects to check off the “OSS contributor” box. Have code in your GitHub account be public, hell just go fork some projects and never do anything with them, better than nothing and takes zero time. Add tasteful color and styling to your resume, etc. Feels superficial, it is! But in a competitive market it’s worth it and all of the above is mostly one-off work, not a “code is my lifestyle” transformation. Be honest if asked about it though, don’t lie about being a Rails core contributor because you forked Rails.

People don't always use their real names on their stack overflow and github acccounts, I certainly don't.

This: >typos really jump out at you when you are looking at a lot of CVs

I've seen a couple of CVs professionally and I've helped a few friends with theirs and it really leaves me with a bad taste when I see spelling/typo mistakes. Perhaps it's my OCD with symmetry and order :-)

Wow, all the emotion in the comments, what's going on? I thought it was a pretty balanced observation and clearly a personal opinion, not a "39 ways to find the perfect candidate" type of post.

"A public Git account" - that is not really a well-defined concept. Did you mean GitHub? Open source software exists outside of GitHub. If we want to be pedantic, even outside of Git.

A static site hosting a git server with your projects could be considered a "Git account" of sorts

FWIW, recently I had to interview a fair number of candidates and screen their CVs. The point made about having a github profile definitely resonates with me. With the small caveat that if it was empty, I considered it silly to put something on your CV that you're not using. For frontend developers some kind of portfolio also stands out, and many did seem to have some.

I know it's bias and many good developers don't have side projects. It's just my "gut reaction" towards the CVs.

Identifies bias. Changes nothing.

Snarky comment aside, that’s the challenge that even if you see a flawed thinking in yourself it’s hard to change your bias. We give ourselves a pass too often.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so forgiving.

Yeah, it’s something I catch myself doing all the time too, confirming a bias I have but then just moving on anyway. As if confirming the bias somehow made it okay to just have it.

In the moment itself I manage to move away from the bias - but a lot of times it probably happens subconsciously.

It's tricky to overcome, not sure if it is even possible to overcome it entirely.

We know that having people vouch for you goes a much longer way than self-reported accomplishments on a resume. I keep wondering why isn't there a platform where your specific accomplishments in a job are validated by your former co-workers? Effectively, a peer-validated resume. Not LI style testimonials but more specific like say "yes, Jack worked on this feature and did a great job!"

It’s because such a system will be gamed by the networkers, not the most competent. The people who are vouched for most will be the people who are most shameless about asking.

22 CV's.

Anyone doing hiring would love if their life only involved 22 cv's. I'd interview half of them :)

If you hire regularly at least in some fields, the total flood of cv's is a bit crazy (obviously something is scraping and auto or one click submitting them).

> There were other technologies that were similarly indicative, such as mention of ‘microservices

I will never mention microservices on my CV. Except maybe as an anti-pattern that I can assist with avoiding.

>an important criteria

In a section of the article about typos, this is annoying to see.

Resumes are a marketing document with a heavy focus on signalling, simply because you can’t stuff much in there.

just another knowitallogist

> I want to be with people that are sharing links to things they’ve read, people who are trying out new technologies and languages, people who have weekend projects, or who are contributing bug fixes back to open source projects.

I hate this culture in software engineering. There are many excellent engineers out there who work to live, rather than live to work. Why do we have this expectation that programmers want to spend every waking second coding something? I'd hire someone who appears to have balance in their life with other interests and hobbies besides computers (all other things being equal).

It’s more fun to work with people who enjoy work rather than people who work to enjoy. At least that’s my 2 cents

I enjoy my work, but it is just that - work. I give my work 100% in good humour when I am working, but I think the expectation that I'm going to go home and do more of the same on my own time is unfair and unhealthy. No other profession expects this.

> No other profession expects this.

I don't think this is the case (anecdotal evidence from friends and family in varied professions)

I think the problem is that there seems to be an expectation of knowledge of the exact technologies. I have to say that lately I have seen a lot more: X or equivalent but this might be related to devops engineer job adverts where maybe they've realised that the tools are similar enough that you can get up to speed quickly enough between them ...

I don't know why people would enjoy work with all of the process stuff we impose on development.

Reminds me of a snarky comment I read, "If you love doing something, keep it as a hobby or you'll begin to hate it."

You wouldn’t want to work at this company anyways. The system works.

Different strokes for different folks.

It's fairly evident to me that many tech hiring managers today, and for the last 20 years really, are just stabbing in the dark and calling it science.

Absolutely.

It's just luck and survivor-ship bias.

The best way to recruit is to use a network, period. Having multiple people vouch for someone is far more valuable than seeing if he has a github. And even then - it might be a bad fit.

Companies never look internally when it comes to recruiting either. They blame other things, like developer "passion" and not fitting a "work hard play hard culture."

I came here to say this. He also states

> if someone was not on LinkedIn or didn’t have a public Git account, I found myself thinking ‘well, what exactly do they do?’

How about spending time with their family, Hanging out with friends. Relaxing and refreshing themselves so they are fresh and ready to go in the morning.

