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Comment by KMag | Hacker News Reader

Back in school, I remember mentioning to a friend that "Don't the Microsoft Research CS papers look a bit different? Whenever I feel like a paper looks a bit off, I look up and see the authors have Microsoft email addresses." and he pointed out to me that MS creates their papers in Word and pretty much all of the other papers I read were in LaTeX.

If your CV is generated from LaTeX -> PDF and all of the others are Word -> PDF, your CV will subtly stand out. Depending on the reader, the subconscious/conscious connection with CS papers may be a plus or a minus.

It's hard to say if having my CV in LaTeX has actually helped me, but this is the reason I use LaTeX for my CV.

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I worked for MSR for ~7 years and all of the papers I worked on were in LaTeX, all the papers I saw from my colleagues were written in LaTeX as well. The only people who wrote papers in Word were from academic communities where that already happened often (e.g. lots of Word papers in HCI conferences; I was in the PL and OS communities where it was very rare to see papers written in Word).

But yes, a paper written in MS Word is glaring by how it handles kerning and hyphenation. You'd be surprised how much products teams don't care about type setting (and Google Docs at Google where I work now is about the same).

> kerning and hyphenation

So these are still broken in modern word-processors? Or expected to be manually tweaked? Seems odd decades later.

You can’t manually tweak it. Actually, I spend a non trivial amount of time fixing under and over flows in LaTeX papers. In Word, it’s just “go ugly early.” The appeal is that a good looking doc is impossible, so don’t even bother.

Interesting but odd. Seems like this would be right in the wheelhouse of the expensive word processor.

I've handed my resume at career fairs and I twice they noticed and pointed out that it was LaTeX and it impressed them a little bit.

But I was a EE student so maybe it'd be different in another field.

I use Calibri in my LaTeX resume for this reason.

I can’t put my finger on why but I’ve found Pages on MacOS good for maintaining a resume that fits precisely in two pages.

> MS creates their papers in Word

I used to collaborate with MSR and never saw anything but LaTeX being used. If you look at the level of sophistication in many of their papers it’s not something Word can even begin to achieve.

Hmm... most of my exposure to Microsoft CS papers was in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Perhaps things have changed, or maybe it was just the set of authors that I read. In any case, the layout was markedly different, and once my friend pointed out that it wasn't just in my head, that they weren't using LaTeX, it was hard for me to un-see.

I would have to agree with this. But I'd like to point out that recruiters should evaluate whether the job candidate is capable of doing their job rather than what format their CV is in.

I agree we should be evaluating “this candidate is a good engineer” and ignoring “this candidate has various attributes which often correlate with being a good engineer” - but how do you propose measuring the former? Bear in mind that even factors like “does well in a coding interview” is actually an example of the latter, not the former

Related to this, I swear that once I started writing my homework solutions in LaTeX in grad school, I suddenly just started getting better grades. I don't think I was actually any more convincing; it just seems like turning in a paper that looked like it was written in LaTeX primed my profs to think was more convincing than I was.

With a little bit of effort, it's easy to bridge the gap without having to switch to LaTeX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8

I've known a team in INRIA writing their papers in Word. It felt so weird...

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