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Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

>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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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