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Comment by dist1ll | Hacker News Reader

There are many problems with your resume, and lack of fancy design is not one of them.

- Half of your CV is empty space

- Dates are formatted really badly, no one would be able to get a good grasp on your project and work timeline quickly

- You have a game project that spans several years, and you sum it up into one sentence. Why are you doing that? It's one of your main selling points, and you don't expand enough on it.

- The prioritization is not sound. I'm reading about your proficiency with vim (pretty much irrelevant) before I even know your work history.

- You mention Linux administration. That's pretty broad. You should specify more. Did you deal with network config? systemd? FUSE?

Overall your resume looks lackluster, unprofessional and bare-minimum. It's been more than 7 years now, and you still see nothing wrong with it? Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm doing you a favor by giving you a reality check.

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If I got this resume from a junior I would hire them assuming the interview went decently.

Half is empty - just graduated, can't expect that much stuff to put there.

Maybe I should have expanded more on the game but I was getting the impression nobody cared that much about personal projects.

The very first two things you do with a resume are match up the list of technical skills with the list of tech in your position requirements, and check the education requirement. That's why those two go at the top.

I'd dealt with a lot of config issues running Debian on various hardware in high school as well as installing it, dealing with apt, understanding chron, a lot of basic things. I don't think systemd was much of a thing yet.

I still fundamentally disagree that the resume is bad. Again, I'd hire this person, and I'm saying that as someone who's done interviews and hired people now.

> The very first two things you do with a resume are match up the list of technical skills with the list of tech in your position requirements, and check the education requirement. That's why those two go at the top.

That is what you do. The very first thing I check is where they worked before and how they describe what they did there.

In the case of juniors, that’s replaced with looking at basically anything they did and how they describe it.

By the time the CV gets to my desk the keyword matching is already done.

While the resume isn’t necessarily bad, it screams to me that the candidate didn’t even bother to look at, or didn’t care how a CV is normally structured/laid out before handing theirs in.

It’s not necessarily bad, but when looking through a bunch of them you don’t really want to adjust your mental parsing model for every resume, so barring anything else about it that stands out, you just mentally dismiss it.

To be fair, this is something I’ve seen more from people just leaving school.

I'm not sure I'd even interview this person; I'd at least have to find reasons to. It definitely doesn't give me anything to ask about. Quotes like "Save a lot of time by automating an email process" are so vague and ambiguous that the bullet point may as well be omitted.

Education on the top is a waste of most anybody's time, let it be on the top only if you have no work experience (and if that's the case, yikes).

I don't care about language/skillset checklists, because that's not what I hire for. Especially with no indication of relative strength or accomplishments with them - if I need a specific skill I'll happily scroll to see if it's there or not, but I want to see an actual story about this person's career and interests, not a set of "fill in the blank" stuff that every graduate has:

* woo high school and a college degree great, that's not something we're going to talk about

* version control, editors, etc are table stakes

Why is all of the experience effectively unscanable (by eye)? Prose-first, no easy way to separate by date, by project, or position held?

A resume doesn't have to be a thesis in print design, but I think you'd do well to consider the feedback you're receiving in this thread and that you alluded to receiving before - this resume isn't advertising anything to me and it's work for me to construct a coherent story about why this candidate is a strong fit for hiring.

> It definitely doesn't give me anything to ask about. Quotes like "Save a lot of time by automating an email process" are so vague

... are you kidding with these two sentences side by side? you just answered your own question, ask about the email process! and how is that outline of what I did even that vague? and everyone says to list accomplishments that benefitted the company instead of responsibilities, which this is a perfect example of.

I'll hopefully never have to write a resume again but if I have to I'll just pay an expert. The way I instinctively read and understand a document by actually reading it and caring about the content first is just too mismatched from the average neurotypical's way of looking at the world for me to empathize.

Don't beg the question in your resume. I don't want coy points to ask about, I want details so I can make sure that I can actually have an engaging conversation about something, especially so that I can figure out how it might relate to work I'm doing here. It's astonishing to me that you can't grasp that a resume is a form of communication, and that therefore you might want to, I dunno, communicate in it.

> and everyone says to list accomplishments that benefitted the company instead of responsibilities, which this is a perfect example of.

It's not perfect, it's nearly worthless. A perfect example would have at the very least some hint of the business value and the nature of the problem at hand.

> The way I instinctively read and understand a document by actually reading it and caring about the content first is just too mismatched from the average neurotypical's way of looking at the world for me to empathize.

This is pretty patronizing. I'm actually suggesting that the content of the resume you provided is itself lacking. The issue is not that "oh no the neurotypicals don't want to read my resume", the issue is that this resume's content has room to improve, but you think that can't possibly be the case. Yeah, you're lacking empathy (or at the very least pretty defensive), but it's because we WANT content, not because we're looking for surface-level stuff. In fact most of the feedback has actually been that this resume is TOO surface-level (list of skills? don't care, vague bullet points? don't care), and you're defending the superficiality of content, which is incoherent alongside the claim that people don't care about the substance.

"Saved over 30 hours of manual work, where the worker had to find a PDF, Excel sheet row contents, and information from one other data source, combine them into a formatted email with this information following certain conditions, and look up the right email to send it to. This was done with Python and the gmail api, <whatever the pdf library was, I forget>, and manual string parsing, building hashmaps of the information and sending the emails out once every 10 seconds to honor the rate limiting. Parsing failures or any other exception was logged for manual review."

All that extra detail seems trivial to me and covered well enough by the gist provided. Is this version really that much better for these details? Is it even enough detail for you yet? It feels like too much detail to me.

It was something about tax ID's and temporary merchant licenses for the state of Maryland.

I think you're just being intellectually dishonest if you can't imagine some compromise between what you started with and what you have here, given the feedback you've received.

No, I was honestly half expecting you to come back and say it still wasn't enough detail.

That's the actual definition of bad faith discussion. True to form, then :)

Edit: An actual dramatic improvement is trivial to pull from your bait example, by the way:

"Automated a manual process for collating tax ID and temporary merchant licenses for the state of Maryland, honoring rate limiting and supporting auditing of failures. Used Python and Gmail API".

Obviously there is some precision loss in my writing because I didn't work on the project and because your description of "something about tax ID's" was ambiguous to begin with.

Could even add "saving 30 hours a week/day/whatever".

The advice I give for resumes is that they fill two roles.

The first is like what you say - make sure you check the right boxes. OFten the first person who sees your resume is non-technical, so make it easy for them to progress you on to the next step.

The second purpose of the resume is far more important: get people interested in YOU.

Almost everyone has done interesting things, but many people are bad at communicating those things. Often people are bad at even identifying the interesting things!

For each skill/technology you want to highlight think of a situation where you solved a problem using that skill. You're aiming for a problem your interviewer will find interesting, and will want to ask you questions about. Very briefly highlight the problem and that you fixed it with SKILL, and you're done. The more specific you can be the more interesting you will appear.

Two or three of those, your employment/education history, and contact details, and you're done.

I think your resume does do this, but it should be both more prominent and more intentional.

If I was helping someone today and they showed me this resume, I'd recommend re-ordering the sections and putting a brief intro at the top serving the same purpose as a cover letter. I'd also make sure they create tailored versions for each job they apply for.

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