Other options:

- working for a company which doesn't allow external contributions

- working on stuff which doesn't make sense on GitHub (does anyone care about a servo driver for a specific component used only on this board?)

- working for orgs where they're not allowed to say much beyond "I'm working for the government"

- not being interested in opensource (gasp!)

- word of mouth, specific industry consulting

I agree with the sentiment, but I feel you're misrepresenting the text you quote:

Creating a LinkedIn account takes what, 30 minutes? You don't need to be one of those high achieving "Can you endorse me for X/Y/Z on LinkedIn" morons to "be on LinkedIn".

Similarly, your parent didn't for a Github account with weekly contributions to OSS projects. Let's be honest, I've seen so many accounts that are just "I was bored during a long weekend and threw together this 200 line utility script". And that's great!

This reduction of people into black and white comes up again and again in this discussion, and I cannot understand it to this day.

Agreed. I will not show you my repository accounts. Never ever will they get attached to my real persona. They will be taken down on the day they become public.

Pay me 300,000$ a month and we could talk about it without commitments from my side. Otherwise I don't want to justify myself towards my employer if I work on private stuff or not. Especially not with contracts in tech, which are already borderline abusive.

That said, I haven't touched my public repositories for quite a while. Why? I have a fucking job! Aside from that I also host gitea on my domain that you will also not get to know. Maybe I would create another one for public display, but that is very unlikely.

I get that some people are forward with this stuff and in general social media presence, but I am certainly not.

edit: Of course there is also bad code in my repos, but that is completely besides the point.

There is bad code in everyone's repo. Several of my repos are from courses in grad school. From a software engineering standpoint, they are horrendous. But, they solved the problem the professor assigned and taught me what the professor intended by the assignment.

It's probably more helpful, in evaluating a developer, to see a progression of thought rather than shiny, functioning code.

In my experience personal projects get reviewed so infrequently that I'm not all that worried about someone digging down and evaluating the code quality of a 4+ year old repo.

Let's be honest. The guy reviewed 22 CVs and went to write a blog post about it.

I have interviewed hundreds of candidates, not just red their CVs (typically around 1 candidate a week for the past 15 years, currently 3 candidates a week on average).

What I have learned is to be very cautious when looking through CVs lest you select for candidates who can make good looking CVs.

I have met many nice and competent people who don't write blog post and who can't make nice CV. They don't make projects for show because they have enough work at... work and they don't do ten other projects because they want to focus where it really matters for them. They might have other non-technical hobbies like riding a bike or picking up girls at the bar. They may not feel the need to impose their interests and thoughts on everybody else or they might think their thoughts and experiences are not at all valuable to general public.

A person who writes blog posts, for-show github repos, who creates public image, is just one of many types of developers. If you select for this you are missing out on many excellent people.

But issue is the people you are talking about rarely gets noticed.

They do, just not on the front page of HN.

I don't know about that, most of the people I've ever worked with (and hired or helped hire) seems to fall in to the category of not writing blogs, etc. A silent majority, if you will. I may well be wrong of course, and I don't doubt that being better at marketing gets you noticed more easily but that's not the same as everyone else rarely getting noticed.

Exactly.

Not every act of noticing must be noticed by general public, if that makes sense.

You might be doing a good job and get promoted and be part of 99.9% of population who will never make headlines.

And the beauty of it is that they are perfectly happy with that.

How can you say on behalf of every one of them?

I hope my backend self never needs to make a snappy looking pretty something. If I am ever judged by the quality of my visual design skills, I’ll be executed for crimes against eyeballs.

I just run a script that auto-generates a pdf via html from an edited markdown file. The css just defines the font and a few spacing parameters. It takes all the headache out of trying to format everything nicely in Word, and any fanciness will look dated real soon.

For my CV, I just use a PDF of my LinkedIn Profile. Seems to work well enough. Maybe a bit long, but the page space is used inefficiently, so I blame big fonts and large sidebars.

Exactly. It's one type of candidate, that the OP happens to like; you don't need this stuff to get hired. Personally my gut reaction to lots of side projects or social media is slightly negative, simply because my experience has been that those candidates tend to interview slightly worse.

I think side projects can be valuable when you want to demonstrate competence at something, and you don't otherwise have experience to draw on. If you're a barista who's learning to code in their spare time, or you want to understand a hot new technology, sure. Otherwise, I'd rather ask you about your actual work.

my experience has been that those candidates tend to interview slightly worse.

Mine hasn’t been that way, but in my experience those publicly visible artifacts tend to be high noise signals anyway.

Over time I’ve generally converged on a few criteria for the resume stage: (1) does this person have a minimally credible claim of being able to deliver projects at the level of the position? (2) if the job requires background knowledge, do they have a relevant background?

If they have a public Github profile, I might go look at some PR’s created by them to confirm that they’re generally respectful to others and that their actual code looks not-insane.

Once you actually watch them work and talk to them, you will get a better sense for them as a candidate, but CVs really don’t tell you much, so it’s best not to pretend that they do.

And not to be a party pooper but that narrative and image could also steer choices away from women, partnered men, individuals with families who practice work life balance as well as disadvantaged candidates. But this trope lives on with vigor in HR...

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