Rustdoc résumé
yozhgoor.github.io
yozhgoor.github.io
It's a fun, different way of presenting a resume. The fact that it made it to the front page of HN means it worked at what it was intended to do: be seen by a bunch of prospective employers and stand out.
Maybe nobody is suggesting it, but these clever resume formats tend to inspire a lot of copycats in my experience.
When infographic resumes went through waves of popularity on social media I started receiving a lot of poorly constructed infographic-style resumes. Most of them came from junior candidates who thought they were going to stand above the crowd and impress us with their ingenuity. Maybe 1 out of every 10 was actually well-designed. The rest were just needlessly cryptic and failed to deliver the information I actually needed to see in a resume format. For example, I don’t want to see that someone rates themselves as 4/5 stars in Python. I need to see some text that explains their Python experience.
After reading 50 resumes in a row, the last thing I want to do is parse my way through non-standard resume formats.
This Rustdoc resume comes close to looking like a normal resume, which is good, but I would strongly suggest the author add a link at the beginning to a regular PDF resume that can be downloaded and shared.
The full resume should expand on the normal resume points, such as explaining their role and responsibilities at their current job and adding dates to employment ranges.
I've never asked a candidate to rank themselves on a skill out of 10, that seems like a low-signal way to filter for overconfident people.
We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I'). So "Former emergency response driver..."
Mentioning a Twitter handle is only useful if your Twitter has things you'd want people to see.
The professional experience section (Modules here) should be in reverse chronological order - so most recent first. It would be useful to say something that you did while working for RustMinded and maybe tell the reader who the company is. So it might look like:
Software Developer, Rustminded $DATE_- present
RustMinded is a Belgian startup dedicated to the promotion of the Rust language.
As others have said, I don't really get the fascination with LaTeX. I get a lot of incoming resumes from my tech clients that are written in LaTeX. It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job".
The project sections are mostly OK other than some language issues.
Who is "we" here? I've always had good results with a first person CV - so far in the US, the UK, and the EU. Maybe I just get away with it by luck or circumstance, but it's clearly not a set-in-stone requirement.
> It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job".
Anecdotally a friend who at that time worked at Sun Microsystems told me that his team prioritised CVs created with LaTeX over all others.
After all, if the purpose of a CV is not to "try and impress you" then what is it?
Of course you 'can' write a resume in first person. It's just not the voice that the reader expects. Similar to third person.
A resume is certainly meant to try and impress the reader, but typically we're trying to impress the reader with professional accomplishments. I'm much more impressed by someone's professional accomplishments than their choice to use LaTeX.
When I hire, I couldn’t care less about whether the person uses I or We.
The other is redundancy - if we use "I", chances are almost every sentence will begin with "I". I did this, I did that.
"If you Google this string, you'll find the arguments" is a logical fallacy. You are claiming that there are arguments for why this rule is true, but not providing any. If anything, the only thing this statement proofs is that you are not able to explain why doing this is even a good idea.
And FWIW, I actually google this and none of the first 5 results actually explained why this rule makes sense. They were all posts of the form "20 rules to blindly follow when writing a resumee".
In other parts of this thread, I've explained why we don't use I. Let me gather them for you.
1 - Redundancy. Imagine a list of bullets that start with the word "I".
- I wrote a playbook for product implementations.
- I managed the project...
- I oversaw a team that...
Hopefully by now you see this wouldn't be a fun read.
2 - Necessity - The resume is about you, not others, so we don't need to say that you (I) did the things on the resume. That is understood, and why 'implied' first person fulfills our needs while also reducing the content. If I ask you what you did today, you can just say "Watched TV, mowed the lawn, ..." - you don't need to say "I watched TV, and then I mowed the lawn."
I hope this helps, and maybe we can put this to bed.
It mainly makes a difference for candidates in more competitive situations - give a recruiter two resumes with somewhat parallel experience, and the better resume (based on writing style, obeying stylistic norms, etc.) is probably more likely to get the interview.
As for a "scam", my results are hard to argue with, and most clients seem to think the investment was a good one. Many of my clients come to me after having failed to get interviews for their dream jobs, and after working with me their fortunes often change. Many of my clients approach me trying to get jobs at places like FAANG companies, while many others just are looking to work at places most people have never heard of.
