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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

I find the author giving just plain bad advice.

"The tech stack in your CV should NOT look like this: [fig of bullet points of techs]"

Why not? In resume screening they look for keywords. You need to list the thing they want.

"If you have worked with a technology years ago, your experiences is not up to date anymore. Tech evolves so fast, and you get rusty and forget things."

This is a trope. Tech hardly move at all and it is way faster to refresh, dunno, 8 year old Java Spring experience, than learn it from scratch. The hiring manager might believe that you need recent experience though ...

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A resumé is a tool for you to guide the interviewer, and you should use it for your advantage.

If you stuff your CV with a contextless list of random tech keywords, half of which are things you did a "hello world" with years ago, the interview is now a game of Russian roulette, and the gun is aimed at your face. Sure, you'll pass the resumé screening, but at what cost? You're leaving a lot to the interviewer's imagination, and what they imagine you should know is not necessarily what you know.

"So, your CV mentions you have MongoDB and DevOps experience. We're actually having some weird issues with it recently, it seems that under very intense loads, some of our nodes get locked and time out, and then the cluster loses quorum. Do you have any thoughts on what we could do?" It sucks to get a question like this, when all your previous experience in the matter is that you pressed the "create instance" button in the Atlas UI three years ago, and decided that was enough MongoDB-ing and DevOps-ing for a CV bullet point.

You can prevent this by showing those tech keywords in the context in which they're relevant. "Created and deployed an online application for candy bar enthusiasts, using React, NestJS and MongoDB on the cloud". Now you might get questions like "I see on your CV that you worked on an app for... candy bar enthusiasts? Could you tell me more about it?", or, "Your CV mentions that you built an app using MongoDB and NestJS, how was the experience of using MongoDB in a Node application?", which you are more qualified to answer. By adding relevant human context to what you did, you guide the interviewer towards the questions you'd want them to ask.

At least in roles where I have sent out a resume, including keywords was less about the interview, and more about passing the not necessarily tech savvy hr or external recruitment process.

In an interview I would hope to talk more about the more detailed parts, but it feels like I need the tickbox stuff to get to that point.

To be clear, the keywords to tick the boxes are all still there, just presented in the context in which you used them, which adds additional meaning and qualifies what you mean by "having experience with X" to an informed reader. My CV has them in bold so that the HR person won't miss them on a quick scan.

That said, if you optimise your CV for success in recruitment processes where no one understands what you're talking about, you will get jobs at places where no one knows what they're talking about.

Why are you even in a position where you are dealing with HR as a filter? By the time my resume gets to the ATS, someone who is in the hiring chain already knows to look for it or at least I’ve gotten an internal referral.

Because I have not had a personal contact within every company that has had an interesting job listing....

Only moving to companies where I can get an internal reference seems very limiting...

What are interesting jobs for you?

I specifically look for companies where they want someone to be hands on. But also lead initiatives as an individual contributor. It traditionally has been at smaller companies (since 2008).

Those types of jobs don’t come from submitting my resume to an ATS. I have to either use my existing network or reach out to someone directly at LinkedIn.

Perhaps doublespanner is applying to positions where they haven't gotten an internal referral.

That works great when you already have a personal network and/or some cachet.

And once you break the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle, you should be forming a network from day one. That network can start with third party recruiters who you reach out to on LinkedIn.

FWIW, at least in my corner of the world, nobody is actually looking at your resume let alone being "guided" by it.

FAANG dependent, of course, but at mine, we've got competencies assigned ahead of time, we drill into those, ask our pe-fab questions, and move onto the next interview. There's just no time to thoughtfully read resumes.

I particularly love these hour long interviews where I've had to fly half way around the world to spend an hour answering shitty questions from some completely unprepared lazy asshole like you who hasn't spent 5 minutes reading each resume.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

My first boss in tech made us all perform interviews. He always used to say that if it's on their resume, it's fair game passcode. We wouldn't judge you for not knowing something, but we would judge you for saying you need something that you didn't know.

