Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

I love stories like this. I have one of my own, actually.

When I was first getting into IT I started sending out CVs. Mine was terrible. I had been working in call centres for years at this point and all my "experience" was basically self-taught, so not really experience at all. As a result my CV was void of any actual content a hiring manager in IT would want to read, thus it was binned a lot.

I applied for a job at a nearby network hardware repair place. They needed someone to look after their Cisco kit and about 30 Debian Linux systems. I was attracted to the mix of responsibilities so I applied, sending in me not-so-good CV. I was eventually asked to come in to have a chat after waiting about a week to hear back from the place.

At the end of the interview, Bob (let's call him), said I was more knowledgeable than the RHCEs that were coming through his door. This was nice to hear, but then he said something that really made me smile...

Apparently my CV was worse than I thought. It was so bad, that Bob literally put it in the bin under his desk. About four days later, Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. So he opens the email and reads the thread in which I helped another LUG member compile a sound driver for their kernel. The instructions I gave worked.

Bob was impressed but he couldn't quite remember where he had seen the name. At this point the business owner, John (heh...), was standing besides Bob's desk and noticed my CV in the bin. He pulls it out and reads my name across the top. The penny drops for Bob and I get the call to come in and have a chat.

I got the job.

>> Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine.

I had the opposite happen.

I took a job doing some programming, some Linux administration, some helpdesk. I came across a convoluted database setup, nobody in their right mind would run multiple servers on the same machine this way... After researching the issue, I found that it was totally unnecessary, and likely a holdover from an earlier (like 15 years earlier) version of the software, because now it was natively support.

During my searching, on a mailing list I found a message from my now-boss. Asking how to do the exact thing they were still doing. And a couple messages from developers of the software basically saying, "If you did it this way, it would in theory work, but it won't ever be supported"

When I was younger, I inherited a lot of old PC hardware from my father. One particular motherboard had a massive gouge through the heatsink for the southbridge, and I could never figure out why.

One day, I was trying to get Mac OSX to run on this particular system, and on page six of google search I finally found a guide to configuring the BIOS for this board that actually worked! It was one of the very first boards that supported UEFI (iirc, before the spec was fully ratified), and the documentation was very incomplete.

I dug a few pages deeper in the thread, and the same poster was describing the poor design of the heatsinks and how they interfered with the full length PCI cards that were used in pro audio at the time. The same poster described how they carefully prized the aluminum heatsink off, screwed it to a board and used a dremel tool to make a slot just wide enough for the card to safely fit.

That was strange... I had exactly the same groove cut in my heatsink...

Sounds right up there with filed-down cards or connectors that had longer grooves cut in them!

I had a parking light burn out on my car. Went to the car store, and a replacement bulb was $$. Perused the lamps on tags in the aisles, and found one that looked the same but had different "ears" on the side.

Bought it, and filed off the ears so it would fit in my car's socket. Worked perfectly, for a small fraction of the price.

Of course, my car is full of aftermarket parts, so I am used to making "adjustments" to get them to fit.

I had to look up what a parking light is. It sounds totally unnecessary to me, but I'd say that about a lot of things put in cars after the 90s.

Probably not important in this case since it's just a light for parking, but lights for cars cost more due to having to meet exacting DOT standards/testing. I wouldn't do this with a brake light or real headlight.

Parking lights are a lot older than the 90s. In Riverside, IL, they have "historical" streetlights that inadequately illuminate the streets (or at least did in the 70s). As a result, it was required if you were parking on the street in Riverside after dark that you left your parking lights on.

Apparently the light setting I always skip past is parking lights and I never knew. I always found the headlights/reverse lamps adequate in the dark though.

> a lot of things put in cars after the 90s

True ... we just moved on from a car build in 1999 to one build in 2011 ... got the "non-extra" version which was half the price.

We still got an AC and bluetooth connectivity.

What we did not get was a multimedia center, a panorama roof, seat heaters and fancy front lights.

I can see that you quickly get used to that ... but tbh I think that most of these are just to justify a higher price because the actual service, getting you from A to B, has not changed in 30 years.