Would you like to be done now? We both have better things to do.
That actually surprises me, because while I don't think it's good advice I did think it was common.
The #1 result in my "rules for resume writing" search did mention first person.
I could be wrong about that, but the data doesn't lie. I've read far more resumes than the average human being - 20 years in recruiting, 7 years as a resume writer, thousands of writing clients - and definitely <10% of the resumes I receive from clients include the word "I" anywhere at all.
If it's not a given, I guess it would be one heckuva coincidence that 90%+ of the tens of thousands of resumes I've seen all don't use "I".
You've laid it down as the prime consideration for writing a CV and given no evidence that it's even important! You may be right, but you haven't shown that you're right even anecdotally. Strongly held beliefs are fine, but they're not evidence.
Can you be successful with a first person resume? Yes. You can also be success with a third person resume, or a resume that is web-based and includes only a list of links to your code repos.
My evidence is from reading resumes every day of my life for 20 years. Tens of thousands from people all over the world. You can call that anecdotal.
The thing is there are no "official" rules for resumes like there would be for haiku or sonnet. It's not that kind of writing, but there are norms.
As another example of a norm, an experience section is written in reverse chronological order (most recent experience first). Have I ever seen someone write it another way? Of course. But that is also incredibly uncommon.
We typically put contact info at the top. Can you put it on the bottom? Maybe even on the last page? Sure. But that would be unusual, and the reader may be inclined to thinking that you don't know how to write a resume.
I think I've used up all my energy in talking about resumes today, and I need to go write some resumes. Enjoy your day.
But if it's just common, well, it's an odd piece of advice for someone who has literally formatted their CV as a programming language's reference document!
Edit: Oh, and thanks for your patience and for engaging.
My apologies for taxing your energy supplies and more power to your elbow in crafting supplications ;)
Ok, it's not an extraordinary stretch to imagine that your form might help, but all you've actually demonstrated is that it's not catastrophically damaging!
Developed a web app in Python that ....
Authored a playbook for...
So it's still considered "first person" by most, but the pronoun is dropped.
Can I be sure that no using "I" on resumes is a "big component" for my success? Of course I can't be 100% sure, and my ability to highlight accomplishments is probably far more important.
But I was a recruiter for 20 years, and I know that 95% of resumes I saw during my career (easily in the tens of thousands) were written in implied first person, and when you send someone a resume that continuously uses "I" it is a bit of a shock to the system (just as it would be to see third person).
I'll tell you what, let's save us both some time. Go to Google and just search "resume", and use image search. I just went through the first page of results, and I didn't see a single resume written in first person (using "I"). Not one.
I'm not saying people are filtering on seeing "I", but they would be surprised in the same way they would be by seeing third person "Thom is a CTO with..." on a CV.
I have no agenda here. I'm just telling you the facts from someone who has probably read far more resumes than most others. You don't need to accept my expertise. Again, run a google image search on resumes, tell me how many you see with the word 'I'.
You clearly don't value my experience. That's OK. I'm not some advocate for first person pronouns - it doesn't help me in any way that resumes are written in this manner. I'm just explaining to you that it's a fact.
This isn't the #1 piece of advice I give in my job. I'm a writer. I write the documents. I'm not telling them what to do.
I do offer review services, which are a small part of my business. If I get a resume with the word "I" for a review, I will tell them what I've told you.
You seem intent on belittling what I do, as if my job is to walk around telling people "don't use I".
Wrote an iOS game that earned $10M in revenue and had 50K downloads.
There is no I there, and I don't think you'd argue that this person contributed.
If you were at iPhone game co on a team and had "wrote an iOS game that earned $10m in revenue an had 50k downloads" there are absolutely people out there that read that as a team accomplishment that's suspicious that you didn't use 'I' to describe what you actually did.
If it was a team effort, we may use "Contributed to development of an iOS game that earned $10M in revenue.".
If it was an individual effort, the bullet I wrote earlier could included a term to clarify that, like "Independently...".
As for 'us on HN', about 100 HN users hire me every year. I even have a discount code for HN users on my HN page here (I got 3 HN orders in the past two days, probably from people reading this thread). I'm familiar with how to write accomplishments on resumes, for HN users and others.