Listing all the tech you've worked with is pretty pointless in my opinion.

If you've learnt all that, you can learn to use more.

At most I would detail what you feel your expertise is and what other skills you have that the company is asking for. Have you programmed in C# for 5+ years and continue to do so? You might think you're really good at it, so make that point.

Did you use React for a little while and the job asks for that experience? Mention it.

Did you use OCaml 5 years ago and not touch it since? Probably don't mention it.

CVs should always be tailored for the job. It's not a life story, it's an advertisement. Car advertisements don't list page after page of tech specs. They focus on the key things they think are selling points. You should do the same for your CV and that will change depending on the requirements of the job you apply for.

Yeah I used to think like you, but I kept getting screened out of interviews because my cv was missing keywords. Then I listed every technology I ever worked with and suddenly I was getting interviews.

I never tailored the cv to each job as that would take way too much time, especially as you get more senior. As a junior developer, sure, it might be worth it because you might get offers from most jobs you apply for. Nowadays I would have to apply for dozens of jobs to find a good fit.

This might only apply for EU and UK though, I imagine things are a lot better in the US

> Then I listed every technology I ever worked with and suddenly I was getting interviews.

I got flooded with job spam that way. As a signal-to-noise ratio, I would much rather strip all the keywords from my CV and get an occasional cold call (or e-mail) than wake up every day to a mailbox full of jobs that are not related to what I've done, but matched some keyword on my resume.

>I never tailored the cv to each job as that would take way too much time, especially as you get more senior.

How many jobs are you applying for? It's harder when you're a graduate looking for a job. When you're senior you're probably only applying for a handful of roles that caught your eye and it only takes 10 minutes to refactor your CV to make it more relevant to each company.

My experience has been the complete opposite, as a junior you are less picky and pretty much every role hits your requirements so you apply for a couple jobs and get offered most of them.

As a senior, you have to apply for lots of jobs because most the jobs you apply for won't hit the requirements (for example, salary). For reference, I have 15+ years of experience so I'm fairly senior for the industry.

The last time I thought about getting a stable job I got quite a few interviews but most of them were offering £100 to £120k which I consider fairly low (I was making that in 2014...)

It's honestly quite a waste of time, I don't know how much different it is across the pond but I imagine it's easier over there, considering the kind of comments you read on HN and such

You don't know what catches your eye until you apply. It is mostly based on details that you learn about at interviews.

> If you've learnt all that, you can learn to use more.

From my experience, at least in Europe, companies are paying the most for people who can "hit the ground running", i.e. being able to contribute from day one - both in terms of code as well design/architecture decisions. That neccesitates knowing their exact tech stack.

Kind of funny given that a sanely factored system with minimal dev dependencies can have anyone writing code on the first day, and other systems involve reverse engineering insane build systems after waiting a couple of months for VPN access to be granted.

It depends on the company and the tech stack. If it's an in demand stack with plenty of candidates then the most capable of hitting the ground running will win.

If you have a less popular tech stack then you need to be more flexible. You aren't going to get a lot of developers that know everything and you will need to look at how adaptable they are.

Where I work we don't particularly care about specific experience with our stack. A good developer is a good developer regardless of the stack. And we set aside time for people to get comfortable with the code base. It's not expected that even seniors come in and make contributions on day one. Obviously it's more generous to juniors and mid level developers.

That's why I said list what's relevant to the job, but don't list your entire life story there. If you're an expert that can hit the ground running, then make it known. But if you're applying for a front end React role and you're listing PHP experience from 5 years ago, it's probably not relevant. You can use that space to detail more about what you're good at.

How does that even work though. "Hit the ground running"? It takes me months to get into a codebase and such a small thing as get it to build might be a multiple week hurdle if the guy you replace is gone.

Is this a US/SV thing? I hear it here over and over but in 20+ years of professional development (Europe + US/Canada remote start ups) never I needed more than a week to start working on a system (usually is 1-2 days that are mixed with onboarding sessions as well).