They’ll have different resistance. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t.

I came to post this. The offset ears on the bulb base are used to specify either a dual-filament bulb, such as tail lamps and brake lamps combined, or high-resistance, low-wattage parking lamps that are designed to not run down the battery while the alternator is not charging.

That makes sense. The cheap bulbs I bought were just slightly dimmer. So they must have had more resistance.

But heck, even a parking light will flatten the battery if left overnight.

  > But heck, even a parking light will flatten the battery if left overnight.

Nominal modern car batteries are about 12.6 volts. I wonder if the high-resistance bulbs will completely dim once the voltage drops to a specific threshold, say around 12.0 volts. If they do, then they should leave just enough charge to crank, as most starter motors can safely crank over with about eleven and a half volts (and all the way up to over 14 volts).

That might be an interesting experiment to test.

And the OP was your father? That would have been a nice coincidence.

About every 6-9 months, I'm searching through error logs looking at odd messages, or trying to see why we have some obscure configuration parameters set, when I start reading something relevant-looking on a Blogspot blog.

It becomes uncannily relevant, even to the point of familiar IP addresses or pathnames in the blog, at which point I realize it was written by my predecessor.

The obscure parameters are usually obsolete, and were required because they were running the very latest versions of the software before the defaults matured. The blog was something like documentation at the time.

It once happened to me that I had a really hairy issue with a sound card driver. After half an hour of web search I found a conclusive answer, written by none other than myself, but four years prior.

The best answers on StackOverflow are those I wrote myself, because they match exactly my own question.

There was a thread on HN a week ago [1] about "How to write a resume that converts" and the most voted comment starts with a sentence "The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely."...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112542

It is, and always been: who you know more is more important than what you know.

People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from networking. In one other situation I was the guy who got several former co-workers hired, all at once, a frankly freak occurrence I still don't quite believe actually happened. My current job, I was contacted out of the blue by the team's manager on LinkedIn. Most of my jobs have come from being active on the Internet, or else from applying cold.

It depends a lot on your network and pure luck.

Here's an example of how much it can matter:

* I co-founded my first company with people I met at university.

* We got our first investor thanks to a chance encounter between said investor and one of my co-founders at a bar.

* When we exited that company, our investors lawyer arranged a meeting for us with another of his clients, who hired us.

* One of the execs at that company hired me for his next startup, and introduced me to his brothers, so I could work part-time for them until he got funding.

* One of my co-workers at that company was one of my co-founders at my next company, and our other co-founders were friends of that person. One of them had worked for the VCs who invested in our first round.

* [I went to Yahoo for a couple of years -- no connections there.]

* The general counsel at my last pre-Yahoo startup pulled me into my next startup.

* [I then went to a web dev agency, no connections there]

* The co-founder of the company I worked at before the web-dev agency contacted me about some contracting, and I ended up joining full time (my current job)

So Yahoo and the web dev agency are the only places I've worked over the last 26 years where my resume has mattered. Even then, at the web-dev agency I name-dropped one of people who'd hired me previously, and it impressed them, so who knows how much my resume really mattered there either.

Many people do get hired cold, but it is the last choice of anyone hiring. If you know the right person you skip to the front of the line with no competition.

>People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from networking.

Funny, only one of the gigs I've gotten in my 30 year career has come from not networking...my first one. Every job after that has come about because of people I know recommending me for the job.

This has been super helpful over the past 15 years as I've been an independent consultant. In fact, I went indie because I had a network.

I don't need to look for gigs anymore, people come to me. I turn down way more gigs than I can take. And I haven't had to have an actual interview for a job in over 20 years.

I'm sure this isn't the norm, but it certainly makes work life a lot easier.

> People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from networking.

Does that not just imply that your network wasn't that good but not necessarily that the adage "who you know more is more important than what you know" is actually false?

Interesting... Only two of my jobs have not.

I have the opposite experience. I have never landed a job that I didn't already have a good contact and recommendation for, of course that is probably because I have never tried.