You can say it exists, but it would be nearly impossible for me to spend an entire career in this field and not ever come across it.
You writing countless articles about what you think doesn't preclude the idea that people out there think differently.
Meanwhile I've personally seen it in hiring committees in every job I've worked for about 15 years now. I actively shut down that line of thinking in said committees (from both directions), and it's not difficult to do because you get a group of five people or so together in a committee and that's normally enough for there to be differing opinions on the matter. "Look, even in this small group, of people we've hired and trust to make good hiring decisions, there's mutually exclusive ideas on what you're 'supposed to do'. So obviously we throw out both ideas and accept whatever in this case since it's completely orthogonal".
I personally take your approach since it's around 75%/25%, and the numbers work in favor, but there's absolutely the other camp out there.
I'm really not sure what you're talking about with hiring committees, but if you're saying that some people are eliminating candidates because they did or didn't use personal pronouns, I think that's well beyond the scope of what I've been saying. I'm not suggesting applicants who use "I" should be eliminated from contention.
Most resumes are processed and chopped up by ancient applicant tracking systems, so you sometimes have to stick to the facts in a resume with a plain layout. These ATS systems rank resumes by relevance, generally based on job ad keyword matching and matching against some synonyms not mentioned in the ad.
I’ve had early success with a less traditional resume layout but I know I was picked due to relevant experience even then. Experience, relevance and luck/perseverance are probably the three keys to landing a job quickly.
I have gone down this path with other types of documents (reports, proposals) not because I love LaTeX but because I hate composing and editing in Word, etc. Especially for long lived or repeated documents. Some of those tech clients might just prefer working with plain text for editing, source control, and/or version branching.
1. An ancient resume macro (and an ancient resume) that I made while a freshman in college is on CTAN. What I used in my early career was not that, although I doubt I have any relic of that later file anymore.
Turns out you get neatly formatted printable docs with not so much effort, and the raw markdown stays with the code where it can be used and updated by fellow devs
I built my LaTeX resume trying to impress a potential employer yeeears ago. So far it's really easy to keep up to date and to temporarily remove parts (comment them out). I think the end result looks a bit more professionally type-set than a Word/GDocs creation.
LaTex is really powerful when you get to a certain point, but unless you’ve tinkered with it until you reach that point, it’s a PITA.
To me the number 1 advantage is that I can easily keep updated various versions of the CV, because by working at startups I’ve always have to wear a lot of hats. I keep a more ‘hardware oriented’ CV, another more ‘software oriented’ CV, and I added a more “management” version that showcases better team leadership instead on focusing on the tech stack.
It’s also very handy to keep everything as text documents when you are asked to submit to different webforms, and being able to adjust things like quality vs pdf size is important when submitting your CV in some places
Sorry but no, that’s bad advice.
I appreciate your response, but implied first person is the industry standard, and has been for as long as I've been in business.
It's not meant to impress you, a resume writer. It's meant to impress other techies.
1. It's almost always much more readable than a Word document.
2. It's not about impressing people. It's about readability for the reader, and maintainability (by avoiding finicky and annoying WYSIWYG editing) for the author.
If using a LaTeX resume means self-selecting out of resume-grinding HR departments that require Word documents — and/or annoying entirely useless tech recruiters — that's a feature, not a bug.
I apologize if these are well known answers but I stick with a fairly technical crowd and, well word of mouth usually gets us passed around to be brutally honest. I hate to admit it, but a half way legible resume and it's usually just references after a point =/
I do quite well as a writer. My hourly rate is $100/hr, I also offer flat rate services, and for the past few years I've consistently had a roster of anywhere from 30-40 clients at any given time.
My clientele is about 50% tech, as that's my specialty and I was a tech recruiter for my entire recruiting career. Word of mouth does sometimes get you by if you have a good network. There are quite a few reasons people hire a resume writer. Some just simply struggle to write. Some struggle to understand what the reader wants to know. Some aren't comfortable taking credit for their accomplishments, so a writer makes it feel less 'braggy'.
I hope I answered your questions.
Depends on the situation! For me it’s grammatical in most informal texts, e.g. emails. (Also, the first sentence of this paragraph.)