I may not be able to refactor the system to use micro services or whatnot, but to dig into the code and start fixing some bugs or even add a small feature has always been a week 1 goal for me (and one I set to the people I manage now).

Dunno it is kinda strange. The variation between different companies has to be huge in how accessable their codebase and workflow are.

I think this might be a cultural difference, in Europe taking months to be able to contribute to a codebase would get you fired pretty quickly.

What stack are you working with? With Node/React I (as a fullstack) could run most projects in 10 minutes, with about 4 hours for the worst offenders with local kubernetes and aws authentication. And I usually merge my first PR on the first day.

I used to think this way until a few phone screens where HR asked me about having experience with X but also ask me about Y and have no idea X and Y are related. Aka:

Q: Do you have experience with Ansible?

A: yes I do I've written custom functions and extensions

Q: do you know python?

I just list it at the end. Fit it in for the keyword scanner, but clump it at the end where a human is unlikely to read it.

Why not? In resume screening they look for keywords. You need to list the thing they want.

It depends if you want to work for a company that hires based on keywords on resumes, or one where the hiring manager reads and understands resumes. In my experience the second type of company is a lot better to work for.

> It depends if you want to work for a company that hires based on [X]

Must we always presume malice? I'm so tired of this piece of conjecture.

Big companies have layers of candidate filtering because of _scale_, not because they unanimously and comprehensively don't know how to do hiring in the right way.

I can see how this might look malicious from the POV of someone who hasn't been involved in every part of the hiring process (as the OP clearly hasn't) but it's no coincidence that the most respected companies with the most talented engineers all read from the same hymn book.

Anyone involved in hiring on either side of the table also needs to understand that companies aren't looking for their soul mate in every role they hire for, and that noone is sitting around pondering the 10x dev who might have been.

Good enough processes for getting engineers/hires of the desired quality or higher: this has always been the goal. Anything more is corporate masturbation; something to scoff about in LinkedIn posts and appeal to those who, as I said, must always assume malice.

I don't care about what kind of company it is. I just want someone to give me money in return for service so I can feed my family.

I can’t speak about the current job market. But once you get experience and build a network and a reputation, you can start being real picky.

On top of that, once you “get in a position of f*%# you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI) your shit tolerance level starts going way down.

Keyword matching is exactly what recruitment companies do, even the good ones, and I worked directly for one of the best ones in London.

What criteria are you using to define 'best'? I'd have thought "can't be replaced with a simple regex" would be a reasonable heuristic, but if you're right then that can't be it...

You're right, scrub 'best'. In their particular area of recruitment, the largest and arguably best known in london. (No names if you don't mind).

I only worked with local recruitment companies back i the day. I’ve met plenty of recruiters in their office an for lunch.

This was pre-remote work. Even now, I wouldn’t just random work with recruitment companies. I work with people. I would reach out to a recruiter on LinkedIn and start a conversation.

Honestly though, at this point in my career, I doubt that I would ever go through a third party recruiter again just because I do have a network.

In no desirable company has the hiring manager enough time to read every resume that comes in as they get spammed with them. They all go through an automatic filter, then an HR/recruiter filter before reaching the hiring manager. So if you don't pass those filters you're not getting to the hiring manager.

This is not true. Basically only large, non-tech enterprises use the keyword stuffing automated scanning process.

Source: I don't do this, and basically never get a call back from anyone using Taleo, but almost always get call backs from Big Tech/startups with humans that look at resumes (tbh I suspect my pdf format also causes issues here).

Not the case where I live in Europe (German speaking countries). From what I've been told by people in HR, lot of people desperate to emigrate from Africa and East-Asia will spam every tech company with applications even if they don't fit the job requirements or the company doesn't offer visa sponsorship so even small-ish companies use automated filters as they get too many applications that don't fit the job description and overwhelm the short staffed HR department.

