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Comment by 0xFFC | Hacker News Reader

I am going to kill myself (exaggeration). I have maybe one of the best cv's (I am not saying that, it is feedback from industry) for last year student focused on low-level programming. But I cannot bypass recruiters. Why? because none of them even heard Boost.Beast or anything on my cv. Or any C++ thing I have done as project or my publication. They literally do bunch of find/search on the pdf. And because of that I am unable to get any internship, particularly now which there is no meet up or in person networking.

P.S. I used to have extremely successful in person networking before COVID19.

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This feedback is well intentioned, so please don't take it as an attack.

As much as we'd rather it not be the case, even for programmers writing skills are incredibly important. This comment is contains a few grammatical errors and is quite hard to read - I checked your comment history and many others suffer from the same problem. As some who hires, if I read a job application with this quality of writing, I'd probably dismiss it.

If you're having trouble finding a job, it may be helpful to have someone read over any written material you submit alongside your CV (cover letters etc) just to make sure it's clear and easy to understand.

I really apricate your feedback. Just one thing you should take into consideration, that is, as ESL I am not going to put that much effort on writing comments on HN to check for every grammatical error. I simply don't have that much time and energy.

I do understand what you say. But that is not the case sadly.

Keep in mind that people reading your comment might not have that much time and energy either.

Completely valid point and shows my shortcoming. I hope I will improve it. But with COVID19 and danger of going homeless, it has become hard for me to manage it all. But you are completely right.

>Just one thing you should take into consideration, that is, as ESL I am not going to put that much effort on writing comments on HN to check for every grammatical error. I simply don't have that much time and energy.

Yeah, I had a hunch that might have been the case, but didn't want to make too many assumptions. I can't string a single sentence together in another language, so I can only guess at what a pain it must be to deal with on a day-to-day basis!

Very under appreciated point even by native English speakers.

You are discovering that most of the value in software... is not in software.

Nothing on your resume will ever cause anyone to say, “We simply have to hire this guy.” On the contrary, the slightest typo, grammatical error, or stray bit-flipping particle will mean that your resume is instantly discarded.

When they do this to your resume, they are doing this to a representation of you: they are metaphorically throwing you in the trash like worthless garbage.

Are you offended by this? You should be.

So don’t use a resume.

Figure out some other way to get on the phone with the people you need to talk to.

You are no longer a tech wiz. You are in sales now. Your job is “selling yourself”.

Congratulations.

Maybe it makes sense to pay someone (perhaps a fellow HNer[1]?) to review your resume and suggest some changes?

Japanese is my third language, so when I was shipping around my Japanese resume in Japan, I had an experienced native speaker review and revise. As a non-native speaker, there's a lot of nuance in writing that you just don't understand.

Your resume is often your first impression, so you want it to glow as much as possible. Honest, but glowingly so. :)

Might help you in terms of landing better jobs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DoreenMichele

If you're willing to associate your username with your personal identity, you could link to your projects/CV in your profile. Other commenters may be able to identify what recruiters are looking for and why your resume was dismissed.

Also, to the point of the post, do you consider whiteboard interviews to be good or bad for your situation? With covid it's harder for companies to find which applicants should be interviewed in the first place, and short questions are helpful for filtering out people who can't code at all.

I can send my cv privately to you.

About the leetcode thing, yes, I used to be pretty code. If you send me a link right now, I might not be able to do it, since I am living under huge stress right now, but with 1 week or 2 training I can get 80-90% in the coding challenge easily.

I'm not in a position to help get you an interview at the moment, so I'd feel uncomfortable asking for your resume. Participating on Hacker News and GitHub is an avenue for networking. Without linking to information about yourself you may not be able to take full advantage of that.

I'm sorry to hear about your stress. The worst part about the recruitment process is that it doesn't put folks in a typical development situation. I hope you're about to find something!

Consider applying to companies directly rather than going via recruiters. Recruiters often just look at past job experience, but hiring managers will look at your actual skillset.

Is your username a reference to your humanity?

What is that supposed to mean?

I didn't know if it was a reference to a gene id

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