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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

The next logical step would be to train an adversarial AI against the hiring AI. You'd have the system generate your resume and application to maximize your chances. Then the hiring AI would need to be re-trained to account for this. And so on.

In the far future, this feedback loop creates an economy where every job application is total gibberish. No human can possibly explain why their resume is a recipe for carne asada, an excerpt from Moby Dick, and a bunch of windings. But supposedly it's predicted to increase final offer salary by 13.54%, so nobody questions it. Anybody who still writes out their resume by hand is considered a luddite weirdo, and definitely not someone you'd want to have join your company.

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I have a section on my resume called:

'Technologies I'm Unfamiliar With'

Underneath is a Laundry list of today's sexiest technologies.

It's not quite as advanced as your suggestion, but it's pretty effective. It's also a good icebreaker when you have the in person interview.

I'd say your name pans out, that seems pretty bold to me.

I've always viewed staying up with the latest tools, technologies, and practices as part of my job. I've also found that the people who tend to not do this or display a similar sentiment you touched on with your comment, it's because you have carved out a large enough amount of success or niche with what you are working with. Am I reading into this too far?

The breadth of the industry makes it completely impossible to keep up with everything. I started typing out a list, but the list would be impossibly long.

I agree that it is impossible to keep up with everything. I am more viewing it from a prospective employability position and safeguarding my future interests. I may do very well writing apps in containers with traditional load balancers, but I very well better learn some Serverless and JAMStack type patterns as well, as a completely random example.

It's part of the filtering process to determine what subset you want to target, but learn something new as often as you can. The bonus I've learned over time is the more paradigms, tools, and technologies I learn and practice configuring and launching sample apps or solving simple challenges with, the more they all start to look and feel the same.

Also once you've done it for about 10 years you realize there's not a lot that's really new.

Like nitrogen explains as well, it's just too much, even if you concentrate on what you are actually usually working on/in, depending on what your field is.

I.e. if you are working on anything that is currently a 'web app' of some sort, then depending on what company you were at, you would either be using one framework or another. So you might write in the "I know technology X" column things like "jQuery, React", because your last job used JQuery, then they grew up and switched to React. In the "I don't know technology Y" column, you write things like "BackboneJS, AngularJS" etc. (the actual lists would be much longer, this is just to take an example). You're still current if you use either Angular or React it just happens that you (or someone at your company) didn't choose one but the other. And then there's the myriad of other frameworks that come and go or that a particular niche of companies might prefer. If you're a web app FE or full stack guy you can still pick any of these up easily enough, so it makes sense to list them for the "pattern matching HR drones" (or computers :)) to get the interview.

As someone who gets to participate in the hiring process more than I'd like to, I look for balance on resumes.

If you bring nothing but J2EE 1.4 experience I'm going to assume you've carved out a focused niche. I'll steer the interview towards broad, modern practices and technologies.

If your resume talks about nothing but modern technologies, I'll try to dive deep to be sure you aren't a dilettante with surface knowledge in a ton of things but no deep capabilities where it matters to $company.

In general the best resumes show a balance of deep expertise in foundational tech and exposure to new technologies. A dev might have done Python for a decade but has started poking at Elixir, an ops person knows Linux like the back of their hand before they start talking about Kube, etc.

Do you have hard data demonstrating that your method actually has greater predictive power for job performance than other methods?

Absolutely not. It's one more approach riddled with bias, human foibles and questionable correlation to results - just like all hiring.

All I can say: in my experience, the engineers I've hired with deep (but potentially old) experience and with balanced resumes have been better performers and more likely to stick around than those who bounce around tech to tech.

I mean, I'm in the same boat as you. I just hate that I have to rely on this type of information, subject to all the flaws and biases of relying on personal experience.

In my experience, it's useful to have a couple 'jack-of-all-trades' types on the team, but you wouldn't want all your engineers to be broad but shallow. I did a stint in the military to pay for college, and something we'd point out was that it was better to have something 'good enough' right now than something perfect a thousand miles away. Breadth of experience is also handy when trying to innovate a novel solution.

But I don't have any better evidence than you. I've never worked anywhere large enough to have that sort of data where we could demonstrate quantitatively that one method works better than another, and of course the metrics are all fairly arbitrary themselves.

If it's part of your job then you spend time in your regular 9-5 day keeping up with technologies correct? Otherwise it's not part of your job, it's part of your personal time.

Employers tend to want people with the right skills but they seldom allow time to develop those skills.

Very clever!

I would title it "Growth opportunities I look forward to exploring", and then yes, absolutely.

This must be an American thing, if someone wrote that on a CV in the UK, this sort of text would probably put people off.

The 'American thing' is putting keywords in white text on a white background.

This is just normal stuff.

I get people hitting me up on Linked In for tech that I outgrew 10 years ago. I can either take them off entirely (making me look very 1 dimensional) or counterbalance that with things I'd love for someone to pay me to learn.