Also, what is a "tech company" to you? Does making SW & HW scanning and moving devices for the semiconductor, automotive and shipping industry not count as "tech"? I feel like SV has stolen the word "tech" from "technology" to now mean "disruptive VC funded mobile web start-up founded to make money on advertising, skirting regulations and tracking users", the same way cryptocurrencies have stolen the "crypto" from "cryptography".

Yeah I'm in Ireland, mostly applying to consumer tech companies run out of the US, so quite different.

That being said, a lot of my roles have come through external recruiters so maybe that's what saves me.

It's odd that Ireland wouldn't see the same spamming though, given that we're an English speaking country with lots of tech roles.

How do you know your companies haven't gotten spammed? If you come through human recruiters then you bypass any automated filtering system.

Because I've never heard anyone talk about it, and I talk to a lot of recruiters, both internal and external.

Did you ask them about it? Maybe it's not something they just bring up?

Also external recruiters don't use autolatric filtering systems since they usually just fish people via LinkedIn. It's mostly the companies own application websites that use these systems as they're the ones getting spammed, not the external recruiters.

Given that I've hired a bunch in big tech so have been talking to recuiters very often (and that I've done LinkedIn sourcing for said companies) I honestly don't think this appears to happen in Ireland.

Which is odd, maybe something to do with the fact that Ireland isn't in Schengen?

> if you want to work for a company that hires based on

I've found that engineering culture rarely matches how HR/recruiting works, especially as companies grow but even in startups often times.

> In resume screening they look for keywords. You need to list the thing they want.

I agree with this. One way or another, as an interviewer I need to know what your skill/experience set is. Skills/experience can always be developed, but that should be a known factor at the point of hire.

One positive point that TFA made was the need to 'Listen Carefully and Answer on Point'.

As someone who interviews regularly, I cannot count the number of times that interviewees have not followed this simple advice. To the question "Give an example of when you last frustulated a gibbet..." they will describe in detail their general thoughts on the many finer points of gibbet frustulation, but not actually give an example.

Also, be "Concise and Offer Details on Demand"

Top tip: when you have finished answering a question, stop answering the question.

I hate the "give me an example when" questions because as soon as I hear them I forget everything I've ever done lol. Also, they can be so ridiculously stupid, "Tell me about a time you worked well under stress?" Like, why can't I just tell you that I'm not going to lose my shit when it hits the fan instead of playing stupid word games.

Second this. I've taken to studying a list of previous examples because I frequently can't dig up ideal examples from memory on the spot. A touch of adrenaline from nerves, even if not obvious to others, really affects my performance in this way.

The merit of a 'give me an example' question is that it evidences a degree of self reflection in the candidate. Specifically, that they can abstract their daily circumstances to produce general truths regarding themselves. This we should all be doing regardless of whether we are preparing for an interview.

Recent pass behavior is a good predictor of future behavior.

You don’t truly know what you would do in a situation until you’ve been tested.

> Recent pass behavior is a good predictor of future behavior.

> You don’t truly know what you would do in a situation until you’ve been tested.

I had an interviewer ask a broad "What can you do with X" question, and my mind went blank.

Five minutes later, he asked about solving a problem and I said "Well I would use X to..."

Open-ended "give me an example" questions are not a situation folks encounter in their job. It's entirely an interview question.

It's entirely a shitty interview question.

I passed a 5 round mostly behavioral interview loop at AWS (cloud consulting), I could answer any of these questions except 6 (I’ve never been a manager) and 15 and 16 (they are new) based on my prior experience.

https://managementconsulted.com/amazon-leadership-principles...

While they are grouped by the Amazon LPs, they are more or less standard soft skill behavioral questions. Almost all of these questions have been relevant during the latter part of my career as the dev lead (2 jobs ago), the de facto cloud/enterprise architect (my last job) and my current job (cloud consulting department).

These are also the standard type of skills you need in most senior dev positions where they are filtering on “scope” and “impact”.

My last three jobs since 2014 before my current one have all been based on my ability to navigate behavioral questions and just have conversations like adults to the hiring manager (department head, IT director, CTO) where we talked about their real world problems and how I would solve them.