I've got exactly zero jobs without networking. =)

My first summer jobs were with people my dad knew. The first actual programming job I got because I happened to be tagging along with my friend who had a job interview.

From there on in I got jobs mostly because I had a friend inside vouching for my talents.

This also goes the other way, I wouldn't join a company where I don't have inside information on how shit actually gets done.

I think that is often true, but I work for a Fortune 500 company and did not know anyone who worked there before getting hired. In the 20 years I’ve worked there I’ve been involved in tons of interviewing potential hires. Every single one got their foot in based on their resume. I’ve never seen anyone hired because they knew someone at the company. I’m sure it happens, I’ve just never met anyone it has happened to.

I have had mediocre experiences, at best, with people bringing in people that they knew from outside the company. There were positive exceptions but usually it ended up being a kind of weird political move that increased divisions in teams. Like there was the group that knew each other from outside and everybody else. something to be wary about

I've hired a handful of referrals, but when I get referrals I immediately look to see if their resume has relevant experience.

This is really an unhealthy and flawed understanding of what is a necessary part of life. The problem is how to find good people, and the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence, the more people need to rely on personal recommendations. It's not that people wouldn't take a stranger for a job, but when there is a lot of uncertainty, they can't absorb the risk of the stranger not being qualified. So they will always prefer someone they know is qualified over someone who they don't know is qualified but might be better.

The above is as necessary and unsurprising as rain falling to the ground. There is no other way that things can work. Thus the practical advice you can give someone is not only to learn something but to widen their professional network so that there are many people who know they've learned something.

It is the exact same thing in a big bureaucracy. You have to know how to sell yourself, which just means you need to successfully communicate your accomplishments. Too many people do great work, but they don't communicate their accomplishments, and then they are surprised that less qualified people are promoted over them, and they grow cynical or resentful when it is really their failure at communication that has caused the problem. Like many things in life, it's better to be mediocre at two necessary things rather than excellent at one and skipping the other. But no amount of righteous anger about the unfairness of life is going to change the fact that people are not omniscient and that talent is hard for strangers to evaluate.

> their failure at communication

So much to unpick in that statement.

The potential for communication differences in culture, gender, and personality to outweigh job performance.

That communication is a two way street, but poor communication is often attributed to one party.

The tendency for the promotion process to favour “upward focused” communication and communicators.

The fact that objective performance measurement, which could ameliorate some of these problems, is a joke.

It’s true that communication skills are essential, but laying the blame on poor performers just perpetuates problems.

> the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence

I'd really rather go with "the more society discovers that we don't know how to obtain objective measures of excellence". We really don't have good tests that can fit in the interview slot for a lot of software engineering jobs.

You can say this over and over again, but that doesn't make it true. It is just a wish of how you want reality to be, and the US is sufficiently wealthy that people can indulge in these delusions and still put food on the table. For a while - there is a lot of wealth and human capital to destroy before things start to break down. These types of delusions are what makes it harder for newer people to enter fields and so inhibits human capital formation. Getting rid of grades in schools or giving different races different grades, getting rid of standardized tests, etc, this all destroys information and human capital. It also makes the nation less competitive when it competes against the (majority) of the world which does not suffer from these delusions and is more interested in acquiring human capital than destroying it for the sake of some equality myth.

You wrote a lot about the issue in general without actually addressing the claim. We don't have an objective measure while interviewing software engineers. Any too specific test will fail on some good hire during an interview. On the other hand generic tests need to adjust as you interview so they're subjective.

That’s how the saying goes but what really matters isn’t who you know, but who knows you (and was impressed by your work).

Successful people put themselves in situations where they can get to know the people who are important.

For example, attend the tech conferences in your field. Contribute to open source projects they are involved with. Hang out where they hang out. Etc.

Make it easy for chance encounters to find you.

I think the issue is rather that many people have a hard time of communicating the skills they have in a way the other side actually gets the level you are at via simple text.