I haven't made any decisions so far so the status continues to remain quo.

I think the joke is that the automated scanners weeding out resumes as in the article posted look for keywords like "React" or "Machine Learning" but without context, so when they see "Machine Learning" on a CV, they are more inclined to accept it, not knowing the context. As an interviewer you can simply play dumb on that aspect.

If I were a hiring manager, and I liked everything else I saw, I'd get a good laugh out of this, which might propel them to the top of my "to be interviewed" pile.

I find job application advice and takes very polarising. Some people are adamant about including other interests in a CV/resume while others consider it a waste of space that implies something negative about the candidate. There are also huge variances in what a CV/resume should contain and be called, such as how many pages it should have[1] or if there should be a picture, that people will die on a hill for.

This is normal! If the hiring managers will reject CVs that have hobbies and you find them valuable information, what you're experiencing is a culture mismatch. That's effective filtering, before you're saddled with a new job contract. Viewing a job application like school, where you're guaranteed a certain result if you have the right talent and work ethic, is the wrong model and will lead to disappointment. It's fundamentally a relationship, so should be viewed like dating.

If I one day become one of HN's fabled star engineers that can have any job they want, I'd like to write a CV in a markdown text file. That's how I really disseminate information in my working life, not Latex.

[1] Having the proper number of pages is an important signal that you are also proper and well educated, i.e. the correct social class.

The picture thing is a no-no in the US, due to discrimination fears, but is reasonably common in Europe.

It'd piss people off in the USA, too

That would tell me so much about a candidate.

The desire to learn and adapt is probably one of the most important thing in Software.

The ability to take a look at oneself and identify blind spots/weaknesses in ones knowledge and skills is also a great indicator this person won't become an "expert beginner".

Resume Index:

Personal Information ... 1

Education and Certifications ... 1

Previous Experience ... 1:2

Known Technologies ... 2

Technologies I'm Unfamiliar With ... 2:348

This is the biggest of big brain moves I've ever heard when it comes to gaming these types of stupid auto-filters. Definitely stealing this for future use.

Brilliant, take a page from dark patterns and make the font white on white or light light gray.

This is similar to Stackoverflow's 'Technologies I don't like' resume section. Every time I encounter something truly horrible I add it there. I also add tech to filter out roles I'd rather not get tricked into doing. So far I get asked about this section a lot. Mostly from recruiters curious to see how flexible I am because internally the company does a little X or Y and needs to know if it's a deal breaker. It can really tell you a lot about places you would rather not work at though if you know for sure there are processes you want to avoid.

If only I had space left on my big brain resume for this.

Yeap. There then ought to be a whole cottage industry of gaming AI applications and AI hiring.

So, we're basically voluntarily letting the machines take over and replace human jobs, nuance, and critical thinking?

Oh and then the next logical progressions are AI performance reviews and AI management. Within a decade, your AI boss will slinging around a coffee cup and saying "yeah, I'm gonna need you to come in on Sunday too."

You are a true believer, blessings of the State, blessings of the masses. Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy.

There are numerous resume consultants who specialize in getting past HR screens and keyword filters.

Who? Where?

Asking for a friend...

Or just send in an image of a koala with a noise filter over it. 99% confidence for a prime candidate.

I kind of rambled on about this in another comment on this thread, but I paid someone $250 to optimize my resume with key words to appease AI. It worked. I got automated replies to schedule phone screenings from jobs that had rejected my old resume. It's already happening.

I am curious what they did - can you share high level details? EG: if you're a developer, did they add more technologies, or what was the type of thing?

The very fact that they serve many clients gives the service a good view on what generates increased response rates.

I once scraped a bunch of job postings and did a simple word frequency count. Just eyeballing the list, I picked out a few of the most commonly mentioned techs and skills. By just rewording a few of my resume entries, it seemed to increase my response rate by quite a bit.

For example, in the description of one project I added "using JSON". It wasn't particularly important to that project that the exchange format used was JSON, but apparently many of those doing hiring are seeing fit to include that in their searches.

Business plan: Undercut Pymetrics by offering a free service. Dominate the market. Then, monetise it by selling optimisation to the applicants.

This has a strong Kurt Vonnegut smell to it.

I also thought of Player Piano when I saw this

he's ded, you know it, right?

So it goes.

We can just replay the history of SEO. I believe we're at the point (was it the late 90s for SEO?) where it's time to put all the keywords onto your resume in a white font.

The scary-ier part is how many life-critical processes might end up ( or already are ) like this. That being said ; balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to. But if you don't have access to that kind of technology, i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [0]

[0] https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2017/06/19/fa...

You underestimate the conflict of interest by far. What makes you think the company that creates the hiring AI won't create the resume AI under a different company name? It's like turbo tax. Create a problem and sell the solution.

I just wanted to say I loved this comment, thanks. Subbed.

Building on this, what are the chances this just leads to a cyberpunk underground economy of interview-passing images/videos?

I would read that if it was a book.

Lol.

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