I know apps - Scott Hanselman | Hacker News Reader

I know apps - Scott Hanselman

hanselman.com

59 pointsrodh25716 comments

I liked a lot this sentence:

"Do you have 20 years experience or do you have the same 1 year of experience twenty times"

If you have been doing the same thing 10 years without ever learning something new, in my view that is not a very big advantage over someone with less exp.

Reminds me of a 25-year old programmer I interviewed once, who's resume sounded like this:

- 3 years worked with iOS

- 2 years worked with Android

- 6 years PHP

- 4 years Java

Those aren't the exact numbers, but if I were to add the years the guy should have started programming around the age of 5

Uh, he probably meant that he was doing several of these at the same time, didn't he?

Obviously. But that's a very uncommon practice in Eastern Europe and Asia (the two areas I'm familiar with). And the applicant was from the same area.

out of interest, what would someone say if they had been spending the last year working at a job that required iOS apps that interface with a PHP backend? 0.5 years each?

You combine the two in a single item, exactly the way you said it. "1 year of iOS front end development with a PHP backend."

I would be more impressed to interview someone who knows the basics of latex than an "expert" in Word. While latex is obviously not a determiner of intelligence, the average person who considers themselves to be a savy Word user would cringe at the thought of "coding" their resume, let alone take the extra effort.

His Careers 2.0 CV includes this:

"Confessions of your worst WTF moment: I shipped my administrator password for an FTP site inside an open source project I was working on. ;)"

Everyone's made mistakes, but I don't know whether I would like to put them on my CV.

Saves them asking you in the interview!

Since everybody makes mistakes, would you throw that resume in the trash?

IMHO, the best people are the ones that learn from their mistakes and being honest about it in a public way goes a long way towards that.

In my own resume that I send out whenever I'm required I am listing some thoughts on a project that was an utter failure. My online resume also contains a couple of words about it, but less explanations. I like it like that and it doesn't really bother me since:

    1) I never apply through recruitment agencies, 
       unless contacted with a concrete offer that 
       stands out (and in such a case, the recruiter is
       already interested in me)

    2) Failing to answer about your failures really 
       stands out in an interview, catching you 
       unprepared. By putting a failure on your resume, 
       you're the one leading the conversation (the
       interviewer will either ask you about it or 
       not ask you about your failures at all)

    3) You don't want to work for companies with 
       brain-dead filtering mechanisms

Personally, I also hate bullshit. I used to interview people and it's a good thing I haven't done so in a long time, because I hate it. I hate listening to people about how awesome they are, while being incapable of writing a FooBar sample.

"Why don't we include projects rather than companies on our resumes?"

Because The Suits demand secrecy and although threats from former employers may get struck down by a court, I don't have the financial resources to find out. Repeatedly. It's less expensive to tell you I've implemented COM in Java on OS X for the last 17 years.

People that don't know how to censor or write up teaser highlights of their career, is the easiest filter when going over resumes. So basically your article is stating your friends resume would go in my rejected pile.

So ... technical people who aren't copywriters or marketers get the boot early on. Good to know.

I realize my comment is a bit harsh, but I learned two decades ago to stop tailoring my résumé to the obsessive desires of a recruiter or an HR manager or a particular interviewer. It's akin to me trying to constantly adapt my personality to everyone's quirks so that I'm liked or just to keep from pissing them off.

This is who I am. Take it or leave it. If you can't find the technical goodies in my résumé, we're probably both better off if I'm working down the road with someone else.

technical people aren't going to list firefox or ical as applications they are familiar with. Again, technical people are required to write documentation and at most write comments.. if they aren't able to highlight efforts in a resume, they are not likely to be good at writing documentation or comments.

As much as I love stackoverflow, I don't know that I want to create a hiring culture/environment in which the top thing on a resume is what % of users person x is in with regards to answering questions (or creating answers people like) on a specific (for profit) website. I do agree with the underlying premise that judging people by resumes is a tired tradition and I don't know if I have a better answer - yet? :) This isn't a dig on gamification either, traditional resumes might be the original 'career gamification'. Just not sure that having an entire industry base expertise in some manner on the weight of one website's ranking algo is a smart move.

I think that weight is a lot more accurate than what we have now, which is many candidates listing technologies on their resume if they've ever heard of them. I have top 10% listed on my SO Careers profile for c#, java, php, javascript, and c++. If you click on any one of them you're taken directly to the search results of what I've written to get those tags listed at the top of my CV. The point is that you don't have to just trust in the algorithm, you can check for yourself.

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