If they already know you, you can skip that step and the risks involved. Depending on your personality and flaws however it might also be a negative thing if people know you : )

In none of the last four jobs I've gotten was there anyone there who knew me. What I knew seems to have been the important factor.

Last time a headhunter managed snatch me was weird. I wasn't really active before deadline because I was on a holiday trip and the headhunter said "it's okay, let's call after your holidays". I wasn't actually looking for a new job but couple of the buzzwords sounded promising so I ended up having calling one of those chitchat calls with the headhunter which then led to a chitchat with the company guys.

When I was meeting the company guys, I'd updated and printed my puny resume in case they would've wanted it but realised they had "my resume" already. Basically the headhunter had copy pasted my puny LinkedIn profile data into their some sort of resume template and the guys were thinking I was actively looking for a new job.

Weird coincidences but ended up taking the job and haven't regretted after 2,5 years.

I wonder if the headhunter used a geek code[0] to resume generator?

Alternatively I wonder if a modern version of geekcode could be created with a service that automatically compresses a submitted resume into a comprehensible string of Unicode characters?

[0] https://www.geekcode.xyz/geek.html

A geek code based on distributed peer review (no blockchain) could be very elegant. A kind of shared CV encompassing gitlogs, third party reviews, customer satisfaction, and actual "thinking when it matters" ability recognition.

Where are the semioticians when we need them? Syntax, grammar, pragmatics, all develop at a rate of knots, but we still use a subset of ASCII for the vast majority of our symbolic computation. Could we do better than a joke from the nineties?

Ha! My first job was effectively through a LUG as well. In the early 2000's, I moved to a new city and joined the LUG there. A few months go by and I'm chatting with someone in the room and they ask what I do. I replied that I was going to college but also looking for part-time work. The next day, another LUG member who owned a small consulting company called me up and said he overheard what I said and pretty much just offered me the job right over the phone.

In fact, looking back at my employment history, only one of my jobs was a direct result of someone seeing my resume before they even met me.

As someone currently wading through resumes and kinda worried about missing some one like this, here's a tip to anyone else like you: The purpose of a resume is to get you hired. If you have something like an incredible technical sound driver support email chain like that... put a link to it in your resume. Yeah, your resume has standard fields, and those are indeed sorted on by HR, so don't leave out the skills & experience... but otherwise, the resume is free form. Generally not prose exactly, but free form. Link to ANYTHING you think will help you get the job.

And don't just say "I participate in some LUG"... that can mean you show up to the meetings once every couple of months to eat the free food. Show your helpfulness in an email chain. Show a project that you did with them with a link that explicitly says you did a big portion of it. If no such link exists, get one created!

By no means do I promise wonders if you do this. HR filters may still eat your resume. But if you do get through to a real human, they may look at those things, and the ones who will understand what this means are the ones you want to work for anyhow.

If you've got the skills to pay the bills but your resume looks like any other high school dropout's, I can tell you, from the other side of the desk, you've given me no way to tell any different. It may stink that all we have are resumes in the initial process... but at least that resume is under your control. (Mostly. Sometimes it gets chewed on. But speaking for myself, I'm looking at raw resumes straight from the candidate and that's not uncommon.) Don't be afraid to use it, and don't be afraid to toot your own horn, that's the whole point of this particular document.

(Similarly, to the extent possible without lying, don't say "I participated in some project" as your work experience. Write something you did in the project. Don't say "I participated in a billing system upgrade", say how you rewrote the UI in React to conform to accessibility standards and made it run 10 times faster than before and customers uniformly loved it and paid lots more money or whatever. "Participation" could be "I had my hand held for every bug as I struggled to keep up" and it could be "I stepped up and took more responsibility than anyone expected and almost single-handedly completed the project, freeing up the other developers" or anything in between. Unfortunately, based on experience, I kinda have to assume the worst because it's usually right. If "the worst" interpretation of that phrase isn't right, don't leave it open to me!)

Believe me, if you're doing Linux support on a mailing list, or anything even remotely like that, you stand out, at least to the right people. Do whatever it takes to work that on to the resume somehow. The "standard resume form" is a skeleton to be fleshed out, not a straightjacket of form.