> Second, there's more than just the subject missing in "Former emergency response driver...".
This is a good point; I did indeed miss this subtlety. (Actually, it’s not even very subtle!) In this case, I must admit to being unsure about how to analyse this.
This isn't technically pro drop. It's a different process called "diary drop". By coincidence I wrote a rant about this only a few days ago:
So please everyone, stop with the performative LaTeX. If you had any idea how many people do this, you'd be embarrassed.
(And to add a dash of humility to this comment, I'll confess that I used to write my resume in LaTeX. After seeing how many other people do too, I stopped.)
I've used both Manjaro and Arch and Manjaro is far away my favorite distribution, because (to me at least) it's Arch for the lazy.
I ran Arch for years before Manjaro and so maybe that's the reason, but I don't believe Manjaro abstracts you away from nuts and bolts layer as much as Ubuntu does?
INB4 the ubuntu comment: I know, I know. You can still do a lot of fiddling under the hood, it's just not in a manner i'd describe as "the linux way". There are a lot of helper layers that break if you try to subvert them, but i will admit that update-alternatives is the only example coming to mind now
I'm a tinkerer typically, but it seemed like they were going out of their way to break things and generate maintenance work for me, I've never had that issue with any other distro and I will never run Arch again because of it.
I was the most impressed with Manjaro, it seems very well polished. From Gnome 40 on Wayland, to the the default ZFS shell with custom Powerline prompt, to the GUI desktop layout switcher which even includes the tiling PoP Shell as an option.
The Manjaro team has done an excellent job at assembling a configuration that is simultaneously power-user-focused but also user-friendly.
I just wish there'd be some more love on architect.
But maybe I need to learn more about the default installer, I couldn't get it to run on LVM and/or LUKS
The only main shortcoming of the installer is, in 2021 it really needs to also offer btrfs as an option for automatic installation. Basically four options for automatic install: Ext4, btrfs, LUKS+Ext4, and LUKS+btrfs.
Having recently migrated to ZFS, and quickly become accustomed to the immense flexibility of datasets/subvolumes, snapshotting, and checksumming, I can't imagine using anything other than ZFS or btrfs now. And btrfs is standard on Fedora 34 and Garuda, probably some other distros too.
If you are looking for something that's closer to pure Arch under the hood, your should give Endeavour OS [0] a try. It's basically vanilla Arch with a nicely configured XFCE desktop and a graphical installer.
Correction: ZSH shell.
I use and like Ubuntu, but I have to agree with this. Even before I finished reading this paragraph I was thinking of update-alternatives. Networking config springs to mind as well for me.
When I dealt with hiring for my team, I've never paid any attention to the formatting. Making formatting stand out from other resumes did not increase the chances for the resume to be picked and moved to the next stage. It did decrease them though, if crazy formatting made it harder to read.
Using Rustdoc might be "clever", but I don't find this resume very readable honestly. It took me some time to figure out what modules or structs mean in this context. Don't do this. Recruiters have really little time and they often get hundreds of resumes. If they can't get the essential information quickly enough, they'll just throw it out.
What makes an outstanding resume is in the content and how well it matches the job requirements. If I'm looking for a database engine expert and I get 999 resumes which all mention building websites in JS or machine learning models in Python, but one mentions experience on Linux kernel performance work (proven by accepted patches), which one do you think I'd choose?
To others, the "Traits" section -- how much impact does this really matter to the hiring managers? You're hired for what you know, but you're fired for who you are. Is it worth it to expand on these "traits", or is it a fluff area that can be replaced with something more meaningful?
Recently, I've also seen people put progress bars for soft skills on a CV, as if they're close to mastering the skill or at least levelling up. It normally takes up a lot of space and is virtually meaningless.
It's not so much the way the content is presented, as much as the content itself!
I've upvoted you to give you the benefit of the doubt, because your comment could be taken as either positive, or negative. Based on the other comments in your profile I think you genuinely intended a positive meaning for your complement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...
If, in your job, you were trying to express technical information, you wouldn't use LaTeX. You might use it for a paper or a book where you have a lot of content or multiple issues that you want to look consistent. But a resume is a single, small document with multiple different sections that have different formatting requirements.