> Why not? In resume screening they look for keywords. You need to list the thing they want.

If you’re an experienced developer and still randomly submitting your resume to an ATS instead of depending on your network you’re doing it wrong.

I have never in 25+ years across eight jobs randomly submitted my resume to an ATS hoping and praying someone would find it based on keywords. I’m much more strategic.

Yes, I’ve applied for (and currently work) for very large organizations.

Sure for a lot of jobs you have to submit your resume to an ATS to start the process. But I only do that as a perfunctory step after talking to someone who is already looking for my resume in the system when I submit it to start the process.

> This is a trope. Tech hardly move at all and it is way faster to refresh, dunno, 8 year old Java Spring experience, than learn it from scratch.

I last wrote a line of C# in 2020 after doing C# in for over a decade. But the last time I was in the weeds as a heavy C# developer was probably around 2018. Even in that brief amount of time, I know that the ecosystem has gone under changes and what are considered best practices have changed. More importantly, new features and frameworks have been added.

I've actually never gotten a job via my network (besides an "internship" driving a forklift in a warehouse), and have worked at startups and big tech companies just from applying on the website. I wouldn't discount it!

My work history

1. I got the job based on a previous internship that itself was based on talking to people in the career office in college. (1996)

2. I talked to someone at a local recruiting agency and went to the office and met them in person (1999)

3. I found an interesting looking job on CareerBuilder for a startup and reached out to the internal recruiter via email and we started having a discussion (2008)

4. When that company was folding, a couple of recruiters reached out to all of us and I was hired four days after I was laid off (2012)

5. I reached out to an in house recruiter on LinkedIn where the manager was looking to start a “tiger team” of experienced developers (2014)

6. I had plenty of recruiter i knew by now. I responded to every local legitimate recruiter who reached out to me. I told them what type of job I was looking for (a tech lead position at a smaller company) and just waited for the right opportunity. I found it in 2016.

7. The same for my next job, I was looking to work for a company that was doing new “cloud initiatives. I asked all of my recruiting contacts to be on the lookout. The recruiter I met in 2012 that I had stayed in contact with knew a guy who was the newly minted CTO of a startup that was trying to bring development in house and be “cloud native”. Before they were using a contracting agency. (2018)

8. A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a software development position. I really wasn’t interested in relocating, working as a software developer for any large company or ever being on call. I kept talking to her and she recommended I apply for a position at AWS ProServe. But even then, she shepherded me through the process and made sure my application got looked at by the right people.

I didn’t just blindly hope for a keyword match (2020)

And btw, in my entire career, I’ve done exactly two coding tests and both of those were FizzBuzz level sanity checks.

I’ve gotten jobs both ways. Ironically(?) the one I liked the best was when I applied randomly online and the one I hated the most was through my network.

> If you’re an experienced developer and still randomly submitting your resume to an ATS instead of depending on your network you’re doing it wrong.

Then I "do it wrong" about half the time! There's a lot of tech out there to explore and if I'm only tethered to my (now many-)siloed network, I'm not going to see it all.

Honestly, hiring "networked" people is also hit or miss. There are a lot of decent IC devs with meh friends; combine that with scattershot hiring practices. And I've seen creepy empire building happen via external hires of networks of friends before, too.

I don't think there's a silver bullet.

The advice on this is all over the place. It comes down to a matter of to whom you should appeal. Are you trying to pass an HR filter so that a human actually reads the resume or do you appeal to common sense and write a resume actually intended to be read by humans but immediately rejected by HR staff?

Ye well circumstances matter and if the author himself is hiring his advice is obviously good to follow to be hired by him.

I think any reasonable hiring manager understands why resumes are blend buzzword essays.

I agree. I’m a contractor and I feel the tech list allows the client to know upfront what I know out the gate and what I don’t. They can make an informed decision around who they want to get in for their project.

> Why not? In resume screening they look for keywords.

I think - what he meant was - only to include ones strongly applicable to the job.

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