This. This is why I always encourage people who I mentor to have a skills section.

My first job I got the interview because at the time I was attempting to turn a snowmobile into a hovercraft. I had plans and everything.

I put this on the resume.

The first question in the interview? "Look, if nothing else we had to bring you in to ask. How the hell are you planning on turning a snowmobile into a hovercraft?!?"

The project never went anywhere, but it got me the job.

When you are involved in hiring, it's surprising just how bad most resumes are. Have a single page of highlights that are going to make me want to talk to you. The interview is the time to go deep on details, if that's how the conversation goes.

It's really hard for somebody to know what's going to appeal. Maybe "planning on building a hovercraft" looks great to you; maybe it looks like somebody padding their resume. Maybe "had a really cool email thread" catches your eye; maybe it looks like an irrelevant detail.

A resume page isn't very long, especially presented as bullet points as expected. And especially when you have absolutely no idea who it is will be reading it. I can tell you great stories about every project I've ever done, but not in a bullet point.

I have no doubt that most resumes are incredibly bad. But I'd venture to say that a substantial fraction of the resumes you think are very good will be considered very bad by the next hiring manager over.

> I can tell you great stories about every project I've ever done, but not in a bullet point.

If you can figure out some way to distill an important project down to a point or two, it's definitely going to work in your favor. A resume is not the place for great stories but it should make me want to ask.

I agree with your last sentence, although I don't think you will find anybody wanting a long resume from you. You could always provide a link to your online CV that is complete while the one you submit is an edited down version tailored to the company and position you hope to interview for.

Yup. That's life. But if you make a resume like everyone else's, you're going to get everyone else's results. That's life too. I don't have a magic solution that will guarantee you a resume so awesome that literally every hiring manager in the world will break down in tears and hire you on nothing more than your resume.

You can turn this to your advantage, which I alluded to in my original. If you want to work with people who thing making hovercraft out of snowmobiles is awesome, put it on there. If you want to work with people who think that is a strange distracting thing to put on a resume, by all means leave it off. I'm sure HN is largely biased towards the first, so let me say I'm not being snarky at all about the second and I'm totally serious; if you are interested in a banking or government job you may well have those sorts of external interests yet find it a bad idea to put it directly on your resume.

Really my main message here is, take advantage of the fact that the resume is free form and don't just thoughtlessly put your name, work and educational experience, and three one-word bullet points about your hobbies or something on your resume, and then stop, because "that's what a resume is". Put whatever will get you hired. If there isn't a standard category/heading for whatever that is, make one.

As an outsider how sends resumes, it is difficult to know what a good resume is because one has not had the on hands experience of actually knowing what others are doing. Some searching on the internet may be helpful in the end but the jobs I got so far felt like blackboxes in the hiring process.

I'm guess your resume was still otherwise impressive

It wasn't awful. I was a new grad though, so I had a grocery store job, some volunteer experience and then fluffed up with whatever skills were on the job posting.

Second this. And especially the "I participated in" bit - that almost immediately makes me heavily discount the value of that experience because it tells me nothing and it's exactly what someone who has had only peripheral involvements but wants to play up their importance would say.

If they get through to an interview, fine, they'll get a chance to be specific, but failing to be specific might well get them filtered out before that.

Do you have a preferred template that gets past the filters? I imagine much of bad resumes comes from people using traditional ones.

Great point.

HR might not even understand what the link is about, but if they see something technical they don't understand but is related to the job, they will ask some technical person.

I got a call when I was younger because I was the maintainer of a package with several million downloads on RubyGems. It wasn't even a Ruby job, but the HR person's rationale was that "at least he's making stuff people are using".

> Apparently my CV was worse than I thought.

I have seen some awful resumes, including for people with PhDs and long records of accomplishments. Even people who have been through resume writing seminars at job search organizations.

Damn. Sometimes the world works with a chuckle.

If interviews worked, then Bob would not have not needed two slaps upside the head to get it right.

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