In your job, you probably share information in markdown or rst. If you're looking to signal - and let's be honest, with LaTeX you are - why not use those?
Bonus: ATS systems and recruiters won't bork your input.
Edit: also, I agree that Computer Modern can come off as signaling (although, in quant finance, I found it to be a useful and positive signal). But using other fonts it doesn't have the same connotations and just looks a bit more polished.
%\item{Built internal dashboard for foo}
% this was that awful project for <person> where they changed the requirements at the last second and yada yada...Specifically, I use `mathpazo` with smallcaps and old-style figures enabled:
\usepackage[sc,osf]{mathpazo}You really shouldn't though. Computer Modern is a pretty ugly font.
At least use something like New Computer Modern if you really need a Scoth Roman font with maths.
I would, and do, use TeX. Hell I'd use LaTeX for everything if I could.
I use LaTeX for mine, not because of some misguided sense of street cred, but just because I want it version controlled. I'm sure there are some nice pandoc templates for styling markdown CVs, but AwesomeCV for LaTeX CVs was what I came across, and has worked fine (roughly, it's abandonware that I've tweaked/fixed a bit but nobody's PRs get merged) since. My CV doesn't say 'proudly generated with heart emojis in LaTeX', or anything like that, it's just the tool I happened to use.
I've used OverLeaf [1] and a tweaked Shawn Pan's 'Resume for a Software Engineer' template [2] in the past.
[2] https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/resume-template-for-...
Edit: Wait... OpenVC? ;)
Yeah, I know, I am weird.
If it was for print then yes, I would. But a CV isn't technical information so I'm not sure what your point is here.
Have you considered that LaTeX might be the only typesetting tool I know? Why would I learn another piece of software just to typeset my CV?
Here are a bunch of templates that range from decent-looking to beautiful: https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv
The reason I think LaTeX resumes/CVs rarely make sense is that there are a number of HR departments that require them in MS Word format (often this is a SharePoint house and yes, I think that bizarre, but that is what I've found). LaTeX can be converted to Word doc, but in my experience always requires tweaking.
For sharing technical work, I think it depends on your audience.
A connected team with a decent wiki or document generation pipline authoring informal technical how-tos or status intended for the team only? Then some flavor of markdown (I prefer Creole) can make perfect sense.
Authoring anything for team external use should use a well defined community standard (rustdoc, rst, etc.) if what's being documented is specific to that community (Rust code, Python code, etc.).
Authoring anything of a more technical nature (papers, how-tos to be delivered to a client, CONOPS) should be authored in a pipeline that starts with a text based format, so that you can put it under good version control (opinionated, but SharePoint/Word do not count for that for me). I prefer LaTeX for that format. Some prefer Docbook, some DITA, and I've even seen a TOML version. This gets you version control, document section re-use, and fine-grained control over document layout.
Note I said should.
Some potential barriers to that are:
* Skillsets - the rest of the team does not know Docbook, DITA, or LaTeX and may be resistant to learn. This will make it a hard sell to management.
* Time - The project does not have the budget or scope to change how documentation is being done, according to management. In reality, this pipeline will save time in editing, and improve quality delivered to the client or end customer.
* NIH/NIMBY - Not Invented Here and it's more obstinate brother, Not In My Backyard. If your shop has always done it a certain way, then the team may be resistant to changing. Especially if the way it has been done is reflective of a Windows world (MS Word, MS PowerPoint). If management is part of this problem, move. Only partially kidding, but a good document pipeline will be a hard sell.
What do you do if you cannot sell a good document pipeline?
You could version control your MS Word documents in Git through conversion[1], but this means you might lose some of the little tweaks your manager did to improve quality/put their stamp on the doc.
Another option is that MS Word has track changes, and you may be stuck with a combination of track changes and SharePoint/Confluence versioning.
Another option, which I've never tried, is to unzip the MS .docx file into a folder (each .docx file is a zip of a bunch of files, most them text), git version control that folder, and re-zip it up when needed. Not sure how well git diffs will work in this situation though. My guess it probably not well, but maybe better than nothing.
[1] https://blog.front-matter.io/mfenner/using-microsoft-word-wi...