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Comment by anusinha | Hacker News Reader

An empirical anecdote: when I was in high school, all of my lab reports for chemistry and physics were typeset in LaTeX while most of my friends either handwrote the mathematics or used MS Word's Equation Editor. There were multiple occasions where a friend and I made the same mistake (we usually worked together; yes, we cited each other) and the deduction on my report was less than the deduction on his. It wasn't huge, usually -1 point vs -2, but there was consistently a difference.

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I've been using LaTex for my resume[1] for years, and I always get compliments on how "professional" it looks.

You can see the resume and source code here if anyone is interested: [1]http://www.jedberg.net/hire_jeremy_edberg.html

I think it would be nice if you expanded the look of your resume to your webpage. Your resume looks impressive, your landing page, much less so.

I like the look of consistency.

Thanks for the feedback. I've been meaning to update the website, but it's pretty low on the priority list.

Not only does LaTeX make your resume look better, it also makes it easier to manage. I have a whole bunch of sections for things like different projects, experience, awards, education and so on. I can easily switch any of them out in any particular resume I want to print because they're all in separate files. The actual resume itself is just a bunch of includes, which means I can easily have multiple different permutations that are kept in sync whenever I update the appropriate sections.

Of course, this hasn't helped me at all because I haven't updated my resume in a year and a half. This might not seem too bad, but I was actually in the middle of freshman year last time I touched it :P.

Yeah, that is another advantage. I use a combo of commenting things out and storing all the changes in git, so I can easily pull back old stuff if I need to for some reason.

Git and LaTex play nicely together.

Heh, when I TeX-ified my resume, I used your code as a template. Just thought you might like the kudos :)

That's why I published the source. Because it took me hours to find all the docs for all the different parts and put it all together. I figured I could help others out. I'm glad I was right!

Oddly enough, your resume's source code is probably a more effective resume than any output it could possibly generate.

Quite possibly. Certainly doesn't hurt!

Haha, you assume my code follows good TeX style and conventions. If the only code sample I ever saw by myself was that, even I wouldn't hire myself. (That was a confusing sentence to write :P.)

If you can imagine a site with IE-specific code and a layout that's half specified with absolute positioning and half with  , you wouldn't be that far off from what my resume code looks like. It's essentially held together with metaphorical duct tape and \vspace{}.

It's like sausage--tastes great, but never visit a sausage factory :).

Maybe it's my browser on this ancient laptop, or maybe it's my ancient eyes, but the two 2011s in the start/end dates in your reddit position don't look identical to me. It looks like there's more horizontal space between the 1s in the second line than in the first, and in both cases, it looks like the first 1 is closer to the zero than the second 1 is to the first 1.

I wouldn't make a hire/no-hire decision based on something as insignificant as that, but in the context of you holding it out as a example of a well-formatted resume, it kind of grabbed my attention right away and wouldn't let go.

It is a great resume, though, and I might steal a few of your layout ideas for mine, next time I update it, if you don't mind.

Maybe those teachers have preferential treatment towards LaTeX users? Heh. Someone should test this out sending resumes to companies to net the initial interviews.

And what about the type of parchment one uses? There are stationery conventions for that sort of jazz: http://www.nationalstationeryshow.com/

American Psycho - Business Card scene:

(http://youtu.be/-U3SXzbYLOA)

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